The essential point of this modern Constitution is that it renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids [part nature, part society] invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable. Does this lack of representation limit the work of mediation in any way? No, for the modern world would immediately cease to function. Like all other collectives it lives on that blending. On the contrary (and here the beauty of the mechanism comes to light), the modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies. By playing three times in a row on the same alternation between transcendence and immanence, the moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social, and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work, and that God no longer intervenes (1993: 34).
All human societies anthropomorphize; all human societies possess animist tendency! And this everyday social and cultural practices invalidate modernity’s Cartesian illusion of subject-object dualism (Hornborg, 2006: 22), and Garuba’s acceptance of that illusion.
Thus, Garuba’s critique of the modernist epistemology is spot on in its understanding of its hypocrisy and racist prejudices. But its premise does not justify labeling the African ontological and epistemological reality as animist, and juxtaposing it as the spectral Other to modernist epistemology. Latour’s argument that we are all animists even in our modernist sensibility undercuts the supposed specificity of animist materialism to Africa. It becomes unenlightening to retort that while modernist epistemology has submerged its animist unconscious, it is alive and functional in the African ontology. On the contrary, Niyi Osundare is as animistic (as Garuba argues) as William Wordsworth. The disenchantment that Weber lamented about the rationalized modern world must not be taken at face value, as Garuba seems to have done. For Latour, “How could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before?” (1993: 115) Thus, antimoderns like Harry Garuba got it all wrong: “You are disenchanting the world; I shall maintain the rights of the spirit!” (123-124)
If it is correct to delineate animism as the unacknowledged underbelly of modernist sensibility—we are neither modern nor premodern—what is required is to look for a different alternative conceptualization of African relational ontology. Latour provides one possibility: we hold on to the analytical strength of the nature-culture distinction while “using the premodern categories to conceptualize the hybrids” (134). Unfortunately, such an option will not be salutary to Africa, since its fundamental essence struggles to be ontologically relational. In this regard, one could contrast Garuba’s animist materialism to Francis Nyamnjoh’s analysis of Africa’s incompletist relational ontology and its epistemic instability that invites openness and conviviality. This incompletist ontology is not burdened by an oppositional imperative that speaks from a premodern margin. Indeed, Nyamnjoh is at pain to ensure that in any attempt at establishing the validity of an African epistemological and ontological dynamics, we must resist the temptation to throw the western baby out with the bathwater:
To save the baby of western civilisation and modernity, I suggest we disabuse it of obvious inadequacies. These include its tendency to claim completeness and superiority often with little evidence to substantiate such extravagant claims. We should also disabuse it of the reluctance to see the realities of others in historical perspective, or to selectively employ history when it suits its purposes. The western(ised) baby needs to be disabused of epistemologies that tend to privilege neat dichotomies and dualisms, and to caricature, dismember or confine reality to sensory perceptions or to essences. The baby must be invited to pay greater attention to the interconnections, hierarchies and gradations that spring from and are consolidated by the ever-evolving messiness of lived experiences that continually reconfigure human reality (Nyamnjoh, 2015: 3).
To understand Africa’s endogenous universes is to immediately understand its incompleteness. Reality is not open to any simple or simplistic dichotomies or dualisms. And experience is not just sensory. Consciousness is determined by being and becoming in multiple manners. In fact, as Nyamnjoh argues, there are multiplicity of consciousness that promises multiplicity of possibilities.
Consciousness matters more than the containers that house it. Consciousness can inhabit any container – human and non-human, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible – regardless of the state of completeness or incompleteness of the container in question. Both reality and the universe are imbued with endless possibilities of being and becoming, thanks to the multiplicity of consciousness available to inhabit them. Things, words, deeds and beings are always incomplete, not because of absences but because of their possibilities (4).
In such universes, there is no unity of being. Perception is challenged and constantly built up and undermined. Relations and interconnections are key to understanding the mediation between being and nonbeing. The relationship between subject and object is subject to a continuum of flux and shape-shifting dynamics. Nothing is permanent except change. The border between the natural and the supernatural is equally flexible and elastic. And there are no essences or ontological closure. This endogenous universe “is a universe of agency ad infinitum, one in which structures exist only to the extent they can be humbled by the agency of those who make structures possible. Agency is not a birthmark or permanence, but something to be discovered, cultivated, nurtured, activated and reactivated to different degrees of potency through relationships with others, things and humans alike” (4).
We may therefore concede that while Harry Garuba’s animist materialism is the far more theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of the African endogenous reality, the incompletist relational ontology provides a more plausible and robust iteration of Africa’s endogenous universes, within an epistemic framework that refuses oppositionality and exclusion.
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