Species Thinking Without Agency: The Afterlife of Slavery, Clones, and Blurring Subject and Object in the Anthropocene

The overwhelming scale of climate change demands new ways of bridging national, cultural, and taxonomic differences. However, ecocritical frameworks that emphasise non-human agency in an attempt to make human individuals empathise with other people, other species, and the earth are haunted by the tenacious spectre of nineteenth-century classical liberalism’s characterization of personhood through specious, fragile dichotomies that can largely fall under the general rubric of agency versus determinism. The putatively opposed terms of these binaries are malleable, and control of their designation is a key element of control societies. Contemporary scholarship has identified several ways subjects bleed into objects, but, even though the ‘individual’ should theoretically collapse under its own ontological pressure in our current biopolitical age, neoliberalism largely holds onto classical liberalism’s central dogma of a person as an agential individual. I analyse the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro and its critical analyses to show how the plight to recognise agency is a prison of analysis that upholds an ideal of the individual as the bastion of personhood. As seen through the afterlife of slavery post-emancipation, those in power can discursively recognise the humanity in people formerly designated 'things' while still perpetuating systematic exploitation and dehumanisation. The metric of ‘agency’ as a unit of hope is an epistemic barrier to effective political rhetoric regarding climate change and species thinking.

The sheer scale of climate change is difficult to conceptualise and convey. As Timothy Morton (2013) puts it, climate change is a 'hyperobject': a system whose scale and magnitude escape both true comprehension and representation. The various effects on ecosystems, economies, and people cannot be synthesised into a uniform narrative, and long-term ecological processes, such as global warming, are challenging to present to the public due to the temporal longevity and relative invisibility in relation to everyday life (Nixon, 2011). In order to increase public awareness around the severity and long-term effects of human-accelerated greenhouse gas emissions and destructive environmental practices, geologist Paul Crutzen (2002) coined the term 'Anthropocene' to name a new geological epoch defined by the catastrophic impact human activity has had on the environment.
While naming a geology of 'humankind' could potentially make the incomprehensible scale of climate change more legible, the term 'Anthropocene' has been a controversial topic of debate in both STEM and the humanities (Grinevald, Crutzen and McNeill, 2011;Zalasiewicz et al, 2008). Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg argue that attributing climate change to the human species through geological nomenclature ignores sociohistorical specificity and obscures the fact that "the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change were predicated on highly inequitable global processes from the start" (2014, p. 63). Etymologically, 'Anthropocene' comes from the Greek root anthrōpos, meaning human. Since the language of the Anthropocene assigns our current epoch of rapid climate change to all 'humankind', there is no distinction between countries that have historically led to nearly irreversible changes to our global ecosystems. Crutzen himself acknowledges that twenty-five percent of the human population disproportionately affect climate change, but the name 'Anthropocene' potentially exonerates countries associated with the Industrial Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution that unevenly contributed to greenhouse gas emission over the last few centuries. Meanwhile, so-called 'developing' countries that rely on fossil-fuel technology to grow their economy and standard of living face the hurdle of being labelled environmentally insensitive for the industrialisation practices that other countries have already historically benefited from.
Despite the dangers of erasing historical specificity, prominent postcolonial Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) still calls for the need to develop a 'species thinking'. Even though Chakrabarty acknowledges that "we can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such" (p. 220), he still sees a use for a putative global identity since he does not find postcolonial and other fields of sociohistorical analysis "adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming" (p. 221). Climate change is so spatially, temporally, and historically disorienting that it demands novel forms of analysis and a new global identity that unites us as a species. The lacklustre efforts to challenge destructive environmental practices corroborate Chakrabarty's suspicion. Although the United Nations met in 1992 to sign an international environmental treaty addressing climate change, since then, trends have not changed; in fact, "more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades" (Wallace-Wells, 2019, p. 4). Beyond the loose alliances of the United Nations and neoliberalism's deregulated global markets, there is a desperate need for a type of thinking that can globally unite people from a non-economic standpoint. fields of thought circulating within ecocriticism, such as object-oriented ontology, vital materialism, and actor-network theory, that employ a 'flat ontology', which decenters the human by making all matter their own subjects in a network where each entity affects one another. There is no ontological hierarchy that dictates increasing agency in the movement from rock to plant to animal to human. The underlying belief is that recognizing the agency of 'things' will abate environmental exploitation -that if the targets of destructive ecological practices were considered subjects rather than objects, their right to existence would necessitate a more active approach to contesting climate change. If we cared about the environment as if it were a person and treated ecosystems as subjects with their own agency, then it would be more difficult to justify their complete abuse.
However, in this paper, I want to put pressure on the naturalisation of 'agency' as the ahistorical metric of sociopolitical recognition, respect, and rights. The valorisation of agency is a remnant of a specific conceptualisation of subjecthood that derives from nineteenth-century liberalism 1 , whose spectre lingers over the biosubjects of twenty-first-century neoliberalism.
