Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014)
The third roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Capital’, and was curated and chaired by Julia Dehm. The two speakers were Angela Last and Adam Bobbette.
It explored how the appropriation of and extraction from human and inhuman matters are capitalized as resources ripe for exploitation. That is, the inhuman as commodified and made fungible in material and financial flows as capital.
Julia Dehm: In opening, I will provisionally suggest that there are various other registers on which we can think about the relationship between the human, inhuman and capital:
- We can think about capitalism as ‘inhuman’ in a colloquial sense, given how it is premised on the extraction and expropriation of surplus;
- We can think about the way the inhuman is transformed into commodified ‘resource’ for capitalist appropriation, extraction and exploitation, and made fungible in material and financial flows. This also demands to consider the techniques through which this is authorised and enabled, and the ways it is resisted;
- We can think about the way in which processes of capital accumulation are premised upon the abstraction and extraction of labour power, treating workers as fungible commodities – or as Marx evocatively described: as vampiric, premised on ‘sucking living labour’ – and thus the dehumanizing effects of capitalist sociability;
- Conversely, we can think the way the inhuman is mobalized or invoked to disrupt the violence of capitalist appropriation – communism as the ‘spectre’ haunting that Marx famously invoked;
- On a different register, we could think about the different understandings of/approaches to materialism in Marxism (historical materialism) compared to in new materialism (as taken up on the nonhuman/inhuman/more-than-human scholarship).
I will open with a very broad question, asking both Angela and Adam to speak to how the category of the ‘inhuman’ appears – or does not appear – in their work? Have you found it a productive heuristic, and if so, how? Or if you have not found it a productive heuristic, why not?
Angela Last: I don’t use the term ‘inhuman’ directly, because it can too easily fix the human through the denial of the violent aspects of humanity. Instead, I work with this resonance of violence that also inflects the concept of the ‘nonhuman’. I want to give you a bit of background to this to make this a bit clearer. I started my theoretical journey in the sciences, physics to be precise. The more complex you get in any science, the more you find that things become philosophical. For this reason, I was initially attracted to philosophy of science and technology studies (STS). However, there was always something unsatisfying. I found the answer in the work of authors such as Suzanne Césaire and Edouard Glissant, who, to me, bridge new materialist and decolonial discourse. I began to view the STS/new materialist discourse and the postcolonial/decolonial/critical race discourse as closely related, as they are both trying to challenge Western knowledge norms. However, their respective approaches are in tension, none the least, because they perform opposing positions: STS/new materialism sees itself as troubling from the ‘inside’, working from a very White position with a very White canon, to try to erode binaries and hierarchies. The discourse around racialisation and colonialism, on the other hand, apparently works from ‘without’ – it actually highlights the system of White erasure that prevents its knowledge from being recognised as located within. Because of the overwhelming Whiteness of STS/new materialism, this puts them in tension, including around the term ‘nonhuman’.
Despite new materialist efforts to show how the ‘nonhuman’ is an improvement on the philosophical ‘object’, it continues to signal a hierarchy in terms of race or species. There is actually an instructive precedent from the interwar period, of conflicting approaches that share common goals of dismantling the subject-object binary. During that time, both Black anti-colonial and White anti-fascist performed opposing forms of ‘antagonistic objectivity’, resulting from the fact that one group of people was denied subjectivity, while the other sought to rid themselves of their privilege. Still today, this tension can lead to some very perverse debates or shutdowns when the two discourses meet. For example, I once witnessed an influential White male new materialist lecturing a female Black postcolonial scholar that she should not think in terms of hierarchies such as race. For me, this condescension reflected the hidden violence within the White desire for levelling hierarchies. This violence also manifests in the increasing references to far right authors in STS/new materialist discourse. I guess what I am trying to do in my work is to highlight these issues, especially strategic erasures, by tracing the histories and geographical transformations of theories.
Adam Bobbette: The ‘inhuman’ is not a category that I have found useful. Surely, I work a lot on the political and social effects of the boundary between the human and non-human, especially between the geological and the human, rocks and people, and the like, but not the inhuman.
