The Nonhuman Turn

by Richard Grusin (Editor)

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Research, Academic

255 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2015

About the author

Richard Grusin is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. His research fields include: media, cinema, history of representation, as well as the environmental, cultural, and American studies.

Reviews

[Scott Rettberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good mixed bag of intellectual nuggets here centered around the increasing focus on the non-human (animal, computational, object, material). A conference book on the divided subject of the Nonhuman turn. I would teach about 40% of this book, though some of the essays read more like conference papers. The book gives a good sense of the various emergent debates around object oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialism, and other matters related to nonhuman studies. Bogost's essay is good fun and sort of sincere and shows the kind of fun of thinking about things in an object-oriented kind of way, Shaviro's is a really engaging take on the idea of "what if we look at sentience all around us?". Morton's is praiseworthy for all the threads and material and cultural connections it spins around one Talking Head's video. I thought Hansen's essay was authentically great -- really opening up some interesting questions about how computationally driven probabilistics (that's not a word but whatever I don't have the book in front of me-- the "predictive") are now driving literal life and death decisions. Wendy Chun's essay is on point and makes some great observations about the discourse of crisis but also repeating stuff she does elsewhere. Sheldon's essay does a really nice job of pulling a lot of disparate elements together and explaining the terms of a conflict I didn't even know existed. Overall, I appreciated this book for what it was -- a really good introduction to a fairly new approach (turn, maybe) in critical theory / philosophy. I read this right after Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, which I thought was great, interested, passionate by comparison, but this well-assembled volume (with a great contextualizing intro by Grusin) really gives you a good sense of an emerging critical discourse and some ofthe debates around it. Well worth a read if you're getting into this type of stuff.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I'm not an OOO person ...

I thought the editor did the book a service in adding a lot of variety and, particularly, Sheldon and Barrett's more critical essays at the end, as they helped clarify what I was missing in the earlier essays. I went back to read Massumi's essay, which was much more interesting the second reading.

In general, the mysterious & inaccessible (except, apparently, through art) in-itself of objects remains no less mysterious & inaccessible after The Nonhuman Turn.

[Jesse Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many collections, it had ups and downs. Some essays were better than others.
I think that most of these weren't written for me, they assume the reader has a working knowledge of Object Oriented Ontology. By the end, I'd picked up the basics but some of them were still pretty dense and full of jargon I don't remember from my semester of college philosophy.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read select chapters, and those were thought-provoking. As they were written by different authors, some were easier to read and comprehend than others. All of them provided insight on the ways theory and philosophical thought may apply to non-humanity.

[kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

a rich constellation of viewpoints and experiments, often in rivalry with each other, always yielding fruitful positions for examination through the friction.

[amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good chapters by Chun & Morton.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a few of these entries suffer from that unfortunate postmodern influenced tendency to write in 5 pages what could be said in a single paragraph, largely this is an important collection regarding the myriad of ways that the present and long lasting anthropocentrism of philosophy can be overturned.

Though in my own opinion much of this anthropocentrism is due to people only engaging in 'western' philosophy, a group of cricle-jerking humanists if ever there was one. There are in fact plenty of 'nonhuman philosophies out there, you just have to look in non-monotheist and pre-christian cultures. Still, what we consider western and especially continental European philosophy desperately needs this look inside itself.

Oddly enough, the essay about the Talking Heads music video, which I rolled my eyes at when I saw, was one of the stronger ones. You never know!

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the Rebekah Sheldon chapter on OOO & feminist new materialism

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially appreciate the chapter by Hansen. Like much of his other work, I get no fun in reading him--not a lot of play--but I get so much from the efforts!