Animism and the Relational Ontologies
The conceptual base of Garuba’s expostulation of animism is found in the deployment of materialism and the unconscious. And he acknowledged his debt to Frederic Jameson (on the notion of the “political unconscious”) and Raymond Williams (on the idea of “cultural materialism”). We are therefore immediately alerted to the Marxist orientation of the idea of animist materialism. The animist unconscious becomes the base upon which the superstructure of the African cultural and social life is built. And we just have to wonder why Harry Garuba took this materialist course; indeed, why did he vote for animism: in what sense would the animist unconscious serve the purpose it is meant for—establishing an African order of knowledge? And, to boot, animistic materialism is a simple and straightforward adaptation of Marx’s idea of fetishism.
Marxism and materialism constitute two theoretical legacies that are deeply suspect for any adaptation strategy. Marx has remained the focus of an intense critical discourse to determine its European and Eurocentric pedigree (Naved, 2008; Agozino, 2014; Rabaka, 2010; Pradella, 2013; Sarno, 2020). But much more than this is Marx’s complicated relationship with the subject-object philosophy which Garuba is at pain to undermine and dissociate from the animist epistemology. What matters, within Marx’s materialism, as Garuba utilizes it, is the materialization of ideas. This is consistent with the materialist’s rejection of the causal capacity of ideas in the world. Humans, for Marx and the materialists, are “material beings and their social world should be understood as material in its actuality. To say this in another way, Marx has a materialist conception of the world and of human thought” (Holt, 2015: 41). This understanding of reality disdains Hegel’s idealism and its idealization of the material world. In the history of western philosophy, Kant demonstrated why the monocausal dynamics of materialism and idealism are patently false. Reality is too complex to be understood within the context of any of the theories in their binary opposition. Raymond Williams is even more critical of materialism’s valorization of its own capacity for “demonstrable physical investigation”:
…material investigation, grounded in the rejection of categorical hypotheses of an unverifiable kind, and basing its own confidence in a set of provisional working procedures and demonstrations, finds itself pulled nevertheless towards closed generalizing systems: finds itself materialism or a materialism. There is thus a tendency for any materialism, at any point in its history, to find itself stuck with its own recent generalizations, and in defence of these to mistake its own character: to suppose that it is a system like others, of a presumptive explanatory kind, or that it is reasonable to set up contrasts with other (categorical) systems, at the level not of procedures but of its own past ‘findings’ or ‘laws’ (1980: 103).
The question is to what extent this critique of materialism applies to cultural materialism, a movement Williams helped founded.
Cultural materialists, of course, reject subjective idealism and its separation of culture from material social life. It essentially substantiates “the material character of cultural practices” (Klaus, 1993: 90). And this is where Garuba stands. And it is on this materialist framework that Garuba erects the animist worldview. For him, animism is defined by
its almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits. Animism is often simply seen as belief in objects such as stones or trees or rivers for the simple reason that animist gods and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits. Instead of erecting graven images to symbolize the spiritual being, animist thought spiritualizes the object world, thereby giving the spirit a local habitation. Within the phenomenal world, nature and its objects are endowed with a spiritual life both simultaneous and coterminous with their natural properties. The objects thus acquire a social and spiritual meaning within the culture far in excess of their natural properties and their use value. Rivers, for example, not only become natural sources of water but are prized for various other reasons. The animist urge to reification may have been religious in origin, but the social and cultural meanings that become attached to the objects often break off from the purely religious and acquire an existence of their own as part of the general process of signification in society (2003: 267).
From this perspective, materialism is essentially the theoretical scaffold that animism requires to achieve its concrete significations. And the theory of fetishism provides an appropriate mold through which objects become animated as the “physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits.” I will outline two worries with Garuba’s animist materialism, and then recommend what I consider to be an alternative conceptualization that hold more promise as a representation of Africa’s relational ontology than animism.
For both Marx and Freud, fetishism constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of reality of capitalist dynamics. In other words, “To identify a fetish is to expose the inadequate beliefs of those who revere it for what they believe it is capable of, by pointing to the real, material, qualities of the object and identifying its presumed capacities as really residing elsewhere – in the ‘true’ god; in human labour; in arousal by a person of the opposite sex” (Dant, 1996: 496). The important point to make is that Marx meant his deployment of the term, in “commodity fetishism,” to serve as a cultural critique. Marx’s realist critique is meant to outline the fetish in its stark nature as an illusion. However, even though Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the significance of the fetish as being important in the figuration of social value, the critical point I am making here, following Dant, is that contrary to Garuba, the symbolic power that the fetish has cannot be reduced to its material representations. What is real or unreal is determined according to cultural framework of meanings. A further argument is that the locus of a fetish is not always clear between the subject or the object. Indeed, it exists in a free zone between the two (Dant, 510). This then troubles the neat subject-object distinction against which Garuba sets up the animist epistemology as a counterpoint to modernist epistemology.
At another level, it would seem that Harry Garuba does not sufficiently interpret the Max Weber’s characterization of modernity and its supposed disenchantment. Animism, for Garuba, is a function of the inversion of the Weberian growing disenchantment with the world, into a continual re-enchantment. This implies a tacit agreement with modernity’s perception of its own borders, vis-à-vis the premodern. Yet, Bruno Latour boldly argues, in his 1993 work, We Have Never Been Modern! And his argument is simple: Cartesian dualism is a gross misrepresentation of the reality of so-called modern societies, and the supposed separation between nature and culture. This dichotomy is essentially dubious, according to Latour:
