Rethinking Ecology with Our Non-Human Kin: An Interview with Philosopher Andrzej Marzec

a.marzec_fot._dawid_nickel.jpg, default, Andrzej Marzec, photo: Dawid Nickel

Non-human actors can teach us a lot, and this is especially important in the difficult time of the climate crisis. The forms of survival and cooperation they have created, which we have not dreamed of so far, are extremely inspiring and can help us think about how to change the human world, says philosopher Dr Andrzej Marzec.

Karolina Rychter: How can we think about the climate catastrophe without falling into depression or stagnation?

Andrzej Marzec: Global warming doesn’t have a specific, individual author because humanity created it unconsciously. Most momentous actions and epochal decisions were made intentionally, while the creation of global warming is a long-term, supra-individual process that none of us planned – the goal of humanity was civilizational development, and the climate catastrophe is a by-product of progress. It’s been happening for a long time, and it’s difficult to point to its beginning. It was only at the end of the 20th century that we became aware of its problematic existence. The situation of global warming can be compared to a child coming of age: it’s a human creation, but now it’s acting independently, and we have no control over it. We live in times in which we’ve also discovered the possibility of our own extinction. We’re aware that the life of the human species is threatened, and the end of the human world has become a real prospect. We react to this most often with stupor or apathy because we’re constantly bombarded with this news; we’ve become accustomed to living in the shadow of the apocalypse, which we’ve simply normalized.

One of the reasons for the stagnation in post-humanist reflection is the dominance of critical thinking, which until now was the main engine guaranteeing the development of Enlightenment philosophy. This tool, effective and proven in modernity, ceased to work today because it mainly relied on creating cognitive distance, a safe and privileged view from the outside – a philosophical lodge from which one could look at the world critically. Meanwhile, the Anthropocene shows us with all its catastrophic power that the outside does not exist, and creating distance, a modern separation of culture from nature, is impossible today. I have the impression that we’ve overdosed on criticism, which frees us from the compulsion to act, hence the urgent need to create new, less distancing forms of thinking that harness commitment.

We won’t get out of the situation of stagnation by criticizing others for their lack of activity or with a ‘get to work!’ appeal from the paternalistic-preacher position of experts. We can also find a critical attitude in ourselves when we start acting ecologically. Following the example of the ‘masters of suspicion’, we very often account for every action, constantly tracking various errors in ourselves, and this paralyzes our ability to act. Let’s imagine an ecologically minded critic who, while sorting waste, comes across a used tea bag. There are only clean categories in his head – paper containers (tea label and tea bag), metal (staple) and organic waste (leafy contents of the tea bag). What to do with the thread and how to separate wet tea leaves from the tea bag? The critic tries to separate the individual elements, but reality turns out to be tangled, and the tea leaves too sticky to do this. Therefore, the critical philosopher, unable to cope with real action, because that’s not the goal of criticism, leaves the tea bag to be thrown away by someone who dares to face its monstrous complexity and tangling. We can see, therefore, how an ordinary tea bag leads critical philosophy to a fatal error, a critical mistake. This failure of separation, that is, the impossibility of maintaining conceptual purity, has been addressed by, among others, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and later Timothy Morton.

Emotions, rarely present in philosophy, are what most often prompt us to take various actions. Affects such as joy, love, sadness, fear or anger connect us with others, have world-creating power and awaken our authentic engagement. If this is our goal, we should move from critical philosophy, which is associated with sterility, distance from reality and thus an outdated model of objectivity, towards a more affective, material-discursive philosophy, which often brings with it an unwanted or even repulsive closeness to non-humans, usually smelling of compost. The Anthropocene is an era from which it’s impossible to distance ourselves; we experience it primarily affectively, in the form of fear, which, however, does not allow us to build a community around it – perhaps it’s a good time to also think about the role of the remaining emotions in ecology.

KR: And what about the concept of the Anthropocene itself? Should we use it? Some thinkers – including you – believe that it’s problematic.

