By CHARIKLIA MARTALAS
A new tributary
My work responds to the call of Francesca Ferrando, who argues that for posthumanism to move beyond theory, it has to involve paths of self-discovery for which people can reach a full existential awareness (Ferrando, 2019). This is the awareness that we are embedded in a web of relations with what is beyond us, ensuring our entanglement with nonhuman agencies. The hope inherent within the path to full existential awareness, is that we do feel how nonhumans respond to us when we encounter them. We feel this responsiveness constrain and enable us, as it opens and locks the doors towards our next actions (Barad, 2007). Yet, the complication we face, is that if we had to in this moment describe our relations with nonhumans, there is uncertainty to whether we would meaningfully capture this responsiveness. Would we be able to describe our relations with the tender nuances needed to fully understand how nonhumans act upon us and with us? (Haraway, 2016). The complication of recognising and acknowledging nonhuman agency is that how we customarily explain and organize our relations with nonhumans cannot account for it. Our language seems to have allowed us to extricate ourselves from an awareness of the fact that there is a dynamic exchange that exists between humans and nonhumans. This is due to how our language has disguised the impositions of thought that have come attached to our chosen Humanist methods of organising our understandings of the world (Braidotti, 2013). Yet the failure of our ordinary language to describe the complexity of our relationality with nonhumans is actually a symptom of deeper lacunas of understanding. These lacunas are difficult to resolve because of the great paradox inherent within them — we are unaware of how limited our own awareness is of our entanglement with nonhumans....
However, what we also know is that we would be obstructed from reaching into the world if we had complete ignorance of the truth that nonhumans are essential for our existence. What is undeniable is that we use nonhumans as the tools and materials with which to build our human lives. It is in this way that nonhumans have taken on meanings for us. To be unaware of our relations with nonhumans would ensure that we would be unable to decode the cultural tapestries of meaning that we inherit. This is because nonhumans are characters in our allegories, figures in our metaphors and our co-performers in the ways we express ourselves. Nonhumans are tethered to human meaning-making in a multitude of ways that fasten and unlatch across time and space and powerfully shape both how human societies function and ultimately disfunction (Hodder, 2012). The paradox is that if we were to be completely unaware of how enmeshed we are with all that is nonhuman, we would fail to comprehend our own reality. And yet, this awareness has not afforded us the insight to recognise how nonhumans are co-creators both of our world and our selves.
Ultimately our awareness of our relations with nonhumans is filled with paradoxes, distortions, contradictions and inconsistencies. Our awareness is its own chimera. Understandings, misunderstandings and lost understandings are all stitched together like a forsaken rag doll. The question is — how has our awareness of our relationality with nonhumans been constructed so that it remains so partial, so chimeric, so paradoxical in nature? To answer this question is to look at the paradoxes and contradictions themselves, for they are meaningful as maps. This is because they can help us trace the patterns of where we are at this present moment when it comes to how we understand our interconnections with nonhumans. To fail to understand what kinds of relations with nonhumans are made apparent to us in this living moment, will only make it much harder to know how best to reveal what is being hidden, concealed and trapped behind all our misunderstandings and unrecognised limitations.
INTRODUCING RUBBISH
As a way to not become entrapped by the paradox of how we are unaware of how limited our own awareness is, when it comes to our entanglement with nonhumans, I wish to turn to the phenomenon of rubbish to be our nonhuman main character. This is because rubbish by nature is so disruptive and confrontational that by using this particular entanglement, the hope is that the contours of our awareness and experience of our relationality with nonhumans will be as vivid and saturated as a neon sign at night. This is in order to not miss the nuances held in the complicated outline of our chimeric awareness.
We can introduce rubbish just by thinking of the multitude of meanings within its name. We can find many of these meanings simply in the adjectives we use to describe it — disgusting, worthless, dirty, discardable, disease-ridden, rotten, disgraceful, unsightly, unhealthy, vile. Further meanings become entangled in the spaces that we expect rubbish to languish in — the slums, the alley-ways, the landfills. These spaces inevitably come to entangle the people that belong to them within the nest of rubbish's associations — the poor in the slums, the homeless in the alleyways, the workers in the landfills. However, rubbish's meaningfulness is not only kept within the human realm. Rubbish holds meanings of nourishment and survival to the animal scavengers that feast upon our wastefulness. Rubbish holds meanings of danger for the creatures whose habitat was colonised by a landfill or the beings whose bodies have become forcefully and unnaturally unified with rubbish, such as turtles with plastic necklaces.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that the lexicon of rubbish's meanings has been formed by both human and nonhuman contributors, does not change the fact that rubbish is solely a human creation. Rubbish is a human invention and holds no equivalent within nature's symbiotic tendencies. In nature the scraps of one process is of great worth to another, nothing is truly expendable (Haraway, 2016). Trash is a human creation because it is only humans that have learnt how to judge a nonhuman thing as being so worthless that it cannot be given another purpose. Without this judgement of abject worthlessness there would be no rubbish. This is because no nonhuman is inherently rubbish. Instead, a nonhuman becomes rubbish through having been squeezed through complex cultural prisms of meaning that dictate when a nonhuman is absent of all value and so ready to be transformed into trash. Nonetheless, nonhumans are not bystanders to their own transfiguration, they act as catalysts when they are broken or having already served their function. However, the difference between a broken toy being fixed or being buried in a landfill all comes down to whether that particular nonhuman was considered expendable and so needed to be discarded (Bohme, 2014).
The supreme meaning of rubbish, the one that is foundational to the myriad of relations and associations that we have to trash, is that rubbish needs to be invisible. This meaning has translated itself into a human imperative, that can be seen in how humans have designed systems in which garbage is not only disposed of but is disposed of elsewhere. Rubbish must be expelled from the realm of human society despite being its child. We see this in the kinds of exiled spaces we choose to become landfills or sewerage plants, or the simple fact that in many homes we disguise our dustbins in cupboards or by making them pretty and charming (Bohme, 2014). Yet, rubbish remains unashamedly visible. Litter is an inescapable menace and can be found in the most remote of places, dustbins are essential fixtures in public landscapes, and the garbage dumps in the Pacific and Indian Ocean are banal newsworthy stories. The nonhumans that are transformed into trash offer a great resistance to having invisibility be imposed onto them, as they assert their visibility by brutally seeping into almost all spaces.
However, the actual physical visibility of rubbish is not the only way rubbish resists the projected need for its invisibility. The visibility of rubbish is that its presence is felt in terms of how it has become fused into configurations of human meaning-making (Hodder, 2012). Our ideas revolving around garbage have come to build a nest of associations that are used to classify the worth of people. What rubbish is cannot be extricated from questions of where it is most conspicuous and who is likely to inhabit those spaces. The perpetrators that have failed to hide their rubbish and so fulfil the imperative of rubbish's invisibility, are generally taken to be those in poverty. People trapped in the slums, are then scapegoats that become trapped in the matrix of adjectives that we use to describe our trash — disease-ridden, unsightly, lazy, disgraceful, dirty and so ultimately undesirable.
Questions surrounding class and human character shows us that even when rubbish has been successfully written into "invisibility," it still commands its presence. Rubbish claims its prominence in that its very absence bears connotations that are forceful in terms of how we interpret and judge each other. The wealthier classes become blessed with all the connotations of superiority that comes with them having the means to maintain the invisibility of rubbish. Garbage then is almost a centrifugal force in terms of the multiplicity of ideas surrounding it — cleanliness, order, chaos, dirtiness. Rubbish not only then resists its invisibility but it exerts its own power. Its power is that whether it is physically present or absent, it still sustains its capacity to affect us and our relations with each other.
THE RATIONAL HUMANIST VS THE IRRATIONAL FETISHIST
To unravel the knotted paradoxes within our relations with nonhumans, is ultimately to trace the threads these paradoxes were created with. This means that we have to trace how we conceive of the implicitly held ideal relations between humans and nonhumans. For it is these implicit ideals that root the patterns of relationality that dictate our engagement with nonhumans. For as we learn how to read these patterns, we come to accept how our awareness has been defined, delineated and so limited. We generally do not try to imagine beyond the ridges, shapes and lines of these ideals, in order to think of other possibilities of negotiating our entanglement with nonhumans.
The patterns that govern our relations with nonhumans have a history (Hodder, 2012). Like all patterns, they are workings and re-workings of ideas of how we should relate to the nonhuman and how we should not. Our conceived ideal relations with nonhumans have come to design the rooms that we use to set our scenes of nonhuman engagement — the symmetry between the two now pronounced because of how engrained these ideal relations are within our patterns of thought. This is due to how these ideal relations are merely another manifestation of our present world's greater inheritance of Humanist ideals, knowledges and dictums of how to organise our understandings of reality (Braidotti, 2013). The mechanisms of our ideal and non-ideal relations with nonhumans are found in a single dichotomy between the rational humanist vs the irrational fetishist. Fetishism was a term that described a human relationship with the nonhuman that was corrupt due to being irrational, superstitious or perverse. Fetishism, was an essential invention for Humanists, a potion that could act as the negative counterpart to the right way of engaging with nonhumans, which was evidently the Humanist way (Bohme, 2014).
Humanists believe that humans are at the centre and apex of reality, humans are the anchor holding all existence together. This can only mean that nonhumans must orbit human reality according to the needs, wants and desires of humans and their purposes. The superior glory of humans is predicated on the belief that it is only humans that inherently possess the powers of reason, rationality and agency. This necessitates that it is only human action that intrinsically matters in the grand scheme of things. Nonhumans by lacking any capacity for rationality, are simply passive and unresponsive. Nonhumans can be acted upon by humans but they themselves can never act in a way that matters. This means that it is only human action that can define the nonhuman, the nonhuman cannot define itself. Unsurprisingly, despite the realms between the human and the nonhuman being held as separate, human action can cross into the nonhuman realm, due to human powers of agency but never vice versa (Hodder, 2012).
