Extinction

Extinction is at once the most human and the most

inhuman of concepts. The very possibility of this
contrary tendency is the hallmark of our most fragile and
most robust present. The twenty-first century is at one
and the same time marked by a sense of impending
human extinction (both literally, with the biological
species coming to an end, and figuratively, with all that
passes itself off as human facing annihilation by way of
technological, ecological and political catastrophe); and
at the same time humanity has declared itself to be a
geological force with the power and will to recognize and
reverse the changes it has made to the earth as a living
system.1 In what follows I outline three articulations of
the concept of extinction, all of which are inextricably
intertwined with the problem of the human.

First, and most obviously, extinction announces itself

today as the sixth great mass extinction. Humans are at
once threatened by this mass extinction event at the
same time as they contribute to the acceleration of this
extinction, and have done so since the earliest days of
human migration (Diamond 1989). The current era of
intense anthropogenic climate change, along with the
declaration of the Anthropocene, seems to have enabled
a shift in degree that has ultimately generated a
difference in kind. Extinction may have been as much a
part of life as growth, decay, mutation and proliferation,
but it may also be that extinction reaches a threshold and
rate that generates a new dynamic between life and loss.
‘Mass extinction’ far exceeds the ‘background rate’ of the
ebb and flow of life’s creation and destruction but there
are nevertheless different ways one can mark the
threshold between extinction as part of the dynamics of
life, and massive losses of species and biodiversity (Wang
2003).

Extinction is as natural and inevitable as emergence, but

it may be that when extinction can be witnessed from
within ‘a’ life that this aspect of existence opens a new
way of problematising the limits of thinking and what it
might mean to mourn or save a form of life. Having
emerged from previous mass extinctions, humans are at
once part of the ebb and flow of life and non-life on
earth, but are nevertheless the first beings to witness,
mourn and articulate extinction as an explicit event.
Elizabeth Kolbert provides a wonderful genealogy of the
sense and milieu of extinction, charting the emergence of
the concept of species loss (prior to Darwin’s theory of
evolution), and then the increasing awareness of the
fragility of many species from the carrier pigeon to
Panama’s golden frogs (Kolbert 2014). This ‘simple’ and
primary sense of extinction nevertheless already
harbours political tensions and contrary tendencies. To
say that humans are the first species to witness and
contribute to extinction is to define humans as a species,
and to deploy species thinking. But who are these
witnessing species-aware humans? The briefest glimpse
of what has come to be known as post-apocalyptic
culture – from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009) in
literature and the Mad Max series in cinema, to the
efflorescence in every aspect of cultural output including
television, music and gaming – evidences that the
experience of extinction requires a certain affective
comportment towards the world. Kolbert’s reflective
journey is a model of mild-mannered culturally-sensitive
respect. Her book expresses none of the narcissistic
panic that accompanies the majority of ‘end of the world’
narratives, which are predominantly ‘end of the affluent
world’ stories in which ‘man’ either becomes exposed to
his fragility and saves the day (World War Z [2013], The
Day the Earth Stood Still [2008], The Day After Tomorrow
[2004]); or, more recently, the end of man and life is
figured in terms of species-bifurcation, with some
humans commandeering and squandering the few
remaining resources while enslaving the majority of
barely-living humans (Lane-McKinley 2015). Yet, even if
Kolbert’s subtle genealogy of the current experience of
extinction does not fetishize a certain type of hyper-
consuming, risk-exposed and globally predatory late-
human existence, it does operate with a sense of the
bounds of species.

