Arquivo da tag: Ontologias

Heidegger and Geology (Public Seminar)

McKenzie Wark

June 26th, 2014

A small, handmade green book mysteriously appeared in my New School mail slot, with the intriguing title: The Anthropocene, or “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.” 

Its author is Woodbine, which turns out to be an address in Brooklyn where the texts in this small book were first presented. (The texts, and information about this interesting project, can also be found here and here). I have never been to Woodbine, but good things seem to be happening there.

I read the book on the way home to Queens from the New School, on the subway. As it turns out this was a fitting place to be reading these very interesting texts, passing through geological strata.

Whenever I raise the Anthropocene with humanities-trained people, their first instinct is to critique it as a concept. It’s hard to buck that liberal arts and grad school training, but it’s an impulse to resist. It’s time to rethink the whole project of ‘humanist culture’, to which even us card-carrying anti-humanists still actually belong.

The Woodbine text makes some useful advances in that direction. But for me I think the project now is not to apply the old grad school bag o’tricks to the Anthropocene, but rather to apply the Anthropocene to a root-and-branch rethinking of how we make knowledge outside the sciences and social sciences.

Woodbine: “The naming of the Anthropocene comes not to announce humankind’s triumph but rather its exhaustion.” (3) This disposes with the most idiotic criticism of the Anthropocene, that it is ‘hubris’ to raise up the human to such a power that it could name a geological age. The Anthropocene actually does something very different. Its not the old rhetoric of a Promethean triumph over nature, but rather poses the question: “How are we to live in a ruin?” (4)

The geologist Paul Crutzen has succinctly listed the signs of the Anthropocene: deforestation, urbanization, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity and climate change. He thinks collective human labor is starting to transform the very lithosphere itself. Woodbines modulates this a bit, calling this “the Anthropocene biopolitical epoch.” (15) But that’s where I think the radical import of the Anthropocene gets lost. Those trained in the humanities are besotted with the idea of politics, attributing all sorts of magical agency to it. But really, up against the lithosphere, politics may be as uselessly superstructural as fine art, or as imaginary as the Gods of the religions.

Woodbine engagingly calls Marx ‘Captain Anthropocene.’ He is perhaps one of our great witness-conceptualizers about the moment when the Anthropocene really accelerated: “Proletarianizing us, as Marx called it, didn’t just separate us from our conditions of existence: it literally recreated how we live, setting up walls against any other way of living.” (12) Collective social labor made a second nature, over and against nature, but in part also alienating the human from that which produced it.

As I have argued elsewhere, the historical response to this has been to erect a third nature, over and against second nature, to overcome its alienating effects – but in the process producing new ones. That’s where we are now, with the growing disenchantment with the internet and all that.

Crisis is a tricky concept, as my New School colleague Janet Roitman ably explains in her book Anti-Crisis. If there’s no crisis then how can the critical be made to work? The self interest of the latter requires the perception of the former. As somebody once said, to a critic with a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.

The Anthropocene might subtly modulate the old rhetoric of crisis. Woodbine: “with the Anthropocene, the catastrophe is here in the form of the age itself, meaning our entire civilization, and its requisite way of life, is already a ruin.” (18) Crisis is not a thing or event in the world, it is the world.

This would be the profound shock of Crutzen’s provocation, that crisis is not merely political or even economic, but geological. Woodbine: “It’s crazy, like we’re reading Heidegger in the annals of the geological societies!” (19) Actually, here is where I would want to dissent from the Woodbine text. It is not that one finds Heidegger in the geological annals, but the reverse. Heidegger is only of any interest to the extent that one finds the geological in his thought, unrecognized.

It is striking how much of the grad school canon lets us down when it comes to the Anthropocene. It’s disorienting. Things once safely left unaddressed cannot be depended on. Latour: “to live in the Anthropocene is to live in a declared state of war.” But one has to ask whether Latour’s recent discovery of the Anthropocene is really all that consistent with his past work, which seems to me to concede too much to the vanity of humanists. It was only ever about part- or quasi- objects. It never really made the leap of recognizing the weakness of its own methods. Latour was a half-way house, a holding operation. As Donna Haraway pointed out a long time ago, Latour still has a thing for stories about great men waging great conflicts.

For Woodbine, the Anthropocene is the scene of a “metaphysical war.” (21) But it might be more interesting to think this the other way around. What if metaphysics was nothing more than a displaced echo of the Anthropocene? Metaphysics is not an essential key to it. Metaphysics is rather one of the pollutants. Metaphysics is just the off-gassing of the Anthropocene.

Let’s pause, too, over the war metaphor, so beloved of the cold war decision sciences. We need a new imaginary of the relation.

Still, Woodbine does get some mileage out of the dust of the old concepts. There is surely a crisis of state at the moment. The link between rationality and governance can no longer be finessed, it is finally abandoned. Governments become ad hoc reaction machines. Its what I call the spectacle of disintegration, where the state can (1) no longer orient itself in an historical time, (2) is now deceiving itself, and not just its subjects, and (3) wears out and fragments all of the ideological detritus that once sustained at least the illusion that state and history were one.

This is where Woodbine is right to point to the rhetorical figure of ‘resilience’ as a salient one. It’s a rejection of the old mastery trope. No longer is the state the collective subject of history bending the objects of nature to a collective will. Rather, it’s a rhetoric of connecting what were once objects and subjects together in webs and nets in constant flux. Now it’s all feedback loops and recursive, adaptive systems. At least in theory. For now in actuality, power is just disintegrating. Its new militarization is a sign of its lack of confidence. The game is up.

Woodbine chooses here a local, New York example. MoMA organized a show, just after the housing bubble burst, called Rising Currents. The brief was for architects and planners to show how the city (actually mostly Manhattan and the cool bits of Brooklyn) could be more resilient. One project imagines a restoration of the old oyster beds that used to dot the foreshores, as a kind of eco- econo- climate resilience virtuous circle.

When I heard someone not unconnected to Woodbine present this part of the Woodbine text at the Historical Materialism conference, the oyster bed project was met with hoots of laughter. But to me this just shows how alienated humanities-trained people are from design and urban planning as kinds of practice. It’s so much harder to even imagine what one might build in the Anthropocene than to divine its concept. And particularly hard to even imagine what one could build that would scale, that would work for the seven billion.

“The Anthropocene provides the urgency to draw together previously unrelated knowledges, practices, and technologies into a network of relation….” (26-27) One might struggle for and against certain forms such networks might take, or even as to whether they are really going to be ‘networks’ (that word which in our time is both ideological and yet so real). Maybe we would rather be infuriating swarms or packs than networks.

Woodbine: “In the Anthropocene, the critical gesture is finished. New Land, new horizons. Everything is to be reinvented.” (28) One might not want to put it in too declarative a style, but yes indeed. Perhaps its time to get to work re-inventing what humanities knowledge might be, and with what it connects, and how it connects.

The actual culture may be way ahead of us. On the one hand, the Anthropocene is the cultural unconscious. Every movie and tv show is about it, whether it knows it or not. We are “living in this end without end, an exhausted civilization dreams its apocalypse anew each morning…” (32) But a certain paralysis results from this.

Woodbine has a good analysis of this. The apocalypse means to uncover, reveal. For the messianic sects that arose out of Rome in decline, apocalyptic time was unidirectional and teleological. Things are in a state of incompletion. The meaning of the fragments around about one lies in the anticipation of the revealing of their unit. “As a result of this anticipation of an eschatological event through which things and beings will be saved from their decrepitude, the whole of reality is derealized. The disenchantment of the world has closely followed this strange derealization of the real…” (39) This is the problem: the apocalypse disconnects us from the world. As for that matter does the communist horizon, that partly secularized version of the temporal logic of apocalypse.

In this perspective, empire is that which holds back the purifying apocalypse. But in our time, apocalypse has been desacralized. It no longer promises redemption. Resilience is government under conditions of constant apocalypse. It’s a temporality which disperses apocalypse, but also takes away its redeeming power. It is to be endured. There’s no revelation imminent. “If we can understand Rome as catechon, warding off a single catastrophe in space and time (Armageddon), resilience multiplies and diffuses this structure across the whole globe…” (49) Salvation is unthinkable, resilience is all about survival.

And yet, curiously, resilience “maintains the homogenous time of a government without end.” (50) Empire wants to think it is not that which impedes the apocalypse which reveals meaning in its totality, after time breaks. Empire today wants to think it can be rubbery enough to be ‘sustainable’, to pass through multiple crises, but keep a homogenous, spectacular time ticking over. Power gets it that the old subject as master of the object ontology has to go, but strangely still maintains a universal homogenous time of petty and baseless things and their wondrous ‘networks.’

That, I think, is a wonderfully distilled analysis. I read Woodbine as wanting to reanimate the messianic rather than abandoning this whole conceptual tar pit. Hence: “Inhabiting the messianic means no longer waiting for the end of the world.” (55) The project is one of transforming lived time. The messianic becomes a practice of the here and now, a practice that might restore a shattered world, that restore being: “we must inhabit the desert.” (57)

There’s a Deleuzian note here, from the cinema books, for example, about believing in the world. “To enter messianic time is to believe in the world, in its possibilities of movement and intensities, and to create worlds.” (58) But as Woodbine acknowledges, this is worse than collapse of Rome. If it’s a ‘crisis’ it is not one that happens in time, it is rather a crisis of time.

Perhaps the worn-out old names so endlessly recycled in grad school are not going to be of much help to us. Are we really expecting, that if time appears now in a very new way, that those who survived the old time and became those who marked its tempo are going to talk about a time not their own? What if Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt had nothing to say about the Anthropocene? When did humanists become the arch-conservatives? Insisting on ever occasion that the answers are always in the same old books? And always the same answers, no matter what the question.

On the one hand, it might be more interesting to pay attention to the organic intellectuals emerging out of more or less consciously Anthropocene practices. Woodbine thinks these are in two categories. Firstly, there’s the insurrections and occupations. Secondly, there’s the cultures of hacking, prepping, modding, which are often not ‘political’ in any overt sense, but which tend to have a firm notion that we need new practices of engaging with the world.

Woodbine wants to think insurrection and occupation as having an almost spiritual dimension. But perhaps the driver of the dissolution of legitimate political form really is going to be the food riot, as it was so often in the past as well. Here I want a much more vulgar read on Marx than Woodbine. We’re going to have to get our hands at least conceptually dirty.

Thinking alongside the organic intellectuals who are hacking and modding the interfaces to the old infrastructure strikes me as a necessary project. I agree with Benjamin Bratton that the question of our time is (as I hear him phrase it, at least): can the infrastructure of the old world produce a qualitatively new infrastructure? But thinking that problem would require a much wider collaboration among forms of knowledge and practice than I think Woodbine is prepared to entertain. It is not the case that only the Gods can save us.

The discourse of the humanities revels in the qualitative, and wants to see only the good side of the qualitative and the bad side of quantitative knowledge, viz: “To be able to judge a situation, or a being, you must introduce some standard of measurement, and hence reduce a living, breathing fullness to an abstracted mass of equivalents. A subject or an object is thus the stripped bare life that can be replaced.” (74)

The problem with this is that it doesn’t follow. There’s no necessary link between measuring something and thinking it replaceable. Climate science, as quantitative knowledge, is counter-factual example enough. On the other hand, the qualitative, as that which makes distinctions, is perfectly capable of making distinctions between who or what matters and what doesn’t, and is replaceable. ‘Bare life’, after all, is a Roman legal category, which has nothing to do with quantification.

Hence I am not too convinced that salvation alone lies in reworking a kind of affirmative ontology: “Whatever singularity is simply the inhabiting, really inhabiting, of the being that we already are…” (75) Rather, the problem might be the very notion that a philosophy can have such magical properties, if only one gets the incantation right. If philosophy was ever going to save us, it would have done so by now.

Most of our theories, it seems now in the Anthropocene, are not keys or tools, but rather symptoms. They are more part of the problem than the solution. I see no difference between keeping the Heidegger industry going and keeping the coal-fired power industry going. Except that the former has even more tenacious apologists.

But I like the Woodbine texts. I salute their attention to what matters. Theory has to know what time it is. Its time is the Anthropocene.

Um surto etnológico (OESP)

30 de abril de 2014 | 2h 07

Roberto Damatta – O Estado de S.Paulo

Um escritor advertia que o personagem central de um texto é o leitor. Sigo o conselho e explico o meu título: surto significa arrebatamento, transporte, rapto. Etnológico diz respeito ao estudo de sociedades tidas como “selvagens” ou “primitivas” porque não tinham escrita, desconheciam uma tecnologia onipotentemente destrutiva, sua sabedoria estava na cabeça de um punhado de idosos e, eis um escândalo: não cobriam seus corpos.

Discutiu-se se tinham alma e imaginou-se que habitavam uma variante do Éden, mas a convivência – essa rotina que transforma presidentes em donos de quitanda e deputados em canalhas logo mostrou que os “primitivos” eram humanos como nós e, como dizia Mark Twain, não pode haver nada pior do que ser um homem.

Surtado, perambulei pelas minhas notas de campo, escritas entre 1961 e a primeira quadra de 1970, quando vivi intermitentemente nas aldeias dos povos gaviões e apinaiés, falantes da língua jê. Na estação atual da minha vida, senti saudade de mim mesmo e fui em busca dos meus 20 e poucos anos, quando tinha uma letra bonita; e não havia experimentado sofrimento, morte e perigo. Sabia de sua existência, mas essas coisas não tocavam meu coração (que era maior do que o mundo) nem os planos de marcar a profissão que abracei com entusiasmo inocente e alucinado.

Queria descobrir se eu havia deixado passar em branco aquilo que meus colegas mais jovens haviam elaborado debaixo da liderança intelectual de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a quem eu dedico essa pequena memória.

Viveiros de Castro é um raro mestre pensador. Num ensaio de grande alcance intelectual, ele formulou uma relação que havia passado despercebida, a saber: no universo dos indígenas americanos, o denominador comum entre os seres vivos não era a natureza, mas a cultura.

Para nós, a humanidade é o centro definitivo e absoluto de consciência e vontade, mas não é assim entre os índios. Para eles, ser humano é um modo de ser entre outros. Talvez seja o mais visível, mas não é o mais central ou definitivo como dizem as cosmologias mais conhecidas e mais influentes, as quais asseveram que o ato final da criação são os humanos. Entre os ameríndios não há sete dias que culminam no Homem. Há uma multidão de narrativas reveladoras que as diferenças entre homens, bichos e plantas não é de substância.

Vejam o contraste. Do nosso ponto de vista, a sociedade humana é a herdeira de toda a criação. Homens, animais e plantas se unem pela sua “natureza” física. No mais, são radicalmente diferenciados, pois foi apenas a humanidade que recebeu o sopro divino.

Entre os “índios”, porém, a humanidade é um modo de ser, estar e perceber, entre outros. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro cunhou o conceito de “perspectivismo” para designar esses outros modos de enxergar a vida. Os mortos, os animais, as plantas e os fenômenos naturais seriam outras formas ou possibilidades de vivenciar a subjetividade que não seria algo exclusivo do humano.

Neste sentido, os mitos não são criações destinadas a explicar o inexplicável. São testemunhos de que somos parte de um imenso todo capaz de se comunicar o qual, em momentos memoráveis, se dividiu em entidades com uma aparência diferenciada, mas todas dotadas da capacidade de comunicação. Como pode adivinhar o leitor, tal reencontro se faz por meio de rituais ou em situações especiais – acima de tudo quando o ser (seja humano ou bicho) passa por um estado de extremada individualidade e solidão.

Consultando e lendo minhas notas de décadas passadas, colhidas na obstinação dos meus verdes anos, encontro muitas informações sobre animais. Esses atores fundamentais dos mitos que logram ou são logrados por algum humano e que, os meus professores nativos, repetiam para ouvidos moucos que eles eram iguais a nós e nos doaram o que sabemos.

Hoje, graças ao trabalho de Tania S. Lima, Aparecida Vilaça e Carlos Fausto – revejo meus dados e descubro como sol e lua, as estrelas, o sapo, os morcegos, o beija-flor e outros bichos são como nós e nós como eles. Eis um universo absolutamente relacional. Nele, ninguém tem o direito de ultrapassar um certo limite porque não há limites, mas modos de ser. Quanto a nós, que inventamos e legitimamos a “civilização” através da tecnologia (do uso dos talheres à bomba atômica), há muito vazamos todas as fronteiras.

Afinal, somos inventores e compradores de automóveis e, pior que isso, de refinarias.

(Se o surto continuar, eu continuo na próxima semana.)

Life in Code and Software (livingbooksaboutlife.org)

LivingCodeSoftwareCover.jpg

Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology
ISBN: 978-1-60785-283-4
edited by David M. Berry

Contents

Introduction: What is Code and Software?

This book explores the relationship between living, code and software. Technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment. Indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies, that we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world. That is, we live in a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, or ontological, which I call computationality, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing. Such that other candidates for this role, such as: air, the economy, evolution, the environment, satellites, etc., are understood and explained through computational concepts and categories. (more…)

Thinking Software

Eric W. Weisstein 
What is a Turing Machine?
David Barker-Plummer 
Turing Machines
Achim Jung 
A Short Introduction to the Lambda Calculus
Luciana Parisi & Stamatia Portanova 
Soft Thought (in architecture and choreography)
David M. Berry 
Understanding Digital Humanities
Edsger W. Dijkstra 
Go To Statement Considered Harmful
Alan M. Turing 
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Martin Gardner 
The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway’s New Solitaire Game ‘Life’
David Golumbia 
Computation, Gender, and Human Thinking
Alan M. Turing 
Extract from On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem

Video of a Turing Machine – Overview

Kevin Slavin 
How Algorithms Shape Our World

Video shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture.

Code Literacy (‘iteracy’)

David M. Berry 
Iteracy: Reading, Writing and Running Code
Ian Bogost 
Procedural Literacy: Problem Solving with Programming, Systems, & Play
Cathy Davidson 
Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms
Jeannette M. Wing 
Computational Thinking
Stephan Ramsay 
On Building
Edsger W. Dijkstra 
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science
Louis McCallum and Davy Smith 
Show Us Your Screens

A short documentary about live coding practise by Louis McCallum and Davy Smith.

Jeannette M. Wing 
Computational Thinking and Thinking About Computing’

Wing argues that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, she adds computational thinking to everyones’ analytical ability.

why the lucky stiff 
Hackety Hack: Learning to Code

why the lucky stiff (or _why) is a computer programmer, talking about learning to code.

Decoding Code

David M. Berry 
A Contribution Towards a Grammar of Code
Mark C. Marino 
Critical Code Studies
Lev Manovich 
Software Takes Command
Dennis G. Jerz 
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
Aleksandr Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov, David Harley, and Juraj Malcho, J. 
Stuxnet Under the Microscope
Ralph Langner 
Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century Cyber Weapon

A fascinating look inside cyber-forensics and the processes of reading code to understand how it works and what it attacks.