For instance, if an animal appears as if they acted it is considered nothing more than mimicry, it is the artifice of action. While inanimate nonhumans like objects are simply dead things (Bohme, 2014). The eccentricities of children are that they will enchant a toy with life. Nevertheless that liveliness, that animation should be an idea that fades, flattens and eventually disappears, as a child grows up and trades imagination for rationality (ibid). The question of whether the toy should become rubbish if broken is dependent on whether it can be defined as a thing that can still be cherished by its human owner. A broken toy is considered to have no power to exert upon any question of whether it can still be adored and so is silent in the decision of whether it must be fixed. Ultimately, it is a human that has to rescue it from it being transformed into trash.
To perpetuate these attitudes towards nonhumans, is not only to be rational and reasoned but also to pass the Humanist test and be deemed a human oneself. The fact that this anthropocentrism was the spine holding the project that categorised which humans were confirmed humans together, ensured that these warped human-nonhuman relations were perpetuated. The distinction between humans and nonhumans was then continually reinforced and insisted upon in a multitude of ways so that the entanglement between humans and nonhumans gave way to the power of human action in a world of absolute separateness (Barad, 2007). In essence, anthropocentrism was taught to never be questioned.
The perversity of fetishisation for Humanists was because the fetishists believed nonhumans not only had luminous power, but had the power to act within the human realm and over human action. Fetishisation was irrational because of how it enchanted the nonhuman world by giving nonhumans a bewitched authority within the human world (Bohme, 2014). The perversity of the break down of the clear boundaries between human and nonhuman is how humans were seduced by the idea that they derive their own enchanted powers from their intertwining with nonhumans, instead of power remaining inherent to humans alone. The litany of fetishists in the Humanist imaginary was simply a litany of all those who were deemed Other. In this way the idea of fetishism was a tool to further other who was already deemed Other by fixing them as irrational.
Yet, even though our ideas of the word fetishism has morphed and changed, the ascribing to nonhumans some sense of agency is still taken to be something primarily negative and potentially othering. In the case of garbage, human inaction to the rubbish graffitiing the streets and spewing from the gutters, is treated as a kind of fetishisation of rubbish. This is why, according to Humanist logic, those in poverty who have failed to make rubbish invisible have a perverse relationship with it. There is order and goodness when a single nonhuman is discarded as rubbish. However, when moving towards the cemeteries of undesirable nonhumans becoming greater and greater assemblages pressed against human spaces, what is amplified is the indictment against those that have neglected the need for rubbish's invisibility. The poor are accused of fetishisation because they have accepted rubbish's domination of them by allowing trash to be visible. Their very desensitisation has given rubbish the power to pacify them.
In essence, this tussle between the the rational humanist vs the irrational fetishist has become imprinted into the ways we presently relate to nonhumans and the way our awareness of those relations manifests themselves. This schemata has not radically changed, not only in terms of projects of othering. The Humanist ideal of how to view nonhumans has not only been sustained as our template by our advanced capitalist world but has actually been enhanced by it. Even more so, our ordinary practices of living have become dependent on us not questioning it.
THE HUMANIST FETISHIST AND IRONIC DISRUPTION
So how do we unravel the knotted paradoxes in terms of how we understand our relations with nonhumans? The full extent of our relationality with nonhumans is hidden behind the fact that we experience the paradoxes that emerge from Humanist ideals but do not always have full awareness of them enough to question them. By having these paradoxes remain unquestioned, the paradoxes will continue to hide what is behind them — this is not only the lacunas within our understanding but also other possibilities for knowing and imagining our relations with nonhumans. Nevertheless, where paradoxes have the power to hide and conceal, they also have the power to illuminate all that they hold within them. Parallelly, paradoxes are one of those peculiar things, where the best way to illuminate other paradoxes is to use a paradox of your own. Paradoxes being able to hold distorted clarities, contradictory truths, counterintuitive intuitions, means that to be unraveled they need to be met with the logic of their own kind.
My paradox is that our present relations with nonhumans is a Humanist Fetishisation. We still relate to nonhumans in light of the humanist ideals of anthropocentrism, rationality and dualisms. These inherited ideals have meant that we continue to perpetuate a relationship between humans and nonhumans that perverts nonhuman nature and the extent of human powers. The architecture of the concept of fetishism was a Humanist invention in order to cement the irrationality of the undesirable Others in society and so to justify their domination (Bohme, 2014). However, inherent in the Humanist invention of fetishism is a paradox, because fetishism according to its definition, best applies to Humanists themselves. There are three knots to our paradox of Humanist Fetishisation - each knot is a key part of the definition of fetishism put forward in the Enlightenment.