What will probably be most useful is if I set up the work that led to The Pulse of the Earth. My strategy in that book was to show how standard Western geological theories of the earth and its evolution were created on the slopes of Indonesian volcanoes and that western scientists were influenced by Indonesian conceptions of political geology. My interest was to expand standard narratives of the geological sciences to show how they are far stranger than humanists and scientists usually think. I was interested in exploring geologists like Johannes Umbrgove who used the term geopoetics to describe his work, what he meant by it was not writing in a poetic style about geology but something very different and very difficult, linking the scale of the body to the scale of the cosmos. But Umbgrove wasn’t only interested in collapsing the micro with the macro in an early modern sense but of tracing creative transformation, what he called ‘differentiation’, across those scales. For instance, he was interested in how the rotation of our galaxy corresponded with periods of mountain building on earth and how those in turn generated evolutionary experimentation and differentiation in species. For Umbgrove, ‘doing geology’ was never separate from understanding what it meant to be human, and moreover thinking the human as geological and cosmic agencies. What was also important was how geo-cosmic forces were powers of transformation, they were creative, becoming otherwise than they are.
Second, I want to expand our understanding of earth knowledges to a much broader world of influence and traditions. I have been deeply engaged for years in trying to think with Javanese knowledge traditions about geological matter as ancestral; that is, rocks as human, a profound animism that descends into the depths of the earth and expands outwards to the cosmos. This challenges how I think about inheritance (spatially, temporally, and as matter) but also earth systems; it also helps me re-think western earth theory, opening up people like Hutton, Lyell, and Darwin in new ways. The project is ultimately critical, to undo conventional narratives of the geological sciences and earth history as a product of western science, but also to bring in long, systematically excluded, knowledge traditions. My book, for instance, shows in considerable detail how Indonesian Islam taught western geologists how to look at earth processes in new ways which led to the theory of plate tectonics. In the 1960s and 1970s, American and European scientists then deleted their sources, they centred themselves, and erased the importance of Indonesian Islam.
The inhuman does not play much of a role in all of this but that is not to say that I conceive of, for instance, animism in conventional biologist/Western philosophical vitalist terms. I am inspired and challenged by traditions in the Malay world of thinking of mineral and rock matters as relational, with agential powers, capacities to act. Not necessarily biological, though.
Julia: Could you both speak to how the category of ‘capital’ arises in your work, and how it might interact with the inhuman/more-than-human – inhuman as capital or the inhuman as disruptive of capitalist accumulation and sociability?
Angela: One thing I have found when studying social justice issues is that the answer often lies in the economic realm. In the current culture war, for example, ‘just follow the money’ gives you some pretty good answers. One of the chapters in my book deals with economics, and how the transition from Marx to Nietzsche in social theory has been a major factor in inhibiting discussions of economics. In political discourse, at the moment, it feels as if the economic dimension has been abandoned, too. We see right wing politicians stoking racism and queerphobia to distract from, or misrepresent, economic issues. It feels like they are trying to verify Nietzsche’s argument that people need a spiritual goal more than economic justice, in the worst possible way.
I have a chapter called in my forthcoming book called ‘We have never been social’ that argues for a greater inclusion of the economic as part of the social. If we want to actually ‘socialise’ everything, as many new materalists seek to do, we have to carefully look at economics. There is more engagement with economics coming from authors who to try to ‘materialise the social’, such as Manuel Delanda or Georges Bataille, although a lot of this work can get quite deterministic, even if it works as an interesting provocation. At the same time, I feel that thinking with the ‘nonhuman’, in all of its dimensions, contains a possibility to rethink economics. Not just in terms of how the environment etc is valued (some useful work by Maan Barua or Stefan Ouma on this) but also in terms of ‘inhuman’ labour and alienation. The chapter actually starts with a satirical quote by Marx, from his German Ideology which reads: ‘Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!’ It is about dog tax, which I use as an example of how capitalists disrupt human-nonhuman relations, whether in the colonies or ‘at home’ – the subsumption of everything into this harrowing system of valuation. It is obviously a satire on Donna Haraway and her writing on dogs, too. While re-reading her work, I was reminded of a pattern of many new materialist texts. There is a frequent dismissal of Marxist economic analysis, while not offering a useful alternative (of course there are exceptions such as Tsing, Verran, and also early Haraway). I can understand why authors might be suspicious about the apparent dualism of the dialectic, but I think it is important to maintain a historical dimension of economic oppression. Edouard Glissant, for example, made a powerful case about the nonhuman and its association with ‘nonhistory’, an imagination which renders people and environments passive and appropriable. It very much brings out the capitalist emphasis on shattering or twisting value relations. Some of the literature on the nonhuman does not go far enough for me in expressing the vastness of the capitalist project of countering this enduring, everyday brutality.
On the subject of dogs, I recently came across a hopeful essay called ‘Rescue Me’ by Margret Grebowicz, which makes some neat economic provocations. It is also reflexive of academic writing as part of capitalist economics and this connection has shaped knowledge in problematic ways. We sometimes forget how we are part of these dynamics.
Adam: The work that I continue to do on Mount Merapi volcano with sand miners is my way into issues of capital and geological material. For my friends on Merapi, trying to stop sand mining from destroying their homes and livelihoods involves invoking all sorts of ancestral spirits, it’s a form of spiritual activism. Part of the work is ontological, to transform volcanic sand into ancestors, to make matter social and historical instead of a dead form of material that can be commodified and exchanged. Extraction then becomes framed as a form of deranged dispossession and alienation, a violent severing of kin and their forced exile along the commodity chain. One of the consequences of this is that people who live with this extracted geological matter (literally as concrete in walls, road foundations, or highway overpasses) inherit these ancestors, somehow. Perhaps they are haunted by them. Perhaps the nature of the haunting is to live with alienated things, with objects in our world that seem to have come from nowhere. It may be that the silence of objects in the built world – the concrete walls of our buildings, the columns of flyovers – are the terrible consequences we have to live with, a kind of reverse haunting where ghosts appear with a cold silence. To put it another way, all concrete comes from someone else’s ground somewhere else, where it was wrapped up in other lives and biographies and landscape processes. When it is made into a wall in a high-rise tower through commodification those relationships are torn, there is no form of mediation, of thanks, of asking, of giving, that enables the object to transition into new lifeworlds and relations. It appears blank, empty. Perhaps the very blankness of bought materials is the punishment.
I’m trying here to re-think processes of urbanization in terms of these ancestral hauntings, to think of buildings and infrastructure as material derangements, commodity chains as dark magic that create spells which make it seem as though materials come from nowhere. Infrastructures that move materials from sites of extraction to installation – excavators, trucks, warehouses, ships, trains, cranes, mixers – can all be thought of as ritual nodes in an alchemical chain that spits out seemingly asocial matter, a matter without history, unable to call to us. The worst is that it seems as though matter is there for us.
I am also very interested but do not quite know how to do it yet of extending this analysis back into earth history. The sand that is used in cement is, in the instance of Merapi, taken from volcanic slopes, it is the product of volcanism which is itself the product of the Australian and Eurasian plate colliding into each other. Sections of the Australian plate are subducting, melting and then re-emerging through volcanic craters in explosions. The mined sand from the slopes of the volcanoes, and therefore towers and flyovers in Jakarta, could be thought of as re-configured ocean floor. I would like to start mapping these pathways, documenting sediment as it travels along these long paths from ocean to volcano to high-rise, to imagine a form of geo-solidarity, the city as a site of geological struggle over what it means to have ancestors.
Julia: Angela, one of the reasons why your work is so pertinent in the current moment is its engagement with reactionary far-right ecologies’ attentiveness to the risk of reactionary mobilizations of materialism and spirituality. Can you speak to some of the dangers you see in how the category of the more-than-human/inhuman is taken up and the care that needs to be taken negotiating materiality and spirituality especially in the face of fascist appropriations of vitalism?
Angela: I think this is where my work overlaps with Adam’s, as we’ve both been tracing some of the spiritual/religious/occult influence on science and science studies. I grew up in an area in rural Germany where there are a lot of völkische Siedler who practise fascist ecospiritualities (some actually think they are on the left, whereas some identify more explicitly with the far right), so this is quite familiar subject matter. One of the things that I am trying to emphasise is that the fascist threat does not necessarily come from without, but from within. In addition to our economic vulnerability, our philosophical tools are so steeped in problematic ideas that we are constantly perpetuating this violence. Without attention to this inherent violence, we are more likely to slip.