These variants of liberalism ask its willing subjects to consider their freedom in terms of several dichotomies: subject versus object, person versus property, human versus animal, etc. The former term of these dichotomies represents agency whereas the latter term represents determinism; control, or perhaps more accurately, aufheben 2 , over the term of determinism defines 1 By nineteenth-century liberalism, I am specifically referring to (i) classical liberalism and its focus on economic freedom as represented by the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, James Mill, and other British philosophers and (ii) utilitarianism as associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. 2 Hegel uses the term aufheben to describe the process of a dialectic. The German word has multiple connotations and signifies both canceling as well as preserving. It can be translated as 'sublation' or 'overcoming'. When a proposition, the thesis, meets its reaction, the antithesis, the antithesis is overcome while simultaneously being preserved through the process of synthesis. I view agency and determinism as a Hegelian dialectic since determinism is overcome yet preserved within conceptions of agency. the autonomous individual. For example, the capacity to own property supposedly demarcates the agency and rights of a citizen within capitalism.
In short, nineteenth-century liberalism posits subjectivity and individuality as the result of the separation of mutually exclusive dichotomies such as person/property, yet these binaries are never mutually exclusive because power operates through the control of their movement.
One can legally be both person and property as seen manipulated in chattel slavery. People, through slavery and its twisted logics, have been horrifically terrorised as subject and object -violently coded human and animal. While scholars of contemporary neoliberal biocapitalism acknowledge that the terms of liberalism's rigid dichotomies are not mutually exclusive (in the past or in the present), they largely retain the framework of these fragile dichotomies of subjecthood even as they show the fluidity with which one can go between person and object. Thus, nineteenth-century liberalism's conception of personhood lingers into the present -especially visible through the branches of ecocriticism that insist on locating the agency of objects, critters, and things as an antidote to their exploitation.
In the simplest terms possible, the main idea of my paper is that nineteenth-century liberalism posited personhood in terms of fragile dichotomies (agency vs determinism); twenty-first-century neoliberalism retains nineteenth-century liberalism's construction of selfhood by framing subjectivity in terms of freedom, agency, and binaries, even if it is the binary's disavowal. Ecocriticism will need to shift away from a (neo)liberal fascination with 'agency' if a true concept of species thinking is to ever be epistemically possible. In the remainder of the paper, I will explore how liberalism's fragile dichotomies still carry over into our present moment of neoliberalism. I then turn to the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) as a paradigmatic representation of neoliberal subjecthood in the Anthropocene and criticism on NLMG as an example of how the focus on agency may inhibit new conceptions of subjecthood necessary to fostering species thinking.
While species thinking has the admirable goal of uniting people across disparate identities in order to collectively address climate change, my analysis of neoliberalism and Never Let Me Go aims to question certain assumptions regarding achieving species thinking -namely, that advocating for the agency of all people and things is the solution to preventing destructive environmental practices.

Fragile Dichotomies: Racialised (Neo)liberal Subjecthood in the Anthropocene
No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done… Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. (Douglass, 1852) The initial question is deceptively simple: what distinguishes neoliberal subjectivity in the Anthropocene? Before Thatcher, Reagan, Volcker, and  (1859), the struggle between opposites reflects a dichotomous logic that creates mutually exclusive dichotomies such as person/property, subject/object, truth/lies, order/chaos, Christian/heathen, man/woman, etc. For Mill, the individual is isolated as a discrete entity that is defined against other individuals, and he emphatically states that "the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it" (p. 16). The 'individual' is the basis of human nature, human rights, and divine order according to nineteenth-century liberalism.
The clean separation between self and other, which can be articulated differently as the proposition that an individual is a subject as long as that person is not property, provides a rich ontological foundation of selfhood's depiction as a function of agency. Mill's nexus of agency, individuality, and freedom relies on two mutually opposed categories; as an example, he argues for freedom of speech by claiming "there can be no fair discussion of the question of usefulness, when an argument so vital may be employed on one side, but not on the other" (p. 26). 'One side' and its corresponding 'other' come to dominate conceptions of subjecthood in the nineteenth century -I am a person because I am not property.
Neoliberalism derives its name from these principles of classical liberalism and its emphasis on laissez-faire principles. However, the unique elements of neoliberalism are supposedly its unprecedented, globalised capitalist circuit and the transition from the individual as homo economicus, who makes rational decisions to maximise income, to the individual as human capital, who strives to increase their speculative value through a careful deliberation of all aspects of their life. For Michel Feher, a defining feature of neoliberalism that distinguishes it from liberalism is that the neoliberal subject-position as human capital goes beyond one's relation to their labour.