By looking closely at each knot that Humanist Fetishisation creates, the hope is that we can unravel how we experience our relationality with nonhumans presently. This is possible because each of the knots comes to drag us into a different paradox in terms of our awareness pertaining to our relations with nonhumans. Furthermore, each knot shows that our paradoxical experience of our human-nonhuman entanglements manifests itself as an ironic disruption. An ironic disruption is the uncanny, puzzled and misplaced experience that results when a gulf between an ideal and an actuality opens in terms of how we organise and relate to reality. An ironic disruption is a kind of paradoxical experience for it illuminates how the ideals we follow fail to properly account for our actual experiences, while also showing how we continue to blindly follow those thin ideals (Lear, 2011). To be aware of how each knotted paradox manifests as an ironic disruption is then a promising beginning to the necessary questioning and interrogation of the ideal itself. The idea is that the knots perform for us the ironic disruption that occurs due to the gulf the emerges between the ideals implicit in how Humanist Fetishisation wishes us to organize and relate to rubbish and our actual encounter with rubbish.
THE KNOTS
The first knot
— a fetishist ascribes meanings and powers to nonhumans that have nothing to do with their own alterity. This ensures that the perception of nonhumans is merely a projection (Bohme, 2014).
By Humanists conjuring ideas that nonhumans are passive and unresponsive to human action and that they lack any agency to be able to act upon the human realm, Humanists fetishise nonhumans. This is because this involves projecting onto nonhumans a conception of them that betrays their actual nature, in quite a fundamental way. The illusion of notions of the passivity and lack of agency of nonhumans is an ascription of meaning no different to ascribing nonhumans with magical properties. To take away, deny, and refute is still the deliberate construction of new meanings surrounding the nature of nonhumans that furiously writes over what their true natures actually are. Here we need to see fetishism as involving more than just enchanting nonhumans with a mirage of powers and meanings that deceive us in terms of the reality of nonhuman alterity. Fetishism is also the building of meanings that serve as the mechanisms that strip away nonhumans' nature as a means to conceal their rich intricacy. Humanist Fetishisation of nonhumans is a project of negation that deliberately refuses to recognise the particular ways of being of nonhumans and why they matter in the workings of the world. It is not merely a disenchanting of nonhumans, it is a complete nullification of them through robbing them of any acknowledgement of the part they play in our human-nonhuman entanglements. This fetishisation by negation creates a perverse relationship with nonhumans in how it is used to justify manoeuvres of illegitimate domination over them (Haraway, 2016).
The projection of meaning onto nonhumans is also concerned about where nonhumans should be placed and positioned within the Humanist order of things. To affirm nonhuman passivity is to dissolve nonhuman nature enough to treat nonhumans as our own tabular rasa (Haraway, 2016). This allows Humanist beliefs to invent their own images of nonhumans — images that have now lodged themselves into our collective thought and are manipulated according to specific ends. The projection of invisibility onto rubbish comes not only from negating the actual agency of rubbish within the human realm. It is also to wipe clean rubbish's meaning as being the direct result of human consumption. The meaning of rubbish has to diminish the actual nature of rubbish to quieten its disruptive presence for the sake of capitalistic processes. This is why ideas that rubbish needs to be managed and ordered outside and elsewhere to the human realm were formed. Rubbish being passive and empty is a fetishisation of rubbish that has helped the plotting of strategies to mitigate any mass recognition of our human responsibility for it.
However, rubbish actively defies these projected meanings of invisibility. The revolutionary will of rubbish is that when it is encountered, it can rupture our distorted awareness. Its raw chaotic nature gives us a way into new insights because the very intensity of the encounter creates such an uncomfortability that there can be no denial that rubbish affects us. Rubbish is sensorily assaulting. The nonhumans that rubbish is constituted by are a mixture of the organic and their tendency towards the entropy of decay and the inanimate that create the corners, caves, and crevices for this decay to house itself. Trash is the rank smell of disintegration and decomposition. It is the foulness of the animate breaking itself down. Trash is the sight of a feast of unsightly creatures that crawl and propagate over what is rotten. At the touch, it is thickened and sticky with slime. Rubbish is obviously disquieting to our senses and so our bodies recoil and violently reject it. Our sensory uncomfortability around rubbish is a sign of rubbish's uncontrollable otherness — rubbish cannot be subdued for there is no way to make rubbish "appealing" or sensorily "safe." When in its presence there is no way to fold it neatly into pleasing prettiness that would make us feel more at ease with our undesirable discarded nonhumans. The imperative for the invisibility of rubbish in this way is because it holds power in how its presence is confrontational. Rubbish is an experience unto itself.
