Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn; and Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large

Abstract

The Nonhuman Turn/Quantum Anthropologies: Life at LargeRichard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).Human Exceptionalism and Decentering HumanCertain areas of contemporary philosophy exhibit an increasing willingness to attribute characteristics that have previously been exclusively reserved for humans to things in world that are not human. In superseding philosophical legacies that portray animals as mechanistic automatons, and non-animals as less agentive than that, The Nonhuman Turn (2015) is one such edited volume interested in reconfiguring how we see animals, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality and technologies. Whilst this is intended to represent a progression of thought, philosophies comprising this collection actually caution readers about subscribing to notion of humans superseding anything. Even though an acknowledgement of ontological productivity of nonhumans is something studies also entails, editor Richard Grusin makes clear that the turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with and see a transformation from to posthuman (ix). Instead, seems be common to each of authors in this collection is challenge to exceptionalism (x). As Grusin demands, importance of turn is its contestation to theories that install and subject/object oppositions, with their insistent privileging of human (xi).This contestation of The Nonhuman Turn can be appreciated by comparing it to an earlier text also concerned with exceptionalist suppositions: Vicki Kirby's Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (2011). For Kirby, social and cultural sciences, seeking to emulate objective facticity of physical sciences, assume a split is required between an observing subject and being observed. Kirby wants to interrogate such sciences classically assume-chronologically anterior, mute material objects whose truths literate humans uncover and represent. Rather than prioritizing a observer and documenter of nature-as-objects, Kirby considers whether Nature is its own interrogator, asking what do we forfeit if we concede that Nature reads and writes, calculates and copulates with itself in most perverse, creative, and also destructive ways?(95). As this question emerges repeatedly (xii, 48, 83,95), Kirby joins her readers in fascinating over dynamism of material, world.Object-oriented ontology's comparable concern with world informs much of material found in The Nonhuman Turn. Timothy Morton's chapter They Are Here, sets a standard for this theme, declaring intention to change sense of is meant by term object (Grusin, 167). Whilst challenges to racist and sexist ideologies are typically concerned with de-objectifying conceptions of those subjects marginalized according to race or sex, studies wish conversely to encourage object-characterizations of subjectivity. In dismantling opposition between human-subject and nonhuman-object, all boundaries separating otherness become more vulnerable, Morton states, whereby the lineage that brought us slavery and racism is also lineage that brought us anthropocentric boundary between and nonhuman (167). What must be considered though is whether this issue of anthropocentrism marks a crucial difference between Kirby's sense of human/nonhuman division and that of The Nonhuman Turn.Objects and Interpretations of ObjectsWanting to problematize conceptual linearity of a world of natural objects that human, cultural representations then distort, Kirby laments that something like deconstruction is interpreted as constructing a linguistic image of an object's reality from which it is ontologically distanced (Kirby, 2). …