Anti-anthropocentrism: it's not a competition

There's a long history of one-upmanship in leftist academe (and in leftism generally). Whether it's trying to be further 'left,' more 'radical' or more 'critical' than everyone else it seems that there's always a rush to go further, faster, more fastidiously, lest one be accused of being 'conservative,' 'unradical,' 'uncritical' or whatever.

It seems to me that anthropocentrism might be taking on that mantle - that is, there's an ongoing competition to be ever more anti-anthropocentric than everyone else. No narcissistic wound is ever fatal enough; no number of decentrings will ever spin the human subject far enough into oblivion; no amount of uncritically imbibed pop science will ever cement the deep, dark nihilism that is apparently necessary to properly cleanse thought of its subject-centred pretensions.

Now, I'm broadly on board with the notion that anthropocentrism is a supreme vice that philosophy, the humanities, the social sciences and perhaps even the Western world at large have been unpardonably guilty of; I fully accept the need for decentrings, for the need to recognise and cognise our narcisstic wounds, to understand our smallness and insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things, etc.

However, anti-anthropocentrism can't be a competition. An absolutely non- anthropocentric philosophy would be a rather self-indulgently pointless thing, even if it were possible. If thought isn't motivated by worldly concerns from an embodied, socialised, air-conditioned point of view then what can it be motivated by? What animates it? What's its purpose?

There's a degree of anthropocentrism that is not only inevitable, it's also desirable, is it not?

All this stuff about how we have to be able to think the absolutely inhuman in order to properly understand our natural, natal, cosmic predicament - this has some merit. Certainly we have to come to understand that existence is in no way given to us or predisposed towards us; that all we have is this planet, one planet only; that Earth, even in its terrifying fragility, is vastly more powerful and enduring than we are; that it (and life) will comfortably outlive us, and so on.

But even this urge to cut human pretensions down to size, this kind of will-to- diminution is anthropocentric in quite an irreducible, unavoidable sense. Stengers writes: 'Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it.' If we accept this it must also mean that the Earth doesn't care if we think about it in a mathematical, scientific or nihilistic way or in a way that reduces it to images and poetry or spirits and demons. So, who or what are we trying to impress with our absolute, unreserved decentredness?

I'm not sure that I can 'think' the absolutely inhuman but I can certainly imagine something like it. It takes very little effort to mentally conjure up an image of a world after humans, all overgrown (or rather regrown) and moved on with its life, all traces of human existence either crumbled or buried. All this I can imagine quite readily, in fact, thanks in no small part to film and literature. But I find it difficult to maintain an entirely disembodied, affectless point of view on the scene (and utterly impossible to imagine the scene with no point of view at all). It provokes feeling; it's melancholy, like walking past a former lover who doesn't recognise you. The viewpoint is inextricably part of that world so long as I inhabit it; it is a precondition of that world's imagining.

So, no, I can't imagine the absolutely inhuman, absent all filterings and formattings. And yet imagining (rather than 'thinking,' whatever that means) the almost-but-not-completely-inhuman doesn't seem to be particularly difficult. And isn't this good enough?

The whole 'thinking the inhuman' thing seems to be a rather bloated, overblown, overstated problem. Representations of the literally post-human are a problem for art and science as much as they are for philosophy, perhaps even more so. If we are able to vividly imagine the world beyond, before and after humans and their attachments it is because of these very same well-nourished, expertly-assembled, diligently-arrayed complexes, networks, assemblages.

And, so, why bemoan the impossibility of thinking the outside in all its purity? The inside is what draws the outside in and paints it in such vivid colours. Shouldn't we spend a little more time mixing our paints and a little less hankering after transcendence?

The risk of 'de-centering humans'; Reflections on LSE last year

Nicholas at Installing (Social) Order has a nice post updating the blogosphere on their latest work, particularly on 'decentering humans' in International Relations.  I'm glad to see that these issues are still burning away and that the IR/ANT collective is still hanging together!

With regard to the project in general, one question that must ultimately be asked, I think, is: when we have traced all the networks that form the human how do we avoid humans being dissolved into those networks?  How do we avoid shifting from anthropocentrism to an un-self-critical network-centrism?  How do we avoid the political complacency that can potentially come from thoroughgoing relationality?  Are there no unintended consequences of ANT's creeping colonisation of more and more intellectual territory?  I think that there are.

This is something that came up at the Millennium conference last year, as I'm sure you remember!  There was a clear divide at that event between ANT-types and others, most particularly from the critical realist camp, for whom human reflexivity as the basis of political agency is indispensable.  It was argued that the appropriation of 'agency' as a substitute for 'causality' undoes all the hard won victories of emancipatory politics (and its accompanying critical theory) in the 20th century.

As something of an ANT-phile I was quite challenged by this idea.  David Chandler in particular helped me to see the point.  I came to realise that it isn't just a blustery, reactionary reiteration of substantialism or modernist humanism (although it sometimes goes that way too!).  When ANT was working just on science and technology it was easy to downplay and de-exceptionalise the agency of the human - scientists and technicians had been granted far too much agency, far too much centredness and self-control and therefore depriving them of that was methodologically and politically unproblematic.  No one was ever going to lapse into thinking that these people really lacked agency or were cultural dopes; the goal was to shift these human agents back into their networks and ANT did that brilliantly.

When we shift forward 25 years and look at the situation where, now, rightly or wrongly, ANT is a sociological metalanguage that is informing all kinds of theorisation we have to tread much more carefully.  The political agency of human beings in general is in no way as assured as that of scientists and technicians.  We simply can't take human agency for granted in all walks of life (or in all modes of existence, perhaps).  Remember that ANT ethnographers were always (and they were always aware of this) studying up.  That is, they were studying persons with more power, money and prestige than they themselves enjoyed.  Studying down, studying persons who are downtrodden, disenfranchised, held by dominant discourses to be feckless and incapable of rational self-determination - these people need to be treated with greater care.

To systematically remove all the classic humanist means by which their agency can be defended without careful consideration of consequences is, frankly, irresponsible.

That isn't to say that ANT-type work has no place within broader social or political theory.  Far from it.  I am still an ANT-phile!  All I mean to say is that irreducing the human must not, ultimately, dissolve the human.  The ontological status of human political agency is too fragile to be thrown around so cavalierly.  That doesn't mean that we must stop walking in the direction that we have been but, as Latour would put it, we may need to slow down.  It isn't that ANT cannot be translated into all these different areas but we need to recognise and deal with the ever larger degree of transformation that is required to properly extend these networks the further they stray from their origins.  Part of that, I think, means that we have to find a way of saying: the more mediations, the more human.  More humanity, not less.  A new humanism.

That's the major realisation that I got from the LSE event last year (having had a year to reflect on it!).