Humanist Fetishisation feeds us with the ideal that rubbish is passive, agency-less and unresponsive to us. The ironic disruption erupts because of the undeniability of rubbish's capacity to make us uncomfortable. This is because a gulf forms between what rubbish is meant to be and how we actually experience the force of rubbish's agency. This is most evident when we experience how our own agency is turned and adjusted towards particular directions of action as a direct response to rubbish itself. The paradox in our experience is that we may recognise that it is the rank smell of rubbish that made us so uncomfortable that we moved, but we will not be able to articulate that this action is more than just a decision of our own agency. It was actually a sign of the fact that rubbish's very nature made us move. The fact that rubbish smells foul, that it teems with things that crawl, that it is slimy and sticky, is not merely neutral features of rubbish's nature. Instead, it is the very means with which rubbish acts upon us (Hodder, 2012).
However, rubbish does not merely exert its own agency directly onto ourselves. Rubbish also exerts its agency on the kinetics of our relations to others by inflaming humanist judgements surrounding hierarchies and social worth (Hodder, 2012). Judgements that can even play out and decorate our most intimate relationships. Rubbish's power is how it can trigger distress and catch conflict in our very homes. Who has to experience the taking out of the rubbish can bring out complex resentments and embroiled questions surrounding social roles. The paradox we feel is that we are trapped in our limited awareness to fully explain to ourselves that this conflict originates not just from the horizon of rubbish's meanings and the entangled associations of who should clean it, but in the uncomfortability of the experience of rubbish itself. It is because rubbish is so sensorily assaulting, that the people who are deemed as being the appropriate ones to engage with it, are also the ones arrogantly minimised by the social order. Let us imagine a split trash bag in a wealthy area. The fact that we would not be surprised if the solution was for the gardener to inevitably be instructed to pick the trash up, illustrates the affective reach of rubbish's agency upon wider galaxies of human meaning, judgement and social organisation. Rubbish's affectivity is then more than just how its physical presence asserts itself by sending us into an heightened uncomfortability. Its agency is that rubbish's uncomfortability has power to not only immediately affects us but to have manipulated the terrain of our ordinary practices of living.
By using our paradox of Humanist Fetishisation, we can see how an ironic disruption is implicated in our relations with nonhumans. This is because the negation of nonhuman agency is an ideal that can never be realised (Lear, 2011). Through our constant encounters with rubbish, we undoubtedly feel its agency in how it influences, determines and shapes our actions. Our infidelity to our experience with rubbish is that we still grasp onto humanist thought to explain it. In doing so, we then suppress the feelings of strange disjointedness and uncanniness that might glimmer into our conscious awareness for a moment. To remain comfortable in the face of rubbish's uncomfortability, means that we have no choice but to diminish the uncanniness that arises due to the fact that the ways we have been taught to relate to rubbish cannot articulate the nature of our encounters with it. The power of rubbish to make us so uncomfortable accentuates the problematic nature of this chasm between a fetishised nonhuman by negation and our experience of being affectively entangled with the full complex nature of nonhumans. The problem with negating nonhuman agency is that it also bleeds out our capacity to form language that can map the affective dynamic between us and nonhumans. The paradox that arises is that we experience the intensity of our affective encounter with rubbish and yet only have the limited language of Humanist Fetishisation to make sense of it. The misplaced feeling is that because we have negated any acknowledgement of affectivity between humans and nonhumans, we ultimately come to struggle to catch our experiences in thought, enough for us to acknowledge that the gulf even exists.
The SECOND knot
— these attributions as projections incorporate meanings and powers for the fetishist himself as a result of the relation to the nonhuman. These are self-deceiving and illusory (Bohme, 2014).
Intrinsic to the original definition of fetishism was that the powers and meanings falsely projected onto nonhumans were said to promise powers to humans in return. The relation between the human and the fetishised nonhuman, then involved the human projecting powers onto himself that he actually did not possess (Bohme, 2014). Humanist Fetishisation does the same by ascribing almost omnipotent strength to human capacities for reason and rationality. Humanist Fetishisation tells us that if humans use the might of our rationality we will see things as they are and solve all pressing problems (Braidotti, 2013). Rubbish is a problem on the precipice of complete uncontrollability. It is now not merely landfills that hold monuments of trash that are always growing. Rational solutions are called for to solve the problem of rubbish due to the fear of the omnipresence of rubbish becoming irreversible. Rational solutions are called for to find solutions to the dirtiness of the slums, the city streets flooded with litter, the landfills and their breached boundaries. However, the rational solutions to rubbish are mere quick fixes of a more fundamental problem - the threatening otherness of rubbish is precisely because of how it is so thoroughly human.
