Abstract
In The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia, Achille Mbembe presents a general critique of the global, extractivist and colonialist paradigm, which is driven by advances in digital computing. Mbembe sets out to frame the central issue as a lack of political understanding that technological advancement ‘is achievable only at the cost of tremendous devastation, to the point where we no longer hesitate to say that humanity is at war with nature, environments, and territories’ (p. 39). Simultaneously in a divining, techno-solutionist manner, technology is viewed as the cure to these self-inflicted crises. In a critique of the current state of the world, Mbembe draws upon African thought to de- and reconstruct this entanglement and envision alternative futures.
In the core of the book, Mbembe describes three megaprocesses ‘that have an overwhelming bearing on what might become of humanity and the planet we live on’ (p. 59). These are expanding forms of necrocapitalism, emerging techno-molecular colonialism, and the dialectics of entanglement and separation. Mbembe describes necrocapitalism as the commodification of every last thing until its eventual destruction by the extractivist hands of the settler-colonialist project. Techno-molecular colonialism is the most recent form of necrocapitalism and refers to the expansion of algorithmic governance into the biosphere on a planetary scale. At the core of this process lies the idea that life itself is a commodity and can thus be dataified, calculated, and algorithmically governed. Rather than liberating men from nature these processes represent an increasing entanglement of techno- and biosphere to a point, where ‘flows of matter, energy, and information are being combined in complex networks and intricate webs of interactions’ (p. 66). The central paradigm shift with algorithms, for Mbembe, is that they are able to autonomously reconfigure these material and social relations existing in the assemblage of data, bodies, and objects.
The third megaprocess is the dialectic of entanglement and separation. Globalized capitalism requires the movement of goods, ideas, and certain populations of people for functioning. Simultaneously, striving for containment in the name of security, this megaprocess sees an increased borderization, ‘by which certain spaces are transformed into uncrossable places for certain population classes, who thereby undergo a process of racialization’ (p. 71). These borderized, ‘risky’ populations, in turn, are most affected by the ecological devastation caused by the extractivist practices of necrocapitalism and techno-molecular colonialism. Digital technologies are central to borderization by turning borders into ‘mobile, portable, and ubiquitous realities’ (p. 71) and are deemed ‘the best tool for governing’ (p. 75) the movement of risky populations.
In staging his critique of the current state of the world and in opposition to the blindness of current politics to techno-molecular entanglement, Mbembe turns to African thought systems. Whereas in rationalist Western thought the earth shall be subjected to human will, in African thought systems the Earth is a place of cohabitation of human and non-human beings, who only temporarily ‘fill’ the planet as passing visitors. While technology links the human and the non-human worlds in a joint assemblage, technological objects become organisms in their own right. Mbembe calls the globalized nature of these entanglements the planetary weave, in which ‘the most fundamental unit is no longer the human subject [ . . . ], but the living in its, as well as in its apparently inert form’ (p. 84). Current forms of Western thought fail to account for this planetary weave, which represents a lacking planetary consciousness. Even if relationality is acknowledged in Western thought, it is viewed as human-centric and static. African-inspired visions of the planetary weave are elastic, moldable, always in flux, and always becoming, transforming and shifting.
Concluding, Mbembe pleads for the establishment of a new earthly community, which needs to liberate all animate beings by making room for the other within the assemblage. For this, the key element of transition is the return to the body and to the earth physically and conceptually against an increasing detachment and separation. This return is not towards an idealized past but an attempt of cohabitation in a world in which ‘the question of technology’s future(s) is inseparable from that of the becoming(s) of the Earth and the living’ (p. 102). The basis for cohabitation shall be not the universal but the in-common, which acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives and realities that come together in the planetary weave and marks the basis for sparking a planetary consciousness.
Mbembe’s writing is at its strongest when joining strands of critique addressing the interrelatedness of the extractivist forces of capitalism, algorithmic domination, environmental devastation and racialized migration. In spite of the grim outlook of impending catastrophe, Mbembe via deconstructing existing techno-ecological entanglements is able to mount a forward-looking critique in calling for the establishment of a new earthly community. The framing of this new earthly community as an interrelatedness of human and non-human entities in what he calls the planetary weave lacks novelty. It resembles many characteristics of material semiotics and the ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS). While Mbembe is certainly placing this book in line with his past works, most prominently Necropolitics, and in African thought, it could have benefitted from closer interaction with recent works on critical, cross-cultural, feminist, indigenous and decolonial STS. It thus is surprising that he prominently quotes Western scholars, such as Sismodon, Merleau-Ponty, Bratton and Heidegger, but does not turn to the citational politics of engaging with more recent, critical, non-Western scholarship. Especially, as Mbembe argues widely for the inclusion of a multiplicity of perspectives as the basis for developing a new earthly community, this presents a missed opportunity to manifest in his writing what he calls a planetary consciousness.
Despite these shortcomings, the main argument of The Earthly Community by weaving together many different strands of critique and outlining their interrelated complexity proves a valuable contribution to a growing canon of works that address the impact of advances in science and technology at a planetary scale.
