In this paper, I want to propose the fetish as a figure that might be mobilized to think about materiality in the age of environmental crisis. Fetishism describes a practice of assigning value, which, within any given regime of value, is excessive. It endows an inanimate object with a power and liveliness usually associated with human subjects. In the Western intellectual tradition, the term has acquired fame—and perhaps notoriety—as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Although working in very different fields, both Marx and Freud mobilize the fetish to theorize the fraught relation between human interiority and the external world of things. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I want to use the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to environmental crises of various kinds and dimensions. In particular, I want to investigate the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowedly materialist project of what I am calling thinking outside the body. I use this phrase to describe a new movement in philosophical thought that, prompted largely by a recognition of the damaging effect of human activity on the earth, tries to sidestep the human subject as the source of meaning and the locus of agency.
In 2010, political scientist Jane Bennett published an extremely influential book called Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things in which she proposes a new form of materialism that asserts the agency of various forms of matter.Footnote 1 Bennett draws on the long history of vitalism within the Western philosophical tradition to outline a theory of materialism that recognizes matter as having a force and liveliness not dependent on human subjects. Her project, she explains, is motivated by a belief that “the image of a dead and thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”Footnote 2 Motivated by an anxiety about the environmentally catastrophic consequence of Western modernity, Bennett mines an alternative tradition of Western thought to outline a less instrumental approach to the material world.
Bennett references but does not pursue the closeness of her project to “premodern” modes of thought. In a curious aside, she notes the importance of adopting a certain “naivete”: “One tactic might be to revisit and become temporarily infected by discredited philosophies of nature, risking the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, and anthropomorphism, and other premodern attitudes.”Footnote 3 Bennett does not give any reasons for not pursuing this affinity with the premodern but her warding off gesture suggests a familiar anxiety about thought that does not originate within the respectable, authorized Western tradition. Despite critiques of Enlightenment rationality and instrumental reasoning, Africa remains associated with illegitimate knowledge, with “superstition,” and with the modes of thought that are considered “premodern.”Footnote 4 Animism, Caroline Rooney notes, “belongs to a vocabulary of stigmatized and stigmatizing terms.”Footnote 5 Despite a growing interest in animism by scholars of environmental crisis, it remains eccentric to the form of disciplinary knowledge recognized by the academy.
Also responding to an anxiety about the consequences of the Western attitude toward the material world, French anthropologist Philippe Descola makes a more radical gesture of displacement. In his groundbreaking work of comparative ontology, Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola proposes that there exist four distinct ontological regimes that are, as Marshall Sahlins explains, associated with different ways of “forming social collectives and characteristic moralities as well as distinctive modes of knowing what there is.”Footnote 6 He describes these as animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogy. Naturalism, under which Descola subsumes Western modernity, is only one such cosmological framework for understanding the relation between humans as well as their relation to nonhuman nature. Descola’s project is to displace Western modernity with its characteristic objectivizing form of knowledge from its place as the teleological endpoint of all knowledge. Rather he argues, “Our object must be to make it clear that the project of understanding the relations that human beings establish between one another and with nonhumans cannot be based upon a cosmology and an ontology that are as closely bound as ours to one particular context.”Footnote 7 Western modernity, he argues, emerges as a response to a particular set of social, environmental, and technological developments. It does not produce an order of knowledge deterritorialized from the conditions of its production. His project then is to undo the persistent valorization of modern knowledge as qualitatively different from forms of knowledge produced in response to very different conditions. In what he refers to as the building site of contemporary knowledge production, his scheme offers an attempt at space clearing or ground clearing, preliminary to the establishment of something that might be seen as the communal house of a shared conceptual framework. He suggests, in effect, that epistemological transformation requires a more egalitarian distribution of knowledge production and a shift in the established hierarchies in which all knowledge must be subjected to the logic of scientific proof.
In this paper, I argue that a reconsideration of materiality that ignores the contribution of African thought to this topic remains incomplete. Africa provides an important counterpart to the conceptual work being done on developing alternative epistemologies, ones that wish to take the new unpredictability of the material world seriously. There are two reasons for this: The first has to do with the long intellectual tradition of animism, which in various iterations has formed an important strand of philosophical thought in different parts of the continent, a form of reasoning in which things are recognized to act in urgent and sometimes unpredictable ways. The second has to do with the relative distribution of commodities around the world. In the short history of the commodity, the period since World War II sometimes described as the Great Acceleration, Africa has not followed the global trend of accumulation. Largely as a result of the structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), large parts of Africa have not industrialized.Footnote 8 Instead, much of the continent has been characterized by particular forms of scarcity. Partly as a result of this scarcity of commodities, the manufactured goods, and the clutter of modern modes of living, a lively materiality has remained far more present in the postcolony both as a resource and as a threat.
