Category: ideas

The wide wild world between anthropocentrism and new materialism

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.

The new materialism of morphogenesis

This blogpost explores morphogenetic approaches to biology, characterized by the work of Goodwin (1994), Newman (2015), Müller (2010), and others[1]. Essentially, the morphogenetic view asserts that, contra neo-Darwinism[2], evolution does not proceed primarily via small incremental shifts in information bearing genetic code. It instead proposes that a range of meso-level physical properties in matter emerge through different organizations (such as adhesion, viscosity, etc.) which one the one hand constrain and on the other enable certain types of body plans over others (Forgacs and Newman, 2005). The role of genes and the role of physical properties of matter are put in considerably new relationship. Against the endless debate as to whether biological causation occurs at the “whole” level of the agentic organism (such as von Uexküllian subjectivist biology) or the “part” level of genetic code (such as Dawkins (1976)), morphogenetic approaches assert that causal relationships emerge temporally at multiple reciprocally interacting levels. This thereby contextualizes rather than rejects either side of dichotomy. And against the competing views that biology can or cannot be ultimately reduced to fundamental physics, morphogenetic approaches observe that new biological organisations and new physical patterns co-develop, often one in consequence of the other. These facts alone have implications for environmental education, through providing a non-deterministic but naturalistic description of life without giving special ontological authority to alleged “programs” like DNA[3]. This highlights the power and novelty-generating capacity of the physical material world in a way not generally recognized by either advocates of scientific reductionism or those who critique physical sciences as inherently reductionistic. In this way, new biology is new materialism.

One rationale for this line of thinking is as follows. A number of studies in environmental education research have focused on the ways in which “matter matters” (as Barad (2003) put it) in human-nonhuman assemblages. One of the purposes of these works is to replace a conception of the world that has the human as a unique and disembodied agent acting in an otherwise merely physical world. The challenge is to restore continuity between humans and the rest of the world but without succumbing to the eliminative materialist’s dream of reducing humans to some base level set of physical laws (ex. Churchland (1989)). This has occurred largely through the strategy of giving allegedly unique human attributes and qualities to matter itself (ex. Bennett (2010)). As much as I see some dangers in certain applications of this vision, I am largely receptive to the overall goal of nonreductively deanthropocentrizing environmental education. However, this is not the only way to do new materialism. Biologists have long been thinking about the role of matter in biological phenomena such as evolution and development. Understanding this research programme is also important for the deanthropocentrizing project, as it helps collapse untenable dualisms set up in our consideration of other organisms, species and processes. How so? With a predominant focus on deanthropocentrizing the human, there is the risk that we persist in anthropocentrizing our focus despite (or rather because of) our efforts. In other words, it is not sufficient merely to focus on the human as a subject to be deanthropocentrized, rather we must also devote ourselves to developing the sensitivities and capacities to understand, theorize and learn deeply from the rest of the universe beyond the deanthroposized anthropos. A second rationale is that our work is “environmental education,” which (should) by definition involve a world of myriad creatures, beings, and processes, few of which are human. The logocentric infatuations imported from postmodernism have taken environmental education theory and practice away from its traditionally sustained engagement with the nonhuman world and have explicitly or implicitly associated any such engagement with some sort of naive or corrupted scientism. New materialism promises to restore such an engagement with phenomena, but without the conceits of earlier epistemologies that assert uncontroversial access to the world for the deified western subject. But to do this, new materialism needs to get beyond articulating what humans are and are not, and pay attention to the processes and transformations of the actual world. Until this point, vestiges of postmodernism still lurk and hamper progress.

With this in mind, I am concerned with some environmental education implications of new ways in which the properties and powers of matter are being taken seriously in the biological sciences. Because much of this work has been done in evolution and development, these areas will form the basis of the discussion. Morphogenetic approaches place the evolution of physical relationships as equally dependent on biology as biology is dependent on physics. In working to uncover the genealogy of the relationship between emerging physics and emerging biology in particular circumstances, science has overcome the urge to seek what DeLanda (2010) calls “reified generalities” (for a video where he discusses morphogenesis, click here). For example, while certain types of cellular organization are possible and others forbidden by physical laws operating at the subcellular level, once cells exist and the biology of genes and signals emerges, these biological processes sustain cells that create new physical properties[4]. Importantly, these emergent mesolevel physical properties in turn constrain and enable certain types of biological organization and activity instead of others. Quantitative changes sometimes lead to qualitative transformations, giving rise to a dialectical materialism but without the rigid necessity of its earlier incarnations. Multicellularity, for example, is not merely a genetically programmed feat. It is only possibly because genetic activity can bootstrap upon the mesolevel physical properties (such as cell adhesion) that had emerged as a result of the prevalence of cells.

The most obvious educational implication is that we abandon tired and vapid dichotomies that see physics as necessarily reductionistic, matter as inanimate, and the organism (or “mind”) as a solution to the apparent violence wrought by such eliminations. In its place, we should study of the actual ways in which different modes of interaction collaborate to enable and constrain the evolution of phenomena. Educators need to pay attention to the complex world around us, which sadly seems long abandoned in “sophisticated” environmental education theory and practice. But instead of returning to a world that is the fateful unfolding of necessary law, the new empiricist is observing and engaging in a developmental world. Pining after and pinning down atemporal laws is replaced with the exploration of particular contingent conditions that give rise to forms of difference and of repetition.

[1] The view described in what follows has a number of historical precedents, ex. Wentworth Thompson (1917), but has only more recently been corroborated evidentially in developmental studies.

[2] Popularised by Dawkins (1976) and Dennett (1995, listen to him here), neo-Darwinism holds that evolution proceed through the differential success of genes (rather than the classic Darwinist view that examined the differential success of reproducing organisms in a population).

[3] The programme view of the genetic code smuggles “mind” back into matter through the back door (Deacon 2007, watch his video here) by replacing organism with a series of micro-teleologies in the form of signalling molecules, receptors,etc., while at the same time mechanizing the process by treating the organism as not merely programmed, but pre-programmed.

[4] We can say “create” new physical properties, because features such as the sorts of adhesion, viscosity, etc. that emerge in cellular life do not occur elsewhere in the universe.

 

References

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3).

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Churchland, P.M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

Deacon, T.W. (2007). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

DeLanda, M. (2010). Deleuze: History and science. New York: Atropos.

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea. Simon and Schuster.

Forgacs, G. & Newman, S. (2005). Biological physics of the developing embryo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, B. (1994). How the leopard changed its spots. London, UK: Orion House.

Muller, G.B. (2010). Epigenetic innovation. In M. Pigliucci and B.G. Muller (Eds.), The extended synthesis (pp. 307-331). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Newman, S. (2015). Development and evolution: The physics connection. In A. Love (Ed.), Conceptual change in biology: Scientific and philosophical perspectives on evolution and development (pp. 421-440). Dordrecht: Springer.

Wentworth Thompson, D. (1917). On growth and form. Dover.