3. Science

Making critical remarks about erstwhile radical political theorists continuing to claim the legal right to be identified as the original proprietorial authors of their books is often dismissed as a vulgar thing to do. Drawing attention to the fact such theorists are making their work available for commercial exploitation on this basis, according to a system of commodity exchange that is governed by the logic of capital, is considered something of a cheap shot. And there may be some truth in this. Still, do such dismissals risk serving as an alibi for the widespread failure to take on board the implications of not thinking through liberal concepts of human rights, freedom, and property as they apply to us as theorists? Liberalism may mean we are free to make rational choices about almost every aspect of life. But it also means we are free to choose only within certain limits. What we are not legally and professionally free to choose is an authorial identity that operates in a manner consistent with a more inhuman form of theory. I'm referring to an identity that functions in terms neither of the human nor the nonhuman. Instead, inhuman theory as I see it involves a form of communication that endeavors to take account of and assume (rather than ignore or otherwise deny) an intra-active relation with the supposedly nonhuman, be it animal, plant life, technology, the planet, or the cosmos.

Why inhuman? And why am I now switching to this term, rather than continuing with the posthuman?

My use of "inhuman" relates to the way the human cannot simply be opposed to the nonhuman. In this respect, there is no such thing as the nonhuman—nor the human for that matter. Not in any simple sense the nonhuman is already in(the) human. Each is born out of its relation to the other. The inhuman is thus a mode of being and doing with the nonhuman. Based as it is on the performance of a nonunified, nonessentialist, polymorphous subject (rather than the sovereign, selfidentical individual of both liberal and neoliberal humanism), it follows that inhuman theory can also be understood as an instance of the inhumanities. For if the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then humanities with this intra-active inhuman figure at their heart must become the inhumanities.

Admittedly, such an understanding of subjectivity and authorship could be gathered under the sign of the posthuman. Approaches to the posthuman, however, have been dominated by the "posthuman humanities [28]" of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and others [29]. Like the radical political philosophers I referred to earlier, these theorists of the posthuman continue to work in quite conventional, liberal humanist ways. My proposal is that the above transformative conception of the human and the humanities can therefore on occasion be more productively articulated in terms of the inhuman. The idea is that such a rhetorical and conceptual shift might enable us to better challenge the humanist subject that serves as a datum point to so many theories—not just of the humanities but of the posthuman and posthumanities too. Building on the argument McKenzie Wark develops in "On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene", could we go so far as to characterize the apparent inability of radical theory to operate according to a more inhuman mode of philosophy as a sign of its obsolescence? [30]

Wark's text on the bourgeois novel was published on the blog of Verso Books as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations she provides in General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers For The Twenty-First Century [31]. While the chapters in that

#### Anti-Bourgeois Theory DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

that, far from part of the solution, calls for a restoration of the importance of the liberal values of the public university and the traditional humanities, although they

Making critical remarks about erstwhile radical political theorists continuing to claim the legal right to be identified as the original proprietorial authors of their books is often dismissed as a vulgar thing to do. Drawing attention to the fact such theorists are making their work available for commercial exploitation on this basis, according to a system of commodity exchange that is governed by the logic of capital, is considered something of a cheap shot. And there may be some truth in this. Still, do such dismissals risk serving as an alibi for the widespread failure to take on board the implications of not thinking through liberal concepts of human rights, freedom, and property as they apply to us as theorists? Liberalism may mean we are free to make rational choices about almost every aspect of life. But it also means we are free to choose only within certain limits. What we are not legally and professionally free to choose is an authorial identity that operates in a manner consistent with a more inhuman form of theory. I'm referring to an identity that functions in terms neither of the human nor the nonhuman. Instead, inhuman theory as I see it involves a form of communication that endeavors to take account of and assume (rather than ignore or otherwise deny) an intra-active relation with the supposedly nonhuman,