The sense of environmental crisis that provokes both Bennett and Descola’s intervention emerges from a reading of the material world as a site of damage. Increasingly, the evidence of damage read in the material of the earth is seen to present a moral critique of modernity and the progress of human societies toward a particular “standard of living” and a refutation of certain cultural and epistemological assumptions. It occupies the space of the early twenty-first century even as other crises—in world political configurations, in economics and the distribution of debt, and in global distributions of violence—continue to take place. It occupies this space as a kind of background that is continually exerting a pressure on the foreground.
But this conceptualization of nature as background is one closely associated with one particular ontological framework—that of Western modernity. In fact, in describing the emergence of naturalism as an ontological mode, Descola explains the transformation that takes place in the seventeenth century as the moment “when nature ceased to be a unifying arrangement of things, however disparate, and became a domain of objects that were subject to autonomous laws that form the background against which the arbitrariness of human activities could exert its many faceted fascination.”Footnote 9 It is precisely this arrangement of background and foreground that the current crisis calls into question. As Michel Serres notes on the current environmental crisis, “Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy.”Footnote 10 Yet as Descola asserts, this mode of arranging background and foreground originates in a very specific set of practices and modes of knowing. There exist other modes of knowing and ontological regimes that have coexisted with the one characterized as “modern,” which conceive of the relation between background and foreground in quite a different way.
Fetish
Because of its long history in Western thought, the term fetish is both immediately familiar and yet strangely hard to define. It’s meaning shifts across its many iterations. Although the main aim of this paper is not to track the familiar albeit often contested role fetishism plays in the work of Marx and Freud, I want to begin this section by briefly looking at its contentious life in the Western academy, a contention that centers on the materiality of the thing itself. As I mentioned earlier, the concept of the fetish is one that is borrowed by European thinkers from an encounter with a very different conceptual system. According to William Pietz, Marx developed the concept from Charles de Brosses, a French writer who compiled a book from tales of Portuguese travelers to West Africa. At the end of this section, I return to some of the specific characteristics of the fetish as described by Pietz to reflect on how a consideration of the concept within the intellectual tradition of animism might suggest an alternative role for the fetish, not as a signifier of excessive and false value but as a form of materiality that exerts a limiting effect on human conduct.
For both Marx and Freud, fetishism involves a form of misrecognition. The value attributed to the object is a misunderstanding of true value of the object. For both, fetishism describes the work of displacement. For Marx, the act of displacement occurs when the exchange value of commodities appears as the real and inherent value of objects themselves. The sensuous useful object disappears along with the fact that it is produced through labor, work done to transform materials that occur in nature, and is replaced by the abstract value generated by the process of exchange. Marx writes:
In order . . . to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.Footnote 11
Through this process of fetishization, commodities are endowed with a social life which allows them to operate as if they themselves had agency. As they circulate through capitalist regimes of value, they appear to enter into social relations with human subjects as well as with other objects. The fetishism of commodities is the name given by Marx to this illusory liveliness.
