“strategic vitalism”

Good post here by Levi on what he calls STRATEGIC VITALISM. I think that’s a good name for Bennett’s point that a bit of anthropomorphism may be needed to overcome anthropocentrism.

One critique I kept getting in New York, and which I don’t in any way see as compelling, is the “but you’re using anthropomorphic language” critique. The point itself may be understandable, but I don’t see it as ultimately all that important.

Let’s say that in one of my books I write something like this: “melons, clouds, and lighthouses scheme endlessly, plotting to take power over the cosmos.” Is this “anthropomorphism”? Sure, but who cares?

For the record, I don’t believe that melons, clouds, our lighthouses actually huddle together in an explicit conspiracy. It’s a metaphor, which means that the qualities of one object are deliberately transferred to another. What happens thereby is not the same thing as declaring explicitly that “melons, clouds, and lighthouses, just like humans, are capable of collective political action.” Something else quite different happens, which I have described in Guerrilla Metaphysics.

While this gesture has certain specific features, it’s also one example of a far wider metaphorical puritanism that one encounters quite often in intellectual life. Namely, people are offended when certain terms are used metaphorically, because the literal concept seems too grave to be trifled with for figurative uses.

The dividing line may be unclear: personally, I see the merit of avoiding metaphorical use of such terms as rape, pogrom, lynching, holocaust, and other terms that express the specific vulnerability of one portion of the populace. It’s simply too jarring and offensive to use such terms. By contrast, I’ve never been convinced by the occasional claims that military metaphors should never be used on the grounds that literal war is too horrible a thing to refer to figuratively. That seems to go a puritanical step too far in impoverishing the resources of language.

But it’s almost amusing that the human/inanimate divide is such a sacred thing to many contemporary people that they are angered by its metaphorical transgression as well. Indeed, this divide may be the central religious principle of modernism, as Latour decisively and permanently demonstrated in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that refutes so many things that refuse to die.