Renewing Humanism Against the Anthropocene: Towards a Theory of the Hysterical Sublime

Matthew Flisfeder (bio)

Abstract

This article puts to question performative contradictions in theories developing a resistance to anthropocentrism in the context of rising interest in the Anthropocene narrative and Posthumanist theories seeking to evade human exceptionalism. By developing the aesthetic category of the hysterical sublime—a term first coined by Fredric Jameson in his early writing on postmodernism—this article challenges theoretical attempts to resist anthropocentrism and, instead, proposes a renewed conception of a universal and dialectical humanism as a methodological and ethical framework for grappling with contemporary crises such as climate change and the rise of digital automation.

I.

Posthumanism, according to the editors of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, is an umbrella term used to describe a range of theories and philosophies, with diverse histories, that are typically resistant to human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism (Rosendahl Thomsen and Wamberg 1). The term has a varied historical development and usage, but, as Rosendahl Thomsen and Wamberg remark, posthumanism ties together a general disdain for anthropocentrism. For instance, at the beginning of Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett notes that “for some time political theory has acknowledged that materiality matters. But this materiality most often refers to human social structures or to the human meanings ‘embodied’ in them and other objects” (xvi). Politics, she adds, is usually conceived of as an “exclusively human domain,” and “what registers on it is a set of material constraints or a context for human action” (xvi). According to Bennett, anthropocentric politics and materialisms too often forget the non-human, or the agency of matter. She therefore defines her own vitalist materialism as a “resistance to anthropocentrism” (xvi).

While Bennett insists on the difference between her work and object-oriented ontology (“Systems”), her vitalist perspective overlaps in some ways with the goals of philosophers like Graham Harman, whose first book, Tool-Being, opens with a declaration about ending the dictatorship of the human (2), and Levi R. Bryant, whose efforts to evade anthropocentrism involve theorizing all things as objects of different kinds to create what he calls a democracy of objects. As Bryant puts it, the aim of object-oriented ontology as a posthumanism is “to think a subjectless object, or an object that is for-itself rather than an object that is an opposing pole before or in front of a subject” (Democracy 19). Referring to Quentin Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism—which claims that, from a humanist perspective, no object can exist without a thinking subject—Bryant proposes, too, that the challenge for equality must be based on a resistance to anthropocentrism (Democracy 39–40). Noting that the earth sciences are now referring to our own geological period as an Anthropocene (Crutzen), Rosi Braidotti similarly acknowledges the need to “move beyond anthropocentrism,” which according to her is the central aim of contemporary posthumanist scholarship (50). In some cases, scholars, such as Bennett and Steven Shaviro (Universe) go so far as to defend the need for forms of anthropomorphism as a mechanism for evading anthropocentrism (Bennett, Vibrant 98–99; Shaviro, Universe 61; Shaviro, “Consequences”). It is worth noting that the brands of posthumanism identified here are not anti-humanist, but rather aim to demote human exceptionalism, placing the human back into its relative position within a chain of equivalence of all beings and objects. The perspectives described above, despite some of their differences, seek to move past the centrality of the human subject in order to evade a burdensome anthropocentrism. Resistance to anthropocentrism forms the core of their work.

However, many of these perspectives still concern themselves with the survival of humanity as a species, and critics have noted an intractable, performative contradiction that persists in attempts to resist anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. As Daniel Hartley notes, for instance, resistance to anthropocentrism aims to demonstrate that the human has been fallaciously elevated above the non-human, despite the fact that the very concept of the Anthropocene would seem to suggest the opposite (158). Braidotti, for instance, notes that the Anthropocene refers to “the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet” (5); yet she also claims that human embodiment is not opposed to matter but continuous with it (35). Similarly, Gamble, Hanan, and Nail argue that, from their own posthumanist and new materialist perspective, human matter is not separate from all other nature, and, in fact, human agency is merely the self-performance of nature acting upon itself. As they explain, theirs is a notion of history “in which humans, when they are involved, are reading and writing as particular performances of matter reading and (re)writing itself” (127). It is difficult, then, to grasp how a conception of an Anthropocene separate from the rest of nature can be possible. From which subjectiveperspective do we grasp this fact of nature proposed by Gamble, Hanan, and Nail? Likewise, Richard Grusin notes that the Anthropocene “names the human as the dominant influence on climate” (vii), but then suggests that “the question of political or social change becomes a question of changing our relations not only to other humans but to nonhumans as well” (xviii), in which case it appears as though humans are singled out as the agents of ethical action. Borna Radnik points out that even the attempt to separate thought and being, or to go beyond the human subject, “necessarily involves conceptual determinations that are only intelligible to us as thinking [human] subjects” (51). Alenka Zupančič, too, argues that “by (im)modestly positing the subject as a more or less insignificant point in the universe, one deprives oneself of the possibility to think, radically and seriously, the very ‘injustice’ . . . that made one want to develop an egalitarian ontological project in the first place” (122). As Hartley, Radnik, and Zupančič all demonstrate, there is an underlying contradiction in the human attempt to evade anthropocentrism, since it is anthropocentrism itself that marks the territory for projects to develop equality and freedom.

