 |
| Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga |
Clapperton
Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Assistant Professor of science, technology and society the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, speaks to the JWTC
Blog.
Bruno Latour's work was very much at the
center of the debates during the 2012 JWTC roundtable on 'Things of
Nature|Nature of Things'. What, from his thought on nature/objects/things,
should in your view be amended as he moves South?
Bruno
Latour is obviously beginning to catch fire in the Global South. He is probably
the next Foucault. Before Foucault there was, of course, Marx. One of
Foucault’s most serious readers in African studies, V. Y. Mudimbe, has lamented
the persistence of a “Western ratio” at the center of African thought. Mudimbe
states very clearly that Foucault, despite his brief sojourn in North Africa,
was not writing for or about Africa but (specific) Western societies. Nor was
Marx; same for Latour.
We
should, therefore, be cautious about what is universalizable about them; that
does not mean they are not intellectually usable material. Even in Western
academia, Latour has been criticized for his “executive approach” that
privileges the lab engineer or scientist. This applies to actor network
heuristics in general. My fear is that people bringing Latour or Science and
Technology Studies (STS) into African Studies are simply going to trace the
itineraries of Western artifacts derived from the labs that STS described, the
infrastructures and thought systems transplanted to Africa from them, and make
this the be-all end-all of science and technology in Africa.
If that
were to happen, my fear is that there will be no investment in investigating
African modes of sciences and technologies—or the very idea that they exist.
Latour does not have a formula for nonwestern ways of knowing (science) and
means of doing (technology). Uncritical discipleship to him will be a trap
because it saddles one with that baggage of theoretical insufficiency.
What would be in your view the most efficient
use of Latour and others in the African context?
I would
urge that we critically utilize Latour as a methodology for writing narratives
in humanities and social sciences, viz., to take seriously the role not just of
humans but also nonhumans as actors (or actants), as heterogeneous actors in
the making of the social.
He
wants us to pay attention to the process through which things come to be
constituted. And one would say Africanists have always been too human-centric
or social-constructivist in their narratives, with animals, the physical
environment, and technology as mere anecdotes, wax in people’s hands, or simply
nuisances and hazards. Foucault made Africanists even more social
constructivist. Two nonhuman elements, technology and ‘nature,’ are quite
central to Latour’s analysis. The former constitutes some kind of Western
idolatry—Western society is crazy about technology in the hi-tech sense - which
means we must question what ‘technology’—alongside ‘experiment,’ ‘science,’
‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ etc.—really mean in the context of African people’s
lived realities.
Are you suggesting that we go beyond some of
the foundational dualisms that have been so central to our craft?
Yes,
definitively. The division between nature and culture (and spirituality) is
tenuous to say the least in the African context. By contrast, Western orders of
knowledge, since Hobbes and Boyle, follow a distinct Fact vs. Faith, Reason vs.
Religion, dichotomy. In African contexts, this tradition of thought confronted
another in which faith and religious structure anchor and inspire fact and
reason - one that, like most Global Southern cultures, was more concerned with
the whole (earth) than the bisected parts. Vivisection did not have a life of
its own; it acquired purpose and meaning within the whole, hence as Joseph
Needham remarked once, if one went into Chinese society looking for Science,
one would not find it; only sciences.
Whereupon
one might ask: As China expands into Africa, Africans into China, and as books
get translated from Chinese to English, what might the growing collection of
Chinese texts tell us about systems of thought similar to pre-European African
modes, now that Western modes of thought have been around and are familiar to
us? Is it time to expand our intellectual vista so that we no longer always
have to look to Western philosophy for grounding our theories? Why must we
always gain universality by looking West?
Should modes of theorization emerging from the
South necessarily aspire to be "universal"?
Erudition
in front of global audiences, or the desire to impress, should not drive our
theory; it should be for the right reasons.
We
speak with more strength, authority, and originality if we can tap into
registers emergent from local creativities, and if we exercise patience in
developing our ideas.
It
should not be about taking the theories of others and running with them. Our own
material can gain universal reference. We should endeavor to make ourselves
aware and read in the registers of others, but never aspire to become miniature
others, merely good imitations of Foucault, Latour, or Derrida. The exercise
shouldn’t be one of wholesale consumptionism. The goal of literature reviews
must always be as precursors to stating our own positions, not making them our
own.
Our
problem is always that we need to be like them in order to gain universal
appreciation. I think we can speak from here with tools from here about
materials from here and still acquire universal validity. Subaltern Studies did
this.
How do you explain the poverty of theory in
'African studies"?
Any
culture of writing and knowledge production emerges out of a specific moment or
inspiration. Ours was the Hegelian framing that gave us no history. We were
mere hostages to nature, mere moments in the Eurasian passages through space.
Even nature (especially the wild) had history. We did not, unless we were part
of the wild (hence my ambivalence about the concept of ‘nature’ or ‘the
animal’). So it had to be a social history and anthropology searching for
empirical evidence, as much of it as possible, wherever it could be found, to
prove we had a history too.
My experience
of ‘philosophy’ in university was of a syllabus on Thucydides, Socrates, and
other foreign people—never about my ancestors’ proverbs and other idioms or
their technological achievements, like Great Zimbabwe which, in any case, had
been attributed to foreign construction. Until we take idioms generated from
here seriously ourselves, they will always be caricatures to and of others.
It
could be that the colonial system of education had no interest in making us
thinkers. Our failure to decolonize our education system and foster a new way
of training students to think and innovate, to be creative beings and not just
potential employees, to move beyond a system where we were supposed to be only
‘baas boys’, good only at taking instructions instead of thinking critical, is
the biggest liability we confront.
Spaces
for creative thinking must therefore be utilized wherever they may be found,
and our youth encouraged to take a kind of creative recklessness toward
received registers. Governments and universities can facilitate the creation of
these spaces. Africa’s vast intellectual
pool at home and abroad has enough networks now that could be marshaled into
spaces of intellectual ferment—right here on the continent.
Any thoughts about the future of critique in
Africa?
Originality
and self-belief will be critical as we move forward. It is as if we are not
confident to think we can stand on our own feet if we think and speak like
Africans and engage the outside as such. If we doubt ourselves, who will have
belief in us?
