The Nonhuman Turn

286 Pages·2015·4.232 MB·English

by  Richard Grusin (editor)

The Nonhuman Turn
Center for 21st Century Studies
Richard Grusin, Series Editor
0
The
Nonhuman
Turn
0
Richard Grusin, Editor
Center for 21st Century Studies
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,” Theory,
Culture, and Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 91–1 12; reprinted by permission of
SAGE Publications, Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore,
and Washington, D.C.; copyright 2011 Theory, Culture, and Society,
SAGE Publications. An earlier version of chapter 9 was published as
Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and
Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 225–3 3;
copyright 2012 New Literary History, University of Virginia; reprinted with
permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Copyright 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin
System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The nonhuman turn / Richard Grusin, editor, Center for 21st Century
Studies. (21st century studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9466-2 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9467-9 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Panpsychism—Congresses. 2. Consciousness—Congresses. I. Grusin,
Richard A., editor.
BD560.N66 2015 141—dc23
2014019922
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator
and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction vii
Richard Grusin
1 The Supernormal Animal 1
Brian Massumi
2 Consequences of Panpsychism 19
Steven Shaviro
3 Artfulness 45
Erin Manning
4 The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry 81
Ian Bogost
5 Our Predictive Condition; or, Prediction in the Wild 101
Mark B. N. Hansen
6 Crisis, Crisis, Crisis; or, The Temporality of Networks 139
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
7 They Are Here 167
Timothy Morton
8 Form / Matter / Chora: Object-O riented Ontology 193
and Feminist New Materialism
Rebekah Sheldon
9 Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism 223
and Object- Oriented Philosophy
Jane Bennett
Acknowledgments 241
Contributors 243
Index 245
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Introduction
RIchaRd GRuSIN
ThIS Book SeekS To Name, characterize, and therefore to consoli-
date a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and
philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences.
Each of these approaches, and the nonhuman turn more gener-
ally, is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward
and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of
animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, ma-
teriality, or technologies. The conference from which this book
emerged, hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at
the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, was organized to explore
how the nonhuman turn might provide a way forward for the arts,
humanities, and social sciences in light of the difficult challenges
of the twenty- first century. To address the nonhuman turn, a group
of scholars were brought in to help lay out some of the research
emphases and methodologies that are key to the emerging interdis-
ciplinary field of twenty-first century studies. Given that almost ev-
ery problem of note that we face in the twenty- first century entails
engagement with nonhumans— from climate change, drought,
and famine; to biotechnology, intellectual property, and privacy;
to genocide, terrorism, and war— there seems no time like the
present to turn our future attention, resources, and energy toward
the nonhuman broadly understood. Even the new paradigm of the
Anthropocene, which names the human as the dominant influ-
ence on climate since industrialism, participates in the nonhuman
turn in its recognition that humans must now be understood as
climatological or geological forces on the planet that operate just as
nonhumans would, independent of human will, belief, or desires.
99 vviiii 00
viii RichaRd GRusin
The ubiquity of nonhuman matters of concern in the twenty-
first century should not obscure the fact that concern for the non-
human has a long Western genealogy, with examples at least as far
back as Lucretius’s De Rerum Naturae and its subsequent uptake in
the early modern period.1 The concern with nonhumans is not new
in Anglo- American thought. In American literature, for example,
we can trace this concern back at least to Emerson, Thoreau, Mel-
ville, Dickinson, and Whitman. The nonhuman turn gained even
more powerful impetus in the nineteenth century from Charles
Darwin’s insistence on seeing human and nonhuman species as
operating according to the same laws of natural selection and
William James’s radical contention in The Principles of Psychology
that human thought, emotion, habit, and will were all inseparable
from, and often consequent upon, nonhuman, bodily material pro-
cesses.2 The nonhuman turn in twenty-first century studies can be
traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical develop-
ments from the last decades of the twentieth century:
• Actor- network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-
long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman
agency, and the politics of things
• Affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological
manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer
theory
• Animal studies, as developed in the work of Donna Hara-
way and others, projects for animal rights, and a more
general critique of speciesism
• The assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel
De Landa, Latour, and others
• New brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science,
and artificial intelligence
• The new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and
Marxism
• New media theory, especially as it has paid close attention
to technical networks, material interfaces, and computa-
tional analysis
• Varieties of speculative realism including object- oriented
philosophy, neovitalism, and panpsychism
Introduction ix
• Systems theory, in its social, technical, and ecological
manifestations
Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously di-
verge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and
methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of
the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first century stud-
ies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
To put forth the concept of the nonhuman turn to name the di-
verse and baggy set of interrelated critical and theoretical method-
ologies that have coalesced at the beginning of the twenty- first
century is to invite the expression of what can only be called “turn
fatigue”: the weariness (and wariness) of describing every new
development in the humanities and social sciences as a turn. Or-
ganizing a conference called “The Nonhuman Turn” ran the risk
of placing it as just the latest in a series of well- known academic
turns that have already been named and discussed for decades.
This complaint is not without its merits; indeed I return to it at the
end of the introduction, where I reclaim the idea of a turn as itself
nonhuman.
Singling out the nonhuman turn among other recent turns,
however, also runs the risk of inviting confusion with the post-
human turn, despite the very different stakes in these two rela-
tively recent theoretical developments. Unlike the posthuman
turn with which it is often confused, the nonhuman turn does
not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin
with the human and see a transformation from the human to the
posthuman, after or beyond the human. Although the best work
on the posthuman seeks to avoid such teleology, even these works
oscillate between seeing the posthuman as a new stage in hu-
man development and seeing it as calling attention to the insepa-
rability of human and nonhuman. Nonetheless, the very idea of
the posthuman entails a historical development from human to
something after the human, even as it invokes the imbrication of
human and nonhuman in making up the posthuman turn.3 The
non human turn, on the other hand, insists (to paraphrase Latour)
that “we have never been human” but that the human has always
coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman— and