Interview with Vicki Kirby

In this article, Vicki Kirby and Daniel McLoughlin are in conversation about What If Culture Was Nature All Along? This volume brings critical theory into dialogue with research in the natural sciences so as to problematize some of the most fundamental distinctions that structure modern thought, those between nature and culture, subject and world, the humanities and the sciences.

Vicki Kirby’s work has consistently sought to rethink these conceptual oppositions by drawing on two sets of intellectual resources. The first is her reading of Jacques Derrida, whose thought, she argues, has had implications for how we understand not only human language but the question of connection more generally. The second is recent work in the life sciences, which shows that cultural meanings can be registered biologically, such that matter is attentive. Drawing on these two fields of thought she asks whether the distinction between nature and culture can be sustained if flesh is literate, and if the human can still be considered radically distinct from the rest of nature if the whole of life also involves a form of reading and writing.

Her interest in these questions is motivated, in substantial part, by the central role that the distinction between nature and culture plays in politics and ethics. Our understanding of what counts as political is deeply structured by the idea that the human is different from the rest of the natural world because we have language. And, as Kirby notes in her introductory essay to the volume, the idea of human exceptionalism, and the division between mind and body that accompanies it in the modern world, is deeply implicated in a range of pressing political problems, from climate change to gendered oppression.

Vicki Kirby’s first major work to explore these problems was Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997), which examined the uncanny resonance between poststructural understandings of ‘the life of language’ and emerging evidence about ‘the language of life’. In Judith Butler: Live Theory (2006) she drew on this deconstructive analysis of materiality and communication to extend the implications of Butler’s work which, she argued, recuperates the nature/culture division it ostensibly eschews. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (2011) then turned to the implications of her deconstruction of the nature/culture binary for the distinction between the humanities and sciences that structures the production of knowledge and the organization of the university. In What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (2017) she has invited a range of scholars working in the critical humanities to think through the nature/culture division and to explore the difficult terrain that emerges from the contemporary crisis of these conceptual categories.

Daniel McLoughlin: Congratulations on the publication of What If Culture Was Nature All Along? The book is an intervention in contemporary debates around the ‘materialist turn’ in contemporary theory. Under this heading you engage with a range of different theoretical tendencies, from ‘speculative realism’, to contemporary feminism, and debates around the Anthropocene. The book gives the sense that you, and the contributors to it, find the questions being asked by the new materialism compelling. Yet your introductory essay, and Ash Barnwell’s piece on methodology, also raise concerns about some of the rhetorical and theoretical tendencies within this literature. What is it that you find important about the materialist turn? What reservations do you have about the moves that are being made in this field?

Vicki Kirby: Although the book appears in the New Materialisms series through Edinburgh University Press, it might be more misleading than helpful to confine the collective focus of these essays in this way. I can better situate the book’s intellectual momentum and explain why this latest ‘turn’ has no special inspirational significance by mentioning something about the reception of my own work. I was recently invited to reprint material from my first book, Telling Flesh: the Substance of the Corporeal (1997), for a German journal on new materialism. I mention this because the two chapters which earned the editor’s interest are an exploration of the weird and wonderful implications of Saussurean linguistics, and they were written 30 years ago as part of my doctoral dissertation. At that time I was especially fascinated by how a circumscribed, ideational system of purely symbolic relevance, something understood as a cultural artefact – namely language – could have biological consequences. How could a word, an idea, a concept, something ephemeral and insubstantial, affect the very meat of the body and prove transformative? In such a description we conceptualize two quite independent entities, culture and nature, and a one-way transfer whereby culture (mind) interferes with nature (bodies) – writes on bodies, constitutes bodies as meaningful in quite specific ways. However, this collection of essays tends to turn this logic on its head by suggesting that it must be in the nature of biology to write, to calculate, to surmise and muse, and such natural capacities suggest that ‘language’ can’t be corralled outside what we conventionally understand as matter. The implications are profound, as we are confronted with questions about the very ontology of language – where and what it is and how it works – as well as quandaries about the stuff of the corporeal. Indeed, when we call up the nature/culture division as if its contents and modes of operation are easily differentiated, or when we assume that causality is a straightforward transfer of force from one site to another, we effectively hobble our ability to investigate, or even to recognize, evidence to the contrary.

