Three Secrets: Secret 2

So I just told you about Hyposubjects. It's been a bit of a top secret project for a while, but it's so hard to keep it in any more especially as Dominic and I are about to publish a 1000 word piece on it. He unveiled the project at the American Anthropology Association in Denver about last week-ish, and people were really into it, I think. That was a great occasion. Hundreds of people. Loads of discussion. A first peoples speaker jumped up on stage full of passion. It was awesome. Our topic: the Anthropocene. Is there anything else? hahaha

So...next. Hyposubjects has this subtitle: On Becoming-Human. Here's the thing. Thinking about ecology so often leaves out the thinker who is thinking, experiencing and so on about ecology. If you think about it, the object-oriented approach began in the Romantic period when poets began to take up geologists' hammers and put down their Claude glasses (metaphorically and literally) and get really up close to rock and so on. And when you get up close to an object, you begin to experience object withdrawal, because you are no longer at a familiar anthropocentric scale. So you start to write poems about how things are dissolving and your experience is melting--you start to write Romantic poems. The two things go together....

And that brings me to my next project. It is with Verso and I'm super excited about proud about it, because it's my way of seeing whether we can expand Marxism (and related forms of theory) to include nonhuman beings. Answer: yes! It's a bit of a hack, like a Marx-hack or something. But you can do it. Not all Marxists will like it, hahaha, but you can't please everyone all the time. I think it will start a great conversation. I seem already to be having this with McKenzie Wark, really happy about that.

So...this book for Verso, it is called

HUMANKIND 

Haha--I tried to think of a long “widescreen” sort of familiar yet provocative word, and this is what came up. Generalization, universalism, essentialism--let's go there!

And the subtitle, I'm into that:

SOLIDARITY WITH NONHUMAN PEOPLE

Right? Right?!

Strangely the way to think all this through, how to include nonhumans within Marxisms and anarchisms etc is to think about mereology, the study of parts and wholes. I've been doing some talks about it and the topic was born in Hyposubjects. I remember the moment. I was biting on a sandwich I think and I told Dominic we needed a new word to describe what we were trying to talk about. To be continued...

I'm so happy and proud to be doing this. The editor I'm working with is like wow, what a genius he is. And writing books for like everyone rather than people who think they want you to be wrong (sometimes) is really different, in a very good way. In many ways it's more sophisticated than writing a scholarly book. I've had some thoughts about it that I may share here.