Bruno Latour’s hostility to what he calls the “anti-fetishist” theorists, such as Marx, is because they want to demystify the illusory nature of people’s attachment to things. For Latour, this form of materialism is in fact an annihilation of the object because it involves a refusal to acknowledge the sensory liveliness of things themselves. To deploy the fetish as a conceptual tool is to already privilege abstract knowledge (knowledge of the true source of value) over sensual experience and practical engagement. Hylton White’s compelling criticism of Latour’s reading of Marx notes that Latour seems to miss the target of Marx’s ire, which is not the object, but rather the “object as commodity” from which all materiality is, at least temporarily, evacuated.Footnote 12
In the article “Marx’s Coat,” Peter Stallybrass takes a single object, the coat that Marx mentions briefly in the first chapter of Capital, and suggests a way of returning to this abstract commodity some of the density of the actual life of a particular object, Marx’s own coat. The real coat, Stallybrass suggests, which travels regularly between Marx’s home and the pawnshop, has a powerful material effect on Marx’s ability to research and write, both because it signals a kind of respectability and because it keeps him warm while traveling across London. While it is in his possession, he can go to the British Library; without it, his work is interrupted. The coat as commodity, on the contrary, cannot be worn and cannot keep you warm because it is defined only by its relation to other commodities. It is a coat removed from the circuits of use for the purposes of exchange. Peter Stallybrass notes that:
For Marx, the fetishism of the commodity was a regression from the materialism (however distorted) that fetishized the object. The problem for Marx was thus not with fetishism as such but rather with a specific form of fetishism that took as its object not the animized object of human labour and love but the evacuated nonobject that was the site of exchange.Footnote 13
As Stallybrass points out, what Marx found ridiculous about fetishism was not the fact of assigning value to a material object, but rather the assigning of value to the material object as commodity (i.e., a material object from which the activity of human labor as well as the sensuous materiality of use value has been emptied out). It is the thing’s ghostly double, its abstract existence as an ephemeral and changeable exchange value that becomes the most significant and vital part of its substance.
Fetishism in Freud’s use of the term is also a form of displacement. To fetishize is to endow an object with an affective charge that properly belongs elsewhere. It is a form of compulsion in which blocked desire finds an alternative path to expression. The term fetish thus offers a concept to describe a form of valuation that enacts a transfer of intensity. It is this intense affective charge, which, under capitalism, becomes attached to the commodity partly through hiding its true origins as the work of human labor and partly by reinserting it into another narrative in which the commodity provides fulfillment for some not precisely defined loss. In the twentieth century, advertising emerges as a key part of the process that creates the narrative in which commodities appear to arrange, even provoke, a particularly satisfying form of human social life. In the twenty-first century, the fetishization of abstract qualities has intensified. David Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have argued that “what people are taught to value and consume in today’s acquisitive society are not use values, reflecting genuine needs that have limits, but symbolic values, which are by nature unlimited.”Footnote 14 This is not to argue that highly disposable commodities such as mobile phones and computers do not have a use value but rather that the precise nature of their functionality is not what drives desire for replacement. In fact, these objects are seldom used to their full capacity, which for most users exists only as an attractive potentiality and as an entry into a sociality of the moment. These objects serve as signatures of the modern or the latest thing.
Marx’s critique draws attention to the fact that the distribution of value under capitalism, a “modern” and purportedly rational economic system, relies on a systematic but irrational transfer of value from things to their abstract instantiation as commodities. In invoking “the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world,” Marx references a different orientation toward the material world. Marx was an atheist, and this reference is used to mock capitalism’s own representation of itself as a modern and rational system. Yet his argument depends on a utopian presupposition that there is an outside, a different mode of interacting with the material world, which for him might be accessed through a reorganization of social relations to labor and private property but which equally surfaces in the history of the term fetishism itself.
For de Brosses, fetishism described a premodern cultural practice in which objects were endowed with a magical power. Pietz explains that the “first characteristic to be identified as essential to the notion of the fetish is that of the fetish object’s irreducible materiality. The truth of the fetish lies in its material embodiment.”Footnote 15 Unlike an idol its power does not lie in an iconic resemblance to something else. The other defining characteristic of the fetish, Pietz notes, is its ability to fix an originating moment within itself and to “articulate relations between certain heterogeneous things’”Footnote 16 These might include not only material elements but also “desire, belief and even narrative structures establishing practices.”Footnote 17 A fetish has the ability to hold in its material form a contingent moment of encounter. An object might become a fetish, for instance, because of its presence at a significant moment. But it can also contain and translate into materiality certain more ephemeral and abstract impulses such as desire.
In his tracing of its history, Pietz suggests that fetishism “develops as concept in the [i]ntercultural space triangulated among Christian feudal, African lineage, and merchant capitalist social systems.”Footnote 18 He goes on to suggests: “The fetish . . . not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems.”Footnote 19 The fetish becomes important as a mode of assigning value in situations where different regimes of value encounter each other. It registers the shock of encountering things displaced from established social traditions and practices. In particular, it signifies incomprehension in the face of objects valued according to an alien regime of value.