The things that I inherit, the things that happen to me, and the things I do all contribute to the maintenance or the deterioration of my human capital. More radically put, my human capital is me, as a set of skills and capabilities that is modified by all that affects me and all that I effect. (Feher, 2009, p. 26  to the law, the slave is referred to as a "person held to in service or labor" and a "person whose service or labor is claimed to be due" (Best, 2004, p. 9).
Rather than referring to ownership of property or ownership of the slave's body, the Fugitive Slave Law defines slavery in terms of potentiality (for labour, for reproduction), obligation, and contract. In the emphasis on liability and duty, Best sees the fugitive slave as paradigmatic of the nineteenth-century American economic shift to consumption over production, services instead of material goods, and the rise of intellectual property rights stemming from technological advances such as voice capture.
The slave's 'head start on modernity' portends a temporal unfreedom of body and the disciplinary and regulatory control over its various capacities 4 .
Stephen Best's description of the fugitive slave's two bodies as simultaneously object and person resonates with other concepts that describe framework to argue that 'the reproductive imperative attached to the female slave constitutes her as a security (a bonded asset, linked to a private debt), while her children are engendered derivatives thereof' (Diran, 2019, p. 700). 4 According to Alexander Weheliye (2014), scholars should not carelessly reduce the historical specificities of slavery and racialised capitalism as a future general condition of modernity. Doing so treats race and blackness not as primary sources of power structures but rather as subcategories of a generalized conception of biopower.  (Hartman, 1997, p. 131). Suddenly, as if there were no conception of history, freedmen could be blamed for their own abject material conditions since they were 'free' and had the potential to work up the socioeconomic ladder in the putative meritocracy of American capitalism. Despite having very few opportunities for such movement immediately post-emancipation, white America shifted the blame from slavery to the freedmen themselves as the cause of their own suffering. However, NLMG shows the reader how the 'elevation' of an object to a subject with agency does not prevent its abuse. The most disturbing environmental degradation will be done under the pretence of caring for the environment and respecting its status as agential subject.
To help explain my choice in text, I will give a brief plot overview of subsequently left to die through the gradual process of organ donation.
The clones in Ishiguro's novel are subjected to the power over life at the point where the political regiment represents the purpose of their existence as organ donors who can be left to die once their organs have fully matured. Maturation of life here coincides with cessation of life (Mack, 2016, p. 201).
The English population is made to live through the death of the clones, so Ishiguro's melancholy novel is both a hyperbolised depiction of biopower as well as the Anthropocene. In a biopolitical reading, the clones are made so the general health of the population can burgeon, and a "biological-type caesura" (Foucault, 2003, p. 255) (Ishiguro, 2005, p. 85). Tommy takes Christopher's warning seriously, and other students join in on the inside joke, and they tell Tommy about "a student who'd gone to sleep with a cut on the elbow just like his and woken up to find his whole upper arm and hand skeletally exposed, the skin flopping about next to him" (p. 86). These pranks are framed as ordinary, innocuous school bullying, yet the centralization of body parts, health, and injury indicates that the State's investment in the clones' health have become their own concern, even if it is subconsciously enacted through mundane social interactions. For the State, the market, and the clones themselves, their bodies, specifically their 'insides', become the target of subjugation.
As demonstrated through these various readings, NLMG is an constellates slave racial capitalism and biocapitalism, effectively revealing to readers that the narrator's and our own neoliberal, supposedly postracial society is predicated on the death function (necropolitics) and on the complex, albeit disavowed and invisible racialization of the population that has been (re)produced for disposability (2019, p. 151).
Put another way, the alienability, fungibility, marketability, and control of reproduction of the clone body resembles the slave body, indicating the afterlife of slavery that lurks within postracial neoliberalism, which operates through the slave episteme.
Ishiguro's clones are white, but they are racialised through operations of power that constellate with Best's (2004)  Logically, the blurring of subject and object should not surprise a neoliberal subject whose work/play/hobbies/sex life/religion have all collapsed into human capital; however, transgressions against the sacred order of liberalism's dichotomies (such as the clones' existence) viscerally affect, disgust, and enrage the neoliberal imagination. Miss Emily explains to Kathy the impact that the clones have on the general population: How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter (Ishiguro, 2005, p. 263).
Besides the obvious biopolitical reading of this passage, Miss Emily's explanation also emphasises discomfort and wilful ignorance as the main responses to the clones' teleological existence. The cause of the discomfort stems from an implicit recognition of the clones' humanity ("their own children" implies a latent recognition of the clones as humans) that clashes with their subaltern status as alienable property whose organs are systematically harvested until 'completion'. The clones are human and 'less than human'. The clones are "told and not told" (Ishiguro, 2005, p Building on Foucault's genealogy of the movement from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies, Deleuze proposes that our contemporary moment is dictated by societies of control. Whereas "in the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory)… in the societies of control one is never finished with anything -the corporation, the educational system, modulation, like a universal system of deformation" (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5). Kathy thus trains all her life to be the best donor she can possibly be in the seamless movement between Hailsham, the Cottages, the hospital, and 'completion'. She feels an urgency to "go wherever it was [she] was supposed to go" (Ishiguro, 2005, p. 288), just like the 'motivated' youth that Deleuze feels pity for.
