prompt: what does it mean for ethical fields to deprioritize humans as ethical subjects?
“[W]e are not used to reading stories without human heroes” (Tsing 2015: 155). The story of Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, the pine wilt nematode, is a story lacking a human hero or villain. It’s a story where change happens, organisms with needs both constructively and destructively interfering meet and clash, and the matsutake and Japanese pine lose a little bit of footing in their habitats. This is not a story without humans, but humans are not prioritized; human activity cultivated the Japanese pine forests in the first place, in which matsutake mushrooms thrived. Human activity brought the pine wilt nematode to the same forests, starting in Nagasaki, where they began eating up the hosts for matsutake. This leads Tsing to her thesis on livability: “if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gathering ways of being. Assemblages are performances of livability” (2015: 157-158).
This theme of telling stories without heroes or villains is not new, but it is difficult for people who are limited to one scale of story, one mode of making relationships between characters. The archetypes of hero, villain, antihero, redeemed villain, etc. are all of the human variety, they are all intraspecies relationships. Tsing wants us to tell stories between the smallest of scales – the ability for a nematode to tune into the life-rhythms of a pine-sawyer beetle – and the largest: the effect that relationship has on an entire ecosystem in Japan.
What does this mean for ethical fields? How does ethics change if the human vantage point is not alone in experiencing, communicating, and choosing actions – that is, in being an ethical subject? Joanna Zylinska offers a solution: “to keep philosophizing as if against all odds, to look for signs of life in the middle of an apocalypse” (2014: 13). Zylinska continues: “even if the Anthropocene is about ‘the age of man’, the ethical thinking it designates is strongly post-anthropocentric…it does not consider the human to be the dominant or the most important species…however…we can make a difference to the ongoing dynamic processes taking in the biosphere and the geosphere – of which we are part” (2014: 20).
So, these theorists implore us to critically engage with stories in which we are not privileged members, but also not helpless onlookers. We humans may be only one small part of the ecosphere, but it is our duty as empowered ethical subjects to influence it in a way conducive and constructive for Life to take place “without either harmony or conquest” (Tsing 2015: 5, original emphasis).
