Law and the Inhuman: Concluding remarks

by | 14 Oct 2024

Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014)

Every moment in Relation to another.

Every Earth a broken ground.

Kathryn Yusoff, ‘a geologic dirge’, in Geologic Life

The Law and the Inhuman roundtable discussions compiled in this CLT forum opened on the morning of April 8, 2024 with an evocative reading of transdisciplinary geographer Kathryn Yusoff’s ‘geologic dirge’. Marking the beginning of her latest book, Geologic Life, the dirge is a lament for the dead, primarily performed as part of funerary rites. The spirit of grieving, loss, and remembrance that this stylistic form evokes remained palpable throughout the presentations that unfolded that day and that sat within a broader project centered on ‘Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene’. These presentations delved in different yet inter-related ways into the local and planetary violences and vulnerabilities engendered by the fictive yet consequential constructs conjured by dominant Western epistemologies of human exceptionalism on the one hand and racialized, objectified inhumanities on the other.

I offer the following brief reflections on these presentations as an environmental anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar whose thinking around philosophies, practices, and protocols of multispecies justice has been hugely enriched by the cross-pollination of insights from fields including socio-legal, political theory, feminist geography, and critical race studies, that were at the heart of this event. These included challenging but vital questions around the substance, scope, and subject of life and non-life, the recognition of animacy beyond the human, the acknowledgement of more-than-human agency across ecological, technological, scientific, and spiritual domains, and the importance of reckoning with matter and materiality less as distinct and individuated entities, and rather as porous and co-constitutive relationalities that are situated and specific, and inter-scalar and planetary.

Together, these themes invited me to ask: how does the analytical optic of the ‘inhuman’ – or non-human, more-than-human, other-than-human, multispecies, infra-human, para-human, posthuman – make us rethink, reimagine, and reclaim livability, grievablity, and killability, the ‘good life’, dignity, bearability, and viability in beyond-human terms? What is at stake in untangling the ethics and politics of the ‘inhuman’ as empirical reality and conceptual construct? Who gets to speak for or about the ‘inhuman’, and on what grounds? And how do we do justice to invisibilized onto-epistemologies beyond the frame of secular scientific frameworks that have always recognized the human as co-constituted with, by, and through the inhuman?

Relations and obligations

One recurring motif that emerged throughout the roundtables pertained to the inadequacy of dominant legal epistemologies that frame the subject of rights in human-only and individualistic terms. While certainly not universal, these dominant epistemologies entrench rigid divides between nature and culture, body and mind, and living and non-living that curb possibilities for imagining and engaging in worlds in relational terms – that is to say, through the processes, practices, and power entanglements that bring different beings into being and shape their mutual becoming.

As Scott Veitch (in the first roundtable on ‘The Inhuman in the Human’) conveys, an acknowledgement of the inhuman – referring here in an all-encompassing way to human and non-human species, but also elemental, chemical, atmospheric, and terraqueous formations – opens paths for a radical and urgent reconfiguration of the normative in the law, wherein the subject of rights is only ever human. To reconfigure the normative in this manner is not just to acknowledge the harms, sufferings, and loss of dignity experienced by the inhuman – it is also to pluralize the spectrum of possibilities when it comes to re-enchanting and re-sensitizing ourselves as humans to worlds, legal and otherwise, that have in many ways been impoverished by exclusionary modernist paradigms of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. This is, in other words, a transformative project that requires that we rethink which relations are beneficial, detrimental, and for whom, that we take the relation itself as a subject of justice, and that we go beyond simply expanding the legitimate scope of the subject of rights beyond the human, yet still in human terms (indeed, one might argue the very language of expansionism is itself redolent of colonial visions that have been central to the construction of the human/inhuman binary in the first instance).

Central to this endeavor is a critical attention not just to the fact of relations in the abstract but rather to the kind of relations that unfold in particular places, times, and material worlds, or what Science and Technology Studies scholar Karen Barad calls ‘spacetimematterings’. It is, in other words, through a fine-tuned attention and attunement to the situatedness and specificity of more-than-human entanglements, rather than an embrace of the universal or generalistic, that legal instruments and institutions might better grapple with the hierarchies and terrains of power that shape which categories of life come to matter, on what grounds, to whose detriment, and to whose gain. Beyond relations, recognition of the inhuman also demands that we rethink worldly entities and encounters through the lens of what Daniel Matthews (in the first roundtable as well) described as obligations. To be obligated to the inhuman does not mean relinquishing all human aspirations, but instead situating these aspirations alongside those of others and other others – whether it is the aspiration to freedom, autonomy, or sovereignty. It means learning to collectively cultivate what feminist philosopher Donna Haraway might call an ethos of response-ability towards the inhuman in light of what we owe it, or what Indigenous STS scholar Kim TallBear might call a mode of ‘standing with’ the inhuman­ in terms of how we defend it – one that, perhaps not so coincidentally, brings us back to the very etymology of the word ‘constitution’ itself. Con-stituere: to stand together, alongside, or with.

