The concept ‘the human’ is very volatile. In every period of history and every culture, commonsensical constructions of ‘the human’ exist, but distinctions are always being undermined and re-constructed. In complex and sometimes contradictory ways, the ideas, values, and practices used to justify the sovereignty of a particular understanding of ‘the human’ over the rest of sentient life is what creates society and social life.
To understand the instability of definitions of who is truly human, we need history. Stories and myths enable people in the past (and today) to make sense of a thoroughly bewildering world populated by an unimaginable number and range of sentient beings. I have found two concepts helpful: The möbius (MOW-bee-us) strip and negative zoology (zow-EE-low-gee).
The möbius strip is named after the nineteenth-century mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius. As a topological space, it is easy to make, but the result is aesthetically and philosophically astounding. Simply take a long, rectangular strip of paper, twist one end by 180 degrees, and glue it to the other end. The result? A one sided-surface, with no inside or outside; no beginning or end; no single point of entry or exit; no hierarchical ladder to clamber up or slide down. The möbius strip is a profoundly useful device, particularly if we want to think outside unhelpful dichotomies such as biology-as-inside/culture-as-outside, animal/human, and fe/male, etc. The möbius strip embodies the roller-coaster ride of life, or zoe. Most usefully, it deconstructs difference. The boundaries between different sentient beings turn out to be as entwined and indistinguishable as the inner and outer sides of a möbius strip.
It would be wrong to conclude from the spiralling möbius strip, with its indistinguishable borders, that all life is fundamentally the same. Quite the contrary. The concept can be simply stated: I believe we must move beyond comparisons based on similarities and dissimilarities and inject instability and indeterminacy into our discussions. The advantage of thinking in terms of the möbius strip is that it encourages a celebration of difference and uniqueness.
This is also not to imply that we can understand the swirling motions of the möbius strip outside of the material, ideological, and historical contexts that brought it into being. There is nothing metaphysical or transcendent about the strip. After all, its existence depends on paper, scissors, glue, and the mental and physical labour of mathematicians like August Möbius and people like you and me! It is a product of human labour, and that labour is political. In other words, agents are involved in determining what the spiralling möbius strip of life actually means.
For me, then, the emotional tone and purported rationales given for tying a knot in that möbius strip in order to declare ‘here! and not there! is what is fascinating. The image of the möbius strip provides a way of challenging tyrannical dichotomies such as biology/culture, animal/human, coloniser/ed, and fe/male. It helps us celebrate the ‘unsubstitutable singularity’ of all sentient life.
What does this mean for historians? As an historian, my work is populated with literate people telling stories about how they made their worlds; they often speculate eloquently on the worlds of others. However, they do both of these things within incommensurable limits. I am particularly interested in two very different types of limits. One type of limits are those set by specific historical and topological contexts. This is the territory historians have been trained to excavate. Each person is born into worlds that have already been forged by others. We resist, create, and recreate – but always from a starting point that is never of our own choosing. Many of us rail against the injustices of pre-existing hierarchies created by species, sex, gender, skin colour, wealth, religion, sexual preference, and a host of other characteristics.
For those of us at the ‘wrong end’ of these predetermined hierarchies, it is frustrating to realize that not everyone is willing to acknowledge the way our worlds are radically diminished. For people who have been designated as lesser-humans, the task is daunting. Unfortunately, it is the nature of hierarchical ladders that those on the bottom rungs often find it easier to attack others in the immediate vicinity. Thus, they often find themselves struggling against other groups who are also protesting inequality and prejudice. In pessimistic moments, we might wonder whether there is a limited economy of sympathy. Non-western (or ‘two-thirds world’) feminists, for instance, end up devoting considerable energy battling the assumptions of some western feminists who believe that their particular (western) war against patriarchy is a global struggle based on universal values. In an increasingly globalised world, characterised by rapid changes induced by mass media, technology, migration, and global capitalism, the key question becomes: how do we decide what values are universal (that is, able to transcend cultural peculiarities) and which are local (and, by implication, peripheral). The question is crucial because globalisation is primarily an issue of power – of the ability of one group (European feminists, for instance) to define its own local values or characteristics as ‘global’ while designating another groups’ values or characteristics (those of Haitian feminists, for instance) as ‘local’. The group with most clout decides.
There is, however, a second and more abstract constraint that we encounter in every attempt to understand radically different worlds. This problem resides not in the specificities of individual creatures, with all their needs, desires, alliances, and conflicts (the passion of historians), but with the broader incommensurabilty of zoe, or ‘life itself’ (more typically, the obsession of philosophers). In the twenty-first century, we have become obsessed with defining, categorising, and identifying zoe. Life itself has become the central focus of every form of institutionalised knowledge, from biology to politics and from philosophy to history. However, the genome project and emerging technologies for creating life-forms notwithstanding, zoe remains beyond description, categorisation, prediction. The vast and exciting knowledges we are acquiring simply make our questions proliferate. In the end, all we know for certain is that we don’t.
