Paul Reid-Bowen

“ What would happen to our thinking about nature if we experienced materialities as actants, and how would the direction of public policy shift if we attended more carefully to their trajectories and powers? I am looking for a materialism in which matter is figured as a vitality both inside and outside ourselves, and is a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense. ”

“ Decentring the human in order to make sense of the assemblages/objects of Goddess traditions and practices seemed eminently reasonable here. Problems quickly surface, though, when attempting to demarcate these religions. Is one dealing with separate withdrawn religions/objects, for example: exoteric/ecological and esoteric/personal Goddess religions? Is one dealing with two religions/objects that constitute parts of a larger Goddess religion/object? Or is one only dealing with only one religion/object? ”

“ Much is owed to the legacy of Kant, and much is owed to the feminist struggle for a liberated world. Regrettably, the former increasingly constrains the aspirations of the latter. Antirealism is ill-suited to the liberation of the world. The time is crying out for a renewed thinking of the things-in-themselves and a revived metaphysical realism. This need not entail naive or immature realism; the errors of the past can be retained in memory. But it may need to be speculative. There can be no paradigm shift in the study of religion or gender until genuinely ontological questions are addressed. ”

“ Thus, while the primary subject of analysis in the study of religion and gender may have been gender bias, object oriented ontology requires the displacement of human bias. This may include: the removal of the human as primary focus of attention; the human as the only or primary source of agency; and the human as the only or primary source of value. What then follows from this decentring? Arguably, the primary outcome is enhanced sensitivity to the affects and powers of objects, specifically to construct, obstruct and perturb other things of the world. ”

“ The best I can do is mobilize more evidence of objects and their association to support, or falsify, my case. The value of an object-oriented approach to the Goddess movement is not that humans are side-stepped or erased – they aren’t – but rather that sensitivity to a complex interplay of things, materialities and actants is required. ”

“ The choice between realism and antirealism, or realism and idealism, has been critiqued and caricatured as far too brutal a bifurcation of the world to be taken seriously. Moreover, when one does examine recent continental philosophy more closely, one is confronted with arguments that are, at their core, antirealist in nature. ”

“ The primary claim is that non-human matter can possess a kind of agency and the line drawn between active humans and inanimate matter is far more controversial and malleable than most believe. Drawing a close alliance with the work of Bruno Latour, she deploys the concept of actants. These, she explains, ‘can be human or not, or most likely a combination of both.’ The world is replete with these actors and agencies. More expansively,
an actant is neither an object nor a subject but an ‘intervener’ akin to the Deleuzean ‘quasi-causal operator’. ”

“ It was Kant who placed severe limits on metaphysical speculation, elaborating and systematizing how a priori categories of human cognition and understanding impose order on the world. Following Kant, knowledge of the things-in-themselves is rendered illegitimate. The concerns of philosophy shift toward interrogating the gap between human and world, problems of access and critique. Always and everywhere the world is structured by human cognition, rather than vice versa. Any differences between analytical and continental philosophers are remarkably minor in this regard. ”

“ Is there an assemblage of persons, spiritual self-help books, magical and ritual objects and lifestyle items that demands to be understood as one type of Goddess religion, while another, one that is more concerned with trees, nuclear power and alliances with political activists, ought to be accepted as another? ”

“ Third, humans are also members of larger objects, such as organizations, religions and societies, just as they are, in part, comprised of smaller objects, such as bacteria and microbes. None of these points denies the existence of gender or rides rough-shod over any specific tools of gender analysis. What an object-oriented ontology does is multiply the number of actants and objects that participate in the construction of gendered individuals. ”

“ Overmining, in turn, is best represented by the correlationist ensnarement of objects in the human-world correlate, although it may also be explained as any position that sets up the experience or manifestation of the object in the mind as that which is of primary significance. Empiricists, for example, may overmine objects as bundles of qualities that are brought under concepts in the mind. [26]
Third, the human-world relation loses all priority. ”

“ The historical landscape of religious studies has numerous examples of methodological approaches which either encourage the foregrounding of objects in their analyses, or else treat religions as complex objects in their own right. Ninian Smart’s construal of religions as multidimensional organisms, for example, encompasses both of these possibilities, by listing the material, textual, experiential and performative dimensions that need to be considered in order to grasp a religion in its unity. ”

“ One can barely start to imagine how this revised landscape might play out if and when applied to religious and gender systems. Bennett champions the ability of everyday objects to exhibit a degree of independence, a capacity to exceed the conceptual frames that we impose on them, becoming ‘vibrant things with a certain affectivity of their own’. [21] Her theorization of material agency draws on and adapts the Deleuzean concept of assemblages. No longer is agency firmly anchored within the human, but it is the product of often dispersed but internally related, human-nonhuman aggregates. ”

“ The fact that gender studies start with a human subject implies an already given enthrallment to the correlationism that the speculative turn aspires to bypass. An approach that is opposed to anthropocentrism might be expected to exhibit a disinterest in, or else a distancing from, analyses of gender. What precisely could an object-oriented approach to gender look like? The points that follow indicate a way forwards, but they are proposals and hypotheses at best. First, there is no denial within object-oriented ontology that objects are acted upon and affect one another ”