Stephen Ramsay 
Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools

A short film on livecoding presented as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group, March 2010, by Stephen Ramsay. Presents a “live reading” of a performance by composer Andrew Sorensen.

Wendy Chun 
Critical Code Studies

Wendy Chun giving a lecture on code studies and reading source code.

Federica Frabetti 
Critical Code Studies

Federica Frabetti giving a lecture on code studies and reading source code.

David M. Berry 
Thinking Software: Realtime Streams and Knowledge in the Digital Age

As software/code increasingly structures the contemporary world, curiously, it also withdraws, and becomes harder and harder for us to focus on as it is embedded, hidden, off-shored or merely forgotten about. The challenge is to bring software/code back into visibility so that we can pay attention to both what it is (ontology/medium), where it has come from (media archaeology/genealogy) but also what it is doing (through a form of mechanology), so we can understand this ‘dynamic of organized inorganic matter’.

Software Ecologies

Gabriella Coleman 
The Anthropology of Hackers
Felix Guattari 
The Three Ecologies
Robert Kitchin 
The Programmable City
Bruno Latour 
The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts- A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads
Mathew Fuller and Sonia Matos 
Feral Computing: From Ubiquitous Calculation to Wild Interactions
Jussi Parikka 
Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
David Gelernter 
Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously
Adrian Mackenzie 
The Problem of Computer Code: Leviathan or Common Power?
Adrian Mackenzie 
Wirelessness as Experience of Transition
Thomas Goetz 
Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Pold 
The Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous Computing: The Experience, Poetics, and Politics of Public Scripted Space
B.J. Fogg, Gregory Cuellar, and David Danielson 
Motivating, Influencing, and Persuading Users
Alexander R. Galloway 
“Deleuze and Computers” – Alexander R. Galloway

“Deleuze and Computers” – a lecture by Alexander R. Galloway at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on December 2nd, 2011.

Gary Wolf 
The Quantified Self

The notion of using computational devices in everyday life to record everything about you.

Gary Kovacs 
Tracking the Trackers

As you surf the Web, information is being collected about you.

Michael Najjar 
How Art Envisions Our Future

Data, information, computation, and technology mediated through art

Attributions

A ‘Frozen’ PDF Version of this Living Book

Download a ‘frozen’ PDF version of this book as it appeared on 13th July 2012

The Ontological Spin (culanth.org)

by Lucas Bessire and David Bond

In the second Commentary essay, Lucas Bessire and David Bond respond to the Theorizing the Contemporary series, “The Politics of Ontology,” edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen.

February 28, 2014

Bessire, Lucas and Bond, David . “The Ontological Spin.” Fieldsights – Commentary, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 28, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/494-the-ontological-spin

The latest salvation of anthropology, we are told, lies in the so-called ontological turn. By all accounts, it is a powerful vision (Sahlins 2013). The ontological turn is exciting in two ways: First, it offers a way to synthesize and valorize the discipline’s fractured post-humanist avant-garde (Descola 2013; Kohn 2013). Second, it shifts the progressive orientation in anthropology from the critique of present problems to the building of better futures (Latour 2013; Holbraad, Pederson, and Viveiros de Castro 2014; cf. White 2013). In both, the turn to ontology suggests that the work of anthropology has really just begun.

At the risk of oversimplifying a diverse body of research, here we ask how the ontological turn works as a problematic form of speculative futurism. While the symmetrical future it conjures up is smart, the turbulent present it holds at bay is something we would still like to know more about. Our skepticism derives from our respective fieldwork on the co-creation of indigenous alterity and on how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized. In both of these sites, we have documented dynamics that elude and unsettle the ontological script. Much, we would argue, is missed. We are troubled at how ontological anthropology defers thorny questions of historical specificity, the social afterlives of anthropological knowledge, and the kinds of difference that are allowed to matter. We are also concerned by the ultimate habitability of the worlds it conjures. Or consider nature and culture. In many places today, nature and culture matter not as the crumbling bastions of a modern cosmology (e.g., Latour 2002; Blaser 2009) but as hardening matrices for sorting out what forms of life must be defended from present contingencies and what must be set adrift. That is, nature and culture matter not as flawed epistemologies but as dispersed political technologies.

Ontological anthropology is fundamentally a story about the Amazonian primitive. It rests on the recent discovery of a non-modern “multinaturalist” ontology within indigenous myths (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Yet, as Terry Turner (2009) shows, the figure of this “Amerindian cosmology” is based on ethnographic misrepresentation. Kayapó myths, for instance, do not collapse nature/culture divides. Rather, the “whole point” is to describe how animals and humans became fully differentiated from one another, with one key twist: humanity is defined not as a collection of traits but as the capacity to objectify the process of objectification itself. In such ways, the attribution of this hyper-real cosmology paradoxically reifies the very terms of the nature/culture binary it is invoked to disprove.

At the very least, this means that ontological anthropology cannot account for those actually existing forms of indigenous worlding that mimetically engage modern binaries as meaningful coordinates for self-fashioning (Taussig 1987; Abercrombie 1998). This is certainly true in the case of recently-contacted Ayoreo-speaking peoples in the Gran Chaco. Ayoreo projects of becoming are not a cosmology against the state, but a set of moral responses to the nonsensical contexts of colonial violence, soul-collecting missionaries, radio sound, humanitarian NGOs, neoliberal economic policies, and rampant ecological devastation (Bessire 2014). Only by erasing these conditions could a “non-interiorizable” multinaturalist exteriority be identified. Doesn’t this suggest that ontological anthropology is predicated on homogenizing and standardizing the very multiplicity it claims to decolonize? What does it mean if ontological anthropology, in its eagerness to avoid the overdetermined dualism of nature/culture, reifies the most modern binary of all: the radical incommensurability of modern and non-modern worlds?

Charged with getting nature wrong, modernity is rejected out of hand in the ontological turn. While the West mistook Nature for an underlying architecture, indigenous people have long realized a more fundamental truth: the natural world is legion and lively. Yet this supposed distinction between modernity (mononaturalism) and the rest (multinaturalism) seems strangely illiterate of more nuanced accounts of the natural world within capitalist modernity (Williams 1980; Mintz 1986; Mitchell 2002). Attributing the pacification of nature’s vitality to the modern episteme neglects how colonial plantations, industrial farms and factories, national environmental policies, biotechnology companies, and disaster response teams have attempted, in creative and coercive ways, to manage the dispersed agencies of the natural world. The easy dismissal of modernity as mononaturalism disregards the long list of ways that particular format never really mattered in the more consequential makings of our present.

It is all the more ironic, then, that ontological anthropology uses climate change to spur a conversion away from the epistemic cage of modernity. We would do well to remember that, in the most concrete sense, modernity did not disrupt our planet’s climate, hydrocarbons did. Such fixation on modernity misses the far more complicated and consequential materiality of fossil fuels (Bond 2013). In the momentum they enable and in the toxicity they enact, hydrocarbons naturalize differences in new ways. Such petro-effects amplify existing fault lines not only in industrial cities but also in the premier fieldsites of ontological anthropology: the supposedly pristine hinterlands. In the boreal forests of the northern Alberta or in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin or in the snowy expanses of the arctic or in the dusty forests of the Gran Chaco, the many afterlives of hydrocarbons are giving rise to contorted landscapes, cancerous bodies, and mutated ecologies. Such problems form a “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that the spirited naturalism of ontological anthropology cannot register let alone resist.

These observations lead us to formulate the following three theses:

  1. First, the ontological turn replaces an ethnography of the actual with a sociology of the possible.
  2. Second, the ontological turn reifies the wreckage of various histories as the forms of the philosophic present, insofar as it imagines colonial and ethnological legacies as the perfect kind of village for forward thinking philosophy.
  3. Finally, the ontological turn formats life for new kinds of rule premised on a narrowing of legitimate concern and a widening of acceptable disregard, wherein the alter-modern worlds discovered by elite scholars provides redemptive inhabitation for the privileged few, while the global masses confront increasingly sharp forms and active processes of inequality and marginalization (Beck 1992; Harvey 2005; Appadurai 2006; Wacquant 2009; Stoler 2010; Agier 2011; Fassin 2012).

In conclusion, we argue that it is misleading to suggest anthropology must choose between the oppressive dreariness of monolithic modernity or the fanciful elisions of the civilization to come. Both options leave us flat-footed and ill-equipped to deal with the conditions of actuality in our troubled present (Fischer 2013; Fortun 2013). Instead, we insist on a shared world of unevenly distributed problems. This is a world of unstable and rotational temporalities, of semiotic and material ruptures, of unruly things falling apart and being reassembled. It is a world composed of potentialities but also contingencies, of becoming but also violence, wherein immanence is never innocent of itself (Biehl 2005; Martin 2009). In this world, we ask how the wholesale retreat to the ideal future may discard the most potent mode of anthropological critique; one resolutely in our present but not necessarily confined to it.

[This is a distilled version of a longer critical essay.]

References

Abercrombie, Tom. 1998. Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Agier, Michel. 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Polity.

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage.

Bessire, Lucas. 2014. Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Biehl, João. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blaser, Mario. 2009. “Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without Culture?” Cultural Studies 23, nos. 5–6: 873–96.

Bond, David. 2013. “Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment During the BP Oil Spill.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 694–715.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. 2013. “Double-Click: the Fables and Language Games of Latour and Descola; Or, From Humanity as Technological Detour to the Peopling of Technologies.” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

Fortun, Kim. 2013. “From Latour to Late Industrialism.” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.2014. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2002. War of the Worlds: What About Peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Martin, Emily. 2009. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. “Can the Mosquito Speak?” In Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, 19–53. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. Foreword to Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, xi–xiv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Terence. 2009. “The Crisis of Late Structuralism, Perspectivism and Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit and Bodiliness.” Tipití 7, no 1: 3–42.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivalism.”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3: 469–88.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

White, Hylton. 2013. “Materiality, Form, and Context: Marx contra Latour,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 4: 667–82.

Williams, Raymond. 1980. “Ideas of Nature.” In Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, 67–85. London: Verso.

Image credit: “Stars in Motion,” by Miguel Claro.

“Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise: The View From Technology (culanth.org)

by Debbora Battaglia and Rafael Antunes AlmeidaFebruary 24, 2014

[Citation: Battaglia, Debbora and Almeida, Rafael Antunes.”“Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise: The View From Technology.” Fieldsights – Commentary, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 24, 2014, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/493-otherwise-anthropology-otherwise-the-view-from-technology ]

In the first Commentary essay, Debbora Battaglia and Rafael Antunes Almeida respond to Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions,” from the Theorizing the Contemporary series, “The Politics of Ontology” published in January 2014.

“Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise

Recent thinking on the politics of ontology (Holbraad, et. al. 2013) invites commentary on the ontological sensibility of what Povinelli calls “an anthropology of the otherwise” (Povinelli 2011). In this paper, we are concerned to bring the domain of technology into the discussion, foregrounding possible implications of its impact on the “new turn” in political world-making discourse.

Overall, a politics of ontology recognizes the multiplicity of modes of existence and concretely enacted relations. This approach carries with it a commitment to a transfigurative ethnographic practice and “experimenting with the conceptual affordances present in a given body of materials.” In other words, the idea is to take native claims and experiment with them. The political axis here is about enabling difference to flourish against the coercive powers of sameness. In the authors’ words, “Domination is a matter of holding the capacity of difference under control” (Holbraad, et. al. 2013).

So where do we look for models that can appreciate that dimension of the project amenable to techniques of diplomacy—an artisanal zone of exchange that creates a value for non-stable design visions (Corsín Jiménez 2013; During 2002; Escobar 2012)? Where do we look to re-imagine mutual “apparatuses of welcoming” (Derrida 2002) that operate in conditions of technologically asymmetrical power relations? Or else to re-imagine modalities of resistance: contaminants to both beautiful and unbeautiful ontologies (cf. Jensen 2014; de la Cadena 2010)? Leenhardt’s (1979) classic description of conceptual and material tools deployed by Kanak in their dealings with colonizers exemplifies both. But things get further complicated when discussion turns to inter-species, human–machine relations, and alien otherwises and lifeworlds as we don’t yet know them.

By this route, we are positioned to invoke the idea of the onto-dispositif. The concept allies with Law and Evelyn’s (2013) notion of devices that create their own heterogeneous arrangements for relating, with the difference that it is a sensibility-engendering rather than an analytic device. Further, the onto-dispositif creates its own heterogeneousexchange protensions—prospecting for its own possible worlds and opening to things like Mars rovers and growing bioart sculptures alongside experiments on earthlings as understood by E.T./UFO believers (Antunes Almeida 2012; Battaglia 2006; Lepselter 2005), or more prosaically, mining machinery and A.I. “robots” studying our commercial preferences.

Inline_meerkcatAll these operations create space for intercession in recombinant worlding, whereby different onto-dispositifs can have different ways of relating—and different onto-politics. The issue is not other peoples’ anthropologies, but the possibilities for an anthropology of appreciating actions like hacking as a mode of relating for humans or nonhumans alike. Jensen (2014) alerts us to ethnography that “begins to look like small machines for intervening in this or that part of the world.” But “small machines” exist that intervene without regard for subject–object distinctions beyond their own interests: Google sampling “robots” only care about subjectivity in algorithmic terms. Cross-species anthropology gets into the same subject–object issues differently: Should a mammal who climbs a human to better scan a far horizon be conscripted into a project that turns on the value of “affection” (Candea 2010)?

Not always, but in some cases, yes—as Sá (2013) describes for the intersubjective relations between Muriquis and primatologists. Or has the ethnographer become primates’ “new technologies”? Google or our E.T. experimenters are taking us as resources, as in nonextractive ways mammals do (the meerkat in the image below), repurposing us to their goals—exposing our hackability.

That sites and operations of dominance are invariably of human design is no longer a given. Our appellations must be parsed more finely, our ears attuned to who or what is engendering value hierarchies, the sina qua non for any dominance to be understood as such—that is, as an undervaluation of something else within its particular ontological sensibility, or beyond it.

Our work, then, is to ask which devices and strategies are useful for crafting a diplomacy adequate to engage “the powers that be.” Onto-dispositifs that can create an interest in slowing down (Battaglia 2013), or in post-cyborgian “transaffection” (Haraway 2003), are cases in point for worlding in a new key. And here is what such a diplomacy might sound like, courtesy of Stefan Helmreich (see video below).

Reference List

Antunes Almeida, Rafael. 2012. “Do Conhecimento Tácito à Noção de Skill, ou Como Saber o Que é um Disco Voador.” Paper Presented at IX Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Estudios Sociales de La Ciencia y de la tecnología, México, Esocite.

Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 2006. E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Battaglia, Debbora. 2013. “Cosmic Exo-Surprise, or When the Sky is (Really) Falling, What’s the Media to Do?” e-flux 46.

Candea, Matei. 2010. “I Fell in Love With Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2: 241–58.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2013. “Introduction—The Prototype: More Than Many and Less Than One.” In “Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science and Politics in Beta,” ed. Alberto Corsín Jiménez. Special issue, Journal of Cultural Economy. Published electronically December 3.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond Politics.” Cultural Anthropology, 25, no 2: 334–70.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Hospitality.” In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 358–420. New York: Routledge.

During, Élie. 2002. “From Project to Prototype (Or How to Avoid Making a Work).” InPanorama 3: Living Prototypes, 17–29. Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.

Escobar, Arturo. 2012. “Notes on the Ontology of Design.” Paper presented at the Sawyer Seminar, Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues about the Reconstitution of Worlds, organized by Marisol de La Cadena and Mario Blaser, October 30. University of California, Davis.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Theorizing the ContemporaryCultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Jensen, Casper Brunn. 2014. “Practical Ontologies.” Theorizing the contemporary,Cultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Law, John, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2013. “The Social Life of Methods: Devices.” Journal of Cultural Economy 6, no. 3: 229–40.

Leenhardt, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lepselter, Susan. 2005. “The Flight of the Ordinary: Narratives, Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American Uncanny.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.

Pedersen, Axel Morten. 2012. “Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Reviews of the Ontological Turn.” Anthropology of This Century, no. 5.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011.“Routes/Worlds.” e-flux, September 27.

Sá, Guilherme J. S. 2013. No Mesmo Galho: Antropologia de Coletivos Humanos e Animais. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras.

Do Animists become Naturalists when Converting to Christianity? Discussing an Ontological Turn (CUSAS seminar)

In the first CUSAS seminar this term, on Thursday 23rd January, Dr. Aparecida Vilaça presented her paper titled ‘Do Animists become Naturalists when Converting to Christianity? Discussing an Ontological Turn’.Aparecida Vilaça is currently Associate Professor in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology, Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and a researcher for the National Science Research Council (CNPq). Since 1986 she has worked among the Wari’ Indians of Southwestern Amazonia, Brazil. Fieldwork has been financed by the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (predoctoral grant and international collaborative grant), and Finep. She was Professor Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999, Directeur d’Etudes Invité at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the same city in 2000, Visiting Professor of the Centre of Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge in 2001, and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology at the same university in 2004. She is a visiting fellow at CRASSH during Lent term this year.

You can listen to the full lecture here.

Read Josef Ellis’ response to Dr. Vilaça’s paper:

Ontological Purification? A Response to (the responses to) Aparecida Vilaça’s CUSAS seminar

Dr. Aparecida Vilaça’s paper ‘Do animists become naturalists when converting to Christianity? Discussing an ontological turn’ sparked considerable ‘debate’ among the audience that witnessed its delivery. Yet the absence of one party in the debate was conspicuous, something I would like to remedy here. I might even suggest that the rhetoric of the arguments mobilised by the audience on Thursday afternoon contain striking resemblances to the very type of ‘purification’ or ‘apartheid building’ they aimed to attack.  In doing so, I will illustrate how Dr. Vilaça’s paper strikes at the heart of contemporary developments in anthropological theory.

While an inferior rehashing of Vilaça’s paper would be a waste (a recording of the talk is available on the CUSAS blog), I will briefly sketch a part of her argument. Vilaça discussed the Wari’, a group of Amazonian Indians in South-western Brazil. The Wari’, prior (and perhaps after) conversion to Christianity are considered by anthropologists to have been ‘perspectivist animists’. In other words, the Wari’ might be said to exist in an ontology in which each subject, both animal and human, is internally intensively differentiated from itself: living entities are therefore particular modulations of this infinite difference, actualised through the dispositions and perspectival positions which can be glossed as the ‘body’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2012 cf. Vilaça 2005, 2009).  The body, nature or exteriority is what varies, with culture or interiority unifying all species (Ibid, Descola 2013). Wari’, and Amazonian ontologies are thus an inversion of Western naturalism, or multiculturalism, being instead a multinatural mode of existence. Vilaça drew out how this multinaturalism has also reared its head in high-theory, discussing various authors associated with the ‘ontological turn’ who, catalysed by the self-refuting universalism of cultural relativism (and also a particular lecture series held in the department (Holbraad in Viveiros de Castro 2012), shift anthropological questions away from representation and epistemology to investigations on a ontological plane, in turn eliciting a probing of the multiple natures of humanity, rather than remaining within the limits of western naturalism (Latour 1993, Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2003, Descola 2013). To return to the Wari’, it would seem that they are an exemplar of one of these divergent natures the ontological turn is concerned with. So what happens when they convert to a Christian (naturalist) religion?