Natures of knowing and temporalities of violence

A second prominent theme pertains to the complex relationship between time, knowledge, and violence in more-than-human social and legal worlds. Matilda Arvidsson’s contribution (in the second roundtable on ‘The Inhuman as the Human’) points us in this direction by exhorting us to approach ‘otherness’ not (only) as an attribute of the inhuman but rather as constitutive of the (human) self from the outset, and consequently to reposition the human as ultimately never entirely knowable to itself. Approaching otherness or alterity as constitutive of the self in turn tempers the impetus to know as a form of control and the primacy of knowledge as a form of mastery and domination over inhumans deemed objects or resources available for extraction. Seen from this perspective, reckoning with the limits of our own human perceptual, cognitive, and sensory affordances in encountering and understanding inhumans comes to embody a form of respect and humility in the face of non-human difference and un-knowability – one that acknowledges what feminist theorist Judith Butler calls our ‘common corporeal vulnerability’ to Anthropocenic rifts and ruptures, but that does not in the process elide or flatten the differentials of violence and suffering that render some lives more exploitable than others, nor reduce the Anthropocenic ‘we’ to any singular identity, privileged species, or homogeneous collective.

Closely tied to a critical rethinking of the Anthropocenic ‘we’ is a collective reckoning with the temporal dimensions of violence and vulnerability, as these manifest within and across species lines. As Connal Parsley argues (in the second roundtable as well), it is essential to reconsider the relationship between value and matter in forging collective futures and flourishing that make space for inhumans such as plants, animals, elements, and also cutting-edge and emergent technologies including artificial intelligence, that push the boundaries of the subject into spaces of ongoing experimentation. At the same time, reckoning with the temporal dimensions of violence and vulnerability entails a process of ‘looking back’ at the processes that have produced contemporary legal normativities and subjectivities. This might include, for instance, drawing on Indigenous knowledges that situate the seemingly ‘novel’ phenomenon of the climate crisis as a ‘colonial déja-vu’ (pace Kyle Whyte), repositioning the Anthropocene less as a humancentric event than as a symptom of the conflation of social and natural histories (pace Dipesh Chakrabarty), reframing the future in latent or anterior terms as ‘something that will have been’ (pace Sara Ahmed), and approaching temporality beyond the progressive, linear arrow of modernity and instead through the lens of cyclical, spiralic, or recursive temporalities (pace Christine Winter and Deborah Thomas).

Non-secular inhumanisms

Non-secular reimaginings of the law, of entities, and of matter constitutes another bright red thread connecting several of the presentations gathered in this collection. By non-secular, I refer to beings or processes that transcend or trouble the realm of the empirical, verifiable, and ‘scientific’ – from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased, to deities, monsters, and ghosts. Rather than relegate them to the world of the fantastical or the folkloric – read here, culture as constructed representation rather than science as falsifiable fact – one might consider rehabilitating these entities instead as rightful and consequential protagonists or portents of ethical coexistence in an age of generalized, ecocidal disenchantment.

Adam Bobbette’s provocations (in the third roundtable on ‘The Inhuman as Capital’) offer a generative pathway towards reconsidering non-secular beings as subjects of justice, notably through his insights into political geology and its role in producing politics and worlds across different cultural and historical contexts. Centering geological matter – in this instance, volcanos – as alive and animate, and drawing on long-standing Javanese onto-epistemologies wherein terraqueous formations have always been considered agentive, supernatural, and spiritual beings, Bobbette invites a form of law that is anchored in a polyphony of knowledges and practices and in doing so, pushes against the ‘taken for granted’ in how we understand the substance and telos of ‘life’ in the first place. This bring us to consider how geological matter relates to or transcends notions of vitality, sentience, intelligence, and cognition, that often act as primary markers for entry within moral and ethical purview, and to work instead towards what plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer might term an inclusive and beyond bios ‘grammar of animacy’. This in turns demands that we reassess how we understand death, non-life, and grievability when it comes to entities like volcanos, rivers, mountains, and oceans, alongside coal, oil, petroleum, and other ‘natural resources’ that may not be ‘living’ in a scientific sense, but that nonetheless constitute what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms ‘the material embodiment of a certain way of being alive’ that is more than biology as currently envisioned.

