Writing

Museums are in crisis, facing escalating pressure to drop fossil fuel sponsors, remove robber barons and war criminals from their boards, repatriate stolen objects, and topple racist monuments, dioramas, and displays. Formed from the extractivist reasoning that fuels climate chaos, museums are grounded in an unfolding history of oppression from which they cannot be extricated. They are complicit in the twin projects of capitalism and settler colonialism, caught in a web of colonialist and capitalist relations whose dynamics disproportionately immiserate the lives of poor Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples. While museums monumentalize and objectify the historical violence of capitalism and settler colonialism, they are not only keepers of the dead. They are haunted by a specter—the specter of primitive communism, a collective mode of life that neither capitalism nor settler colonialism could fully manage, contain, or eradicate. This mode of life sustains a relation to the land that is fundamentally incompatible with the capitalist world.

Capitalism relates to the natural world as a frontier for growth, as raw material to be extracted and turned into profit or waste. The alternative, as Glen Sean Coulthard articulately suggests, is “for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in non-dominating and non-exploitative terms.”^[1] This non-capitalist relation to the land persists despite a centuries-long war against it precisely because it cannot be accommodated by capital. It constitutes the impossibility at the core of the capitalist world, existing and insisting as a specter that haunts its institutions and infrastructures. 

Jodi Dean has argued for the need to develop a partisan politics of climate change: “Rather than trapped by our fascination with an (always illusory) anthropocenic whole, we cut across and through, finding and creating openings. We gain possibilities for collective action and strategic engagement.”^[2] We see the museum as one apparatus in which such a partisan politics can be grounded. This is possible only if we begin with the stance that the museum is split, not equivalent to the capitalist and colonial practices and values on which it was founded. The split institution is not determined by capitalism. It is struggled over. This struggle sets the stage for institutional liberation, which we have described as a practice of institutional seizure that generates counterpower by strategically mobilizing the power institutions already have.^[3] This chapter proposes a political theory for institutional liberation in the terminal crisis of climate change. If museums take the side of the spectral threat to capitalist and settler-colonial domination, then they can be established as sites for thinking beyond the capitalist enclosure. This requires, first, that we refuse the lure of holism driving dominant fractions of environmental thought.

There Is a Gap in the Oikeios

Responding to the failure of the concept of the Anthropocene to accurately assign the primary agent of planetary change, Jason W. Moore has argued that we talk about our era as the Capitalocene, where capitalism, not humanity, is the driving force of ecological change. Moore argues that by seeing the entanglement of capitalism and nature, we can attend to its dynamic relation to the oikeios—his term for “the creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment” that makes up the planetary home.^[4] Just as nature provides the raw material for capitalist accumulation, capitalism produces nature as a real abstraction: nature as an extractable, commodifiable, manageable raw material that can be bought, sold, represented, destroyed, or protected. Arguing that the Cartesian dualism of Nature/Society is “directly implicated in the colossal violence, inequality, and oppression of the modern world”^[5] by virtue of its capacity to externalize nature as an object to be extracted and turned into profit and waste, Moore proposes an alternate concept of nature, which he terms the “web of life”: “the ‘web of life’ is nature as a whole: nature with an emphatically lowercase n. This is nature as us, as inside us, as around us. It is nature as a flow of flows.”^[6] Moore’s theoretical distinction between Nature and the web of life helps to explain the decisive shift in liberal environmentalism over the course of the past several decades. For most environmentalists today, nature is not simply understood as the dominion of the non-human. It is an ecology to which we contribute, and to which we can hold our impacts accountable. If capital N Nature demands an ethics of protection and conservation, the web of life demands our contribution. Our capacity to contribute to nature’s ecological balance requires that we reduce our individual and institutional carbon footprints.

In conceptualizing capitalism as a world-ecology, Moore reflects a broader ecological turn in the environmental humanities, which finds in ecology an antidote to dualism. The concepts of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene all follow from the same idea: that, whatever its origins, and whatever forces prevail, there is no outside to the oikeios.

Wrestling with the connectedness of people and things, thinkers in this paradigm seek to acknowledge the existence of human, non-human, and inhuman feedback loops at a planetary scale, to establish connections that make porous the capitalist world’s operative divisions. Frédéric Neyrat traces the principle at the root of this theoretical tendency—that everything is connected to everything else—to Barry Commoner’s 1971 book The Closing Circle. Informed by cybernetics, this hugely influential book “shows that feedback loops connect each part to the totality of the system (what affects one part affects the other).”^[7] As an attempt to overturn colonial science’s traditional prioritization of substances over relations, this project is viewed by its advocates as a means of bringing critical theory in line with Indigenous ways of knowing—a distinct mode of thought that constituted colonial science’s historical other. However, a brief examination of the history of ecological thought reveals that ecology is no less bound up in the project of colonial expansion and capital accumulation than was its dualist precursor.

