Necropolitics (Theory in Forms) by Mbembe Achille

Author:Mbembe, Achille [Mbembe, Achille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2019-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Return of Animism

Another key feature of this age is the advent of electronic reason and computational media as well as the return of animism .

In old African cognitive worlds, some objects and tools were thought to be a mirror image of humans. It was not as if, in interacting with them, humans were interacting with illusory entities situated on the other side of the mirror. In any case, in numerous circumstances, the impossibility of ever fixing such a boundary was universally recognized. It was also generally recognized that there will always be some degree of overlap and even reversibility between the human, his body, and the objects he invented, that agency was shared between different entities and co-agency was itself a key element in the nurturing and circulation of all kinds of vital forces. Whatever the case, human beings were never satisfied with simply being human beings. They were constantly in search of a supplement to their humanhood. Often, to their humanhood, they added attributes of animals, properties of plants and various animate and inanimate objects. Personhood was therefore not a matter of ontology. It was always a matter of composition and of assemblage of a multiplicity of vital beings. To convert one specific object into something else and to capture the force inherent in every single matter and being constituted the ultimate form of power and agency. The world itself was a transactional world . One was always transact ing with some other force or some other entity just as one was always trying to capture some of the power invested in those entities in an effort to add the latter to one’s own originary powers.

Modernity rejected such ways of being, such different ways of sensing and acting with objects and relegated them to the “childhood of Man.” Today, the technological devices that saturate our lives have become extensions of ourselves. In the process, a new relationship between humans and other living or vital things has been instituted. This new relationship is not unlike what African traditions had long prefigured. Not long ago, it was understood that the human person (who the West mistook for the white man) was neither a thing nor an object. Nor was he an animal or a machine. Human emancipation was precisely premised on such a distinction. Today many want to capture for themselves the forces, energies, and vitalism of the objects that surround us, most of which we have invented. We think of ourselves as made up of various spare or animate parts. How we assemble them and for what purpose is the question that late modern identity politics raises so unequivocally.

Neoliberalism has created the conditions for a renewed convergence, and at times fusion, between the living human being and objects, artifacts, or the technologies that supplement or augment us and are in the process transfigured and transformed by us. This event, which we can equate to a return to animism , is nevertheless not without danger for the idea of emancipation in this age of crypto-fascism.

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