The Epistemologies of the Natures of Nature

Sabelo Mcinziba

I could not have imagined a better position for Achille Mbembe to begin his talk on Climate Change and the book of the Apocalypse than the position of epistemologies of nature. He claims that the conceptions of nature the world-over are not and have not been the same. This Western conception of nature can be characterised as instrumental, that is, in the European conception, nature is seen as “a giant complex of equipment” whose relationship is significant as it owes its usefulness to human beings, human beings themselves not nature but nature as an external relation that must be understood in order to be dominated.

In contrast or alongside to the European conception of nature is the African conception of nature – specifically West and Central Africa, with particular emphasis to the latter. This conception of nature is said to be located in the forest where nature is considered as a living organism which not only shapes the modes of thought in “life force” or vitalism but is also seen as a self-arising event and gift. Quite importantly was the argument made about the finitude of the physical environment as a Western conception and how the African idea is that of perpetual metamorphosis of life from one form to another, therefore rendering ideas such as ‘end of the world’ or ‘death’ of as a final stage mutually unintelligible. To this followed the conclusion that our understanding of nature as it stands today is a result of a certain epistemology of the world, to spell the obvious, the West’s.

Viewed from this perspective, there could be very little disagreement with this conclusion as it really tells the story of the world as the ‘battle of epistemologies’ between European gnosis and bodies of knowledge from other parts of the world. These battles have been ranging from economic and political governance and thought, spiritual rationalization, medicinal diagnosis and practice, forms of artistic expression, aesthetics of the physique, and so on.  As noted by Achille himself that this is a mere introduction to the characterizations of nature by Africa and Europe and in reality are not all that simplistic, they still leave us with a few potentially problematic understandings of both epistemologies.

On the first, one could ask whether the ‘instrumentalization’ of nature has not been useful to better the life of humans world-over if not the only constant practice that has allowed humans to move from the different Ages of our history. Europe, in this minimal regard, is no different from the rest of humans in all other parts of the world, perhaps the sharp distinction that even allows us to pointedly differentiate between the epistemologies of the nature of nature among humans is the development of capitalism in Europe. As capitalism developed, so did ideas to rationalise this environment and something akin to a body of thought developed, highlighted by the so-called Enlightenment. In Africa, before Europe developed Capitalism and as it was developing capitalism, the environment of social organisation was vastly different. Generally, being a place of historical abundance, Africa will have had as it did a different rationalization of its environment and how its humans think of themselves in relation to the environment vis-a-vis their European counterparts. Indeed, many Africans will confirm what Achille was asserting as the rationale of perpetual metaphormosis and that nature is a gift tied with the spiritual and cultural ways of existence. As delivered by Achille, and given that it was an introductory feature of his talk, it risks leaving itself open to criticism that Africans have never used nature instrumentally – and of course we know this not to be the case as Africans were the first humans and consequently the first manipulators of rock/stone into then complex tools and technologies that were useful to people at the time. The visit to the Origins Centre at Wits further crystallized this.

I think what ought to be taken strongly from Achille’s characterization of nature from the perspective of Africa and Europe is the cautionary tone against this radical instrumentalization of nature by humans under the shadow of capitalism brought to African life by colonization and colonialism. As a philosophy (capitalism) operating from a rationale of scarcity of resources and the finitude of the physical world, and through its global reach as a result of colonialism and universalization of its local realities, it makes (contextual) sense for Europe to build its epistemology of the nature of nature based on this ontology (“dark age/s” in Europe). As indicated, this epistemology of the nature of nature could not have emerged in Africa because the ontology of Africans was quite different and in fact its fertility and abundance (as opposed to scarcity) was the very drive for its colonization and appropriation for European needs and purposes. With much emphasis again, this is not to impress that the African epistemology would not allow for the usage of nature for the ends of humans (whilst it remains a gift), but the sharp distinction being that of orientation between Europe and Africa. Achille’s criticism takes place from the viewpoint of the South, particularly Africa, and it is situated in a world where one body of knowledge has had almost vanquishing power over another.

