{"id":9172,"date":"2017-04-20T23:17:35","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T04:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9172"},"modified":"2017-04-20T23:32:47","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T04:32:47","slug":"a-metaphysics-they-cant-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/04\/20\/a-metaphysics-they-cant-match\/","title":{"rendered":"A metaphysics they can’t match"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opening the ISSRNC<\/a> conference on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes<\/a> with a set of images from anti-pipelines and indigenous solidarity events, Karenna Gore<\/a> (daughter of Al and founding director of the Center for Earth Ethics<\/a>) said something\u00a0that struck me as an evocative distillation of what’s really at stake in the world.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration’s Inquisition-like demolition of environmental governance, she suggested, is “no match for a metaphysics of humanity interconnected with its sacred landscapes<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

Let’s think about\u00a0this for a bit. What’s at stake, she is saying, is metaphysical.<\/p>\n

All the “ontological turns<\/a>” of recent years (especially among anthropologists) have tried to make this case, but as long as it’s about a turn (yet another one) of theory, it becomes mostly about us, the theorists. (And as long as it’s about “new materialism,” or “speculative realism,” or some other take on the world that’s as disembodied and non-obligatory as all the rest, it’s just more intellectual contortions for the sake of the contortionists.)<\/p>\n

The metaphysics we seek and need, Gore is\u00a0suggesting, is one that takes humanity seriously — because we are humans — but that finds that humanity thickly entangled in and with\u00a0a larger world of places, of landscapes, of spirits and territories and folds in time and space that are not merely random or happenstance, but that are morally and ontologically loaded<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here’s\u00a0where the affective<\/a> and the ontological come together.<\/p>\n

And it’s where the political Left likely does not have the resources to take on Trumpism, or capitalism, or late industrialism, or the Anthropocene in toto. The reason it doesn’t is because it restricts itself to us humans, moderns who are either individuals with some potential to form contractual collectivities (at best) or who are collectives defined by nothing other than human history (the proletariat, the march of progress, etc.).<\/p>\n

What’s required is more than this — it’s something that takes its force from relations that are morally obligatory and that far exceed us in time and in space — relations that require<\/em> us to act on behalf of the contracts we have with the land and its spirits. What’s required, in other words, is a\u00a0decolonization<\/em>\u00a0of our understanding of ourselves and the world.<\/p>\n

The fear here (and I understand it well) is that such a “decolonization” involves a return to some prelapsarian innocence where we still believed in spirits, or in essences, or in capital-n Nature or capital g-Gods. But what I hear in Gore’s phrase, and in the cosmopolitical<\/a> proposals of Latour, Stengers, and others, is not that there’s any possibility of return<\/em> to such a state, but, rather, an acknowledgment\u00a0that we can neither remove ourselves from such obligations\u00a0nor accede to any one set of them fully. They are all still at stake<\/em>\u00a0with no guarantees either way — whether of any one set of ontological entities being the “correct” one or<\/em> of any enlightened transcendence of all of these options.<\/p>\n

Instead, we are caught in a world riven with\u00a0multiple obligations — whether to the sacred waters of south Dakota, or to the mountain hollers of Appalachia, or to “the economy” and “infinite growth,” to\u00a0“the nation” or some “revolution,” to the ancestors, and so on. (And once we put it that way, we’ll see how few of us are actually ready to put our lives on the line for “the economy.”)<\/p>\n

One of my favorite passages\u00a0in Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern <\/em>is this one:<\/p>\n

“All natures-cultures are similar in that they simultaneously construct humans, divinities and nonhumans. None of them inhabits a world of signs or symbols arbitrarily imposed on an external Nature known to us [westerners] alone. […] All of them sort out what will bear signs and what will not. If there is one thing we all do, it is surely that we construct both our human collectives and the nonhumans that surround them. In constituting their collectives, some mobilize ancestors, lions, fixed stars, and the coagulated blood of sacrifice; in constructing ours, we mobilize genetics, zoology, cosmology and h\u00e6matology.” (1993:106)<\/p>\n