There have been some attempts to re-introduce religion and spirituality into new materialism, but I find many of them quite worrying in terms of their methods. Isabelle Stengers, again, follows the Nietzschean line of thought that we need a Christianity replacement and, like him, uncritically goes back to the Greeks. While I like her attention to economics as another pillar that needs addressing, I think it is a problem to go to the Greeks as a foundation, especially to the whitewashed version of Ancient Greece as the foundation of The West. It just makes me angry, especially as this not only leaves out stuff such as slavery, but also the geographical realities of ancient empires (Latour also performs this erasure in his evocation of the ‘oikos’). Another problematic example, for me, is the work of Jane Bennett who works from a very two-dimensional view of the Enlightenment as a cause of despiritualisation. She effectively develops a type of vitalism that seeks to prompt ethical responses to a lively materiality. Not only does her view seem to dismiss the vast majority of people in this world who identify as religious, but it also privileges Romanticism without any critical examination of its ethno-nationalist tendencies. The racist and fascist histories of vitalism are also not subject to scrutiny, though Marx’s racist use of ‘commodity fetishism’ is. I think it is important to remain more sensitive to how spiritual dimensions are absorbed, theorised, concealed or weaponised in ‘secular’ discourse – especially in the current Islamophobic climate, especially during a time where queerphobic politics are bankrolled by Western Christian organisations, especially when Indigenous people and their cultures are dismissed as regressive or aggressively appropriated to affirm Whiteness.
Julia: Adam, can you speak a little more about how your current work on critical minerals further explores and challenges our thinking of the ‘inhuman’?
Adam: My current project is about critical minerals and the energy transition. Critical minerals are defined by states as being crucial to their industrial production and they are ‘critical’ precisely because their supplies are subject to supply chain disruption and geopolitical conflict. Most critical minerals currently on European and North American states’ lists are related to the production of renewable energy. Basically, the creation of renewable energy infrastructures is very mineral intensive, and thus, mining heavy. We now know that reaching net zero will require more mining than ever before in human history. This is already leading to new resource conflicts and the destruction of people’s land, exacerbating civil wars, and the creation of ecological dead zones. In line with the long modern histories of colonial and imperial violence, it is Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples who are at the sharp end of these extractive frontiers.
A necessary and urgent intervention in this, in my view, is to re-think what minerals are. It has become recently clear to me that the very definition of the mineral (including juridically) is based on an anthropocentric and hierarchical classification of the mineral below the biological. The very word has the mine in it: mineral. Linnaeus adopted the Judeo-Christian separation and hierarchization of the human when he separated out the vegetable, animal, and mineral realms. This deep structure enables the characterization of an entire realm of entities/actors/beings as coming into being through human labour, the mine. I think that we can characterize this as a form of geological violence. But how do we develop other relations with minerals? What else are we to call them, perhaps we can resurrect mediaeval and early modern terminology and call them earths? Are there forms of mining and working with earths that are not wholly destructive and based on exploitation and violence? These are the questions that currently preoccupy me.
One process I have been interested in lately as a way into these questions is smelting. When I was on the island of Sulawesi a few summers ago to visit one of the largest nickel mines on earth (the concession is the size of greater London), I witnessed a slag pour late at night. I was at the side of a road in the darkness when the sky lit up with orange. The mine was pouring out massive containers of slag behind a ridge and it struck me immediately that it was volcanic, it looked exactly like a lick of lava coming out of Mount Merapi. In this instance though it was anthropogenic. And much of the nickel it was the by-product of went into making rechargeable batteries in electric vehicles and computers. It was a volcano at the centre of energy production. I wondered if it were possible to build a different relationship to smelting, or to bring smelting closer, as it were, to bring volcanism more deeply into the centre of our objects and how they are made. I want to explore how making minerals (and metals) can mean entering into a very intimate relationship with the fundamentally liquifying capacity of the earth.
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Adam Bobbette is a Lecturer in Political Geology at the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His first book, The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke University Press, 2023) tells a story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. His current book project Earthworks (Verso) is about the history and politics of critical minerals, mining, and geological violence. He was also the co-editor of two volumes, New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (with Alison Bashford and Emily Kern, published by University of Chicago Press in 2023) and Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life (with Amy Donovan, published by Palgrave in 2019).
Angela Last is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Geology & the Environment, University of Leicester. Her current book project for Manchester University Press, entitled “Tainted Tools: New Materialism and Epistemic Violence” examines the transition from Marx to Nietzsche in materialism, and its impact on discussions around politics, economics and the environment. Her writing oscillates between two overlapping themes, materiality and institutional critique, that she also explores in more experimental or fragmented form on her blog Mutable Matter. She is currently a Humboldt Fellow at Bonn University, where she is developing a geography teaching resource that highlights historical erasures.
Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe Law School, Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan) and Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.