To violently reduce her nuanced and subtle ethnography; Vilaça argued the Wari’ did not simply reject or convert to naturalism. Instead, upon conversion to Christianity, the perspectivist regime seemed to encompass the naturalist. Instead of resulting in a stable background of a biological body, Wari’ bodies were still given by perspectives, only now in relation to God, or in some cases, the devil. Similarly, Vilaça argued that the Christian devil itself was a powerful generator of hybrids in Latour’s sense, entities that violate the modern constitution of the rupture of nature and culture (1993). Vilaça drew out two related implications for the ontological turn from this ethnography. Firstly, given that perspectivist animism and Christian naturalism appeared in some sense to exist at the same time among the Wari’, she aimed to qualify the strength of arguments which posit a radical separation between the two. In a related way, she drew attention to the fact that Christianity is not such a purely naturalist formation, as seen in its hybrid-producing devil (although that would make Christianity ‘modern’ in Latour’s sense).

The audience appeared to take this qualification extremely well, and many comments were made regarding the danger of the ontological turn’s supposed positing of extreme alterity between naturalists (the west) and other ontologies (the rest) (cf. Laidlaw 2012). Similarly, the ontological turn was attacked for being overly concerned with contradiction, and invited to entertain the presence of contradictory ontological potentials within cultures (or natures) rather than between them. Case closed then? Not quite.

I want to make it clear that some of the stronger anti-ontological worries and arguments emerged from the discussion of the paper, rather than being argued in the paper itself. Nevertheless, I offer a few small rebuttals for reasons of provocation rather than desiring to become a representative of a particular ‘side’. Firstly, the argument that the ontological turn consists of constructing an image of the world involving geographically bound ontological ‘zones’ should be questioned. This argument reacts more to the rhetoric and political pragmatism of the ontological turn than its analytical content (cf. Candea in Venkatesan et al. 2010). When Viveiros de Castro spoke of ‘the Amazonian ontology’ he did so out of an allegiance to a political project of ‘conceptual emancipation’ or perhaps the radicalisation of an ‘Amerindian war machine’ (sensu Deleuze & Guattari 1988) against Western philosophy (Latour 2009). Put simply, in the genesis of such a political project, initially clearly delineated lines might have to be drawn. This has lead to some confusion when other in members of the ontological term used the slogan of conceptual self-determination, giving the sense of bounded, or essentialized ontologies to be intellectually liberated wholesale (Henare et al 2007, Alberti et al 2011).

Yet as was made extremely clear in a recent positional paper at the AAA in Chicago this year, ontological self-determination is not concerned with the positing of the rest against the West, but rather about the recognition of the capacity to differ, which operate within a particular social milieu as much as between them (Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014) This allows the ‘non-sceptical elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could be’ an understanding of the ‘otherwise’’ (ibid, cf. Povinelli 2012). Ontologies that appear to ‘contradict’ one another are not bulldozed by this project, they are expected by it. This leads me onto a second point about contradiction. As was perceptively put by an extremely esteemed member of the audience (as well as someone who has used ontology extensively recently cf. Lloyd 2013), the Western philosophical concern with the law of non-contradiction has been rather overstated, particularly in anthropology, and perhaps our writing should shift away from ‘purifying’ social contexts into embracing their ambiguities. While I would agree wholeheartedly with this statement (indeed I believe the particular faction of the ontological turn I am discussing would similarly give ascent), I want to make a small point in rebuttal. Even when we acknowledge, as Latour famously did, that western purification is accompanied by the production of hybrids it denies are possible, this does not remove the fact that the discourses of the most powerful in our societies are very much within the terms of the impossibility of contradiction. If the ontological turn is ultimately a ‘technology of description’ (Pedersen 2012) that aims to recognise the otherwise as ‘viable as a real alternative’ (Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014) then this must necessarily need to reflect something of our political grammar to have any effect. While contradiction may always be present, the impulse to make sense out of the contradictory is a necessary side-effect of taking something seriously, and should not be dismissed easily. The ontological turn is a movement that is rapidly maturing, and I might suggest that some of the criticisms that were mobilised on Thursday were rather purificatory in their reduction of a theoretical turn that is shifting under our feet.

It is precisely for this reason that one might consider Vilaça’s paper an example of the productiveness that the turn to ontology has lent to our discipline. This is a productivity that does not reduce in any direction, but gives us the sensitivity to fathom complexity, both here and elsewhere.

References

Alberti, B., Fowles, S., Holbraad, M., Marshall, Y. & Witmore, C. (2011). “Worlds Otherwis” Archaeology, Anthropology and Ontological Difference. Current Anthropology. 52 (6). 896-912

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Descola, P. (2013). Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. Lloyd, J. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Holbraad, M., Pedersen, M. & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014). The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Posistions. Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online. January 13, 2014, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions

Laidlaw, J. (2012). Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of this Century. 4.

Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Porter, C. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Latour, B. (2009). Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’. Anthropology Today. 25 (2) 1-2

Lloyd, G. E. R. (2013). Being, Humanity and Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pedersen, M. A. (2012). Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews of the Ontological Turn. Anthropology of This Century. 5.

Povinelli, E. A. (2012). The Will to be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance. South Atlantic Quaterly. 111 (3). 453-457

Venkatesan, S. (2010). Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology. 30 (2) 152-200

Vilaça, A. (2005). Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian
Corporalities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 11 (3). 445-464

Vilaça, A. (2009). Bodies in Perspective: A Critique of the Embodiment Paradigm from the Point of View of Amazonian Ethnography. Social Bodies. Eds Lambert, H. & McDonald, M. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 129-147

Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998a). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4. 469-488

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2003). ‘AND’. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2012). Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Hau Masterclass Series. 1.

A New Physics Theory of Life (Quanta Magazine)

Jeremy England

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life. (Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine).

By: Natalie Wolchover

January 22, 2014

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

Plagiomnium affine

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self Replicating Microstructures

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.” In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

Snowflake

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates. “One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said.  Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

Emily Singer contributed reporting.

Correction: This article was revised on January 22, 2014, to reflect that Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, not physics.

On the ontological turn in anthropology

Ontology as the Major Theme of AAA 2013 (Savage Minds)

by  on November 27, 2013

Most attendees of the annual meetings in Chicago are, as one wag put it, exhAAAusted from all our conference going, and the dust is only now settling. As we look back on the conference, however, it is worth asking what actually happened there. Different people will have different answers to this question, but for me and the people in my scholarly network, the big answer is: ontology.

The term was not everywhere at the AAAs, but it was used consistently, ambitiously, audaciously, and almost totally unironically to offer anthropology something that it (supposedly) hasn’t had in a long time: A massive infusion of theory that will alter our paradigm, create a shift in the field that everyone will feel and which will orient future work, and that will allow us, once again, to ask big questions. To be honest, as someone who had been following ‘ontological anthropology’ for the past couple of years, I was sort of expecting it to not get much traction in the US. But the successful branding of the term and the cultural capital attached to it may prove me wrong yet.

In fact, there were just two major events with the world ontology in the title: the “Politics of Ontology” roundtable and the blowout “The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology”. But these events were full of ‘stars’ and attracted plenty of attention.

Will this amount to anything? What is ontology anyway? Were there other themes that were more dominant in the conference? I don’t have any answers to these questions yet, but I hope to soon and will let you figure it out when I do. If you get there before me, then fire away in the comments section and we’ll see what people think.

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A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 1 (Somatosphere)

By 

January 15, 2014

This article is part of the series: 

Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?”  This was the reading list we received from Judith FarquharMax Palevsky Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.  Answers from a number of other scholars will appear as separate posts in the series.

In providing a reading list, I had lots of good “ontological” resources at hand, having just taught a seminar called “Ontological Politics.”  This list is pared down from the syllabus; and the syllabus itself was just a subset of the many useful philosophical, historical, and ethnographic readings that I had been devouring during the previous year, when I was on leave.

I really like all these pieces, though I don’t actually “follow” all of them.  This is a good thing, because the field — if it can be called that — tends to go in circles, with all the usual suspects citing all the usual suspects.  In the end, as we worked our way through the course, I found the ethnographic work more exciting than most of the more theoretically inclined writing.  At the other end of the spectrum, I feel quite transformed by having read Heidegger’s “The Thing” — but I’m not sure why!

Philosophical and methodological works in anthropology and beyond:

Philippe Descola, 2013, The Ecology of Others, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

William Connolly, 2005, Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. (Ch. 3, “Pluralism and the Universe” [on William James], pp. 68-92.)

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2004, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipiti 2 (1): 3-22.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2012, “Immanence and Fear: Stranger events and subjects in Amazonia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 27-43.

Marisol de la Cadena, 2010, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334-370.

Bruno Latour, 2004, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.

A dialogue from Common Knowledge 2004 (3): Ulrich Beck: “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach” (pp. 430-449) and Bruno Latour: “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck” (pp. 450-462).

Graham Harman, 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.  Melbourne: Re.Press.  (OA)

Isabelle Stengers, 2005, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.  Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 994-1003.

Martin Heidegger, 1971, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (Tr. Albert Hofstadter).  New York: Harper & Row, pp. 163-180

Graham Harman, 2010, “Technology, Objects and Things in Heidegger,”Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 17-25.

Jane Bennett and William Connolly, 2012, “The Crumpled Handkerchief,” in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Time and History in Deleuze and Serres. London & New York: Continuum, pp. 153-171.

Tim Ingold, 2004, “A Circumpolar Night’s Dream,” in John Clammer et al., eds., Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 25-57.

Annemarie Mol, 1999, “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions,” in John Law, and J. Hassard, ed., Actor Network Theory and After.  Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74-89.

Terrific ethnographic studies very concerned with ontologies:

Mario Blaser, 2010, Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond.  Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Eduardo Kohn, 2013, How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Helen Verran, 2011, “On Assemblage: Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Media (2003-2006) and HMS Investigator (1800-1805).” In Tony Bennet & Chris Healey, eds.,  Assembling Culture.  London & New York: Routledge, pp. 163-176.

Morten Pedersen, 2011, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

John Law & Marianne Lien, 2013, “Slippery: Field Notes in Empirical Ontology,” Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 363-378.

Stacey A. Langwick, 2011, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Westview 1996),Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Duke 2002), and Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (Zone 2012) (with Qicheng Zhang), and editor (with Margaret Lock) of Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Duke 2007).

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A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 2 (Somatosphere)

By 

January 17, 2014

This article is part of the series: 

Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?”  This was the answer we received from Javier Lezaun, James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance at the University of Oxford. 

Those of us who have been brought up in the science and technology studies (STS) tradition look at claims of an ‘ontological turn’ with a strange sense of familiarity: it’s déjà vu all over again! For we can read the whole history of STS (cheekily and retroactively, of course) as a ‘turn to ontology’, albeit one that was rarely thematized as such.

A key text in forming STS and giving it a proto-ontological orientation (if such a term can be invented) is Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening (1983). On its surface the book is an introduction to central themes and keywords in the philosophy of science. In effect, it launches a programme of research that actively blurs the lines between depictions of the world and interventions into its composition. And it does so by bringing to the fore the constitutive role of experimental practices – a key leitmotiv of what would eventually become STS.

Hacking, of course, went on to develop a highly original form of pragmatic realism, particularly in relation to the emergence of psychiatric categories and new forms of personhood. His 2004 book, Historical Ontology, captures well the main thrust of his arguments, and lays out a useful contrast with the ‘meta-epistemology’ of much of the best contemporary writing in the history of science.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves and disrespecting our good old friend Chronology. The truth is that references to ontology are scarce in the foundational texts of STS (the term is not even indexed in Representing and Intervening, for instance). This is hardly surprising: alluding to the ontological implies a neat distinction between being and representing, precisely the dichotomy that STS scholars were trying to overcome – or, more accurately, ignore – at the time. The strategy was to enrich our notion of representation, not to turn away from it in favour of higher plane of being.

It is in the particular subfield of studies of particle physics that the discussion about ontology within STS developed, simply because matters of reality – and the reality of matter – featured much more prominently in the object of study. Andrew Pickering’s Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984) was one of the few texts that tackled ontological matters head on, and it shared with Hacking’s an emphasis on the role of experimental machineries in producing agreed-upon worlds. In his following book, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995), Pickering would develop this insight into a full-fledged theory of temporal emergence based on the dialectic of resistance and accommodation.

An interesting continuation and counterpoint in this tradition is Karen Barad’s book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007). Barad’s thesis, particularly her theory of agential realism, is avowedly and explicitly ontological, but this does not imply a return to traditional metaphysical problem-definitions. In fact, Barad speaks of ‘onto-epistemology’, or even of ‘onto-ethico-epistemology’, to describe her approach. The result is an aggregation of planes of analysis, rather than a turn from one to the other.

Arguments about the nature of quarks, bubble chambers and quantum physics might seem very distant from the sort of anthropo-somatic questions that preoccupy readers of this blog, but it is worth noting that this rarefied discussion has been the terrain where key elements of the current STS interest in ontology – the idioms of performativity and materialism in particular – were first tested.

The work that best represents this current interest in matters of ontology within STS is that of Annemarie Mol and John Law. Their papers on topologies (e.g., ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’ in 1994; ‘Situating technoscience:  an inquiry into spatialities’, 2001) broke new ground in making explicit the argument about the multiplicity of the world(s), and served to develop a first typology of alternative modes of reality. Mol’s ethnography of atherosclerosis, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2003), is of course the (provisional?) culmination of this brand of ‘empirical philosophy’, and a text that offers a template for STS-inflected anthropology (and vice versa).

One distinct contribution of this body of work – and this is a point made by Malcolm Ashmore in his review of The Body Multiple – is to extend STS modes of inquiry beyond the study of new or controversial entities, and draw the same kind of analytical intensity to realities – like that (or those) of atherosclerosis – whose univocal reality we tend to take for granted. For better and worse, STS grew out of an effort to understand how new facts and artifacts enter our world, and the field remains attached to all that is (or appears to be) new – even if the end-result of the analysis is often to challenge those claims to novelty. The current ‘ontological turn’ in STS would then represent an effort to excavate mundane layers of reality, to draw attention to the performed or enacted nature of that that appears old, settled or uncontroversial. I suspect this manoeuvre carries less value in Anthropology, where the everyday and the taken-for-granted is often the very locus of inquiry.

The other value of the ‘ontological turn’ is, in my view, to recast the question of politics – as both an object of study and a mode of engagement with the world. This recasting can take at least two different forms. There are those who argue that attending to the ontological, i.e., to the reality of plural worlds and the unavoidable condition of multinaturalism, intensifies (and clarifies) the normative implications of our analyses (see for instance the genealogical argument put forward very forcefully by Dimitris Papadopoulos in his article ‘Alter-ontologies: towards a constituent politics in technoscience’). A slightly different course of action is to think of ontology as a way of addressing the intertwining of the technological and the political. Excellent recent examples of this approach are Noortje Marres’s Material Participation: Technology, the Environment, and everyday Publics (2012) and Andrew Barry’s Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline (2013).

In sum, and to stake out my own position, I think STS is best seen as a fairly tight bundle of analytical sensibilities – sensibilities that are manifested in an evolving archipelago of case studies. It is not a theory of the world (let alone a theory of being), and it quickly becomes trite and somewhat ritualistic when it is transformed into a laundry list of statements about what the world is or should be like. In this sense, an ‘ontological turn’ would run counter to the STS tradition, as I see it, if it implies asserting a particular ontology of the world, regardless of whether the claim is that that ontology is plural, multiple, fluid, relational, etc. This sort of categorical, pre-empirical position smothers the critical instincts that energize the field and have driven its evolution over the last three decades. Steve Woolgar and I have formulated this view in a recent piece for Social Studies of Science (‘The wrong bin bag:  a turn to ontology in science and technology studies?’), and a similar argument been made often and persuasively by Michael Lynch (e.g., “Ontography: investigating the production of things, deflating ontology”).

Javier Lezaun is James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance and Deputy Director at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the politics of scientific research and its governance. He directs the research programme BioProperty, funded by the European Research Council, which investigates the role of property rights and new forms of ownership in biomedical research. Javier is also currently participating in research projects on the governance of climate geoengineering, and new forms of consumer mobilization in food markets.

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Ontological Turns Inside-Out (Struggle Forever)

By Jeremy Trombley. Posted on Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 4:35 pm.

It seems Ontology has finally gone mainstream in anthropology. Only a few years ago, it was something heard on the edges of the disciplinary discourse. Now you can’t throw a stick without running into a blog post, article, conference paper, or what-have-you that uses ontology as a central theme. Over at Somatosphere, Judith Farquhar has assembled a nice reading list for an introductory understanding of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Then, over at Anthropological Research on the Contemporary (ARC), Lyle has a solid critiqueof this turn in anthropology – suggesting that it fails to change the form of inquiry to match its subject. It’s a running joke that anthropology has taken so many turns in the last  few decades that we’ve often ended up right where we started. I think there’s a truth to that, and I appreciate Lyle for calling out the underlying conservativism that can be found in this (or any) turn.

As a frequent (though not influential) supporter of the ontological turn in anthropology, I feel as though I should put in my thoughts on all of this. I can’t speak to the events at the AAA – I wasn’t there and I haven’t followed up on any of it as I’ve been obsessively working on an NSF proposal for the last two months (which I just submitted yesterday!!) – so I’m going to talk about some impressions that I get from this turn and then some of my thoughts on where things ought to go from my perspective. My first impression is much like Lyle’s. In the name of ontology, there seems to be a retreat to classical ethnography and broad, sweeping comparative analysis. The terms have changed – reflecting on “ontologies” rather than “cultures” – but the means, methods, and results are much the same. In this sense, it’s not really overcoming the Nature/Culture dualism so much as bringing everything into the cultural domain. I agree with Lyle when he says:

…the question is not about categorizing and typologizing multiple ontologies but rather of charting the historical emergence of new ontologies.”

He continues:

The stakes are not only ontological, but also ethical: how to live in this changed world? How to live together amidst these changed beings and groupings? How to make anthropological knowledge about these changed beings and lives? The point is not that ontology is not a useful question for anthropologists, and indeed forms a productive critique of the comparative form of cultural anthropology. Rather, the point is that an ontological critique must be coupled with a transformation of the procedures and form of anthropological inquiry. The question is where one goes after making this ontological “turn”: towards the contemporary, or towards the 19th century.”

