Politics of Infrathin.
Aberystwyth, UK 8.2012
How do you teach about environmental degradation in 2023? I thought about this as I was preparing a first year undergraduate lecture. After the obligatory slides that reminded students about the fact that, for some, it’s already too late, I was not quite sure where to go from there. In the past, it felt sufficient to provide an overview of what the international regime of climate change and the well-known Conference of the Parties (COP) had achieved or, more frequently, not achieved. But how could I provide hope for students when I saw so little signs of its existence. More so, while climate change pessimism has gradually become a hegemonic mindset in my lifetime, I was facing a demographic of students that are too young to remember the optimism - misplaced or not - of Al Gore famously presenting his Call-to-Action graphs. In fact, most of these students were literally born when An Inconvenient Truth came out. Somehow I had to address the anthropocentric elephant in the room: why is environmental degradation continuously framed as a problem for humans when it is the non-human world that has and will continue to face its most direct consequences?
Just around the time when I started deleting slides of the Tragedy of the Commons and the Collective Action Problem, a colleague left a book on my office shelf with the serendipitous title Interspecies Politics: Nature, Border, States. The problem in facing he environment, the book’s author Rafi Youatt argues, is that international politics has typically framed the environment as an anthropocentric issue, an issue that primarily concerns humanity and has only been addressed from the perspective of humans. Indeed, the very idea that we live in the so-called Anthropocene suggests that the world only exists for and by human activity. What we therefore need, Youatt proposes, is a politics that takes the non-human natural world seriously; from a politics of the environment to one with the environment. In Youatt’s case for an interspecies politics between humans and non-humans, I found a rare voice that completely shifts the debate, not just on climate change but on (environmental) politics as a whole. From the question on how long humans can live on this planet, the issue became one of how we are living on this planet right now. In sight of the apocalypse, Srećko Horvat has referred to the need for a hope without optimism (which he borrowed from Terry Eagleton). And while I’m not sure that narratives of “last chances” and “before it’s too late” are strategically helpful or even empirically true, I read within Horvat’s Poetry from the Future a need to develop and share tools of navigating the reality of an end that is already here (and indeed has already been here for many beings on this planet).
The idea of an interspecies politics is indeed not an abstract construct but a practical reality. Youatt highlights many examples, including Equador’s 2018 constitution that incorporates the rights of nature, Bolivia’s 2019 constitution that recognises the importance of protecting the natural world, or New-Zealand’s 2017 law that grants legal personhood to the Whanganui River. I quickly put together a slide that listed all these examples, assuming that students would recognise the critical hope that demonstrates that it is possible to radically reconceptualise the relation between the human and non-human natural world from within the existing frameworks of human politics. When showing this slide in class, a student raised their hand and objected (or maybe just questioned) that these examples seem quite arbitrary. While I have long accepted the impossibility gaging the way in which students internally digest course material within the sterile context of an academic lecture, I felt frustrated that amending a national constitution was perceived as arbitrary. When so much noise in politics boils down to the idea what there is no alternative, perhaps we have become conditioned to no longer recognise alternatives already existing in the world. Yet after the fragility of my lecturer’s ego had once more been revealed, I recognised validity in the student’s point. Is the incorporation of the non-human natural world within the legal frameworks of the human world truly such a radical reconfiguration of anthropocentric politics? While it may not have been the student’s point I started to wonder what kind of politics can meet, as opposed to incorporate, the non-human natural world.
What we need, seems to be a politics of relation that is not configured as either difference or sameness. It reminded me of a talk the French artists and writer Marcel Duchamp gave that was posthumously published in his Notes (1980). In the talk, Duchamp developed the concept of infrathin (French: Infra-mince), which he defined as follows: ‘The possible, implying the becoming - the passage from one to the other takes place in the infra-thin.’ Beyond this, it is hard to find a definition of what infrathin really is. Duchamp argued that it cannot be grasped by desires for definition or conceptualisation; we can only provide examples of it: ‘fire without smoke, the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk, iridescence, the people who go through (subway gates) at the very last moment, velvet trousers their whistling sound is an infra-thin.’ Infrathin is the space in between two things that cannot be summed up by their combination. It is an in-between that is equally part of both. The reason why it cannot be defined is due to the fact that it is in constant transition; a transition through which something is left behind that brings the background into the foreground and visa versa. As Erin Manning describes it, infrathin is the tension between things, which is ‘the relational field that holds difference in the event.’
In the literature on infrathin, there are countless of examples that trigger the mind into blending difference and sameness as liminality: ‘the qualities of wine appreciated after the sip; the glow of sound that fills the auditorium after the music ends and before applause begins; the light spots you see after you stop looking at something bright; the warmth left by a touch after the hand has pulled away; the smell of fresh baking after the cookies have left the oven.’ Yet what interests me more is to explore what the infrathin as a space of liminality can mean for rethinking a politics of relation in a way that does not reproduce anthropocentric notions of difference and sameness. Such a politics may indeed not be capable of conceptualising itself and I’m well aware that students may not find the infrathin any more productive in tackling pollution or deforestation than organising another COP. Yet such a criticism would perhaps miss the point I am trying to make. If this crisis is one of a lack of imagination, where it has become impossible to define the relation between the human and non-human world, then exploring what arises in the liminality between those worlds might be a first step in sparking a new imagination. In fact, the idea that these worlds are incommensurable is premised on the problematic idea that non-human life should be excluded from the human realm of politics. According to Youatt, this argument is known as the language objection, which states that humans are seperate from other, non-human life forms, due to their capacity for language and abstract thought. While this completely ignores the systems of communication among non-human life-forms, it also does not address the fact that the non-human natural world is already deeply implicated within human politics.
In the end, I am merely at the stage of exploring a politics of infrathin as a way of thinking about the liminality between the human and non-human world. Thinking trough the ideas mentioned above, it is not possible and perhaps not desirable to codify or even articulate the ramifications of such a politics. Infrathin may therefore be similar to a Koan, short riddles used in Zen Buddhism to say the unsayable. So perhaps it is not a politics but a (micro)poetics. Duchamp indeed suggested that only art can meaningfully explore the space of the infrathin for only art can exploit the productivity of liminality without capturing it into either difference or sameness. So perhaps what we need to look for are those spaces where the human and non-human world find each other in liminality. The reality is of course that these have become spaces subjected to logics of anthropocentrism where experiences are immediately appropriated, captured, and commodified to accommodate the human desire to tame and colonise the wild. So perhaps what we can start with is to find ways of exploring these spaces as experiences rather than relations rife for appropriation.