I was trained to be vigilant about the ways in which matter and ideation, nature and culture, body and mind, are perceived in exclusionary terms as a figure/ground gestalt, where what appears to come first in a narrative of evolving complexity is made the site of lack, failure and incapacity, a mere backdrop of relative insignificance against which true value is easily identified. A vast body of feminist scholarship has shown how the rules of rhetoric and logic inevitably background ‘the feminine’ as the natural repository of what is ‘other’ to Man – what is comparatively primordial, incapable, irrational or even wrong. Importantly, the political economy of value that motors this mode of ‘making sense’ in terms of an A/-A gestalt isn’t simply overturned or resolved. We see the tenacity and constitutive denials that motor this binary logic in more recent discussions about the error of human exceptionalism: human hubris and self-importance are roundly condemned on the one hand only to emerge as a redemptive salve on the other. In sum, the attribution of a singular sense of agency, mastery, and the capacity to take responsibility is prerequisite to judgements about the destruction of global well-being as well as its remediation. What is important, and this is the difficulty here, is that the desire to intervene and expose the error and inequity of this conceptual economy will tend to repeat it. If the correction returns us to the black and white binary of truth versus error, then condemnation of binarity, without an awareness of its viral ability to appear in more palatable guise, will reinstall and even reinforce it.

Ash Barnwell makes a similar point in her nuanced reading of certain new materialist approaches that reject critique and the politics of revelation as yesterday’s failed practices. She explains how a litany of strategies and assumptions – an attention to language, representation and the subject, an analysis of structures of constraint, and the central importance of being human – are now regarded as moribund. Barnwell captures the jaded frustration with what came before in a citation from Rita Felski.

We know only too well the well-oiled machine of ideology critique, the x-ray gaze of symptomatic-reading, the smoothly rehearsed moves that add up to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ideas that seemed revelatory thirty years ago – the decentered subject! The social construction of reality! – have dwindled into shopworn slogans […] what virtue remains in unmasking when we know full well what lies beneath the mask? (in Barnwell, 2017: 31)

However, Barnwell explains the structural sleight of hand in these arguments that tends to equate certain contemporary or ‘new’ approaches with what is useful, and ‘old’ historical bodies of knowledge with what is redundant and even obstructionist (p. 41). Further, the denigration of the past as exhausted and even foolish has the effect of leveraging its replacement (here, various theoretical perspectives within new materialism) with almost automatic importance and authority. The trap for the unwary is that replacing what is moribund with what is vital, or what is exclusionary with what is generous and inclusive, relies on the same logics and methodological strategies said to be exhausted. After all, this particular critique of critique is motored by the progressivist need to denigrate and exclude – here, the scholarship of previous and now decaying ‘shopworn slogans’.

Barnwell’s intervention is twofold: she engages ‘the critique of critique’, and yet in her hands we are not left with yet another battery of corrections and rejections meant to trump previous perspectives. She takes the notion of inclusivity and the failures of critique even further than her protagonists, showing how every practice remains alive to myriad influences, including those that are deemed absent, moribund, or just plain wrong. What is amusing and a tad uncomfortable about this insight, inasmuch as it applies to all of us, is captured in Brian Massumi’s confident pronouncement that ‘judgemental reason is an extremely weak form of thought, precisely because it is so sure of itself’ (p. 41). Barnwell underlines the irony in such statements that remain blind to the self-certainty of their own judgements and unaware that any text, even one whose meanings seem exhausted or proscribed, can still provoke readings that might surprise.

Within this context of mangled perspectives and concerns you’ll appreciate why the comings and goings of various intellectual fashions in the academy aren’t especially important to most of the contributors. Nevertheless, because new materialism is a broad church, heterogeneous in its claims and commitments and willing to entertain what is sometimes conjectural and experimental, it provides a useful platform for debate and speculation. The re-reading of vitalism that interrogates the ontology of non-human others and even things, the quantum implications of our representations and the challenge to the ‘two-cultures’ divide between the humanities and the sciences have all been valuable interventions.

