The seesaw between the modern and the premodern is something that both authors could not fathom. And hence, re-traditionalization seems obfuscating in the face of the challenges of development or modernization. How could the traditional (and hence the irrational), rather than rationalization—or the continual disenchantment of the world—be the basis for development?
Garuba’s project, therefore, is to supply the rational logic of the “irrational” found in what he calls “animist materialism” and the “animist unconscious”—a project that demands, contrarily, the continual re-enchantment of the world. The larger context for this project is situated within the discourse on the African order of knowledge vis-à-vis the Western epistemic violence and injustice against Africa as a dark and obscure Other that cannot be reckoned with in terms of knowledge and development. Western philosophy was founded on the subject-object distinction, and an object-ive epistemology that speaks to a material and knowable reality. And through the dynamics of colonial difference, this modernist order of knowledge, and a knowledge/power framework, undermined alter/native epistemic possibilities. What Mudimbe described as the “colonizing structure” ensured a trajectory that led from any indigenous order of knowledge (like animism) to the modern epistemic paradigm. Garuba argues that animism, within this colonial/modern context, becomes the “spectral Other that simultaneously constitutes and haunts the modern” (2012: 4). Its inclusion is already foregrounded on its exclusion from the knowledge calculus.
Accorded the recognition of non-recognition, animist understandings of the natural and social world functioned within discourses of colonial modernity as the aberration, the past-in-the-present, to be disciplined to create civilized worlds and subjects. The colonial modernist order of knowledge, built on translating/transforming these animist worlds and subjects into modernity, spawned the various dichotomies that have defined the study of Africa. In other words, animism has functioned as the metaphoric receptacle for everything that is a negation of the modern, and the goal and structure of the African order of knowledge bequeathed by colonialism has been to decipher and translate/transform these worlds into European constructs and fit them into European theoretical models… (4).
And what better way to complicate the Western fetishization of the binary or dualist epistemic order, and indeed inaugurate animist epistemology as an alternative regime of knowledge, than a reference to Marx’s fundamental complication of the object or commodity as a simultaneously material and mysterious thing. In Garuba’s reading of Marx’s formulation, the dichotomy between the knowledge of the material and that of the mysterious is spurious and already overridden by the argument that mystification is a necessity for materialization of the commodity. This implies, for the animist project, that “twithout animism, the values of positivist science are difficult to imagine” (6). Animism becomes a spectral presence that constricts the objectifying demands of modernist epistemology. Garuba argues further that it is not sufficient to just iterate animism as an epistemological alternative. On the contrary, to make it a proper alternative conceptualization of an African order of knowledge, animism must be energetically rescued as a knowledge paradigm deodorized by the West for the production of new Western knowledge. Animist epistemology, for Garuba, must be conceptualized as an already there and functional coeval epistemic presence. And what Garuba offers as the starting point of rescuing animism is to recognize fundamentally what he calls the “animist unconscious”—a code that “operates basically on a refusal of the boundaries, binaries, demarcations, and linearity of modernity” (7). Animist thought, Garuba argues, leads to a continual re-enchantment of the world, rather than a disenchantment, as Max Weber claims. The animist logic “continually spiritualizes the object world, acknowledging and appropriating recent material developments and discoveries and animating them with a spirit” (7).
In “Explorations in Animist Materialism” (2003), Garuba spells out his vision of an animist materialist framework that could be taken as an optimal alternative conceptualization for understanding African societies. Indeed, this conceptual recuperation is already manifest in the precolonial and the postcolonial cultural and political practices of the African elites and nation states. For him, this recuperation should not be taken as a “conscious nationalistic appropriation…nor is it entirely a consequence of the dialectic of ‘residuality’ and ‘emergence’” (265). The animist mode of thought is so embedded in the material and economic activities of the people that it manifests in cultural and social life, and hence becomes “a producer of effects and therefore acts as a driving force in the formation of collective subjectivity” (269). The animist unconscious is therefore already there as the structuring principle for African cultural beingness. But he is at pain to insist against an essentialist reading of the animist unconscious. By delineating it as a “continual re-enchantment,” he argues that he is dissociating himself from reading the animist thought “as the natural, immutable, collective instinct of a people” (266). And then Garuba drives this argument through African literary, ideational and social world to outline the manifestation of the animist unconscious: Within the animist world-view…the physical world of phenomena is spiritualized; in literary practice, it devolves into a representational strategy that involves giving the abstract or metaphorical a material realization; and in the social world of human relationships, and economic and political activity, the mediating meanings that animist thought posits as the currency of social exchange are instrumentalized, more often than not in ways that serve only local elites and leaders (284-285).