The fetish is thus a concept that is formulated through contact between different ontological regimes. Its immense popularity as a concept suggests that it immediately finds a place in the consequent discursive reordering of the world. In their recent republication of one of Charles de Brosses’s articles, “On the Worship of Fetish Gods; Or, A Parallel of the Ancient Religion of Egypt with the Present Religion of Nigritia,” Rosalind Morris and Daniel Leonard note the extraordinary mobility of the concept of the fetish in Western thought. Their book The Returns of Fetishism includes a lengthy essay by Morris that tracks the “particular itineraries of fetishism” through the disciplines of philosophy, psychoanalysis, political economy, and anthropology.Footnote 20 Morris’s analysis of the recurrence of fetishism through the history of Western thought in such authors as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan, and finally more briefly Latour, Bennett, and Descola, leads to an astringent assessment that the supposed reversals proposed by these last three authors in the name of animism are merely repetitions.
Yet I would argue that the fact that fetishism enters and circulates within Western philosophical thought, the fact that it is seized upon to name something, however imperfectly, is in itself interesting. This is not only, I would like to suggest, because it allows Europe to constitute its own reason in opposition to the unreason of Africa. But also because it seems to have the ability to name a complex set of ideas pertaining to the mystery of value itself. In the dizzying unfixedness of value in exchange, it offers a way of anchoring value in (real or illusory) materiality. I will return to this idea later because it is this ability to refer to a felt but unarticulated connection that, I think, allows the fetish to operate as a corrective to the unanchored and universalizing claims of new materialism.
Marx’s historical materialism asserted the importance of returning commodities to their materiality as objects subject to productive forces and made by human labor; Bennett’s new form of materialism responds to a similar if intensified anxiety about the increasing abstraction of consumer capitalism by asserting a different kind of materialism, one from which the human has been displaced as the central figure of analysis. Before returning to the fetish as limit, I want to explore briefly Bennett’s project of vital materialism.
Vital Materialism
In this section, I outline key elements of Bennett’s description of vital materialism to trace both its close resemblance to animist modes of thought and its points of divergence to explain why I consider her work as promoting a peculiarly abstract form of thinking—a form of thinking that I critique as thinking outside the body. Vital materialism, like historical materialism before, responds to a sense of crisis. In an interview Bennett comments, “There is definitely something afoot, something about everyday (Euro-American) life that is warning us to pay more attention to what we’re doing.” Paying attention to objects, having the sense of a “strange and incomplete commonality with the outside”Footnote 21 allows vital materialists to develop a more careful attitude to the material substrate of contemporary life. Giving objects due attention pushes aside the expansive even excessive demands of humans to control the meaning and shape of the material world. It invites a recognition of the limits of the human (as a conceptual category) and of humans (as agents and actors) in the world of materiality. Their limited engagement with the key intellectual tradition associated with animate objects, however, results in a theorization of materiality that at times appears curiously ungrounded.
Aligning her project with Adorno’s negative dialectic, a mode of engagement that requires the investigator to submit themselves to the demands of the object, she begins her discussion with a moment of what Adorno might call “unintentional reality”—a curious assembly of objects she encounters in the gutter in Baltimore: a dead rat, some oak pollen, a stick of wood, a plastic glove, and a bottle cap, which “stop [her] in [her] tracks.”Footnote 22 In this “contingent tableau,” she observes, “objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.”Footnote 23 They are not merely the waste products of human society; they have a recalcitrant materiality that is not wholly contained by the concepts used to give them meaning within human culture. Although Bennett acknowledges that this tableau is to some extent constituted by her act of looking, by her own “idiosyncratic biography” that makes her look in this way, her desire is to propose a different interpretation, one in which she is herself part of a wider flow of energy and meaning.