AM: The concept of the Anthropocene initially caused a sensation in the humanities because thanks to it we began to perceive humans no longer through the prism of the individual and individual actions; we began to think of them as a human species, a collective or even a geological force. However, it quickly turned out that instead of violating the concept of the human individual or the humanistic image of the human, it actually preserved them. Hence the strong reaction of the post-humanist community, drawing attention to the fact that the end of the world in which we now participate and which we are terrified of had already affected non-European cultures due to their brutal colonization, as well as non-human beings.

Today we know that the Anthropocene is primarily associated with anthropocentrism, hence the proposal to abandon it. In postmodernism, the popular belief was that what kind of world we wake up to on a given day is up to us humans because reality is the result of a free play of interpretations; it’s created by imagined, textual plots. I find a similar constructivist story in the Anthropocene itself. Except that now it concerns the material world, and it depends on us whether it ends in a catastrophe or whether we’ll be able to save it like some Captain Planet. In moving away from the anthropocentric way of thinking, we can be helped by concepts that are competing with the Anthropocene, such as Jason Moore’s Capitalocene, which blames the system – the capitalist economy – for global warming. Or, on the other hand, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing’s Plantationocene, according to which blame for the climate crisis lies with Western agriculture, taking the form of monocultures that are unfavourable to biodiversity.

On the other hand, my own proposal is an ambiguous Anthropocene – a concept created by the contamination of the Anthropocene category. I want to use it to draw attention to the non-human dimension of humanity. By signing up to all possible actions, humans often take away agency from non-human beings who co-create them, which is why they disappear in the human shadow as supposedly passive or powerless beings. On the other hand, the anthropo-shadow postulates a reduction in the role that the human wants to play in reality and suggests retreating into the shadow. Not every space has to bear the trace of the human; paradoxically, the withdrawal of our presence from many places may prove to be most life-giving for the planet. It’s worth noting that the very concept of nature, which we so much want to protect, is related to a specific, human vision of reality.

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Smog in centre of Warsaw, photo: Aleksiej Witwicki / Forum

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KR: Should we therefore abandon the concept of nature?

AM: Bruno Latour claimed that modernity was an era attached to pure, sterile concepts, which is why it tried unsuccessfully to separate the reality of nature and culture. For a long time we believed that we could describe the world in this way, but it turned out that we were never modern. The world is inhabited by nature-cultural hybrids: mussels work in sewage treatment plants, and police dogs retire. However, a large part of ecological activism still focuses on the category of nature. I want not to inhibit any type of activism but rather to point out that the concept of nature is not the best ally in the fight for the well-being of non-humans and for recognizing their needs.

We don’t know exactly to what state of nature and from what period of Earth’s history we’d like to return and whether it’s really possible. Nature is a kind of huge bag into which we put all the non-human actors, and most often we simply don’t recognize those who create it. Non-humans are therefore immersed in a timeless, ahistorical, cyclically reborn space in which none of us would like to find ourselves. We call the human living environment culture because it’s traditionally recognized as a space for conversation, dialogue and creating meaning. When we abandon the nature/culture binary, we’ll be able to think of non-human actors as creative, with their own history, individuality and agency – the category of nature effectively blocks this way of thinking. In place of the nature we’ve seen so far, we’ll very quickly begin to see specific plants and individual animals with their existential choices and dilemmas – we’ll also be able to enter into relationships with them that are other than exploitation or protection.

KR: Can we really create a community with them? Can we think about solidarity and responsibility differently than we have so far?

AM: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have pointed out that our view of the non-human world is most often seasoned with a desire for power and control, which spoils all relationships, including human ones. Anna Tsing, in turn, proves that linking human fate with wheat and its large-scale cultivation has enabled the emergence of a social hierarchy and class exploitation. Timothy Morton goes further and shows that contemporary thinking is shaped by agricultural tradition, and the word ‘culture’ itself derives from plant cultivation. He calls this connection of agriculture and philosophy agrologistics, or the logic of dividing plants and animals into those that are useful and those that are weeds or pests. On one side we have the domesticated, safe but deprived-of-freedom animals and plants in our homes, and on the other, the wild organisms that enjoy freedom but have no protection.

