The Nonhuman Turn Center for 21St Century Studies Richard Grusin, Series Editor 0 the Nonhuman

The Nonhuman Turn Center for 21st Century Studies Richard Grusin, Series Editor 0 The Nonhuman Turn0 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): 91–112; 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): 225–33; 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 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu 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- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity 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-Oriented 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 This page intentionally left blank 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. 9 vii 0 viii RichaRd GRusin The ubiquity of nonhuman matters of concern in the twenty- first century should not obscure the fact that concern for the nonhuman 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 developments 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 • Theassemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel De Landa, Latour, and others • New brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence • Thenew 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 studies 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 methodologies 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 posthuman 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 human 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 x RichaRd GRusin that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the non human. Brian Massumi offers a “Simondian ethics of becoming” as a counter to the assertion that the human is entering “a next ‘posthuman’ phase,” arguing that Gilbert Simondon shows us the presence of “the nonhuman at the ‘dephased’ heart of every individuation, human and otherwise.”4 Simondon’s argument for the coevolution of humans and technology has been restated from a different perspective by philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who characterizes humans as “natural- born cyborgs” in or- der to underscore how (at least since the invention of language) human cognition has been interdependent with embodied, nonhuman technologies.5 To name a conference “The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies,” then, was first and foremost to make a historical claim about a certain set of not always entirely compatible developments in academic discourse in the humanities and social sciences at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty- first centuries.6 Intended as a macroscopic concept, the nonhuman turn is meant to account for the simultaneous or overlapping emergence of a number of different theoretical or critical “turns”— for example, the ontological, network, neurological, affective, digital, ecological, or evolutionary. As something of a theoretical or methodological assemblage, the nonhuman turn tries to make sense of what holds these various other “turns” together, even while allowing for their divergent theoretical and methodological commitments and con- tradictions.

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