To make further sense of this contradiction, I further develop in this essay an aesthetic category first introduced by Fredric Jameson (“Postmodernism”): the hysterical sublime. Jameson explains that for philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime names the human experience of the irrationality of an external nature. The hysterical sublime, by comparison, refers to our experiences in postmodern culture of the irrationality of technologies produced by late capitalism, best represented in popular sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Matrix, The Terminator, and in a TV series such as Black Mirror. I employ the concept of the hysterical sublime in this essay to show how Anthropocene discourse and theories resistant to anthropocentrism repress their humanist and anthropocentric core. On the one hand, they extend and even displace the fear of technology onto the fear of the human. On the other hand, they maintain the centrality of the human subject as the ethical agent of change and transformation. My claim is that the repression of humanism that we so often find in posthumanism stems from attempts to distance positions from anthropocentrism rather than to make it the methodological and ethical center of our struggles. The hysterical sublime thus renews and defends a conception of universal humanism appropriate to our era of twenty-first century capitalism.

As an aesthetic category, the hysterical sublime provides a representational framework for thinking critically about the contradictions of human culture and society and about the way that our collective impact upon the non-human has resulted in a crisis of our own self-preservation and freedom, caught as they are between the twin crises of climate change and automation. This, too, is the product of political conflict and the implementation of systems of production that benefit the few over the many. The hysterical sublime lets us see our culture today not as anthropocentric but, as Jason W. Moore has proposed, as capitalocentric. The hysterical sublime surpasses simplistic humanisms to reflect the cultural contradictions of capitalism and its technological impact upon both nature and ourselves, and to show capitalism’s centrality in our present historical and existential dilemmas, such as the rise of automation and global climate change. These dilemmas, along with the discourse of the Anthropocene, have compelled some to question the human as a species. According to Timothy Morton, we only begin to see ourselves as a species at the moment we start to concern ourselves with other species (Humankind 39). Yuval Noah Harari echoes Morton by suggesting that we only begin to take an interest “in the fate of so-called lower life forms, because we are about to become one” (116). Harari is alluding to an assumed overtaking of humanity by smart machines, an argument popularized by different strands of automation theory and accelerationism whose most vocal proponent, Elon Musk, has argued that to stay relevant humans must become cyborgs (Solon). The once-radical perspective of Donna Haraway now provides the very substance of twenty-first century capitalist mantras.

For Harari, the posthuman moment occurs when we are about to become dominated by machines; and, in a way, both Morton and Harari are correct, but not because we are for the first time expressing concern for other species—in hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, Harari notes, humans have been animal and nature animists—or because we are about to become a “lower” life form. Rather, they are correct because we have now arrived at the moment in capitalist development when all of life has been completely objectified and commodified. We need only reflect on the various practices of objectification in contemporary culture to grasp this: the self-branding of social media influencers, cosmetic surgeries deemed to be necessary components of self-investment, the practice of medicine that treats the body as though it were a car needing a tune-up every few months as opposed to offering more holistic approaches to living and care, and so on. The body is treated like a technological object constantly in need of upgrades and repairs, and some theorists today imagine the equality of all objects in the same way: as just so many different kinds of machines (Bryant, Onto-Cartography). We may thus grasp historical progress today, as Mark Fisher puts it, “not in cultural shifts but in technological upgrades” (K-Punk 585). The middle class and its intellectual force concerns itself with objects at the very moment when people are about to become, or have already become, completely objectified, ourselves the product of capitalist processes of reification. We begin to see ourselves as potentially transforming into a lower life form against the rise in automation and artificial intelligence. It is only now that we aim towards a “democracy of objects,” where equality with the alterity of the nonhuman becomes a concern, because objecthood is deemed to be the basic condition of all things. Far from advancing radical theories, resistance to anthropocentrism, by downgrading the kind of human exceptionalism required to enact emancipatory ethics, is the ideological expression of twenty-first century capitalism. Resistance to anthropocentrism is becoming the norm, such that even the most vocal critics of new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology insist on resisting anthropocentrism much as the theories and theorists they criticize do.

II.

This last point requires clarification. For instance, in “New Materialism and the Labor Theory of Value,” Jennifer Cotter argues that new materialism is “an ideological articulation of commodity production and exchange relations that inverts its own historical conditions of possibility in human historical and social relations by representing the logic of exchange as an ontological condition of life as such” (172). Yet, despite her acute critique of new materialisms as mirrors of the market, Cotter is careful to distance herself and Marxism generally from any association with a humanist outlook: “historical materialism is not actually a form of anthropocentrism; rather, it understands that humans themselves are the evolutionary products of the dialectics of nature.” What she means by this is that human subjects are the products of “the dialectical praxis of labor” and that they “act to transform nature to meet their needs and in doing so transform their needs and their nature” (173). While I don’t dispute the claims she makes, it is difficult not to see her description of the dialectical praxis of human labor as anything but anthropocentric. It is a theory that still puts human labor at the center of production. Cotter recircles this point by remarking that in historical materialism it is not consciousness that determines social existence but social existence that determines consciousness. What she forgets, to borrow a phrase from Marx, is that people still make history, but they do so in conditions not of their own choosing. The trap to be avoided, then, is not anthropocentrism but feeling the need to avoid it. Attempts to do just that are bound to a performative contradiction that verges on a kind of inaction or withdrawal (to steal a term from object-oriented ontologists) based on a bad infinity that leaves intact existing relations of exploitation. Bad infinity is another way of explaining the kind of self-reflexive anxiety—of thinking problems and contradictions all the way down—that preemptively halts all activity. It is what Mark Fisher refers to as “reflexive impotence,” a self-fulfilling prophesy of cynical capitalist realism (Capitalist 21). Bad infinity thus transforms into a contemplative materialism or an idealism in the guise of materialism. Therefore, if posthumanisms such as new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology express an ontology of the reified space of the market, then their ethics is one of withdrawal, unreason, and inaction lest we give in to the spectres of Promethean anthropocentrism and hubristic pride.

