Abolish Species: Notes toward an “Unfenced Is,” Part I

Abstract:Despite its provenance in racial paradigms of colonial research, the notion of species has proved to be remarkably resilient and adaptable to post-racial frameworks of thought. Species has survived both the death of the subject and the cancellation of man. In their ascendance over nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of life, white environmentalisms have relegitimated this keystone of biological racism by deploying species as if it were an ideologically agnostic articulation of a meaningful grouping. This article unsettles the common portrayal of species as a culturally unmarked and racially neutral concept, whose function is to denominate what remains of the planet. Working against the orthodox definition of species as the “basic unit of biodiversity,” I apprehend species as a form of onto-epistemic incarceration that has been imposed, globally, as the dominant mode of biological understanding and, subsequently, as the prevailing structure of representation used to account for environmental loss and abundance. In excess of its taxonomic function, species serves as an instrument that, practically and ideationally, converts flesh into potential wealth. This investigation begins by checking the conventional presumption that captivity is incidental to species and examines how, on the contrary, species is productive of capture, whose economic and epistemic dimensions are mutually enriching. This critical reappraisal then moves toward an argument for the abolition of species, made on the basis of four overlapping grounds. First, the institution of species enforces mono-lingualism and consolidates white entitlement to bestow a universal name on everything living. Second, species normalizes extractive incarceration as a means of accumulating value. Third, species secures Euro-American hegemony over the way difference is “objectively” defined—restrictively, in terms of heteronormative logics of reproduction that, in turn, lend coherence to projects of racialization. Fourth, the notion of species enforces a normative paradigm for processing environmental loss that blocks perception of the colonial violence that it reproduces.