INTERDEPENDENCE
Adrián Santamaría e Irene Ortiz
To understand the notion of interdependence, called for in political ecology and ecologism, we first need to take a step back. To consider the relations human beings build, we must first clarify the human condition. While since Aristotle this was defined according to man’s social and political nature (zỗion politikón), Modernity adds implications we cannot overlook. Broadly speaking, we can state that from the ideals of rationality and independence, Modernity constructs a new human consciousness that, as noted by Wendy Brown, has reached our time in the neoliberal context (Brown, 2017, p. 90). A representation of human beings as independent individuals who can master the world -delivered to them by God- appears clearly in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. Well into the 18th century, Adam Smith and David Ricardo anticipated Mill’s formulation as homo oeconomicus to depict an autonomous man, guided by his own advantage, and therefore in competition against others to seize resources and satisfy his own interests. This is a tentative genealogy for a concept of the human as an independent and fully autonomous being who, as some feminist economists such as Pérez Orozco (2006) remind us, stands in the public agora as rational, able to control their emotions, neat and well groomed, well fed: the self-made man, in modern parlance. However, as pointed out by Perry Anderson (2016), at least from the philosophical slant, the advent of post-modernity put an end to the idea of ‘heroic humanity’ suggested by the French Revolution. To a large extent, what the ecosocial crisis has revealed since the 1960s is that the modern, independent and resource-accumulating subject can no longer meet the challenges of today’s reality.
The ecosocial crisis we are immersed in –which, according to Riechmann, entitles us to speak of the Century of the Great Trial (Riechmann, 2019)–, therefore, rocks the conceptual architecture holding up this modern regulatory ideal of negative freedom; that is, freedom conceived as a sphere free from interferences. In the context of this crisis, representing the human being as someone who can intervene at will in reality has become more than complicated. Instead, what we find is the radical dependence that humans always had, despite not being recognised, with the patriarchal connotations inherent thereto (Pérez Orozco, 2014). The self-made man has always been privileged with huge amounts of invisibilised care within his private circle. It is at this point that feminism (more precisely, ecofeminism and feminist economics) made its appearance. The radical dependence on care that characterises the human being, an increasingly unquestionable fact, allows us to define them as an animal that is, above all, extremely vulnerable (Mackenzie, 2014). This issue has given rise to a broad debate on the implications -also within the political sphere- that derive or should derive from assuming such vulnerability as a defining trait in human beings. For example, Joan C. Tronto insists that were public policies to envisage this constitutive vulnerability, they would have to promote the exercise of care (2013). Martha Nussbaum, for her part, has also opposed the idea of homo oeconomicus, placing in a central position the notion of care from a relational and independent perspective, and insisting on the idea of fragility as a constitutive human trait (2000). Taking a broader view, and considering the intersectional character of vulnerability (assuming the perspective of gender, race or class), Silvia Federici has argued for decades that traditional Marxism has neglected the sphere of reproduction, stressing that capitalism would never have been possible without the unpaid care provided by women (2022). Moreover, the anthropologist Yayo Herrero has insisted on the fragility of human life which, enclosed in bodies that must be looked after, requires attention especially at certain moments in the life cycle such as infancy, old age or illness (2017). To this purpose, thanks to the notion of relational autonomy (Delgado, 2012) we can be more precise and expand on humans’ interdependence on each other. From this angle, life prospers solely because a series of regular care is given and not, for instance, because individuals are fully autonomous and independent. Studies on interdependence have highlighted the tension stemming, on the one hand, from demands for independence and individuality, rooted in tradition, and on the other hand, the observable dependence of human beings on each other. All this opens the necessary debate on how to transcend modern coordinates when it comes to forming a conception of the notion of freedom.
Nevertheless, as pointed out by several authors including Pérez Orozco (2006) (2014), Madorrán (2023) or Riechmann (2016), focusing on the dependence of human beings only on others of the same species may lead us to overlook something that the different currents of ecologism have been vindicating for years: that we not only depend on other human beings, that is, we are not only interdependent, but we also depend on the good health of ecosystems and the biosphere: in a word, we are ecodependent (Riechmann, 2011, p. 76). Or, stated differently: Gaia makes her appearance in political life. Life in common, as stated elegantly by essayist Todorov (2008) and the title of one of his most important productions, does not belong merely to the social sphere. Thus, inevitably, the concept of interdependence leads to that of ecodependence (notions that have merited tentative exploration both through post-humanities and the ecological humanities).
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