The Inhuman

How does the ever-shifting boundary between human and inhuman affect the way we image or imagine nature?

Thinking the inhuman can be seen as the key movement of thinking nature. Latour (2004) writes, “…if we take nature away, we have no more ‘others,’ no more ‘us.’ The prison of exoticism suddenly dissipates. Once we have exited from the great political diorama of ‘nature in general,’ we are left only with the banality of multiple associations of humans and non-humans” waiting the work of collection into a unity of those who live upon a common earth (p. 46). Sandilands (1999) calls for a form of analysis that can shift to a “questioning of specificities through the recognition of polyvocality – but also with a direct confrontation with the bifurcating categories of human and nonhuman experience” (p. 74).

Latour (2004) notes that political philosophies – and emancipatory struggles – have focused exclusively on human politics, “leaving most questions to be sorted out elsewhere, in secret…in an assembly of nonhuman objects that were undertaking mysterious operations to decide what nature was made of and what sort of unity we humans formed with nature.” (p.53). Latour argues that we need to refuse to collect the world into the categories of human (the social world of politics) and inhuman (the natural world that is the realm of science), and refuse also to seek a reconciliation or unity between these two ruined opposites. Politics can become instead the convocation of a new unity that rejects this bifurcation.  According to Latour (2004), political ecology asks what political institutions can be forged or adapted to redistribute speech between humans and non-humans, “while learning to be skeptical of all spokespersons” (p. 62, 232). (See Council of All Beings as one possible model.)

Perhaps the fact that who and what counts as human changes drastically across cultures and in different historical periods is self-evident to women (who became persons in Canada only in 1929) and queers (who in this country – though not elsewhere – are barely enfranchised at the contested edge of humanness). (See Queer Ecology and Ecofeminism.) The contested boundary between human and inhuman also functions in establishing “racial” difference:

Democratic struggles create new collective identities and “mark alternative sources of strength and legitimacy to some extent outside (or on the margins of)…dominant codes of meaning” (Sandilands, 1999. p. 42). But is the democratic struggle is always and inevitably one which strives to center this new identity, to naturalize and normalize it as fully human and thereby identical with power, subjectivity and citizenship (without questioning these dualisms that think in our place)? What would it mean instead to allow or listen to the inhuman in both self and other? Such an approach suggests fostering strangeness, inviting the inhuman as interlocutor, and, as M’Gonigle and Stark (2006) advocate, allowing place its agency in shaping human affairs (p. 65). 

“Several prints dating from the early nineteenth century illustrate the sensation generated by the spectacle of "The Hottentot Venus." A French print entitled "La Belle Hottentot," for example, depicts the Khosian woman standing with her buttocks exposed on a box-like pedestal. Several figures bend straining for a better look, while a male figure at the far right of the image even holds his seeing-eye glass up to better behold the woman's body. The European observers remark on the woman's body: "Oh! God Damn what roast beef!" and "Ah! how comical is nature!” http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Hott.html

Isolated from the inhuman, Western thinkers need exotic “non-Western” people to mediate between themselves and nature (Latour, 2004). Hall (1997) tells the tragic short story of Saartje Baartman, a.k.a. the Hottentot Venus. Brought to Europe from Africa in 1810, she was exhibited to the public and scrutinized by scientists until her death five years later. In her first appearances Baartman was treated as an animal – caged and chained. Subsequently, she was semi-humanized by being baptized, married, and learning English. Like many other cultural figures that transgress the boundaries between human and inhuman (ranging from Shylock the Jew through Ham the Astrochimp) the figure of the Hottentot Venus works to explore, exceed and reestablish difference. “Knowledge” of nature is reasserted as knowledge of self and other. Hall writes, “Naturalization is a representational strategy designed to fix difference and thus secure it forever. It is an attempt to halt the inevitable ‘slide’ of meaning, to secure discursive or ideological closure” (p. 245).

“A poster depicting Alfred Dreyfus as a snake. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus--the only Jewish member of the French general staff--was accused and convicted of spying for Germany. He was exonerated of all charges a decade later, but only after strenuous protests on his behalf.” http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/antisemitism.html

What form of culture might instead give voice and presence to the inhuman, allowing it to live beyond the human imagination of its life?

Lynne Hull has addressed this question by developing a “trans-species art.” She creates her sculptures as habitats for wildlife whose territory is vanishing with human interventions. “Hull proposes ‘EcoAtonement Parks,’ or community healing places, where we can restore devastated sites and come to terms with ‘the wounds left from our ware against nature’” (Lippard, 1997, p. 130).

The Bower for Bears to Dream the World – Art/Nature Boreal, Quebec, Canada, 2002. Photo: Lynne Hull. “a shelter for sleeping bears based on an ancient story that bears dream into being all the events of the coming year; disaster comes when they neglect to dream all that is needed.” http://www.landviews.org/articles/mystery-lh.html

Perhaps even more telling in its address to the human/inhuman divide is a remarkable work of public art organized by native women on the downtown Eastside of Vancouver every Valentine’s Day since 1992. Hundreds of people gather to honour the memory of women who have been murdered in the area. At a smudge ceremony they name the dead women, and form a healing circle to honour their lives. The group then marches through the streets, stopping periodically at sites where women have died violently.

The Valentine’s Day demonstration works on multiple levels: it is at once art, social analysis, ceremony and media event. The occasion is one of solidarity and community resistance. It asks that we see patterns, take sides. At the same time, the event reveals the city as a whole community, where some profit and others die because of their class, race and sex. The ironic choice of Valentine’s Day as a date for the demonstration implicates the whole culture of desire. It invites recognition of the process through which these women are deprived of humanness by the dominant culture, where they are voiceless objects of a desire that is forever disavowed. It asks whose interests are served by unlinking the practice of prostitutes frequented by suburban men from the privileges and precariousness of suburban women. The annual demonstration began thirteen years before the teeth and toes of dozens of murdered women were discovered on a Port Coquitlam farm where the women had been butchered and fed to pigs.

Latour (2004) comments that where Western culture has described (and created) the social as a prison that stands opposite nature, we might more productively view the social as a shifting collectivity into which newly-recruited non-humans may be assimilated. With this view, we can undertake the work of collecting and recruiting tangled beings who are both (or neither) human and inhuman. The Valentine’s Day demonstration does more than demand the substitution of a positive ("human") representation for a negative ("inhuman") representation in the dominant culture; it refuses to produce this happy ending. Instead of telling a seamless narrative, it establishes a dialogical space in which new collectivities can potentially be forged.

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