“Diego Rivera, Water, Origin of Life, 1951” © Joaquín Martínez 2012 Flickr under CC BY 2.0
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.[1]
At the time it was written, the assertion of the universal equality of man found in the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) reflected the emancipatory spirit of a people that was in the process of attaining its freedom from British subjection. The Declaration also reflects the principles of arguably the most important philosophical movement of the 18th century: humanism, a philosophy which upholds the inherent equality of all human beings. We can thus interpret the Declaration as an emphatically humanist proposition that the American people can govern themselves because they are the equals of their oppressors. By achieving their independence, the American people verified this proposition and, in so doing, created for themselves a new social order that aimed to make equality a common principle of national unity. The American independence movement thus illustrates that upholding the equality of human beings can form the basic principle of a revolutionary and socially transformative approach to politics, one whose main goal is the liberation of the dominated.
In retrospect, however, the material and logical hypocrisies of the Declaration’s humanism are glaringly obvious. There is, of course, a gendered bias in the declaration itself. It explicitly makes the image of “men,” the male gender, the universal subject of equality. Women were thus excluded from the movement claiming to emancipate all mankind. Furthermore, emancipation from British rule meant very little for people in the Americas not of European descent. Slaves would not be liberated, nor would Native Americans be spared the horrific violence of colonial expansion. A strange situation thus results: the emancipatory project of humanism, founded on the principle of universal human equality and freedom from subjugation, paradoxically reproduces the inequality and oppression of human groups. But from whence in the logic of humanism do these contradictions arise?
Proffering an answer to this question, philosopher and feminist activist Rosi Braidotti claims that the paradoxes generated by humanism occur because beneath its pretensions to universality, a certain image of the subject is always presupposed by those declaring the universal self-evidence of human equality. And throughout history, the predominant image of the subject of equality has been humanist Man, the model for which is Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man: “a male of the species” who is also “white, European, handsome and able-bodied.”[2] Braidotti thus suggests that “the human of humanism” or humanist subject of equality often operates as a normative principle, “a systematised standard of recognizability – of Sameness – by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location.”[3] To perpetuate its own supremacy, the humanist subject must ensure that these “others” (modes of being not recognised as fully human) are not only barred from participation in the community of humanist subjects, but hierarchised on a sliding scale of inequality. Braidotti argues that this form of subjugation operates via a “dialectics of otherness,” the “anthropocentric, gendered and racialised” process by which others are “cast out of normality.”[4] That is, as a historically dominant mode of being, the human of humanism reduces all others to a non-identity, to their “not-being” a humanist subject. This not only results in the exclusion of all those different from the norm but also results in the creation of a new system of domination, as the hypocrisies of the American independence movement demonstrate.
Of course, Braidotti’s insights into the perverse consequences of humanism are not novel. Anti-humanism has been a popular philosophical position since the second half of the 20th century as it was championed by some of the biggest names in French philosophy, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray.[5] However, what is unique about Braidotti is that her criticisms of humanism are tempered by her praise for its focus on emancipatory politics which she claims is one of the its “most valuable aspects.”[6] Indeed, Braidotti’s aim is not to do away with ideals of emancipation or the concept of equality, but to develop “a different scheme of emancipation and a non-dialectical politics of human liberation.”[7] As she puts it, the “struggle for equality” need not be separated “from the affirmation of difference,” rather they can complement one another as radical principles for social change.[8] Importantly, however, in bringing these principles together to form a new politics of social transformation, Braidotti does not subordinate the affirmation of difference to equality. Rather, she embraces difference through equality as a means of “undoing existing arrangements so as to actualise productive alternatives.”[9] On her view, it is possible to think equality with difference to the extent that challenging the social order through struggles for equality requires that one operationalise their difference from societal norms. For instance, Braidotti claims that the “women’s movement is the space where sexual difference becomes operational, through the strategy of fighting for equality of the sexes.”[10] By attempting to verify their equality, women have not endeavoured to prove that they are the same as men, but that their differences do not make them a lesser form of human. Calls for equality thus challenge the humanist hierarchisation of the social order by visibilising differences in the form of a polemic surrounding who does and does not deserve to be counted as an equal. Consequently, whilst equality plays an important role in politics, this importance is secondary to the difference equality helps bring to the fore.
