SCUM International – K-News

Slavoj Zizek writes In a recent column, philosopher Michael Marder not only directly documents the horrors unfolding in the Gaza Strip, but also considers the ontological consequences of what we see in drone photographs of the ruins.

Let me quote him: “…Gaza is rapidly becoming a landfill where buildings and human bodies, ecosystems… and orchards have been destroyed beyond recognition, reduced to a mixture of organic and inorganic rubble. Solidarity with the destroyed lives, spaces and worlds requires more than compassion. So what could it be?

Mader’s answer is to offer “a different kind of solidarity based on the overall health of biomass”. To say “I am biomass” means “identifying with the life that is disappearing”, seeing Gaza as “the most concentrated image of the planetary trend”. The transformation of all living things into biomass – a chaotic heap of organic and inorganic matter – is seen everywhere, but in Gaza similar processes are “accelerated by the latest technologies of destruction”. What is needed, therefore, is not compassion, but solidarity among wastes, daring to say: “We are biomass”.

This notion of biomass echoes the ideas of philosopher Levi Bryant: “In an era when we face the imminent threat of radical climate change, it would be irresponsible to differentiate in a way that excludes non-human actors.” However, in modern capitalist societies, attempts to mobilize the majority to fight for the environment have always failed. We all know that we are part of nature and completely dependent on it for survival, but this knowledge does not translate into action. The problem is that our choices and worldviews are influenced by many other forces, such as biased media coverage, economic pressures on workers, material constraints, etc.

In her 2010 book Pulsing Matter, philosopher Jane Bennett invites us to imagine a filthy landfill site, where not only are humans actively contributing, but also where there is decaying garbage, worms, insects, abandoned cars, chemical poisons, and so on. The existence of similar biomass accumulations falls into the same spectrum as the situation in Gaza, although the latter is an extreme example. There are many areas of the world, especially outside the developed West, where digital waste dumps exist, with thousands of people dedicated to removing glass, metal, plastic, mobile phones, and other materials from the garbage dumps. One such slum is the Agbogbloshie slum, located near the center of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and has been called “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Living in such conditions is simply horrific, and the social hierarchy in the slums is rigid, with children forced to do the most dangerous jobs under extremely difficult conditions. But because this use of biomass seems attractive for the environment (under the banner of “recycling”), it fits the requirements of modern technology very well: “In the technological age,” writes philosopher Marc Lasor, “what matters most to us is to extract the “greatest possible good” from everything.

After all, the purpose of using resources sparingly, recycling, etc. is to make the most of everything. The end product of capitalism is piles of garbage – useless computers, cars, televisions, VCRs and hundreds of airplanes that have found their final “refuge” in the Mojave Desert. The idea of ​​perfect recycling (all waste is reused) is the ultimate capitalist dream, even – or especially – when it is seen as a means of maintaining the natural balance of the earth. This is further evidence of capitalism’s ability to exploit ideologies that seem to oppose it.

Yet biomass development diverges from capitalist logic, reproducing a chaotic desert as our natural state. While this condition can be partially exploited, it cannot be reversed. As Mader says, biomass is our new home; we are the biomass. It is an illusion to think that these conditions can be overcome and replaced by life in some idyllic “natural,” ecologically sustainable environment. For us, this easy way out has been undone. We must accept what is left to us and work with what we have, perhaps discovering new harmonies beneath the layers of seemingly chaotic debris.

This will require us to open ourselves to the objective beauty of different levels of reality (people, animals, ruins, collapsed buildings) and to abandon the hierarchy of aesthetic experience. Are we ready? If not, then we are really screwed.