Species thinkingPosted on June 9, 2014 by admin

Dipesh Chakrabarty uses the phrase “species thinking” to characterize a major twist in social theory. This is a

mode of thinking that takes humanity-as-species for its object: a shift from the condition of “species being” as

invoked by Marx, towards an analytic awareness based on a recognition of “boundary parameters of human

existence.”[i] For an historian and critic of globalization—that earth-encompassing phenomena, feeding on

and reproducing inequality wherever it travels—this is a notable shift in focus for Chakrabarty, because it

entails thinking humanity in “universal” terms. He elaborates: “These parameters are independent of

capitalism…They have been stable for much longer than the histories of [its] institutions” . These parameters

come into view out of a breach “between the present historiography of globalization and the historiography

demanded by anthropogenic theories of climate change….”

Species, he acknowledges, “is a word that will never occur in any standard history or political-economic

analysis of globalization.” In contrast, species thinking “is connected to the enterprise of deep history” (213) or

the Anthropocene—the idea that humanity has impacted the planet in such a thoroughgoing manner as to

constitute a distinct, new geological era. Revoicing Walter Benjamin, he suggests, “species may indeed be the

name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of

danger that is climate change.” In this precarious moment, the power/history frame of social theory proves

singularly inadequate: The “critique that sees humanity as an effect of power” is insufficient “in dealing with

the crisis of global warming” (221). In this view, a cultural analysis limited to assessing the “social conditions

of possibility” of an idea or life form—privileging capital and politics (e.g., “neoliberalism), reinscribing or

delimiting the social as a uniquely human—reproduces anthropocentrism and is insufficient for grasping our

species’ predicament.

For a species that has given a good deal of thought to species, Chakrabarty concept is a notable development.

The fact that species are “good to think” provided the basis for articulating sociality for perhaps as long as

humans formed into durable group arrangements. As well, this theoretical formulation crucially opened an

enormous intellectual capacity to recognize logical or analytical thought operating on and through a variety of

nonhumans, while leveling the hierarchical contrast between civilized and primitive thought. Strikingly, the

recognition of species being was also central for the transformation of social theorizing with Marx. In the

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx declared, “In the mode of life activity lies the entire character

of a species, its species character, and free conscious activity is the species-character of man” —that odd

species that bears the history making capacity to transform “life itself.”

Markedly underscoring the fundamentally social orientation of this concept, species thinking arises out of an

analytical intuition, rather than a phenomenological sensibility. That’s because, in Chakrabarty’s formulation,

it is not possible to grasp species thinking experientially: “We humans never experience ourselves as a

species….There could be no phenomenology of us as a species…no one ever experiences being a concept”. This

arguably matches the central tenet of biological thought: that natural selection works on the individual, rather

than the species; the phenomenological experience of species being is continually forestalled by the operation

of “selective pressures” on individual, competitive, reproductive units. But if not phenomenologically, then

through our capacity to recognize both culture, generally, and its similar operations amongst other species. For

the very recognition of this moment of peril is linked to the transformative efficacy of the Anthropocene to

raise “artificial selection” onto a competitive plain with its “natural” counterpart.

Aesop's AnthropologyTheorizing culture across species lines

[i] Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.

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