So it looks like my next project is up and running. With any luck it will come out with the Posthumanities Series with University of Minnesota Press next year. Right now I’m tentatively entitling it The Domestication of Humans. I’m conceiving it as a sort of theoretico-historico biography of the human race in the spirit of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Inverting the way we commonly talk and think about domestication, the book will explore how grasses, grains, various animals such as wolves, cows, cats, goats, and microbes, as well as technologies have conspired to domesticate human beings for their own ends. Throughout North America and other parts of the world, for example, grass cultivated humans to be beings that love lawns and large grassy areas for their sports so that humans would spread grass all about the world, thereby getting itself replicated. Likewise, cows, in a sinister plot against other herd animals, cultivated humans to have a particular love of beef so that they might get replicated and spread across the globe, cornering the market on prime pieces of grazing land. The first club that seduced humans– as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey –was the initial salvo on the part of technology to advance itself throughout the solar system. Humans had to be cultivated in particular ways so as to enhance the ability of technology to replicate and cultivate itself. Something similar happened in the case of language and signs.
The whole point of such a project, of course, is to develop enhanced techniques for thinking in terms of flat ontology. When posing questions in the humanities our tendency is to think in terms of unilateral determination. We talk about humans structuring reality through their perceptions, concepts, and signs, treating the process of structuration as proceeding from the human towards a sort of gooey chaos that then gets structured by the human. Flat ontology calls for bilateral determination, where determination doesn’t simply run from human to world, but where all sorts of other entities structure humans and societies as well. Cultivating this sensibility requires, paradoxically enough, first surrendering bilateralization for a time and thinking unilaterally, but now in the form of a unilateralization that runs from all sorts of other nonhuman entities to humans and societies. In this way we begin to develop Latour’s “sociology of associations”, where the social is thought of in terms of associations or compositions in the process of being built, regardless of whether or not those associations involve humans. For example, in Latour’s sense a deep ocean volcanic vent teaming with life is a society, a field of associations, that exists in and through those associations (there aren’t any transcendent “social forces” that structure it), and that doesn’t involve humans in any way (at least until recently).
December 15, 2010 at 1:45 am
I’m excited, and want to hear more about it.
December 15, 2010 at 2:11 am
Sounds wildly ambitious – and wonderful. DeLanda tried to cover a thousand year period, and some environmental historians (and historical ecologists) have done it for shorter periods, but the whole history of humanity…? (In a more popular vein, Evan Eisenberg and Richard Manning tried something like it too.)
If you succeed, I may have to assign it to my Nature & Culture class (240 students – lots of sales!).
December 15, 2010 at 2:53 am
Adrian,
Oh yeah, that would be too ambitious. The idea is a bit tongue and cheek. It’s the concept that counts. Most of it will be theory with representative examples from the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world, the microbial world, the semiotic world, and the technological world interspliced.
December 15, 2010 at 4:28 am
Levi, this sounds amazing. And so exciting you’re going to be part of the Posthumanities series, so cool and much deserved! Just a quick question on a distinction I’m hoping you might clear up for me: you say that a field of associations exists in and through those associations with no transcedental social forces structuring it. I’m not clear as to what way the contours of the field in a field of associations would differ from the transcendental quality of the derivation of forces that interact in the concept of ‘social forces’. Would you be able to explain the difference between the two in a little more depth?
December 15, 2010 at 4:43 am
Do you know Richard Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype? It’s got this idea written all over it.
December 15, 2010 at 11:32 am
You have a knack for eye-catching titles! Great idea and looking at the Posthumanities page you will be in great company.
Do you envisage this as a long-long term project or do you hope to submit it by year’s end or so? I ask because this is exactly the kind of book I like to read outside philosophy and we need to do it more often within philosophy.
December 15, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Well, color me excited.
My first response is to think of Heidegger’s concept of being-at-home-in-the-world (and the corresponding concept of NOT-being-at-home-in-the-world). For Heidegger, this ontological status of ours emerges out of our confrontation with a world that is primordially alienating. Out of Earth we carve a tenuous World, and this process is never-ending. But Heidegger has little to say about why the world is fundamentally unheimlich, beyond his usual discussion of the flux, Wiederholung, etc. It sounds like your project is to give a more properly ontic account. We’re not at home in the world because things call out to us, pressure us, taunt us, entice us, confuse us, and so on, and they all do so in very particular ways. A flat ontology is capable of accounting for this in a way that Heidegger’s more ontological account cannot (because that’s not really his interest in the first place).
My question: how on earth (Earth?) can objects domesticate humans? Don’t objects continuously de-domesticate us? What is responsible for “our” domestication if not “us?” Don’t we need a concept of World to make these kinds of distinction?
Or perhaps I’m missing something and my questions are fundamentally misguided.