DM: The book engages with a range of authors closely associated with new materialism: Karen Barad’s work is a particularly important influence for a lot of authors, and Peta Hinton’s chapter, ‘A Sociality of Death’, develops a reading of Rosi Braidotti. However, the various authors in the collection tend to draw on theories that are not often associated with the new materialism. Your introductory chapter suggests that your ‘unorthodox’ reading of Jacques Derrida played an important role in the formulation of the project. While Derrida makes only one explicit appearance in the remainder of the book, a number of the chapters, such as those of Jamieson, Chiew and Davis, use evidence from the sciences to trouble the nature/culture binary in a fashion that seems quite deconstructive. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology also makes an important appearance in a number of the chapters. What do you think the volume is able to contribute to contemporary discussions around materialism by drawing on methodologies that are usually neglected in these debates?

VK: You’re right to suggest that the question of method, or methodology, is of crucial importance for the book’s collective argument. And to this end, I should clarify up front why the contributors are especially exercised by fault lines; namely, how a bar of prohibition operates to identify and segregate one thing from another, how we isolate causes and origins from effects and ends, how we determine what is simple from what is complex, and how we adjudicate significance and value accordingly. As space is restricted, I’ll confine my response to deconstruction. Although I described my own reading of Derrida as unorthodox I did go on to qualify this description. It was something of a ruse, as I’ll explain again here.

Let’s begin with the deconstructive vocabulary of ‘writing in the general sense’, ‘text’, ‘différance’, and so on – these ‘terms’ that evoke a sense of language even as they destabilize what we mean by communication and reference. What Derrida hopes to conjure by using these ‘non-concepts’ is a sense of dislocation and disorientation from what is familiar and routine in our thought. In sum, Derrida doesn’t begin his research by appealing to the quiddity of something so that he can then ask how its ‘being-itself’, its ‘self-presence’, relates to, or is different from, other things that are assumed to possess similar, self-defining properties. In other words, the atomic integrity of an entity, whether by that we mean a person, a word, a gene, or even an enlarged entity that might appear as a system of relational operations such as a natural language, is more of a question for Derrida than an accepted departure point. Derrida’s meticulous consideration of that old lefty question, ‘Where to begin?’, returns him to what might loosely be called the mode of production of value. And although his notion of ‘systematicity’ is certainly resonant with the Marxian drive to account for the hidden processes that surround and generate a product’s cultural and economic value, we need to remember that Derrida’s ‘system’ is a sort of in/finite involvement that inhabits what it generates. Consequently, this is not a conventional notion of production that is indebted to, or connected with, a causal chain of different operations that bring a particular entity into being. As Derridean ‘systematicity’ has no outside against which to contain and define its identity, nor an inside whose internal ‘components’ are easily segregated, this generative force-field is an implicate order whose intrications Derrida evokes with the term ‘text’.

Importantly, ‘textuality’ is not a synonym for literature. As Derrida somewhat despairingly repeated throughout his career, ‘The text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference’ (1988: 137). Because his work is read as literary or philosophical hermeneutics it may seem odd to embrace questions about neurology and perception, the vagaries of allergic reactions, the biology of epigenetics or even plant communication or quantum notions of time. But let’s remember that deconstruction isn’t a methodology, a model or application: it refuses the neat subject/object split that a methodology is thought to mediate. I think you’re picking up on how identifying divisions feel more confounded and ambiguous in these essays.

A good illustration of this confusion wherein epistemology and ontology are one and the same can be found in Derrida’s discussion of François Jacob’s research on genetics in the seminars La vie la mort (1975). Derrida is curious about the gene’s pedagogical achievement – its ability to communicate, instruct, or reproduce itself – and he compares these actions with the reproducibility, or communicative structures, of social and cultural institutions. However, what might seem mere metaphor, a device meant to encourage contemplation about two similar yet quite independent entities – nature and culture – has a significantly disorienting and even bewildering effect when we realize that Derrida can make no appeal to a third term, an ‘in-between’ one thing and another. It is the status of the model as intermediary, the assumption that the world is made up of independent and quite separate entities, that Derrida works to undermine. In his discussion of the gene’s behaviour and capacity he notes,

that which we pretend then to accept as model, comparison, analogy with the view of understanding the basic living entity; this itself is a complex product of life, of the living, and the claimed model is exterior neither to the knowing subject nor to the known object  … The text is not a third term in the relation between the biologist and the living, it is the very structure of the living as shared structure of the biologist. (Derrida, 1975: Seminar 4, 5)

Although ‘textuality’ refuses the separation of subject from object the suggestion that physics, biology, or the workings of plant and animal life might express the mired involvements of ‘writing’ (systematicity) usually comes as a surprise. And yet I’ve always had an uneasy suspicion that this ignorance is a sort of motivated knowing, a defensive disavowal that indemnifies ‘the human’ as sole reader of a world that must remain illiterate, comparatively incapable and lacking agency. A Derridean engagement with the question of method makes these neat adjudications considerably more problematic.

