We can’t be sure whether sentient beings are machines or not. And it would be dangerous if we thought we could. Inner depth might just be an illusion. And still weirder, this illusion might have actual effects. My uncertainty about this, evoking the uncanny, is essential to the encounter with the strange stranger. However much we try, we can’t explain the strange stranger away. We’re stuck with the paradoxes of pure appearance. We have to care for a world that presents itself in an illusion-like way that we can’t ignore. Loving the strange stranger has an excessive, unquantifiable, nonlinear, “queer” quality. There is something utterly outrageous and, at the same time, universal and unavoidable about it, something the phrase “tree hugger” fails to capture. In a perfect inversion of Herzog’s relationship with Treadwell, the director of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill falls in love with Mark Bittner. Bittner’s love for the parrots and Treadwell’s love of the bears transcend habitual affection for other sentient beings. Yet all affection has an exorbitant quality. Out of the universe of things, I choose you. This is another reason why the aesthetic of cuteness won’t fly for all sentient beings, all at once.
Texts are messages in bottles. The reader is the future of the text. The text addresses a strange stranger, beyond and above the specific addressees of the specific message. Are you an android, you who are reading this? Are you a person? Are you reading this three thousand years from now in some impossible-for-me-to-imagine future, in some impossible-for-me-to-imagine form? Does my awareness of your awareness of my awareness of your future being affect this writing?
The text contains a void into which the reading mind leaps.100 Meaning depends on unmeaning. Evolution is a text like this. Just like reading a novel loaded with “too much” information, the more details we find, the more gaps we perceive.101 The more we know about strange strangers, the more we sense the void. Determined to think interconnectedness to the end, the ecological thought produces a mental openness far more disturbing than outer space. The openness exists on the intimate level of the encounter with the strange stranger. I mean this differently than Jean-Paul Sartre, who in an allergic way finds the existence of others to be a “drain hole” in one’s being. Other minds are like the dark side of the Moon: there, but invisible to us.102 Our intimacy is an allowing of and a coming to terms with the passivity and void of the strange stranger. And since the strange stranger is us, the void is us, too. This is very good news. We have a platform for compassion rather than condescending pity, and therefore, we have a basis for reimagining democracy. The inbuilt uncanniness of strange strangers is part of how we can be intimate with them.
Democracy implies coexistence; coexistence implies encounters between strange strangers. Are there any ways of modeling this encounter? If we’re not casting stones, since we’re not without sim/sin, what are we doing instead? Democracy is based on reciprocity—mutual recognition. But since, at bottom, there is no way of knowing for sure—since the strange stranger aspect of personhood confronts me with a terrifying darkness—the encounter at its zero level is a pure, absolute openness and is thus asymmetrical, not equal. The stranger is infinity.103 Since the strange stranger is not my mirror, there is no way of knowing whether she, or he, or it is a person. So before we get to mutual recognition, we must have radical openness. There are many difficulties here.104 The encounter is loving, risky, perverse. Because the strange stranger is uncanny and uncertain, she, he, or it gives us pause. The fact that the strange stranger might bite is the least of our worries. It is more like how feminist Luce Irigaray puts it, when she imagines the nonhuman as a teacher and the nonhuman–human relationship as a model for future ways of human being.105
Sentient beings do suffer—that is practically the definition of sentience. Some assert that suffering distinguishes life forms from artificial intelligence. What about bacteria? Where is the limit below which a being can’t be considered to be sentient? Wouldn’t this possibly include some AI, and therefore, at least in theory, couldn’t AI suffer? If you’re prepared to claim that thinking is “emergent” like a cloud or a stock market pattern, shouldn’t you be prepared to say that consciousness can exist without a specific skin in which to wrap it?106
QUEER DUCKS
These questions extend Turing’s proposition that if a machine walks like a mind and quacks like a mind, it might as well be one.107 The uncanny and uncertainty are basic to the ecological thought. If we try to get rid of them, we conjure up Nature that rises up to judge, monitor, and discipline: we don’t love Nature properly; we should act natural; unnaturalness will be noted and punished. Environmentalism has been trapped in ideologies of masculinity, the ultimate performance of nonperformance, the ultimate imitation of Nature. This goes not only for subjects who experience Nature but also for objects—Nature itself. We often think of Nature as female. But Nature is also masculine, if masculinity means a desperate attempt to peel the feminine dimension of pure semblance away from one’s being.
Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through extreme contrasts. It’s outdoorsy, not “shut in.” It’s extraverted, not introverted. It’s heterosexual, not homosexual. It’s able-bodied—“disability” is nowhere to be seen, and physical “wholeness” and “coordination” are valued over the spontaneous body.108 As the private school motto put it, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Nature is aggressively healthy, hostile to self-absorption. It’s allergic to semblance. Appearance should have a point: those mountains over there must be about themselves, or my soul, or Nature, and so on. There is no room for irony, no room for anything more than superficial ambiguity. Things should mean what they say and say what they mean. There is no room for humor, except perhaps a phobic, “hearty” kind. Masculine Nature is the operating system of the authoritarian personality.