Creating an interspecies community primarily involves entering with non-human actors into various relationships that are not based on power and subordination. Very often, ecological thinking is based on vertical relationships – for example, mercy, the attitude of a god looking down from on high onto smaller beings in need of help. In this behaviour we can, of course, find a desire for care but above all, patronization. In this paternalistic model of coexistence, humans are the sole and one-sided authors of relationships. We should redefine our concepts of responsibility and solidarity, freeing them from patriarchal meanings. A way out of this situation may be various horizontal relationships based on responsibility as the ability to respond, on negotiations and mutual companionship – we’re still not very creative when it comes to relationships with non-human organisms. The beginning of true solidarity may be the moment when we realize that we ourselves are not fully human because we’re created by non-humans, various microorganisms that once decided to live together.

KR: You mentioned that we should avoid power relationships and not impose our vision on non-humans. But one might ask, how can we communicate with them?

AM: The humanities, along with the rich tradition of hermeneutics, have accustomed us to the fact that we can only understand someone who uses words. Martin Heidegger believed that animals simply do not participate in human language. Unfortunately, we won’t have a chat with our dog, which does not mean that we won’t reach an understanding with it. None of us claims that we can talk to trees as in animated fairy tales, but we are able to negotiate with non-human actors in various ways and communicate with them. The key is aesthetics, understood as sensuality, responsible for all social contacts of living beings. It’s thanks to aesthetics that we can communicate with non-humans, and modern social networks operate on a similar principle. Instagram, TikTok or YouTube communicate a number of things to us through appearances alone, perfectly managing without words. I can communicate with my dog without any obstacles; we can create an interesting, exciting relationship together, despite the fact that he does not read Being and Time with me. I suspect that most of the human community does not do this either.

We still attach too much value to human language, as Karen Barad and other new materialists have mentioned, and it’s no longer the only source of meaning or a condition for creativity – in fact, most happens outside of language. Non-humans teach us various ways of being, completely different from those to which we have become accustomed. We can learn from mushrooms not only their amazing cooperation with trees. Anna Tsing also draws attention to their key feature, which is their recalcitrance, that is, their anarchistic disobedience and anti-systemicity. Mushrooms are unpredictable – you never know when or if they’ll appear – and independent – most of them cannot be cultivated. They are also enemies of monocultural plantations. They function in the vast majority outside the principle of unlimited accumulation of goods. They grow when they want, they don’t collect points and they don’t play the game called capitalism, which so occupies humanity today. Non-humans can also teach us their own ways of survival, which is especially important in the difficult time of the climate crisis. The forms of survival and cooperation they have created, which we have not dreamed of so far, can be incredibly inspiring and help us think about how to change the human world.

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Mushrooms in Białowieża National Park, photo: Agencja Wschód / Forum

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KR: The Polish translation of Timothy Morton's ‘Dark Ecology’, to which you wrote the introduction, has just been published for the first time. Morton claims that the end of the world has already happened. Why is this a liberating way of thinking, freeing us from the depression and stagnation we’ve been talking about?

AM: The vision of the end of the world fulfills the function of constantly hanging over us, keeping us in check, terrifying and paralyzing us. The story of the apocalypse is nothing new, it’s constantly present in culture, it’s a promise that, as Jacques Derrida claimed, never comes true. Today, the story of the apocalypse has become basically the only story interpreting reality – we have no other, competing plots. We’re accompanied by a dramatic lack of imagination. Morton, by saying that the end of the world has already happened, wants to get out of this apocalyptic impasse in which we’ve been stuck for a long time, to free us from paralysis and to enable us to regain agency. To this end, he gives up on a linear structure of time, in which we have a clearly outlined beginning and end, which allows us to wait for the culminating event of the destruction of humanity straight from disaster genre movies. The history of life on Earth is intersected by cyclically recurring catastrophes. Extinctions have always been the end of a certain way of life and have given rise to completely new models of existence – in this perspective, ‘to exist’ always means living after some catastrophe, finding ourselves together in new and difficult situations.

KR: Morton is also the creator of the concept of the hyperobject. These hyperobjects – such as the COVID-19 pandemic or global warming – can terrify us. Can we somehow negotiate with them too?