There is another way of expressing this problem: we are faced with the fundamental unknowability of zoe. But how can zoe be ‘unknowable’ if we ‘know’ it is not-known. How to get out of this quandary?
I find it helpful to think in terms of what might be called a ‘negative zoélogy’. The term ‘negative zoélogy’ is a neologism, taking its inspiration from ‘negative theology’, albeit with God resolutely excised. In other words, theologians and philosophers have faced the problem of incommensurability before: in their struggles to talk about God. Famously, in the late fifth and early sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius (or Dionysius the Areopagite) asked, how can human-beings talk about God, a transcendent being beyond all human knowledge, language, and mystical intuition? The only solution, he concluded, is to exchange all positive descriptions (God is Great, Omnipotent, Good, Omnipresent, and so forth) for apophantic or negative ones. As Pseudo-Dionysius said of the Divine,
words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them.
God cannot be spoken of in terms of ‘similarity or dissimilarity’; God is both ‘beyond assertion and [beyond] denial’. In other words, speaking about God requires some form of affirmation, which must then be denied, only to then deny the denial, and so on.
Shorn of its mysticism (of which, more below), this is, I believe, a useful concept when thinking about the radical making of worlds here on earth. As with the möbius strip, negative zoélogy enables us to move beyond comparisons based on similarities and dissimilarities. It injects instability and indeterminacy into our discussions, and serves as a (much needed) reminder that we are not masters of the universe and that all our knowledges are contingent. I find its negativity generative: it incites imagination. The möbius strip is a reminder of the fluidity of zoe, which is always in motion, affirming and negating, subverting identity and claims of sameness. Negative zoélogy merges with this twisting strip, insisting that violence is done by assertions of ontological solidities: unity or disunity, sameness or difference. Bluntly, it undermines assumptions of superiority/inferiority inevitably popping up when making comparisons with other worlds (‘different compared to what/whom?’).
Admittedly, the relationship between negative theology and negative zoélogy is simply allegorical. At the most basic level, there is nothing other-worldly or redemptive in negative zoélogy, unlike negative theology. It insists on a radical alterity that is not liberating in itself, but only within the milieu of specific political and historical struggles. Encounters with other sentient beings occur in temporal and topographical contexts, albeit profoundly complex ones.
This is what makes historians sympathetic to negative zoélogy. History as a discipline has an in-built tendency to apophantic or negative utterances: historians are taught to be sceptical about all universals, all assumptions that the world as we know it has always existed. Every history student is taught that the world is not as we know it; that whatever we think is stable and certain is not; that there is not an unambiguous ‘us’; and – paradoxically – that the joy of history is in affirming the relevance of what is not like ‘us’ for the present. In this sense, the discipline of history itself is infused with practices conducive to negative zoélogy: of denial followed by affirmation and further denial. Geoffrey Harpham made a similar point, albeit about the Humanities more generally, rather than the discipline of history solely. In his words, the Humanities produce
not certain but uncertain knowledge, knowledge that solicits its own revision in an endless process of refutation, contestation, and modification. Humanists aspire to speak the truth, but none would wish to have the very last word, for such a triumphant conclusion would bring an end not just to the conversation but to the discipline itself.
The historians’ mantra is: we must always acknowledge the material, ideological, and historical contexts that has brought any particular version of Möbius’ spiralling strip into being. Negative zoélogy goes further, reminding historians of the dangers involved in attempting to pinch the spiraling strip in any one place in order to appropriate other worlds into our own. The title of one of the most eminent historical journals tells it all: Past and Present; incommensurable worlds, in dialogue.
This emphasis on the historical contexts of all acts of world-making, including ones that focus upon zoe itself, returns us to the productive forces and material practices of social interaction. Put another way, it foregrounds power relations. Otherness should never be reified. It is never a ‘good’ in and of itself.
Negative zoélogy, radical alterity, and the dizzy circling of the möbius strip provide us with more optimistic ways of thinking with different worlds. They anticipate new and creative ways of thinking about each other. They provide a way of playing with difference, while avoiding the tendency to invent other creatures (human or animal) in our own image or to use them simply as pawns in our own ideological or material battles. They are tools, if you like, that offer a subversive critique of identity politics, based on a play of difference (‘them’) versus sameness (‘us’). They deny the hierarchies that work against justice while, at the same time, paying homage to a desire for authenticity, certainty, and community. Most importantly, they refuse to deify other beings, while still reminding us of the beauty of motion, of affirmation and denial and further affirmation. By situating fellow-creatures within specific temporal and geographical spaces, we keep them resolutely in the real world, with all its suffering, joy, identifications, and struggles. Situated within history and politics, negative zoélogy, radical alterity, and Möbius’ strip encourage us to affirm knowledge while simultaneously gesturing towards the fact that there is more – much more – always to come. They point to a politics that is as committed to uniqueness of all life forms as much as to the creative, exhilarating desire and struggle for community and communion, authenticity and certainty.
The practical as well as historical implications of these ways of thinking are explored in my book What It Means to be Human (Reaktion Books)
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