“How, then, to take seriously 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?” 

– Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism.” 

Re-enchant the West! We have heard the imperative cried for many decades, now, and have felt its urgency increase. Today those of us who were raised to smirk at such things find it increasingly difficult to defend a view of the nonhuman world that does not recognize in it lively agency. We have learned the hard way the consequences of treating everything except human beings as dead matter, as less than alive. This is the reason why anthropology is now so much in vogue: in the accounts of Indigenous societies we find rumours of a thinking that listens to place and kicks back against those Western ontologies that have proved so disastrous to planetary life. So we hear alongside the first cry, a second: decolonize thought! For if a future different to the one promised by the West is possible, surely that possibility lies in difference, in learning with the non-Western. Yet a non-Western world-view exists not only outside the West, neither is the West any longer a geographical location. Capitalism, secularism, materialism and human-only-ism now invade every corner of the planet; but so too do animism, vibrant materialism and more-than-human-ism erupt constantly from within capitalist culture. 

​

Movements toward animism are ongoing experiments, not definitive conversions. Animism is not the opposite of Western thinking but indicates efforts to rework impractical approaches to that most fraught of matters: matter’s liveliness. Addressing the question in this way, the first stage of the course engages what Isabelle Stengers calls the “reclaiming” of animism. Taking her lead from the postcolonial recovery of animism (by thinkers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marisol de la Cadena), Stengers thinks of “reclaiming” as a movement allied to the “decolonisation of thought”: “the attempt to resist a colonising power” by thinking with the ontologies which Western philosophy regards as “other.” In particular, Stengers thinks with animism. “How…to keep the question of animism...from being framed in terms that verify Science’s right to define it as an object of knowledge?” (“Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux, 36 (2012): 2). Tolerance – which leaves animism recognised by still not spoken with as an equal – must be avoided, but so too must the temptation to explain animism, to speak on “behalf” of the other and so unwittingly “claim” their worldview as an extension of one’s own. Hence Stengers’ idea of “re-claiming,” rather than “claiming,” animism. Reclaiming animism is working with the animisms with which one shares the world. 

​

This seminar is an experiment in reclaiming animism. To reclaim animism means finding new ways of speaking, within one’s own language, the liveliness of the world. Those new ways involve experimentation with language and style – as argued in recent decades by David Abram and Robert Macfarlane – but also experimentation with the givens of a tradition and practice. Working with animism does not mean escaping Western ontology but deactivating those structures of thought that make escape seem necessary in the first place. The reclaiming of animism thus converges with other philosophical currents – such as new materialism, posthumanism, queer theory and postcolonial criticism – which seek to reformulate not only our stories about the world but the way we tell those stories. In the second and third stages of this course we look at texts where experimentation with style and form are the principal ways in which animism is expressed. 

​

The first stage takes its point of departure from natural history writers seeking to active the animist sense through a renewal of scientific language. Here we focus on texts concerned with birds, and with depicting the liveliness of birds. The second stage centres on the reformulation of philosophy in light of plant life and pure affectivity. In both sets of texts, but especially the texts that form part of the third stage, these reformulations are allied to Indigenous epistemologies, and we will be considering the nature of that alliance. What is at stake is not so much – or not only – the task of investigating the imposing mass of literature, poetry and art through which writers today reflect on the liveliness of matter in animist terms. Rather, it is above all a question of being alert to the critiques of thought that such art makes necessary insofar as it aims to bring about radical changes to the whole discourse and practice regarding the nonhuman. Without seeking to identify with animists, the purpose of this seminar is to think and write as if the lively matter-world to which they give voice mattered.