In the book Imperial Ecology, Peder Anker charts the development of ecological discourse as it emerged as a privileged framework to not only address questions in the natural sciences, but also address the social, economic, and political problems confronting the British Empire since the late nineteenth century. The term “ecosystem” was coined by Arthur George Tansley, a British botanist and Oxford University professor whose own research and editing in the early twentieth century were crucial to the expansion of ecological methodology into the fields of sociology and psychology. The research of Tansley and his Oxford colleagues was born from a conservationist ideal that served to justify and legitimize British expansion in the colonies:

The aim of their research was to empower the social order of their patrons in various colonial agencies or commercial companies by ordering the economy of nature so that it could serve the social economy of British imperialism. This was achieved by rendering the ecological order of nature into an order of knowledge suitable for managerial overview. This aerial view on nature, society, and knowledge—the master perspective from above—was at the very core of British ecological reasoning.^[8]

For the Oxford ecologists, the discipline of ecology was thus not only a means to map and classify relations between organisms in the interest of objective scientific inquiry. It was also a means to manage nature’s economy according to the interest of the imperialist state. As a systematic methodology for mapping the relation between organisms, ecology was central to the economization of nature. Guided by both colonialist and capitalist imperatives, ecology was also wielded as a tool to control nature by pacifying traditional Indigenous practices that the imperial power could not understand.^[9]

Anker is not alone in drawing connections between ecology and capitalist political economy. Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper have suggested how more recent advances in complex systems theory, most notably the influential work of ecologist C.S. Holling, have marched in lockstep with neoliberal economic thought. Charting the structural compatibility of Holling’s complex systems theory and Friedrich Hayek’s late theory of spontaneous market order, they argue that the holism of contemporary ecology, as well as its insistence on the inherent instability of ecosystems, is only a step away from neoliberal capitalism’s dominant conceptualization of resilience, risk management and crisis adaptation.^[10]

The question is not whether or not the theory adequately breaks from the inheritance of capitalist or colonial thought—ecology, like Nature, has its dark side—but how it orients our perspective on the terrain of struggle. In its drive to subsume and manage antagonistic forces, much ecological thought gives form to what Alberto Toscano calls the “logic of pacification,” a structural capacity to “shift from external-contradictory differences to internal and harmonized ones.”^[11] Oil companies operationalize this logic when they factor the costs of public pushback into their infrastructure development plans, mobilizing “risk mitigation” strategies to neutralize Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure.^[12]

In contrast to the revolutionary traditions of Marxism and anarchism, which recognize antagonism and class struggle as motors for political change, ecological thought frequently envisions politics as network management.^[13] It is not surprising that ecology emerged as a dominant metaphor for thinking relations under capitalism in the neoliberal era. It pictures a world in which there is no gap, no other—the very world invoked by Margaret Thatcher’s routine claim that there was no alternative to economic liberalism. The supposition that “Capitalism makes nature. Nature makes capitalism”^[14] results in a naturalization of capitalist domination, strengthening the dominant ideology that makes it, as the common saying goes, “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” The oikeios is the capitalist world. Ecology offers a framework to interpret relations between capitalism and nature, allowing us to make sense of climate change as a project of capital. The problem is that while ecology can picture the capitalist world, it also participates in the active repression of the gap in it. Our premise is that there remains a gap in the capitalist world that the framework of ecology cannot recognize. Non-capitalist modes of life persist and insist, within and against.

Haunting the Individual

The answer to the problem of the gap is not to disregard the web of life in favour of its precursor. There is no dispute that the enlightenment concept of Nature was complicit in capitalist and colonial violence, and to return to it would be to disregard decades of critique from within the environmental movement. As Andreas Malm points out, “[t]he prototypical wilderness subject is a white male bourgeois individual,” whose identification with wild nature “symbolically reenacts his conquest of the world.^[15] Malm’s perspective is provocative because, despite his targeted critique of the concept of wilderness, he is not prepared to completely disregard it: “The fact that the ruling ideas about wilderness are the ideas of the ruling class is no more reason to dispense with that category than the same fact about democracy or freedom or justice for that matter.”^[16] For him, the concept points beyond the anthropocentric fantasy of a constructed world, acknowledging how the supreme power of nature dwarfs that of capitalism. If nothing else, the focus on wilderness renders the capitalist system contingent and vulnerable: “[P]laces with a high degree of wildness still hint at the possibility of life beyond capital.”^[17]

