Why epistemologies of the south?

JWTC in conversation

“Why epistemologies of the south?” Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s challenging lecture was charged with greater provocation in the context of the JWTC conversation on nature and environment. It was even more provocative since his argument seemed to unsettle the emergent view in the workshop that knowledges alternative to hegemonic knowledge are romanticized reinventions whose time has passed since the world in which their interventions may have been productive has already been fundamentally transformed. The lecture foregrounded the epistemologies of the metaphorical global south in the context of what the speaker observed as seven threats to social justice in the forms taken by contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Some of these threats, like continued colonialismfor example, are not new or different, just paradoxical in the ways that they continues to perpetuate racism while superficially rejecting the nineteenth century science of race. Other threats to social justice identified represent a widening out of the exclusions of earlier forms of capitalism: For example, as technological advances have allowed work to be brought home and as the nature of the workplace has changed in various sectors, incursions into leisure time have been pushed further. These forms of unpaid labour have thus expanded the sphere of the most significantly unrecognized and unrecompensed labour of traditional women’s work. Most of the threats outlined identify attacks on social justice which allow the continued encroachment of a fluid and engulfing capitalism.

 One of the threats singled out by the speaker, however, namely, the destruction of nature, is a threat of a different magnitude and order since it threatens both the dominant and the dominated. This reinforces the view of Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, who suggests that the finitude of the world conceptualized as resource makes the present crisis of capitalism a crisis which capitalism’s legendary protean powers of transformation will not succeed in transcending. In fact, the environmental threat is a planetary catastrophe which could destroy not only actors in capitalist relations of power, but also animal and vegetable life. (This question addresses a different tension which seems to have arisen in the JWTC conversation. On the one hand, some points of view have taken for granted environmental finitude and potential catastrophe. On the other, the discourse of disaster has been presented as part of the problematic which needs to be challenged.)

 The speaker asserts that containing and reversing global disaster in the cause of social justice cannot emerge from the systems of knowledge which have produced transformations of the natural world on a scale hitherto unknown and unthinkable. In the context of global warming, there quite literally is no part of the planet which lies outside of human influence – there is no wilderness. The speaker maintains that since the sum of knowledges of the world exceeds a western understanding of the world, the epistemologies of the global south suggest a trajectory out of the impasse. Responses to environmental finitude for the most part engage only the knowledge of the global north whose epistemology exists on one side of an “abyssal divide”, producing a radically truncated horizon of possibility. In this way cognitive injustice reinforces social injustice.

Some questions, however, remain troubling in this approach which clearly is inspired both by a pragmatic realism and social concern. In terms of the argument presented, those on the other side of the “abyssal divide” must engage indigenous epistemologies. There is an interesting slippage in the terms used to describe the knowledge which must be gleaned. The argument shuttles between the terms “epistemological” and “cognitive” justice and also “indigenous understandings”. One gets the impression, one that possibly may be misconceived, that the framework and the terms of thinking of indigenous knowledges may, in fact, produce an instrumentalisation of epistemologies of the south, just as epistemologies of the north defined, delimited and  instrumentalised nature. If epistemology of the south refers only to indigenous “know-how”, then it may disembed knowledge from a much more profound understanding of the world which connects human, non-human, plant and cosmos. These spiritually and philosophically integrated worlds are also worlds enabled by a mythology which may not be shared by other indigenous groups. The question then arises of how different indigenous ethical understandings might encounter and engage one another.

Constituting the epistemology of the south as an epistemology of “those who have suffered injustices” as the speaker does, also tends to elide the enabling mythology of indigenous groups in favour of a mythology of a constitutive moment forged out of the engagement with capitalist modernity. In other words, this paradigm would continue to cast into abyssal darkness the epistemology which exists in excess of the epistemology of injustice constituted at the moment of capitalist encounter.

The broader framework of the argument also implies that somehow the radical left summons itself into being outside of an enabling mythology, in other words, universally, and so may be tasked with the role of managing indigenous epistemologies.

Indigenous cosmological or cosmogonic mythologies also simultaneously constitute a set of social and human – nonhuman relations conceived as obligation, the ways one ought to act and engage other people and the natural world. The epistemology of the south is always inherently an ethical understanding, not just a “know-how”. Ethics is also a term which has repeatedly been introduced in the JWTC conversation, but one which has not gone on to produce a dialogue.

Fiona Moola

English Department, University of the Western Cape

Living in a Critical Position part two

JWTC interview with David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)continues…

The UCHRI, of which you are the Director, has initiated various modalities of collaboration with nodes of critical thought in various parts of the global South (Johannesburg, Beyrouth, Shanghai, Mexico). What is the purpose of these collaborative endeavours and to what extent do they differ from the old North-South models?