Masculine Nature fears its own shadow—subjectivity itself. It wants no truck with the night of the world, the threateningly empty dimension of open subjectivity.109 This dimension is feminine. “Feminine” is a term, perhaps a patriarchal one, for the open, purely apparent dimension of subjectivity. 110 Environmental phenomena exhibit this concrete infi nity.111 Levinas talks of the “defenseless eyes” of the face.112 Masculine Nature is afraid of the nothingness of feminine “mere” appearance. It’s the Trickster quality found in many indigenous cultures. When we approach the idea that all sentient beings are equal and free, we discover the Trickster.
The ecological thought gets along just fine with the Trickster. Thinking itself is tricky. When you think, you move from one place to another, from A to not-A. Like a magic show, thinking is this tricky play. The ecological thought is the Trickster, thinking of the Trickster. Turing’s own wonderful example of his test is not about a human and a nonhuman but a man and a woman. The man has to convince the interviewer that he might be a woman, and vice versa. Is not this the height of Trick-sterishness? And doesn’t it demonstrate that identity is a performance—you can walk and quack like a duck, like a woman, like a mind?113 This is about what evolutionists call “satisficing”: instead of becoming optimal for their environments, living beings do just enough to look and quack like themselves.114 The ecological thought might invert the conventional wisdom on virtual reality art, such as transgender artist Micha Cardi-nas’s simulations of nonhuman existence, as a dragon in the online domain Second Life.115 It’s not that these simulations demonstrate posthuman platitudes about malleable identity (Cardinas’s own estimation), but rather that identity as such is already a simulation—a performative display. Might this not imply that virtuality is hardwired into living substance? It’s not just that rabbits are rabbits in name only: it’s that whether or not we have words for them, rabbits are deconstructive all the way down—display happens at every level. Nothing is self-identical. We’re embodied, yet without essence. True materialism would be nonsubstantialist: it would think matter as self-assembling sets of interrelationships in which information is directly inscribed: DNA is both matter and information.
The Trickster tea
ches us that subjectivity is an inescapable part of reality. Even if we are alone in the “wilderness,” we are not alone. Our examination of the uncanny should demonstrate this. What is scary about being lost in a forest of tree upon tree, or lost in a city of street upon street, is catching a glimpse of yourself, from the point of view of the trees. It is the feeling of being watched, of being accompanied. And what are you seeing? What is seeing you? We can identify only a shadowy darkness. The dark openness gazes at us. We aren’t exactly seeing ourselves in a mirror. We’re seeing ourselves as the void that looks back at us, as if we looked in the mirror and saw a hooded figure, and underneath the hood was nothing. The uncanny path in the forest and the city goes round and round in circles.
The novel and movie Into the Wild (by Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn, respectively) reckon the terrible damage the masculine Nature meme can cause.116 Christopher McCandless changes his name to Alexander Supertramp, evoking a gay Greek imperialist and disco lyricism—strange given his fatal experimentation with rugged male individualism. He only realizes that other people are important just before he dies from eating a poisonous plant, on his abandoned school bus home in the heart of Alaska. The “into the wild” fantasy is a syndrome, a social performance. In January 2008, Rice University student Matt Wilson disappeared into the wilderness with a fistful of money and a beard. Do these suicidal young men think they are disappearing into Nature? Supertramp was just a few miles from shelter and about fifteen miles from a major highway. His concept of wildness overrode his life instinct.
This is no journey into the wild but into the mind. Men (mostly men) like Supertramp think that they’re escaping civilization and its discontents, but in fact they occupy the place of its death instincts. Their fantasy is of a world of absolute control and order: “I can make it on my own” is what American boys are taught to think. The “return to Nature” desperately acts out the myth of the self-made man, editing out love, warmth, vulnerability, and ambiguity. Even the aesthetic of the cute is a beginning of affection, so it’s better than nothing. Warmth and vulnerability might not be served well by high art. What the ecological thought is thinking is unbeautiful, uncold, unsplendid.117
Masculine Nature is unrealistic. In the mesh, sexuality is all over the map. Our cells reproduce asexually, like their single-celled ancestors or the blastocyst that attaches to the uterus wall at the beginning of pregnancy. Plants and animals are hermaphrodites before they are bisexual and bisexual before they are heterosexual. Most plants and half of animals are either sequentially or simultaneously hermaphroditic; many live with constant transgender switching.118 A statistically significant proportion of white-tailed deer (10 percent plus) are intersex.119 Hermaphroditic snails curl around each other with seemingly palpable affection.120 Seeking an encounter with another individual is good for plants, but they do it via other species such as insects and birds; thus bees and flowers evolve together, through mutually beneficial “deviations.”121 Heterosexual reproduction is a late addition to a gigantic ocean of asexual division.122 And it looks like a good option (rather than a very expensive add-on) only from the “point of view” of macromolecular replicators.123 It doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of these molecules’ vehicles (you and me and the beetles).
Try a simple experiment: can you see gay humans where you live? Good. Why do you think, after several hundred million years of homosexual behaviors, that gay life forms persist? Could it be that homosexuality is no problem, from DNA’s point of view? Given that binary gender performance floats in a colossal welter of transgender, homosexual, and asexual phenotypes, isn’t it time to drop the idea of Nature as a straight, binary, exclusive realm?