I think that there is an element of this in the “ontological turn” most notably with John Law‘s and Annamarie Mol’s work – attempting to understand how the creation of new beings or systems of relation affect those beings and relations that already exist. This is expressed by the two (though Mol deserves credit for coming up with the term) in their conception of “ontological politics” (a concept that, to me, mirrors Latour and Stengers’s “cosmopolitics”). The way I see it, there can be no concrete ontology, not because we cannot know (this is the difference between this and earlier critiques) or access ontological reality, but because ontological reality is itself fundamentally weird and always in the process of being produced. Ontology is never settled, and that’s why we have to be cognizant of other ontologies, and attentive to the relationships between them. Furthermore, we have to be attentive to our own ontological commitments and effects. It’s not merely a question of understanding others’ ontologies, but of understanding our own as anthropologists. This is why I would ask that we take the “ontological turn” not left, right, or wrong, butinside-out. Turn it back on ourselves and our own practices rather than focusing once again on others. What kind of world are we creating through our practices as anthropologists? What kind of world do we want to create? And how can our methods and practices make that world come into being? These are the important questions an ontological perspective begins to address.

I still support an ontological anthropology, but one that is strange, weird, magical, and inside-out.

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A Reader’s Guide to the Ontological Turn – Addendum (Struggle Forever)

By Jeremy Trombley. Posted on Friday, January 17, 2014, at 11:57 am.

Somatosphere’s recently shared two posts (part 1 and part  2) of reader’s guides to the ontological turn, which are extremely useful and full of interesting books/articles/etc. that I hadn’t encountered before. However, there are some noteworthy exceptions, and so I feel compelled to add my own list of influential works in my ontological education. I don’t have tons of time at the moment, so I’ll just write it up as a list and hopefully you can click through and decide which are important to you. Here goes:

Blogs

Academic blogging has been a central feature of the ontological turn over the last several years, so I think it’s unfortunate that these have been left out of the recent reading lists. Much of my own education has taken place through reading and engaging with these blogs – I owe the greatest debt to all of these writers. Here are some of my favorites:

Larval Subjects by Levi Bryant

Synthetic_Zero by Michael, Arran, and DMF

Archive Fire by Michael

Attempts at Living by Arran James

Knowledge Ecology by Adam Robbert

Immanence by Adrian Ivakhiv

Circling Squares by Phillip

Formal Publications (books/articles/etc.)

These could also be considered author recommendations since I won’t list all books and articles by each individual.

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson

The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering

After Method by John Law (also check out his website for tons of great essays and articles!)

The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant

A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History by Manuel De Landa

Ecologies of the Moving Image by Adrian Ivakhiv

Territories of Difference by Arturo Escobar

Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour

Cosmopolitics by Isabelle Stengers

When Species Meet by Donna Haraway

Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style by William Connolly

The Ecological Thought by Tim Morton

O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies

That’s it for now. If I’ve forgotten anyone/anything please fill in by commenting! I will add to the comments too if anything else comes to mind.

Notícias sobre o fim do mundo (Ponto de Vista)

12 de janeiro de 2014

Por Amneris Amaroni

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Acabei de assistir a duas palestras recentes – em vídeos – do prof. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro e quero recomendá-las aos meus leitores. O primeiro vídeo- palestra tem como título: Filosofia, Antropologia e o Fim do Mundo (http://vimeo.com/78892524); a segunda palestra tem como título: III Conferência Curt Nimuendajú (http://vimeo.com/81488754). Recomendo vivamente ambas.

Nesta postagem farei um breve chamamento para as duas palestras e, desde já, assumo que sou absolutamente fiel às ideias de Viveiros de Castro, praticamente recuperando as suas palavras; exercito, porém, uma certa edição das palestras e então dou ênfase – porque recupero longamente a fala de Viveiros – em relação a algumas questões em detrimento de outras – e, por isso, o melhor para os leitores que desejarem acompanhar o pensamento do antropólogo na íntegra será assistir os vídeos.  Farei também uma reflexão sobre o diálogo – ou a inexistência do diálogo – entre psicanálise e a nova antropologia tendo presente a dramática situação que estamos atravessando do ponto de vista civilizacional. Particularmente quero chamar a atenção dos leitores para o novo campo de luta, uma guerra de fato, que a antropologia – via Bruno Latour e Viveiros de Castro – vislumbra entre os Terranos e os Humanos: quem são os participantes dessa luta, e como as ¨alianças¨ vêm se estabelecendo. E o que é fundamental: como as psicanálises se posicionam frente a esse novo campo de luta, frente a essa – nas palavras de Bruno Latour – guerra que  já estamos vivendo.

Antes de iniciar quero dar um depoimento pessoal da experiência que tive ao assistir a esses vídeos. Penso que a principal virtude dos antropólogos em tela é acoragem. Fiquei completamente mobilizada pela coragem lucidez de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, e sinto que, através das palestras, mobilizou-se em mim também coragem e lucidez. Penso que só neste início do século XXI começamos a perceber a importância do Anti Édipo e dos Mil Platôs de G. Deleuze e F. Guattari. Há uma nova sensibilidade em curso que a antropologia de Viveiros de Castro capta e transforma em projeto político[1].

I) Filosofia, Antropologia e Fim do Mundo

Davi Kopenawa

O antropólogo parte de duas observações: qual a nossa condição, qual o nosso momento, na tradição cultural ocidental; e como essa tradição é compreendida pelos habitantes da América indígena.

Comecemos pela primeira questão: houve mortes sucessivas das grandes transcendências nos últimos séculos. E. Kant partiu de Deus/ do Homem e do Mundo. Essas três instâncias foram morrendo sucessivamente e isso define a presente condição: 1) Deus morreu; 2) o Homem moderno morreu e agora 3) temos que enfrentar a morte do Mundo, o fim do mundo. Sem Deus, sem Homem e sem Mundo. Três séculos, três mortes.

Hoje há uma inquietação imensa; as mortes suscitam crises. Podíamos viver sem Deus, podíamos viver sem o Homem; podemos viver sem Mundo? Como o pensamento antropológico e filosófico se reorganiza em torno dessas mortes?

Davi Kopenawa, líder dos Yanomamis, tem um escrito publicado em francês e em inglês chamado A queda do céu – esse livro conta com a participação do antropólogo Bruce Albert[2] Nele Davi Kopenawa diz que ¨os brancos dormem muito, mas só conseguem sonhar com eles mesmos¨. Essa frase para Viveiros de Castro contém uma imagem do pensamento, contém uma teoria e uma crítica da filosofia ocidental: uma crítica do nosso projeto civilizatório.

A frase nos alerta para a ideia que os Yanomamis ¨não sonham só com eles mesmos¨. É preciso, todavia, frisar que nós os vemos de outro jeito, já que dizemos que os índios são animistas, narcisistas, primitivos e só sabem ler a si mesmos no mundo inteiro! Davi pensa exatamente o contrário e diz que ¨são os ocidentais que não veem nada, ficam só cabeceando de sono e não veem nada¨.

O pensar é essencialmente sonhar para os Yanomamis: sonhar com o que não é humano, ter a capacidade de sonhar e de sair da humanidade. Davi Kopenawa nega a nós, os brancos, essa capacidade porque para nós, brancos, o pensamento está concentrado no ¨mundo da mercadoria¨, porque só vemos a nós mesmos. Como os brancos só pensam nas mercadorias, só sonham consigo mesmos – não saem de si mesmos, não saem da humanidade. Não sonhar consigo mesmo significa para Davi, sonhar com os seres das florestas, os seres invisíveis, as almas, os animais.

O pensamento ocidental tem uma trajetória e nela o pensar foi se introjetando e se tornando uma contemplação narcísica de si mesmo: o pensador ocidental investiga a cognição, a imaginação, o entendimento do próprio homem. Os brancos só sonham então consigo mesmos.

Davi está denunciando o que Freud diz: tudo que o homem sonha é projeção: plantas, animais, etc. É sempre conosco mesmos que sonhamos. É possível pensar outra coisa e então sair de si mesmo? Os brancos já não podem fazer isso.

Davi Kopenawa pertence a uma cultura xamânica, e nela o acesso à realidade se dá através do sonho, com o uso de drogas e alucinógenos e isso é muito diferente do aprendizado da leitura e da escrita dos brancos. Por isso os brancos ficam quando sonham como um ¨machado no chão¨, dormindo como um ¨machado no chão¨ – como se fossem objetos ou como se estivessem mortos:  sonhando consigo mesmos. Ao contrário disso, para uma cultura xamânica, o sonho é a condição de encontrar uma exterioridade, um fora-exterior, e os brancos tem uma incapacidade de atingir o fora, um exterior pelo pensamento. Acrescente-se a isso que os brancos estão apodrecendo a Terra para tirar petróleo, minério, e com isso o céu vai cair e a humanidade vai entrar embaixo da terra e virar fantasma! Quem mantém tudo isso ainda em pé – a Terra e o Céu – são os xamãs. A queda do céu já aconteceu várias vezes e sempre o motivo foi o mesmo: o que nós, brancos, chamamos de crise ecológica.

As cosmologias indígenas falam em ciclos sucessivos de destruição e criação: desabamentos sucessivos da Terra. Hoje, os brancos promovem sem freios a extração de minérios, o desmatamento e então o mundo vai acabar. Duas questões propostas por Davi Kopenawa: 1) só sabem, os brancos, pensar em si mesmos; 2) o mundo vai acabar. Esta acusação de Davi ¨que nós só sonhamos conosco mesmos¨ exige uma resposta. Como responder a isso? Como responder à imanência? À exterioridade? No ocidente isto está reservado à arte – e não à ciência e à técnica.

Para os indígenas fazemos objetos e máquinas prodigiosos, mas sociologicamente somos imbecis, agressivos, escandalosos, primitivos, toscos nas interações. Eles ficam seduzidos pelo prodígio técnico do ocidente e tem a tentação de separar a técnica da sociedade. É possível separar as duas coisas? Para os Yanomamis não tem jeito; eles recusam a cultura do branco in totum.Estamos – diz Viveiros de Castro – prensados contra nós mesmos e contra os outros povos, já que os três pilares da nossa civilização – Deus, Homem e Mundo – estão em crise. Nosso narcisismo é incurável! Os outros povos não podem nos ajudar e nós estamos ameaçando levar todos para o abismo.

Que resposta vamos dar aos outros povos que nos ¨acusam de só sonhar conosco mesmos¨? Que fazer diante disso?Os brancos ¨só sonham consigo mesmos¨: os brancos não incluem os não-humanos no seu universo político!

O fim do mundo é um tema riquíssimo do ponto de vista filosófico e político – afirma Viveiros de Castro. Aliás, esse tema são os  índios  quem sabem pensar, pois os brancos acabaram  com o mundo deles, acabaram com o mundo deles repetidas vezes.

A perspectiva de uma crise ambiental em escala mundial nos coloca em uma situação parecida com a dos índios. Nós corremos o risco de sermos dizimados por nós mesmos! Como será viver após o fim do mundo? É preciso retomar a questão do fim do mundo no pensamento. O que está acabando é o mundo que começou em 1500. O fim da era moderna chegou.

2) III Conferência Curt Nimuendajú

Bruno Latour

Essa conferência, proferida no final de 2013 por Viveiros de Castro, é bastante longa e aconteceu no Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (CESTA/USP) em homengem a Curt Nimuendajú, que fez o primeiro trabalho moderno de etnologia, há exatamente 100 anos – em 1914 – em torno das lendas de criação e destruição e principalmente da destruição do mundo, como fundamento da religião dos xamãs Apopukuvas – Guarani. A palestra então também homenageia os guaranis que hoje são o símbolo concreto da ofensiva final contra os povos indígenas.

Nimuendajú teve seguidores na antropologia, por exemplo, os trabalhos de Pierre Clastres e de Helena Clastres e vários outros etnólogos; hoje, sua perspectiva é retomada em teses e dissertações de mestrado. Para Niemandajú como para esses trabalhos recentes, os Guaranis tinham e tem um pensamento pleno, um pensamento especulativo,  escatológico  e cosmológico pleno de direitos.

Ora, nós também, ocidentais brancos, estamos especulando e dando voltas em torno da questão do fim do mundo. As lendas científicas e outras do ocidente especulam cada vez mais esse tema e então tal especulação tornou-se um problema de todos.

Muitas questões foram discutidas nessa longa palestra e eu vou me ater a duas delas: a) a catástrofe que nos espreita e b) a proposta política em curso trazida por Bruno Latour e Viveiros de Castro.

a) É um equívoco chamarmos o perigo que nos espreita de ¨crise ambiental¨ e isso ficará claro a seguir quando o antropólogo demonstra quão mais sério é a nossa questão. Para ele, o mais importante problema que atravessamos é a entrada do planeta no antropoceno – a terceira época geológica do período quaternário e que, prevê-se, durará muito mais tempo do que a espécie que o batizou! Vale dizer, os efeitos da ação humana sob o sistema Terra durará mais que a própria espécie. O antropoceno – a era do homem – refere-se a um novo regime termodinâmico: e este é um mundo novo e não temos ideia do que vai acontecer. Temos claro uma série de projeções, de especulações – próxima, aliás, como vimos, dos Guaranis – de como o mundo vai acabar. Nosso cenário é tão inquietante hoje quanto o dos Guaranis.

Mudança climática é na verdade um dos parâmetros para compreendermos a atual crise. Há muitos outros parâmetros – que delineiam muitas outras mudanças – para medir essa crise.

Antropoceno, apesar de ter o nosso nome, não nos elogia! O que se quer dizer com ele é que a humanidade tornou-se uma força geofísica. Alguns argumentam que não é a humanidade inteira que se tornou uma força geofísica, mas o capitalismo, as classes dominantes, as sociedades privilegiadas e, principalmente, os países que consomem combustíveis fósseis e energia em geral, mas isso tem efeitos sobre a população de todo o planeta. O problema é que a população inteira do planeta tende a adotar os padrões de consumo energéticos modelados nos padrões de consumo dos países que conduzem as ¨locomotivas antropocênicas¨, os países que conduzem as mudanças climáticas.

Então, há uma espécie de inversão de figura-fundo que caracteriza relação entre humanidade e ambiente! Retomemos a argumentação: antropoceno designa o fato de que a humanidade se tornou uma força geofísica.O nome Gaia vem também junto à noção de antropoceno, só que no sentido inverso. A Terra tornou-se um personagem, um interlocutor político, ao mesmo tempo que o homem tornou-se uma força geo-política. É como se tivéssemos nós, os homens, passado para o fundo e a Terra tivesse passado para a frente. Uma inversão súbita entre figura e fundo que só pode dar errado! É uma inversão fantasmagórica e aterrorizante e nela desaparece a noção de escalas: uma escala de tempo geológica e uma escala de tempo antropológica – essas escalas eram de ordem e magnitudes completamente diferentes. O que se vê hoje é o colapso dessas escalas a tal ponto que há mudanças na estrutura da atmosfera, na circulação dos ventos que se modificam em um tempo mais rápido que os sistemas sociais! E isso é, no mínimo, irônico e, no máximo, aterrorizante.

Essas considerações levam a outra implicação: à ideia do fim da natureza como um pano de fundo imóvel ou muito lento contra o qual nós evoluímos, contra o qual podíamos medir e calibrar nossas ações. O que estamos vivendo hoje é ainversão das escalas, colapso das escalas.

Dito de outra maneira trata-se da ideia mesmo de destruição do ambiente; num certo plano a noção de ambiente desapareceu visto que houve uma interiorização – introspecção – do homem, e as plantas e animais passaram a ser lidos como internos ao ambiente humano e não mais o homem como parte do ambiente!

Isabella Stengers, filósofa belga, recusa a ideia de crise ambiental, recusa a ideia mesmo de crise – a ideia de crise supõe que se vá sair dela e nós não vamos sair do que está acontecendo, porque já aconteceu, nós estamos vivendo os efeitos da ação humana que há muito aconteceu. Isabelle Stengers prefere o termocatástrofe ambiental e muitos insistem que essa é uma visão catastrofista, melancólica, pessimista – dessa mesma visão partilhavam, segundo Nimuendajú, os Guaranis na figura dos xamãs Apokokuvas-guarani entre 1905 e 1912, período de sua pesquisa. Esse pessimismo, dizia o etnólogo no início do século XX, era próprio de uma raça, próprio de um povo cansado de lutar, cansado de ser perseguido. Para os Guaranis, a própria terra estava cansada. Mas como veremosos Guaranis não são apenas pessimistas, pois imaginam também uma renovação do mundo. Tudo isso, e principalmente o pessimismo e a melancolia, ecoa a nossa situação atual.

b) Bruno Latour entende hoje que estamos em um estado de guerra; ele diz também que há uma diferença fundamental entre estado de guerra e estado de polícia, pois na guerra não há árbitros, não há um terceiro termo. A guerra se decide entre duas partes, sem árbitro. E nessa guerra estão de um lado osHumanos e ele diz isso com evidente ironia. Os Humanos, para Latour, somos nós, os modernos que pretendem conquistar todo o planeta para o padrão de consumo americano. Aos Humanos Latour opõe os Terranos – os habitantes da Terra. E é preciso decidir de que lado estamos nessa guerra. Latour diz também que essa de-cisão não será tomada tendo como base argumentos científicos e isso porque o consenso científico é maciço no sentido de que  existe uma grande crise ambiental e que essa crise é de origem antrópicaantropocênica e, todavia, esse consenso não impede que haja contestação! Não é bem assim dizem uns; não é antropocênica dizem outros. Assim, a ciência pode apresentar dados irrefutáveis e isso não impedirá e não impede a controvérsia e a continuidade da ordem existente. E isto porque a controvérsia não é entre ciência e não-ciência, mas é uma controvérsia política; é uma controvérsia em torno do tipo de Mundo, do tipo de Terra que queremos viver. Trata-se então de uma disputa de valores. Os índios são uma espécie de resposta viva: eles estão a nos apontar que existe outra forma de viver, outros Mundos além daquele dos brancos!

Lembro também que – para Viveiros de Castro – os climatocéticos sãonegacionistas, por analogia, com os  historiadores que diziam e dizem que não houve extermínio em massa dos judeus, não existiu a shoah e isso tudo não passa de conspiração do Estado de Israel! São os negacionistas. Os que estão preocupados com a catástrofe ecológica também chamam os que põe em dúvida a crise atual de negacionistas negam o óbvio  e através da negação afirmam  em que Mundo querem afinal viver!