Malm refuses a central tendency in contemporary ecological thought, which he has characterized as its “dissolutionism”: the erasure of the boundary between nature and society. For him, binaries are “analytical equipment,” and the binary of Nature/Society retains both analytical and political utility in the context of the climate crisis.^[18] In arguing for a concept of nature as other, Malm invokes Immanuel Kant’s analytic of the sublime, which, for both radical and liberal critics, has been roundly critiqued for reinforcing the very ideological foundations of capitalism’s extractivist reasoning. Kant argues that the terrifying, overwhelming, disorienting experience of sublime nature produces not only fright, but also a moment of transcendence that results in the ultimate validation of the individual. Sightings of the sublime “raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.”^[19] The encounter with nature’s incalculable power produces the omnipotent individual subject precisely by threatening its obliteration. From the perspective of capitalism, the sublime will always reinforce capitalist relations of domination—a logical reason why scholars in the environmental humanities have persistently steered clear of it.^[20] However, the sublime also names the otherness that the individual is recruited to manage, identifying in nature a profound threat to bourgeois individualism.

If for Kant, the sublime power of nature constituted the other to the rational individual, for Sigmund Freud, it was the unruly crowd. Jodi Dean reveals how Freud’s work in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), as well as in his primary interlocutor Gustave Le Bon, pit the individual against the crowd. Le Bon’s influential 1895 study The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind shaped the modern discourse on crowd psychology, arguing that when absorbed by the crowd, the individual loses control of his reason, forgets his individuality, and reverts to his most primitive state. For Le Bon, the revolutionary uprising of the crowd was approaching:

The claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.^[21]

Le Bon points to the “primitive communism” imagined to have preceded Western civilization, aligning with Marx’s own diagnosis of a communitarian ontology, which interprets the human as a social animal ^[22] In Group Psychology, Freud builds on Le Bon to ask both what unites people in a crowd and what holds them together. Freud’s answer, as Dean puts it, follows from his interpretation that the unconscious is a crowd: “Moving from many to one, Freud’s explanation encloses the directed intensities of Le Bon’s crowd into an individual unconscious. Collective desire is reduced to an amplification of frustrated individual desire.”^[23] From this perspective, it is the leader who assembles and directs the crowd according to his individual desires. Against Le Bon, Freud writes that man is “an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.”^[24] He defends the ground on which the politics of liberalism were established.

For Freud, there is no such thing as collective desire, only the desire of individuals. Consequently, for him, the crowd is competitive by nature. In the absence of collective desire, a charismatic “chief ” must necessarily impose his desires on the crowd. Freud’s invocation of the language of tribal governance points to the work of ideological enclosure on Freud’s own thought. Constructing the chief as individual, Freud actively disavows the threat of primitive communism that was revealing its force both in the streets and in the colonies at his time of writing, while reflecting an alignment with the project of settler colonialism, which recognized individuation as a weapon against the collective and communal modes of life supporting Indigenous Nations before and during colonization. 

Unearthing the long tradition of resistance to settler colonialism within the territorial boundaries of the United States, Nick Estes offers insight on the perspective from which the settler saw both Indigenous people and Indigenous land. Settler colonialism was not only a project of dispossessing Indigenous peoples of common land, but also an assault on the collective bonds that held Indigenous Nations together in their relation to the slivers of land which they continued to inhabit. The process of allotment provides an example of the settler-colonial project of individuation. Allotment was the process of breaking up collectively inhabited reservation land into plots of private property. These parcels were “given” to individual Natives, while “surplus” was auctioned at dirt cheap prices to settlers. Estes writes of the effect of allotment on the national unity of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, or Great Sioux Nation: “Allotment emphasized individualism, breaking up the tightly knit family units of direct kin and extended relations called the tiospaye, isolating them on different plots of land in distant parts of the reservation.”^[25] Routine violence against Indigenous women was also part of this project of individuation: “White traders and trappers appropriated Indigenous women’s bodies as much as they had appropriated the wealth of the land by harvesting and selling the skins of animals. The two practices went hand in hand.”^[26] The degrading material and psychological toll of individuation was built into the settler-colonial project of enclosure.

