“Who even are you?” asked Antonio, of the bright blue bird. “I don’t remember seeing you when I was growing up in Sardinia. Are you real?”
“Well I’m real,” replied the Bowerbird, “but right now neither of us are exactly material. You’re dead and I’m a posthuman figuration.”
“We’ve got beyond humans now, have we?” Antonio said, rolling his eyes.
“We’re getting there,” affirmed the Bowerbird. “Lots of robots around. Plenty of flesh and blood bowerbirds too. Posthuman doesn’t mean exactly that. It’s a new concept since your day but very much influenced by your thinking. That’s why I wanted to have a chat with you.”
It was a quiet day in the graveyard and the spectral Antonio was tending his geraniums. “Go on,” he said, sitting awkwardly on the ground. “I’m intrigued. I like having visitors but they only ever talk to me about stuff I already know. I’d like to know what a ‘posthuman figuration’ is. But first, tell me about you.”
The Bowerbird hopped down from the top of the gravestone and perched by the small man’s feet.
“I’m Australian,” he said, “which is why you didn’t see me in Ales.” He cocked his head to one side. “I’m quite a famous thief, actually.”
Antonio frowned. “That’s not something to be proud of,” he said. “You sound like a capitalist to me.”
The Bowerbird flew up to sit on his shoulder. “No, no,” he said. “I only steal things that people have thrown away. Blue bottle tops and discarded straws, condom packets…OK then, the odd sapphire…” he hurried on, “but I’m not interested in turning a profit. I want to build a bower.”
“To live in?” asked Antonio.
“Nope,” said the Bowerbird. “To get a girlfriend. The females come along at mating season and the boys have a dance around and we show off our bowers, hoping to be chosen. I’ve always won the dance off,” he added smugly.
Antonio sighed. “Sounds like a lot of effort,” he said, but his tone was wistful, thinking of the many hours he’d spent writing to his Yulia. He’d put the effort in all right.
“It’s joyful,” said the Bowerbird firmly. “The older females choose the best bowers - I always put a lot of effort into mine - but the younger ones prefer the best dancers, like me!” He hopped off Antonio’s shoulder and danced around the grave.
Antonio pulled himself up with some effort, and began weeding around the geraniums again. He moved slowly; still expecting to feel the pain he’d lived with all his corporeal life. The Bowerbird paused, perhaps remembering why he was there.
“Anyway, I’m a figuration,” he continued. “I’m here to tell you that your interregnum is back and we need a new plan.”
“I heard rumours,” said Antonio. He had lots of visitors to the cemetery - some dead, some living - and they often confided their worries at his graveside. “Facism is back, I hear.”
“It never went away in some parts of the world,” confirmed the Bowerbird. “But you know the Europeans, they are really only interested in their own history, so they got complacent. Even your lot were fascists in the end!”
“My lot!” repeated Antonio, contemptuously, glaring at the Bowerbird. Then he paused, sighing. He’d always been an honest man; that was his downfall. “Well, I guess they were. You only had two choices, back in the day.”
“There’s our problem,” said the Bowerbird. “Binaries are no good. Your lot made the same mistakes as the fascists, under a different economic system. It was inevitable, really, when you think about it. It was the same frame of reference - Marxism began in opposition, with no possibility of thinking in a different way. The ideas were corrupted by people being people. Nobody was interested in non-people like me in any meaningful way and now the crisis is existential for us all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Antonio.
“The earth is dying,” said the Bowerbird simply. “Humans made that mess. And because they still basically think in economic terms, they’ve no idea how to clear it up.”
“So they are doomed?”
“There’s still hope.” The Bowerbird came to settle on Antonio’s shoulder again, and they rested companionably in the shadow of the cypress trees. “We need to go further back in history than your time, to put things right. Did you ever read Spinoza during your stay in Russia?”
Antonio thought for a moment. There had been a lot of reading during those heady days. “I think so,” he said. “I seem to think he was popular with the Mensheviks.”
“Theirs was a very limited reading,” dismissed the Bowerbird. “They were only really interested in Spinoza in a materialist sense, to prop up Marks and Engels. Probably only translated the bits they liked.” Birds can’t roll their eyes, but the Bowerbird might have done so if he could. “Spinoza offers more to us than that.”
“Go on,” prompted Antonio. He was finding the conversation interesting. “You’ve not told me where your posthuman comes in yet.”