No final de sua última conferência, em fevereiro de 2013, em Edimburgo a respeito da Gaia e do Antropoceno, Bruno Latour diz que há uma guerra entre os Terranose os Humanos. E então ele nomeia os Humanos: são os modernos. Ou seja, osHumanos não é para ele o Homo Sapiens. Os Humanos são todos os entes que fazem parte da modernidade, do projeto moderno e então inclui entre os Humanosos computadores, os animais domésticos, as armas químicas, os cachorros policiais. Todos esses entes fazem parte do exército dos Humanos. Os Terranosnão se sabe, todavia, bem quem são. Quem seriam os Terranos se pergunta Latour? Ali estariam todas as espécies em extinção (sementes/ animais/água/ar/humanos/polo norte/terra), inimigos naturais dos Humanos, ameaçados  ontologicamente. Mas entre os Terranos, claro, está estão também humanos. São o ¨povo de Gaia¨, numa ficção positiva do termo. O ¨povo de Gaia¨ está em oposição ao ¨povo da Natureza¨ que são os modernos, que acreditam em uma natureza transcendente, com leis únicas, absolutamente racional, dominável e controlável – uma ficção negativa do termo.

Latour se pergunta: é possível aceitar como ¨povo de Gaia¨, a pachamama, a deusa natureza, de que falam os ameríndios e outros povos não modernos? Para Latour, esses povos têm se adaptado à retórica ambientalista ocidental para, compatibilizando suas cosmologias e seus projetos existenciais, serem ouvidos pelas sociedades dominantes do hemisfério norte. Latour não acredita que esses povos possam fazer parte do ¨exército dos Terranos¨. Parece que há nesses povos respeito pela Terra, mas só parece, pois são impotentes na medida que sua tecnologia é fraca e sua população ínfima. Esses povos, de acordo com Latour,  chamados de tradicionais sem tecnologia, em pequenos número,  não tem um modo de vida que os qualifique para o ¨exército dos Terranos¨.

Para Viveiros de Castro, é exatamente isso que Latour lê como impotência que pode ser um recurso crucial para um futuro pós-catastrófico que, diga-se de passagem, Latour acredita que vai acontecer. Para o antropólogo brasileiro somos nós os brancos industrializados, em rede, estabilizados farmacologicamente que terão que ¨descer¨ – ¨perder as proporções gigantescas de vida¨ – e isso em todos os sentidos.

Pergunta-se ainda Viveiros de Castro: será que são de fato minorias e o pequeno número demográfico deve ser levado em conta como propõe Latour? A ONU estima oficialmente em 370 milhões de pessoas o número de minorias indígenas no planeta – estariam encapsuladas nos Estados Nação, mas não coincidiriam com os Estados Nação Ou seja, enfatiza Viveiros:a minoria não é tão minoria assim. É pois um ¨exército de Terranos¨ considerável!…

III) E a Psicanálise com isso?

Tenho alguns palpites a respeito disso, e desde já insisto que as idéias que seguem é de minha inteira responsabilidade, e nem Bruno Latour nem Eduardo Viveiros de Castro têm qualquer participação nelas, nas ideias. Também enuncio desde já que se trata de uma brincadeira séria, muito séria, e que foi escrita com total liberdade criadora e com muito bom humor. Engraçada e pessimista sob alguns aspectos; séria e esperançosa sob outros.

Por exemplo, se Bruno Latour e Viveiros de Castro se submetessem a uma psicanálise clássica e oferecessem logo no primeiro dia para um zeloso psicanalista as duas ideias discutidas acima – notícias sobre o fim do mundo e a nova aliança política proposta entre Terranos x Humanos – e insistissem, como fazem acima, que há uma guerra planetária em curso; se isso acontecesse, temo que seriam considerados psicóticos, delirantes, com estranhas e perigosas fantasias. E, se o eminente psicanalista fosse uma pessoa medrosa, creio também que, além de diagnósticá-los, convocaria discretamente uma ambulância, e eles seriam gentilmente retirados do consultório do analista em camisa de força e imediata e fortemente medicados!

É engraçado e trágico pensar isso, mas lastimo dizer, a probabilidade de isso acontecer seria grande! Como posso supor – o leitor tem todo direito de me perguntar – que isso aconteceria? Como a  ¨ciência da escuta¨ não levaria em conta a lucidez do prof. Viveiros de Castro? Por que consideraria suas agudas percepções como fantasias psicóticas delirantes? Antes de responder, prossigo por um momento no meu argumento: as percepções dos antropólogos que, diga-se de passagem, supõem dados oferecidos pela própria ciência climática, têm também por base uma gigantesca desconstrução da subjetividade moderna. Não é possível chegar a tais percepções pela via do intelecto. Ambas as questões envolvem infinitos des-locamentos emocionais, infinitas outras desconstruções. O que está em curso nos antropólogos citados – e numa grande massa de indivíduos – é então uma gigantesca des-construção da subjetividade moderna. Ora, a psicanálise também desconstrói a subjetividade moderna, já que enuncia um sujeito duplo – consciente e inconsciente – e é nisso que reside seu potencial crítico. A desconstrução subjetiva e emocional, todavia, do ¨povo de Gaia¨ foi muito além e desconstruiu e desconstrói a própria subjetividade psicanalítica! O ¨povo de Gaia¨ está deixando de ser antropocêntrico e quebrou as fronteiras entre-mundos, incluindo no seu universo político, na Terra que querem viver, outros seres: as plantas, os animais, os seres invisíveis, o ar, o clima, as sementes, Gaia.

As duas questões discutidas nessa palestra pelo antropólogo Viveiros de Castro só poderão então ser escutadas por aqueles que se desconstruíram emocional e cognitivamente na direção do ¨povo de Gaia¨.

Os antropocêntricos não podem então escutar compreender as propostas acima. Dou exemplos: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro fez, em 2010, uma palestra na Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo – SBPSP – intitulada ¨O Anti-Narciso: lugar e função da antropologia no mundo contemporâneo¨. A palestra do antropólogo foi publicada no volume 44 da Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise[3].Junto com a palestra dois comentadores escolhidos a dedo entre os analistas da Instituição foram convidados a comentar a fala de Viveiros de Castro. Para meu espanto eles não compreenderam nada da palestra do antropólogo! Dediquei a isso a postagem de agosto/2012 e até agora me sinto traumatizada com esse debate, já que é óbvio que os psicanalistas poderiam dialogar e discordar de forma radical das ideias expostas sobre o pensamento ameríndio e a nova antropologia. Mas, não poderiam – como foi o caso – nada compreender daquilo que foi exposto! Nem as piadas eles compreenderam! Isso que aconteceu foi traumático, mas também revelador para mim de que as novas sensibilidades não são passíveis de serem aprendidas pela psicanálise clássica. E por psicanálise clássica estou entendendo todos aqueles que vivem sob o espírito de O mal estar da civilização, sob a égide de Totem e Tabu e com a bíblia embaixo do braço, refiro-me ao livro O Futuro de uma Ilusão de S. Freud. Assim como o espírito da política é Maquiável – e o PT está aí para demonstrar quão verdadeiro é a presença desse Pai-fundador na política atual -, a psicanálise que eu chamo clássica vive sob a égide de O Mal estada Civilização e não abre mão da civilização de ¨mão única¨  proposta por Freud, e nela a ideia que a repressão instintual  é  inquestionável ainda que o preço sejam as guerras – mundiais diga-se de passagem. Lembremo-nos quanto Hebert Marcuse em Eros e Civilização tentou dar um basta à civilização de mão única! O problema é que o mundo mudou e o preço hoje deixou de ser tão somente (o que já era bastante!) as guerras mundiais, o problema hoje é o fim do mundo! Mas entre a realidade e o pai-fundador nessas premissas fechadas – porque excetuando-as  abraço eu também o pai-fundador – os psicanalistas clássicos dão as mãos para o pai-fundador e não para a realidade sob seus olhos!

Centenário de Totem e Tabu, escrito por S. Freud e publicado em 1913, o livro mereceu uma re-edição e também debates no Brasil. Freud visava, como se sabe, formular uma nova ¨cosmologia¨, um novo pensamento sobre a condição humana e o mundo. Nela, narra a origem da hominização a partir de um passo fundante que jogou o homem dentro da sociedade, regida doravante por regras (tabus) e não mais pela força do patriarca despótico – figura cuja a força se manifesta nos totens[4]. No centro de nossa cultura temos agora, a partir de Totem e Tabu, um assassinato e um repasto antropofágico. Eis que tornamo-nos humanos após uma insurreição dos filhos, membros da horda primeva, que revoltados contra o despotismo do pai, tomam-lhe o poder, matam-no e devoraram-no. Diz ainda o articulista: ¨esta história estaria esquecida, enterrada na origem da humanidade¨[5], mas seria atualizada nos indivíduos através do complexo de Édipo:  o drama social assim se atualizaria desde sempre e sempre! E conclui o articulista: essa narrativa sintetizava todo um saber antropológico, etnológico, filosófico, histórico, social e psicanalítico. Tem alguma importância para o ¨saber psicanalítico¨ que Freud, ao tratar dos povos ditos ¨primitivos¨, não conseguira se livrar da visão linear, evolucionista e eurocêntrica[6]Sinto dizer, mas para a psicanálise isso não tem nenhuma importância, pois como dizem seus adeptos ¨suas conclusões são totalmente sustentáveis ainda hoje[7]¨. O que fazer frente a uma surdez desse porte?!

Concordo com V. Safatle quando ele diz, de maneira muito inteligente e sem desgostar ninguém, que o único universal que persiste é o mal estar[8]– Unbehagen – o indivíduo na modernidade é arrancado da tradição e lançado ao desabrigo, sem lugar e sem clareira. Penso que qualquer outro universal, Édipo, por exemplo,  tornou-se repressivo – e então me compreenda o leitor não tenho nada, muito ao contrário, contra Édipo, a castração e o princípio de realidade, que esses dispositivos da subjetividade ensejam, são bem-vindos em qualquer clínica, desde que não se pretendam universais!

Dou um exemplo a partir da minha experiência pessoal: frequento os psicanalistas clássicos – debates não faltam em São Paulo, também supervisões clínicas  –  não tenho com eles uma conversa em torno do assunto dessa palestra, raramente, falo do ¨povo de Gaia¨  ou do ¨exército dos Terranos¨ e, todavia, vivo combatendo o universalismo, vivo combatendo a ideia de que Édipo e a castração ensejam o único princípio de realidade possível, e, para meu espanto, eles não compreendem o que eu falo! No início pensava que se tratasse de má vontade, agora sei que não é, é mais grave, pois se trata de uma construção emocional e mental que não lhes permite  por em dúvida o mundo que habitam,  o  mundo  moderno (quando, seja bem dito, este mundo, moderno, está em acelerada desconstrução). E isso não deixa de ser engraçado porque ninguém mais se preocupou com a realidade, com o princípio de realidade, com a aceitação da realidade do que a psicanálise clássica. O problema, inesperado e imprevisível problema, para eles, é que a realidade está mudando! Dito mais precisamente a desconstrução da subjetividade, desconstrução emocional e psíquica – tendo como base o homem moderno e o homem edipiano – nos permite entreabrir umanova percepção da realidade que, doravante, temos chance de compartilhar. O século XX com suas matanças sem fim, com muitos genocídios, com o totalitarismo sempre à nossa espreita, trouxe-nos essa preciosa abertura, a compreensão que a realidade é múltipla e depende dos nossos olhos, da nossa matrix emocional/psíquica/espiritual. Um milagre, como experiência,  se pôs para nossa contemplação e então para nosso pensamento. Por essa realmente ninguém esperava!

De novo é surpreendente que seja assim, mas é assim! A psicanálise clássica é a mais antropocêntrica das disciplinas humanas[9] e valendo-me da fala também lúcida de Davi, dos Yanomamis, põe os homens para ¨sonhar consigo mesmos¨. Principal aliada dos Humanos – modernos e achando imensa graça na era doantropoceno – a psicanálise clássica não vê e não verá com bons olhos osTerranos e não se deixará tocar pelo ¨povo de Gaia¨. E então lá – na Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise –  a fala perspicaz do prof. Viveiros de Castro não pode ser escutada e compreendida. A construção emocional e cognitiva – tendo Édipo como centro – impede-os de fazer essa  escuta porque o princípio de realidade a que tem acesso é edipiano e, com ele, fronteiras rígidas entre-mundos. Édipo reina soberano com os Humanos – modernos e seus infindáveis dispositivos mortíferos. E isso para mim revela que o problema não é somente o negacionismoaludido por Viveiros de Castro mas, mais sério ainda, o que está em jogo é uma determinada construção emocional e cognitiva: moderna e edipiana. A guerra então não é de persuasão, de convencimento; a guerra está se dando entre modos de ser modos de ver.

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E as outras correntes da psicanálise seriam possíveis ¨aliados¨ dos Terranos,acolheriam ou pertenceriam ao  ¨povo de Gaia¨?

Os junguianos por exemplo? Seriam sim, poderiam participar da aliança com o ¨povo de Gaia¨ se abandonassem seus sonhos conservadores, passadistas e prestassem atenção no imenso perigo que vem pela frente! E, tenho claro e afianço para os meus leitores que tirar os olhos do passado e pô-los no presente é um desafio gigantesco para um junguiano. Desde sempre o movimento junguianotem aversão-afetiva pelo ¨povo da Natureza¨ e pelos Humanos – modernos e como forma de resistência lançaram seu olhar para o passado esperando seguramente dias melhores. E lá ficaram com os olhos voltados para o passado durante todo o século XX! Agora, os dias melhores para eles chegaram, e se ousarem olhar para o presente, os termos da aliança com  o ¨exército dosTerranos¨  poderia se dar via  sensibilidade romântica da escola junguiana e o amor que eles tem por Dionísio, afinal o corpo dionisíaco é, enquanto tal, abertura cósmica. Não foi isso que aprendemos com F. Nietzsche?  Acrescente-se a isso que Jung um romântico inveterado e tardio buscava os arquétipos nos homens e também nos animais e isso seria a base comum da aliança entre homens a seres vivos em geral. E, saliente-se, Jung não negligenciava o mundo inorgânico, pois em uma bela passagem de Memórias, Sonhos e Reflexões tem  sérias dúvidas se ele é uma pedra ou se a pedra é ele! Os Humanos psicanalíticos, aliados ao ¨povo da Natureza¨, costumam ver de forma bem  crítica essa passagem já vendo nela a psicose latente de Jung! E, todavia, essa dúvida angustiante que Jung empreendia com o mundo inorgânico é parte da sensibilidade romântica e alquímica do unus mundus. De qualquer maneira há nas ideias de Jung uma possibilidade de unir e sentir mundos diversos e de sonhar objetivamentepara foracom o exteriorcomo propõe Davi Kopenawa, líder dos Yanomami. Jung e seus pacientes sonharam seguidamente e anos antes com a Primeira Guerra Mundial!

Além disso, o mundo junguiano é um mundo encantado graças à ideia de sincronicidade que correponde às afinidades eletivas[10] de Goethe, e com elas a retomada de uma única substância – pensamento e matéria – de B. Espinosa. A experiência da sincronicidade é, enquanto tal, diálogo entre-mundos: o ser humano – e não só ele por suposto – com as plantas, florestas, pedras, gnomos, fadas, seres invisíveis em geral.

Poder-se-ia objetar que são os seres humanos que, através do que chamam sincronicidade, estabelecem o sentido e a significação para  os outros seres, orgânicos e inorgânicos. E, então, eu diria não é bem assim se, de fato, levarmos em conta as afinidades eletivas de Goethe, um dos pilares de Jung para tecer o conceito-experiência de sincronicidade – e só se compreende isso, como disse acima, se levarmos em conta Espinosa e os Românticos que liam o mundo a partir de uma única substância. Em uma sincronicidade vivida como experiência profunda é a pedra, por exemplo, o animal ou uma semente que detém o segredo do significado para o humano e, não raro, encontramos alguém que tem a sensibilidade junguiana fazendo uma circuambulação em torno da pedra, do animal, de uma semente, por anos, às vezes por décadas, abrindo-se para a pedra e/ou a semente detentoras do segredo da significação! A narrativa de um junguiano, de uma pessoa que tem essa sensibilidade, é a do ¨povo de Gaia¨ com certeza.

Em relação a essa escola de psicologia a aliança com os Terranos e com o ¨povo de Gaia¨ se resolveria mais facilmente, já que não são antropocêntricos e o fechamento não é de ordem cognitiva-emocional. São, sim, possíveis aliados.

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E os lacanianos veriam com bons olhos os  Terranos? Seriam simpáticos ao ¨povo de Gaia¨?

Pouco posso dizer sobre os lacanianos, não os conheço bem. Dois lacanianos, porém, chamam minha atenção, e talvez com eles, refiro-me a W. Safatle e C. Dunker, os Terranos encontrariam algum acolhimento. Ao que parece são parceiros intelectuais e propõem a travessia do Imaginário para o Simbólico e então o Real. Vale dizer, levam sim o Real – do último Lacan – em conta – ao contrário de outros lacanianos que só pensam a clínica até o simbólico. Safatle, em particular, concorda com Deleuze quando critica aqueles que acreditam que fora do Eu, fora do indivíduo moderno, só pode haver caos.  Safatle pensa que essa é a pior de todas as falhas morais, já que nos prende na defesa do sempre idêntico[11].

São as premissas de Lacan que nos ajudam a compreender por que, para Safatle, ¨há uma humanidade por vir e não temos o direito de temê-la¨[12]. Uma dessas premissas é que para Lacan, ¨toda a socialização é alienação¨. Ou só há sujeito fixo graças a repressão, e então a verdadeira fonte de sofrimento é resultante do caráter repressivo da identidade: ¨dessa identidade que devemos internalizar quando passamos por processos de individuação e de constituição social do Eu. Daí porque Lacan será tão sensível às temáticas vanguardistas de dissolução do Eu e de desarticulação de seus princípios de síntese enquanto condição para o advento de uma experiência capaz de realizar exigências de autenticidade. Isso a ponto de ele afirmar ser a análise uma ¨experiência no limite da despersonalização¨[13].

Outra premissa é que a psicanálise nasce no momento de crise profunda da modernidade ocidental. Mais enfaticamente, a psicanálise, ela mesma, é osintoma maior dessa crise que nos levou a colocar em questão nossos ideais normativos sobre auto-identidade, sexualidade, modos de socialização, justiça e, sobretudo, nossas ideias sobre o que estamos dispostos a contar como racional[14]. Sintoma dessa crise, a modernidade oferta para o pensamento – eu diria para o pensamento psicanalítico, mas não só ele – uma outra concepção do humano:…¨uma concepção que insiste na importância de experiências deconfrontação com o inumano, com o despersonalizado, com oindeterminado, para a formação de uma práxis emancipada. Pensar como a verdadeira práxis virá da capacidade que sujeitos devem desenvolver em se confrontar com o que não tem a figura de ¨humanidade¨ do homem: eis uma tarefa que Lacan nos deixou¨[15]. Confrontar-se com o que aparece como ¨Inumano¨ no interior do desejo, desprovido de imagem identitária do homem: uma potência de indeterminação e despersonalização que habita todo o sujeito. Daí o impacto político da ênfase no Inumano, pois através dessa  noção redimensiona-se a teoria do reconhecimento: como reconhecer aqueles que não se configuram completamente como indivíduos no sentido que nós entendemos[16]?