In bringing non-Western onto-epistemologies of matter to the fore, Bobbette is also in direct conversation with Angela Last (in the third roundtable as well), who reminds us of the perils of framing contemporary and emergent materialist theories as ‘new’ when non-Western (and particularly Indigenous) philosophies have long recognized beyond bios beings as actors and as kin. Harking back to the earlier discussion on obligations as a more generative way of framing relations to the inhuman, Last’s commentary brings home obligations of accountability and recognition when it comes to engaging with non-dominant understandings of life and making decisions around the intellectual ancestors whose theories we draw on as scholars. This is a vital prompt to reflect on the genealogies that are alternately foregrounded or backgrounded, centered or silenced, instrumentalized or invisibilized within academia. It centers the importance of tracing intellectual ancestries together in a form of coalitional labor across ethnographic field sites and disciplinary fields. It speaks to what Sarah Riley-Case and Juliana M. Streva (in the fourth roundtable on ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’) call a practice of ‘fugitivity from within’ – that is to say, a mode of decolonial or anticolonial knowledge production that challenges entrenched hierarchies of value and valorization operating within the law, and also in academia. In these and other respects, reimagining the subject of justice in both secular and non-secular terms, and across temporal terrains, brings us to ask ourselves seriously, what kinds of ancestors we want to become, how we want to be remembered, and what material and intellectual worlds we hope to leave, both to those that come after and those that came before us.

Race and the inhuman

A final recurring theme pertain to the relationship between constructs of race and constructs of the inhuman. Sarah Riley-Case (in the fourth roundtable on ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’) helps us think though these constructs in her engagement with the works of Jamaican novelist and activist Sylvia Wynter and her exploration of European-Christian constructions of the ‘human’ that metasticized globally during the colonial period. In doing so, she brought home the force of what critical race theorist Alexander Weheliye calls ‘racializing assemblages’, or systems of knowledge and power that position some humans as non-human, not-yet-human, or less-than-human, and therefore disposable or killable before the law. Attempts to reframe the subject of the law beyond the human thus requires a careful and critical consideration of the fraught intersections of race, species, and culture, in order to avoid multispecies justices rendering certain human lives yet more unseen.

Rather than thinking with the ‘(in)human’ as a singular noun, the call here, in Juliana M. Streva’s terms (in the fourth roundtable as well), is to think with ‘dehumanization’ or ‘inhumanization’ as a plural process, in all its situated mutations, mobilizations, and manipulations, and in all its equally situated reclaimings, recuperations, and repairs. Repositioning the ‘human’ in the Anthropocene, in other words, means delving into the often violent and diminishing ways in which the category itself has been weaponized to further certain hierarchies of worth and dignity over others. It calls for a deep dive into the legacies and afterlives of colonial racial capitalism, as these continue to shape anti-Blackness and anti-Brownness, alongside Indigenous dispossession, displacement, and disempowerment, and the creation of disvalued or fungible flesh as what STS scholar Murphy calls ‘surplus life’.

When it comes to multispecies justice then, the challenge lies in holding different violences and inhumanizations in the same frame of thinking and acting without erasing the consequential differences and incommensurabilities that define and distinguish human from non-human vulnerabilities. This challenge is certainly monumental – but not necessarily insurmountable. As critical race scholar Joshua Bennett writes, possibilities of solidarity across species lines arise precisely in the face of different yet shared experiences of thefts of dignity and sovereignty, past and present. Forging futures together demands the creation of new alliances across heterogeneous communities of life, anchored in coalitional resistance and refusal to the racialized and speciesist hierarchies that capitalist modernities are fed and fueled by. This is the work of careful equivocation rather than straightforward comparison across human and non-human experience—one that in turn calls for a careful consideration of who gets to speak with and for the non-human other, of the inflections of the human across various genres and gradations, and of the law itself as a product of particular socio-racial and colonial histories that continue to shape possibilities of recognition, justice, and dignity across species lines.

Closing

In the image of the dirge that opened our discussions, the essays gathered in this collection bring home the growing realities of endings and destruction that shape an age wherein industrial activities are undermining conditions of life on Earth as ‘broken ground’, in Yusoff’s terms. And yet these essays also offer forms of tentative hope, glimmers of possibility, registers of resistance, and opportunities for relating to the more-than-human otherwise and more justly, all of which and differently inform the law as institution, principle, and practice through a trans-disciplinary reimagination of the inhuman in the human, the inhuman as the human, the inhuman as capital, and the inhuman as refusal.

That the tenor of these essays is not solely shaped by realities of loss and refrains of lament found echo (literal and figurative) in the very venue wherein they were first shared. Indeed, some of those present that day of early April noticed another, more-than-human kind of chorus backdropping our conversations – the chanting and chirruping of birds outside the conference room, invisible yet distinctly audible from high up in the foliage of Tilburg’s baroque forest of Oude Warande. The cadence of this more-than-human chorus shifted as time drew out, heavy rain sporadically interrupting lively song, the return of sunburst bringing with it other avian harmonies. In this, the always-already present inhuman reminded us that spring, here as elsewhere, and for all that has been lost, is not yet, nor need be, entirely or permanently silence(d).

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Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice. For more information, visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

1 Comment

  1. This article provides a deep and insightful exploration of the inhuman in legal and philosophical contexts. It’s a valuable read for anyone interested in these topics.

    Reply

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