If, prior to modernity, there were apocalyptic narratives

– with day to day existence being a constant experience
of exposure, fragility and contingency – the pre-modern
sense of apocalypse was also pre-human. To feel that
one was living in end times, that all might be brought to
nought, that a flood or pestilence might annihilate
‘everything’ was quite different from the sense of there
being a specific kind of life – human thinking life, a life of
reason – that might one day cease to be. Even if Ancient
philosophers such as Aristotle theorised the difference
between human reason and other forms of ensouled life,
it was never with a sense that reasoning life was a part of
existence that might cease to be. And when Aristotelian
thought was carried over into Christian philosophy
human reason was a fragment of a divine and eternal
reason. Or as Gilles Deleuze, after Foucault, argued,
reason unfolded from human beings towards infinity.
But something quite distinct occurs with modernity and
‘man,’ whereby the reason that can grasp life and its
temporality is itself a fragment of life (Deleuze 1988). It
becomes possible to think about reason in terms of a
species. Intellect, reason or ‘thinking’ is at once defined
as a unique capacity to grasp the infinite that is
nevertheless tragically finite. Extinction – as opposed to
the sense that everything might end – relies upon on a
new sense of life that takes the form of distinct species
(which, in turn, requires a modern, Western, tabulating
comportment to the world). The thought of human
extinction, in turn, entails the sense of ‘us’ as a species;
while the preliminary mourning and panic that
accompanies the thought of human extinction indicates a
fetishized and supreme self-regard which is brought to
the fore in the next understanding of human extinction
that I explore below. For now, I would suggest that even
the general notion of the ‘sixth mass extinction,’ that
‘we’ are witnessing and perhaps feeling responsible for,
is grounded in a panoramic view of life and humanity
that is culturally and historically specific. What has come
to call itself ‘the human,’ both requires and
problematizes species-thinking. Without the unifying
and dividing logic of species it would be difficult to think
of global humanity – even if humanity most often defines
and regards itself as a species that has transcended its
ground.
This bring me to my second, ultra-human, sense of
extinction. The very possibility of extinction, along with a
milieu in which there is an awareness of possible
catastrophe, intensifies the modern sense that reason is
bound to life, and that this singular life that is bound to a
species may become extinct. Nick Bostrom’s work on
existential risks and the future of humanity not only
outlines all the scenarios in which human intelligence
might be destroyed, and not only insists on the
avoidance of that catastrophe at all costs; he also allows
for the possibility that what is valuable in the human
species may survive biological extinction (Bostrom 2002
and 2013). One may have parochial, sentimental and
irrational attachments to life as we know it in its current
human and fragile form, but a genuinely rational
consideration of life and its values would yield two
imperatives. Bostrom insists that upon reflection we
should direct resources to averting existential
catastrophe, and that the true task of the future is that of
securing the full technological maturity of human
intelligence. This may require some form other than
human biological life. Here his thought intersects with
other theorists whose intense investment in human
intelligence is at once quite happy to contemplate a
future in which intelligence survives without humans,
while also assuming that nothing is more catastrophic
than the loss of this definitive human capacity (Kurzweil
2005). While Bostrom and thinkers like Ray Kurzweil
might appear to be extreme outliers in a world that is
attached to humans as a species rather than the human
intellect as a capacity that might outlive ‘us,’ I would
nevertheless suggest that their thought captures a
tendency of post-apocalyptic extinction culture. It is
almost as though the axiom of the twenty-first century is,
“I am threatened with non-being, therefore I must
survive.” James Lovelock, for example, has argued
written that we have reached a point where simply being
more green will not suffice; only more technology will
save us (Aitkenhead 2008). But who is this ‘we’ that has
reached a tipping point and has declared ‘game over’?
And who is this ‘we’ that declares that only the
technology that got ‘us’ into this mess will help us into
the future? The threatened ‘we’ of techno-science finds
nothing more alarming than the possible end or non-
being of techno-science, even as it acknowledges that
techno-science has been the motor of destruction. The
Cartesian echo of ‘I face extinction therefore I must
continue to be,’ alerts us to the modernity and hyper-
humanism of the logics of extinction. It is only with a
radical separation of thinking as a substance, and not (as
it was prior to Descartes) a potentiality of ensouled life,
that the possibility of the erasure of thought becomes
thinkable.

