“A specter is haunting the specter of communism,” Timothy Morton announces in Humankind (2017), “the specter of the nonhuman.” For Morton, haunting begets more haunting, and it’s specters all the way down. The category of “humankind” put forth by Morton becomes an inexhaustible reservoir of existential alienation, in which the human and the nonhuman must coexist in the strangest of places. Perhaps this is why Morton begins Humankind with a dedication to the water protectors at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, yet does not discuss their struggle at length.

Humankind was written, after all, with a particular audience in mind: one steeped in the post-industrial identity politics of the New Left, which largely overlaps, through sheer transcontinental osmosis, with the collective experience of every graduate student who has sat through a class on Critical Theory or Marxism. And so a dedication to the water protectors, coming from Morton, can’t help but be read as a challenge to the patience of this intended audience. Humankind, however, is more than a self-serving gesture towards some vague and faceless Other, even though it reads likes a handbook for Not All White Guy Philosophers.

But worse than coming off as insincere is the opposite: as coming off as too sincere. Attempts at solidarity risk outright dismissal as too sentimental; as lacking the necessary pragmatism needed for meaningful support. Talk is cheap they say, with their glass half empty. Instead of saving Marxism from itself, Morton risks infecting Marx with the kind of New Age, panpsychic animism that haunts the eyes of The Serious Scholar, as they roll back into their head like a child ducks under their blanket to shield themselves from ghosts.

Academia, to use Morton’s example, does not allow for the unironic enjoyment of songs like The Muppets’ “We Are All Earthlings.” For the “we” of The Muppets appropriates the beliefs of indigenous people in order to make white people feel better about their ability to “co-exist” with what they are passively destroying. So how exactly is a white man supposed to talk about anything outside of their own white-male-ness when others want them to sit down and be humble? This is something Morton is painfully self-aware of, stating, “there are no pronouns entirely suitable to describe ecological being.”

The I And Thou of Martin Buber needs an update. The pronoun I either conflates something with how it is processed through (and for) our Ego; or it flattens the ecological landscape of things by privileging notions of themselves as extending naturally from the whole of Nature. You reinforces the “not-you” of the I that speaks it. He and she: too heteronormative. It: too dehumanizing. We presumes that I can speak for them. And they does the exact opposite. Morton settles on using versions of it and they. These will form “the thou” that Morton will use to address our ongoing ecological being.

Correlationism and Cultural Relativism

The classic, philosophical trope of subject versus object is retold by Morton through a metaphor on mixing and mastering audio:

“Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee. Strong correlationism turns the correlator fader all the way up and the correlatee fader all the way down. Thus arises from strong correlationism the culturalist idea that culture (or discourse or ideology or…) makes things real.”

The subject, or audio engineer, is the correlator of reality, foregrounding certain audio channels or “tracks” that make up their “recording,” as they privilege others to the forefront of the song’s final mix. The correlatee comprises the different channels that comprise the various “inputs” of these tracks. The differences in each track are mixed and mastered by the correlator, as they try to produce the ultimate version of the song from these recordings (i.e. into a coherent output). This act of privileging certain channels over others (re)forms reality as the set of what is correlated for us, the listener, in which the correlatee, and its various audio tracks, become blended into the final mix, or “single,” produced by the correlator.

Reality, as we know and experience it, comes to resemble the modes in which they are correlated–under culture, language, ideology, etc.– until they are impossible to distinguish from reality itself. Once one culture starts to delineate (or territorialize) its own boundaries, it generates its own mechanisms of exclusion like nationalism and xenophobia in relation to other cultures and groups of people. The more monolithic a particular culture seems, the more the whole enterprise of communicating across cultures risks collapsing into unbridgeable, cultural relativism. In the absence of some universal standard shared across cultures, might makes right and only the fittest of the fittest shall survive.

The alternative is a deferral to pre-Kantian metaphysics, in which the particularity of all objects are subsumed into “a colorless lump of pure extensionality.” This mechanical picture of causation, according to David Hume, operates like billiard balls colliding in a chain of events that set off other events. Under this picture, it seems like humans were destined to discover agriculture, transform resources into consumer goods, and burn fossil fuels until they ultimately destroy themselves alongside the ozone. Or to put it in another equally unhelpful way, humans will keep being humans until they aren’t.

To reroute these deterministic feedback loops from pushing us towards our own extinction, Morton suspends the law of non-contradiction, which states something cannot be both itself and not itself at the same time. Thus Morton argues, “Step one of including nonhumans in political, psychic and philosophical space, must therefore consist in a thorough deconstruction of the concept of nature.” In order to deconstruct our concepts of nature, Morton builds on some foundational concepts in the contemporary Speculative Realist movement.

Morton draws from Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology, which privileges the ontology of all kinds of objects: be they material, ideal, or virtual. All these objects exist simultaneously, in different modalities, both independent of and in service to human subjectivity, which is itself a type of collectivized or hyper object among a plethora of others. And though he’s not explicitly mentioned, Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude introduced the problem of correlationism in post-Kantian philosophy. Philosophers now wonder if it’s even possible to break out of the correlationist merry-go-round.

This constant back and forth can be seen in most post-Kantian philosophers: like Hegel’s absolute idealism, Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, and Wilfrid Sellars’ manifest and scientific image. All three engaged in versions of correlationism by bracketing reality on one side, and on the other, a particular mode of accessing and mediating that reality in an “authentic” way. All three have their own particular, respective mode of accessing reality, which entail different standards of epistemological authenticity. Yet the conceptual dependence on correlationism remains. Morton is writing in response to this malaise, set deep in the heart of Western philosophy.

The closer Harmon and Meillassoux are read together, the more Speculative Realism veers between these two pictures: (1) a flattened ontological landscape of things that recede into themselves (and away from us) the more we explore them and (2) one that points to a radically contingent future, with the possibility to suspend the law of noncontradiction: allowing for novel conceptual schemas like set theory and other forms of higher mathematics and abstract logical reasoning.

These conceptual rifts have produced some of the most promising and fecund spaces for thinking through the post-human turn, as it coincides with the history of human intervention in the present geological epoch and the emerging era of the Anthropocene. This context, which is bound to the historical rise of agriculture, will help us in exploring:

(1) How ecological being bears on our deeply embedded notions of both nature and what is natural.

(2) How consumerism takes the form of the correlationism between our self-identity and how it bears on the possible identity of others.

(3) How we allow for consumer goods to bear on our self-identification.

(4) How the human of humankind is always-already the nonhuman.

In order to resist the anthropomorphic tendencies of these different strains of correlationism, Morton examines how our notions of what it means to be human preclude our more shadowy or spectral notions of the nonhuman. Capitalism is presented as the prevailing or default mode of human reality, because it dictates how we relate to other beings: be they human or nonhuman. In short, capitalism determines who should do what; what should be produced; and how we should transform something or someone into property that may be used as their owner feels fit. But how exactly did we get to this to hyper-capitalistic reality?