Africa itself being the victim of the most vicious form of capitalist labour exploitation, land and resources, human displacement and so forth, the epistemologies dominant in Africa have been those of a Eurocentric interpretation, including in the climate change debate, and the systematic organization of knowledge/s in Africa today through the university.

The university in Africa today struggles to theorise from the position of the South, as the framework of learning and thinking in Africa today is only such by geographical demarcations. This was clearest when Achille discussed the issue of the apocalypse, particularly as a Western concept, specifically a monotheistic one, perhaps more accurately to locate that monotheistic rationale squarely in Judeo-Christian thought. While it is true that there is no understanding of an apocalyptic event (Judgment Day/Hell) in the African epistemological framework but a perpetual metamorphosis of living organisms, it must also be recognised that that made more sense when Africans controlled what happened in their natural as well as social environment. In the age of Euro-American hegemony, where the ‘battle of epistemologies’ has been to the defeat of Africa, the university in Africa today cannot even thoroughly critique the West outside of Western thought and mannerism. The reality that Africa is experiencing now, is an experience forced onto Africa by Euro-American hegemonic forces and the real challenge for Africa today and the rest of the colonized world is build epistemology from ontology and more importantly that that ontology must emerge out of Africa’s own determination. Until the epistemologies from the formerly oppressed peoples of the world: racially, gender-based, queer, working class, etc. have power to their knowledge and an articulation of difference without the temptation to interpret difference hierarchically therefore justifying domination can we move towards a more humane existence.

Sabelo Mcinziba

Reflections on why I did not squirm

Achille Mbembe kicked off the JWTC 2012 ‘Futures of Nature’ workshop with a lecture entitled Climate Change and the Book of the Apocalypse. To begin, he sketched for us two caricatures of ‘life’: that of a certain Western ‘instrumental’ concept of nature and another from equatorial Africa, for which nature is understood as deep interconnections between a multitude of beings. For some, this introduction was a bit uncomfortable: seeming to reproduce notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that anthropology has tried so hard to move beyond. This led us into a discussion centered around epistemological differences, which I won't get into here.

My own listening took me somewhere a bit different: the so-called ontological turn in anthropology which has destabilized a universal notion of nature and put forth a world organized by ontological difference rather than cultural difference. From his introduction, Mbembe continued on to make two points. First, he argued for plurality and the need for anthropologists to “deal with multitude of archives.” Second, Mbembe weaved in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses’ and the ways in which humans are part of natural life, that is are ‘species.’ This points to a need to rethink ‘the human’ and ‘human-nature’ relations. In the end, Mbembe’s argument joins others who have called for an ‘anthropology of life’ as way of approaching questions of climate change. To me, this was an ontological argument: asking us to consider the entanglement of our multiple ways of inhabiting the world. In Mbembe’s words: “A world of signification becomes visible for humans to experience.” Similarly calling for an ‘anthropology of life,’ Eduardo Kohn, has suggested a ‘semiotics of life’: that is (as I remember) a treatment of sign processes as part of all life forms, not just humans communication.

Another topic was raised in the discussion was that of ‘local’ knowledges or imaginaries. Here, my thoughts travelled to the work of Hugh Raffles who put forth the idea of ‘intimate knowledge’ collapsing the geographically-bound conceptions of ‘local’ for an idea of nature as something lived, something of which
we are a part, something we are caught up in, and
which is mediated by other places, needs, desires, practices, memories. Again I emphasize [perhaps over-emphasize] the ontological: the challenge, it seems, as we continue to discuss the futures of nature, is not only to shift the ways in which we approach nature, but how these various ontological orientations, then, encounter each other. How do we approach and address sites of ‘friction’ (to borrow from Anna Tsing)? How can rendering ontological difference be brought to bear in debates of land rights, conservation, resource extraction, and development?