“Spinoza is important partly because of his time in history,” continued the Bowerbird. “He was born 40 years after Descartes, at the start of the Age of Enlightenment. Age of Endarkenment, I call it,” he scoffed. “Look what it led to - elevating humans above nature and some humans above other humans. The start of colonialism and slavery and the rape of the earth.”
“There had always been slavery,” cautioned Antonio, “and colonisation.” He was still ignoring the earth bit, the Bowerbird thought, just like the Mensheviks had.
“Not as part of a global economic system,” the Bowerbird countered. “Not on the same scale. We are reaping what humans sowed back then - wars, ‘natural’ catastrophes, mass migration. It all comes from thinking that some humans are better than other humans and that all humans are better than their earthly home.”
“Enlightenment thinkers believed in the power of men to elevate themselves,” protested Antonio. “All men are born free…”
The Bowerbird interrupted, a little rudely. “That’s literally not true, is it?” he said. “And try elevating yourself if you were a woman back then, or have dark skin now, or are not Christian” - here they both paused, remembering where they were in the ‘non-Catholic’ cemetery in Rome. “Or even, Antonio, have disabilities like yourself.”
“So they sowed the divisions…” mused Antonio.
“Yes - for real in the world, and in people’s thinking!” The Bowerbird was hopping round again, agitated. “It’s your hegemony, but writ large. Those divisions have become part of human DNA. Humans literally can’t think beyond them. It’s all gone crazy!”
“In what way?” asked Antonio, patting his knee for the Bowerbird to settle on.
“Human identity has become more and more atomised,” the Bowerbird explained. “People identify themselves with increasingly limited identity wrappers. There’s no solidarity across difference. Everybody wants to just spend time with “people like them”. Nobody wants to hear alternative views. They can’t think differently because they can’t see beyond the capitalist framework. It’s become naturalised.”
“Oh.” Antonio was silent for a moment. “Oh, I see. Global hegemony.”
“Global hegemony,” confirmed the Bowerbird. “Internalised hegemony. People acting up because they know they are perceived as ‘less than’ in society. Others with more privilege taking up the air space and oppressing lives. TV and social media are distracting and confusing. Austerity means people are working ever harder to stand still. Some people, that is. Others are creaming the wealth. The mirage of progress. The rise of populism.”
“How might Spinoza’s way have been different?” asked Antonio.
“Because he brought the earth back in,” said the Bowerbird, simply. “He’s been dead 350 years and in that time nobody has thought about the earth, not really. I mean, that’s a nanosecond in human existence, but the damage that has been visited by humans on the earth in that time has passed the point of no return. We can only bandage it up and hope to survive a while longer and we’re not even doing that. We can’t heal it totally.”
“How is adopting a new ‘bible’ from someone who died three centuries ago going to help?” asked Antonio, genuinely interested.
“Well it won’t help, will it?” said the Bowerbird in a bossy tone. “It’s still just one man’s view of the world, not some essential truth. But we can learn from it.”
“How?”
“Well, for one thing, we can learn that we are all connected,” said the Bowerbird. “We’re all part of one huge system, wherever it comes from. Human actions influence the earth and vice-versa. Spinoza believed in God, that was his frame, and what made him so unpopular was his idea that God is in all of us, human and non-human. I prefer to think of it as a life force we share, and we need to start thinking with the earth in mind.”
“Where does posthuman come into all of this?” asked Antonio.
“Spinoza directly influenced posthuman thinking,” said the Bowerbird. “Critical posthumanism is about two things - remember Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man? The one with all the arms?”
“Who could forget?” murmured Antonio.
“Posthumanists believe that humans have internalised that model,” explained the Bowerbird. “It’s our hegemony. It sets up an ideal that most of us can’t reach, in fact the further away from it we are, the closer we are to death, exploited for our time, energy and resources. Animals don’t feature at all,” he added, in disgust.
“So posthumanism is about writing us all back in?” asked Antonio.
“Exactly that!” triumphed the Bowerbird, hopping again. “And if we can do this, we can start to take everything into account - all humans and the earth. Back in time - your historicism - and forwards too, becoming good ancestors. If we live, we share a life force and we can do something with that force, something for good. Spinoza called it God, but these days - thanks to some French guy called Deleuze - we think of it as a joyful, activist, changemaking force. By getting beyond the identity wrappers, humans can think with others not like themselves and can think with the earth.”