É exatamente daí que parte C. Dunker, feroz observador das transformações da subjetividade na alta modernidade, justapondo e aproximando o ¨perspectivismo ameríndio¨ e os ¨tipos clínicos¨ recém  configurados por ele: zumbis[17], mortos-vivos, frankensteins[18] e psicoses! Os nomes propostos por Dunker não são nada simpáticos e à primeira vista parece estranho aproximá-los do ¨perspectivismo ameríndio¨  de Viveiros de Castro. Em um primeiro momento essa justaposição pareceu-me grosseira e injustificável, mas aos poucos foi ganhando algum sentido para mim e, de repente, foquei minha atenção nas proposições do psicanalista e as novas sensibilidades em curso – ainda que descritas por ele como ¨experiências de sofrimento¨. Zumbis e Frankensteins sofrem com a falta de experiências produtivas de indeterminação pois para eles os processos de racionalização aparecem como vazio indiferente ou como experiência caótica de si e do mundo. Vale dizer, o Real aparece como impossível. É nesse momento que Dunker conclui, confesso que para o meu espanto: …¨os Zumbis e Frankensteins estão mais próximos daquilo que o antropólogo brasileiro Viveiros de Castro chamou de perspectivismo ameríndio (ou seja, uma cultura na qual a identidade não é tratada como um fato de origem e onde a experiência de reconhecimento está sujeita a elevados níveis de indeterminação)¨[19].      O perspectivismo ameríndio estaria então  mais próximo da experiência do inumano, já que a vivência do laço social não se baseia na perspectiva de identidade. É disso que se trata?

Classificar e pensar não fazem boa parceria!  Essa sede classificatória e diagnóstica de Dunker  é amiga fácil de estereótipos e inimiga do pensamento. Osmodos de ser existenciais tendem a ser duramente ofuscados por classificações e diagnósticos. Quando C. Dunker classifica e aproxima as formas de sofrimento atuais – que ele com muita sensibilidade e perspicácia recupera – do perspectivismo ameríndio, por suposto não nos ajuda a pensar! Acrescente-se a isto que C. Dunker não precisa da nova antropologia nem do perspectivismo ameríndio para construir a sua argumentação. Para quê então ele faz isso? E me vejo obrigada a fazer uma pergunta incomôda: Bruno Latour, Viveiros de Castro, Davi Kopenawa como seriam classificados? Seriam eles também Frankensteins, Zumbis, Mortos Vivos, Psicóticos  – ainda  uma vez?

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Outro tanto poderia ser dito em relação à esquizoanálise, paraíso dos Terranos, e do ¨povo de Gaia¨, e isto porque eles – os humanos que participam desses grupos –  existem e subsistem a partir de duas qualidades  pelo menos nesse momento: uma de-cisão a partir de valores, quero dizer, de-cidiram-se por esses grupos respondendo à pergunta ¨qual a Terra que queremos viver¨? Uma Terra onde a vida não acabe. Decidiram-se então pela Vida e a outra qualidade de ambos os grupos é que seus ¨adeptos¨ provém de entre-mundos: vegetais, animais, humanos, sementes, pedras, ar, terra, água: todos os ameaçados de extinção! Ora, a esquizoanálise de F. Guattari e G. Deleuze é propiciadora do valor Vida, aliás, vida vibrátil, vida pulsante em sua potencialidade máxima! E, também, vamos sugerir em seguida, pode ser patrocinadora dessa aliança entre-mundos .

A esquizoanálise é compreendida como uma ética-estética de valorização da vida, e quem participa dessa experiência se lê a partir de uma perspectiva – não tem em mãos – muito longe disso –  uma metodologia e/ou uma teoria universal. Como uma perspectiva convive com todas as outras abordagens  sejam dialéticas, estruturalistas ou qualquer outra. Como perspectiva, a esquizoanálise é muito mais do que uma prática clínica, sua intenção, aliás, foi e é de romper com os saberes instituídos em troca de um saber subterrâneo ao qual Deleuze e Guattari chamaram de rizoma, termo extraído da botânica. O ¨povo de Gaia¨ precisa romper com os saberes instituídos, a esquizoanálise lhes convém pois. Convém-lhes também porque a esquizoanálise não tem modelos para a vida; não há modelos existenciais bons e maus, mas infinitas possibilidades existenciais. A melhor atitude, a melhor possibilidade existencial, é aquela que produz uma vida mais vibrátil e pulsante. A vida só pode ser julgada pela própria Vida! E, todavia, há sempre duas lógicas em jogo: a lógica maquínica – que corresponde à subjetividade instituída e produzida socialmente através do ¨inconsciente maquínico¨ e/ou ¨inconsciente capitalísta¨[20] – e nesta lógica os corpos perdem a sua potência de expressão e há a construção de sujeitos narcísicos; mas, também há a lógica pulsátil presente nos corpos vibráteis que não repelem a sensorialidade, visto que procuram uma existência plena e para isso desejam afetar e ser afetados.

A esquizoanálise trabalha também com a ideia de agenciamentos e esse conceito-experiência supõe disparidade – agenciamentos díspares –  e precisa ser ordenada desde o ponto de vista da imanência, a partir do qual a existência se mostra indissociável de agenciamentos variáveis e remanejáveis que não cessam de produzi-la. Há agenciamentos ¨molares¨ e  os agenciamentos ¨moleculares¨  – e  todo agenciamento remete em última instância ao campo do desejo sobre o qual se constitui . Então a maneira como cada indivíduo investe e participa da reprodução de agenciamentos sociais depende de agenciamentos locais, ¨moleculares¨ e, através desses últimos, cada indivíduo, introduz suas pequenas irregularidades. Cada um de nós combina concretamente os dois tipos de agenciamentos em graus variáveis, o limite é a esquizofrenia como processo – deterritorialização absoluta. Cito Mil Platôs: ¨Se a instituição é um agenciamento molar que repousa em agenciamentos moleculares (daí a importância do ponto de vista molecular em política: a soma dos gestos, atitudes, procedimentos, regras,disposições espaciais e temporais que fazem a consistência concreta ou a duração – no sentido bergsoniano – da instituição, burocracia estatal ou partido), o indivíduo por sua vez não é uma forma originária evoluindo no mundo como em um cenário exterior ou um conjunto de dados aos quais ele se contentaria em reagir;ele só se constitui ao se agenciar, ele só existe tomado de imediato em agenciamentos¨[21].  E concluo apostando que a esquizoanálise é uma prática micropolítica que só  ganhará  sentido com referência a um gigantesco rizoma de revoluções moleculares que proliferam a partir de uma multidão de mudanças mutantes: tornar-se mulher, tornar-se criança, tornar-se velho, tornar-se animal, planta, cosmos, tornar-se invisível…[22].

A noção acima, o ¨indivíduo só se constitui ao se agenciar¨, libera o poder de afecção dos indivíduos, para o entre-mundos – uma individuação por hecceidades e não por meio de características identificantes. E com isso, a esquizoanálise é aberta a novas formas subjetivas, novas formas de compor a vida, novas alternativas de reapropriação existencial que, porventura, novas coletividades humanas e de indivíduos venham a ¨agenciar¨: vidas vivas, vibrantes e então muito diferentes das formas de vida pobres que a subjetividade maquínica nos impõe.

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Muitas outras escolas da área-psi teriam como contribuir com o ¨exército dosTerranos¨ e com o ¨povo de Gaia¨. E, todavia, paro por aqui.

Uma palavra em torno do meu consultório. Sabe-se que um analista neurótico atrai muitos pacientes neuróticos, um analista com um certo traço mais esquizoide atrai muitos pacientes esquizoides, um analista ferido narcísico atrai muitos pacientes também feridos primais. Tudo isso se dá por afinidades eletivas! Claro que nem todos os analistas tem essa percepção à mão, refiro-me à sincronicidade, e então, não raro, acreditam que no mundo só tem neuróticos e  esquizóides, por exemplo, e continuam então ¨sonhando só consigo mesmos¨ – como denuncia Davi Kopenawa.

No meu consultório aparecem muitos Terranos, a maioria dos meus pacientes sãoTerranos – cá e lá um Humano do ¨povo da Natureza¨ acolhido também com muito amor . Mas estes últimos não são numerosos. Quero com isto dizer que há sim uma nova sensibilidade cuja ¨experiência de sofrimento¨ é a de não adaptar-se ao mundo dos Humanos – modernos do ¨povo da Natureza¨. Essa não adaptação, claro, traz muito sofrimento, mas começa-se a dizer não para o princípio de realidade instaurado pelo Humanos modernos e edipianos. A guerra está ganhando corpo.

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[1] Frente ao impacto que tive ao escutar e compreender as palavras do Prof. Viveiros de Castro em ambos os vídeos não resisti e fiz o mapa natal do antropólogo e seus trânsitos nos próximos anos. Eduardo é do signo de Áries e nasceu a 19 de Abril de 1951, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Trata-se então de um ariano e qualquer astrólogo escutando-o pode apreender isso facilmente. Não sei o horário que o antropólogo nasceu e então não sei qual é o ascendente. E, todavia, só com os dados que tenho posso ter muitas informações sobre ele. Seu sol está a 28 graus e 43 minutos e a imagem Sabeu ( símbolo tradicional da astrologia) do sol é: a large audience confronts the performer who disappointed its expectations (¨Uma grande plateia confronta o artista que frustrou as expectativas do público¨) . Como interpreto esta imagem? O ariano inicia novos mundos, esse é o seu fazer, pois é um iniciador. Ao iniciar um novo mundo, claro, sempre frustra a expectativa de muitos!É inevitável.

A Vênus do Eduardo está a 5 graus de gêmeos e o símbolo sabeu que lhe corresponde é: a revolutionary magazine asking for action (¨Uma revista revolucionária pedindo ação¨) . Desde 2011 Netuno em peixes, um dos grandes deuses da mudança, está fazendo uma quadratura com a Vênus do antropólogo e isto significa que ele se abriu para a ¨unidade da vida¨. Dito de outra maneira sua forma de amar e de criar mundos desde há alguns anos transformou-se pois cairam as fronteiras entre-mundos.Netuno dissolve as fronteiras entre-mundos e abre para todos nós, quando passa pela Vênus ou pelo sol, a ¨unidade da vida¨.Em 2013, 2014 e 2015 Netuno fez e estará fazendo quadratura exata a 5 graus de gêmeos e – prosseguirá em conjunção ainda por alguns anos –e então Viveiros está e estará no auge dessa apropriação: criação de mundos a partir da ¨unidade da vida¨. E isso nos permite ler poéticamente então o símbolo Sabeu que corresponde a Vênus: escritos revolucionários que pedem ação!

Este trânsito de Netuno quadrando Vênus é então quem dará uma tonalidade especial aos dois grandes trânsitos sobre o Sol do antropólogo. Urano em Áries, o imprevisível, e Plutão em Capricórnio, o transformador,farão respectivamente conjunção e quadratura com o Sol do antropólogo. Urano a partir de 2015 já estará fazendo conjunção com o Sol  e fará conjunção exata em 2017 e 2018 – prosseguindo ainda em conjunção por alguns anos.Plutão estará fazendo quadratura com o Sol de Eduardo a partir de 2018 e quadratura exata em 2022 – e por alguns anos ainda a partir dessa data. O que significa isso? Significa que esses dois planetas transpessoais trarão à tona as sementes genuínas da individualidade do antropólogo e com isso ele dará inícios – já que é o que melhor sabe fazer! – a mundos a partir de sua singularidade máxima. Quem viver, verá!

[2] A Queda do Céu: Palavras de um Xamã Yanomami¨ é um relato único da história de vida de Davi Kopenawa. Relata a sua iniciação como xamã e os primeiros encontros com os forasteiros brancos. Descreve também a rica cultura, história e modos de vida dos habitantes da floresta e não se furta a descrever suas impressoões da cultura ocidental. O livro foi publicado em francês e em inglês e será publicado em português em 2014.

[3] Volume 44, número 4, 15-26, 2010, cujo tema é Alteridade.

[4] Freud e uma nova origem da espécie. Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Folha de São Paulo, 29/12/2013.

[5] Idem, ibidem.

[6] Idem. Ibidem.

[7] Idem. Ibidem.

[8] Cito-o: ¨Sim, há algo universal. É o desconforto das pessoas com suas limitações identitárias. Essa experiência é partilhada em qualquer tempo e lugar; define a condição humana. Dizer isso é o desdobramento de uma ideia freudiana: o mal estar é quem define o homem. Se quisermos podemos dizer que o mal estar é uma categoria ontológica[…] Então, acho que é possível construir experiências políticas, estéticas e reflexões clínicas, fazendo apelo a essa dimensão profundamente essencial que é a experiência do desconforto¨. Cult 186, ano 16/ dezembro de 2013. Entrevista com W. Safatle, ¨A Filosofia nua e crua¨.

[9] Talvez os bionianos ( W. R. Bion) possam abrir-se para essa escuta e isso em função da noção de inconsciente como potencialidade infinita. A mente primordial, realidade primeira do mental, para Bion, poderia bem ser pensada como transpessoal e mesmo transespecista – e é sim possível pensá-la para além da espécie homo sapiens.Da  mente primordial de Bion faz parte a  história mesmo do cosmos e o futuro do cosmos: é o Ó,  inominável, infinito, informe e é em direção ao Ó que se dá a expansão da mente. Bion discípulo e analisando de Melanie Klein parte, com certeza, da personalidade edipiana, mas tende para ummais além, para o infinito, para Ó.

[10] Afinidades Eletivas  é um romance de Goethe, que eu também recomendo;  sofreu publicações em vários selos editoriais.

[11][11] Cult, número 186, já citada, p. 11.

[12] Idem.

[13] Confrontar-se com o Inumano, Revista Cult, número 125, grifos meus.

[14] Confrontar-se com o Inumano. Op.cit.

[15] Idem, grifos meus.

[16] Cult, número 186, p. 11.

[17] C. Dunker é um psicanalista atento aos sofrimentos que se constelam como invenção e resposta às transformações no horizonte da nossa época. Uma dessas formas de sofrimento que o autor generaliza tomando como parâmetro as observações de W. Benjamim sobre os soldados que voltavam da Primeira Guerra Mundial refere-se à impossibilidade de narrar, de nomear, de dizer o sofrimento. Esse sofrimento hoje generalizado, expressa a brutalidade do choque, o inominável da experiência que silencia e, doravante, os que dele participam estão tais como os combatentes de guerra ¨narrativamente lesados¨, na medida em que não conseguem inscrever seu sofrimento em um discurso . Cito Dunker: ¨Seu paradigma literário são os zumbis ou mortos-vivos, seres funcionais que repetem automaticamente uma ação, incapazes de reconstruir a história da tragédia que sobre eles se abateu. Parecem seres que perderam a alma e cujo sofrimento aparece em meio a mutismos seletivos, fenômenos psicossomáticos e alexetimias ( dificuldade de perceber sentimentos e nomeá-los)¨. Revista Cult 174 – 19/11/2012. O artigo de C. Dunker chama-se ¨O real e a verdade do sofrimento¨.

[18] Na direção inversa, Dunker recorrerá à ¨antropologia do inumano¨ proposta por W. Safatle; estes experimentam uma forma de vida que é sentida como monstruosa, animal e coisificada e fracassam sistematicamente em dar nome à causa de seu sofrimento. E já que não nomeiam a causa, buscam encontrar a razão de seu mal estar no mundo, explorando para isso a força da inadequação,  do estranhamento e da fragmentação. Fora do tempo, fora de lugar, fora do corpo: ninguém melhor que as sexualidades estudadas por Judith Butler para dizê-los. Errantes da linguagem, inadaptados do trabalho, depressivos do desejo, seu sofrimento pode ser tematizado como exílio e isolamento e clinicamente é o que encontramos no trabalho de luto. Ressentimento e tédio rondam a vida desses seres errantes. Cito Dunker: ¨É o drama daqueles que são habitados por experiências de radical anomia e indeterminação, cujo maior exemplo literário é Frankenstein. Esta desregulação sistêmica do mundo, teorizada por Lacan como separação entre real, simbólico e imaginário, exprime-se como sentimento permanente de perda de unidade¨ ( CULT, número 174, p. 26).

[19] Cult,  número 174, p. 27 – grifos meus.

[20][20] O ¨inconsciente capitalístico¨ e ou o ¨inconsciente maquínico¨ corresponderiam à subjetividade capitalística produzida pela mídia e pelos equipamentos coletivos e impõe  modos de se compor com a vida que visam atender às exigências globais do sistema.

[21] DELEUZE, G.GUATTARI. F. Mil Platôs,  S. P. Editora Trinta e Quatro, 2003. p. 318 grifos meus.

[22] GUATTARI. Féliz. ¨Os oito ¨princípios¨ da esquizoanálise¨, escrito por Bernardo Rieux, 12/10/2005.

Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (somatosphere)

September 23, 2013

By Frédéric Keck

This article is part of the series: 

Editor’s note: As part of our new series, Second Opinion (not to be confused with the SMA’s similarly titled newsletter) we ask two contributors to review the same book, respond to the same question, or comment on the same set of issues.  For our first pair of Second Opinion posts, we invited two reviews of Eduardo Kohn’s new book, How Forests Think. The second review will appear within the next few weeks.

How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human

 By Eduardo Kohn

University of California Press, 2013

$29.95, £19.95; Paperback, 228 pages.

There is a long genealogy of anthropologists who have borrowed their titles from the translation of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive — How Natives Think.  Running from Marshall Sahlins’ How “Natives” Think to Maurice Bloch’s How We Think They Think, these transformations run parallel to those of the discipline itself. By entitling his book How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn indicates that he doesn’t study the way the people he worked with in Ecuador thought about forests, but the way forests actually think. By making a claim about the relation between life and thought, this book takes part in the ontological turn (Candea 2010) that decenters anthropologists’ longstanding focus on cultural representations to ask how representations emerge within forms of life. Following Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Kohn shows that Amazonian ethnography challenges our conceptions of life and thought in a way that raises the ontological question of what there is. As the ecological crisis leads to a proliferation of new entities that both blur the opposition between nature and culture and ask for political recognition – “pets, weeds, pests, commensals, new pathogens, ‘wild’ animals, or technoscientific ‘mutants,’” (9) this kind of ethnography cautiously scrutinizes the continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans. The book is ethnographic in a classical sense, and yet its chapters follow a theoretical progression, while powerful images plunge into an “enchanted” world – a term Kohn takes up deliberately – entangling humans and nonhumans in puzzling ways.

