Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
not anyone’s existence.” In Szymborska’s terms, nothing is usual or normal; in Zwicky’s terms, nothing can be substituted for. Either way, poetry resists the global economy’s pressure to make anything substitutable for anything else, and thus to make everything susceptible to market exchange.
Technology and economy have changed our world, but they also have changed us. We live in different circumstances than ever before, and we ourselves are different. Humanist and posthumanist accounts concur in the assessment that our reach now exceeds our grasp, and that this exceeding is not the unqualified, heavenly good that Browning’s Andrea del Sarto sought.
Martha Nussbaum formulates the difference elegantly in her humanist manifesto Not for Profit. In our world, she declares, “people face one another across gulfs of geography, language, and nationality. More than at any time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.” Our most pressing problems are global, with no hope of solution “unless people once distant come together and cooperate in ways they have not before.” The global economy “has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standards of people in distant nations” and “put pressure on the global environment.” To some small extent, it was ever so. Hunter-gatherers pressured other species, and left a rubble of tools and shelters. A northerner’s cotton blouse in the antebellum U.S. subsidized the enslavement of an African-American on a plantation down south. The difference in degree, though, is now so great as to amount to a difference in kind. My shoes subsidize child labor in Singapore, the car I drive sanctions the circumstances in which female factory workers are routinely raped and killed at the U.S./Mexico border, my trash is dumped into a vast dead zone in the Pacific, and on and on. Nussbaum finds it irresponsible of us “to bury our heads in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.” Until I reckon with that influence, my human interactions will be “mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain,” and I will continue to harm distant others.
If Nussbaum’s humanist manifesto emphasizes the synchronic extension of our reach, its expansion across space, Timothy Morton’s posthumanist manifesto Hyperobjects emphasizes the diachronic extension of our reach, its expansion across time. Morton distinguishes, as the fields through which our reach has come to extend, three timescales, “the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying.” The horrifying is the scale of five hundred years, beyond the time of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to the time of the events the play depicts, “historical” even to Shakespeare. Morton notes that I participate now in activities that will affect humans as far into the future as Henry VIII is in the past: “75 percent of global warming effects will persist until five hundred years from now.” As at the “horrifying” timescale, so at the “terrifying” timescale of thirty thousand years. This is the distance into the past of the Chauvet Cave paintings, yet my current actions will have effects that far into the future: 25 percent of the carbon compounds my car releases the next time I drive to the market will remain in the atmosphere thirty thousand years from now. Even at the timescale Morton calls the “petrifying,” my effects will linger: “7 percent of global warming effects will still be occurring,” and “form built structures (skyscrapers, overpasses, garnets for lasers, graphene, bricks)” will have created “a layer of geological strata.”
Morton’s point is that “the future hollows out the present.” Because it can be imagined, infinite duration — eternity — is forgiving. Because it can’t be imagined, time at the scales Morton considers, the time of “very large finitude” rather than of infinity, is unforgiving. Morton describes us as participating in the construction of “hyperobjects” such as global warming, the very large finitude of which starkly reveals the degree by which my reach exceeds my grasp. Even my most trivial-seeming decisions/actions affect others far into the horrifying, terrifying, and petrifying futures: “A Styrofoam cup will outlive me by over four hundred years.”
Changed circumstances and changed selves entail changed responsibilities. My indirect actions now are more potent than my direct actions; the unintended consequences of my actions always and necessarily exceed the intended consequences. The asymmetry between effect and control has switched. When others’ effects on me exceed my control (the old situation) the result is tragedy: my destruction looms. For the Greek tragedians, my agency is inadequate to my circumstances (a fact personified as Fate, Necessity, and so on): my effects are too small to fulfill my intentions. For us, now, my agency is overadequate: my effects are too large for my intentions to manage. Now that my effects on others exceed my control (the new situation) the result is disaster (war, climate change, structural violence): our destruction looms. The state in which contemporary technology and the contemporary global economy have placed us differs from the “state of nature” Hobbes depicts. In Hobbes, we are each threatened with destruction: any human might be destroyed. In current circumstances, we are all threatened with destruction: humanity might be destroyed. In Hobbes, the bind is the prisoners’ dilemma: we need a way to remove agency from the individual. Now the bind is Midas’s touch: we need a way to restrain the agency of the individual.
This inversion of the relationship between agency and volition invites a contrast between the ethopoesis I am advocating, and the prevailing cultural norm, which I’ll label ethotechne. Pairing Smokey Bear’s familiar “Only YOU can prevent forest fires” with the invented correlative “Only YOU can prevent global warming” will advance the contrast, because of a difference between the two admonitions. Intent on fulfilling the first admonition, I will diligently monitor my decisions and actions when I go camping this year, and as a result of that diligence I will cause no forest fires. There will be one forest fire less than otherwise there might have been. Even if I am equally intent on fulfilling the second admonition, though, there is no due diligence for me to perform. I can take measures to reduce my carbon footprint, but global warming will continue inexorably, not measurably or discernibly slowed. My part in forest fires differs from my part in global warming, and the difference between the two exemplifies the difference between ethotechne and ethopoesis.
In ethotechne, my intention governs my agency: I can, for example, cause a forest fire by myself. In contrast, in ethopoesis my intention does not govern (is not adequate to) my agency. I cannot cause global warming by myself. In the ethotechnical realm, intention and effect converge; in the ethopoetic realm, they diverge. Consequently, in the ethotechnical, teleological and deontological approaches to ethical concerns will tend to concur, and in the ethopoetic, they will tend to contrast. My having good intentions will suffice in relation to forest fires, because those intentions, since they govern my agency, will yield effects consonant with the intentions. My having good intentions will not suffice in relation to global warming, because, absent their governing my agency, effects consistent with them need not attend them. In ethotechne, my intention and agency relate to one another in such a way that I can decide not to cause a forest fire, but in ethopoesis, my intention and agency relate to one another differently: I cannot simply decide not to cause global warming.
Primary to ethotechne is occasion: I can start a forest fire only when I am on a camping trip, in the forest, not when I am at home in the city. In ethopoesis, though, conditions are primary. I live in a time period and within a human social arrangement in which hydrocarbons are the primary energy source, as a result of which carbon is being released into the atmosphere faster than it can be absorbed by natural processes. It is not a specific occasion on which I cause global warming; it’s the conditions in which I move and live that cause global warming. I might wake up one morning and decide that the time is right to set a forest fire. There is no occasion, though, for my bringing about global warming: I am engaged in doing so continually, not occasionally.
The forest fire can be described in a clear and adequate way by a simple causal chain. I decide to leave a campfire burning when I’m not watching it, or I carelessly throw a cigarette butt out the window of my car as I drive through Yellowstone; that action lights dry leaves on fire and that fire expands into a large area. I do one particular thing, from which follows another particular thing. In ethopoesis, though, the cause/effect relationship is not a simple causal chain, but a complex