Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
brains are one and the same.30 According to Raymond Tallis, neuroscience has been responsible for the figurative attribution to other animals of human cognitive experiences, a process of ‘Disneyfication’ or a pincer movement in which humans get described in beastly terms, and animals in human terms. Talking down humans by denying them awareness of the nature, purpose and motives of their actions is complemented by talking up animals by anthropomorphising their attributes and behaviour.31 An analogy often made in the neuroscientific argument implies that similarities in the behaviours of humans and apes indicate a similarity in the mental states that attend on and generate them.32
The writings of Donna Haraway and her followers have had a significant and comparable impact on environmental thinking. Defending her ‘cyborg’ ontology, Haraway has invited us to elide not only humans with other animals, but also the organic with the inorganic. The breakdown of these conceptual divisions is acclaimed as both emancipatory for humans and ecologically progressive: as an anti-anthropocentric advance that recognises the parity, connectivity and relationality of all forms of being. In endorsing this approach, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that a primary condition of political progress is that we recognise that
human nature is in no way separate from nature as whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth; … [and] that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures and hybridizations.33
In their recent ‘accelerationist’ case for a technically driven post-work future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams likewise enthuse about the contribution of ‘cyborg augmentations, artificial life, synthetic biology and technologically mediated reproduction’ to a posthumanist ‘synthetic freedom’, insisting that there is no authentic human essence to be realised and associating all such talk with a limited and ‘parochial’ humanism. (Although quite how this anti-essentialist position coheres with their own polemic against the ills heaped on human beings by capitalism, or their presentation of the contrasting fulfilments to be realised in a post-capitalist future, remains unclear).34
There are notable contrasts between these various types of argument, and it may therefore be misleading to assimilate them under a general posthumanist umbrella (Haraway has herself rejected the term). But they share several themes: the merging of nature and culture; the decentring of the humanist subject; the view that human–animal dualism obstructs ethical guidance on the treatment of non-human animals; a resistance to accepting human exceptionality. There is also, normatively speaking, some general agreement that the ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions now faced by humans and other species has been encouraged by the errors of ‘dualist’ and ‘humanist’ thinking.
Posthumanist theory, however, is produced exclusively by and for human beings and it seeks a response through their particular capacities for adjusting thought and behaviour in the light of argument. It thus relies for its theoretical coherence and ethical appeal on an implicit commitment to distinctively human qualities, and by extension to intentionality and conscious agency. Its critique of humanism is therefore self-subverting, and this surfaces in a particularly acute form in relation to its cyborg thinking and argument on inorganic being. Even those who would have us blur the mind–machine conceptual division, do so on the basis that advanced AI possesses mind- and soul-like qualities. But if these capacities or attributes themselves invoke a regrettably ‘humanist’ estimation of human powers of cognition and reflexivity, implying some preferential evaluation of minds and souls, then why should they be accorded any special attention? There is also some tension involved in maintaining a cyborg disregard for organic–inorganic distinctions while at the same time defending a blurring of the human–animal divide on the grounds that it will issue in more compassionate treatment of non-humans. To protest against the cruelties of agribusiness is surely to protest against the treatment of organic beings as if they were on a par with Cartesian machines and thus indifferent to their suffering.35
There are problems, too, with Deleuzian-influenced eco-critical approaches that refer us to the play of forces through which all living beings are united in a rhizomic universe. Recognition of the relationality of being is, after all, consistent with any and every ethics or politics. Such theory tends to operate at so high a level of abstraction that little guidance is given on the economic and political institutions that might meet its professed objectives. In the absence of that guidance, however, it readily reverts to an essentially descriptive account of actuality: a comprehensive but somewhat scholastic mapping of practices and subjectivities attached to a messianic and hence ultimately evasive politics.36 Rosi Braidotti, for example, has recently written that ‘sustainability expresses the desire to endure, in both space and time. In Spinozist-Deleuzian political terms, this sustainable idea of endurance is linked to the construction of possible futures [… which in turn] entails the collective endeavour to construct social horizons of endurance, which is to say, of hope and sustainability … and hope gives us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines.’37 This is well-meant, but it says very little about where or when or how or by whom any of this creative potential or hope will be mobilised.
Posthumanism, then, undoes itself if it attempts to dispense with human exceptionalism, and the only persuasive discourses offered under its influence are those which are prepared to recognise and talk about the humanism which irreducibly remains in play throughout its questioning of the human. It is fine to point out that we are all inter-connected in nature and share more with other animals than we previously thought. One can also agree with those who argue that what generates our moral response to animals and their treatment is not some distanced and impartial calculation of what consideration is rightfully due to them, but rather our sense of the mortality and vulnerability we share with them, and the compassion that goes with that.38 However, it is precisely with a view to sustaining the philosophical coherence of this position, with its appeal to the distinctive role of human imagination and sympathy in generating a moral response, that we need to defend the difference between humans and other creatures. As Cora Diamond has put it:
… if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, in our appeal, try to obliterate the distinction between human beings and animals and just get people to speak or think of ‘different species of animals’, there is no footing left from which to tell us what we ought to do, because it is not members of one among species of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectations of other human beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and we do something like imaginatively read into animals something like such expectations when we think of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow’s eyes. There is nothing wrong with that; there is something wrong with trying to keep that response and destroy its foundation.39
We need, then, to avoid crassly anthropocentric approaches to human–animal relations. We also, however, need to recognise that it is only humans who are in a position to extend moral consideration to other animals, and that even when posthumanists argue that animals should be treated on a par with human subjects, an appeal is being made to a capacity for moral discrimination that is exclusive to human beings. We also know that no animals can think of themselves as having responsibility towards us in the way that many humans do towards them. I am not denying here that some companion animals, dogs in particular, will sometimes show care and concern for their owners or handlers. What I mean is that other animal species do not conceive of or exercise any universally applicable form of concern for the members of other animal species, humans included. I mean, too, that they have not produced representations of us humans, orally, in writing or pictorially, nor are there philosophical arguments about their relations with us. This surely obliges us to say that they cannot imagine what it is like to be a human being. The sensibility that makes us (or should make us) hesitate about assimilating other animal species too closely to human beings must surely also acknowledge this failure of imaginative reciprocity between ourselves and other creatures. No other animal can recognise a right or feel an obligation to respect it; most other animals appear indifferent to the welfare of other species – fortunately so, in many ways. Most animal species would die of starvation were it not for the suffering of other creatures they catch daily, tear apart and eat alive. Human exceptionality, by contrast, is as readily