Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene - Andreas Weber
Published in 2019 by MIT Press, Cambridge MA
195 pages
ISBN: 9780262536660
Climate change is one of the most pressing and imminent threats to our world today. The climate crisis on our hands is without precedent, as we have seen a marked increase in flooding, heatwaves, wildfires, famines, hurricanes, and storms, leading to mass migration, displacement, and the staggering loss of human life. Faced with the oncoming ecological catastrophes facing our global contexts, we have seen a rise in green critiques within popular discourse over the past few decades. Resolutions and accords such as the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Agreement seek to mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change by limiting our consumption of fossil fuels and providing economic stimuli for developing alternative energy sources. Yet, in the face of global capital, in its opposition to sustainability, we have reached an impasse. New ways of thinking and reconfiguring our ideological commitments will be key to overcoming this impasse, and green critiques have provided one such way to recalibrate our material commitments for the sake of the Earth.
Adding to the discourse regarding ecological reconfiguration in the wake of global capital, Berlin-based biologist and eco-philosopher Andreas Weber draws connections between biology and economics in his 2019 book, Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene. Within this short volume, Weber mounts a formidable argument against a dualistic understanding of humans and our relationship to nature. Instead of controlling nature, we exist in a commons of mutual transformation. Against a Victorian, Neo-Darwinian understanding of economics, in which material reality is devoid of subjectivity, Weber calls us to a project of “enlivenment.”
Overview:
As a playful reconfiguration of “Enlightenment”, Weber’s vision of Enlivenment reconsiders life and aliveness as categories of thought and action through the process of meaning-making. Weber argues that, in the wake of our current ecological crises, we need a second Enlightenment, which he calls Enlivenment. Why do we need this? Weber argues that in the centuries following the Enlightenment, we have lived and operated under a metaphysics of death, where we try to narrow our way of thinking about the world into dead categories in order to manipulate and change them (especially in the field of biology). Similarly, Weber argues, our economic models are caught in Enlightenment thinking. While we in the postmodern world claim to be over this Cartesian dualism (mind/body), it is still very much persistent in our treatment of economy and ecology (money as a neutral exchange value, the earth is an inert material open to exploitation, etc). In this way, Weber writes, postmodernism is not an overcoming of Enlightenment, but rather an ideology of enclosure that colonizes our inner selves and “culminates in the idea that the more-than-human world and the body themselves do not exist, but are solely artifacts of culture” (67).
Therefore, if we look at economics and biology within the same frame (what Weber calls bioeconomics), we see that the history of both fields developed in mutual relationship. For example, we see microevolutionary theories make their way into microeconomic models, in which competition, scarcity, and efficiency are essentialized and shapes our way of thinking about the natural world and “the way things are.” Weber argues that these two fields are one science predicated on 19th century Victorian culture, which created and privileged these categories of efficiency, competition, growth, and scarcity. Instead of recognizing these aspects of life as being contingent and merely a reflection of 19th century English society, we have instead utilized Victorian understandings of biology and economics (via Darwin and Malthus, respectively) and essentialized these ideas into thinking that they are the fundamental facts of life, covering both bodily action and social thinking and foreclosing any model of the commons that emphasizes cooperation (55).
Weber argues that we can readily deconstruct these categories. Through biological observations, Weber argues, we can see that nature is not efficient (mammals consume 97% of our energy just to maintain metabolism, photosynthesis is only 3-6% efficient, fish lay millions of eggs to only have a very few offspring survive, etc). Nature does not grow endlessly but rather evolves in a steady-state economy. Scarcity does not encourage biological diversity, but rather hampers it, leading to the stagnant dominance of only a few species in the ecosystem (such as the temperate ocean mudflats). Competition does not increase speciation, but rather causes biological monotony and the dominance of relatively few species. In terms of property, we do not even own our own bodies, as our bodies’ material composition continuously changes as we take in oxygen, carbon, and food sources. Furthermore, more than 8% of our human genome (100,000 pieces of DNA) stems from retroviruses, acting as a biological kind of open source tinkering. While these bioeconomic categories have been the fundamental tenets of our capitalist modes of production, they do not reflect the natural way of living in the world, which Weber argues is much more attuned towards an economy of the commons.