Braidotti thus presents herself with the difficult task of outlining a politics of emancipation that is based in the affirmation of difference but that does not disavow humanist notions of equality that have historically elided these differences. This task is doubly problematic if we consider that equality between humans as a principle of emancipation seemingly excludes nonhuman others from politics. As Graham Harman has noted, when contemporary political theorists on the emancipatory “Left”[11] speak of equality, they often ground it “in an innate equality of all human beings.”[12] Therefore, Braidotti not only has to contend with the historical difficulties associated with equality in regard to human emancipation, but its anthropocentric tendencies which leave “no political role” for nonhumans.[13] Despite these difficulties, Braidotti’s solution has been to “double-down” on equality rather than minimise its role in political emancipation. Indeed, one of Braidotti’s most fascinating contributions to political theory is the way in which she employs the concept of equality to promote the production of politically effective difference on two different levels. First, there is the equality used by subjugated groups as a principle for the transformation of oppressive social systems. This form of equality, which we have discussed above, operationalises differences to create a more equal society. Second, there is what Braidotti has variously called “species” or “zoe-centred egalitarianism” which does not achieve emancipation through the transformation of society, but through the production of posthuman forms of subjectivity that challenge the hegemonic humanist subject.
To clarify, in Braidotti’s work zoe refers to all nonhuman beings that are not considered as belonging to the category of bios (human). Zoe thus ranges across the biotic and abiotic spectrum from bacteria and animals to geological structures and technology. Therefore, zoe-egalitarianism is the claim that all these elements of life are equally as dynamic, self-organising, and intelligent as bios.[14] When taken up by human individuals, Braidotti asserts that zoe-egalitarianism becomes the “core of the post-anthropocentric turn” to the extent that it challenges the classic image of Anthropos as an individuated subject. This is because even the capacity to think and produce knowledge is no longer viewed as “the exclusive prerogative of humans alone, but is distributed across all living matter and […] self-organizing technological networks”.[15] As such, zoe becomes a generative and “transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains” leading to the creation of new posthuman subjects that are premised on the deconstruction of anthropocentric ways of being.[16] Moreover, by blurring the categorical distinction between zoe and bios, posthuman subjects learn to embrace the “generative vitality” of life and the politically emancipatory ways of thinking and feeling such an embrace produces. Zoe-egalitarianism thus operates as a principle for becoming other-than the dominant humanist subject and for emancipating oneself from the logic of anthropocentrism.[17]
However, Braidotti is wary of making zoe-egalitarianism a principle of radical equality between humans and nonhumans that would flatten differences between these two groups. For Braidotti, political emancipation still revolves around the creation of new subject positions capable of operationalising their difference. This is evident in her criticism of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, whose “claim to the equality between human and non-human actors” lacks “an epistemology that does justice to the power structures of contemporary subjects.”[18] Zoe-egalitarianism is not a principle of Latourian ontological flattening, but a principle for the production of emancipatory differences. Consequently, we might question the degree to which zoe-egalitarianism challenges anthropocentrism since it seems to primarily serve human beings in their quest for emancipation. In response to this criticism, Braidotti would likely claim that subjects acting under the principle of zoe-egalitarianism would not separate the struggle for their own emancipation from the liberation of nonhuman others who also suffer under the exploitative system of anthropocentric humanism. Such a response would be in keeping with Braidotti’s Deleuzian roots to the extent that in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between macropolitical and micropolitical levels of socio-political analysis. At the macro or molar level, politics is reduced to conflicts between composite social entities such as classes, sexes, or nations. Deleuze and Guattari single out Marxism as a form of macropolitical analysis because it centres politics around struggles between aggregate social groups like the bourgeoisie and proletariat.[19] In contrast, micro or molecular politics analyses less perceptible changes that escape macro-level analysis.[20] For instance, Deleuze and Guattari argue that to understand the French macro-level class struggle commonly known as “May-68,” one must know “which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners.”[21] In other words, micro changes in the behaviour of individual subjects can aid in understanding their macro political effects. This does not mean that micro and macro levels of analysis are differentiated by their scale or size. Rather, they are different kinds of analysis, two ways of understanding the same political event. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that although molecular flows can escape macropolitical analysis, molecular “movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.”[22]
Zoe-egalitarianism can thus be understood as a principle for the creation of micro-level differences to the extent that it instigates the production of new ways of becoming a posthuman subject through one’s relationship with nonhumans. As such, zoe-egalitarianism tries to sustain “processes of subject-formation that do not comply with […] dominant norms” and thus create politically effective “counter-subjectivities” that can challenge the domination of the humanist subject.[23] At the macropolitical level, these micro alterations can lead to the composition and actualisation of a new community. And this community, rather than being formulated as an exclusive humanist community, is based in “the compassionate acknowledgement of its interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of the Anthropocene, are quite simply not anthropomorphic.”[24] In short, the aim is to expand the concept of community to all those previously excluded by the normative figure of the humanist subject, including nonhumans.