Alexander Galloway shows that object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are, likewise, not merely mirrors of the market but of the algorithm. He makes this claim in relation to the origins of object-oriented philosophies in object-oriented programming, which designs software around objects rather than functions. It is worth noting that, just as neoliberalism objectifies us in the form of human capital, in the age of the algorithm, data and math make claims about the world from which they extract value (Galloway 358). These points are not insignificant and, again, like Cotter’s characterization of new materialism as reflecting the logic of the market, Galloway assesses object-oriented philosophy as expressive of an algorithmic ontology of data objects. In fact, both Morton and Harari use this very metaphor in their respective challenges to anthropocentrism: Morton proposes that the algorithm provides a snapshot of humankind (Hyperobjects 17), while for Harari humans are algorithms that reproduce by making copies of themselves (Homo Deus 98). The problem with posthumanist new realists such as these is that, unlike someone like Slavoj Žižek, they claim, as Galloway notes (357), that ontologies shouldn’t be political. Galloway’s retort is that any claim to lie outside of the political is one of the surest signs of being traversed by political antagonism. However, Galloway, like Cotter, takes time to distance himself from anthropocentrism and humanism.

Although the concluding section of his essay centers on the Heidegger-Sartre debate over humanism, Galloway makes sure to avoid being accused of anthropocentrism. In a footnote he writes, “[m]y argument is not an elegy to humanism, Sartrean or otherwise, at the expense of the nonhuman. This debate is false.” The true debate, he says, is between realism and materialism: “The issue is not objects versus humans but rather the real versus history” (364n28). Galloway is right to inquire about the politics of object-oriented philosophies, but I remain puzzled by his and Cotter’s urge to distance themselves from humanism and anthropocentrism. Isn’t history and our making of it precisely the human, subjective, and radical core of historical materialism? Isn’t the point for us not merely to contemplate the world but to change it? When Fredric Jameson tells us to “Always historicize!” he explains that the objective path of history is bound up with a subjective dimension “of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand [the historical origins of things themselves]” (ix). I raise this point not merely to claim that history is simply the product of human subjective intervention. There is objective history, but it intersects with an ethical dimension only along the lines of the “concepts and categories” by which it is known.

Cotter and Galloway are not alone in maintaining critical distance from humanism or anthropocentrism, even in their poignant challenges to new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In a piece that begins with a critique of the post-critical stance of Bruno Latour, Judith Butler claims that even the early Marx of the 1844 manuscripts, notorious for its (immature, according to Althusser) humanism, is not in fact anthropocentric. Her claim rests on the fact that, echoing Morton, Marx reflects on the inorganic alongside the human. Butler attacks Latour for his positivism but then doubles back to show that Marx—even the early Marx—was not anthropocentric (Butler, “Inorganic Body”). And why don’t we add Jameson himself to this resistance to humanism? In Allegory and Ideology, Jameson defends his career-spanning assertion, here against the aesthetics of “posthumanist” spaces, that allegory and representation are foundational—not as the grounds for meaning but for thought. The aesthetic dimension is the very ground against which all thought reacts and on which it reflects, a position with which this essay aligns itself. However, in his next move, Jameson characterizes the distinction between allegory and symbolism as like that between science and humanism, like Althusser’s distinction between science and (humanist) ideology. He aligns symbolism with humanism, since it is in the pursuit of meaning that interpretation of allegorical representation upends scientific investigation. Jameson equates to the symbolic pursuit of depth and meaning, something against which we must turn (Allegory 37). In short, even some of the staunchest critiques of posthumanism, new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology continue to run away from humanism. Where do we go from here?

III.

I now turn to a theory of the hysterical sublime to provide a fuller description of the concept as I use it, and to explain its significance for thinking through the contradictions present in theories aimed at resisting anthropocentrism and humanism more generally. Jameson first introduces the hysterical sublime in his early writings on postmodernism. The concept has irked me somewhat since first discovering it, but even though Jameson does not delve into the meaning behind his use of the term “hysterical,” I find the concept useful for my analysis and argument. Because Jameson does not develop the concept any further in his own work, it is useful to do so here: I propose that the psychoanalytic understanding of the hysterical neurotic shows us how anthropocentrism becomes the stumbling block of Anthropocene discourse and thought.

Jameson develops his conception of the hysterical sublime by comparing the postmodern sublime to the accounts of the sublime developed by Burke and Kant. It is, therefore, useful to explain how it functions in their writing before developing further Jameson’s concept of the hysterical sublime, below. For Burke (1998 [1757]), our experience of the sublime emerges from sensations of fear and terror in the face of the dangers of the natural world. We experience these sensations with delight in those moments when we feel safe and secure. The sublime is thus, for Burke, the pleasure garnered from the painful experience of danger, but which is nevertheless kept at a distance where we can perceive it in safety and respite. For Kant (2000 [1793]), however, the sublime is not merely the product of our experiencing the dangers of nature from a safe distance and remaining in awe of them. Rather, the sublime is brought to bear on our aesthetic enjoyment in the moment when we experience our own affirmation of a limit, one that we put in place ourselves to assert our own power. Such a limit is self-affirming at the same time that it creates and puts in its place the sublime as a negative pleasure.