Even though Elliott aptly articulates the problems with a static, binary notion of agency, she retains 'agency' as the metric of neoliberal personhood; the desire to never let go of 'agency' even when the term becomes overloaded and insufficient correlates to a hidden reification of selfhood as classical liberalism's dichotomy of agency versus determinism.
Elliott (2013) calls attention to the limitations of subjecthood as agency, yet she also posits neoliberalism's totalising logic in a similar manner to how determinism is constructed against agency: Our enclosure within Kathy's consciousness, and her failure to imagine an escape route, stage on the level of form the inability to think past the terms of neoliberal personhood. When we as readers assume that life-saving action on her own behalf is the necessary solution to her dilemma, we demonstrate that we, like Kathy, can't see beyond the terms of the logic in which we are embedded-in our case, the logic that links self-preservation to action in one's own best interest, to agency, to personhood (p. 97).
In Elliott's framework, readers either acknowledge forms of agency that are dissociated from liberalism's positive connotation of the term or they fall victim to an all-encompassing neoliberal schema. I share Elliott's concern about deterministic readings that disavow Kathy's agency due to the presence of subjugation, but I am hesitant to accept 'suffering agency' as a central variable of neoliberal personhood. The necessity of the adjective 'suffering' in the nomenclature suggests a deviation from a putative, normal meaning of agency; the power of its name comes from the betrayal of the utopian ideal of pleasurable agency: the same agency that is posited by nineteenth-century liberalism as the negation and dichotomous other of determinism.
Agency is rife with suffering (as demonstrated in NLMG and our own horrific quotidian experiences), but a new lexicon is necessary to escape from subjecthood's transmutation into a rigid binary between agency and determinism. Otherwise, contemporary ecocriticism will continuously acknowledge that we "can't see beyond the terms of the logic in which we are embedded in" (Elliott, 2013, p. 97) while simultaneously using the language, frameworks, and rhetoric of the very logic it is trying to disavow. What The coronation of 'agency' and its associated terms as the indicator of self-possession limit our understanding of political efficacy and attempts to construct a 'species thinking' in the time of the Anthropocene. Ecocriticism faces an epistemic roadblock: the construction of subjecthood as a function of agency. In the vital materialism movement that seeks to acknowledge non-human agency, I find the centralisation of individual agency insufficient to address the hyperobject of climate change. Considering Jane Elliott's (2013) framework of suffering agency and how individual agency is mandated by societies of control, the ontological recognition of the latent potentiality in objects/things/environment will not abate global warming. Following Kathryn Yusoff's (2018) lead 8 , it is important to incorporate critical race theory into conversations on the environment in order to grapple with the histories of how subjects and objects have always-already been violently blurred through the process of racialisation.
Ecocriticism will have more political efficacy if its scholars shift away from (neo)liberalism's nexus of personhood/subversion/agency. The recognition of land/animals' agency or their anthropomorphising does not subsequently equate to respecting their 'rights' or lead to political action to combat their subjugation. As seen through Black studies' research on the fugitive slave's two bodies as well as my analysis of NLMG, those with power can discursively recognise the humanity in people labelled as 'things' and 'property' while still perpetuating systematic domination, exploitation, and dehumanisation. Like the clones in Ishiguro's novel, ecosystems can be recognised as their own agential subjects while still being oppressed.
Harkening back to Hailsham, neoliberalism is well-equipped to rhetorically transform murder into 'completion' -granting objects and environments agency may lead to new, sinister forms of domination that simultaneously treat the environment as an ontological equal while irreversibly harming the planet. We already see these strategies through the marketing tactic of 'greenwashing' when companies such as Shell use tree-planting initiatives 8 Kathryn Yusoff argues in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None that the sociogeological displacement of contemporary climate change is preceded by the violent displacement of the Middle Passage and colonialism, which was the end of the world for millions of Black individuals. Thus, Yusoff's title argues that Anthropocene discourse does not acknowledge the billions of lives/worlds already lost through colonialism and slavery, and it discursively shifts the products of racialised capitalism and Western colonialism toward an ahistorical notion of deep time.
and social media campaigns highlighting their low carbon technology research to hide their massive involvement in the planet's destruction (telegraph.co.uk, 2020). As far as their rhetoric delineates, oil companies can respect the planet and its inhabitants as living, agential subjects even though they are killing them slowly. Thus, it is time to shift away from 'agency' as the main metric of hope, and I see the fragile dichotomies of nineteenthcentury liberalism as an epistemic barrier to a species thinking capable of promoting true care for all people, creatures, and ecosystems.