Dehumanising the Mind
Friday, October 23, 2020 at 10:18AM This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give as part of the 'Inhumanities' seminars Open Humanities Press is curating for the Australasian Post-Humanities series.
In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, which Open Humanities Press (OHP) published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism. I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. In my ongoing work I also explore traces of liberal humanism within the posthumanities – as evidenced by the field’s continuing adherence to concepts such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture. The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist that my collaborators and I have been exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective. The rationale behind these projects is to show how our bourgeois liberal humanist modes of being and doing as theorists can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. For unless we can learn not just to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
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Gary Hall, Dehumanising the Mind
In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’ that Open Humanities Press published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism.(1) I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. And this is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as liberals, socialists, conservatives, libertarians, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists. Something similar can be said about the relation of the posthumanities to the humanities. Posthumanists may write about transgressing the boundary that separates the human from the nonhuman, be it animal, insect, technology, plant life, water, air, the planet or the cosmos. Yet when it comes to how they themselves work and act these critical theorists remain liberal humanists. Evidence their continuing adherence to concepts and values inherited from the humanities, such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the long-form argument, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. In this respect all the references in their work to objects, materials and media technologies is just non-human filler designed to make their liberal humanist ways of being and doing appear otherwise.
Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, the first, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture, including antihumanist theory and what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘posthuman Humanities studies’.(2) The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist my collaborators and have been exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective.
In this talk for the Australasian Post-Humanities seminar series I want to develop this critique of both the humanities and posthumanities as different aspects of the same bourgeois liberal humanism by referring to three recently published texts: Reni Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Bernadine Evaristo’s Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’.(3) For the answer to the question of why my collaborators and I want not only to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities is quite simple. It’s about showing how our ways of being and doing can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. Unless we can learn to do so, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In it Ngũgĩ explains why he regards the translation between African languages such as Ibo and Yoruba as the ‘foundation of a genuinely African novel’, rather than anything written in English, French or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonisers. (4)
References
(1) John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, in Michael Marder and Patricia Viera, eds, The Philosophical Salon: Speculations, Reflections, Interventions (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017): http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-philosophical-salon/.
(3) Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (London: Penguin, 2020); Bernadine Evaristo, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’, New Statesman, October 1, 2020: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/10/bernardine-evaristo-goldsmiths-lecture-longform-patriarchs. After the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests that occurred around the world following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Eddo-Lodge became the first black Briton ever to top both the non-fiction paperback and overall UK book charts during this period, while Bernadine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top that for paperback fiction with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
(4) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986) 84.