The human subject’s affirmative placement of the sublime is called visually to mind in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), when Mal (Marion Cotillard) places her totem, forever spinning, inside a toy house, which creates for her the illusion of the dream reality as the real thing. The scene is useful for grasping the way that, in the psychoanalytic sense, our approach to reality is always already framed by the fantasy scenario we create in our relation to it. Similarly, the creation of the sublime positions for us our very own relation to the reality of the world in the very form of our affirmation of it as limited. We can understand in this way the Hegelian thesis that, “behind the curtain of phenomena, there is only what we put there” (Less 282). The limit that we apply serves as a heuristic, a regulative idea against which the capacity to reason is established. By positing the heuristic limit, we are made capable of reasoning the aesthetic experience of the sublime, which is nowhere present in reality until that moment when it is represented in our thinking it. The latter, we can say, marks the point of origin, the positing of the presuppositions, in the Hegelian sense, that pivots towards the establishment of the system of philosophical inquiry, thinking, and rational cognition, which is a totality closed on one end by the affirmation of the limit, and on the other by its ends and goals, or by its teleology. I argue that the latter is only a secondary moment of the dialectic, however, since we are subjectivized through the curvature of the negation of the negation that returns us to our starting point, but from an inverse perspective in the aesthetic.

According to Jameson, the sublime occupies an alternative imaginary in the context of postmodern capitalism. For Jameson, the other of postmodernity is not nature but technology, which figures the representation, or the aesthetic limit, of reality. Jameson is careful to note that for him the hysterical sublime refers not necessarily to technology, but that technology serves as an aesthetic shorthand for our experience of the global network of advanced capitalism (“Postmodernism” 77; 79). It is because productive technology exists as congealed dead labor that we can come to experience it as an alienated power that we set against ourselves (“Postmodernism” 77). It is this sublime other, an aesthetic figuration of late capitalism, that we encounter in representations of technology. For instance, according to Jameson, even in the early 1980s, the computer comes to represent  the general global network of the financial stage of capitalism. We can also say that this stage finds expression in popular culture genres such as cyberpunk, where the digital, virtual realities, artificial intelligence, androids, and replicants extend the panic mode of the sublime in everything from HAL 9000 and Roy Batty to the matrix and black mirrors. Yet even here technology and the digital in the context of Anthropocene discourse don’t capture the sublime other of our present. Compared with technology itself, or even the capitalist mode of production, the hysterical sublime is more readily readable and located in the human subject. After all, it is the human subject that transforms nature through the dialectical praxis of labor, submitting it to the human will in the process of developing the tools that build human civilizations. The hysterical sublime, I claim, thus expresses our fear and panic and even our awe and terror of ourselves as we are faced with a confrontation with overwhelming anthropocentrism. The hysterical sublime corresponds to human self-loathing that we place behind the curtain of phenomenal reality, ourselves. The concept of the hysterical sublime, as I now appropriate it from Jameson, thus represents the rising resistance to anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism that I’ve described above. However, there is also a psychoanalytic sense that I wish to add to Jameson’s initial diagram of the hysterical sublime, related to conceptions of the thinking and reasoning human subject, and through which we can understand the concept of the hysterical sublime in another way.

In a reversal of the terms “hysteric” and “sublime,” we might begin by asking why, according to Lacan, is Hegel “the most sublime hysteric” (Lacan, Other Side 35;Žižek, Most Sublime)?  The psychoanalytic discourse begins by investigating a constitutive (as opposed to contingent) alienation of subjectivity, similar to the Hegelian reading of the subject in Phenomenology of Spirit. We can, for instance, read the entirety of Hegel’s text as one long narrative of “that’s not it,” as we move from the moments of sense-certainty and perception, to understanding, consciousness, and self-consciousness; from the dialectic of the Lord and Bondsman, to the Unhappy Consciousness and the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul—all of the scenarios in Hegel’s text depict the pursuits and impasses of trying to grapple with the inevitability of contradictions towards which we are driven. Similarly, desire in the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis is grasped as the continuous pursuit of the lost object that will supposedly satisfy the subject’s enjoyment. However, as analysis explains, the object pursued is never truly a material object that actually exists. Its positive existence is merely that of being lost, which is why no concrete object will satisfy the subject’s desire. In this way, the hysterical neurotic symptom is one of metonymically reaching out to every material object, which it subsequently cancels as the object “that’s not it.” For Lacan, the subject’s desire is always the desire of the Other—that is, the subject hopes to satisfy its own desire by fulfilling the desire of the Other. However, since no positive object is ever it, the hysterical subject, according to Lacan, ultimately reaches the point of frustration, demanding to know from the Other, “ché vuoi?”—“what do you want from me?” In the Lacanian paradigm, hysterical neurotics, through the constant pursuit of the lost object, and by reaching the point of frustration in their demand to know what to do, produce for analytical discourse the very knowledge upon which it is founded (Lacan, Other Side 14; 31-38). The hysterical subject is, in this sense, the producer of knowledge, and it is in the production of the analytical discourse that the hysteric aids in the development of the very language—the interpretive language, or the Symbolic—that enables the process of the talking cure. It is then through the recognition on the part of the subject that every positive object is bound to failure that the cure enables the subject to retroactively transform its relation to its enjoyment and to grasp the constitutive fact of alienation. It is, in other words, the psychoanalytic moment of the negation of the negation.

