A Joyful Extinction? On Keeping Futures Open for Humans and Nonhumans
by CAPAS-Fellow Christine Daigle
What futures await us? Must we undergo extinction for these to be possible? Are there extinctions that are desirable—necessary even? Can extinction be joyful? My project answers “yes” to the latter questions and, to support this answer, I am developing a theory of joyful extinction built upon critical posthumanist material feminist principles that reject human exceptionalism, champion entanglements of all beings, and seek the thriving of all—human and nonhuman alike—instead of mere survival.
There is no denying that we live in a moment of multiple crises—environmental, political, medical, ethical, and economic—that coalesce to confront us with ongoing and possible extinctions: our own as well as that of other species. Naming the Anthropocene intended to mark the extent of the environmental crisis and identified the culprit: the human and its reckless ever-increasing exploitation of natural resources. Additionally, the unfolding of the 6th mass extinction further reinforces the notion that our way of life is enjoyed at the expense of the many nonhuman beings whose life is rendered impossible by our ambitions for ongoing growth. Moreover, the wasteful Western humanist way of life is not enjoyed by most humans, since many suffer conditions of poverty, hunger, and violence to support that way of life.
The crisis conjunction in which we live provides for bleak futures for humans and nonhumans alike. This is because we are already living through extinction. Extinction is not an event compressed in time with the death of an endling, the last individual of a species. Rather, it is the long, protracted unravelling of a species’ way of life and its relations to other species and its environment. Thus, we must recognize that for some human populations the world has already ended and that they have indeed experienced "extinction", perhaps more than once. One only needs to think of the fate of Indigenous peoples and Black Africans through European colonialism. And we can question whether the way of life of the human species as a whole is going extinct.
Given that we find ourselves in a time of multiple crises and our human and nonhuman worlds are increasingly unravelling, we can state that the apocalypse is now. However, my project rejects “doom and gloom” as a paralyzing attitude leading to inaction and despair. Instead, I seek to develop a generative attitude that can motivate action and upon which futures can be built. If worlds are ending, it is due to the extractivist and oppressive relations we put in place towards nonhuman others—animals, plants, minerals, ecosystems, earth system. At the same time, these exploitative practices deprive many people of a liveable future. The Colombian American anthropologist Arturo Escobar suggests that we need to develop practices of reworlding that make better futures possible. At the heart of his proposal is the need to rebuild connections among beings.
The Anthropocene teaches us an important lesson: we have come to a point of no return. Extinctions are inevitable—such as the extinction of our current way of life, of the human as we have known it, and of nonhuman species. But extinctions are also positive as they open up space for the emergence of new lives and new ways of living. My project aims to demonstrate that we need to embrace extinction as a multivalent and generative fact that opens up these possibilities. Extinction can only be joyful if we take it as an opportunity to leave our humanist ways of living behind and explore living differently.
Extinction and the future it opens will be joyful only if animated by posthumanist principles. While the posthumanist critique of the humanist worldview is essential, constructive proposals to effect a shift in worldview are equally crucial. Posthumanist methodologies provide new tools that redefine humans, nonhumans, and reality itself especially as we live in a context of environmental uncertainty and technological expansion. The driving conviction is that we need to design new thoughts using new methods to find new solutions to the manifold problems with which we are faced.
Critical Posthumanism
Embracing critical posthumanist material feminist core principles and concepts—such as vitalism, the impossibility of separating the human from nature, interconnectivity, and agentic capacity distributed among all living beings—and building upon my ontological model of transjectivity—all living beings are constituted through their subjective and material relations—I propose an ethos of care as the necessary backbone of the futures we need to build. Basically, we need to embrace humility and care as an ethos, one that recognises the web of relations and its various asymmetries, its thriving, its timescales, and its eco-temporalities. Embracing an attitude of humility is part of the ethos that will allow the transjective human to pursue its own flourishing while acknowledging that it is intertwined with the thriving, and sometimes demise, of others and perhaps itself. This humility should permeate the work needed to address social, environmental, knowledge production, urban, and technoscientific issues, issues that need to be tackled to construct the futures in which we can thrive.
To give a very concrete example: in Canada where I live, folks tend to their lawn in a sometimes obsessive manner. The lawn is cut short through the summer and leaves are picked to the last piece in the fall. This is all driven by human-centered aesthetic preferences. But what if we were to think of all the beings entangled in this space? What if we took in consideration the concerns of bugs and bees who need longer grass to protect themselves from the heat in summer and a dead leaves cover to make it through winter? Shifting our perspective on such an everyday matter and changing our action may have really important impact for the thriving of these nonhumans. Imagine what this shift in perspective might do in other matters such as, for example, urban development, environmental policies!
Does our horizon of extinction lead to impoverished or enriched futures? Whereas humanist imaginaries have failed us and closed futures for humans and nonhumans alike, critical posthumanist imaginaries are capable of opening up the vision of a better future. Examining the productive potential of extinction is at the heart of this endeavour and key to my work. The process of extinction can be a joyful one only if it opens up futures for humans and nonhumans alike. It has the potential to be a joyful one if humans reject a damaging worldview and way of existing while embracing a relational ethos of care and humility that fosters the thriving of all entangled beings. To arrive at this, it is necessary to investigate the Anthropocene and extinction, how they feed one another, how we conceive and represent them in our imaginaries and cultural discourses, and how they thereby impact the futures that are being made as we live through them.