Anthropocentrism’s fluid binary

Abstract

I consider myself among a band of heretics seeking to deanthropocentrise environmental education. And yet, I increasingly struggle with blanket condemnations and recommendations. I do not know if the binary is as real or useful as I once thought. In this paper, I unearth some of the ways in which alleged anthropocentrisms can be nonanthropocentric, and vice versa. They seem much more fluid to me now. My purpose is not pedantic: I think environmental educators need to be more careful in their diagnoses and prescriptions. As we grope toward sustainability, we need pedagogies that help students imagine and engage with what our various claims and conceptualisations actually do when believed (if indeed they do anything at all); pedagogies that develop suppleness in our capacity to modify beliefs in alignment with intentions, and that help us modify these intentions in turn. I believe confronting the instability of dualistic thinking reveals paradoxes inherent in human reason, ushering a dose of humble bafflement essential for navigating the (non)Anthropocene.

Keywords:

• New materialism
• posthumanism
• environmental education
• philosophy of education
• sustainability education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Something like multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) might be considered as another form of multicentric (non)anthropomorphism primarily aimed at empirical understanding

2 Physicists do treat them as acting as a single object with a centre of gravitation.

3 The range of ways that two such objects interact gravitationally is described in terms of relations between variables.

4 It is of course relevant to environmental educators that these discoveries remain abstract and in tension with a simultaneous counteractive trajectory. Demographic shifts mean humans are increasingly living in technologised spaces and cities that present themselves phenomenologically as generally human centric.

5 I question the sharpness of this dichotomy elsewhere. See Affifi 2016a.

6 I use the word intra-act with caution. Barad (2007) created this term but appears to use it in different ways. In one use (that I am sympathetic of), she contrasts it to interaction, in a way that is similar to Dewey and Bentley (1949) discussion of the difference between interaction and transaction. In transactions, the knower and the known are seen as aspects of a total situation rather than separate entities. A major difference seems to be that Barad wants to insist that all relationships are intra-active, whereas Dewey and Bentley assert that different phenomena can be seen to relate in different ways, and not all are transactive. I am more suspicious of a second use of the word intra-act by Barad, where she wants to extend a nonlinear temporal interpretation of quantum events at the electron level to the world writ large. I do not yet see how entanglement between the past and future, which she describes in quantum events, is needed for the sort of co-constitutive relationality most commonly associated with her term.

7 Moreover, the genesis of those ontologies she finds unsatisfying owe their existence to the same more-than-human entanglements that she asserts have given rise to her own views.

8 This word has a complex and evolving history. For some insight into the discussion of its meanings and uses in Buddhist practice, see Bucknell 1999; Shulman 2008.

9 Part of the problem is terminology. Many new materialists are committed to the term 'material' despite what I see as its problematic associations, while critical of associations that other suitable (or overlapping) terms might have. New 'materialist,' as the name suggests, emphasises matter and not mind. Even if some new materialists thereafter insist that 'everything' is matter is a broad term that includes thoughts and feelings, they are swimming against a current they themselves have created. Calling this domain of thought 'new naturalism' instead would avoid this problem (in the sense that any 'adequate naturalism must be able to account for all domains of being, including the transcendental' Grant (2011, p. 4), a point that the American pragmatists were also well aware of (as was Deleuze (2004) in what I understand to be the relationship between actualisation and counter-actualisation)). The cost, of course, is putting a foot on one side of the scales of another binary (natural/artefactual, etc.). Following scholars like Butler (2011), talk of nature and naturalism is itself deemed anthropocentric and is now (unfortunately, in my mind) avoided by many new materialists (Morton 2009; though see McPhie and Clarke (2018) for some important taxonomical work into our modes of thinking/rethinking 'nature').