When we then think about the various examples and dramatizations in the Phenomenology of Spirit, from the Lord and Bondsman to the beautiful soul and the law of the heart, we see that every scenario raises new and irreconcilable contradictions. As Žižek puts it, Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit tells us again and again the same story of the repeated failure of the subject’s endeavour to realize his project in social Substance . . . the story of how the ‘big Other,’ the social substance, again and again, thwarts his project and turns it upside-down” (Ticklish 76). As Žižek has also argued, it is then at the point of Absolute Knowing that the subject “finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity” (Sublime Object 6). Alienation is less the problem to be solved (and here the humanisms of those like Lefebvre [2009] or Fromm [2011] fail); alienation and negativity are, instead, the very constitutive dimensions of subjectivity and freedom. By alienating ourselves from nature, by negating our natural determinants as well as our social and cultural ones, we enact our freedom, which constantly plagues us. It is only by reconciling ourselves with this fact—the fact of alienation and the inevitability of contradiction—that we come to see things in their totality, or as the bigger picture that counts as Absolute Knowing, which overlaps in Hegel’s Logic, with the moment of the negation of the negation, or the true infinite (119). As Žižek puts it, “in the negation of the negation, the subject includes itself [its own alienation] in the process” (Less 299).

The production of the new concept (or, in semiotic terms, the new signifier) is thus the very way in which the Symbolic is meant to have an effect in the Real. The production of the new—affirming the new concept—is the method by which the free subject gives structure to its freedom. The foundation of our collective freedom is built upon the production of aesthetics and structures, a production that makes this collective freedom possible. The hysterical sublime is thus, on the one hand, the figure of the human subject itself, which bears the marker of being the stumbling block of sense in a posthumanist ethics resistant to anthropocentrism; on the other hand, it is the manner in which the human subject produces the new in the realm of the Real. Through the production of discourse that properly grasps the object of the Real, the discursive or Symbolic knowledge that the subject produces makes possible our transformation of our material reality and the conditions of our existence. This, after all, is the sense in which Jameson first coins his concept of “cognitive mapping”—which he describes as an aesthetic, “which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”—and, he does so in precise Lacanian terms, noting the way that the Symbolic (as interpretation; narrative as a socially symbolic act) has an effect in the Real, a point missed in the Althusserian reference to ideology as an imaginary representation of the subject to its real conditions of existence (“Postmodernism” 92). It’s on this point that historical materialism and psychoanalysis overlap. Leaving aside the fact that humanisms have created deleterious interactions with the world, we start to arrive at the point where our interpretive relation to the world is also our salvation from ourselves. If the dialectics of nature means anything, it is that although we are made by nature we at the same time also transform nature to meet the needs of our historically conditioned freedom. It is thus futile to attempt a reconciliation with nature, since alienation is the foundation for our understanding of the conditions in which we exist. To grasp this we require universal humanist concepts that allow us to represent the aesthetic as well as the ethical conditions we need to enact, or even to limit and regulate our relation to nature, which is also a relation to ourselves.

IV.

What evidence is there to support the claim that the human subject is the sublime other—the hysterical sublime—of posthumanist critical theories resistant to anthropocentrism? For the sake of brevity, I’ll refer here to a single example, noting that the theory I present is the beginning of a broader investigation. It is significant that Graham Harman in his aesthetic theory explicitly rejects the category of the sublime. Object-oriented ontology, he writes, “does not really distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime” (Art 47). For him, the two different experiences of the beautiful and the sublime are simplified into the allure of the object. Harman’s object-oriented ontology denies the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, because this would detract from the formal equivalence and flatness of aesthetic objects. From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, Harman continues, “aesthetics must treat the apples of a still life and the awesome power of a tsunami in precisely the same way” (47). What he denies, therefore, is the very subjective form of translating aesthetic pleasure into the subject’s instituting power to reason. At the same time, however, he ignores his own positing of the human subject as that very other against which his own reasoning in object-oriented philosophy is founded. In other words, what he misses is the human fantasy framework that allows us to consider the formal equality of objects, the criteria by which they can be judged. They are made equivalent only insofar as their measurement is reflected by some foundational regulatory and heuristic limit, which I am here calling the hysterical sublime.

            Harman has responded to this critique in his reading of Marx (“Object-Oriented”). One of the chief claims of object-oriented ontology is that even though human subjects may think their relations to objects or to the noumenal, even as a limit (it is typical of anthropocentricism), they ignore the relationship between objects. For Harman, this bias returns in the Marxist account of the commodity as congealed human labor. However, his response to the criticism that OOO is fetishistic in the same way as commodity fetishism nevertheless avoids confronting the central ideological dimensions of Marx’s conception of the commodity. Harman focuses instead on the dimensions of value production and the emphasis in Capital on the social dimensions of commodity production as the congealing of socially necessary labor time in the commodity. Commodities, he says quite rightly, are objects with social value and are therefore still the product of an anthropocentric constellation (“Object-Oriented” 32-33). What Harman ignores is the ideological aspect underlying commodity fetishism, which is not too far off from his own disavowed position of enunciation, which is the very basis for the market reification of value. Both the market and perspectives resistant to anthropocentrism disavow the human social dimensions present in their reflections on the world of objects, be they commodities or otherwise. This is a crucial point not to be missed: while Harman criticizes the responses to OOO as fetishistic on the grounds that commodity fetishism still relies on the social, noting that OOO is different for its critique of anthropocentrism, he fails to see that his own position is also inherently anthropocentric, relying on the social.

            Recall here Marx’s description in Capital, Volume 1 of the imaginary scenario of commodities communicating with each other in the market:

If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us a objects, however, is our own value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen to how those commodities speak through the economist:

            ‘Value (i.e. exchange value) is a property of things, riches (i.e. use values) of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not’.