Freud’s claim that man is “an individual creature in a horde led by a chief ” represses the violence of individuation. When understood as an assemblage of individuals, a crowd can be broken up, disciplined, managed, or eradicated by force. A culture can also be exterminated. However, as Dean makes clear, when we disidentify with the individual enclosure, we can see that the leader does not speak on behalf of the collective but posits a gap that is struggled over: “The crowd doesn’t desire the leader; the leader incites and directs the desire of the crowd.”^[27] The leader is not a hypnotist, but is “hypnotized by the idea”—an idea that always exceeds the person who believes it.^[28] The leader can be substituted for another person, or even a common name, icon, or flag. The idea, rather than the charismatic leader, is what governs the crowd. And the idea cannot be killed.

What is Inalienable?

Kant’s analytic of the sublime and Freud’s theory of crowd dynamics are two sides of the same coin. They construct the individual as a bulwark against a threatening collective other. The story of capitalism and settler colonialism’s attempt to eradicate this abject other—be it Indigenous or communist, human or non-human—is not only the history of the capitalist world, but also the history of the gap in it. To speak of the gap in the capitalist world is to insist on a common that has not been enclosed by capitalism, a suggestion that notably breaks from Marx’s thesis on primitive accumulation, which took the “violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones” as a historical phase in the development of capitalism.^[29] What remains following primitive accumulation is a world ravaged by capitalism, turned into pro!t and waste. Numerous challenges to this thesis have emerged in feminist and decolonial Marxist traditions, where, building on David Harvey’s reading of Rosa Luxemburg, thinkers such as Silvia Federici, Glen Sean Coulthard, and George Ciccariello-Maher, among others, have reconceived primitive accumulation as an incomplete and ongoing process of dispossession.

Coulthard challenges Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation on three counts: First, Marx’s temporal framing of primitive accumulation, which stages the violent expropriation of common land as a stage in the development of capitalism. Second, Marx’s original commitment to modernist developmentalism, which led the author to claim primitive accumulation as “a historically inevitable process that would ultimately have a beneficial effect on those violently drawn into the capitalist circuit.”^[30] Third, Marx’s insistence on the violent character of primitive accumulation. Coulthard argues that a shift in perspective—from one that prioritizes the capitalist relation to one that prioritizes the colonial relation—enables the development of a theory of primitive accumulation that can attend not only to the persistence of violent dispossession under neoliberal capitalism, but also to the fact that “violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession.”^[31] The flipside of Coulthard’s critical rereading of Marx is perhaps the most provocative: in a world devastated by capitalism, elements of noncapitalist life can be defended from the siege of primitive accumulation.

One reason, as Estes explains, is that for Indigenous peoples, the natural world is inalienable. Describing the perspective adopted by Water Protectors who gathered to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s controversial Missouri River crossing in 2016, Estes writes: 

Mni Sose, the Missouri River, is one such nonhuman relative who is alive, and who is also of the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. Nothing owns her, and therefore she cannot be sold or alienated like a piece of property.^[32]

By this, Estes is not suggesting that the Missouri River had evaded capitalist accumulation until the Army Corps of Engineers approved plans to route the Dakota Access Pipeline under it. Other pipelines cross under the river. Railroads cross over her. Industries line her shore and pump waste into her. Since the nineteenth century, she has been an important shipping channel for everything from commodities to ammunition. The Pick-Sloan dams, constructed from the 1940s to the 1960s to provide electric power as well as irrigation and flood control for the agricultural industry in Missouri River states, turned the river against its original custodians, flooding seven Lakota and Dakota reservations and dispossessing their already displaced and dispossessed inhabitants. What Estes means is that when seen from the perspective of the Oceti Sakowin—a perspective that understands land, water, and animals as living non-human relatives— the Missouri River is not reducible to its expropriation by the capitalist state.^[33] To state that water is inalienable is to posit a truth claim—not a falsifiable hypothesis in the manner of colonial science, but an unfalsifiable claim demanding a specific political and ethical response from the collective that it hails into being. It conjures a subject that is true to it.

Geographies undergo historical transformations, and as the climate changes, rivers dry up. However, just as burial grounds remain burial grounds even after their contents are exhumed by archaeologists or bulldozed by oil companies, water remains, despite its periodic desecration, an inalienable excess to capitalism and settler-colonialism’s war on the common. Recent Indigenous-led movements to protect water against the extraction industry make this emphatically clear: water is alive in the material sense, but it is also sacred. The concept of the sacred oriented modes of non-capitalist life for centuries, in defiance of capitalist and colonial rule. It continues to foster the courage of revolutionary anti-colonial movements today. This concept works to establish a beyond to the material world in which to posit collective belief. 

