Reclaiming Animism

“Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers—weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling.”

“But bridge-making is a situated practice.”

“As a philosopher, I am situated: a daughter to a practice responsible for many divisions, but which may also be understood as a rather particular means of bridge-making.”

“The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all Western philosophy can be understood as footnotes to Plato’s texts. Perhaps I became a philosopher because writing such footnotes implies feeling the text as an animating power—inviting participation, beckoning to me and suggesting the writing of another footnote that will make a bridge to the past, that will give ideas from the past the power to affect the present.”

“In spite of this, I will not take advantage of the possibility that philosophy is a form of textual animism, using this to delocalize myself, to feel authorized to speak about animism. Indeed, where what we call animism is concerned, the past to be considered is primordially the one in which philosophical concepts served to justify colonization and the divide across which some felt free to study and categorize others—a divide that still exists today.”

“I must acknowledge the fact that my own practice and tradition situate me on one side of the divide, the side that characterized “others” as animists. “We,” on our side, presume to be the ones who have accepted the hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world—one that is our task to appropriate.”

“In particular, I shall not forget that my side of the divide is still marked today not only by this epic story, but also, and perhaps more crucially, by its moral correlate: “thou shalt not regress.””

“Such a moral imperative confers another meaning on my decision to stand on the side I belong to. Indeed, there is some work to be done on this side. We can by addressing the moral imperative that mobilizes us, as it produces an obscure fear of being accused of regression as soon as we give any sign of betraying hard truth by indulging soft, illusory beliefs.”

“How, then, to keep the question of animism, if it is taken seriously at all, from being framed in terms that verify Science’s right to define it as an object of knowledge?”

“The work that I feel needs to be done on my side of the divide may be characterized in terms of what the ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called a “decolonization of thought”—the attempt to resist a colonizing power that begins already with the old lady with the cat, defining her in terms of a belief that may be tolerated but never taken seriously.”

“However, I would not identify this colonizing power with the living work of scientists. The feeling that it is possible and necessary to resist also stems from my interest in what I would call scientific achievements, and my correlative disgust at the way such achievements have been translated into the great epic story about “Science disenchanting the world.””

“Science, when taken in the singular and with a big S, may indeed be described as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge.”

“In the name of Science, a judgment has been passed on the heads of other peoples, and this judgment has also devastated our relations to ourselves—whether we are philosophers, theologians, or old ladies with cats.”

“Scientific achievements, on the other hand, require thinking in terms of an “adventure of sciences” (in the plural and with a small s). The distinction between such an adventure and Science as a general conquest is certainly hard to make if you consider what is done in the name of science today. However, it is important to do so because it allows for a new perspective: what is called Science, or the idea of a hegemonic scientific rationality, can be understood as itself the product of a colonization process.”

“On this side of the divide, it would then be possible to remain true to a very particular adventure, while also betraying the hard demands of an epic. In order to think sciences as an adventure, it is crucial to emphasize the radical difference between a scientific conquering “view of the world” and the very special and demanding character of what I would call scientific “achievements.””

“An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones.”

“What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a “partner” in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.”

“Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.”

“One might object by calling this a figure of anarchy. Yes—but an ecological anarchy, because while connections may be produced between any parts of a rhizome, they also must be produced. They are events, linkages—like symbiosis. They are what is and will remain heterogeneous.”

“In order to resist the powerful image of a treelike progress, with Science as its trunk, I will now address another idea of Gilles Deleuze, that of our need to “think by the milieu,” meaning both without reference to a ground or ideal aim, and never separating something from the milieu that it requires in order to exist. To think then in terms of scientific milieus and what they demand, it is clear that not everything will agree to some of these demands. In particular, not everything may accept the role associated with scientific creation, the role of putting to the test the way it is represented.”

“It has even been proposed that psychoanalysis was not the subversive “plague” that Freud boasted of, but rather a restoration of order, since it helped explain away mysterious cures, magnetic “lucidity,” and other demonic manifestations pigeonholed as purely human. In the name of Science it deciphered a new universal cause. The Freudian unconscious was indeed “scientific” in the sense that it authorized the denigrating of those who marveled and fantisized, and it extolled the sad, hard truth behind specious appearances. It verified the great epic Freud himself popularized: he was following Copernicus and Darwin, inflicting a final wound on what he called our narcissistic “beliefs.””

“Reclaiming the past is not a matter of resurrecting it as it was, of dreaming to make some “true,” “authentic” tradition come alive. It is rather a matter of reactivating it, and first of all, of smelling the smoke in our nostrils—the smoke that I smelled, for instance, when I hurriedly emphasized that, no, I did not “believe” that one could resurrect the past.”

“Learning to smell the smoke is to acknowledge that we have learned the codes of our respective milieus: derisive remarks, knowing smiles, offhand judgments, often about somebody else, but gifted with the power to pervade and infect—to shape us as those who sneer and not among those who are sneered at.”

“However, we can try to understand everything about how the past has shape us, but understanding is not reclaiming because it is not recovering. Indeed, this is the anguished question of David Abram, a question that we cannot avoid just by invoking capitalism or human greed: How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth?”

“Yet David Abram still writes, and passionately so. As a first step towards recovery, I propose that the experience of writing (not writing down) is marked by the same kind of crucial indeterminacy as the dancing moon. Writing resists the “either/or” dismembering of experience. It resists the choice between either the moon that “really” offers us illumination, as an intentional subject would do, or the moon of the critique, just triggering what would “really” be of human provenance.”

“Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author’s, that they demand some kind of cerebral—that is, bodily—contortion that defeats any preformed intention. (This contortion makes us larvae, as Deleuze wrote). It could even be said that writing is what gave transformative forces a particular mode of existence—that of “ideas.” Alfred North Whitehead suggested that Plato’s ideas are those things that first of all erotically lure the human soul—or, we could say, “animate” humans. For Whitehead, what defines the (Greek) human soul is “the enjoyment of its creative function, arising from its entertaining of ideas.””

“Whitehead wrote that, after The Symposium, where Plato discusses the erotic power of ideas, Plato should have written another dialogue called The Furies, which would have dealt with the horror lurking “within imperfect realization.” The possibility of an imperfect realization is certainly present whenever transformative, metamorphic forces make themselves felt, but this is especially true where ideas are concerned, if, as I claim, the realization of ideas implies writing.”

“Indeed, once “written down,” ideas tempt us to associate them with a definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing. This is all the more so in a world that is now saturated with texts and signs that are addressed to “anyone”—separating us from the “more than human” world to which ideas nevertheless belong. In order to reclaim animism, however, it is not sufficient to entertain an “idea” that would allow us to claim that we know about it—even if for people like myself it is crucial to realize that my experience of writing is an animist experience, attesting to a “more than human” world.”

“Reclaiming means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as “not ours” but rather as “animating” us, making us witness to what is not us.”

“An assemblage, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming together of heterogeneous components, and such a coming together is the first and last word of existence. I do not first exist and then enter into assemblages. Rather, my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write and as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down. I am not gifted with agency or intention. Instead, agency—or what Deleuze and Guattari call “desire”—belongs to the assemblage as such, including those very particular assemblages, called “reflexive assemblages,” which produce an experience of detachment, the enjoyment of critically testing previous experience in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what. Another word for this kind of agency that doesn’t belong to us is animation.”

“What the witches challenge us to accept is the possibility of giving up criteria that claim to transcend assemblages, and that reinforce, again and again, the epic of critical reason.”

“What they cultivate, as part of their craft (it is a part of any craft), is an art of immanent attention, an empirical art about what is good or toxic—an art which our addiction to the truth has too often despised as superstition.”

“They are pragmatic, radically pragmatic, experimenting with effects and consequences of what, as they know, is never innocuous and involves care, protections, and experience.”

“Reclaiming always implies a compromising step. I would claim that we, who are not witches, do not have to mimic them but instead discover how to be compromised by magic.”

“We might, for instance, experiment with the (nonmetaphoric) use of the term “magic,” which designates the craft of illusionists who make us perceive and accept what we know to be impossible. Magic, the witches say, is a craft. They would not be shocked by a transversal connection with the craft of performing magicians if this connection was a reclaiming one—that is, if the craft of performing magicians was addressed as what survived when magic became a matter of illusion and manipulative deception in the hands of quacks, or left to the mercenary hands of those who know the many ways we can be lured into desiring, trusting, buying.”

“What “illusionists” artfully exploit would then be the very creativity of the senses as they respond to what Abram characterizes as “suggestions offered by the sensible itself.””

“Our senses, Abram concludes, are not for detached cognition but for participation, for sharing the metamorphic capacity of things that lure us or that recede into inert availability as our manner of participation shifts—but, he insists, never vanishes: we never step outside the “flux of participation.””

“When magic is reclaimed as an art of participation, or of luring assemblages, assemblages inversely become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not of general consideration or textual dissertation.”

“Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing—all our words express the ambivalence of lure.”

“Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted. Scientific experimental crafts, which dramatically exemplify the metamorphic efficacy of assemblage conferring on things the power of “animating” the scientist into feeling, thinking, imagining, are also a dramatic example of this enslaving power. What I would call with Whitehead an “imperfect realization” of what they achieve has unleashed a furious conquest in the name of which scientists downgrade their achievements, presenting them as mere manifestation of objective rationality.”

“But the question of how to honor the metamorphic efficacy of assemblages—neither taking it for granted nor endowing it with supernatural grandiosity—is a matter of concern for all “magic” crafts, and more especially so in our insalubrious, infectious milieu. And it is because that concern may be common, but can receive no general answer, that reclaiming magic can only be a rhizomatic operation.”

“A rhizome rejects any generality.”

“Connections do not manifest some truth about what is common beyond the rhizomatic heterogeneous multiplicity—beyond the multiplicity of distinct pragmatic significations associated with “magic” as related to what we call politics, healing, education, arts, philosophy, sciences, agriculture, or to any craft requiring or depending upon a capacity to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention.”

“The only generality here is about our milieu and its compulsion to categorize and judge—and spiritualism is here a probable judgment—or to negate whatever would point to the metamorphic dimension of what is to be achieved.”

“Rhizomatic connections may be a non-general answer to this generality. Each “magic” craft needs connections with others in order to resist infection by the milieu, the divisive power of social judgment, to smell the smoke that demands we decide whether we are heirs to the witches or the witch hunters.”

“Where the dangerous art of animating in order to be animated is concerned, what connects may be practical learning about the needed immanent (critical) attention.”

“Not about what is good or bad in itself, but about what Whitehead called realization. Again, no mode of realization may be taken as a model, only as calling for pragmatic reinvention. In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art.”

“Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist.”

“Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected—and also to feel, think, and imagine.”

“Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.”