            ‘Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond’.

            So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” (176–177)

The scenario as Marx lays it out is meant to demonstrate the fact that the exchange value congealed in the commodity is not its intrinsic value, but its value insofar as it is expressed in human social relations of exchange. The fantasy of the intercourse between commodity-objects is not far off from Harman’s conception of noumenal intercourse. In the case of commodity exchange, the scenario is bound to money as its universal equivalent. Money measures equivalent value in the commodity and is the universal point of signification against which all commodity-objects, including commodified human labor, waged or otherwise (slave labor, social reproduction), find their equivalence as objects. It is this fantasy scenario itself, or what Slavoj Žižek calls the sublime object of ideology, that informs the necessary subtext to the proper fetishistic functioning of money (Sublime Object). The hysterical sublime likewise provides for posthumanist resistance to anthropocentrism the same kind of subterranean point of reflection, first in its ability to lay claim to the equivalence of all objects (or, even, in its attempt to theorize all substance as equivalent), and second in its attempt to dispel the instituting binary logic of anthropocentrism. This, however, nevertheless dismisses the fact that the non- or posthuman subject is itself a binary other of the human and humanisms, which are its target. By “target” I mean both that which forms its focal point of attack and, paradoxically, that other human subjects are precisely those whom it aims to convince—of what?

            This brings us back to Harman’s reaction to Kant, both in terms of his aesthetics as well as his ethics. The two are inherently related to the extent that the positing of the needed presuppositions required to produce and create the background of the sublime very much pertains to the kind of freedom that is anticipated in the categorical imperative. Only a free human subject can create the internal limits required to posit the sublime as the negative pleasure against which we perceive and experience beauty. Similarly, only a free subject, for Kant (2015 [1788]), is capable of an ethical act since, as he argues in the second Critique, an ethical action must be taken as free from punishment and reward. Ethical actions are self-authorizing, but only insofar as the subject acts freely while at the same time acknowledging the conditions that make possible its own freedom. Harman is quick to counter, arguing that ethics are never merely the human subject acting on an object, but rather the hybrid formation of the compound entity between the agent and the object (“Object-Oriented” 34). He relies, even, on the Heideggerian difference between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand to make this case. Present-at-hand entities, he writes, are inherently relational, but not in the same way as exchange-value, because exchange is a wholly social relation, unlike Heideggerian presence (Ibid). But Harman might betray himself here when thinking the correlate between the intercourse of noumenal objects and the presence of the subject to such a scene. For Harman, the problem with anthropocentrism is that it remains idealist and anti-realist in the sense that, for him, it cannot perceive reality apart from human contact with it. But this is not the point of dialectical materialism, which is at its most basic a theory of the political ethics of the subject, insofar as it relates to the dynamics of the human knowing, reasoning and acting upon the reality and materiality of the world. As Žižek notes, at its core dialectical materialism concerns the way that human knowledge is tied to our interactions with the real world: “[t]he idea that knowing changes reality is something quantum physics shares with psychoanalysis (for which interpretation has effects in the Real) as well as with historical materialism, for which the proletariat’s acts of acquiring self-consciousness (of becoming aware of its historical mission) changes its object—through this awareness, the proletariat in its very social reality turns into a revolutionary subject” (Incontinence 228). To this list I would add, perhaps somewhat ironically, object-oriented ontology as one example of its various approaches. To be more blunt: what is this resistance to anthropocentrism if not a theory of knowledge aimed towards changing not merely the object but our own social relation to reality? Who precisely is the target of Harman’s polemic? Who is he trying to convince and for what action does he call? If the aim is to persuade other human subjects to move beyond a contemplative materialism, then perhaps these are the grounds upon which we might begin to rethink an implied posthumanist ethics in more precise humanist rhetoric and aesthetics.

V.

Having now set some of my contentions alongside perspectives resistant to anthropocentrism, I would like to provide a provisional conclusion and offer a way forward that proposes a renewal of humanism through the concept of the hysterical sublime. There are three ways that resistance to anthropocentrism relies on humanist dimensions: the methodological dimension; the ethical dimension; the conceptual-aesthetic dimension. Methodologically, a constitutively alienated human subjectivity is the position from which we are able to grasp the situation. My conception of humanism thus departs from an older Marxist humanism—found in the work of Erich Fromm or Henri Lefebvre, for instance—that sought dis-alienation as its goal. Instead, for me, humanism remains the methodological and ethical measure of our actions, graspable only from conditions of inherent alienation and negativity. Ethically, then, we have to assume that resistance to anthropocentrism expects free action on our part—why else would the discourse be arguing for a critique of humanism if it genuinely felt that we were unable to act, or abstain from action, freely? In other words, why engage in polemical critiques of humanism if freedom in the humanistic sense is deemed to be illusory? What is the point of receiving information if we are not driven to act on it? It is not enough to “understand the passions,” as Rosi Braidotti puts it (Posthuman 47). Our very act of thinking is already our subjective investment in them.

Finally, it is only by relying on humanistic concepts such as humility, accountability, responsibility, equality, equity, and freedom that we can begin to make sense of our relations with the nonhuman and our impact on the world. Resistance to anthropocentrism is in this way at least productively antithetical, but it is so only in the sense that we come to grasp the centrality of the human subject and the role that we humans play in the production of the world. Humanism may be differently grasped as the for-itself—or the coming into self-consciousness and awareness—of the Anthropocene. As Jameson puts it in Allegory and Ideology, “[i]f the human age is to be celebrated, and the Anthropocene given its due, it is in terms of its production of reality and not its transformation into an aesthetic image. It is the perspective of human activity (Tätigkeit), of Marxist productivism, of the construction of nature as well as of human reality, that is the truly exhilarating vision” (36). He concludes that “[t]he glory of the Anthropocene . . . has been to show us that we can really change the world. Now it would be intelligent to terraform it” (348).