Through creating a series of assemblies of things, Bennett’s book seeks to probe the limits of the thinking that locate all meaning in human culture. Drawing attention to moments in which human control fails, where complex systems such as energy grids appear to act in unpredictable ways, she offers what amounts to a manifesto for a different way of thinking about materiality:
If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief.Footnote 24
The idea that humans share physicality with other animate and even inanimate bodies is one of the characteristics of the form of ontology Descola calls naturalism. He argues that “since Descartes and above all Darwin, we have no hesitation in recognizing that the physical component of our humanity places us in a material continuum within which we do not appear to be unique creatures.”Footnote 25
Bennett’s point is, however, that this recognition of a shared physicality has always been combined with a focus on what made the human unique. The “post-humanist” gesture of vital materialism wishes to redirect attention away from human singularity and instead to submerge the human in something larger, a material vitality that “is me, . . . predates me, . . . exceeds me, . . . postdates me.” Footnote 26
Bennett acknowledges the paradoxical nature of this impulse that attempts to evade the human even as it engages in the very human act of philosophical inquiry. Her answer is an equivocal one, to invite the reader to “postpone” the question of subjectivity, to recognize that the “I” who speaks is constituted of many entities including bacterial colonies and parasitic worms, to accept that human agency is always mixed up with the nonhuman in complex way. Although Bennett does not use this phrase, it seems to me what her text struggles to perform is a mode of thinking outside the body. In an act of narrative contortion, it attempts to defuse subjectivity out of the human body and into other bodies not credited, within Western scientific discourse, with subjecthood and agency.
Bennett ends her book with what she calls a litany for would-be vital materialist, which ends with the following statement: “I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies for human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.”Footnote 27 In an age of accelerated consumption and global catastrophe, the impulse to chasten fantasies of mastery seems a laudable one. Yet the apparently radical nature of the project seems belied by the return in the last words to the notion of reshaping the self. Her avowedly materialist project seems to be the strangely abstract act of reshaping the self through an effort of conceptual displacement.
Bennett’s project, as she acknowledges, shares affinities with an animist mode of thinking. Primarily, her desire to assign vitality and agency to material objects aligns her work with a form of thinking in which “the phenomenal world is understood through subjectifying rather than objectifying it, where this is not simply a matter of perception but of perceiving the subjectivity of the so called object.”Footnote 28 For Bennett, however, this proposal requires a certain conceptual contortion. She is brought up against the paradox of thinking outside her own body, of refusing her own authorial control even as she outlines her project. Yet, as I argue in the next section, a closer look at animist modes of thinking suggests a different way of understanding both the agency of the object and the implications of thinking outside the body.
Animism
To invoke animism is to use a word (to adapt Bakhtin) populated, even overpopulated, with the intentions of others. The archive of animism is in many ways an impossible archive. Knowledge is held either in the preserved but highly compromised anthropological records or in the much more ephemeral practices of everyday life where they may be current activities or only memories, traces, and oblique references. I am not going to rehearse the series of arguments about the status of animism as a mode of thought that has taken place in both Western and African academies. Instead, I want to pick up on two elements of animist thought that seem to me to complicate any general invocation of vital materiality as a response to the objectivizing logic of capitalist modernity and suggest a corrective to what I see as the strange and contradictory abstraction of vital materialism—its project to think outside the body.
The first relates to the way animist thought is closely tied to locality. In his description of an animist social imaginary, Harry Garuba suggests that “perhaps the single most important characteristic of animist thought . . . is its almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits.”Footnote 29 The claims of materiality are specific claims addressed to a specific audience. It is within this context that “objects . . . acquire a social and a spiritual meaning within the culture far in excess of their natural properties.”Footnote 30 This insistence on locality and embodiment limits the possibility of making general claims about the meaning and behavior of things. The liveliness of things is intertwined with the particular situations they find themselves in.
The second element of animist thought that appears to me to be significant relates to the constraint imposed on thought by the material body. In Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola describes the animist mode of thought as one in which a continuity exists among the interiority of all things—human, animals, plants, and things. But this continuity does not produce a uniform subjectivity because the consciousness of each kind of being is produced by its material body’s encounter with the world. This is in direct opposition to the view of nature proposed by the naturalist mode of thinking in which there is a “continuity of physicalities.”. In other words, in animist thought, what distinguishes humans, animals, plant, and things is the way in which their essentially similar soul or spirit or interiority is strained through a particular material form. The materiality of each body constrains the kind of interaction with the world and with other bodies that is possible. It is the very particularity of the human body that constrains human consciousness and its engagement with the world. In this it resembles Marx’s materialist claim that our consciousness is formed by our metabolic interaction with the world.
The vital materialist project wishes to displace the human, divides consciousness from the materiality of the body, and proposes that it is possible to think outside the body. Within the animist tradition, thinking outside the body or inhabiting another’s materiality is possible, but it is always a precarious undertaking fraught with danger and difficulty. In Godfrey Tangwa’s discussion of the practices of the Nso’ of Kamerun,Footnote 31 he describes a particular instance in which one figure, the king, is able to undertake such shifts. He explains:
Supernormal human beings (wir sem) can also transform themselves into other creatures. Sem (or depth literally) is generally of two types: benevolent (kingly) “depth” (sem vifone) and malevolent “depth,”, usually associated with witchcraft and sorcery (viriim). The king (Fon) of Nso’ is particularly believed to be capable of transformations as an aspect of his kingly attributes.Footnote 32
Transformation, or inhabiting another body, enables a person powerful enough to undertake such an act to think through another’s materiality, but it is not to be undertaken lightly. The deployment of such power involves the recognition of bonds and obligations that exist between the human and the material world. This “transformation,” however, is not something that can be subjected to Western scientific proof. Tangwa writes with some irritation about the problem of translation between conceptual systems:
That is simply not the way things work in this system. Within this system, super-human and even extra-ordinary knowledge and capacities/capabilities are looked upon with awe and even dread because of the heavy moral responsibilities they impose and the dangers of abuse.Footnote 33
What is described as witchcraft in animist thought is precisely the way in which the liveliness of things and the ability to transform into another body can be used to manipulate and destroy others perceived of as enemies.
In animist thought, thinking outside the body is always thinking in someone else’s body. Consciousness is always constrained by some kind of material form. Shifting your thinking or perspective out of your own material form is never simply an intellectual exercise, a voluntary change in consciousness. Thing-power does not necessarily discipline human subjects into a more ethical, ecologically conscious engagement with the world of things. Like any power, the power of the material world is vulnerable to being put to use in a way that enhances the well-being of some people at the expense of others.
Animism, therefore, unlike vital materialism, acknowledges a differential distribution of vitality among both people and things. This vitality is profoundly grounded in specific social relations that pertain between people and between people and things. It cannot be generalized. At the same time, the material bodies, though connected by a shared interiority, give rise to divergent subjectivities. The paradox of thinking outside the body is replaced by the practice of transformation or thinking in another’s body. This practice is never a purely conceptual gesture, and it requires the individual to be embedded within a specific social and natural environment. Animism makes demands on those subjected to its logic that would be difficult for a modern individual, disciplined by capitalism’s valorization of choice, to accept. Although vital materialism draws on an animist logic, Bennett’s return to the notion of “shaping the self” at the end of her book marks a clear divergence from the communally embedded interaction with the material world that characterizes animism.
Writing in the Prescriptive Mode
I will return in this final section of this paper to the possibility of the fetish as that which can confer on vital materialism something of the “depth” or “weight” of animism’s interaction with the material world. I want to consider the figure of the fetish not as a sign of excessive value, but as a reference to value that refuses to be commensurate. New materialism, like much current writing about the contemporary environmental crisis, resembles the form of advice literature. It asserts the necessity of thinking differently about the world in order to act differently. For Marx, this would be an idealist project, one that suggests that consciousness is produced not by the material conditions of production but by changing intellectual traditions. Although Marx’s historical materialism may no longer be adequate to the form of crisis we are currently experiencing, his insistence on the close relation between the material world and consciousness remains a key insight. In espousing an approach that seems to displace thought from the human, vital materialism seems to require a level of abstraction that is at odds with the materialist desire of the project. In something that is almost an aside to her main argument, Bennett writes:
It hit me then in a visceral way how American materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever shorter cycles, is antimateriality. The sheer volume of commodities and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter.Footnote 34
In this statement, Bennett returns almost involuntarily to the fetishism of commodities, which is, as Marx would agree, a displacement of vitality from an individual thing to its exchangeability as a category. She recognizes the vitality of the commodity, its lively mobility in capitalist society, is an illusion. She engages briefly with the context of her own knowledge production. Commodities, by presenting themselves as always available for the satisfaction of desire, seem to confirm the centrality of the human subject. Commodities are submissive things that appear to confirm human power over the material world, even when the ability to exercise this power is frustrated by lack of disposable income. In a world dominated by commodities affirming human mastery, her desire to displace the human from its sovereign position is understandable.