Even before questions of evolution and the genesis of

reasoning life were taken up by thinkers such as Freud
and Darwin, Wordsworth and Kant were wondering what
would happen to thinking if a certain fragment of life
were no longer to exist. In The Prelude Wordsworth
wonders both what would happen if the material archive
of books were to be extinguished, and what would
remain of thinking if the earth were to suffer mass
destruction:
Should the whole frame of earth by inward throes
Be wrenched, or fire come down from far to scorch
Her pleasant habitations, and dry up
Old Ocean, in his bed left singed and bare,
Yet would the living presence still subsist
Victorious, and composure would ensue
…
… Oh! Why hath not the Mind
Some element to stamp her image on
In nature somewhat nearer to her own?
Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad
Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?
(Wordsworth 173 [V 3-50]).
Kant, too, begins to think of human rationality as bound
to a species, and even entertains the possibility of other
species with a different rational limit: ‘Humankind’s role
is thus very artificial. We do not know how it is with the
inhabitants of other planets and their nature, but if we
fulfill this task that nature has set us well, then we may
well be able to flatter ourselves that we can lay claim to
no mean status among our neighbors in the universe.
Perhaps in the case of our neighbors an individual is able
to fully attain his destiny within his lifetime. In our case it
is different: only the species as a whole can hope for this’
(Kant 2006, 9)

Once humans think of themselves as a life-form, and

then as a life-form with the exceptional capacity of
thinking or reason, it becomes possible that the
potentiality for thinking could cease to be, and that such
a non-being of thinking is what must be averted at all
costs and without question. One may not share
Bostrom’s calculation that, upon reflection, the horrors
of Auschwitz are not even close in scale to the thought of
a loss of intelligence per se, and one may not be as
sanguine as Kurzweil or even Lovelock about the saving
power of technology, but the assumption that this life (of
‘we’ thinking humans) is what is worth saving above all
else is hard to shake. Nothing seems to justify our
existence more – nothing seems to generate more of a
feeling of the right to life – than the contemplation of
human non-being, especially when that non-being is
figured as the absence of rationality.

Yet, it is just this sense of entitlement and right to life

that might be fruitfully vanquished in an inhuman future.
Let us imagine two post-apocalyptic landscapes, the first
of which is typical of what Madeline Lane-McKinley
(2015) has referred to as ‘Post-Occupy” dystopian
cinema. The world of the future is controlled by a
rapacious, squandering and privileged few, who are living
at the expense of an enslaved and disenfranchised many.
One looks with horror at the wasteland of a humanity
that is no longer party to the comforts of late capitalist
urbanity. Yet, the horror of this other, futural, inhuman
world – a world that (for ‘us’) had always been the third
world – comes from a position of limited imagination. It
has become a commonplace in discussing post-
apocalyptic culture to say that it is easier to imagine the
end of the world than it is to imagine the end of
capitalism. The problem with this cute phrase is that the
imagined ‘end of the world’ is an imagined end of
affluent capitalism. The ‘end of the world’ is one where
humans wander aimlessly, just surviving, exposed to the
contingency of a nature that is no longer so abundant
with resources that everyone is suffering from obesity,
hyper-consumption and stimulus-overload. (One might
concur here with McKenzie Wark [2015] who argues for a
nature without ecology.) This post-apocalyptic landscape
is media-deprived, all of the archive left in tatters, bereft
of shopping, art galleries or leisure industries. It is a
world that one might think of as dystopian and post-
apocalyptic if what makes life worth living is reflective
human reason and hyper-consumption grounded in a
specific archive. This world at the end of the world is
perhaps, if one takes away the disdainful ‘first-world’
framing, what a great deal of beings have known and
respectfully lived as life. If one thinks about extinction
beyond species-fetishism one might think of other modes
of existence (that might survive what ‘we’ can only
imagine as the end of the world) as the beginning of new
worlds.