Antonio found himself getting excited, an unusual state of being for a ghost. “But how do we do that? Do you know?”
“Well it’s not going to be easy,” the Bowerbird admitted. “After all these years and all the binaries and all the propaganda, human minds are neurologically programmed to think in certain ways. They can’t see beyond the structures, systems and hierarchies we have now. But things are changing. Posthuman thinking is beginning to have influence. Not politically, not yet. Politically, things are going from bad to worse. Intellectuals need to step up.”
“Organic intellectuals?” asked Antonio.
“We need organic intellectuals, yes,” agreed the Bowerbird. “But we need public intellectuals too, organic or not. And if they are true posthumans, they will find ways to educate others without othering or infantilising them. Academic ego is still an issue,” he added.
“It always was,” sighed Antonio. “Always will be as long as people don’t have access to an education.”
“An education that makes them think for themselves,” said the Bowerbird. “Many more people in the world receive some form of education - and for longer - than in your day, but it’s basically teaching them how to contribute economically. Can’t get beyond the container of capitalism, you see.”
“And education has always been at the mercy of ideologists,” added Antonio. “My lot were the worst for that.”
“They certainly were,” said the Bowerbird. “The capitalists have learned plenty of new tricks from your mind controls. Well, not yours,” he added hastily, catching Antonio’s expression. “You weren’t into that, I know. You wanted people to think for themselves - to become organic intellectuals - you were ahead of the game.”
“Sounds like my writings were a waste of time,” replied Antonio, sadly.
“Not in the least,” reassured the Bowerbird. “That’s why I’ve come to see you. You get it. You saw that humans and non-humans needed to encounter one another but that it could only happen once human consciousness evolved to embrace a more sustainable and equal relationship with nature. It’s just that you were ahead of your time and trapped in one half of the binary, which got you punished by the other guys. Pity you didn’t read more Spinoza, you’d have found out about potentia.”
“Power…?” asked Antonio.
“Sort of,” said the Bowerbird. “But not power as we think of it in the world now. A different sort of power. A power that’s animated by that life force Spinoza wrote about, that pooling of energy between diverse humans, and between human and non-human.”
“I would be writing about that now if I had a pen,” said Antonio, sadly.
“You are writing about it,” said the Bowerbird. “You still exist in your words and the concepts you gifted to the world. We need the inventory of self-responsibility, the notion of hegemony, the concept of the interregnum and the organic intellectuals more than ever. We need the philosophers of praxis to be the conduit of hope in the world. We just need their thinking to be infused by the non-human world, and influenced by humans who exist far from the Vitruvian ideal. Our conversation will go out into the world and some people will listen. They will listen, and they will start thinking and they will step into their own potentia.”
“That’s…hopeful,” said Antonio, cautiously.
“That’s literally hope,” said the Bowerbird. “It’s the only hope. Through figurations like me we can entangle our thinking. Humans can bring nature into conversation. They can listen to nature. They can protect it through enacting law. Did you know that there is a river in England that has a legal status, along with the beavers that populate it?”
“I didn’t know that,” admitted Antonio. “I’d write about that if I could. But I’m just a ghost. What can I do to help?”
“You can stay right here,” said the Bowerbird, “with your geraniums. You are dead, yes, but your writing lives on, as do these hardy plants around your grave. Educators need to know about you. Politicians need to know about you. Philosopers of praxis need to know about you. You are as relevant now as you always were and the words you left us are tools with which we can change our ontology, and change things in the world.”
“I am a pessimist because of intelligence and an optimist because of will,” said Antonio Gramsci, softly. He felt a lump in his throat. “That optimistic will, that’s…”
“Potentia,” finished the Bowerbird. And they rested quietly together in the cemetery, taking a pause in the noonday sun.
Thank you for sharing this Lou. I enjoyed it, and learned from it, and I found it both hopeful and reproachful. I’m sure you will know what I mean. D.
I absolutely love this, I felt a sort of ´finally’ - a sense of creatives making concepts relatable and powerful, of ideas made tangible beyond that land of the bamboozle and mesmerising. I was mesmerised actually, but in a great way, an entranced and empowered way. Thank you Dr M and that bower bird of yours 😘