So then what can we substitute for bioeconomics? Weber proposes a theory of “biopoetics,” which recognizes the expressive and experiential aspects of being alive. In biopoetics, living organisms are seen as sentient subjects, rather than mechanistic objects. Through this enlivened biology/ecology we can start to see interesting parallels to an economy of the commons; In what Weber calls “natural anti-capitalism,” this biopoetic perspective gives rise to an experiential ecology in which subjects are constantly renegotiating relationships between one another. In this coupling between matter and relationship, we see that an ecosystem is not a blank slate in which we inhabit or a stage on which we perform, but rather an ecosystem is its inhabitants. Biology is thus a biosemiotic process that provides the broad framework for an interpretation of the commons through enlivenment. In this way, freedom is not achieved through individualistic autonomy and competition, but rather by participating in the commons through the negotiation of necessities (105). In this way, “no one functions as a producer or consumer, and the resulting program is not a ‘product.’ Everyone acts as ‘stewards’ of a resource, and even the resource itself is more an element of the community itself than a separate, objective ‘other’” (123).
Weber’s theory calls us to be active participants in the biosphere and to apply theory into practice. Against the Enlightenment focus on rationality, Weber prioritizes feeling as a primary avenue for interpreting reality, casting his project of enlivenment as a kind of “Romanticism 2.0.” For Weber, biopoetic commons economies address embodied experience, as opposed to the overly-rational neoDarwinian/neoliberal bioeconomic model (homo economicus). Through the overlapping of domains poetic objectivity and empirical subjectivity, Weber advocates for developing a first-person science, which emphasizes an embodied, relational way of thinking. Weber contends that instead of repressing the contradictions of life, we should rather embrace paradox as a constant fixture of life. For Weber, life is about the moment-to-moment attempt to resolve paradoxes. He connects this to a sense of spirituality, where we are consciously enacting principles and structures at the base of the unfolding of the world. It is then that we are doing something sacred; according to Weber, in the ancient indigenous world, daily life was sacred for itself in its recognition of plenitude and contradictions, acknowledging the imbalance of the world and partaking in living creation in playful celebration. Essentially, in Weber’s project of enlivenment, we are all connected, blurring the line between nature and culture, and we need to move beyond dualistic thinking and embrace full participation in the world, acting as an extension of nature rather than detached subjects. Thus, the project of science is not one of objective, static information, but rather subjective meaning and creation through a shared commons.
Commendation:
Weber’s thesis is valuable and important to consider for several reasons. First of all, at its core, Weber’s work reminds us of our dependence on the natural world and how much we are a part of it. He calls us to see ourselves as the temporary stewards of the natural resources around us (which are living subjects themselves), rather than existing as detached subjects imposing our will on static, inert objects. One of my dearest professors in graduate school, Dr. Kimberley Patton, would often say, “We are a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects,” and Weber’s writing emphasizes this key point, calling us to live presently in communion with the world around us.
Weber does well to point out the ways in which our conception of nature might actually be a cultural projection from Victorian society. Weber examines Neo-Darwinism and uses its assumptions as a way to critique our understanding of capital. Looking at the current neoliberal landscape, we can see that social Darwinism and the Victorian worldview (based in a hierarchy) are still very much prevalent today. Weber gives us plenty of examples of the ways in which the natural world does not reflect our current economic understanding, even as we’ve naturalized our economic condition. Thus, when we say of capitalism “that’s just the way things are” and it regulates “human nature”, these are often more a result of Victorian views of science and culture, rather than our natural inclinations. This is one of the book’s strongest points, in getting us to reconsider what we’ve taken for granted and how we've essentialized human nature through 19th-century biology to justify capital.
Furthermore, Weber is right in asserting that much of Enlightenment thinking typically focuses on the capacities for rational thought, much to the neglect of embodied experience. While this assertion is not new by any means, it is one with which we must grapple in order to construct a robust philosophy of the human subject. Weber also utilizes some Hegelian thought in the final chapters, chiefly in the vein of Hegel’s assertion that substance is subject (“The world is sentience because it is matter” 149). While Weber does misread Hegel earlier on in the book in favor of Schiller (130), he later advocates for a life lived amidst contradiction. Weber is clear that his project is anti-utopian, and rather advocates for an economic commons, utilizing biology and ecology as support for this system. Weber argues that cooperation and symbiotic relationship, rather than brute competition, are the driving forces in ecology, and we should apply such principles to our economic systems. In this way, Weber gives us a new angle with which to view and critique our current economic situation, as he calls us to imagine new ways of organizing ourselves in society.
Critique:
On the other hand, Weber’s thesis is not particularly new or novel, and his line of reasoning can often be difficult to follow. While Weber does have several good ideas, he often has difficulty getting them off the ground and doesn’t develop them much further. During the course of reading, I found several sections of the book seemed to be repeating themselves over and over again, just in different ways. Much of the rhetoric of the book tends to veer into the abstract and is often devoid of concrete examples of grounded action. There are few examples of how to enact enlivenment aside from an internal shift in perspective. By the end, I was left wondering how this viewpoint could affect policy, especially in the hopes of establishing a new economic system based on the commons. Perhaps the enlivenment perspective could be utilized and integrated into a political project, but it’s unclear how this might be accomplished.