December 16, 2010 at 3:32 am
awesome, would love for a section on technology. I love the posthumanities series, but some of the works have been a bit too focused on THE animal and THE human. Seems like the recent “insect media” might be cool, I would like to check that one out at some point!
December 20, 2010 at 10:07 am
Be careful how you approach this. Conceptions of selection do not authorise teleological readings here any more than equivalent stories do in intelligent design. Symbiotic readings, such as Margulis, already cover the space you need in a form well suited to your purpose. Don’t take more ideology with you on this journey than the bare minimum or you’ll just parrot naive selectionist teleologies and fail to cut through to anything new.
As a for instance, grass had already domesticated mammals when humans first appeared on the scene (at least in terms of your unilateral deconstruction). The lawn is a footnote in this story.
Best of luck!
December 21, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Dude,
I think you will need a post explaining this post to the flood of analytical types that will be reading your post via Leiter.
Don’t let them misrepresent you.
December 22, 2010 at 1:17 am
Hah, Leiter’s outraged post seems to now have an UPDATE that is grudgingly halfway in favor of Levi’s idea. Could it be that Leiter opined angrily on an area of science, philosophy, and/or politics in which doesn’t actually know much? Surely that would never happen…
December 22, 2010 at 2:48 am
[...] seems that I’ve drawn the attention of the luminary Brian Leiter. In response to my gloss on The Domestication of Animals, Leiter writes a post entitled “I’m Not Sure if This is a Joke”. Leiter writes: I [...]
December 22, 2010 at 2:52 am
Have you read the Botany of Desire?
December 22, 2010 at 2:56 am
Nope, should I?
December 22, 2010 at 3:04 am
As much as I dislike Pollan, definitely read The Botany of Desire. Also, you might be interested in many of the works about the way that grasses shifted as we replaced bison with cows. Two books, both brilliant, that I know mention it (but don’t spend a lot of time on it) are Netz’s Barbed Wire, and Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. Those books are gold standards for my work.
December 22, 2010 at 3:05 am
I haven’t either, but if I had, I would recommend it ;)
The subtitle is “A Plant’s-Eye View of the World,” which seems to fit what you’re saying here. As if from a flat ontology point of view, Polan seems to be exploring how certain plants have domesticated humans (via their different cravings) in order to proliferate. Let me know if it’s any good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Botany_of_Desire
December 22, 2010 at 4:12 am
[...] This seems very likely. Note how happily the slave-girl supplicates to her overlord – satisfied she knows just where the greener grass grows. Hat tip. [...]
December 22, 2010 at 7:26 am
‘Botany of Desire’ is on Netflix, by the way.
December 23, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Levi, you have to read ‘The Botany of Desire’. It discusses four ‘domesticated species’ of plant: potato, tulip, apple, cannabis. But it argues that these and other plants manipulate us; it’s a story of co-evolution. In short, it tries to dispel the ‘erroneous impression that we’re in charge’.
I can’t remember if Pollan talks about coffee, but when I read your post I thought about when I once tried to give up caffeinated coffee. I accomplished this, but it was not without some discomfort from the withdrawal (no pun intended). That discomfort subsided, but I was still drawn/pulled/lured to the caffeinated coffee, even if a perfectly respectable cup of decaf was also on offer. Reflecting on this experience the other day, I thought about Starbucks and how it has ‘domesticated’ our coffee consuming habits. One might argue that coffee is the domestic beverage par excellence.
On a related noted: Pollan did a nice piece in National Geographic last year on orchid/wasp relations. Not only is the article relevant to your project, the photo gallery has some great shots that may be helpful if you ever teach D/G’s ATP and want some visual aid.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/orchids/pollan-text/1
December 26, 2010 at 6:38 pm
[...] of object-oriented ontology (see Vu’s Polygraph review for a primer)—frankly I consider claims like these to be so preposterous as to be self-refuting—but nonetheless I’ve downloaded [...]
December 26, 2010 at 7:41 pm
[...] ontology (see Vu’s excellent Polygraph review for a primer)—frankly I consider claims like these to be so preposterous as to be self-refuting—but nonetheless I’ve downloaded the PDF for new [...]
December 27, 2010 at 1:26 am
[...] above-mentioned series of blog posts is also worth following up. It kicked off with Levi Bryant on The Domestication of Humans, followed by some initial ridiculing then back-pedalling by Brian Leiter, then followed by [...]
December 27, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I welcome the departure (I work on domestication myself), but I have to echo what Chris said about Margulis. I would also read Haraway’s companion species as co-domestication stories that do not give in to teleologies.
I am also with scu in recommending Netz and Cronon in this genre. Latour did an extended review of Netz’s The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics. that’s how deep I imagine these new co-domestication stories to dig. have a pleasant journey!
April 29, 2011 at 4:16 am
[...] reminds me of Levi’s new project, The Domestication of Humans, which has resonances with Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. At [...]