"A different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?" Thoughts on the planetary from Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe (FranceInter)
We are fascinated by these quotes taken from recent interviews with Achille Mbembe, the stellar Cameroonian critical theorist who is trying to think politics in a truly “planetary” register. (Another making the same effort, from a different cultural base, is Benjamin Bratten). This kind of thinking nourishes the “World” section of the I - We - World framework that A/UK uses to structure its initiatives - as well as our explorations in cosmolocalism.
This first stretch is an interview, published in New Frame for the first time this month, given in 2018 in Norway. In a very wide-ranging discussion, here Mbembe is asked about what a “curriculum for the planet” might entail. Note that this is two full years before the pandemic:
To design a truly planetary curriculum implies salvaging whatever remains of reason as a shared human faculty. To be sure and in view of its own history of violence and unreason, reason must be reformed. But I cannot possibly see how, without it, we can adequately answer one of the most urgent questions that will haunt the human race in this century – the question of life futures.
For a long time, we have been concerned with how life emerges and the conditions of its evolution. The key question today is how it can be repaired, reproduced, sustained and cared for, made durable, preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends.
Overall, these debates about how life on Earth can be reproduced and sustained and under what conditions it ends are forced upon us by the epoch itself, characterised as it is by the impending ecological catastrophe and by technological escalation.
I am not sure that they can be properly answered from a purely market logic perspective that addresses life as a commodity to be manipulated and replicated under conditions of volatility.
On the other hand, there is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological in the sense that technologies are moving towards “general intelligence” and self-replication. Over the last decades, we have witnessed the development of algorithmic forms of intelligence. They have been growing in parallel with genetic research, and often in its alliance.
The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere does not only bring with it a greater and greater belief in techno-positivism and modes of statistical thought. It also paves the way for regimes of assessment of the natural world, and modes of prediction and analysis that treat life itself as a computable object.
Concomitantly, algorithms inspired by the natural world, and ideas of natural selection and evolution are on the rise. Such is the case with genetic algorithms. As Margarida Mendes (“Molecular Colonialism”) has shown, the belief today is that everything is potentially computable and predictable. In the process, what is rejected is the fact that life itself is an open system, nonlinear and exponentially chaotic.
I keep raising these issues because they are not unrelated to a problématique of “decolonisation” that would not be a mere ideological phantasm. In fact, these issues may be symptomatic of a truly momentous event we might not be willing or ready to contemplate.
Reason may well have reached its final limits. Or, in any case, reason is on trial. On the one hand, it is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information.
In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms while the human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines and all kinds of devices.
As we are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wavefronts of calculation, all we are willing to ask from it is to detect patterns or to recover artifacts whose existence is derived from financial models built on technologies of miniaturisation and automation.
As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason, its only legitimate manifestation. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponised. Life itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics.
If my description of current trends is accurate, then one of the questions a planetary curriculum must ask is the following: What remains of the human subject in an age when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation?
The second is: Who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable?
The third is whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?
Image by from Noema’s ‘Planetary Politics From Inside The Prison-House Of Language’
This next excerpt is from a recent Mbembe interview in Noema magazine, extending his thoughts on a “planetary politics”:
Planetary politics should be connected to a politics of life, to a politics of the Earth. That includes all creation: all the people of the world; the creations or works of humanity; the mass of things we have invented; animals, plants, microbes, minerals; and mixed bodies (which is what we all are).
In other words, the whole physical universe, all of reality, including (since I’m drawing from the African pre-colonial archive) spiritual and biological energies consistent with the definition of the living world.
…From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. This precariousness is to some extent the result of the imbalances we have been discussing, yet at the same time, in the kind of archives I’m working with, life has been understood as a dynamic, positive and often risky exposure to the unknown and the unpredictable.
When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe, but we do not simply breathe individually. We also share the vital breath.
In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it, between the human universe and the universe of nature, of objects and so forth. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. It is a different ontology.
We start from the assumption that imbalances do exist, but fundamentally they never trump the sharing of agency — the fact that it is possible for something that might appear to lack power to affect that which we think has more power. It’s a different metaphysics of power and of agency. Therefore, the liberation of the vital forces, les forces vitales, is how imbalances are dealt with.
And finally, from the same Noema interview, Mbembe asks (and answers) a leading question:
Who will speak for the planet? I’m not sure that we will ever exit the situation where some speak for the planet while others speak against it. And also, speaking for the planet and listening to the planet are not exactly the same things. Maybe the first step is to listen.
The question then becomes, how do we listen to the planet? Does the planet speak for itself? It has to speak for its self before we can listen. And I think it does speak for itself.
To understand how it is that every single living being on Earth speaks for itself, we have to get out of a certain epistemology that has been premised on the fact that humans are the only speaking entity, that what distinguishes us is that we mastered language and the others didn’t.
But we now have studies showing that plants speak, that forests speak: a de-monopolization of the faculty of speech, of language.
When we look into the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West, broadly speaking we find knowledges of how other-than-humans speak — and how humans, or some humans, have learned to listen to those languages. This requires a radical decentering, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together.
The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.” We have to institute an act of radical decentering that forces us to be born together again. It seems to me that that’s what a new planetary consciousness forces us to undergo — and I believe it is possible.