Book Forum: Humanitarian Technologies and Racial Reproduction

I participate in all your hostility to dogs and would readily join in any plan for exterminating the whole race. I consider them as the most afflicting of all the follies for which men tax themselves. But as total extirpation cannot be hoped for, let it be partial. . . I am satisfied that taking the whole mass of dogs in the state into consideration, the average of what they get fairly & unfairly of the food fit for man, would feed a man. Are there not as many sheep and hogs annually lost to the owners, by dogs, or with their aid, as there are dogs in the state? (Thomas Jefferson’s Letter Hostility to Dogs, 1811) ¹

Nonhumans have always been at the forefront of the contestations and the making of governance and global politics. For example, in the letter cited above, Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, announces his readiness to ‘join in any plan for exterminating the whole race’ of dogs. In 1808, suspecting dogs were killing his sheep, Jefferson ordered his overseer in Monticello to kill all his slaves’ dogs. ² Thomas Aiello mentions that Jefferson ‘once hanged a dog from a rope passed over the branch of a tree to watch him die, foreshadowing what would later become the most common method of racial lynching’. ³

In Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (2023), Benjamin Meiches intervenes in the debates on the relations and entanglements of human and nonhuman animals in humanitarianism, ranging from mine-clearing dogs to milk-producing cows and goats and disease-identifying rats. As a heterogeneous interdisciplinary research project, the book’s goal is to trace how nonhumans play a key role in humanitarian efforts, affecting the nature of that work and humanitarianism itself. Meiches demonstrates that nonhumans such as mine-detecting dogs, goats, and sniffing rats, are not passive tools of humanitarian logistics but co-constitutive actors within the global humanitarian apparatus. Drawing on concrete case studies, he shows how these animals materially and affectively shape intervention outcomes, mediate risk, and secure the epistemic authority of humanitarian professionals. Meiches unfolds a key argument and critique of humanitarian projects as instantiations of a key paradox: humanitarianism seeks to rid the world of human suffering while deploying nonhuman animals to do the work and taking for granted the idea that it is legitimate for humans to kill and eat them.

Like other multispecies and posthumanist studies, ⁴ the book’s vibrant and heterogeneous interdisciplinary research program challenges anthropocentrism ⁵ and it offers by offering critiques of these studies’ premises of an ontological idealism. ⁶ Rather, Meiches argues it is crucial to understand the encounters of humanitarianism through the analytical lenses of the nonhuman. Like intra-, inter- and multispecies scholars, he mobilises notions such as nonhuman labour, responsibility, ethics, multispecies justice and grapples with what these entanglements and relationships make us become.

With the series of wars, environmental degradation, the desire for exo-ecological worlds and their conquest, and the rise of authoritarian regimes, new ideas about human-nonhuman relationships are emerging. Nonhumans have always been part and parcel of the collective ways humans have desired, imagined and lived their lives. Similar to the 18th century, when the biblical genealogies and environmentalist explanations of human physical diversity post-conquest and enslavement left a lacuna in the human sciences, there is now a need to devise new analytics to respond to queries and issues we face, waned to be replaced with racial classifications. Now, the globe is confronted with limits on the register of (white) ‘race’ and its ‘reproduction’. New understandings of ‘reproduction’ and humanity entangled with new ideas about time (i.e. quantum physics) are demanding the re-conception of humanity’s place in the natural and social world and calling for practices and experiences beyond the human.

Meiches’ work makes a significant contribution to these debates by focusing on two key issues relegated to the margins of global politics: nonhumans and humanitarian projects. His engagement with a broad literature of posthumanism, black thought, critical humanitarianism and critical continental philosophy points to the fundamental but problematic assumptions that come with the study of nonhumans in the world of humanitarianism, which he claims, along with Deleuze and Guattari, is an ‘apparatus of capture’. ⁷ For him, this hegemonic formation is able to ‘negotiate, leave behind axioms, adapt, and even integrate critiques without “changing the underlying dynamics of power”’. ⁸ For Meiches, Anthropocentrism is one of the problems; it needs to be understood, engaged and disrupted. Another issue is the paradox of humanitarianism. In his words, if humanitarianism ‘problematizes the human-nonhuman distinction and uses this insight to transform itself, then humanitarianism may join a host of other political efforts to challenge planet-wide mass extinction, ecological destruction, and entanglements of gratuitous violence that affect humans and nonhuman communities’. ⁹ This critique also points to the technoscientific capacity to disrupt humanitarianism’s productions of morbidity for profits and violence.

