Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body

311 Pages·2021·2.241 MB·English

by  Emily Anne Parker

Elemental Difference and the Climate
of the Body
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Elemental Difference
and the Climate
of the Body
EMILY ANNE PARKER
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Preface
This was written as a book about how difficult it is to pay attention to the pol-
itics of ecology without recreating the polis. I argue that the polis, the philo-
sophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to
blame for an indistinguishably political and ecological crisis. The polis shares
the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental
difference from which to address the polis and also to understand why the
prevailing terms for what is called climate change are so misleading.
As I make my final edits, however, I am thinking just as much about zo-
onosis. In July 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme and
International Livestock Research Institute produced a document entitled
“Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic Diseases and How to Break the
Chain of Transmission.” It argues that zoonosis is caused by human practices
and is responsible for numerous infectious diseases of recent years, including
Ebola, SARS, the Zika virus, and most recently Covid- 19. The manuscript
for my book was written in 2019, but I am sending the final version to the
press in October 2020, as the Covid-1 9 pandemic continues. A zoonotic
disease is by definition one that “came to people by way of animals,” writes
Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme. She also writes, “At the heart of our response to zoonoses and
the other challenges humanity faces should be the simple idea that the health
of humanity depends on the health of the planet and the health of other spe-
cies.” This is both an open identification with the planet and with other spe-
cies, and a partitioning of these from a homogeneous humanity, which I argue
constitutes the polis. Writing this book has taught me to ask the following: if
Covid- 19 came to earth by way of human practices, many of which are also
responsible for climate change, and if climate change itself is responsible for
occurrences of zoonosis, then doesn’t it make more sense to say that Covid-
19 came to the planet by way of the practices of certain people? Why does the
polis selectively identify as and blame animality, a term too broad even to be
meaningful, for its own problems? Why in this case does the agency of matter
get attributed, while the polis denies its own responsibility? My response to
viii Preface
these is that the polis both understands itself to be one sort of animality (one
species) and also blames animality (for “zoonosis”) at the same time. It seems
to me that the problem in the case of zoonosis as well as climate change is not
so much a lack of agency being attributed to matter, and not so much a lack
of identification with a certain natural condition of “animality,” so much as a
shifting distinction between polis and other agencies. Amid myriad agencies,
the polis disguises and authorizes and congratulates itself. Indeed identifica-
tion with animality can hide the question of humanity.
Many speak in the present of dual pandemics: Covid- 19 and racial injus-
tice. This is a crucial claim. My argument is that these pandemics share a
common cause in the polis. In that sense there are not two pandemics, but
instead one concern, to perceive the ways in which the tradition of the polis
takes shape. Since the completion of this book I have discussed this in more
detail in a piece that is forthcoming in a special issue of the International
Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, edited by Shelley L. Tremain, whom
I thank.
That is where the project is today. It is thanks to so many conversation
partners.
With deep gratitude I would like to thank those who advised, mentored,
and showed the way. This book owes much to the influence of Alia Al- Saji,
Jane Bennett, Debra B. Bergoffen, Elizabeth M. Bounds, William E. Connolly,
Penelope Deutscher, Pamela DiPesa, Noel Leo Erskine, Christos Evangeliou,
Thomas R. Flynn, Pamela M. Hall, Sara Heinamaa, Alice Hines, Rachel
E. Jones, Philip J. Kain, Hilde Lindemann, Jay McDaniel, John Murungi,
Dorothea E. Olkowski, Parimal G. Patil, Laurie L. Patton, Jo- Ann Pilardi,
Alexis Shotwell, Margaret Simons, Alison Stone, the late Steven K. Strange,
Michael Sullivan, Gail Weiss, and Shannon Winnubst. A very special thanks
to Lynne Huffer and Cynthia Willett, for reading, encouraging, and chal-
lenging my work over so many years. I am so grateful.
Research for parts of this book were originally presented at meetings of the
California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, the Canadian Philosophical
Association, the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, the
International Association for Environmental Philosophy, the Irigaray Circle,
the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, philoSOPHIA: Society
for Continental Feminism, and the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy. I also thank California State University– Stanislaus
for the invitation to present what turned out to be the earliest version of
Chapter 1 to the Department of Philosophy.
