Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman

Mark Jackson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367872786
• eBook ISBN: 9781317415992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book brings together emerging insights from across the humanities and social sciences to highlight how postcolonial studies are being transformed by increasingly influential and radical approaches to nature, matter, subjectivity, human agency, and politics. These include decolonial studies, political ontology, political ecology, indigeneity, and posthumanisms. The book examines how postcolonial perspectives demand of posthumanisms and their often ontological discourses that they reflexively situate their own challenges within the many long histories of decolonised practice. Just as postcolonial research needs to critically engage with radical transitions suggested by the ontological turn and its related posthumanist developments, so too do posthumanisms need to decolonise their conceptual and analytic lenses. The chapters' interdisciplinary analyses are developed through global, critical, and empirical cases that include: city spaces and urbanisms in the Global North and South; food politics and colonial land use; cultural and cosmic representation in film, theatre, and poetry; nation building; the Anthropocene; materiality; the void; pluriversality; and, indigenous world views. Theoretically and conceptually rich, the book proposes new trajectories through which postcolonial and posthuman scholarships can learn from one another and so critically advance.

1 For new ecologies of thought

Towards decolonising critique

Mark Jackson

… a new creation, still damp from the vast firmament.

—J. Baldwin, Another Country

Signs don’t come from the mind. Rather it is the other way around. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis.

—E. Kohn, How Forests Think

Interdependency is not a contract nor a moral ideal – it is a condition.

—M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care

The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.

—Thomas King, The Truth About Stories

With an eye to developing their critical engagement and implications, this chapter picks up from the preceding ‘Introduction’ and returns to examine, in more detail, some of the key distinctions at play in this volume. The chapter’s main concern is to draw out the implications for critique of bridging relationships between thinking about coloniality, about the questions the posthuman or more-than-human bring, and so also about ontology.

Conceptual affinities: Que(e)rying the production of the human

A quick glance at the operative terms – ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘posthumanism’ – reveals the beginnings of some simple discursive kinships. As critical discourses, each circulates around the epistemic, ethical, and political question of the human. What does ‘human’ refer to? Who counts as ‘human’? What are the histories of this designation? And who speaks for the human? Postcolonialism focuses, typically, on modern colonial and imperialist exclusions from political and epistemic legitimacy, by Eurocentric discourses, of non-European peoples, their ways thinking, and their social and cultural practices. For decades, it has centred its penetrating critiques on the historical and continuing colonial productions of race, reason, and right in the largely European designation of normative, modern humanism. Postcolonial studies argue that modernity and coloniality are fundamentally imbricated aspects of one-another. Further, the modern and the colonial articulate themselves through violent productions of what is human, what counts as human, and, fundamentally, who speaks for what counts as human. Postcolonial critique, thus, seeks means for identifying these violences and resisting them within the insight that we have always already been postcolonial. In other words, the conditions for resisting colonialism precede, subtend, and extend beyond the emergence of the colonial itself. It is not as though those deemed, or deeming themselves, postcolonial learn anew the conditions of resistance, but that the possibility for, and forces of resistance and opposition co-exist, emerge with, and respond to, any exercise of power. Constitutive means for living otherwise, in the very nature of being designated ‘other’ by the colonial thus precede the circumstances of their exclusion. Crucially, from these always already subtending capacities constantly at play in the field of difference, the postcolonial creates discursive spaces for the diversity of human thinking and practice to shape how sense and value may be recognised in ways other than hegemonic or normative European inheritances. In doing so, it shows how thought may be performed differently and anew. A specifically postcolonial politics emerges, consequently, from the ethical need to situate thinking, speaking, and doing in relation to alterity: other ways of life; other cultures; and, other worldly traditions.