However, one difficulty which arises in relation to Braidotti’s approach to emancipatory politics it that it does not provide a precise link between the operation of equality at both its micro and macropolitical levels. In other words, it is unclear why the micropolitical becoming of new posthuman subjects, founded on the concept of zoe-egalitarianism, would produce macropolitical forms of militant action that aim to create a more equal social system. Indeed, the creation of new and experimental subjects does not logically guarantee that these same subjects will confront their subjugators in the name of equality. Rather, experimentation only guarantees that posthuman subjects will be different from humanist subjects. However, difference in-and-of-itself cannot guarantee that subjects will possess the principles or affective dispositions that would bring them into confrontation with dominant humanist subjects, it simply makes them different. Therefore, we could say that a certain gap exists between equality with nonhuman beings and the equality of the oppressed with their oppressors, between micro forms of subjective experimentation and the desire to transform society into a community that recognises a greater number of “others.”
Of course, one could simply argue that no such gap exists because the two forms of equality are bridged by difference. Indeed, it could be argued that whereas zoe-egalitarianism aims to produce subjects different from humanist subjects, equality acts as a vehicle to operationalise this difference for politics. But perhaps we should accept that there is no guarantee that the production of differences will lead to their effective operationalisation. If anything, this theoretical gap in Braidotti’s work points to the precarity of politics in general, the fact that nothing, not even principles of equality reconciled with difference, can guarantee the transformation of society into something better. Perhaps Braidotti shows us that all we can do is to continue to perform the risky acts of experimentation that guarantee nothing, but at the very least present possibilities for the creation of a new common world.
[1] Declaration of Independence, United States, 1776.
[2] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013), p. 24.
[3] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 26.
[4] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 68.
[5] Braidotti has frequently noted her indebtedness to these philosophers, going so far as to call them her “beloved anti-humanist French teachers.” See Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press, 2019). Often referred to as “post-structuralists,” this generation of French thinkers were responding to the implicit humanism of Marxist thought which tended to project as the motor of history a universal human (and archetypically masculine) subject.
[6] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 29.
[7] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 35.
[8] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 161.
[9] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 130.
[10] Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 161.
[11] Harman names thinkers like Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as members of the emancipatory left. See Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014), p. 164.
[12] Harman, Bruno Latour, p. 164.
[13] Harman, Bruno Latour, p. 164.
[14] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 60, 65.
[15] Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge.
[16] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 60.
[17] Braidotti has elsewhere called this process “becoming-minor or nomadic”, concepts which have their roots in the works of Deleuze and Guattari. See Rosi Braidotti, “Anthropos Redux: A Defence of Monism in the Anthropocene Epoch”, Frame 29.2 (2016): 40.
[18] Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge.
[19] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 216.
[20] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 216.
[21] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 216.
[22] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 216-217.
[23] Braidotti, “Anthropos Redux,” p. 40.
[24] Braidotti, “Anthropos Redux,” p. 41.