Where Indigenous anticolonialism anchors collective belief in the natural world, communist movements anchor belief in the proletarianized many, locating a beyond to the world of capitalist domination in the specter of communism. When, at the start of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels posit that “A specter is haunting Europe,”^[34] they are not referring to existing communist party infrastructure (the party does not yet exist), but to the red threat recognized by the ruling class. The specter, as an absence that insists from within the capitalist world, connects living communists to their ancestors—the primitive communists of pre-capitalist times—and their descendants, those who have yet to take up the cause. The specter of communism holds up the living communists, orienting them toward a communist future. It gets embodied in the strikes and working-class uprisings to which Marx and Engels referred, but also in the ceremonial practices of Indigenous Nations, performed in de!ance of settler law. Like the sacred waters, the specter is inalienable. It adopts the form of a prosthesis in the material world, but it cannot be reduced to the prosthetic form that it takes.^[35] When it appears, it links the dead to the living, holding open the gap of collective desire.

The Specter Is in the Object

In “The World Is Already without Us,” Alberto Toscano asks the question, “why are photographs of manufactured landscapes so often depopulated?”^[36] Addressing the erasure of labor in the contemporary landscape photography of Edward Burtinsky amongst many others, his examination could be expanded to address the more widely critiqued genre of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, which likewise erased the presence of the Indigenous human and non-human inhabitants who tended the land according to a non-capitalist relation until and after settler occupation. These representations, reflecting both the rei!cation of labor and the rei!cation of nature, actively repress the specter that haunts them in the present. For Marx, the concept of the commodity follows a congruent structure: it is an object that both embodies and invisibilizes the labor that produces it. It rei!es an entire system of production, of private property, capitalists, and workers, as well as the “iron laws” that make the system a system. Like the museum, the nineteenth-century landscape painting, or the contemporary manufactured landscape, the commodity tells the story of what is extinguished in its making.

Toscano’s account of the dialectic of extinction and resurrection latent in the labor process presents a key for thinking about what it might mean to conjure the specter that haunts the natural history museum. Reflecting on the “hidden abode” masked in the commodity form, the mounting dead labor concentrated in commodities as they travel through the production process, Toscano clarifies that “the fact that they are indeed products of past labor is, in Marx’s colorfully crude metaphor, ‘as irrelevant, as, in the case of the digestive system, the fact that the bread is the product of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller and the baker.’”^[37]

The project of resurrecting dead labor is not equivalent to resurrecting labor history:

When living labor power seizes these products, these things, and ‘awakens them from the dead’, as Marx declares, it is not as past but as present use value within a labor process overdetermined by the empty, homogenizing time of exchange value.^[38]

The work of conjuring the specter in the land or in the natural history museum follows from this: the specter is awakened not as past but present use value, not as traumatic reminder but as prophetic guide for revolutionary work.

The museum is constituted through the same dialectics of extinction and resurrection as is the commodity. It represses the outside in the objects it contains, overdetermining them in its taxonomic, display, and interpretive protocols. It works to convince itself that it has captured the objects it contains. It does this by means of individuation, by separating the objects in its collection from their original uses and from the communities that cared for them, and by processing them as specimens, trophies, and rare goods. From the perspective of the modern individual—which is also the perspective of the capitalist state—this is interpreted as an effective, unilateral process of extinguishing, not one part of a dialectical struggle that includes a possible resurrection. From this perspective, the individuated object is an object of desire—a fetish severed from the source.

But the museum object also holds the potential to become an object cause of collective desire: when the object’s sacredness is presupposed by a collective, it stands as a beacon for collective belonging, embodying the non-capitalist excess of the capitalist enclosure. The sacred can be desecrated but not destroyed. When the museum object is recognized as imbued with the power of the sacred, it stands for the non-capitalist gap in the institution, activating the museum divide.

The project of institutional liberation emerges from the perspective of the gap. It attunes the partisan gaze not to the power of the enclosure but to the sublime threat to it. It is from this perspective that a partisan politics can be lodged into the capitalist world ecology. Such a politics is the necessary precondition for militant collective action on climate crisis. By orienting our gaze to the spectral threat to the capitalist world, we enter the dialectical struggle between extinction and resurrection, awakening the non-capitalist power in the capitalist world. When we see this non-capitalist power, we see it everywhere. As the object cause of desire, it produces the collective desire for collectivity in us. It opens a gap, holds us in common, and concentrates counterpower as we organize around it.

Not An Alternative (est. 2004) is a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and theory. The collective’s latest, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (2014–), a traveling museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The Natural History Museum collaborates with Indigenous communities, environmental justice organizations, scientists, and museum workers to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.

“Beneath the Museum, the Specter” was originally published in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott and Subhankar Banerjee (Routledge, 2021), 418-427.