Why inhuman? And why am I now switching to this term, rather than continu-

My use of "inhuman" relates to the way the human cannot simply be opposed to the nonhuman. In this respect, there is no such thing as the nonhuman—nor the human for that matter. Not in any simple sense the nonhuman is already in(the) human. Each is born out of its relation to the other. The inhuman is thus a mode of

being and doing with the nonhuman. Based as it is on the performance of a

nonunified, nonessentialist, polymorphous subject (rather than the sovereign, selfidentical individual of both liberal and neoliberal humanism), it follows that inhuman theory can also be understood as an instance of the inhumanities. For if the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then humanities with this intra-active inhuman figure at their heart must become the inhumanities. Admittedly, such an understanding of subjectivity and authorship could be gathered under the sign of the posthuman. Approaches to the posthuman, however, have been dominated by the "posthuman humanities [28]" of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and others [29]. Like the radical political philosophers I referred to earlier, these theorists of the posthuman continue to work in quite conventional, liberal humanist ways. My proposal is that the above transformative conception of the human and the humanities can therefore on occasion be more productively articulated in terms of the inhuman. The idea is that such a rhetorical and conceptual shift might enable us to better challenge the humanist subject that serves as a datum point to so many theories—not just of the humanities but of the posthuman and posthumanities too. Building on the argument McKenzie Wark develops in "On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene", could we go so far as to characterize the apparent inability of radical theory to operate according to a more inhuman mode of philosophy as a sign of its obsolescence? [30] Wark's text on the bourgeois novel was published on the blog of Verso Books as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations she provides in General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers For The Twenty-First Century [31]. While the chapters in that

may have their hearts in the right place, are actually part of the problem.

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

be it animal, plant life, technology, the planet, or the cosmos.

3. Science

ing with the posthuman?

64

book offer succinct analyses of individual thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Hiroki Azuma, and Paul B. Preciado, Wark's focus in "On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" by the writer and novelist Amitav Ghosh [32]. In this nonfiction book, Ghosh contemplates the environmental crisis and global warming from a literary perspective that has its origins in the Indian subcontinent. As far as he is concerned, climate change is not just about ecological problems or even capitalism and its carbon-based political economy. Climate change is about empire, it's about imperialism, and above all, it's about climate justice. Providing an account of Ghosh's influential lectures on the great derangement thus enables Wark to conceive of a geohumanities project that brings earth science into contact with "post-colonial voices that have pushed back against imperial mappings of the world." In doing so she acknowledges that approaching climate change in terms of social justice brings with it a conceptual challenge. "One has to avoid excluding the diversity of human voices," Wark writes, quoting from The Great Derangement, "and yet at the same time avoid excluding the nonhuman world and rendering it a mere background, or "environment." One has to voice "the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences [33]."

Ghosh approaches this conceptual challenge as a literary problem. The difficulty, however, is that climate change (or climate crisis or climate breakdown as many are now terming it in attempt to describe more accurately the environmental emergency we are now facing) goes far beyond what can be expressed in the form of the bourgeois novel. The issue is summed up for Wark by the fact that "fiction that takes climate change seriously is not taken seriously as fiction." Hence some of the best responses to the Anthropocene have been provided by science fiction. Hence, too, Ghosh's concern that we are now "entering into a great derangement." Wark describes this as "a time when art and literature concealed rather than articulated the nature of the times and the time of nature." In place of dealing with the Anthropocene, novels become choked with what, following Franco Moretti, can be thought of as "filler, the everyday life of bourgeois society, its objects, decors, styles and habits [34]."

The reason the bourgeois novel is obsolete, then, is because it has not "adapted to new probabilities." Instead, Wark characterizes the bourgeois novel as "a genre of fantasy fiction smeared with naturalistic details—filler—to make it appear otherwise. It excludes the totality so that bourgeois subjects can keep prattling on about their precious 'inner lives.'" Yet, as we have seen, critical theory has not been adapted in the Anthropocene either. In fact, to include it seriously in the argument Wark makes about literature and art only serves to place further emphasis on the idea that we are arriving at "a great derangement," a period when no element remains in its original place. For ours is a time when established theory too can be said to obscure rather than express the changing nature of the times and the time of nature. As with the bourgeois novel, it's a derangement that works through formal limitations. In the case of theory, these limitations involve the named individualistic author, the immutable object, intellectual property and so forth. As with the modern novel, the screening out of this scaffolding "continues to be essential" to the functioning of what we might now rather teasingly refer to as bourgeois theory [35]. To further paraphrase Ghosh by way of Wark, here then is the great irony of theory in the Anthropocene: "the very gestures with which it conjures up nonhuman actors, objects and elements "are actually a concealment" of them [36].

