New materialist views have taken hold in many disciplines over the past couple decades and have recently sharply increased in education theory. They are seen as suggestive new ontologies that transcend pervasive humanistic and anthropocentric shortcomings. While I am attracted to these motivations and to the de-centering project, I am currently exploring the limitations of a strong new materialist ontology and hope to share some thoughts today for discussion.
Between strong anthropocentric views and strong new materialist views lie a range of ways of conceiving and interacting with the world. In this blog entry, I shall briefly argue that ethical engagement in the world involves exploring this middle space -and that this is especially relevant for the environmental educator. To do so, it is worth articulating the types of strawmen I want to set up on either end of my spectrum. On one side, I argue are positions which claim for various biological, cultural, linguistic, or religious reasons, that humans are ontologically unique entities in the cosmos. They have a special sort of causal potency distinguished entirely from the physicochemical order, a particular consciousness that requires serious ethical engagement, pedagogical attention, and so on. Descartes (in his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa (1644)) is known for occupying this position. Most views that inform decision making in education practice as much as policy, follow closely this sort of thinking. Often blamed for this persisting worldview is the so-called “Great Chain of Being” (Lovejoy, 1936) an Aristotlean, and later Scholastic, model of creation that places humans somewhere between apes and angels along an ascending spectrum between the lowliest and grittiest inorganic matter and the highest form of being, i.e. God.
While there are obvious problems with the “Great Chain” ontology, diagnosing it as a root conceptual problem of the (now) globalizing culture throws the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of a nefarious spectrum there is something closer to a deadly dichotomy, with humans positioned as having vastly different ethical and ontological standing than any other being or process. This may not seem like a radical proposition given that Descartes saturates anti-anthropocentric papers with a prominent bull’s eye painted on his head. Nevertheless, it is important to not conflate these positions because the possibility space of each ontology is very different.
It is largely because we are living in the shadows of dichotomy and not a great chain of being that new materialism has emerged as a dominant way of challenging the anthropocentric view. A key new materialist strategy is to collapse the dichotomy by extending the vocabulary used for allegedly unique human traits to the most unexpected of things (Bennett, 2010). It makes a name of itself by speaking candidly about the “agency” of chairs, the “voice” of electrical grids, or the ethical considerability of cement. To flatten the ontology is obviously a neat parsimonious trick, especially for those of us steeped in the economic aesthetic of western scientific theory (i.e. Occam), so new materialism has attracted many recent adherents. Because ontology flattening rejects the unique qualities given exaggerated place in humans (and wrenched from the rest of the world), it appears to undercut the presumptions of humanism, and a scientism based on the laws of efficient causality, -in a single stroke. As such it tempts its proponents, who may inadvertently become “blind mules,” smuggling in humanistic and scientistic assumptions in the soles of their human-supremacy-steel-toed kicking boots. A flattened ontology holds onto dichotomy not by choosing one side over another but by collapsing it entirely, which often means amalgamating the qualities that define either side while missing all the diverse phenomena in between. We end up with de-agentialized humans and hyper-agentialized chairs; all the while those blinders block a clear view of the many diverse sorts of agency in the world are kept intact.
Some new materialists are not so crude, but the trickled down message often comes to this. Environmental education is not likely to meet a fruitful end if it follows new materialism down this rabbit hole. What is needed, rather, is a different sort of “great chain of being,” a chain that recognizes that the various beings and processes of the world are both similar and different -to each other, and to us- in complex, diverse, and partially understandable ways. While anthropocentrism and new materialism each bleeds the world of its diversity through homologously related sorts of reductionistic maneouvering, a strong antireductionism resists any ontological generalisation in favour of everflowing pluralism.
We need neither a dualistic ontology nor a flat one, but a description of the world that enables us to encounter the diverse ways in which forms, functions, properties, relations, qualities, emotions, experiences, modes of communication, etc. emerge and re-emerge perpetually in radically different ways. We need a sort of new empiricism, a gentle and embracing empiricism not grounded in notions of supremacy nor desires for control, that inquires into the world out of a respect for its possibilities of kinship and difference, that sees both poles of relation as equally astonishing and worthy of exploration, and forever resisting the expectation that preset templates (either way) are adequate. Environmental education should be grounded on a view that neither presumes that the diverse phenomena of the world are identical or different, nor that we know a priori in what ways it is -or becomes- either, or both. To assume otherwise is to silence the world, putting us on a hellbent mission to destroy our sense of human superiority through firing our shotgun into an open crowd.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Descartes, R. (1644). Principia philosophiae (free Google ebook)
Lovejoy, A.O. (1936). The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Harvard University Press.