Furthermore, I am a bit skeptical of Weber’s reliance on Romanticism (or his newly enlivened Romanticism 2.0) as a viable alternative to Enlightenment rationality. Towards the end of the book, Weber writes that reality is “oneness, yearning to unfold and to know itself through fission and diversion...We have to accept that this cosmos is alive. Then feeling becomes the deepest insight into the character of reality” (136). For me, this reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment seems to swing the pendulum too far, as Weber seems to overvalue feeling as the primary register in which to understand reality. Weber’s solution, especially when coupled with the romanticization of pre-modern cultures and indigenous tribes, seems a bit too simplistic, especially since the foundational mechanisms and ideological scaffoldings of capitalism were formed long before the Victorian justifications found in Darwinism. In short, I’m not convinced that we need to reach back into primordial wisdom in order to recover a way of life that is lost or ignored in our society, but that we need to take tradition and wisdom from the past in order to construct a radically new way of living.
While Romanticism was a much-needed reproach to Enlightenment rationality, we also have to acknowledge the contributions of the Romantic movement towards the development of nationalism and totalitarianism in the 19th century. Indeed, the individual subject is nearly dissolved in this ideology, as Weber writes, “It is not about me, but about the fertility of the whole, which includes myself. Aliveness in its innermost core carries the plea that there be life, not that I am fine. Putting the desire that there be life first might even provoke my own destruction” (153-154). While I am fully on-board with moving toward communitarian modes of living and acknowleging our humble roles within the biosphere, this total dissolution of the individual, to me, seems like a potentially dangerous route that has opened the door for the worst kind of nationalistic and totalitarian regimes, and one I’m not sure should be reopened. If the enlivenment project is to hold emancipatory potential, it must refrain from mystifying nature and refuse to absolve the individual from working through their contradictions by them offering a new, definitionally slippery ideology of pure “life.” To be fair, Weber acknowleges and encourages embracing these paradoxes of life toward the end of the book, but it is difficult to reconcile this with some of his other assertions (although, to his credit, this might prove to be a creative paradox in itself).
Also, I would argue that while the Enlightenment might still have a stronghold on thinking within the sciences, Romanticism is still very much present with us today in the form of literature, art, advertising, and even economics (especially in the recognition of the desiring subject). As someone whose primary methodology is in the field of psychoanalysis, I couldn’t help but wonder what the role of desire and drive might be within the enlivenment perspective. As opposed to Weber, I don’t see the human as merely an animal, but rather inherently separated from the rest of the world through subjectivity, which arises in the failure of language. In subjectivity, the central lack is not within biology, but within our symbols (language). Weber would most likely say that this is where poetic language comes into play, but I would be interested to see what a psychoanalytic treatment of enlivenment could contribute to Weber’s overall thesis.
Finally, I am also interested in what role (if any) religion could play within the Enlivenment perspective. Many of Weber’s critiques of the Enlightenment are for the ways in which it separated the human subject from its own body through dualistic thinking (such as Descartes distinction between mind and body). Weber’s project is to emphasize the role of embodiment and subjectivity within the sciences, and I can’t help but think that religion might serve a key role here, especially through embodied rituals and practices which extend the individual beyond oneself and helps them to recognize their role in the symbiotic relationship with the world around them. In discussing the concept of gift exchange and property in nature, Weber writes, “ We can understand death as being the freedom to give oneself to the community one day. There remains a largely unexplored connection between giving and taking in ecosystems in which loss is the precondition for generativity” (102). Does this connection not describe, in light of Terry Eagleton’s recent work, the notion of sacrifice, in which death and loss is the precondition for regeneration and new life? This is a central theme in theology, and I wonder how thinking theologically could contribute and potentially strengthen Weber’s argument.
Conclusion:
Overall, Weber’s work is a provocative and necessary call for us to reconsider the ways in which our biological thinking has influenced and shaped our economic theories. By critiquing bio-economics, Weber gives us a unique lens through which to examine our own presuppositions regarding the development of economics and politics as he bids us to construct more cooperative, communitarian ways of living with the world around us. While I think that his thesis is far from complete, it is a fascinating and beneficial analysis of our current predicament, and how we might begin to think differently, not just about, but alongside the natural world.