CHASTENED HUMANISM AND METABOLIC TRANSCENDENCE

Biota “construct” their ecological niches, maximizing resource metabolization until pulled up short by niche exhaustion or other biota. If this maxim, sometimes regarded as ecological law, is correct, the “global humanity” of a CaCaCo world (the carbon, capitalism, and colonialism assemblage that is our shared world) is doomed. Construction of a globally human resource niche is effective-unto-death. The possibility of human metabolic transcendence of ecological law is thus conceptually prior to rhetorical negotiation of power relations that might organize more broadly vital futures (no less so for those disavowing humanism and transcendence alike). This chapter details, in conversation with defender of humanism Karen Ng and exponent of humanism as transcendence Rabindranath Tagore, a “chastened humanism.” My aim here, with a little help also from Judith Butler, is to give an account of chastened humanism as a strategy for metabolic transcendence, that is, for superseding the apparent ecological law that says all biota maximize overall metabolism unless externally limited. Accounting for chastened humanism as metabolic transcendence is a way of inhabiting at once the domains of truthful cognizance of broadly human devastation of the world and of proleptic, inventive possibility. It is an intellectual salvage operation.