The performance of serious theory today is thus as formally limited to bourgeois liberal humanism as the novel. This means it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of political theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To sample and remix Wark's text on the novel in the Anthropocene in order to further undercut notions of the author as self-identical human individual, anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory's established scaffolding, how it's created, published, and disseminated, is regarded as not proper, eccentric, and odd and risks banishment. "But from what? Polite bourgeois society?" The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory is to be found? [37].

my research. So, much like Eribon and Louis, I'm not sure who I'm writing for. It could even be said that, in denaturalizing and destabilizing notions of the virtuoso human author, creativity, and copyright, my research is designed to challenge many of the common sense values and practices that could otherwise have been used to

theorist that a lot of people may find difficult to understand. It's about doing something that is indeed strange, weird, awkward, confusing, and surprising, something that's not so easy to approach unconsciously, in a default setting, as if it's already known and understood in advance. I'm certainly not interested in making myself appear more human in my work. I do not want to think these issues through the lens of memoir in the way Eribon and Louis do. For me, the biographical human subject is more of a symptom than a cure. So I provide very little in the way of autobiographical information as a means of peaking people's interest and holding their attention: next to nothing about my life, background, class, sexuality, personal vices, or virtues. I do not use either words or pictures to share what it feels like to be me or tell the story of the struggles I've overcome to get where I am and how that process has changed me. Nor do I create opportunities to form interpersonal relationships with me by using Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In fact, I try to avoid

anything that might have the effect of obviously humanizing me.

This is another reason I'm interested in experimenting with ways of working as a

Since it's clearly leading me to break many of the rules about how to attract a twenty-first century audience, I realize this risks coming across as my being willfully difficult, if not self-defeating. (And all the more so in an era of intersectionality, when people are conceived as being the sum total of their class, race, gender, and other identities. It is an era when, as a number of commentators have pointed out, individuals "not only bear the entire history of these identities; they 'own' them. A person who is not defined by them cannot tell the world what it is like to be a person who is [44]." A backstory can be useful in such circumstances in making one appear more authentic.) But if I'm interested in transforming the dominant discourse network and its manufactured common sense about how (posthuman) knowledges are to be created, published, and circulated today, then

Having said that, if we want to avoid falling passive victim to ways of acting already established in advance, we need to be careful not to merely substitute one set of rules for another: those associated with the production of long-form books of antihumanist or posthumanist theory, say. It's for this reason that my work does not necessarily adhere to predefined ideas concerning what forms a theoretical text can take. I'm experimenting with new ways of being a theorist that are neither simply neoliberal nor liberal humanist; and I'm doing so because, rather than endeavoring to speak on behalf of a preexisting community or otherwise represent them—as we saw Eribon and Louis trying to do with the working class—it seems to me we have to actively invent the context and the culture in which such a missing community, replete with new notions of the subject, agency, the human, and so on, can emerge. What's more we have to do so without any assurances or certainty on our part that this will actually happen. We know from Derrida that the future is monstrous. "A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future [45]." As theorists, we need to open ourselves to a future in which we do not simply adhere to the proper, accepted systems for creating, disseminating, and storing our work, together with their preprogrammed ideas regarding the singular human author, originality and copyright. Rather we need to display what Eribon describes as a "lack of respect" for those rules of bourgeois liberal humanist decorum that insist "people follow established norms regarding 'intellectual debate' when what is at stake clearly has to do with a political

struggle" (p. 161). In short, we need to be weird, unsettling monsters.

gather an audience around it.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

it's a risk I have to take.

67

In this way theory eliminates the "improbable"—including nonhumanist, nonliberal modes of being and doing—"from serious consideration." We could perhaps cite examples designed to provoke further speculation the fact that an orangutan in Argentina called Sandra has been declared by the courts there to be a "nonhuman person" with legal rights [38]; that the Whanganui River in New Zealand has been given the same rights as a human person [39]; and that the Amazon has recently been declared a "subject of rights" by Colombia's supreme court in a bid to protect it from further deforestation [40]. If nonhuman things can now have rights and be the party of interest in administrative proceedings—just as they have at various times and places in the past [41]—can we envisage reaching a point in the future where a work of critical theory can be legally and professionally recognized as having been co-authored by an ape, a river, a forest, an ecosystem, and even by nature in general? If so, what would the consequences be for our notions of the author, creativity, and copyright? [42]. Does even asking such improbable questions not involve us in imposing legal and professional strictures that are designed for humans onto nature? Certainly from the perspective of bourgeois theory that which is outside its inherited frame in this respect can only appear as "strange," "weird," and "freaky." Any such "strangeness" emanating from an actual engagement with the implications of the Anthropocene can thus be kept in the "background," the unmarked environment in which theory takes place or moved into it. As is the case with the bourgeois novel, such theory—with rare exceptions—"draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman," not to mention the "collective and collaborative." Here, too, the actions of individual human agents are treated as "discontinuous with other agents," elements, and energies (including "the masses, peoples, movements"), even though "the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities … [43]."