The question brings together threads from my responses to the initial two questions.  It has long been the case, as Ann Stoler has repeatedly reminded us in her own work, that metropolitan modernity--and what we now identify as the global north--has been constitutively produced and constituted in significant part through relational interaction with the colonies, and now the global south. We must complicate this view by insisting that the global norths and souths (each is plural) now more than ever find themselves in and through each other, stamping deep, visible and not so visible, constitutive elements and conditions on the making and remaking of each other. We cannot think and know ourselves without thinking with and understanding the other, the global north in the global south and the global south in the north. And engaged in this way, questions and responses to these overlapping and interactive conditions of our time are posed differently, provide insights, open up possibilities for thinking our world critically that would not be available, which would remain obscure, but for these ways of thinking productively, critically together. It is these conjoint, intersecting modes of "living in a critical condition" which I think demands this open and honest engagement together.

This is different than even a decade ago when those from global north might be invited to China and other sites to discuss the question of modernity, of modernization; to bring the truth of the north to the south, when knowledge production would emulate political and economic power and be overwhelmingly unidirectional, arrogant, and ultimately close down as much as it opened up. It produced all sorts of embarrassing expressions.  Clearly the world has in many ways been turned upside down. Thinking our overlapping and intersecting conditions together, with, in and through all their unevenness, has become imperative. It entails a very different set of dispositions, a modesty, an openness, different modes of critical engagement, working out together what the themes will be, what questions are productive, how to proceed critically, what modes of inquiry and indeed experience and sensitivities are most productively revealing.

The title of the Platform you and Meg Samuelson have crafted for the 2012 Session of the JWTC is Oceans|Islands|Littorals|Beaches. Why do you think a critical analysis of these formations might tell us something about the futures of nature in general?

Meg, to her credit, has taken the lead on this. There is a small but growing body of work on oceans, a longer if still small tradition focused on islands, and very little critical work on littorals and beaches (I think of Mick Taussig's wonderful fictional essay on the beach). Ocean and sea water make up something like 70 percent of the earth's surface.  Islands and their "clean" beaches have long been these outposts of supposed civilization, exotic sites for modernity's self-making or recreational excess. Today islands have assumed a doubled importance. For one, they have become the sort of "canary in the coal mine" of the effects of global warming. We see this most obviously in the case of the Maldives, threatened literally (and perhaps littorally) with drowning. Islands and beach coastlines are most vulnerable to these impacts. Oceans and seas represent both effects of our lack of stewardship of nature and the agentive intervention in response, interactive effect and cause. Attending to these formations will reveal the critical conditions in which we find ourselves: the brittleness of the food chain; the dramatically changing weather patterns and devastating "natural" events (which now are deeply "naturalcultural," as Donna Haraway has put it); the threat not just to ways of life but to life itself on very large scales; the wastefulness of those who have overwhelmingly at the expense of those who don't; the impacts on futures and natures of work, ways of being in the world and on the world itself; the signal of the range of vulnerabilities we face and the deep relation of these vulnerabilities to each other across spaces, places, and scales. It is so often the case that the least attended condition turns out to be the most deeply revealing, and I think a focus on the earth's water surface, which we have taken for granted for so long, bears this out. 

In your view, can current debates on the futures of nature help to refigure our understandings of the futures of race?

This is a terrifically provocative way of posing the question.  Across the long duree of modernity until at least the mid-twentieth century, race was taken up variously as either natural or naturalizing condition, as a condition of nature itself. Critical work on race in the last quarter of the twentieth century came to see race not just as social product but as helping to reveal how nature and naturalizing processes were deeply culturally inflected and constituted. So in one sense it could be said that Haraway's provocative formulation of "naturculture" comes out of these insights about race, sex, and gender, about their co-constituting natural-cultural condition. Nature is constitutively culturalized and culture likewise naturalized. At the same time, to some degree the deeply cultural focus on racial makings and workings lost sight of its naturalizing condition. Race and nature, as conceptions, are thus deeply tied up with each other, the one revealing of features of the other.  Thinking about the futures of nature--not just its cultural constructedness but what forms nature will assume, what worlds it gives rise to, what potentialities it opens up and what it closes down, how all of this is connected to political economy as both cause and effect, and so on--all of this cannot but help have an impact, is already having an impact, on how we think or ought to be thinking about the racial, about race-making and its possibilities and what it closes down, about the significance and limits of postraciality and the work the notion of "the postracial" performs as racial condition, and how all of this is related, as cause and effect, to political economy as well as to the postcolonial and the postcolony.

There is no doubt we live in interesting times, as the Chinese proverb exhorts. What the proverbs silently hints at is that the most interesting of times are likely also the most unsettled and unsettling, and so too also the most troubling and challenging. The challenge of critical theory today, as it has generally been in times past, is to rise to the occasion of comprehending and so possibly helping to work out what it means to intervene productively in the troubling times we face today.