Zine :
Lien original : par Julian Langer
One of the ideas I most appreciate from Timothy Morton is his thoughts on subscendence and the whole being less than the sum of it’s parts. This ties in with one of my biggest issues with environmentalist thought and practice, mainstream and radical, which is the lazy embrace of collectivism.
If collectivism is correct, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, then it doesn’t matter if 10% of a coral reef is bleached, or 20%, or 90%, because you have this transcendental greater than, which remains. Likewise, the death of 1 polar bear doesn’t matter, because individuals are inconsequential, and neither does the extinction of 1 species, because you still have this larger whole of earth that matters more, and likewise it doesn’t matter if 200 individual species comprised of statistically irrelevant individuals die due to ecocide, because the transcendental whole remains.
From a collectivist ideology, including a Green one, everything is reducible to a machinic-part of a totalitarian system, that is greater than through resource extraction, while being smaller as a demarcated totality – like how the city is greater than the countryside, which is greater than the wilderness, while each is actually smaller. (This is why civilisation is geographically huge but ontologically tiny.) Environmental praxis becomes reduced either to liberal-collectivism of “if we all just do our bit and recycle and reduce our carbon footprints, as part of a collective effort” or Marxian style “we need a collective mass to make a stand” revolution talk.
If you switch the perspective and destroy the transcendence subscendentally, so that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, then individuals matter. An individual who we call a polar bear is not irrelevant because of the collective mass of polar bears, whose whole they are considered part of, and is uniquely valuable for being the individual they are. Individual woods and forests, with all the individuals who live within them are greater than the collective whole of the country that they are considered a part of, as they are ontologically massive and a nation is ontologically tiny as an effort in reductionism – this is obvious when you consider how many different beings there are when walking through woods, with particular attention on the leaf litter and then contrast that with how little there is when walking through a town or a city, where there is just pavement beneath your feet.
Individualism, not meaning collectivist-marketeering of being-part-of-the-economic-transcendental-whole, necessarily starts with the body of an individual, as an affirmation of presence. Environmentalism is an affirmation of the presence of a body, that you affirm as an affirmation of your body – I breath air to live and exhale it out into the environment. An individual body is also an environment, home to many living beings – most of me isn’t “me” with all the bacteria.
If I were to reduce this as best I can it’s-
Collectivism- whole is greater than sum of it’s parts, dualism = totalitarianism, body renunciation.
Individualism- whole is less than the sum of its parts, monism = pluralism, body affirmation.
Let’s move this away from environmentalism and to race. Within a collectivist ideology, it doesn’t actually matter if Simeon Francis or any other black individual dies at the hands of the police, because the whole of black people is greater than them and they are statistically irrelevant. This is obviously a bullshit perspective intuitively, if you’re not coming from slave-owner-type ideology, and this is why people have erupted over the images of abuse towards black individuals. Because individuals matter, we feel, if we’re not totally indoctrinated into this culture, an instinctual affirmation of their experience of abuse and a sense of disgust towards the ill treatment of the body they are, as we recognise instinctually ourselves as ontologically valuable bodies. So we feel rage towards acts of abuse towards individuals, because individuals are valuable and actually not reducible to some machinic-categorical mass, which contains multiple spare parts.
This is also intuitively obvious from an existential perspective. Taken from a collectivist-God’s eye, everything is so huge and I am irrelevant, so I must either embrace religion or kill myself to transcend my condition, the lives of individuals are meaningless and unimportant. But we subjectively affirm the ontological value of our individual bodies through our will to life/power, as an absurd act (because we all ultimately die), that is a rebellion against death, which affirms the world by saying “I’m going nowhere!”.