Meiches highlights the importance of what he calls humanitarian efforts, saying the book is not a statement of ‘rejection or hostility’. Rather, and this may be the gist of this ethical writing. Meiches says ‘part of this ethos of agonistic respect and presumptive generosity. . .is taking it as an article of faith that humanitarianism efforts are also working towards a contestable version of the good, and on this basis are capable of some forms of generosity’. ¹⁰ Nonhuman Humanitarians instantiates this ethos by pointing to the possibilities and limits of this desire.

Three chapters deal with nonhumans enrolled in different humanitarian projects. In Chapter 1, Meiches begins with the history of dogs’ humanitarian service since World War II. For example, he says dogs’ olfactory sense and other physiological characteristics allow them to operate in complex minefields, performing demining practices beyond human processual capabilities. Furthermore, dogs exhibit joy ¹¹ during demining and could improve the emotional state of the human deminers. For Meiches, these reactions show nonhumans exceed the human anthropocentric ways of understanding this humanitarian enterprise, its politics and its contingent dominant affective regimes.

In Chapter 2, Meiches engages with African giant pouched rats and their humanitarian contributions as detectors of explosives and infectious diseases. I find this chapter generative as it made me realise the disgust we feel towards rats ¹² unless we watch the movie Ratatouille and now sympathise with rats or even love them. But I digress. The point is not sympathy or disgust but Meiches’s argument for the need to ‘appreciate the rats’ capacities as generative, agentic, and perspectival’ ¹³ and sympathise with the humans who ‘admit rats into a realm of objects of care’. ¹⁴ Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘the impossible gift’, Meiches argues their enrollment in humanitarian projects constitutes a gift to the humans who have over the years made them objects of disgust. Humans cannot reciprocate even when they honour the rats as heroes or saviours of some kind: ‘in effect, formally annulling the possibility of formally reciprocating a debt or responding to the gift in advance’. ¹⁵ These human-nonhuman relations reveal that humanitarianism as a set of care projects does not originate with humans. He writes, ‘rather than establishing ethics based on the minimal threshold of being “merely” human or “resembling humans” or “doing work for humans,” [humanitarianism] involves committing to a foray into otherness, to the possibility that something nonhuman can generate previously unknown forms of care’. ¹⁶

In Chapter 3, Meiches conjuncts industrialised agriculture and subsistence farming to speak about cows and goats. As an example of humanitarian relief involving nonhumans, he points to the initiative of the nonprofit organisation Heifer International to send cows and goats to impoverished communities to improve recipient families’ lives. Such organisations are part of a global life that enables agri-capitalism, at the expense of what I assume he takes to be resistant subsistence economies. ¹⁷ With this conjunction, Meiches points simultaneously to the paradox of the relations of humans and nonhumans: their everyday use in humanitarian projects for the saving of people but also their commodification in market relations and in what he calls ‘cannibalistic humanitarianism’ (i.e. the killing of these animals and the silence of their deaths). For him, and in relation to his larger project on the crucial role of nonhumans in global politics, the animals’ bleating and kicking embody nonhuman perception and agency.

In the fourth and most speculative chapter, Meiches calls for a metacommunicative approach that will allow us to read nonhumans’ contributions and understand their collaborations (I assume) with humans in humanitarianism. This approach draws attention to what he calls ‘third ecology’ questions (i.e. ‘a mutual work of interspecies labor that has yet to fully consider the status, needs, and statements of its nonhuman collaborations’), ¹⁸ especially those of multispecies justice. He writes, ‘Human and nonhuman conduct in humanitarianism as a form of metacommunication in which nonhumans, do, through a variety of means, contribute to the formation of humanitarian concepts’. ¹⁹ The chapter expands the idea of metacommunication through the notion of nonchalance. To explain why nonhumans are apparently unmoved by the humanitarian missions and sentiments which their labour sustains, Meiches argues the ‘indifference of nonhumans to humanitarian labor may not be a result of poor understanding, exhaustion, or lack of comprehension on the part of nonhuman animals but rather a form of communicative nonchalance that emerges from the deep ambiguities that affect nonhuman laborers’. ²⁰ However, this nonchalance is a kind of possibility for changing what anthropocentrism imagines humanitarianism as an enactment of justice, specifically its propagation of the human as having ‘global value’. ²¹ Meiches attempts to experiment with an ethos and physical openness of forms and material assemblages, implicitly rejecting both the ethical and physical confines of humanism. Arguably, however, this move to the nonhuman may constitute a transcendental flight from an already corporeally and socially reified and asymmetrical construction of the ‘human’ with some as subjects of politics and others as matter on the side of nature or a ‘dark abyss’.