The power of rubbish is that its otherness is not constituted purely by the nonhuman. The uncomfortability of garbage is that it demands an awareness of our relationality with it, because of its undeniable causality. It is an indisputable truth that rubbish is the bastard child of humanity's ways of living. The rising amount of rubbish is now an unstoppable force. The neglected conundrum is that the exponential expansion of rubbish, is a direct result of how humans have cemented patterns of consuming and discarding nonhumans (Bohme, 2014). The endless rush of consumption to waste, is exacerbated by processes of excess, choice and novelty. The urgency of our need for rubbish to be invisible is directly correlated to our continuous hunger and desire for consumption (Illouz, 2019). The disquieting nature of rubbish is that when encountering its otherness, we end up encountering the otherness of ourselves, for it reflects the habits of life that we do not wish to claim. This is why we are likely to experience at some point, an ironic disruption when trying to organise and control the rubbish in our own lives. This is because there is a gulf between the ideal of our rational problem solving and the actuality of our experience. This is more than just the wincing uncomfortability that arises because of how rubbish affects us sensorily. It is also how rubbish resists our attempts to cage it by calling into question the very ways we understand it. Rationality, when following the epistemological dictums of Humanist Fetishisation, wants to neatly categorise rubbish in a way that it stays immobilised on the other side the tight binary of human/nonhuman. The problem we face is that rubbish defies being held captive by such binaries.
This ironic disruption is best articulated with our ordinary experience of cleaning up our own rubbish. For despite following our reason to make rubbish invisible, we feel a discomfort that our reason cannot fully articulate. This discomfort is because our encounter with cleaning up our own rubbish shatters the dichotomy of human/nonhuman. The threshold of when the dichotomy breaks down is low. We simply have to experience the contradiction that comes with how our sense of disgust at our own rubbish is enchained with our knowledge that the rubbish is the consequence of our own actions and habits. The dichotomy also immediately breaks down in the moments when we claim some piece of trash as our own - where the trash belongs to us because it is the direct result of our actions. This knowledge becomes immediately apparent because our own desires, preferences and patterns of consumption are reflected in the haunted configurations of rubbish we have to manage and control. Rubbish is a strange mirror to our own way of being. It emerges from the ways our actions reflect upon us. Garbage, then does more than resist its demanded invisibility, it resists our own ways of thinking in relation to it. Garbage forces us to acknowledge how entangled we are with it. For a fleeting moment we realise we are instigators of our own disgust and uncomfortability as we are implicated in the creation of rubbish. We have to confront the sharp truth that rubbish is constituted by our own very natures, it is an otherness that is our own (Barad, 2007). Rubbish resists the power we ascribe to reason and rationality by showing the emptiness in rationality's tricks of binding categorisations and cemented binaries. The force of seeing our own humanness within rubbish's nonhuman otherness, then is a radical experience, even when fleeting. This is because it breaks down the accepted and familiar ways that we order the world (ibid).
Humanist Fetishisation heightens our hopes in the powers of rationality, for despite its limitations that glitch its epistemological processes, we still believe it will give us certainty if we follow how it wishes for us to order reality. The paradox we experience is that the right way of thinking comes to fail us when we wish to contain rubbish's uncomfortability. The irony is that our uncomfortability is not just because of rubbish's powerful affectivity, it is that there is a sense that we don't quite grasp what it is and how we relate to it. Rationality comes to fail its own ideal of accounting for exactly the way things are. Rationality becomes ironically disrupted by our encounter with rubbish, as its very nature points to the fragility of the human/ nonhuman binary. This is how rubbish exerts its agency not only on our human senses but also on our human practices of thought. Rubbish is then chaotic and disruptive in that it breaks our expectations of nonhumans so that we feel the disorientation of being unmoored from our usual habits of meaning-making in terms of our human-nonhuman entanglements. Rubbish forces us to understand it in terms of its dynamic uncontrollability. Rubbish's ultimate defiance of our rationality is simply in how difficult it is to fix its meanings into one place.
The difficulty we find in the gulf that is created between how we should relate to rubbish and rubbish's transgressiveness, is that it is more than just being left with ways of understanding that don't fully account for our experiences. It is that we become trapped in the uncanny, uneasiness of the ironic disruption itself. This is because the lacunas that exist because of Humanist Fetishisation cannot be resolved with humanist thinking nor can humanist ways of ordering reality lead us to new ways of relating to rubbish that resolve the problems it brings with it. The conundrum is that the limitations of rationality is because reason and rationality has been imprisoned by Humanist ideals. This closes up the possibilities of imagining other means of understanding our entanglement with rubbish, so we become lost in the chasm between ideal and actuality without a means to reorientate ourselves. This ensures that the paradox we experience is one of feeling profoundly misplaced in terms of our human capacities, our relations with rubbish and what is actually needed in the face of rubbish's rising omnipresence.
The THIRD knot
— the fetishist bind to nonhumans prevents any realisation that the fetishist has created this particular relation to the nonhuman themselves, ensuring that their connection to the nonhuman is compulsive and unconscious (Bohme, 2014).
