by Christopher Hall

Simone Weil What does it mean to turn somebody into an object, either literally, by killing them, or in a more conceptual sense, by robbing them of freedom of thought and action? This, according to Simone Weil in her celebrated essay on the Iliad, is the central topic of that poem:

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form – the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does notkill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it cankill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. (Mary McCarthy’s translation)

*A thing that has a soul.*Is this not a rather routine definition of what a human being already is? In one line of thinking, a human being is an object, and no amount of force is needed to make this so. We are the same kind of stuff as rocks, clouds and black holes, even if one feels Weil would very much balk at this description, and insist that the human being, properly understood, is no sort of object at all. Why insist that force makes us into this “extraordinary entity” otherwise? Force may exercise the majority of its workings on the human object, but its ultimate goal and function, in Weil’s view, is an attack on the subject. Unless we are of the opinion that such a subject doesn’t actually exist – and there are plenty around who are – then force does indeed enact something terrible on the human being, whether we subsist, at least in part, as objects or not.

But what does that entail, exactly – the transition from subject to object?It is to set us loose in territory we already live in, but are deeply unfamiliar with. A set of loosely concurrent philosophies that have come under the name of “speculative realism” charges Western philosophy as being too focused on the human mind and its constructions. An element of hubris is evident, as Graham Harman says in Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything:

We have launched spacecraft, split the atom, cracked the genetic code[….]But all of these amazing achievements, even if we assume that animals cannot do anything nearly as complex, and even though we as a species are of special interest to ourselves, do not automatically make human beings worthy of filling up fifty percent of ontology. This, however, is the verdict of modern philosophy since Descartes and Kant, whose ideas entail that we cannot speak of the world without humans or humans without the world, but only of a primordial correlation or rapport between the two[…]

The “other fifty percent of ontology” is that world of objects, contemplated as if the conscious subject didn’t exist. And this only makes sense; unless one subscribes to some of the bolder speculations about quantum physics, if every conscious subject disappeared from the universe tomorrow – so far, we only know about the existence of the human kind – it is doubtful that the being of, say, a galaxy 34 billion light years away would be affected. Perhaps this is ultimately what force does: it denies the “specialness” of consciousness, and renditions us “back” to a place where we are subject to no different laws and occupy no more special position than anything else in the universe. Objects are meant to be used, altered, and destroyed as need be.

Eugene Thacker, in describing “the horror of philosophy,” likewise tries to approach thinking about the unthinkable territories of the non-human. In Thacker’s view, the universe is three-fold: there is the “world-for-us” – the world as a place directly tied to the human, of things and relationships designed for humans; the “world-in-itself,” a world of objects subject to empirical investigation; and the “world-without-us,” a world not subject to any form of human cognition. It is the world not funnelled through any terrestrial sensory apparatus or Kantian cognitive machinery. This world, as Thacker states in his book In the Dust of this Planet, “lies in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific” and “persist[s] in the shadows of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself.” It cannot be thought out through philosophy, though cultural productions like supernatural horror and science fiction may allow some confrontation of it.

That violence “dehumanises” people is a trite observation, but I’m not entirely sure we understand all that that term means. It is not merely that we look at others as not human; it is not that the subjects of violence are pressured to become kinds of automata as force relentlessly grinds away at their being. It is that the “world-for-us” disappears, the “world-in-itself” becomes irrelevant, and we are stuck in the territory of the “world-without-us” – a world that was there all along, but is resolutely unthinkable.

I say all of this because the unthinkabilityof the current moment has been, ironically enough, the prime subject of my thoughts lately. I’ve tried to process the reality that I may be living on the cusp of a new era of force that will make the depravities of the 20th century look like an undercard to the main event. I’ve also been thinking about how much “the future” plays a role in my conception of my current state of being. I can cognise, and live with, a future without me – I suppose I’m as comfortable with the idea that I won’t be around at some point as the next person. But I do not think I can entirely process a future without us. And I don’t mean this purely in the sense of any mere post-apocalypse, after the actual, physical annihilation of every human being. People being wholesale replaced by automata has at least as long a pedigree in science fiction as *Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.*If I don’t quite mean anything so dramatic, I do wonder whether the central challenge of the 21st is not merely to save our collective bodily existence.

Weil has perhaps the same blind spot toward the nature of force that Orwell did. Force, in their conception, is the kind that, when it does not kill, steps on a human face, the one that creates actual slaves. That sort of literal force is at the present moment making itself very much felt. But there is another kind of force, one Aldous Huxley might be more apt to recognise. I’ve had the fantasy more often recently of being a philosophical zombie – something which would do all of the things I do, would work and relax normally and interact as usual with other people – but which would have no conscious mind. How nice it would be, for a while, not to knowand not to think, but to also retain all of the things I need to my life going, like relationships and a job. Yes, Freud diagnosed this a century ago as the Thanatos, the death-drive that whispers to us that the purest state of relaxation is non-existence. But I suspect there is also a kind of force involved here – something about the age which pushes us to want our objectification. The totalitarian state – definitely on Weil’s mind as she composed her essay in the 1940s – moulds us in this direction with the subtlety of a demolitionist. But we need not believe that force is so restricted in its methods. There is force by deprivation and force by saturation. And a lot of what is forcing us into a kind of mechanisation is, at least at the beginning, rather pleasurable. If we’d all rather have a masseuse do the job, is the moulding any the less accomplished?

So I feel myself being pushed into strange regions. The “world-for-me” is still there – my toaster still works, my dog still needs walks, my job is still there, etc, and the “world-in-itself” I presume continues on much as it always has. That “world-without-us” comes, as Thacker suggests, not with clarity but in glimpses and hints. I get them sometimes when I’m marking an AI-generated student assignment. It would be hysterical to treat this in apocalyptic tones, but a future where machines do all the writing andthe reading (I have as yet not given into the temptation to use AI when I’m grading) is one which the human subject has retreated from. A future in which art and literature continue to fade into irrelevance is one in which human consciousness makes no significant mark upon the world, beyond the ongoing rituals of ecological destruction. And in doing so, the subject has done more than retreat “inside;” it brings that mechanisation into itself. Suddenly, the unthinkable territory of a “world-without-us” becomes the pathway to the chasm of “us-without-us.”

We will have to start thinking seriously about the duty to think. The path forward – assuming the air isn’t on fire in 15 years or so – is not just to cultivate inwardness, but also to reward whatever masterful expressions of that inwardness we find in the outer world with our rapt attention.

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