DM: I’d like to pick up on this last issue. You seem to be pointing to a connection, made in the book, between the nature/culture distinction and ‘linguistic idealism’, that is, the idea that our access to the world is always mediated by a language that separates us from it. Could you elaborate on how rethinking language, in the way that you suggest, opens up new perspectives on the relationship between human beings and nature?

VK: It is commonly believed that only humans have language, that is, an abstract and complex system of expression, and the effect of this conviction creates a bulwark of cross-referencing prejudices which is difficult to dismantle. Even when we concede ‘other than human’ languages, a comparison with what is regarded as humanity’s unique achievement will automatically deem them primitive. Not unrelated, the illiteracy of nature in a different theatre of inquiry can figure indigenous peoples as not yet, or not quite, human. One thinks of the colonial occupation of Australia and the justification of dispossession in terms of terra nullius (land belonging to nobody). By equating the native with fauna, indigenous literacies become invisible, indeed impossible.

I mention this because the interested myopia of ethnocentrism (securing the identity of the one who knows by distancing oneself from the ignorant and primitive other) is mirrored in the logic that underpins human exceptionalism versus its others (A/-A). I don’t regard language as a property that we either possess or lack: it doesn’t reside in a circumscribed bubble wherein cultural expression invents a world which is necessarily fictional because the latter’s substantive truth is mediated. When we reduce ‘language’ to a process of naming a world that is elsewhere and otherwise, we forfeit any sense of the dynamic and entangled creativity of the world’s ‘own’ self-involved ‘textuality’. And we thereby identify the subject who acts, the one who authors change, with being human. I think a more generous appreciation of what ‘language’ involves could reorient the question of anthropocentrism in ways that are more provocative because less predictable and pre-digested. If we can appreciate that the very flesh and bone of our biology generates and interprets what we conventionally understand as a natural language such as English, then we are forced to consider that language is variously expressed – as vibration, electrical currents, differential pressures, chemical grammars and so on. Biology can learn a language because its particular ‘transformativities’ and translations of itself are already ‘language’. Most of the essays in this collection are working with the suggestion that ‘there is no outside nature’, and this means that nothing is prescribed: nature is no longer a passive and prescriptive substrate lacking creative ingenuity.

DM: As you point out in the introduction, the materialist turn is often cast as a response to the urgent political challenges of our moment, and the sense that the theoretical limitations of linguistic idealism have contributed to the failure to address environmental crises such as anthropogenic climate change. I’m wondering what kind of contribution you think the book’s unique ‘new materialist’ perspective makes with respect to thinking through the very serious problems that you identify in its opening chapter?

VK: If we question the denigration of previous perspectives as prerequisite to an appreciation of contemporary ones then this need to ‘take one’s distance’ – the mantra of objectivity, reason, fairness and progress – becomes suspect. And if the complexities of the past, whether in previous writings, ‘literacies’ of supposedly primal life forms, elemental forces, or biological stratagems, are all strangely contemporary, even human in their complexity and agential smarts, then we need to ask if notions of distance and separation (of time, of entities, of actions and commitments) might need revisiting.