Preface ix
For discussion of the work of Sylvia Wynter I wish to thank many
collaborators. Taryn Jordan and Lynne Huffer organized a workshop enti-
tled “A Philosophical Encounter with and against the Human” that focused
on reading Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault in the spring of 2018 during
an annual conference of philoSOPHIA: Society for Continental Feminism.
I thank the organizers of that conference as well as other participants in
that workshop. Discussion at that event helped to shape my understanding
of both Foucault and Wynter. That was the event at which I met Elisabeth
Paquette, whom I thank very much for sending me an electronic version
of Wynter’s unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamorphosis: New
Natives In a New World.” Linda Martín Alcoff gave me access to an online
collection of Wynter’s writings. I have been so appreciative to have access
to that. I am so grateful to Susan Stryker, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the spring
of 2018, who recommended to me the work of Londa Schiebinger as well as
discussed with me the work of Sylvia Wynter.
In the fall of 2019, the Department of Philosophy at Emory University
hosted a presentation of the first half of this project as the William J. Edwards
Undergraduate Lecture. Conversations during that visit were invalu-
able. I especially thank Lynne Huffer, Marta Jimenez, John Lysaker, Rudolf
A. Makkreel, Falguni Sheth, Michael Sullivan, and Cynthia Willett.
I am beholden to many for reading and discussing various pieces of
the manuscript: Deborah Barer, Wesley N. Barker, Jane Bennett, Sierra
Billingslea, William E. Connolly, John Gillespie, Laura Hengehold, Lynne
Huffer, Ada S. Jaarsma, Rachel E. Jones, Ruthanne Crapo Kim, Morgan
LaRocca, Peter W. Milne, M. D. Murtagh, Romy Opperman, Joshua St. Pierre,
Gokboru Tanyildiz, Nancy Tuana, and two readers for Oxford University
Press. The manuscript has improved greatly thanks to your questions and
reading recommendations.
The manuscript came together during a sabbatical granted by the College
of Liberal Arts at Towson University. I am grateful to Towson University
for travel monies and to the staff of Cook Library for research assistance.
In the final months of the sabbatical, if it had not been for the generosity of
Siavash Saffari, who loaned me his office at Seoul National University during
November and December 2019, it is possible that the manuscript would not
have been completed on time.
Introduction
Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Difference
The philosophy of performativity understands political differences in race,
sex, gender, ability, class, and sexuality among humans to be matters of human
imposition. It has recently and rightly been criticized by “new materialists,”1
among them political ecologists, who argue that in giving exclusive atten-
tion to this power of human imposition, performativity overestimates the
power of human perception to shape a material world that has powers of its
own. And yet, while political ecological efforts are yielding new avenues of
inquiry in a variety of humanistic disciplines, they do not offer a distinctive
account of political difference other than the performative one. The perfor-
mative philosophy2 of political difference is apparently the only one. This
book gives performativity a conversation partner, a philosophy of elemental
1 “New materialisms” refers to a group of thinkers who advance “rigorous and sustained atten-
tion to global, ahuman forces of ecological change as well as to local spaces of vulnerability and re-
sistance,” in the words of Richard Grusin, ed., Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017), ix. See also Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford, MA: Polity,
2019); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). My own approach to “new materialisms” owes much
to Lynne Huffer’s essay “Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy,”
in Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism, 65– 88. Later I focus my efforts on two new materialists, Karen
Barad and Jane Bennett, both of whom are elaborating political ecologies in Bruno Latour’s sense. See
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004); and Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans.
Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018).
2 By philosophy I mean what Bryan W. Van Norden means: “Philosophy is dialogue about problems
that we agree are important, but don’t agree about the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ulti-
mately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.” The term “philosophy” is ety-
mologically descended from ancient Greek philosophia, the love of wisdom. As Van Norden argues,
ancient Greek philosophers did not invent wisdom. They had one way of understanding it. Bryan W.
Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017), 151. See also Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the
Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1 830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body. Emily Anne Parker, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197575079.003.0001
2 Introduction
difference that combines the crucial work of performativity with that of po-
litical ecology.
Seeking this new way of understanding political difference is, however, not
the purpose of the project. What I ultimately desire is a way of understanding
bifurcations of the political and the ecological in a time of climate disruption,
characterized by ubiquitous changes on the part of a relational planet: rise
of ocean and sea levels,3 deoxygenation of oceans,4 increased risk of crop
failure,5 global heating,6 “racially driven police brutality, the criminalization
of climate refugees along racial lines, neocolonial tourism, the outsourcing
of toxicity and littering [and] . . . the militarization of practices of resources
extraction.”7 Each of these is an entanglement of the political and the ecolog-
ical. From where did the distinction come?