AM: The hyperobject theory is very interesting because it offers us a new perspective on space and stems from an ontology focused on objects. For Morton, only objects exist, and they are spacious, deep, containing other objects. Therefore, objects are not located in an objectively existing space as in a container, but, like nesting dolls, they’re always located in other objects, thanks to which we can consider reality at different levels. For microorganisms that inhabit and co-create our bodies, a human being will be a hyperobject. On a human level, global warming, capitalism or the pandemic you mentioned will be hyperobjects. They’re so large that we’re completely immersed in them, and so we can doubt their existence. Therefore, some of us ask: ‘Where is global warming, capitalism or the pandemic if I’m unable to tangibly touch or see any of these entities?’ The rules governing hyperobjects, which have persisted in existence for centuries, are completely different from the laws of the world of individuals immersed in them. Sometimes we think that a human individual is capable of changing the shape of global warming, while it operates on a completely different level. Finding ourselves in the hyperobject of global warming, we’re a bit like a bacterium in a puddle – only another hyperobject, such as all of humanity, can confront global warming. Describing global warming through processes often allows us to trivialize its problem and claim that the climate has always changed.

Meanwhile, Morton shows that it’s an independently existing object that has a long history of its existence and operates on its own. Granting legal personality to rivers is also possible today thanks to the category of the hyperobject. In this context, we begin to treat a river not as flowing water – a process that we’re unable to capture – but as a certain integral, enormous entity visible especially when we look at it from a bird’s eye view. Hyperobjects, as you’ve said, scare us because large finitudes arouse in us a sense of uncanniness, of awe and fear at the same time. How can we deal with this? Morton emphasizes that the whole is always ontologically weaker than its parts, and his advice is to move downwards – that’s why instead of dreaming of greatness, we should go downwards, be more down-to-earth. My individual life is more real than the organization I create. The problems of hyperobjects should be solved at the macro level, not at the level of individuals. Individually, I can take care of small environments and habitats – plants and animals around me, not using toxic cleaning agents, refrain from certain activities instead of dreaming of ecological hyperactivity. However, what happens in the reality of hyperobjects, we must deal with together as humanity – these are decisions that should be made at the level of the human species, not the individual.

KR: It’s not only hyperobjects that scare us; since childhood we’re also afraid of the dark, and in Morton's work, the metaphor of darkness plays an important role.

‘Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence’ by Timothy Morton, Polish edition, photo: Oficyna Związek Otwarty

AM: Yes, darkness usually arouses fear in us. We speak of the darkness of the Middle Ages with contempt, darkness is associated with superstition and lack of education, it’s something we want to get out of. Contemporary rationality is largely shaped by the Enlightenment project, then continued in modernity. Because of this, the relationship between thinking and light seems intuitive to us: reflection, explanation, visualization, clarity and distinctness, illuminating problems. When writing the introduction to Dark Ecology, it was important for me to escape the logic of the Enlightenment – instead of explaining Morton’s concepts, I’d rather draw us into their thicket and entangle our fates with them. Donna Haraway emphasizes that in Western culture, chthonic deities, those associated with the earth and the underworld, have always functioned as synonyms for evil. Darkness definitely has bad PR, and we most often associate it with a reality from which we’d like to escape at all costs. Personally, what scares me more than darkness is too strong, blinding brightness, the dead unambiguity of philosophical concepts – the desire for purity, bringing with it purges and destruction.

Darkness turns out to be a life-giving shelter for living beings; it’s a non-discriminatory space in which there are no mechanisms of segregation producing unnecessary beings, victims of a certain vision of order. In darkness, you can’t see that I have a stain on my shirt; in darkness, these discriminatory concepts of purity and dirt, norms and pathologies cease to have significance. Dark ecology realizes that we don’t own life; it’s ours and at the same time it’s collective – we owe it to others, whom we’ll probably never know, because they’ll remain forever in darkness. The relationships that connect us with non-humans are often complicated, twisted, dark and strange, and yet they are the ones that are life-giving.

Andrzej Marzec – philosopher (assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), film critic, and editor at Czas Kultury. His research interests focus on speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, environmental humanities, and contemporary alternative cinema. He is the author of the books Spectrology: Philosophical Theory and Artistic Practice of Postmodernity (2015) and Anthropo-shadow: Philosophy and Aesthetics After the End of the World (2021).

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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