Significantly, Mbembe emphasized in his lecture that these encounters are not confined to questions of space but also time. Our ‘horizons of responsibility’ are temporal as well as spatial. Our future(s) is(are) already present – as is, of course, our pasts. According to Mbembe, imagination and possibility have a particular role to play in addressing the futures of nature. In his words, it is through “wonder and awe that understanding of nature becomes a possibility.” And so I end this post by posing a question to all you dear readers: what is the place of wonder and possibility in critical theory? Daston and Clark, in their history of wonder, lead me to ask what if we think of ‘wonder’ as an ontological orientation as well as a cognitive one? To me there seems to be a need to think about ways of dealing with and inhabiting the world – even if/when we don’t fully understand or 'know' it.

Joella Bitter

Anthropology, New School.

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.

Living in a Critical Position - part one

JWTC interviews David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)

Ten years ago, you initiated a new project called SECT. What were the reasons behind this new initiative, what is its current state and where is it going?

SECT (the summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory) was born of a double imperative: one intellectual and the other fiscal. Critical Theory early in the 21st century already appeared to be facing challenges. The trajectory that ran from the Frankfurt School through Foucault, Derrida, and others seemed to be winding down. It had also attended to questions of the colonial, postcolonial, and racial at best as secondary and clichéd concerns, oftentimes if at all. So I was looking for a way, a forum, to animate intellectual engagement around these sets of issues that for me have been socially constitutive, and so imperative. Forums like the School of Criticism and Theory seemed still caught up in this older esteemed paradigm. On the West Coast we were seeking to open a space of engagement around these issues (it is interesting to note that the School of Criticism and Theory actually started on the Irvine campus by the same folks who had initiated UCHRI before moving to Cornell). At the same time, the University of California was facing recessionary budget cuts (which turned out to be the first and perhaps least severe of a series of such cuts over the decade) which threatened to cut into UCHRI's operating university budget. So I was looking for a forum that at the very least would fund itself. I began a conversation with Ken Reinhard at UCLA and out of that grew the first SECT, which focused on psychoanalysis and politics with the likes of Badiou, Zizek, Joan Copjek and Zizek's Slovenian colleagues, Alenka Stepancek and Mladen Dolar, among others. It gave me the organizational model even as it perpetuated something of the older model's avoidance of the issues I was concerned to bring into critical play. The second SECT accordingly turned to biopolitics, race, and empire. And the model worked quite marvelously.

Four years ago we took two additional and somewhat related turns. We had run two-week summer seminars over five years at the Institute in Irvine. In a sense it was becoming too easy, too rote, less challenging, a bit safe and stale. The "experimental" in "experimental critical theory" was tending to the predictable. Globalization, after all, is not just a uni-directional set of movements, of sitting at home and watching the world come to one. I was concerned to ask how the critical questions we pose as well as the responses to them might shift provocatively and revealingly if we pursued a SECT elsewhere in the world. I had been to Shanghai for a conference at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and thought that would be a really dynamic site. My close friend and colleague, Ackbar Abbas, and his partner, Liu Sola, the wonderful avant garde composer, singer, and writer, put us in conversation with the Beijing avant garde, artists like Ai Wei Wei, Liu Dan and Xu Bing as well as filmmaker Ning Ying and so on, and over two years we put together what became a really provocative summer institute in Shanghai focusing on questions of "design." This then opened up a way of partnering with different institutional sites globally, leading to collaborative engagements in Beirut this summer, as well as future possibilities in Mexico City, Bangalore, India, possibly South Africa. The larger theoretical frame pulling these sites together is what I have designated "living in a critical condition," how the conventional relations between global south and global north are upended when one thinks along these lines, how this way of posing things leads to genuinely new engagements and insights. The work we are doing around "epistemologies of deception" has emerged directly out of these collaborative interactions.

The upcoming engagement with Bangalore--and here Nishant Shah, co-founding director of Bangalore's Center for Internet and Society, has been instrumental--speaks to the other direction in which things have moved. At UCHRI we have been deeply engaged with questions of the digital, and how digital connectivities in all their complex dimensions transform not just relationality but knowledge making, learning, and social practices more broadly. We have a thread running through SECT engaging these questions, from the third SECT in Irvine to our summer institute focusing on the contributions of the Pacific Rim to these transformations we conducted in Hawai'i last year, to the forthcoming engagements in India. Here the interest is exactly at the interface of the technological and epistemological, the cultural and the critical, power and the political.