In terms of these considerations the appeal to methodologies that underscore their ‘what really matters’ credentials can’t actually guarantee what is new, more foundationally substantial or effective than claims that acknowledge their linguistic idealism. If the literary markers of political urgency and ‘cut through’ action rely on the persuasive powers of rhetorical convention, then whether I call myself a new materialist, a positivist, an affect theorist, a pragmatist or cultural constructionist, writing and reading remain central to my practice. Importantly, the Derridean notion of ‘writing’ mines this insight but takes it much further. For Derrida, the difference between nature and culture is no difference at all, and this, not because we humans are caught in a mirror-maze of hermeneutic deception whose cultural vagaries prevent unmediated access to reality: in other words, by dint of being human I can’t determine where the border between nature and culture falls. But because the systemic involvements and intricate productivities that mark this side of the cultural ledger as more evolved are in evidence on the ‘other’, purportedly more primitive side. Derrida invites us to reconsider how to ‘do politics’ when the black and white logic of our moral routines and political prejudices gets murky. What should we make of his insistence that there is no mediation, no ‘in-between’, no third term of separation? If life in all its manifestations enacts a sort of cross-referencing reflexivity, then translation/differentiation is both cause and effect. Within such a ‘scene of writing’ we can see that the bifurcation into infrastructural (material) or superstructural (ideational) importance, as well as the agonism over what belongs where, will discount the operative indeterminacy within any single adjudication.

I’ve argued that the myopia of anthropocentrism works like commodity fetishism: we see ourselves as executive agents who can determine the future of the planet, as if we are located above or somehow outside it. However, when anthropocentrism is read grammatologically ‘the human’ manifests as an ecological ‘decision’ that remains open and unfinished, ‘made’ in the vagaries and cross-currents of worldly forces. This means that climate change and ecological degradation aren’t problems we will encounter; they are already at work within us, redefining our very ontology and conditions of possibility. ¹ Acknowledging these incestuous intimacies underlines, at least for me, that reparative action needs to be strategic, nimble and provisional. If ‘the environment’ includes the competing motivations, contradictions and self-sabotage of human behaviours, then nature will not provide a touchstone against which to measure our success.

DM: On a related note, I’m interested in your thoughts on the relationship between the ‘materialist turn’ and the ‘biopolitical turn’ that has been central to critical theory over the last two decades. Michel Foucault famously argues that modernity has seen the development of political technologies that intervene in the biological life of the population. The modern development of knowledge and power have thus, in a certain fashion, already undermined the opposition between nature and culture. How does the attempt, in this volume, to deconstruct the nature/human binary overlap with, supplement, or conflict with, the theory of biopolitics that has been so influential for social theory over recent years?

VK: This is a great question, especially as the whole book is an extended meditation on life/nature as inherently political. As we saw in the citation where Derrida underlines the self-reflexivity of life, he eschews any appeal to a third term (language, the model, technology) as an instrument through which we access the world. Derrida turns this tripartite division (subject, instrument, object) into one of intra-implication, and this heralds a very different analytical intent than what we see in a lot of biopolitical analysis. For example, when you note that ‘political technologies aimed at manipulating and fostering the biological life of the population’ have already undermined the difference between nature and culture’, I hear that familiar argument about ‘nature denatured’. Georges Canguilhem warns against a way of thinking that sees nature changed or defiled in some way, leaving us with a sort of hybrid and impure confection that is no longer what it was. But if nature – here, biology – is inherently technological, manipulative, calculating, then what we understand as human culture and society reflects nature’s own political machinations. In other words, if power doesn’t emanate from an ‘outside nature’ or causal site of domination because it is disseminated and perverse in design and expression, then reading biopolitics grammatologically can complicate its frame of reference. Importantly, this is not to trump or dismiss biopolitics but rather to reinvigorate its attentions by revisiting its most foundational assumptions. With the forthcoming publication of Derrida’s seminars, La vie la mort, and Francesco Vitale’s close reading of them in Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (2018), ² I think we are well placed to explore this important conversation. ³

Within this more involved sense of life, nature can’t be appealed to as wholesome foundation, passive ‘victim’ or unwitting precursor. And if we can’t appeal to an enduring referent to stabilize what will count as a good political or ethical practice – namely, nature as feminized and racialized Other to be protected from interference – then things get considerably more difficult, but also interesting. As we’ve seen, the routine of correction and agonistic nay-saying is an argumentative structure that discovers moral superiority in the critic – if you are wrong then I am right, and by implication, good. Is it possible for us to find virtue in not being sure of what comes next, in finding ourselves wrong-footed and disoriented or even complicit with something we deem to be wrong? Could a sense of deliberative uncertainty that acknowledges this muddle shift the inside/outside logic of the current biopolitical landscape even as we make our decisions? – which we must.