In a series of works culminating recently in Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi
Braidotti has argued that modernity now gives way to a “posthuman predic-
ament,” the “convergence” of centuries of “critiques of Humanism” with the
“complex challenge of anthropocentrism.”8 She writes, “The former focuses
on the critique of the Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal
measure of all things, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and anthro-
pocentric exceptionalism.”9 But if humanism, as Braidotti so convincingly
argues, was always ever Man-i sm, then wouldn’t it be more to the point to
say that the study of humanities, the question of what it is like to be human,
has so far been thwarted by the study of Man? This is the suggestion of Sylvia
Wynter, and it is the one that I take up in this book.10 I argue that the distinc-
tion between political and ecological is rooted in the concept of the polis,
the ancient Greek term for city, a source of the English word “political.” But
3 Fiona Harvey, “Greenland’s Ice Sheet Melting Seven Times Faster Than in 1990s,” The
Guardian, December 10, 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/ environment/ 2019/ dec/ 10/
greenland- ice- sheet- melting- seven- times- faster- than- in- 1990s.
4 Kendra Pierre- Louis, “World’s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen Rapidly, Study Finds,” New York Times,
December 7, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/ 2019/ 12/ 07/ climate/ ocean- acidification- climate-
change.html.
5 Zia Mehrabi, “Food System Collapse,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2019): 16– 17, doi:10.1038/
s41558- 019- 0643- 1.
6 Yann Chavaillaz, Philippe Roy, Antti-I lari Partanen, et al., “Exposure to Excessive Heat and
Impacts on Labour Productivity Linked to Cumulative CO2 Emissions,” Scientific Reports 9 (2019),
article 13711, doi:10.1038/ s41598- 019- 50047- w.
7 Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race
7.1 (2019): 34.
8 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, especially 2 and 8.
9 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 2. See also Karera, “Blackness,” 39ff.
10 See especially Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/ Truth/
Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—a n Argument,” New Centennial
Review 3.3 (Fall 2003): 257–3 37.
Introduction 3
“polis” is no ordinary word. It is a philosophy, one answer emerging in a “di-
alogue about problems that we agree are important, but don’t agree about
the method for solving, where ‘importance’ ultimately gets its sense from the
question of the way one should live.”11 Although in the ancient Greek context
many philosophies of the polis circulated, one seems to have survived: the
leaders of the city, those bodies exemplary of the promise of the polis, were
those capable of disembodied, eternal, immaterial thought. Thus, within the
polis, a discernment among bodies is fundamental. A certain body figures
the denial of matter of the polis. An exposition of the concept of the polis is
in this way the key to understanding events collected currently under the eu-
phemism “climate change.”12 The need for critiques of Man-i sm and anthro-
pocentrism are not convergent events so much as they are the same event
whose shape has yet to be appreciated.
The philosophy of performativity suggests that climate disruption
dramatizes political problems. Climate disruption is understood as the re-
sult of a distinct and disordered politics primarily— not ecology. In the other
direction the philosophy of political ecology suggests that climate disrup-
tion illustrates the agency of nonhumans— animal, vegetable, and mineral. It
argues that climate disruption is the result of a naive or absent ecology—n ot
politics. The problem according to political ecology is that humans forget
that they, too, are animals. What both sides miss is the bizarre splintering of
these two domains— the splintering of that which is political from that which
is ecological.
I will argue that elemental difference resides on both sides of the line be-
tween the political and the ecological. It is the inherently relational agency of
elementality. The lack of a philosophy of elemental difference is just one sign
of and result of the splintering of these domains. But the lack of an adequate
account of the event of climate disruption is my ultimate interest. I am in-
terested in the politics of ecology and the ecology of politics. But more than
that: I am interested in the curious divergence of the terms themselves.
Elemental difference refers to singularities of location, movement, living,
aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the
polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be
11 Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy, 151.
12 The phrase “climate change” was apparently originally suggested by US Republican political
consultant Frank Luntz as an alternative to the more alarming “global warming.” The phrase caught
on. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter
(Medford, MA: Polity, 2017), 25.