What we have come to call ‘posthumanism’, arguably a newer and more recent development within the humanities and social sciences, is also ‘other’ oriented. The term, vaguer and perhaps more diffuse, nevertheless denotes an epistemic and ontological attention to the status of the human. Equally locative as the postcolonial, the resonance of who and what is human centres less, perhaps, on the politics, identities, and representations of non-European human exclusion, and more on incorporating into the performance of thought ‘the material heterogeneity that “the human” founds itself upon’ (Wolfe, 2007: xii). Its object is to expand the relationships of material inclusion to what embodies the human through its precedence, subtending, and extension, including organic, inorganic, technological, and bio-engineered forces. Where, indeed, do the boundaries of the human animal lie? Does the porosity of human fleshy encounter include the technical as much as it does the preceding and subtending living, biotic non-humans who share the ecologies that make up our embodiment? Like the postcolonial, the posthuman asks us to consider the possibility that we have never been ‘human’, if by ‘human’ we mean, ‘the free-agent, the citizen-builder of the Leviathan, the distressing visage of the human person, the other of a relationship, consciousness, the cogito, the hermeneut, the inner self, the thee and thou of dialogue, presence to oneself, intersubjectivity’ (Latour, 1993: 136). We – that is, those of us setting agendas for knowledge production by often wrongly speaking for others – have always already been more-than-human, and so never human in the terms circumscribed by the normative purview of Enlightenment modernity. Hence, if the human is always already other-made, and other facing, where is the locus of human agency, its essence or uniqueness? Is it even possible to identify some thing or some process that renders humanity unique? What does the search for such an essence or locus reveal about a politics of identity and those making the designation: ‘This is “human”; that is “not human” ’?

Just as the postcolonial asks us to recognise how we face and navigate those alterities produced as other, socially and culturally, to accepted centralities of thinking and living, so posthumanism extends critique to questions of embodiment, and likewise, to questions of epistemic accountability and responsibility, material and ecological relation, and the dynamic co-constitution of the many forms that make up the complexity of social life. Geology, digitalism, energy, animality, and the affective all become strange, intimate bedfellows in the posthumanist’s critical lexicon. Just as for the postcolonial, what the spaces of ‘the social, ‘the political’, and ‘the real’ mean, as well as who and what articulates these spaces, is a product of the many human and non-human assemblages that make up our sensible worlds.

Both discourses, of course, are mobilised under the prefix ‘post-’. ‘Post’ overtly operationalises a reflexive orientation of critical analysis and self-examination. If as suggested in the Introduction, the postcolonial is most usefully conceived as a means to think carefully about the extent and effect of one’s coloniality (Pratt, 2008: 460), it is a means to think about how modern knowledge production is imbricated and complicit within the material conditions of colonialism. Posthumanism, likewise, may also usefully be thought of as a reflexive means by which to reflect on how it is that ‘we’ moderns demarcate what ‘we’ mean by ‘the human’. The prefix ‘post-’, in each instance, denotes a critical reflexivity towards how we constitute what count as meaningful statements about ourselves. Again, ‘we’ and ‘our’ in each of these instances encompasses those doing the speaking and determining, those in the centres of epistemic and political privilege delimiting the ostensibly necessary conditions for the possibility of knowledge and value. Each mode of analysis is, therefore, formed within an ethos of self-criticism, much more than either makes any contention that we are at an historical moment beyond the colonial or the human.

Quite the opposite. Neither the postcolonial nor the posthuman in any simple sense refers to what comes after colonialism or humanism. ‘Post-’ obliges our ethical responsibility to interrogate how contemporary knowledge production is complicit within ongoing colonial oppression. If it is the case that our anthropogenic present is Anthropocenic, that is, ‘the Age of Man’, then the problematics of modern colonialism manifest in the stresses that some human beings place on each other and the planet have, perhaps, never been more pressing. We are certainly not in an age after colonialism and imperialism; the capitalist and industrial social relations responsible for Anthropogenic forcing are predicated in coloniality. In planetary terms, we are certainly not beyond, at least, the question of what some humans can and are doing materially to ourselves and others. Coloniality and its version of the human are still amongst our most insistent and problematic demands.