I found the project of foregrounding nonhuman experiences and contributions within humanitarian discourse compelling. It offers a meaningful challenge to dominant frameworks such as the anthropocentric paradigm and the humanitarian paradox. But I am left with three questions. First, does the move to include the nonhuman really challenge the mess we are in? Second, does acknowledging or grappling with the ways the nonhuman becomes enrolled in humanitarianism enable a ‘turning point’ ²² for humanitarian projects? Third, does the book fulfil its promise to ‘disrupt. . . the loops that characterize humanitarian discourse’? ²³ These questions for me are important for a global politics, as a set of practices and imaginaries, which despite radical Enlightenment critics of European colonialism and enslavement still remain wedded to the idea of a theorist or critic able to stand outside and above the reality and fantasies of humanitarian projects to discern humanitarianism’s future, albeit and even in a form different from today’s. Such claims are still repeated in some posthumanist and continental philosophy (e.g. Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben), contributing to the modern racial classificatory system of human/nonhuman division despite attempts to deconstruct Cartesian logics and the Anthropos.

Global politics must see the past retroactively, as it has been reordered by multiple humanitarian events, so that the future becomes an open question, a reinvention to remember Frantz Fanon here. Radical empiricism in the form of focusing on nonhumans’ experiences and practices cannot do this.

With the invention of the idea of race in the late 16th century, racial classifications, and the ‘discovery of time’, ²⁴ Enlightenment scholars transformed the ‘history’ of nature, bringing together new understandings of deep time and a materialist view of reproduction. The language of empire deployed racism and the vocabulary of the modern nonhuman world in hierarchisation and in opposition to humanity, being shaped and social Darwinist thought and eugenic ideas. The control of reproduction, the elimination of certain offspring and the recording of bloodlines bolstered Darwinist beliefs and illusions, including the idea that breed, and race are matters of genetics and biology, not structures of global politics and power. Recent studies have challenged belief in modern science as the ultimate arbiter of phenomenological conflicts, thereby questioning the racial capitalist order’s inscriptions and highlighting how racism and reproduction are inextricably connected to state formation, class structures, and national and species identities.

Historically, a (white) Man or a (white) Human has been seen as the ‘determining agent of making and recombining an asymmetrical commensurability as global politics’. ²⁵ This Man possesses determinacy, drives political projects to generate global value (i.e. colonial, imperialist, and nationalist-capitalist expansions and extractions), and lays claim to the normative possibility of what Meiches calls humanitarianism, a ‘global, empathic institution defined by commonalities regarding human dignity, experience, suffering and life’. ²⁶ Yet these same projects are also technologies of reproduction of global racial power and its contingent orders. Amid potentialities for care and generosity are violence and force ²⁷ ; Meiches knows this as well.

The attempt to centralise the agency of the nonhuman animates questions of who the human is, what their body means to them, where it comes from and when, and what will become of it. It animates questions about life and social death. Such a focus, if not putting pressure on readers to be more attentive to the kind of processes of becoming, at least opens to question the fantasy and fiction of a unified, cohesive, and knowable species (human and nonhuman) and world. This may generate insecurity, making readers less confident in the binaries between matter and life or human/nonhuman and consciousness. Meiches pushes us to recognise our embeddedness in the world, with all the global power asymmetries this implies.

Yet does Meiches fulfil his promise to show how the enrollment of nonhuman animals is a ‘turning point’ ²⁸ for humanitarianism and its hegemonic practices? And does the book demonstrate how this enrolment ‘disrupts the loops that characterize humanitarian discourse’ and towards harnessing such emergence to produce new modes of relationality with and living beyond the world of (white) Man? ²⁹

In addressing these questions, I focus on three issues: first and foremost, the dichotomisation of human and nonhuman to reveal the engendering of care, compassion and creativity; second, the ability of the nonchalance of nonhumans to disrupt the determinacy of (white) Man and his projects; third, the question of humanitarianism as instantiations of expenditure with reserves.