The main thesis of the book is about semiosis, the life of signs. If we are troubled by the idea that forests think, it is because we conceive thinking as a conventional relation to the world. Following 19th century American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, Kohn argues that all signs are not conventional symbols, and that there are other ways to learn the meaning of signs than to relate them to each other in a cultural context. When a hunter describes the fall of a palm tree under the weight of a monkey as pu’oh, the meaning of this sign is felt with evidence, without knowledge of Quichua (the language spoken by Kohn’s informants), because it relates hunters, monkeys and trees in a complex ecosystem. Kohn asks for “decolonizing thought” and “provincializing language” by looking at relations between signs that are not symbolic. Hence the program of an “anthropology beyond the human” that places human symbols in the forms of life from which they emerge. Without romanticizing tropical nature, Kohn argues that most of our problems are ill-shaped, or filled with anxiety – as in a wonderful description of the bus trip that led him to Avila – if we don’t place them in a larger semiotic field.

Following Terrence Deacon’s interpretation of Peirce (2012), Kohn is less interested in the classifications of signs into indices, icons and symbols than in the process through which they emerge one from the other. A sign refers to something absent that exists in futuro, just as the crashing of the palm tree under the weight of a monkey refers to a coming danger for the monkey, and a possible catch for the hunter. Habits fix the meaning of signs by producing similarity, and are considered as “interpretants” of signs. Using the example of the walking-stick insect, Kohn argues that what appears to look similar is actually the product of a selection from beings that looked different. Signs thus refer to the past as a memory of beings who have disappeared. Since this relation to the past and future is what, for Peirce, constitutes selves, all living beings, and not only humans, can be considered as selves.

The strangeness of Kohn’s text come from the way it interlaces these theoretical analyses of signs with an account of the life of the Runa people, considered not as a cultural context but as “amplifying” certain ontological properties of life itself. “Living beings are loci of selfhood,” Kohn writes. “I make this claim empirically. It grows out of my attention to Runa relations with nonhuman beings as these reveal themselves ethnographically. These relations amplify certain properties of the world, and this amplification can infect and affect our thinking about the world,” (94). This is an original intervention in the ontological reappraisal of animism. Kohn neither contrasts animism to naturalism as two inverse ontologies in the mode of Descola, nor does he engage in the paradoxes of perspectivism like Viveiros.  Instead, he considers living beings as selves in relation to past and future relations, and social life as an amplification of this process of self-formation.

Thus, puma designates both predators like jaguars and shamans who can see the way that jaguars see. Runa people need to learn how jaguars see in order not to be eaten by them. The soul, as what exceeds the limits of the body, is “an effect of intersubjective semiotic interpretance,” (107). What Kohn calls “soul blindness” is an inattention to the effects of the souls of other living beings. The problem is how to live with runa puma: jaguars who act like humans, and kill to revenge other killings, who are dreaded but also considered to be mature selves.

Dreams, analyzed in Chapter 4, are common ways of communication with souls and remediating “soul blindness.” Runa people give hallucinatory drugs to dogs so that they will dream, and their barks during dreaming are interpreted literally—in the same way as their daytime barks–while human dreams of hunting are interpreted metaphorically. Rather than doing a symbolic analysis of dreams, Kohn places them in the semiotic life they express, between humans, dogs and jaguars. Dreams are ways of communicating between species without abolishing them, constituting a “trans-species pidgin.”

In Chapter 5, Kohn makes an important distinction between form and sign. “Whereas semiosis is in and of the living world beyond the human, form emerges from and is part and parcel of the nonliving one as well,” (174). The question he asks is that of the efficacy of form, the constraint it exerts on living beings. Taking the example of the distribution of rubber trees in the Amazonian forest, which depends on the ecology of parasites as well as on the network of rivers, he argues that shamanistic hunting and the colonial extraction of rubber were both constrained by the same form. Forms have a causality that is not moral but that can be called hierarchical: signs emerge from forms, and symbols from signs, in a hierarchy between levels of emergence that cannot be inversed. This is a powerful interpretation of the insertion of colonial extraction in forms that historically precede it: if power brings with it moral categories, this insertion cannot be thought of as an imposition from above, but rather as a fall-out or an incidental movement.

Kohn links this morphodynamic analysis of colonialism to Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of “la pensée sauvage” – a form of thought emerging from relations between signs rather than being imposed upon them. Through forms and signs, Runa people have “frozen” history in such a way that they can interpret events through their dreams. The dream of Oswaldo, who saw a policeman with hair on his shirt, is ambivalent: does it mean he will be caught by the white man, or that he will be successful in hunting peccaries? The final chapter of the book analyses the reversals in relation between the Runa and White missionaries or policemen, as well as the pronouns by which Runa people refer to themselves as subjects, such as amu. “Amu is a particular colonially inflected way of being a self in an ecology of selves filled with a growing array of future-making habits, many of which are not human. In the process, amu renders visible how a living future gives life some of its special properties and how this involves a dynamic that implicates (but is not reducible to) the past. In doing so, amu, and the spirit realm upon which it draws its power, amplifies something general about life—namely, life’s quality of being in futuro,” (208). The question for Runa people is how they can access the realm of the White masters, that is also the heaven of saints: what is generally called the “super-natural.”  To live is to survive, Kohn argues, that is to live beyond life, in the many absences that constitute life as a semiotic process.

The strength of this book is to propose a rigorous demonstration while never leaving empirical analysis. Starting on the level of signs in their triadic mode of existence, Kohn finds form on one side and history on the other, and describes their constraints and ambivalent relationships. This is not a dualism between nature and culture that would be solved through the concept of life – and Kohn tries to avoid an all-encompassing anthropology of life – but a logical tension that is amplified by humans, almost in the way that genetic material is amplified inside and outside the laboratory (Rabinow 1996). Kohn’s anthropology “beyond the human” – but not of the “post-human” – grounds itself in the life of signs where humans emerge to amplify them. The ambition of this ontological claim, its clarity and its theoretical productivity will not doubt be amplified by other ethnographic inquiries on life.

Frédéric Keck is a researcher at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (CNRS) in Paris. He has published works on the history of philosophy and social anthropology in France (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss) and translated Paul Rabinow’s French DNA into French. He now works on the management of animal diseases transmitted to humans, or zoonoses (Un monde grippé, Flammarion, 2010, Des hommes malades des animaux, L’Herne, 2012)

References:

Candea, Matei
 (2010) Debate: Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture.Critique of Anthropology 30 (2): 172-179

Deacon, Terrence (2012) Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton.

Descola, Philippe (2005) Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 4, 469-488.

Rabinow, Paul (1996) Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Somatosphere)

September 23, 2013

By 

Editor’s note: As part of our new series, Second Opinion (not to be confused with the SMA’s similarly titled newsletter) we ask two contributors to review the same book, respond to the same question, or comment on the same set of issues.  For our first pair of Second Opinion posts, we invited two reviews of Eduardo Kohn’s new book, How Forests Think. The second review will appear within the next few weeks.

How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human

 By Eduardo Kohn

University of California Press, 2013. $29.95, £19.95; Paperback, 228 pages.

There is a long genealogy of anthropologists who have borrowed their titles from the translation of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive — How Natives Think.  Running from Marshall Sahlins’ How “Natives” Think to Maurice Bloch’s How We Think They Think, these transformations run parallel to those of the discipline itself. By entitling his book How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn indicates that he doesn’t study the way the people he worked with in Ecuador thought about forests, but the way forests actually think. By making a claim about the relation between life and thought, this book takes part in the ontological turn (Candea 2010) that decenters anthropologists’ longstanding focus on cultural representations to ask how representations emerge within forms of life. Following Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Kohn shows that Amazonian ethnography challenges our conceptions of life and thought in a way that raises the ontological question of what there is. As the ecological crisis leads to a proliferation of new entities that both blur the opposition between nature and culture and ask for political recognition – “pets, weeds, pests, commensals, new pathogens, ‘wild’ animals, or technoscientific ‘mutants,’” (9) this kind of ethnography cautiously scrutinizes the continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans. The book is ethnographic in a classical sense, and yet its chapters follow a theoretical progression, while powerful images plunge into an “enchanted” world – a term Kohn takes up deliberately – entangling humans and nonhumans in puzzling ways.

The main thesis of the book is about semiosis, the life of signs. If we are troubled by the idea that forests think, it is because we conceive thinking as a conventional relation to the world. Following 19th century American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, Kohn argues that all signs are not conventional symbols, and that there are other ways to learn the meaning of signs than to relate them to each other in a cultural context. When a hunter describes the fall of a palm tree under the weight of a monkey as pu’oh, the meaning of this sign is felt with evidence, without knowledge of Quichua (the language spoken by Kohn’s informants), because it relates hunters, monkeys and trees in a complex ecosystem. Kohn asks for “decolonizing thought” and “provincializing language” by looking at relations between signs that are not symbolic. Hence the program of an “anthropology beyond the human” that places human symbols in the forms of life from which they emerge. Without romanticizing tropical nature, Kohn argues that most of our problems are ill-shaped, or filled with anxiety – as in a wonderful description of the bus trip that led him to Avila – if we don’t place them in a larger semiotic field.

Following Terrence Deacon’s interpretation of Peirce (2012), Kohn is less interested in the classifications of signs into indices, icons and symbols than in the process through which they emerge one from the other. A sign refers to something absent that exists in futuro, just as the crashing of the palm tree under the weight of a monkey refers to a coming danger for the monkey, and a possible catch for the hunter. Habits fix the meaning of signs by producing similarity, and are considered as “interpretants” of signs. Using the example of the walking-stick insect, Kohn argues that what appears to look similar is actually the product of a selection from beings that looked different. Signs thus refer to the past as a memory of beings who have disappeared. Since this relation to the past and future is what, for Peirce, constitutes selves, all living beings, and not only humans, can be considered as selves.

The strangeness of Kohn’s text come from the way it interlaces these theoretical analyses of signs with an account of the life of the Runa people, considered not as a cultural context but as “amplifying” certain ontological properties of life itself. “Living beings are loci of selfhood,” Kohn writes. “I make this claim empirically. It grows out of my attention to Runa relations with nonhuman beings as these reveal themselves ethnographically. These relations amplify certain properties of the world, and this amplification can infect and affect our thinking about the world,” (94). This is an original intervention in the ontological reappraisal of animism. Kohn neither contrasts animism to naturalism as two inverse ontologies in the mode of Descola, nor does he engage in the paradoxes of perspectivism like Viveiros.  Instead, he considers living beings as selves in relation to past and future relations, and social life as an amplification of this process of self-formation.

Thus, puma designates both predators like jaguars and shamans who can see the way that jaguars see. Runa people need to learn how jaguars see in order not to be eaten by them. The soul, as what exceeds the limits of the body, is “an effect of intersubjective semiotic interpretance,” (107). What Kohn calls “soul blindness” is an inattention to the effects of the souls of other living beings. The problem is how to live with runa puma: jaguars who act like humans, and kill to revenge other killings, who are dreaded but also considered to be mature selves.

Dreams, analyzed in Chapter 4, are common ways of communication with souls and remediating “soul blindness.” Runa people give hallucinatory drugs to dogs so that they will dream, and their barks during dreaming are interpreted literally—in the same way as their daytime barks–while human dreams of hunting are interpreted metaphorically. Rather than doing a symbolic analysis of dreams, Kohn places them in the semiotic life they express, between humans, dogs and jaguars. Dreams are ways of communicating between species without abolishing them, constituting a “trans-species pidgin.”

In Chapter 5, Kohn makes an important distinction between form and sign. “Whereas semiosis is in and of the living world beyond the human, form emerges from and is part and parcel of the nonliving one as well,” (174). The question he asks is that of the efficacy of form, the constraint it exerts on living beings. Taking the example of the distribution of rubber trees in the Amazonian forest, which depends on the ecology of parasites as well as on the network of rivers, he argues that shamanistic hunting and the colonial extraction of rubber were both constrained by the same form. Forms have a causality that is not moral but that can be called hierarchical: signs emerge from forms, and symbols from signs, in a hierarchy between levels of emergence that cannot be inversed. This is a powerful interpretation of the insertion of colonial extraction in forms that historically precede it: if power brings with it moral categories, this insertion cannot be thought of as an imposition from above, but rather as a fall-out or an incidental movement.

Kohn links this morphodynamic analysis of colonialism to Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of “la pensée sauvage” – a form of thought emerging from relations between signs rather than being imposed upon them. Through forms and signs, Runa people have “frozen” history in such a way that they can interpret events through their dreams. The dream of Oswaldo, who saw a policeman with hair on his shirt, is ambivalent: does it mean he will be caught by the white man, or that he will be successful in hunting peccaries? The final chapter of the book analyses the reversals in relation between the Runa and White missionaries or policemen, as well as the pronouns by which Runa people refer to themselves as subjects, such as amu. “Amu is a particular colonially inflected way of being a self in an ecology of selves filled with a growing array of future-making habits, many of which are not human. In the process, amu renders visible how a living future gives life some of its special properties and how this involves a dynamic that implicates (but is not reducible to) the past. In doing so, amu, and the spirit realm upon which it draws its power, amplifies something general about life—namely, life’s quality of being in futuro,” (208). The question for Runa people is how they can access the realm of the White masters, that is also the heaven of saints: what is generally called the “super-natural.”  To live is to survive, Kohn argues, that is to live beyond life, in the many absences that constitute life as a semiotic process.

The strength of this book is to propose a rigorous demonstration while never leaving empirical analysis. Starting on the level of signs in their triadic mode of existence, Kohn finds form on one side and history on the other, and describes their constraints and ambivalent relationships. This is not a dualism between nature and culture that would be solved through the concept of life – and Kohn tries to avoid an all-encompassing anthropology of life – but a logical tension that is amplified by humans, almost in the way that genetic material is amplified inside and outside the laboratory (Rabinow 1996). Kohn’s anthropology “beyond the human” – but not of the “post-human” – grounds itself in the life of signs where humans emerge to amplify them. The ambition of this ontological claim, its clarity and its theoretical productivity will not doubt be amplified by other ethnographic inquiries on life.

Frédéric Keck is a researcher at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (CNRS) in Paris. He has published works on the history of philosophy and social anthropology in France (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss) and translated Paul Rabinow’s French DNA into French. He now works on the management of animal diseases transmitted to humans, or zoonoses (Un monde grippé, Flammarion, 2010, Des hommes malades des animaux, L’Herne, 2012)

References:

Candea, Matei
 (2010) Debate: Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture.Critique of Anthropology 30 (2): 172-179

Deacon, Terrence (2012) Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton.

Descola, Philippe (2005) Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 4, 469-488.

Rabinow, Paul (1996) Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Common nonsense: a review of certain recent reviews of the “ontological turn” (Anthropology of this Century)

By Morten Axel Pedersen

http://aotcpress.com/articles/common_nonsense/

If the success of a new theoretical approach can be measured by the intensity of the passion and the amount of critique it generates, then surely the so-called “ontological turn” within anthropology and cognate disciplines qualifies as one. As still more scholars and perhaps especially students express sympathy with some or all of its analytical aspirations, the larger and the louder becomes the chorus of anthropological sceptics expressing reservations about the project and its implications. But what is this “turn” really about, and how fair – and thus also how damaging – are the various critiques raised against it? With a view to addressing these and related questions, my aim in this essay is to review certain recent reviews of the ontological turn with special emphasis on whether or not this theoretical method and some of the most common critiques of it may themselves be said to rest on implicit meta-ontologies.

Let me begin by describing what I consider the ontological turn to be all about. I shall be relatively brief, for a lot has already been written about this question, notably by my friend and sometimes partner in crime Martin Holbraad, partly in relation to critiques of the book Thinking Through Things, which he co-edited with Amira Henare and Sari Wastell (and to which I myself contributed) in 2007.

In a recent paper about the oftentimes implicit linguistic conventions underpinning anthropological descriptions of Amerindian cosmologies, Magnus Course correctly observes ‘that what people have meant by ontology has been diverse’ and that the ontological turn therefore comprises ‘neither a “school” nor even a “movement”, but rather a particular commitment to recalibrate the level at which analysis takes place’ (2010: 248). Nevertheless, Course goes on to define it as the ‘dual movement towards, on the one hand, exploring the basis of the Western social and intellectual project and, on the other, of exploring and describing the terms in which non-Western understandings of the world are grounded’ (ibid). This characterization seems to me basically right, for the ontological turn has always above all been a theoretically reflexive project, which is concerned with how anthropologists might get their ethnographic descriptions right. The ambition is to devise a new analytical method from which classic ethnographic questions may be posed afresh. For that is what the ontological turn was always meant to be, in my understanding: a technology of description, which allows anthropologists to make sense of their ethnographic material in new and experimental ways.

So, why all the fuss? Leaving aside the already hotly debated proposition that ‘ontology is just another word for culture’ (Venkatesan 2010) and other claims that the ontological turn is simply an anachronistic icing on the obsolete culturalist cake, one of the most common objections centres on the very word ontology itself. For just how – many students and scholars ask themselves and others with varying degrees of incredulity and shock (for a good example, see Keane 2009) – can this term, with its heavy load of philosophical baggage and its metaphysical, essentialist, and absolutist connotations, be of any use to the anthropological project? One of the best examples of this critique can be found in a recent essay by Paolo Heywood (2012). Inspired by Quine’s (mocking) concept of “bloated universes” in which ‘”existence” covers everything both actual and potential’ (2012: 148), Heywood argues that the ontological turn has failed to live up to its own mission of always allowing ethnographic specificity to trump theoretical generality by operating with a tacit meta-ontology of its own. ‘At some point or another along the path traced by the “ontological turn”‘, Heywood asserts, ‘we will have to start deciding what is, and what is not. Holbraad and others use the word “ontology” precisely because of the connotations of “reality” and “being” it brings with it; yet they neglect to acknowledge that insisting on the “reality” of multiple worlds commits you to a meta-ontology in which such worlds exist: what Quine would call “a bloated universe”‘ (2012: 146).

Of the different critiques of the ontological turn that I have come across over the years, this is one of the subtlest. For, even if one does not necessarily share Heywood’s concern that ‘there is a difference of usage in the concept [of ontology] as it is employed by anthropologists and by analytical philosophers’ (after all, why should this constitute a problem at all – surely this is a sign of growing disciplinary confidence and maturity?), Heywood is evidently touching upon a rather delicate question, namely whether the ontological turn amounts to a big theory (or “meta-ontology”, in Heywood’s terms) or not? To be sure, Holbraad in particular has gone to great lengths to stress that the ontological turn (or the “recursive move”, as he calls it in more recent writings) is a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixed theoretical framework. In a characteristically mind-boggling line of reasoning, he explains:

At issue … are not the categories of those we purport to describe, but rather our own when our attempts to do so fail … Rather than containing [contingency] at the level of ethnographic description, the recursive move allows the contingency of ethnographic alterity to transmute itself to the level of analysis … [R]ecursive anthropology … render[s] all analytical forms contingent upon the vagaries of ethnographically driven aporia … This, then, is also why such a recursive argument could hardly pretend to set the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, anthropological or otherwise … [T]he recursive move is just that: a move – as contingent, time-bound, and subjunctive as any (Holbraad 2012: 263-264).