Two interrelated social phenomena bear this out. One could begin with numerous others. As I write, hundreds of refugees from former colonies and current neo-colonies drown in the Mediterranean Sea. Dozens drown daily. Sometimes hundreds. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees conservatively estimates that well over 7,000 people have drowned in 18 months from January 2015 to October of 2016 (UNHCR, 2016: n.p.). In 2016, one in 88 people died attempting the crossing; one in 47 died if the crossing was between Libya and Italy. In 2015, 1,015,078 made the crossing. In 2016, 355,361 made the crossing. The dead, and the hundreds of thousands who make the crossing successfully, are refugees attempting to escape the violence and immiseration wrought by modern colonial legacies of war, systematic exploitation, and imperialism in regions like Western Asia and South Asia (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Yemen, etc.); North and West Africa and the Western Sahel (Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, etc.); and, the Eastern Sahel and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Congo, Zimbabwe, etc.). Tens of thousands more wait to attempt similar perilous crossings each week. Across Europe, hundreds of thousands find themselves currently detained at shorelines or between borders in temporary, makeshift accommodation. Millions more are housed in now familiar humanitarian spaces of exception: ‘permanently temporary’ camps. All manifest the bare life of colonial violence and inequality. Yet, debates amongst the Amer-European privileged rage over who should be more compassionate.

At the same time, soaring temperatures are recorded in a parched pre-monsoon South Asia. Never have historically documented temperatures reached 51 degrees Celsius in the Sub-continent. Increasing temperatures are driven by atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that have reached planetary saturation levels not seen in four million years. The atmosphere, every ‘corner’ of the earth, is now filled with more than 400 parts per million of CO2. Rising temperatures are also part of a pattern of annual increases in global mean temperature that has seen record highs topped every year (and every month since 2014) in the warmest recorded sixteen consecutive years since 1998 (NOAA, ‘State of the Climate Report’ November 2015). The trend reflects an average rate of increase in the global annual temperature of 0.07°C (0.13°F) per decade since 1880, and 0.17°C (0.31°F) per decade since 1970 (Ibid.). Today’s causes of consistent and persistent planetary warming are human driven. Energetic demands behind growth and development strategies are entwined within modern colonial and contemporary capitalist structures of accumulation, production, and consumption. The material possibilities of efficient energy enable some of us to conceive ourselves and our worlds differently. Debates rage amongst the Amer-European privileged – at least by those not in denial – over who should be more flexible in attempting to ameliorate the carboniferous causes of planetary warming, and, therefore, who should transform their conceptual imaginaries and responsibilities.

Thus, the very political logics of inequality that secure the flight of millions are also part of the same architectures of thought that secure an increase in all-too-human atmospheric energies. Melting glaciers, disappearing islands, accelerating bio-diversity declines, and acidifying oceans are connected – one might even argue directly connected – to the political and economic rationalities that lead to drowning refugees. The material conditions of violence and want that drive people, desperate, into rickety, overloaded vessels are causal drivers of anthropogenic environmental destruction. If responses to these connections are imbricated within the global causes and effects of colonialism, then so are they also imbricated within a politics of planetary degradation. The ecologies of material interaction that enrich a global few at the expense of the many are also the ecologies of interaction that imperil human and more-than-human planetary futures. Crucially, the political and ethical responses to both desperations cannot divorce the legitimacy of the human from either its colonial causes, or its human and more-than-human effects. Our contemporary, Amer-European idea of ‘the human’, embedded as it is in histories of modern colonial production, representation, and violence, is also constituted by the wider material relationships, energies, and forces that made possible those histories, and the character of their futures.

Yet, it is not the case that our present, the purported Anthropocene, is human tout court. It is, rather, the age of a certain idea of the human, one enrolled within capitalism, industrialisation, colonialism, fantasies of control, and patriarchy. Composed within an epistemic and ethical estrangement from the material heterogeneities that make possible human-ness, these are separations which modern processes also predicate as necessary to protect a particular notion of privilege. As the critic and writer Sylvia Wynter notes,

[I]t is only the capitalist mode of production that can produce and reproduce our present biocentric, and therefore economic, integrating conception of being human. That conception is the imperative. This is why, however much abundance we produce, we cannot solve the problem of poverty and hunger. Since the goal of our mode of production is not to produce for human beings in general, it’s to provide for the material conditions of the existence for the production and reproduction of our present conception of being human: to secure the well-being, therefore, of those of us, the global middle classes, who have managed to attain its ethno-class criterion.

