She was basically outlining the different materialisms in order to get to an argument where nothing and everything is materialsim… the nature of matter lies so far and beyond and around us that it is entirely amongst us. Then, in a subversive way she brings in oil as a core element of the movement and value of matter to humans… therefore its shared materialism and agency with labour and slaves (all under capitalism)… and then links back oil in that it has this edge to it, as a living, throbbing, agency of and within materialism.
The nature of nature as such can be thought as agential (Karen Barad’s agential realism); as ancestral or as a real that was already there before us (Quentin Meillassoux); or as objectal, when everything, subjects included, turns into objects (Graham Harman), or even into hyperobjects (Timothy Morton) that now, at the end of the world, rise beyond all our measurements (global warming, etc.). It can be described in older oppositions of subject and substance, or subject and object, or subject and thing (materialist dialectics and transcendental materialism, critical Marxism, psychoanalysis). It can be approached as forms of life (vitalism), as bodies (corporeal, transcorporeal, and incorporeal materialisms, or what Alain Badiou ironically calls “democratic materialism”), or as media and technology. It can be dialectically or nondialectically opposed to technology, or identified with it. It can be represented and symbolized as a constant lack—a lack of resources (extractive economy), a lack of desire (libidinal economy), etc.—but at the same time as an irreducible excess; as a realm of need and necessity, or of hyperchaos and contingency; as something to be defended and preserved (ecophilosophy, deep ecology), or as a threat—a complex of unknown, blind, and potentially destructive forces (dark materialism).
In his book In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker presents a dark materialist philosophy of nature through the lens of horror. The word “world” has, according to Thacker, three different meanings. The first is the world-for-us, or simply the World; the second is the world-in-itself, or the Earth, and the third is the world-without-us, or the Planet. The World is anthropocentric, the Earth is natural, and the horrifying Planet is supra-natural, or fantastic. Regarding the Earth, or nature, that in a significant part is “grounded by scientific enquiry,” Thacker says that it is “a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-it-itself and becomes the world-for-us.
Today these meanings are maintained in the paronymous words “economy” and “ecology.” Both economy and ecology are concerned with nature—either as a living world, environment, Umwelt, or as a source and resource. They are conjugate—beyond ecology there is always economy, and vice versa: this is our earthy home, here we keep slaves and exchange oil for money. But this is not the whole story, as beyond the doors of nature, the Greater Outdoors stands and creates anxiety. How is it possible, the world-without-us?
The fact that it is a fantasy does not mean that it can be neglected. As psychoanalysis teaches us, fantasy is at least as important as what we call reality, and perhaps even more so. The phantasmatic world-without-us is not only attached to the world-for-us, but presents its internal truth. It is uncanny and unhuman and unnatural, where the prefix un- does not merely negate, but produces a kind of displacement or resistance that dialectically turns canny, natural, human, etc., into their opposites, while maintaining the ostensible clarity and significance of the original. This is why these new concepts of nature continue to revolve around an old concept of the human, in various directions, including the transhuman, the nonhuman, the antihuman, the posthuman, or the inhuman. Such concepts seem to start from the dismissal of the human, but often end up with what I would call negative anthropocentrism, i.e., anthropocentrism of a centrifugal, rather than a centripetal, type.
- if i want more references I can re read Mark Fishers the weird and eerie
In the world-for-us, where things operate according to the domestic laws of restricted economy, the unconscious becomes a capitalist unconscious.19 Existence under a capitalist regime is bound to a general equivalent, or a value form that can be attached to any piece of living and nonliving matter. The world as we know it consists of commodities, and among commodities there is one for which all other commodities can be exchanged: money. Money is both abstract and real; it is a real abstraction that, even if it does not really exist, produces effects in reality. However, this does not give us an entire picture of the structure of the world-for-us. The fact is that money is not an ultimate commodity. It is not an autonomous being. Behind money, there are three main commodities upon which it grows: the first is matter, the second is labor, and the third is time. All three of these are of principal interest, but here I will only address the first one.
In contrast to money, matter is not an abstraction; otherwise, it would not be matter, but an idea—this is the meaning of what Bataille calls “senile idealism.” Matter as an ultimate commodity is a concrete piece of substance, to which money clings in order to prove that it is real. Such a piece of substance historically stands for the whole material world exchanged for money. It is a material side of the general equivalent, or the Thing of the economy. In old times, the general equivalent was represented by gold. Now such a commodity is—not “officially,” but conventionally—oil.
Remember Marx, who, in his Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, does not really make an essential distinction between a worker and a slave: the point is that exploitation transforms living labor into dead capital. What do a slave, a worker, and oil have in common? The very fact that they are not only the repressed, but the oppressed, not only the unconscious layer of a society in which we exchange matter, labor, and time for money, but that which is exploited, consumed, and burned up in the production of surplus. The worker is exploited as a labor force, the slave is exploited as a “black” labor force, and oil is exploited as a natural resource. If we want to grasp oil, as Hegel would say, “not only as substance, but equally as subject,” not only as the thing from the Greater Outdoors but as “the Real that is already right here,” we must admit that oil—which, like money, now stands for the whole material universe—is not a master, but a kind of ultimately inhuman black slave, one that literally occupies the lowest—and the biggest—strata of the pyramid of exploitation, and creates the very core of our capitalist unconscious.
- brilliantly tied back in!
THINKING RESEARCH 