In shifting the emphasis from commodity to thing, Bennett thus is engaged in a kind of demystification. As I have argued in this paper, however, the form it takes is one of personal revelation. Her exhortation to the global academic public is to learn to value themselves less and things more. Although I recognize the impulse behind this desire to displace the human, thinking outside the body seems to free thought from precisely those constraints of the material that animist thinking recognizes—the limits of inhabiting a particular material form. This is not to assert the centrality of the human but to acknowledge that those of us confronting and writing about the environmental crisis are only human, or in other words that we cannot escape the limits to consciousness imposed by our human bodies. Unlike new materialism, animist thought does not require this decentering of human subject, in part because of the very different way in which the human is conceptualized, not as an individual but as a person whose interests are always subordinated to the social good.
Tangwa describes the Nso’ worldview as primarily communitarian but with an idea of community that extends beyond the human community. He explains:
Nso’ morality is ultimately human-centred in so far as its teleological end and limits are defined by human well-being. Super human spirits and non-human animals are not prone to moral error nor are they vulnerable to the consequences of their own moral errors. In this way they are different from human beings in not being subject to moral imperatives and sanctions.Footnote 35
Yet Tangwa acknowledges the practices of the Nso’, like other forms of social practice, do not exist outside of history. He notes that in talking about these practices it is difficult to know whether to use the past or the present tense. This is because in the contact with European culture begun in 1902 with the introduction of Western systems of law, as well as education and religion by German colonizers, the practices that he describes “have been abandoned, are in abeyance or which are becoming rarer and rarer.”Footnote 36
These gradations of presentness (“abandoned,” “in abeyance,” “rarer and rarer”) offer a nuanced representation of these practices not as traditional forms of knowledge superseded by modernity but rather as fragments of a conceptual scheme that continues alongside Western knowledge, which in a world dominated by global capitalism is required for basic transactions and survival. Rooney identifies this as the accommodative vision of animist thought that allows it to coexist with other forms of logic.Footnote 37 The continuation of this conceptual scheme as a substrate not only to knowledge but also to everyday practices, Garuba has called an “animist unconscious,” which has its own distinct logic that “operates basically on a refusal of the boundaries, binaries, demarcations, and linearity” of modern forms of knowledge.Footnote 38
Animist vitality is very different from the liveliness assigned to objects by capitalism. Elizabeth Povinelli, discussing the figure of the animist within the new distribution of power she calls geontopower, suggests that capitalists could be said to be the purest animists because under capitalism “nothing is inherently inert, everything is vital from the points of view of capitalization, and anything can become something more with the right innovative angle.”Footnote 39 Yet the vitality of the commodity is very different from the vitality of the fetish object. In the commodity, circulation or movement produces the impression of liveliness, supported by narratives generated by advertising, but the ultimate character of the commodity is not its singularity but its commensurability. It is its loose relation to meaning that allows it to circulate. The fetish stops circulation in its tracks because of its singularity and because its meaning cannot be generalized into the abstract space of the global economy.
Within this context, the possibility of the concept of the fetish is that it can provide a means of articulating different kinds of materialist critiques. The fetish is interesting firstly because its meaning is inaugurated at a moment of contact between different conceptual schemes and different regimes of value. Its popularity indicates a shared problematic, a shared concern with the problem of value, without excluding the possibility of misunderstanding. In its lively mobility, it indicates the incompleteness of conceptual schemas and the difficulty, but not the impossibility, of translation. Secondly in animist thought, the fetish is something that acts on and constrains conduct. It does this because of its essentially social nature. It resists any universalizing impulse and insists instead on the powerful influence of background on foreground, or the way the meaning or vitality of a thing is dependent on its occupation of time and place. A fetish object is always tied to a particular situation. Reading according to the logic of the fetish challenges us to recognize which object in any situation or text stops circulation in its tracks and condenses in its material form, both the interruption of temporality that inaugurates it and the narrative structures and desires that accrue around it. It invites us to consider which objects have value but cannot be exchanged.
The fetish object also seems to have the power to assemble and materialize apparently incommensurable elements. It implies a logic that is not the same as the logic of the academy and is disinterested in subjecting itself to scientific proof. It lives beyond the reach both of the academy and the logic of consumption. Unlike proclamations about the vitality of all matter, the fetish—always a specific object—invites materiality into an essentially human interaction. As a conceptual tool, it contains a provocation—a challenge to think about the limits of the human without the contortion of trying to think outside the body. This is not to dismiss the impact of vital materialism that has sparked resonances in a wide range of scholarly writing about the environment, but to suggest that these sparks belong more properly to the possibilities of animist logic.