The aesthetic is at the same time the ethical to the extent that the foundational representation is an ethical gesture whereby the subject posits a self-limit in the form of the representation itself (the movement from Vorstellung—or static image—to Darstellung, as the dialectical presentation or unfolding of the concept, for instance). Representation is a heuristic that provides the ground for thinking, and it is against the imposed limit that all thinking and reasoning takes place. When this occurs, the subject is able to grasp the freedom it also has to posit and represent new limits, making possible a newly-freed ethical act capable of transforming the very conditions of the subject’s existence. The conditions of experience, in other words, are subject to transformation. Embracing new limits, producing new aesthetic forms, as Anna Kornbluh puts it, is the condition of freedom (154). Thinking creates its own forms, or, as Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda put it, “there is no form outside of the act of formalization. There are no pregiven forms of rationality waiting to be discovered: there is nothing to see behind the curtain except for what we ourselves put there. The forms of thought produce themselves in the process of being formalized” (21). Likewise Reza Negarestani suggests that thinking is equivalent to giving structure to the universe: it is “the very register of intelligibility” (Intelligence 1). Rationality, as Ray Brassier explains, is “simply the faculty of generating and being bound by rules,” which are not fixed in advance but historically contingent and mutable (485). This means that we create and set the limits that are necessary for our thinking as well as acting. It’s not by lifting or negating limits that we set ourselves free, as in the project of permanent criticism set out by Foucault in “What is Enlightenment?” It is by imposing new ones against which we relate. Or, as Negarestani puts it, we cannot critique norms without at the same time producing them (“Labor” 439).

When anti-correlationists write off reason and assume unreason as an absolute ontological priority, as Meillassoux does for instance (53), they establish, by way of reasoning, a new norm of unreason. But this is not liberating, since we are today plagued by a lack of reasoning. On the one hand, unreason potentially signals a turn towards some quasi-mystical reliance on the divine, since freedom becomes meaningless if the only necessity is contingency itself, as Meillassoux (2008) puts it in the subtitle to his book, After Finitude. On the other hand, privileging unreason sets up the conditions for the kind of competition that neoliberalism takes as its own quasi-naturalist presuppositions—a lack of a common truth makes competition and a “will to power” the only means of asserting and defending the actual. Underlying all of this, however, is the universal form of the commodity as the disavowed universality that centers reality in the capitalist terms of the present ideology. Instead, it makes sense to posit the practical limits that, given our particular historical conjuncture, set the rules for our material freedom in the form of something like the social state, the kind of prometheanism that Brassier, for instance, defends as the rational engineering of ourselves and the world (not artificially, but through laws that serve the public good over private interest), or the kind of project that Jameson above calls terraforming. But ultimately it is human subjects who set these limits for ourselves (not the divine, not a ruling class). Thus, as Kate Soper puts it, humanism is “about getting human beings to recognize their unique responsibilities for creating and correcting environmental devastation, both for themselves and for other species” (377).

This is how we have to grasp the kind of humanism reflected in the paradoxical status of the hysterical sublime: humanism it is not a theory of dominance, but there is no way for us to exist beyond the methodological as well as the aesthetic and ethical centrality of human subjecthood. Human centrism has erroneously been claimed as ideological hubris that preaches superiority. But centering the human subject merely recognizes that we are the ones whose ideas, motives, and desires make us act in the world. We define the rules, concepts, and values by which we think people should live, and according to which we judge ethical action, including our way of relating to nature and the nonhuman. The hysterical sublime is thus a call to build an aesthetic that reflects our ethical conditions in the face of ecological catastrophe and the built-in obsolescence of automated capitalism. Any sense of a communist or socialist ethic against capital must take the methodological, aesthetic, and ethical principles of humanism into account.

Returning to the avowed resistance to anthropocentrism, then, the first question to ask is an obvious one: why must we tear down the dictatorship of the human? Why make this assumption at all? The problem is the following: who will do this tearing down? Who is the agent of this opposition to the dictatorship of human beings? In Lacanian terms, the enunciated content is here undermined by its position of enunciation. The very act of reasoning the nonhuman only in reference to the human subject shows us that the underlying thrust of a resistance to anthropocentrism is itself inherently anthropocentric. Of course, it is commendable that posthumanist critical theories draw our attention to the nonhuman in the way that they do, precisely at the moment when we face the existential question of our demise in the face of climate change and rising concerns over digital automation and artificial intelligence. But the truth of this crisis is evident only to the human subject and can only be acted upon by it. Even if we anthropomorphize the nonhuman to the extent that we claim such an awareness on its part, we are the agents at whom posthumanist polemics and criticisms are aimed. We cannot, in other words, convince a rock that it is noumenal. We need to convince ourselves of our own rational and ethical centrality. If “posthumanism” means merely taking the nonhuman into consideration within our ontological and ethical frameworks, then it is questionable why this premise is outside the contours of humanism and the values of accountability and responsibility it espouses. Maybe we can extend agency to the nonhuman, but it is a different question when it comes to the ethical implications of human subjectivity and accountability.

