Solidarity With Nonhumans as Response to Empire

• In Event: The Viability of Change: Challenging Established Norms and Structures in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Objective
This paper begins with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s political ontology in order to open up the ontological space afforded to solidarity. The purpose of the paper is to make the case for a different kind of solidarity with non-humans using the work of ecological thinker Timothy Morton. While this case could be made without recourse to the work of Hardt and Negri, their use of poststructuralist and Neo-Marxist concepts injects a necessary political urgency to how and why a solidarity with nonhumans is urgently needed. As a response to the Foucault sig call for papers, this work puts Foucault’s genealogy and archaeology in direct conversation, as both methods address the problem of scale and critical ecological work.

Theoretical Framework
In this paper, I want to begin with some fundamental aspects of ontology that are present in Hardt and Negri’s work. These aspects are: i) ontology cannot be privatized or enclosed; ii) material reality is immanent and not transcendent; iii) difference and commonality are co-enabling and intricately tied together; iv) the controlling sides of modernity, colonialism and capitalism are a grave threat to the survival of many forms of life on the planet. To describe a political horizon that is adequately creative the concepts of ‘the common(s)’, multitude, and empire are put forward to invoke a kind of political imaginary. After outlining some of Hardt and Negri’s creative political ontology, I bring the ecological thought of Timothy Morton (2017) as a way to expand the concept of solidarity as resistance to the stranglehold capitalism, colonialism, and agricultural-age thought has on who humans can express solidarity with

Modes of Inquiry
The modes of inquiry will be the use of comparative philosophical inquiry that draws together posthumanist, poststructural, and to some extent autonomous Marxist thought, in order to open up an ontological understanding of solidarity. The method of inquiry is somewhat diverse in that the ontologies of Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and Timothy Morton are not commensurate, though all require engagement with a political ontology.

Scholarly Significance

The scholarly significance has to do with educational research that engages our current moment of the Anthropocene. It is clear different kinds of thinking are needed to engage this time of ecological crisis, and rethinking how we relate with nonhumans, politically, ethically, ontologically, and materially, is a vital terrain of thought for education today. As far as the Foucault SIG goes, I think it is useful to relay Foucauldian thought--in this case the ontology of biopolitics through Hardt and Negri--with thinkers of our current time.

Author

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina