Rethinking the Ambiguities of Abstraction in the Anthropocene

The ambiguities of abstraction were at the heart of critical approaches to the problems of modernity. Abstraction, so fundamental to the modernist episteme, was seen to have alienated humanity from itself and from its entangled relations with its environment, constituting a fundamental rift between the subject and the world. This article analyses how the critique of the modernist episteme has increasingly shifted under the auspices of the Anthropocene. Rather than seeking to overcome the ambiguities of abstraction and return the human to the world, approaches that seek to affirm the Anthropocene have emphasised that modernist thought did not take abstraction far enough. Rather than abstraction being problematic for contemporary thought, abstraction is seen to be a facet of the world in its lively, partial and contingent interaction. This article is organised in three sections. The first section introduces the problematic of abstraction in the Anthropocene, highlighting that critical theory approaches tend to see the Anthropocene within a discourse of modernist critique. The second section draws out the importance of understanding the distinct mode of contemporary affirmation, which rather than seeking to return man to the world, emphasises the impossibility of finding meaning in the world. It is this inverting of critical understandings that enables abstraction to be seen positively rather than problematically. The final section expands on this point to consider how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of abstraction as the guide to contemporary modes of life

Close encounters of a critical kind: a diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology

For a number of years, new material feminists have been developing new theoretical tools, new modes of conceptual analysis and new ethical frameworks. Object-oriented ontology, part of the speculative realism ‘movement’, has been engaged in something similar. Yet these endeavours have often taken place in ‘parallel universes’, despite sharing – or at least colliding around – a range of somewhat similar ontological and epistemological commitments. Composed as a diffractive musing encounter in which insights are read ‘through one another’ (Barad, 2007: 25) in order to ‘attend to … details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’ (Barad, 2007:71), the article brings Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, already a ‘foundational’ text for new material feminism, into an encounter with a speculative realist text of the same ‘foundational’ status, Harman’s The Quadruple Object. The article develops a notion of diffractive musing as embodied, sensory struggle which instantiates intellectual generosity as a mode of critique. Following this, it puts diffractive musing to work theoretically via an encounter between object-oriented ontology and new material feminism. Keywords : new material feminism, speculative realism, diffraction, musing, critiqu

Beyond the ontological turn: affirming the relative autonomy of politics

In this article, I critically evaluate a characteristic tendency that is found across the various traditions of poststructuralism, both narrowly and more broadly defined. This is an increasing propensity to be preoccupied with ontological questions and seemingly at the expense of either a refinement of political concepts or a concrete analysis of forms of power and domination. I consider the reasons for this development and stress how this characteristic feature of poststructuralism appears to follow from the very fact of ontological pluralism. What we see in contemporary continental thought is a proliferation of different traditions, and each side seeks to defend their position in ontological terms. Following this, I advance the idea of a relative autonomy between ontology and politics, where the former does not determine the latter in any direct or straightforward fashion. I argue that we need to stress this relative autonomy to open a little space between ontology and politics, space where we can return poststructuralism to a more concrete engagement with ‘the political’

A Decolonial Imagination: Sociology, Anthropology and the Politics of Reality

While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By developing a sustained engagement with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s work, as well as establishing possible connections with what has been termed the ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology, in this paper I argue that in order for sociology to become exposed to the deeply transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, it needs to cultivate a decolonial imagination in order to move beyond epistemology, and to recognise that there is no social and cognitive justice without existential justice, no politics of knowledge without a politics of reality

The anthropology of money and finance : between ethnography and world history

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings and prospects, while referring back to the discipline‘s founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. From the 1980s the anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance especially have taken off. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and in attempts to reform it.http://www.annualreviews.org/hb201

Geography, death and finitude

publication-status: PublishedRomanillos J L, 2011. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published Environment and Planning A, 2011, Vol. 43, Issue 11, pp. 2533 – 2553 DOI: 10.1068/a4474Copyright © 2011 PionDespite growing interest in the geographies of death, loss, and remembrance, comparatively little geographical research has been devoted either to the historical and cultural practices of death, or to an adequate conceptualisation of finitude. Responding to these absences, in this paper I argue for the importance of the notion of finitude within the history and philosophy of geographical thought. Situating finitude initially in the context of the work of Torsten Hägerstrand and Richard Hartshorne, the notion is argued to be both productive of a geographical ethics, and as epistemologically constitutive of phenomenological apprehensions of ‘earth’ and ‘world’. In order to better grasp the sense and genealogy of finitude, I turn to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Georges Bataille. These authors are drawn upon precisely because their writings present powerful conceptual frameworks which demonstrate the intimate relations between spatiality, death, and finitude. At the same time, their writings are critically interrogated in the light of perhaps the most important aspect of the conceptual history of finitude: the way in which it has been articulated as a site of anthropocentric distinction. I argue for a critical deconstruction of this anthropocentric basis to finitude; a deconstruction which raises a series of profound questions over the ethics, normativities, and understandings of responsibility shaping contemporary ethical geographies of the human and nonhuman. In so doing, I demonstrate the geographical importance of the notion of finitude for a variety of arenas of debate which include: phenomenological understandings of spatiality; the biopolitical boundaries drawn between human and animal; and contemporary theorisations of corporeality, materiality, and hospitality