First, the humanitarian framework critiqued by Meiches is wedded to a dichotomisation of human and nonhuman, aka the anthropocentric frame. To be fair, the book sets out to challenge this frame, but doing so would require Meiches to query the emergence and practice of this dichotomisation in newer configurations and modulations of modern regimes of global politics in a way that would move us beyond its practices of hierarchy, genealogy of difference, classification and expenditure with reserve. ³⁰ Meiches wants to be generous to the humanitarian project/s and what they contribute to global politics. However, in foregrounding the relations of humans and nonhumans we are left to wonder not only about the hierarchy that comes intra but also inter these relations and practices. The impetus here is that there must be some meaning of the work of nonhumans. In other words, their presence in analytics and everyday politics must be a signifying event. But in this grid of supplementarity between human and nonhumans, humanitarians and nonhumanitarians, real and symbolic, one can see underlying economic dynamics of the dominant imperial and colonizing subject along with their animals.This relationship raises question about the colonial subject and its animals as modern animals. How should we understand their relegation as expenditure with reserve?

Second, humanitarian doctrines function as technologies. They emerge and are designed to correct the ‘excesses’ of the technoscientific and imperial, racist, nationalist, corporate, patriarchal military projects whose goal is to capture the bio-political capacity to regenerate systems of morbidity for accumulation and profit. If the idea of nonhuman humanitarians is to question and experiment with the constitution and dynamics of organic and physical boundaries and fluidity of structure (and I think it is), then the ‘turning point’ could be given more analytical space to mark the ways that the technoscientific capacity of racist regimes and projects of regeneration of the structures of capture and conquest can no longer be possible. The anthropocentric framework is presupposed in accounts of juridical, political, ethical, aesthetic and economic statements. This, in turn, presumes a universal that operates as a priori force producing ‘things’ and enabling us to consider ‘Truth’ in relation to something else. Yet these productions of ‘things’ and relations are mediated by rules and norms that can only be ‘captured’ by this Anthropos to use Sylvia Wynter’s idea here. Of course, equating what Meiches calls the human with global value turns us back to a universal and to the constitution of an object of knowledge whose properties emerge out of the judgement of a certain human (whether that human is joyful or sentimental, a humanitarian, an expert on humanitarianism, or a capitalist).

The move to bring in the nonhuman, even at the moment of challenging the anthropocentric power of anthropocentrism, generates more questions than answers since the human and nonhuman cannot be so easily compared in a structure of globalising and liberalising humanitarian forces, a structure which reproduces political life by organising nonhuman labour bio-politically and undermining its political effectiveness, thus producing the ‘impoverished’, the ‘human’, the ‘animal’, the ‘saviour’, etc. And can the assignation of value be easily disrupted or challenged if the comparison of humans to nonhumans is impossible? The universal basis of categorisation remains incommensurable, even at the moment when the nonhuman is enrolled in humanitarianism or instantiates a nonchalance because of colonialism. Doesn’t the assignation of value to a certain human as ‘global’ already presume a certain kind of universal reason and a kind of power that operates through a universal unit of measurement? Can this juxtaposition of human and nonhuman consider the complex modulations which are entangled with multiple objects, their unfolding and their transformation, and thus be offered up for public consideration and debate?

Let me elaborate on this juxtaposing of humans and nonhumans. Meiches has already oriented us towards this trajectory by saying the book is a critique of anthropocentric power and a critique of how humanitarianism, with all its ethical claims against suffering, ends up leaving those nonhumans enrolled in it outside its theorisations and epistemic edifices. The nonhuman is not the only one that is presumed outside the apparatus of and structures of power. Anthropocentric reason is not distributed equally to all humans, thereby dividing humanity into those who possess dignity and self-determination a la Kant, Hegel, etc., and those who do not. For instance, Hegel, Denise Ferreira da Silva tells us, deploys the notion of determination to ‘transform. . . World History into a scene of development (the self-actualization of universal reason), which culminates in the mental and social (juridical, economic, symbolic) configurations found in post-Enlightenment Europe’. ³¹

Taking these moves and presuppositions as our starting point instead of beginning with the division of human and nonhuman alllows us to question from the vantage of social death the scientific, political, economic, ethical and aesthetic ‘figurings of determinacy’ ³² (i.e. those individuals and institutions who can imagine, articulate and determine the division, hierarchisation, sequencing and ordering of the world into units of global value). The processes through which certain inscriptions are made possible in the becoming can be traced to the 19th century when inscribed racial (at times animal) and natural differences were co-produced with certain regimes of knowledge and their contingent economies of procedures and explanations. This was the time when the European white mind was presumed to be the possessor and owner of universal reason (i.e. self-determination). This imagination, articulation, division, hierarchisation and sequencing also determined the ways racial practices and experiences and the knowledges inscribing them yielded a humanity that is not truly universal. Rather, it indexes and names racial collectives and ecologies. ³³