We can therefore see that bourgeois theory clearly "is not working." The nonhuman, climate breakdown, the Anthropocene in general, exceeds what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, it has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. Instead, theory "imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value." Just as "serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous," so too does serious theory. The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary critical theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler—objects, materials, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, and geological formations—to make it appear otherwise.

### 4. Weird, unsettling monsters

To be fair, the situation I've described creates problems for my own ways of being a theorist, too. After all, if what I'm doing is placing a question mark against both our neoliberal and liberal humanist models of subjectivity, it'd be naïve to expect there's going to be a large, preexisting audience out there I can appeal to with

#### Anti-Bourgeois Theory DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

self-identical human individual, anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory's established scaffolding, how it's created, published, and disseminated, is regarded as not proper, eccentric, and odd and risks banishment. "But from what? Polite bourgeois society?" The for-profit world of Verso books and

In this way theory eliminates the "improbable"—including nonhumanist, nonliberal modes of being and doing—"from serious consideration." We could perhaps cite examples designed to provoke further speculation the fact that an orangutan in Argentina called Sandra has been declared by the courts there to be a "nonhuman person" with legal rights [38]; that the Whanganui River in New Zealand has been given the same rights as a human person [39]; and that the Amazon has recently been declared a "subject of rights" by Colombia's supreme court in a bid to protect it from further deforestation [40]. If nonhuman things can now have rights and be the party of interest in administrative proceedings—just as they have at various times and places in the past [41]—can we envisage reaching a point in the future where a work of critical theory can be legally and professionally recognized as having been co-authored by an ape, a river, a forest, an ecosystem, and even by nature in general? If so, what would the consequences be for our notions of the author, creativity, and copyright? [42]. Does even asking such improbable questions not involve us in imposing legal and professional strictures that are designed for humans onto nature? Certainly from the perspective of bourgeois theory that which is outside its inherited frame in this respect can only appear as "strange," "weird," and "freaky." Any such "strangeness" emanating from an actual engagement with the implications of the Anthropocene can thus be kept in the "background," the unmarked environment in which theory takes place or moved into it. As is the case with the bourgeois novel, such theory—with rare exceptions—"draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman," not to mention the "collective and collaborative." Here, too, the actions of individual human agents are treated as "discontinuous with other agents," elements, and energies (including "the masses, peoples, movements"), even though "the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities … [43]." We can therefore see that bourgeois theory clearly "is not working." The nonhuman, climate breakdown, the Anthropocene in general, exceeds what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, it has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. Instead, theory "imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value." Just as "serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous," so too does serious theory. The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary critical theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler—objects, materials, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, and geological formations—to make it appear otherwise.

Routledge journals where proper theory is to be found? [37].

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

4. Weird, unsettling monsters

66

To be fair, the situation I've described creates problems for my own ways of being a theorist, too. After all, if what I'm doing is placing a question mark against both our neoliberal and liberal humanist models of subjectivity, it'd be naïve to expect there's going to be a large, preexisting audience out there I can appeal to with my research. So, much like Eribon and Louis, I'm not sure who I'm writing for. It could even be said that, in denaturalizing and destabilizing notions of the virtuoso human author, creativity, and copyright, my research is designed to challenge many of the common sense values and practices that could otherwise have been used to gather an audience around it.

This is another reason I'm interested in experimenting with ways of working as a theorist that a lot of people may find difficult to understand. It's about doing something that is indeed strange, weird, awkward, confusing, and surprising, something that's not so easy to approach unconsciously, in a default setting, as if it's already known and understood in advance. I'm certainly not interested in making myself appear more human in my work. I do not want to think these issues through the lens of memoir in the way Eribon and Louis do. For me, the biographical human subject is more of a symptom than a cure. So I provide very little in the way of autobiographical information as a means of peaking people's interest and holding their attention: next to nothing about my life, background, class, sexuality, personal vices, or virtues. I do not use either words or pictures to share what it feels like to be me or tell the story of the struggles I've overcome to get where I am and how that process has changed me. Nor do I create opportunities to form interpersonal relationships with me by using Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In fact, I try to avoid anything that might have the effect of obviously humanizing me.