(Wynter, quoted in Scott, 2000: 160, emphases in original)

Wynter terms the securitisation of the well-being of a particular conception of the human ‘the overrepresentation of Man’: ‘[T]he Western bourgeois conception of the human, Man, … over-represents itself as if it were the human itself’ (2003: 260). We are not living in ‘the human age’, for, as postcolonial and posthuman approaches may reflexively agree, there is no generalisable human characteristic, natural or otherwise – there never has been – to which we may point as the causal locus for our contemporary ills. There are, instead, very many peoples, cultures, ways of life, and modes of living, both within the densest urban agglomerations and within the thickest forests, exposed plains, or relatively unpopulated shores where care and reciprocity foster forms of flourishing that are not destructive to human and ecological futures. They may be in the minority, and they may be tenuous and difficult to isolate in the overwhelming clamour of the present, but their presence, tenacity, and resurgence (see e.g. Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2011), give the lie to totalising generalities that lay blame for the Anthropocene at the feet of a bipedal, upright, rogue primate.

The elision of the conditions of our global planetary predicament, caused as it is by Wynter’s ‘Man’ as a generalised idea of human, is itself part of the problem. The Anthropocene, cast as a human problem with technical solutions or apocalyptic reverberations, is the work of ‘Man’ over-representing itself. Alternatives to the finality of the ostensible Anthropocene have been operative for tens of thousands of years, and they continue to be the case in multiple instances around the world. Of course, many past and present human societies either destroyed themselves, or are in the process of destroying themselves. But what destroyed them were complex, specific sets of social, political, economic, and geographical circumstances that are not generalisable about humanity as such. Critical responsibility must be to these specificities, and not to false abstractions or universals that enable new means to assert unfoundable and unjust legitimisations. There are, in other words, many imaginaries of the human that are not Anthropocenic, nor Enlightenment humanist, nor capitalist, nor industrialist, etc. Wynter, again, notes:

there was always a something else besides the dominant cultural logic going on, and that something else constituted another – but also transgressive – ground of understanding. So that the plot is not simply a sociodemographic location but the site both of a form of life and of possible critical intervention.

(2000: 164, emphases in original; see also McKittrick, 2006: 123)

Our politics and ethics must be ones that address the multiplicities of these and many, as yet, unthought, unimaginable, interventions and forms of life, as much as they – or even more so – must also now meet a generalising planetary condition of one overbearing form of human expression (for a similar claim, see also Chakrabarty, 2011).

Priorities: Or, what is meant by politics?

At the conjuncture of examining genealogies of the human multiple, the postcolonial and the posthuman may agree and overlap. Decolonising our thinking about the human means, necessarily, engaging with others’ precepts of the human, which either are or also share much with many posthumanist approaches. The implications for their agreement have, however, given rise to divisions and differences across the two diverse discourses. And, it is here in accounting for the seemingly incommensurable implications, that the attempt to characterise a shared conversation, or shared ambition, becomes much, much more complicated. A simple consideration illustrates a central tension.

I have invoked, thus far, Bruno Latour’s now famou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Lists of figures and box
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A critical bridging exercise
• 1 For new ecologies of thought: Towards decolonising critique
• 2 Anti-colonial ontologies: A dialogue
• 3 Chronic carriers: Creole pigs, postplantation politics, and disturbing agrarian ontologies in Haiti
• 4 Terra plena: Revisiting contemporary agrarian struggles in Central America through a “full earth” perspective
• 5 Refracting colonialism in Canada: Fish tales, text, and insistent public grief
• 6 Unsettling the urban geographies of settler-colonial cities: Aporetic encounters with the spatiotemporal dynamics of modern logic
• 7 “Well, City Boy Rangoon, it’s time to stitch up the evening”: Material, meaning, and Man in the (post)colonial city
• 8 Ethno-linguistic cartographies as colonial embodiment in postcolonial Sri Lanka
• 9 Immanent comparisons and posthuman perception in the filmic sensorium of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• 10 Political ontology and international relations: Politics, self-estrangement, and void universalism in a pluriverse
• Index