How would you characterize the current moment in the field of 'critical theory' in the North?

As I hinted at above, the prevailing trajectory of critical theory in the North through the latter half of the twentieth century, as crucially important as that has been, seems to have run its course. Perhaps that is to be expected, as conditions have so dramatically shifted since at least the end of the 1980s both politically and technologically. It is perhaps revealing that the prevailing questions to which critical theory in this trajectory have turned in the past decade have concerned the Event, the universal, and affect. There have been some curious developments of late in response to this sense of exhaustion. One has been a return among traditionalists in the humanities to formalism. The journal Representations coming out of Berkeley was quite prescient a year or so back in identifying this turn in a special issue. This turn to formalism, a re-turn, has been prompted both by the perceived exhaustion of those pursuits identified with poststructuralism (most notably but not only deconstruction) as well as by the less noticed impact on  intellectual dispositions of the rapid and dramatic turn to the digital. The other has been the very recent attention--in many cases by those who until now have paid no attention other than dismissively--to issues of race. This latter turn (also a re-turn) is a little odd: just as conventional socialities and politics declare the moment of postraciality, some of our colleagues suddenly discover the racial, and do so with just about no engagement with the voluminous work that has been done on these issues over the past two plus decades.

In general, then, I would say we are in a moment of constitutive unsettlement in critical theory, where the old has exhausted itself but the new, the futures of these pasts, have not yet been born, are in the process of a difficult birth. Perhaps we should expect just this. Troubled times produce troubled, and often troubling responses. Some desperately hold on to what they know, what has made them comfortable; others grope for anchors, grabbing onto flotsam they barely comprehend; and some again experience the unsettlement, the shifting ground beneath our feet, as openings, possibilities to rethink not just what is happening around us but the very terms of self-understanding, and do so finding help from bits and pieces of the critical archive without feeling the need for uncritical deference to the entire project other pieces of which no longer fit our current condition. This latter mode is what some of us--notably my colleagues Ackbar Abbas and Kavita Philip--as a theory about theory, have been calling "poor theory". 

Four developments in the wake of all of this are revealing. The recent slew of work--in too many instances just fashionable repetition--around precarity/precariousness has in its most compelling formulations importantly sought to reach beyond the impasses of conventional theoretical developments. I think most notably of Judith Butler's work here. The second has been the considerable output on issues in political theology, which has slowed down of late. Here there were two or three directions, revealing of the impasses of critical theory currently. First, there was much the most voluminous of work around issues of secualrism. As important as this was, it quickly became repetitive. The second concerned issues of sovereignty which shifted how we thought about political theory more generally. That too seems to have run its course, though left critical theory in a different if still troubled state. And the third concerned a deep rethinking of the history of philosophical thinking, something which is ongoing and likely to have a much more lasting impact on critical theory. I think here, among others, of not just Butler's work but of the ongoing contributions of Achille Mbembe, Ackbar Abbas, Saba Mahmood, and so on.

The third set of critical foci has concerned a theorizing of neoliberalism in all its varieties and impacts. Foucault's lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics was formative here, and more recently Wendy Brown's seminal contributions have been crucial. In all three cases, the impact of the postcolonial has been more or less visibly important. It has been only partly so in the case of the fourth focus, which has been the important emergence of science and technology studies, a fast developing formation obviously prompted by the enormous shift in dominant knowledge production to the overriding concerns of science and technology. Here Bruno Latour's work has been formative but there have been really interesting recent developments around postcolonial science studies which will have long lasting shape-shifting impacts on knowledge formation and ultimately on critical theorizing.

On final thought here. The way in which interests have shifted so quickly, prevailing objects of critical knowledge have emerged and dissipated with alarming speed, seems to mirror modes of political economy, patterns of consumptive fashion. This too should trouble critical theory.