The point is that by ascertaining and determining the nature of existence and the truth about human difference, this anthropocentric arsenal presumes European/whiteness/Man and his existence as the criterion against which everything else is to be measured. This division of human and matter or human and nature enables the subjection of matter (i.e. animal, human, ecologies, bodies), frames the idea of conquest of the globe (not just the Americas) and reveals the serious consequences of grounding empire in ‘nature’ (and humanitarianism as a project of global power figuring of racial capitalism). Thus, nature cannot be included as a term of comparison ³⁴ as it remains a ‘thing’. In a sense, the ideas of both anthropology and social sciences of the racial as animal or matter transmute and sanitise the colonial and imperial violence into the laws of nature and their operation through multiple projects: bodies (animals and humans), states, societies, interstate and global structures of power.

A question remains: doesn’t the creation of such categories as human and nonhuman occlude the totalising but not total violence in the form of conquest, displacement, settlement and enslavement? Sneaking in the nonhuman from an anthropomorphic vantage analytical point does not rupture the conditions for the emergence of a segregation regime which posits humans and nonhumans in hierarchical and asymmetrical opposition, grounding all political projects, including humanitarianism in this opposition. If the point is – if it is not today’s insistent existence of the nonhuman that demands a new understanding of humanitarianism but the fact that humanitarianism carries within itself a constitutive idea of expenditures with reserve in the form of conquest and enslavement, then we are speaking about something stickier, something that does not secure the desire to move ‘beyond the human’ as Zakkiyah Iman Jackson writes, and Meiches cites – this would be an impossible move for those who have never been accorded this position in the configurations of global power and its contingent regimes of global value.

Ultimately, I suggest the move to focus on multispecies relations without a focus on the conditions of colonialism and enslavement as they are engendered in the founding of projects and categories like humanitarianism simply extends the life of a new moral economy called humanitarian reason. Such a move must acknowledge how humanitarianism cannot reinvent European humanism (I am implying that’s what we experiment with when we bring in the category of the nonhuman or focus on multispecies relations without querying what brought them as categories and through what projects into being and what forces enable their reproduction). If what brings the segregation of ‘nature’ and racialisation of existence into being is the European invention of Man, which also gave birth to its multiple others, and whose relationship to history is necessarily one of backwardness and animalism, then its carceral practices and logics cannot be simply traced to its cultural and structural Cartesian hegemony.

Second, even if we suggest taking the nonchalance, an activity of quiet contemplation, more seriously towards the remaking of the world of humanitarianism, including its machineries and sites of capture and co-constitutions of global imperial and capitalist racial power and a certain anthropocentric order based on accumulating primitives and nonhumans, would that effort allow for rethinking humanitarianism as the nuanced existence of ‘the potentialities of care and generosity that unfold amid a multiplicity of conflictual but coexisting forms of life?’ ³⁵ Furthermore, the wish to understand humanitarianism beyond ‘a narrowly defined set of human inequities and interests’ which also and simultaneously is able to ‘subtly and apolitically structure discussions about what forms of life ought to be championed and cherished’ ³⁶ is crucial. However, it is not clear how introducing the idea of the nonchalance of nonhumans could enable a ‘turning point’ in the future of humanitarianism. Couldn’t this nonhuman nonchalance itself be circuited into further forms of harm in the regeneration of the structures of the politics of global power?

Third, if colonialism and global racial capitalism conditions still inform and shape any humanitarian project, then the integration of nonhuman animals into humanitarian practice cannot be enough to unbind the fetishes and fantasies that impoverish all social (including humanitarian) life. Unbinding humanitarianism from its shackles requires both ontological forces and onto-power to explore potentialities without the constraint or compulsion to target all creatures as expenditures with reserve, human and otherwise, to disrupt the direction of their heterogeneous energies, and to challenge harnessing their emergence to the processes and ends of an already extractive and accumulative regime and its bourgeois order. To see the current operation of nonhumans in humanitarianism as conforming to a creaturely model of transvaluation or as instances of injustice and suffering may be idealistic and even blind to the decidedly masculine form of such integration. And where does the posthumanist vitalism movement asserting the need to integrate nonhumans fall in this debate – on the side of rethinking humanitarianism, or on the side of those identified as irreparable expenditure?