Humanist ideals of how we should relate to nonhumans are pervasive because it is convenient for us to stay loyal to the idea that nonhumans are passive and unable to act upon us. The Humanist Fetishisation of nonhumans is profitable for social processes that are reliant on being able to pick and choose when it is best to efface the handiwork of human action as well as when to obscure nonhuman responsiveness to it. This unsurprisingly leads not only to our lack of awareness of how entangled the human and nonhuman are, but also empties us of any possible feelings of responsibility for where the human is directly implicated in undesirable consequences surrounding the nonhuman. This lack of awareness becomes threaded into ordinary practices of engaging with the nonhuman, ensuring we teach ourselves to relate to nonhumans in a way that is compulsive and unconscious (Haraway, 2016).
Essentially, to hide rubbish is to hide that the real problem is how rubbish germinates and spreads only because of other unconscious and compulsive relations we have to nonhumans. Humanist Fetishisation of nonhumans has not only justified a sense of entitlement that nonhumans exist purely for human purposes. It has also encouraged a disfigured awareness of nonhumans, in that we are only aware of them when we want to use them for some ends (Hodder, 2012). However, as soon as we cannot sustain our desire to use particular nonhumans, we classify them as expendable. Our relational ties to these nonhumans become loosened into mere shadows, as expendability ascribes to nonhumans the meaning of being replaceable. For as soon as another nonhuman is more desirable, the expendable nonhuman descends into abject worthlessness and becomes ready to be transformed into the irreversible status of undesirable of rubbish.
The rise of rubbish is due to the choking excess of choice and the speed of the novelty of consumerist society. Our fascination and excitement that can arise because of nonhumans may mask as appreciation of them, yet it is more likely only the thrill of our devotion to newness than the alterity of the nonhumans themselves (Illouz, 2019). This is because our awareness of our relationality with nonhumans is so partial and distorted allowing for the presence of different nonhumans to become interchangeable. In a consumerist society it is unnervingly difficult for nonhumans to escape their expendability. Our feverish consumption leaves nonhumans always at the precipice of becoming rubbish. Rubbish is not simply because of how fast our ideas of value change, it is because consumerism has ensured we are trapped in a cycle of moving from one kind of partial awareness of particular nonhumans to the next. This limited awareness is unconscious and compulsive because we are never allowed a full enough awareness of our relationality with nonhumans to appreciate their full natures (Haraway, 2016). Expendability as a habit and rubbish as the inevitable end, is because of how our patterns of consumption obstruct our awareness that we have unwittingly fallen into precarious trends of wastefulness. Our movements of consumption to waste occurs with such speed that it blurs and collapses our accessibility to our own entanglements with the nonhumans we consume.
The dilemma that we face is that if these unconscious processes of how we treat nonhumans is never brought fully into awareness, the imperative to control and manage rubbish by making it invisible will always fail. Where the first knot addressed the agency of rubbish and the second knot addressed rubbish being born from human-nonhuman entanglements, here the third knot is a question surrounding our response to rubbish itself. There is no doubt that rubbish needs a response. The capacity for rubbish to baptise all spaces with its presence, is not just a human problem — it is also a problem for the nonhumans that have to suffer because they struggle to unbind themselves from rubbish once it has intertwined with their bodies and penetrated into their habitats. The uneasiness we feel when it comes to the question of rubbish, is that there is a gulf between what we should do in relation to trash and how these very humanist ideals create inadequacies in our response to the reality of our entanglement with rubbish.
The urge to have rubbish be invisible is that this is the easiest way of making any awareness needed to take accountability for it, to vanish. We feel the disquieting paradox that we are encouraged to master our waste while still being expected to play our part in humanity's rampant, continuous cycles of consumption (Illouz, 2019). The difficulty we face when experiencing this intense contradiction is that humanist ways of thinking do not grant us the imaginative freedom to create new understandings that can resolve the paradoxical demand of needing to control rubbish in a system that is designed for its exponential creation. The need to other rubbish into invisibility, is part of our sacrosanct illusion that we can manage our waste and be dedicated, glowing consumers. The purpose of the imperative of rubbish's invisibility is to prolong for as long as possible a collective lack of responsibility for our own human behaviours and so to continue to feed capitalistic interests.
However, we are now being asked to shoulder further contradictory ideas simultaneously with our command to be good consumers, now that we have the arrival of louder climate change conversations and recycling reminders on our packaging. We are told that there is a problem with the way that we waste, without ever being demanded to radically change how we consume nonhumans. The issue at hand, is that these urgent appeals for control and management of rubbish is an ideal that becomes ironically disrupted by us being largely unaware of how it is our relations with nonhumans that fuel the creation of rubbish in the first place. Rubbish is only a symptom of a greater problem of how we relate to nonhumans. The ironic disruption is that our aggravated rubbish problems are minimised by false comforts that treating the symptom is actually the cure. Where the first knot showed us as being unable to articulate our experiences of nonhuman agency and the second knot showed us how we are trapped in the limited ways of understanding human-nonhuman entanglements, the third knot shows us that our partial awareness of our relations with nonhumans makes us inadequate to respond to our present challenges. The paradox we experience is that we know something needs to change and yet are trapped in distorted forms of awareness that constrain us from knowing exactly what that something is.