The point, however, is that there is no privileged vantage point for sorting through these semiotic worlds, and the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we’ll be able to get down to the work of carving out a viable\u00a0understanding of how to proceed in the diffractive interstices between them all.<\/p>\n

We can<\/em> choose our “sacred landscapes” (up to a point), but the only way they’ll actually be sacred for us is if we let them choose us<\/em>, too. If we don’t know how to do this, there are no better guides for us than those among us who still do. They are the ones over whose bodies and sacred lands the\u00a0war for the future is already well underway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opening the ISSRNC conference on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes with a set of images from anti-pipelines and indigenous solidarity events, Karenna Gore (daughter of Al and founding director of the Center for Earth Ethics) said something\u00a0that struck me as an evocative distillation of what’s really at stake in the world. The Trump administration’s Inquisition-like demolition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688615,688977],"tags":[454991,454989,16796,454990,454969,454987,454988,16788,392,123573,454953],"class_list":["post-9172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropo_scene","category-geo_philosophy","tag-affective-turn","tag-center-for-earth-ethics","tag-cosmopolitics","tag-decolonization","tag-eco-justice","tag-issrnc","tag-karenna-gore","tag-latour","tag-metaphysics","tag-ontological-turn","tag-sacred-landscapes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2nW","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9480,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/11\/05\/ontology-decoloniality-and-the-people-land-nexus\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":0},"title":"Ontology, decoloniality, and the people-land nexus","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's something I've written to accompany a reading and discussion of Arturo Escobar's piece \"Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimensions of the Epistemologies of the South,\" which I proposed as my suggested reading contribution for an intro graduate class in Environment and Society. I'm sharing it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2017\/11\/20161024_110624-275x155.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5158,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/06\/nature-the-popular-imagination\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":1},"title":"Nature & the Popular Imagination","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm helping to organize this conference. Nature, Hollywood, eco-apocalypse, and the Malibu coast (the one that Mike Davis says we should let burn)... Can you resist? NATURE & THE POPULAR IMAGINATION The Fifth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8-11 August 2010,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13598,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/07\/18\/ontology-101-b-buchlers-natural-complexes\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":2},"title":"Ontology 101-B: Buchler’s “natural complexes”","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 18, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"An earlier post on this blog, entitled \"Ontology 101,\" proposed to clear the way for a general understanding of the different kinds of things an ontology (or general conception of reality) should be able to distinguish. My book The New Lives of Images, which will be out in September, examines\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2024\/04\/image-5.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7499,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/04\/21\/visiting-uc-davis\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":3},"title":"Visiting UC Davis","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"I'll be participating in the Mellon-sponsored Environments and Societies Colloquium Series next Wednesday, April 30,\u00a0at the University of California Davis. My colloquium paper, entitled \u201cOn Matters of Concern: Ecology, Ontological Politics, and the Anthropo(s)cene,\u201d is\u00a0available for reading on the E & S website. (It's a variation of a chapter for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Kirsten_Dunst_Charlotte_Gainsbourg_Melancholia_LarsVonTrier_film_3","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/04\/Kirsten_Dunst_Charlotte_Gainsbourg_Melancholia_LarsVonTrier_film_3-300x127.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11657,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/03\/15\/new-earths-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":4},"title":"New Earths to come","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 15, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Reading Nigel Clark and Bron Szerszynski's just published Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences is helping me think through what I see as perhaps the key philosophical debate of the current time. That debate is over the \u201contological politics\u201d of the difference between science in its\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/03\/51W1pAWWiIL._SX330_BO1204203200_-266x400.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7078,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/12\/01\/ontologies-of-bilocation\/","url_meta":{"origin":9172,"position":5},"title":"Ontologies of bilocation","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"For interdisciplinary scholars, it's always a challenge to decide which conferences to attend and which to forgo. The problem is particularly acute when the conferences are held at the same time, as occurred last week with the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and American Academy of Religion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9172"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9183,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions\/9183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}