“ The real object is never accessible, either to us or any other object directly. Interactions only take place with sensual objects, and these interactions occur via the specific external relations into which a real object might enter. By way of example, consider multiple interactions with a road-side shrine – a real object. The passage and ritual contact of human travellers will inevitably touch on certain sensual qualities of the shrine ; the contact of passing pigeons, foxes and insects will engage with others, just as the contact of rain, snow, wind and photons will interact with yet others. ”

“ First, there is nothing in the removal of humans from the centre of analytical, interpretive and methodological frameworks that also attributes a negative value to those humans or else vacates value from the human. Second, accusations of the objectification of humans simply miss the theoretical content of the ontology that is proposed. As Harman elaborates on the matter,
the objects of object-oriented philosophy have nothing to do with objectification. ”

“ An operator is that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event. [19] Her aim here is nothing short of a reformulated vitalism, in which it becomes increasingly necessary to think in terms of multiple modes and degrees of agency. She de-emphasizes the human, directing attention towards networks of change, more-than-human assemblages, and the agentic contributions of myriad nonhumans to socio-political events. ”

“ Speculative realism is taken as the point of entry into continental realism. By way of definition, the movement is realist in its opposition to correlationism and speculative in that the models of reality it produces might be contrary to common sense, counter-intuitive, or even weird. ”

“ To cite Harman, ‘the interaction between cotton and fire belongs on the same footing as human interaction with both cotton and fire.’ [27] Human encounters with other objects are no more special than those of bacteria or household furniture with those objects. Fourth, objects are external to their relations. This is perhaps one of the stranger premises of object-oriented ontology. Many people’s intuitions and many theories suggest that the objects of the world are constituted through their relations with other objects. ”

“ Few are willing to risk the embarrassment of metaphysics, the taint of essentialism, or the accusation of being precritical. Some transitions can be noted in the growth of materialist feminisms, new materialisms and the posthumanities. [15] But I suspect only continental realism and the speculative turn may force the issue. Let us consider two possibilities: vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology. ”

“ To objectify someone or something is to limit it, to reduce it: ‘You are nothing but slave labor – gather my crop, under penalty of death!’, ‘You, supposed mind, are nothing but a physical brain!’ ... ”

“ The Goddess movement was one of several religious movements that coalesced during the 1970s and 1980s. Taking impetus from the women’s movement and new social movements for peace, ecology and alternative lifestyles, the Goddess movement interwove these concerns with a more encompassing project of spiritual discovery, empowerment and revolt. ”

“ First, objects are the basic units of reality, and subsequently the primary concern of philosophy. Whether atoms, angels, chairs, choirs, elephants, epistles, galaxies or gods, all of these are to be understood as objects. This is not to suggest, to cite Harman, that ‘all objects are equally real, but that they are equally objects. ”

“ The object-oriented ontologists might applaud some insights generated by the Copernican Turn, particularly with regard to social phenomena, such as the gendercritical turn, but they argue that new models of reality are required, especially ones that can retain these positive insights, while escaping the obsessive focus on the human-world gap. ”

“ All talk of social constructivism, along with undue attention to the power of discourse, language and text, needs to be set aside and replaced by a far more inclusive constructivism, one that recognizes the contribution of many diverse objects and materials to the constitution of the world. ”

“ From Elisabeth Eisenstein’s systematic two volume analysis of the revolutionary agentic role of the printing press in the Reformation, through to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s evocative and queer opening meditation on lemons, odours and underwear in Indecent Theology, it is clear that there are starting points for object-oriented forays into religion and gender. ”

“ All objects may affect, construct and translate one another; or, if one favours Bennett’s work, one would need to take account of different degrees of agency. If implementing an object-oriented study of Roman Catholicism, for example, it might be just as reasonable to be concerned with the affects and causal powers of cassocks, cathedrals and church mice, as with those of clerics, choirs and creeds. ”

“ My favoured hypothesis is that the movement has become increasingly polarized along several of the aforementioned tensions, dividing along two trajectories: the esoteric/personal and the exoteric/ecological. The esoteric values Goddess as an inner reality, a extension of the self, an archetypal or mythic source of power, a spiritual lifestyle choice. The exoteric values Goddess as an ecological, pantheistic and/or cosmological whole, the living body of nature. ”

“ First, it does not seem too controversial to suggest that the global ecological and economic crises, the ever-increasing incursions of technology into the human life world, or the escalating awareness of existential dangers, such as meteors, pandemics, resource depletion and supervolcanoes, have placed the ascendency of the human subject in question. ”

“ That is, the decentring of humans may be identified with a denigration of the human, and the characterization of humans as objects may be viewed as an invidious reduction of humans to the status of objects. ”

“ Initially, it is clear that within the Goddess movement there are many religious objects which share common relationships, and move in similar orbits to one another, blocking any easy division into separate religious assemblages. For example, ceremonial, magical and ritual objects seem to be interchangeable across the movement. ”

“ There would seem to be capacity for the implementation of similar approaches at the interface of religious studies and gender studies too.
The practical first step toward applying object oriented approaches to the humanities, arts and social sciences is decentring the human. ”

“ Second, it remains the case that humans as objects are differentially acted upon in accordance with such factors as the kind of objects that they are – for example, female, male, old, young, diseased, healthy – and also the kind of object that they are identified as being. ”