THE TRIPLE KNOT
We have now unravelled the knotted paradoxes inherent within the ways we relate to nonhumans presently. However, we cannot leave the threads all loose. To begin the act of rethreading we can begin with the fact that the best way to illuminate paradoxes is to use a paradox. The paradox of Humanist Fetishisation was essential, for it could break apart the Humanist ideals that lead to the creation of our knotted paradoxes, from within the ideals themselves. Humanist Fetishisation did this by implicating Humanist ideals within their own notions of what counts as fetishisation. By using the humanist definition of fetishisation as a guide, we developed three knots that could each unravel a knotted paradox of how we relate to nonhumans. These paradoxes manifest as ironic disruptions of humanist ideals — for a gulf was shown to exist between what humanist ideals tell us what our relations with nonhumans should be and what our actual experiences are. The experience of ironic disruption may be fleeting but it still holds within it a profound uncanniness that can be powerful if leant into.
If we begin to interrogate how we experience the paradoxes of the three knots as ironic disruptions, we find key arguments to why the humanist ideals governing our relations with nonhumans are in fact untenable. All three knots show us that our awareness of our relationality with nonhumans cannot make sense of our actual experience when encountering nonhumans. The fact that our awareness of our relationality with nonhumans is partial and distorting manifests also in our incapacity to articulate our relations with nonhumans in language. Our language, when restricted and bound by Humanist ideals, works to categorise human-nonhuman entanglements in neat, distinct binaries that are absolutely separate (Barad, 2007). Because of this our language fails to articulate both the affectivity of nonhumans' responsiveness to us, that humans and nonhumans come to shape each other through our entanglements, and that we are responsible and must hold ourselves accountable to how we respond to nonhumans (Haraway, 2016). The dangers of our incapacitated eloquence is that there is also a failure to articulate the very fact of our partial awareness - we lack the language to even articulate that our awareness of our relations with nonhumans is lacking or misaligned.
The problem is that it is more convenient to avoid thinking about how our humanist awareness does not fully accommodate our experience of nonhumans. It is easier to not see that our language is unequipped to help us explain the complexity of our reality, considering our relations with nonhumans are fundamental to how we experience the world, how we created our cultural webs of meaning and how we relate to each other. However it is not merely convenient, it is also necessary to further the agenda of social processes like capitalism's rampant consumerism that is dependent on us having a partial awareness and restricted means of description of our human-nonhuman entanglements. The issue is that by perpetuating our avoidance we perpetuate the lacunas of understanding that are engendered by not being fully aware of our experiences and not having the language to articulate the very fact that we are limited. These perpetuated lacunas means that our actual responses to the very real challenges that our relations to nonhumans brings us, is inadequate. We then become trapped in the state of ironic disruption, where we cannot orientate ourselves to resolve our lacunas of understanding because humanist ideals are still our guiding framework as well as still the cause of the lacunas in the first place.
The hope is that since the knotted paradoxes manifest as ironic disruptions, we can see how the ideals of humanism are untenable as a framework governing our relations with nonhumans and our awareness of these relations. Our lacunas of understanding that are engendered are unresolvable within the patterns of relationality we have learnt and continue to weave. To try use humanist ideals, such as rationality, to resolve our limitations is to forget that unless we move radically away from our anthropocentrism and tendency to isolate the human from the nonhuman, we will still be feeding the unconscious and compulsive habits of our engagement with nonhumans that profit the set agenda of advanced late stage capitalism. We need something radically other to Humanism, since it is always predicated on an indifference to the actual nature of nonhumans and their capacity not only to act upon us but most importantly to act with us (Haraway, 2016). The consequences of not looking closely at our chimeric, partial and paradoxical awareness, is real and pressing. Nonhumans in our present age are shaping human action and human lives more than ever before, whether that it is technological advancement like Al or processes of climate change. We need a rupture from humanist thought, a rupture that tears apart the dichotomy between human/nonhuman allowing each of them to meet in the collapsed space in the middle and begin the process of knowing each other once more. What ironic disruption shows us, is that rubbish may be the perfect culprit for such a mission.
REFERENCES
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Bohme, H. (2014). Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (A. Galt, Trans.). De Gruyter Incorporated.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
Ferrando, F. (2019). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Wilely-Blackwell.
Illouz, E. (2019). The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Oxford University Press.
Lear, J. (2011). To Become Human Does Not Come That Easily. In A Case for Irony (pp. 3–41). Harvard University Press.
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