One must be careful here. One might say that only a

position of Western privilege and luxury might
romanticize a world that does not enjoy the ease,
stability and dignity of an affluent way of life that is
increasingly becoming less and less available to the vast
majority of humans. But just as it is irresponsible to talk
glibly about worlds other than our own, it is even less
responsible to assume that the end of ‘a’ world is the end
of ‘the’ world. What if rather than focusing on
extinction, or on how many species we are losing and
how we may lose ourselves, one looked at all the ways in
which what has come to recognise itself as the species of
humanity already required the extinction of other ways
of being human? If there were no logic of species then
one might problematise humans as a whole; one might
think of extinction not as the erasure of thinking but as
an opportunity to ask about what is worth saving, and –
more importantly – about whether one might imagine a
world in which ‘saving’ is not the only ethical
comportment towards future life.

Works Cited:

Asafu-Adjaye, John, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand,

Barry Brook, Ruth de Fries, Erle Ellis, Christopher
Foreman, David Keith, Martin Lewis, Mark Lynas, Ted
Nordhaus, Roger Pielke Jr., Rachel Pritzker, Joyashree
Roy, Mark Sagoff, Michael Shellenberger, Robert Stone,
and Peter Teague, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,”
accessed 9 October 2015.
http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto.

Aitkenhead, Decca. 2008. ‘James Lovelock: 'enjoy life

while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the
fan.' The Guardian. March 1, 2008.
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01
/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange?
CMP=share_btn_fb

Bostrom, Nick. 2002. ‘Existential Risks: Analyzing Human

Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazard.’ Journal of
Evolution and Technology, 9 (March 2002).
Bostrom, Nick. 2013. ‘Existential Risk Prevention as
Global Priority.’ Global Policy 4.1 (February 2013) 15-31.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand.

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

Diamond, Jared. 1989. ‘The Present, Past and Future of

Human-Caused Extinctions.’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B
325(1989) 469-477; DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1989.0100.

Kant, Immanuel. 2006. ‘Idea for a Universal History from

a Cosmopolitan Perspective.’ Toward Perpetual Peace
and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Ed.
Pauline Kleingeld Trans. David L. Colclasure. New Haven:
Yale University Press. 3-17.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity is Near: When

Humans Transcend Biology. New York : Viking.

Lane-McKinley, Madeline. 2015. ‘Imagining the End of

Capitalism in ‘Post-Occupy’ Dystopian Films: Part 1.’
http://blindfieldjournal.com/2015/08/25/imagining-the-
end-of-capitalism-in-post-occupy-dystopian-films-part-1/

McCarthy, Cormac. 2009. The Road. New York: Vintage.

Minteer, Ben A. 2015. ‘The Perils of De-Extinction,’

Minding Nature 8.1 (January 2015) 11-17.

Wand, Steve. C. 2003. ‘On the Continuity of Background

and Mass Extinction.’ Paleobiology
29.4 (Autumn, 2003) 455-467.

Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the

Anthropocene. London: Verso.

Wordsworth, William. 1996. The Prelude: A Parallel Text.

Jonathan Wordsworth ed. Harmondsworth Penguin.
1
Perhaps the two clearest examples of human self-regard and felt grandeur are the notions of the
‘good Anthropocene,’ and ‘de-extinction.’ The first will use all the powers of technology that
transformed the earth at a geological scale to render the earth more liveable, primarily by way of geo-
engineering, while de-extinction will not only restore lost species but will also annihilate them again
at will should they prove to do more ecological harm than good. On the good or great Anthropocene
see, John Asafu-Adjaye, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand, Barry Brook, Ruth de Fries, Erle Ellis,
Christopher Foreman, David Keith, Martin Lewis, Mark Lynas, Ted Nordhaus, Roger Pielke Jr., Rachel
Pritzker, Joyashree Roy, Mark Sagoff, Michael Shellenberger, Robert Stone, and Peter Teague, “An
Ecomodernist Manifesto,” accessed 9 October 2015, http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto. For a
powerful criticism of the de-extinction movement see Ben A. Minteer, ‘The Perils of De-Extinction,’
Minding Nature 8.1 (January 2015) 11-17.