We mustn’t confuse the rationalization of the planet with mere technologization or re-industrialization. We don’t need a “fourth industrial revolution,” nor do we need to rely on technology to flatten our relations with the nonhuman. We need a social revolution that privileges the public good over private interests. We don’t need to accelerate technology, and we mustn’t think technocratically. We must think humanistically. When we place ourselves at the methodological and ethical center of knowledge and understanding our thinking has the capacity to reason; and, when we reason, we go from decentering to re-centering the collective to act. To renew universal humanism it is necessary to begin by foregrounding a humanist commitment to freedom, responsibility, accountability, respect, and equity, but also to make critical reasoning and human subjectivity central to our ethical endeavours. I also argue for a conception of humanism connected to class struggle. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, resistance to anthropocentrism reflects market ideology and its processes of reification. Human subjectivity is nevertheless the methodological and ethical center of the dilemmas we face in the Capitalocene. It is because the human subject is constitutively alienated that we require the construction of conditions for a freedom that is mutually satisfiable, between human subjects, collectively, as well as between the human and the nonhuman environment that sustains our freedom. Humanism, to be effective politically as well as ethically, must be based on a perspective that is universal: emancipation is universal or it is nothing. What I am calling the hysterical sublime, as a representational device, allows us to perceive the positing of the conditions that puts humanist conceptions of freedom and accountability, as well as the methodological dimensions of human subjectivity, front and center. Without this human and humanist perception, the earnest goals of posthumanist and new materialist approaches to imagining the planet equitably, which includes seeing the human as one species among others, cannot be accomplished. Attempts at resisting anthropocentrism cannot help but produce performative contradictions. The renewal of humanism must take ownership of this dilemma to facilitate universal emancipation.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his deep appreciation for the thoughtful feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article from the anonymous reviewers, as well as the meticulous commentary and assistance on the preparation of the final version from the general editors. This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Works Cited

• Bennet, Jane. “Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy.” The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, U of Minnesota P, 2015.
• —. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
• Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
• Brassier, Ray. “Prometheanism and Its Critics.” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, Urbanomic, 2014, pp. 467–87.
• Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, 2011.
• —. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh UP, 2014.
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful. Penguin Books, 1998.
• Butler, Judith. “The Inorganic Body in the Early Marx: A Limit-Concept of Anthropocentrism.” Radical Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 6, 2019, pp. 3–17.
• Comay, Rebecca and Frank Ruda. The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. MIT Press, 2018.
• Cotter, Jennifer. “New Materialism and the Labor Theory of Value.” Minnesota Review, no. 87, 2016, pp. 171–81.
• Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature, no. 415, 2002, p. 23.
• Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
• —. “For Now, Our Desire is Nameless.” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018.
• —. “Mannequin Challenge.” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, translated by Catherine Porter, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon, 1984, pp. 32–50.
• Fromm, Erich. Marx’s Concept of Man. Frederick Ungar Publishing, 2011.
• Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 347–66.
• Gamble, Christopher N., et al. “What is New Materialism?” Angelaki, vol. 24, no. 6, 2019, pp. 111–34.
• Grusin, Richard. “Introduction.” The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, U of Minnesota P, 2015.
• Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Signal Books, 2015.
• Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.
• Harman, Graham. Art + Objects. Polity, 2020.
• —. “Object-Oriented Ontology and Commodity Fetishism: Kant, Marx, Heidegger and
• Things.” Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, no. 2, 2017, pp. 28–36.
• —. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books, 2018.
• —. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court, 2002.
• Hartley, Daniel. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Problem of Culture.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, 2016, pp. 154–65.
• Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
• Hegel, G.W.F. The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni. Cambridge UP, 2010.
• Jaeggi, Rahel. Alienation. Translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith, edited by Frederick Neuhouser, Columbia UP, 2014.
• Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology. Verso, 2019.
• —. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981.
• —. “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, no. 1, iss. 146, July/Aug. 1984, pp. 53–92.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer. Cambridge UP, 2000.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge UP, 2015.
• Kornbluh, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. U of Chicago P, 2019.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII.
• Translated by Russell Grigg. W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
• Lefebvre, Henri. Dialectical Materialism. Translated by John Sturrock, U of Minnesota P, 2009.
• Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books, 1990.
• Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier, Bloomsbury, 2008.
• Mészáros, István. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Merlin Press, 2006.
• Mooers, Colin. Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2016.
• Morton, Timothy. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Verso, 2017.
• —. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013.
• Negarestani, Reza. Intelligence and Spirit. Urbanomic, 2018.
• —. “The Labor of the Inhuman.” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, Urbanomic, 2014.
• Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin Books, 2018.
• Radnik, Borna. “Subjectivity in Times of (New) Materialisms: Hegel and Conceptualization.” Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, edited by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek, Northwestern UP, 2020, pp. 50­–67.
• Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads and Jacob Wamberg, editors. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• Shaviro, Steven. “Consequences of Pansychism.” The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, U of Minnesota P, 2015, pp. 19–44.
• —. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
• Solon, Olivia. “Elon Musk Says Humans Must Become Cyborgs to Stay Relevant. Is He Right?” The Guardian, 15Feb. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/15/elon-musk-cyborgs-robots-artificial-intelligence-is-he-right. Accessed 22 Nov. 2021.
• Soper, Kate. “The Humanism in Posthumanism.” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2012, pp. 365–378.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels. MIT, 2017.
• —. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2012.
• —. The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Polity, 2014.
• —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989.
• —. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 1999.