Abstract
The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming-with nonhuman knowledge.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 315-339 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Zygon |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 4 Jan 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author would like to thank Ruben Visser and Sara Löfgren for their research assistance in preparing an earlier version of this article, as well as the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, where the arguments contained in this article were first debated.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Zygon® published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Joint Publication Board of Zygon.