For about two hundred years, the heavy lifting for homophobic Nature has been organicism, which we’ve explored in its roles as a bearer of ideas of holism and squishiness. Organicism polices the sprawling, tangled, queer mesh by naturalizing sexual difference. Biologist Joan Roughgarden argues that gender diversity is a necessary feature of evolution. Moreover, her argument is possible because Darwin himself opened a space for it. Strict Darwinism is profoundly anti-teleological (Marx liked it for this reason). Individuals and species don’t abstractly “want” to survive to preserve their form: only macromolecular replicators “want” that. From the replicators’ viewpoint, if it doesn’t kill you (“satisficing”), you can keep it, whatever it is.124 A vast profusion of gender and sex performances can arise. As far as evolution goes, they can stay that way. Thinking otherwise is “adaptationism.”
The ecological thought is also friendly to disability. There are plentiful maladaptions and functionless phenomena at the organism level. Webbed feet may be “beautifully adapted to swimming”—but coots get along just fine without them. Functionality only really manifests at the genomic level. Why are there organisms at all, as a matter of fact? Only because it benefits some replicators to clump together.125 As we saw, it’s better to think of organs without bodies than of discreet, self-contained, and self-identical organisms. Sphex wasps paralyze crickets to feed to their young. If you move a paralyzed cricket from in front of the burrow that the Sphex wasp who paralyzed her is inspecting (for the presence of grubs), the wasp will repeat the same behavior, moving the cricket back meaninglessly to the entrance of the hole, without dragging her in.126 Nature only looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going, like the undead, and because we keep our distance, frame it, size it up. The mesh is made of prosthetic devices and algorithmic behaviors. An eye is a wet, squeezable pair of glasses. Legs are soft, brittle crutches. Ears are rather florid headphones. Brains are things that quack like minds.
Like a stream slipping around a large stone, the ecological thought flows past masculine Nature. The idea of species is far too rigid and arbitrary to account for the mutagenic, liquid strange stranger.127 Every being is forked, bent, blind, deaf, mentally afflicted. Men have nipples because the common ancestor of humans and other apes was intersex.128 Male nipples can secrete milk at puberty and birth, and it’s likely that “during a former prolonged period male mammals assisted females in nursing their offspring.”129 Indeed, says Darwin, “at a very early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and female glands. Hence some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous.”130 If you ignore the nipples, males look almost male.
Welcome pine trees with their profuse clouds of pollen, welcome grandmothers with dogs, and boo to philosophers who should know better who disparage grandmothers with dogs in favor of wolves.131 For such thinkers, if there can’t be a return to Nature, there should be a return to non-Nature. Pets are queer animals, not Natural. They may be neutered, but they have many ways of expressing affection and sexuality. They form a bionic hybrid coexistence with their guardians.132 The cute still has some juice left. Just because the cute is limited, we shouldn’t exchange it for the “into the wild” meme. We must make choices at some stage, so I vote not to throw out the cute baby with the “Natural” bathwater. The sickly-sweet subjects of the cute are better for human and ecological survival than the deadly sublime of “naked,” unqueer Nature. The sentimental is about feeling tenderness.133 Soft toys induce love. The subtitle of Wall•E could be “cuteness saves the planet.”134 All that survives the mass evacuation of consumerists are ghostly sentimental fantasies. Criticize the cute, but not in the name of masculine Nature. In “sophisticated” discourse, sentimentality is something disgusting that other people have: “She is sentimental, you are too emotional, but I have genuine feelings.” The perverse, dark side of the ecological thought wants to indulge this sentimentality a little. Anyway, there are no genuine (versus fake) emotions. They are all fake.
Okay, deep breath—it just isn’t right to criticize genetic engineering as unnatural, as if decent people should ban horses, dogs and cats, wheat and barley. It isn’t sound to call “technological” gene manipulation wrong, as if stud farming wasn’t technical manipulation. Crossbreeding is a form of
technology. Fields and ditches are technology. Apes with termite sticks are technological. And what is barley if not a queer plant? Biological beings are all queer. All food is Frankenfood.135 The ecological thought might argue, provocatively I know, that genetic engineering is simply doing consciously what was once unconscious.136 My DNA can be told to produce viruses—that’s how viruses replicate. There isn’t a little picture of me in my DNA: hence the swine flu, which evolved from viruses affecting three different species. Genomics can use a virus to tell bacterial DNA to make plastic rather than bacteria.
What’s wrong about genetic engineering is that it turns life forms into private property to enrich huge corporations. Large, dynastic families controlled corporate capitalism all the way back to the spice race, the first space race.137 Capitalism has always restricted gene pools and amassed large quantities of property, with accompanying stability and power. The capitalist language of deregulation, flow, and circulation masks the static, repetitive, “molar” quality of capitalist forms. But processes of privatization and ownership contradict the liquid, queer, mutagenic, shadowy, and ungraspable qualities of life forms. If we’re going to resist genetically engineered life forms, we shall need to figure out why. Otherwise, our illusory reasons will produce in the long run just as illusory a result.
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