It is hard to imagine a more logically compelling response to Heywood’s critique. No, goes Holbraad’s reply, the ontological turn has no covert meta-ontological ground, for its only “ground” is precisely its radically contingent attitude expressed not only in its open-ended attitude to its object of study, but also in its relative lack of commitment to the heuristic concepts that it creates and deploys to make sense of “ethnographically driven aporia”. To claim, as Heywood and several others have done, that variants of the ontological turn have ‘moved too far from the call to “take seriously” other worlds, and started positing world of their own’ (2012: 144) is to fail to recognise the limited degree to which the ontological turn takes itselfseriously. Indeed, seen from its own radically contingent perspective, ‘…a future non- or even anti-recursive turn cannot be excluded, just as they cannot yet, in their constitutive ethnographic contingency, be conceived. What we have, in effect, is a machine for thinking in perpetual motion – an excessive motion, ever capable of setting the conditions of possibility for its own undoing’ (Holbraad 2012: 264-65).

Yet, compelling as Holbraad’s argument is, I am not entirely sure that it lets him and other self-proclaimed “ontographers” (myself included) fully off the hook. For the question is whether the analytic ideal of a radically heuristic “ethnographic theory” (Da Col & Graeber 2011) is actually synthetically possible, to adopt Kant’s old distinction. A perfectly recursive anthropology of the sort sketched by Holbraad above may well be logically conceivable as a pure abstract possibility. But, to my knowledge, all of the “ontographic” studies published to date have been wedded to a particular theoretical ground captured by concepts such as “relational” (Strathern 1988), “fractal” (Wagner 1991), and “intensive” (Deleuze 1994). Certainly, some of my own work is guilty of this – if that is what it is to analyse from a set of theoretical assumptions: a sin for which one can be charged and found guilty in the Cambridge court. As far as I am concerned, the meta-ontological critique made by Heywood does not refer to an ethnographic crime but an anthropological necessity of which one can, as long as one maintains a high level of theoretical reflexivity, consider oneself proud. Indeed, as I am going to suggest in what remains of this essay, this is the main weakness of Heywood’s and other recent critiques of the ontological turn: they are curiously blind to their own theoretical ground. For, no matter whether they want this or not, they too are meta-ontological sinners.

Nowhere is this more clear than in James Laidlaw’s recent review in this journal of my book on Mongolian shamanism, Not Quite Shamans, or, put differently – in keeping with Laidlaw’s own jesting spirit – his review of a single footnote in the book’s Introduction, where I summarise my take on the term “ontology”. The problem, Laidlaw argues (closely echoing Heywood’s critique of Holbraad), is that my position involves a tacit ‘oscillat[ation] between two different uses of “ontology”‘, which are mutually incompatible. On the one hand, Laidlaw asserts, I use this term in the same sense as he himself appears to subscribe to, namely with reference to ‘the study of, or reflection on, the question of what there is – what are the fundamental entities or kinds of stuff that exist?’ And, on the other hand, I also deploy ontology in what Laidlaw considers to be a more radical and dubious sense of a purported ‘”radical alterity” of certain societies … [which] consists not in them having different “socially constructed” viewpoints on the same (natural) world, but in them living in actually different worlds. The differences between them and Euro-America are not therefore epistemological (different ways of knowing the same reality) but ontological (fundamentally different realities)’. This, Laidlaw maintains, is a contradiction, for if in the first sense, ‘”ontologies” … refer to views about what exists rather than … a claim about what exists’, then, in the second and what he calls “original” sense, people in ‘Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia live in different worlds, [and] enjoy ontological auto-determination’. Accordingly, Laidlaw concludes, my concept of ontology and therefore my theoretical position more generally, ‘delivers not new post-plural multi-naturalism, but merely the familiar old idea that different peoples have different theories about the world’ (Laidlaw 2012).

Now, I am happy to admit that my use of the term ontology “oscillates” between two different and apparently contradictory meanings, namely ontology in the sense of “essence” (what there is) and ontology in the sense of “theory” or “model” (of what there is). But I am less inclined to agree that this poses any real anthropological problem; in fact, I would like to think of this seeming slippage from essence to theory/model as one of the greatest methodological advantages of the ontological turn. For Laidlaw, there is a qualitative difference between ‘refer[ing] to views about what exists’ as opposed to ‘putting forward a claim about what exists’, and it is precisely because what he refers to as the “original” ontological turn is concerned with the latter project (“ontology”) and not the former (“epistemology”) that it disqualifies itself as (good) anthropology and turns into (bad) philosophy. However, is this a fair depiction of the ontological turn, be that in its “original” form or not? And further, does not the distinction between describing ontologies and making ontologies hinge on a tacit meta-ontology of its own? It seems to me that Laidlaw’s critique of the ontological turn contains a boomerang-effect, in that the more or less implicit premises underwriting his identification of internal contradictions in my usage of the term “ontology” may be turned back on Laidlaw himself to the effect of exposing otherwise hidden theoretical grounds in his own anthropological project.

To flesh out this point, it is instructive to look at a concrete example of what Laidlaw refers to as my ontological “possession” or “challenge”. He sums up my attempt to describe what a Darhad Mongolian shamanic spirit (and a shaman) is in the following way:

Instead of being unchanging entities of which people’s diverse fleeting impressions are imperfect representations, the unseen entities of shamanism are labile, as it were, “all the way up” … The confusing, fragmentary manifestations people encounter in a shamanic séance just is what there is. On this account, “genuine shamans”, those who are able to some degree to pin their spirits down and control them are, Pedersen argues, less shamanic than the not-quite shamans whose unpredictable behaviour more fully manifests the “fluid ontology of spirits”: “ontology” here meaning merely “composition” (Laidlaw 2012).

This is a stellar gloss of one of the central arguments of my book, with which I have no difficulty. Indeed, note that Laidlaw and I here seem to agree about how “ontology” might be used in an anthropologically meaningful sense, namely as “composition”. But what interests me for our present purposes is the seemingly insignificant “merely” in Laidlaw’s formulation. For what he presents us with here, I think, is the tip of a conceptual iceberg that extends right down to the edifice of his own meta-ontology. After all, what invisible referent could this “merely” have other than the essentialist notion of “the really real” with which Laidlaw (unjustifiably, in my view) accuses the ontological turn of operating? It would appear that, in his eagerness to expose the contradictions of my argument, Laidlaw inadvertently brings to the fore some pretty serious ontological challenges of his own.

But of course, this does not let me off the hook, either. The fact that Laidlaw performs the same meta-ontological sleight of hand that he associates with me does not make his critique of the ontological turn less pertinent. But then again, perhaps it does in one way. For what happens, we may ask, the moment we omit the word “merely” from Laidlaw’s depiction of the Northern Mongolian shamanic cosmos ? We are left with an anthropological concept of ontology that does not confuse “essence” and “model”, or “reality” and its “representations”, but that denotes a single yet infinitely differentiated object of ethnographic study, which spans ‘everything both actual and potential’ (Heywood in op cit). This anthropological ontology contains everything one encounters during fieldwork – spirit beliefs and doubts about these, propositions about the nature of reality, and descriptions of such propositions, and then some – for the whole point is to never ‘start deciding what is, and what is not’ (ibid). This is what the talk about “multiple worlds” is all about: not the (epistemologically and politically) dubious reduction of each “culture” or “people” to a encapsulated reality, but, on the contrary, the explosion of potential concepts and “worlds” in a given ethnographic material, or combination (comparison) of such materials. There are still too many things that do not yet exist, to paraphrase a memorable expression by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998).

Still – and here my position may be seen to differ somewhat from Holbraad’s – although the ontological turn offers an unusually open-ended and creative technology of ethnographic description, it does, nevertheless, rest on a certain set of theoretical premises, which may or may not (depending on how strictly one defines this term) be deemed meta-ontological. Methodological monism, we might call this heuristic anthropological ontology: the strategic bracketing of any assumption – on behalf of the ethnographer and the people studied – that the object of anthropological analysis is comprised by separate, bounded and extensive units. The ontological turn amounts to a sustained theoretical experiment, which involves a strategic decision to treat all ethnographic realities as if they were “relationally” composed, and, in keeping with its “recursive” ambitions, seeks to conduct this experiment in a manner that is equally “intensive” itself. This is why the ontological turn contains within its conceptual make-up the means for its own undoing: it is nothing more, and nothing less, than a particular mode of anthropological play designed with the all too serious aim of posing ethnographic questions anew, which already appear to have been answered by existing approaches. To claim, as Laidlaw for instance does in his review of my book (Pedersen 2012), that I overlook what appears to be the most obvious interpretation in my analysis of a Mongolian hunter’s uncertainty about the spirits not as doubt about their existence but as doubt about their whereabouts at a particular time and place is therefore not entirely off the mark. But the point is that this “least obvious” interpretation (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009) is done entirely deliberately and with a very particular purpose, namely, in the case at hand, to account for peoples’ “apparently irrational beliefs” and their distancing towards such beliefs in a new and ethnographically more satisfactory way.

For the same reason, the ontological turn does not, as I would like to see it, automatically mean taking people, animals, artefacts, or whatever “more seriously” than other anthropologists do, as if there were a vantage-point imbued with the authority to pass such normative judgements. But it does involve adopting a certain, and theoretically highly self-reflexive, stance towards what ethnographic data might be, what concepts they might evince, as well as what such data and their conceptual yield might do to common senses of what reality is. It is, above all, this theoretical reflexivity which Holbraad and I try to “take seriously”, and for which we may justly be criticized, albeit not, I think, necessarily for the reasons laid out by Heywood, Laidlaw, and others.

The ontological turn, then, does indeed involve a concept of a “bloated universe”, but this does not mean that it celebrates itself as the holy grail of anthropological theory. Rather, it represents a certain (and thus unavoidably fading) moment in the recent history of the discipline, where a vaguely defined cohort of mostly Cambridge-associated scholars found it exciting to experiment with the nature of ethnographic description and anthropological theorizing in a certain way. Certainly, no one is pretending that the ontological turn is particularly new anymore, let alone that it will last forever. Indeed, the time may well have come to put the ontological turn to rest, or at least to transform it beyond recognition by distorting its core assumptions from within. So, by all means, let us all look for ways to puncture the inflated ontological balloon, insofar as it is fair to say that such a thing ever existed beyond the artificial confines of the monster created by its critics to shoot it down.

Still, there are different ways of deflating the ontological bubble. Some of these critiques may be deemed more productive than others in that they seek to push forward the limits of anthropological theory and the riddles that good ethnography poses, as opposed to trying to defend an imagined status quo or, even, reverting to ossified positions. As I have suggested elsewhere (2012), such a productive unsettling of the ontological turn (and of “relational anthropology” more generally) would seem necessarily to entail a further radicalization or distortion of its “intensive” ground to the point where it ceases being “relational” anymore. Possibly, this differs from Holbraad’s attempt to construct a ‘machine for thinking in perpetual motion’ (cf. op. cit), for whereas he takes “alterity” to constitute an ethnographic fact that only a recursive anthropology can take fully seriously, I wonder whether the notion of ‘ethnographic alterity’ itself might not be inseparable from the very ‘relational anthropology’ that we might now imagine leaving behind. Be that as it may, whether a creative destruction or distortion of the ontological turn can occur from within its own recursive logic (as Holbraad seems to suggest) or – as I rather tend to think – not, is, in the larger scheme of things, beside the point. What matters is the commitment to an anthropological vision, which insists that a viable answer can only be found through still more ethnographic explorations and experimentations. To be sure, it is hard to imagine Laidlaw or any other critic of the ontological turn disagreeing with this (again: show me an anthropologist who does not aspire to take his ethnography seriously!) But I do think that he and other “default sceptics” may be criticized for a certain lack of reflexivity about their own theoretical grounds. After all, scepticism – along with its favourite rhetorical trope, sarcasm – rests on a certain ontology, too.

In his classic essay, “Common sense as a cultural system” (1975), Clifford Geertz writes:

There are a number of reasons why treating common sense as a relatively organized body of considered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, should lead on to some useful conclusions; but perhaps the most important is that it is an inherent characteristic of common sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience not deliberated reflections upon it … Common sense is not what the mind … spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions … concludes … [N]o religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more general. Its tonalities are different, and so are the arguments to which it appeals, but … it pretends to reach past illusion to truth, to, as we say, things as they are (1975: 7, 16-17)

This, it seems to me, is a rather precise depiction of the more or less conscious meta-ontological ground inhabited by Laidlaw, Heywood, and, coming to think of it, what seems to be most other recent critiques of the ontological turn (see e.g. Geismar 2011): common sense, in its various guises. Or, could we say, provocatively, common nonsense, as a way of conveying what in my own (and it would appear also Geertz’s) opinion represents the basic flaw of this approach, namely its striking unwillingness to reflect on its own theoretical presuppositions. Common nonsense, that is to say, as a term for denoting the all too common anthropological problem of not recognising the intrinsic and inescapable theoretical ground of all ethnographic description and anthropological analysis, including – and perhaps especially so – those descriptions and analyses that claim “to not be overly theoretical” or, worse, to “not be theoretical” at all, as if “theory” was the name of a spirit that could be exorcized by denying its presence and not talking about it. And, not for the first time, we can thank an old anthropological master like Geertz for reminding us that common (non)sense, along with other meta-ontologies in our discipline, is associated with certain particular ‘stylistic features, the marks of attitude that give it its peculiar stamp’ (1975: 17). For is that not how the otherwise tacit ontology of anthropological skepticism shows its face: through a telling ‘air of “of-courseness,” a sense of “it figures” [that] is cast over … some selected, underscored things’ (1975: 18)?

It should be amply clear by now that, from the perspective of the critiques of the ontological turn, the question (indeed, the mere mention) of the word “ontology” is better left to the philosophers to deal with (as if philosophers were especially well equipped to address “big” questions about the reality of things, leaving the “smaller” question of how different people see and know these things to anthropologists and other mortals). But, as I have tried to show, this is, for a number of reasons, an untenable position. The time has come to challenge the commonsensical sceptics to stand up and make explicit their own theoretical ground.

REFERENCES

Course, Magnus. 2010. Of Words and Fog. Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology. Anthropological Theory 10(3): 247–263.

Da Col, Giovanni & David Graeber. 2011. Foreword: The return of ethnographic theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): vi–xxxv.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone.

Geismar, Haidy. 2011. Material Culture Studies and other Ways to Theorize Objects: A Primer to a Regional Debate. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(1): 210–218.

Geertz, Clifford. 1975. Common Sense as a Cultural System. The Antioch Review 33 (1), pp. 5-26.

Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. 2007. Thinking Through Things. Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.

Heywood, Paolo. 2012. Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on “Ontology”. Cambridge Anthropology 30 (1): 143-151.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Planet M : The intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.” Anthropological Theory 9 (4): 371-394.

Keane, Webb. 2009. On Multiple Ontologies and the Temporality of Things. Material World blog, 7 July 2009. URL: http://www.materialworldblog.com/2009/07/on-multiple-ontologies-and-the-temporality-of-things/. Accessed 15 Sept. 2012.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of This Century, vol. 4, London, May 2012. URL: http://aotcpress.com/articles/ontologically-challenged/.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Cornell University Press.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For the Motion. Critique of Anthropology 32 (1): 59-65.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Venkatesan, Soumhya et al. 2010. Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology 30 (2) pp 152-200.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998a. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469-88.

Wagner, Roy. 1991. The Fractal Person. In Big Men and Great Men. Personifications of power in Melanisia. M. Godelier & M. Strathern (eds.), pp.159-173. Cambridge University Press.

Information Overload in the Era of ‘Big Data’ (Science Daily)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2012) — Botany is plagued by the same problem as the rest of science and society: our ability to generate data quickly and cheaply is surpassing our ability to access and analyze it. In this age of big data, scientists facing too much information rely on computers to search large data sets for patterns that are beyond the capability of humans to recognize — but computers can only interpret data based on the strict set of rules in their programming.

New tools called ontologies provide the rules computers need to transform information into knowledge, by attaching meaning to data, thereby making those data retrievable by computers and more understandable to human beings. Ontology, from the Greek word for the study of being or existence, traditionally falls within the purview of philosophy, but the term is now used by computer and information scientists to describe a strategy for representing knowledge in a consistent fashion. An ontology in this contemporary sense is a description of the types of entities within a given domain and the relationships among them.

A new article in this month’s American Journal of Botany by Ramona Walls (New York Botanical Garden) and colleagues describes how scientists build ontologies such as the Plant Ontology (PO) and how these tools can transform plant science by facilitating new ways of gathering and exploring data.

When data from many divergent sources, such as data about some specific plant organ, are associated or “tagged” with particular terms from a single ontology or set of interrelated ontologies, the data become easier to find, and computers can use the logical relationships in the ontologies to correctly combine the information from the different databases. Moreover, computers can also use ontologies to aggregate data associated with the different subclasses or parts of entities.

For example, suppose a researcher is searching online for all examples of gene expression in a leaf. Any botanist performing this search would include experiments that described gene expression in petioles and midribs or in a frond. However, a search engine would not know that it needs to include these terms in its search — unless it was told that a frond is a type of leaf, and that every petiole and every midrib are parts of some leaf. It is this information that ontologies provide.

The article in the American Journal of Botany by Walls and colleagues describes what ontologies are, why they are relevant to plant science, and some of the basic principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of the ontologies that are relevant to botany, with a more detailed description of the PO and the challenges of building an ontology that covers all green plants. The article also describes four keys areas of plant science that could benefit from the use of ontologies: (1) comparative genetics, genomics, phenomics, and development; (2) taxonomy and systematics; (3) semantic applications; and (4) education. Although most of the examples in this article are drawn from plant science, the principles could apply to any group of organisms, and the article should be of interest to zoologists as well.

As genomic and phenomic data become available for more species, many different research groups are embarking on the annotation of their data and images with ontology terms. At the same time, cross-species queries are becoming more common, causing more researchers in plant science to turn to ontologies. Ontology developers are working with the scientists who generate data to make sure ontologies accurately reflect current science, and with database developers and publishers to find ways to make it easier for scientist to associate their data with ontologies.

Journal Reference:

R. L. Walls, B. Athreya, L. Cooper, J. Elser, M. A. Gandolfo, P. Jaiswal, C. J. Mungall, J. Preece, S. Rensing, B. Smith, D. W. Stevenson. Ontologies as integrative tools for plant scienceAmerican Journal of Botany, 2012; 99 (8): 1263 DOI: 10.3732/ajb.1200222