Since it's clearly leading me to break many of the rules about how to attract a twenty-first century audience, I realize this risks coming across as my being willfully difficult, if not self-defeating. (And all the more so in an era of intersectionality, when people are conceived as being the sum total of their class, race, gender, and other identities. It is an era when, as a number of commentators have pointed out, individuals "not only bear the entire history of these identities; they 'own' them. A person who is not defined by them cannot tell the world what it is like to be a person who is [44]." A backstory can be useful in such circumstances in making one appear more authentic.) But if I'm interested in transforming the dominant discourse network and its manufactured common sense about how (posthuman) knowledges are to be created, published, and circulated today, then it's a risk I have to take.

Having said that, if we want to avoid falling passive victim to ways of acting already established in advance, we need to be careful not to merely substitute one set of rules for another: those associated with the production of long-form books of antihumanist or posthumanist theory, say. It's for this reason that my work does not necessarily adhere to predefined ideas concerning what forms a theoretical text can take. I'm experimenting with new ways of being a theorist that are neither simply neoliberal nor liberal humanist; and I'm doing so because, rather than endeavoring to speak on behalf of a preexisting community or otherwise represent them—as we saw Eribon and Louis trying to do with the working class—it seems to me we have to actively invent the context and the culture in which such a missing community, replete with new notions of the subject, agency, the human, and so on, can emerge. What's more we have to do so without any assurances or certainty on our part that this will actually happen. We know from Derrida that the future is monstrous. "A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future [45]." As theorists, we need to open ourselves to a future in which we do not simply adhere to the proper, accepted systems for creating, disseminating, and storing our work, together with their preprogrammed ideas regarding the singular human author, originality and copyright. Rather we need to display what Eribon describes as a "lack of respect" for those rules of bourgeois liberal humanist decorum that insist "people follow established norms regarding 'intellectual debate' when what is at stake clearly has to do with a political struggle" (p. 161). In short, we need to be weird, unsettling monsters.

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

References

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

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[3] Eribon. Returning to Reims. California: Semiotext(e); 2013. p. 33. Unless indicated otherwise, all further references in the text are to this book the U.S. version, which I bought shortly

[2] Louis É. History of Violence. London:

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

[10] Solomon N. The Profits from Publishing: Authors' Perspective. The Bookseller; 2018. Available from: https://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/ profits-publishing-authors-perspective-743226; referring to the findings of Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman of the London School of Economics and

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[11] Shaffi S. Publishing Seeks To Address Industry's Lack of Diversity.

[12] Centre for Literacy in Primary Education. Reflecting Realities—A Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children's Literature 2017. 2018

[13] The Sutton Trust. Over Half the Country's Top Journalists Went To

[14] Thurman N. Does British Journalism Have A Diversity Problem. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism;

[15] Paine A. Q&A: Enjoying the Good Life (Festival) with Cerys Matthews.

[16] After the 2011 jury for the Man Booker prize stated that they were going to privilege writing that was 'readable', the Goldsmith's Prize was established in 2013—with Josipovici as one of the judges—to explicitly encourage experiments designed to open 'up new possibilities for the novel form'

[17] Wark MK. General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso; 2017

[18] The word 'datum' means a proposition that is assumed, given or

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[6] de Lagasnerie G. Édouard Louis: Life with his brothers in arms and in spirit. Le Monde in English. 2018. Available from: https://medium.com/m-le-maga zine-du-monde/edouard-louis-lifewith-his-brothers-in-arms-and-in-

[7] Kelly S. Does Westworld tell a truer story than the novel can? Guardian. 2016. Available from: https://www.theg uardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/ dec/20/does-westworld-tell-a-truer-

[8] Josipovici G. Whatever Happened to

[9] Waidner I. Liberating the canon: Intersectionality and innovation in literature. In: Waidner I, editor. Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature. Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Experimental;

for an intellectual and political

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Harvill Secker; 2018

after came out in 2013

Vintage; 2018

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story-than-a-novel-can

University Press; 2001

2018

69

Modernism? New Haven: Yale
