There are no extinctions in relations without bodies: on the violence offlat relational ontologies
Panse, Silke (2022) There are no extinctions in relations without bodies: on the violence offlat relational ontologies. PARSE Journal (15). ISSN 2002-0953
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This essay considers violence and extinction to articulate the limits of relational, and to a degree also non-relational, flat ontologies. It suggests that relational ontologies cannot register violence because they privilege relations over bodies. Given their contention of ecological progressiveness after nature, this essay focuses on Donna Haraway’s and Rosi Braidotti’s relational posthuman ontologies, while also responding to Timothy Morton’s non-relational, object-oriented ecology. It cautions that rather than being politically progressive—as postnature ecologies claim to be—not respecting boundaries violates bodies. The essay contends that promulgating blurred boundaries as ecological and feminist, as Haraway and Braidotti do, is especially detrimental given the extinction of species and the gender-based disenfranchisement of bodily autonomy. In this PARSE Journal issue on “Violence: Environment”, I argue that if there is only environment, there cannot be any acknowledgement of violence, and that the denial of violence itself constitutes violence. I contend that in flat relational ecologies biodiversity is erased.
As Haraway blurs relations and materials between life and art, I contrast her approach to figures and representation with those in contemporaneous writings by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. I engage with Haraway’s shapeshifting between metaphors and matter from the “Cyborg Manifesto” in postmodernism to some more recent outputs, observing an intentional entanglement in contradictions and an emphasis on construction that is politically problematic as well as anthropocentric.
Because Benedict de Spinoza is often embraced by flat relational ontologies for his emphasis on immanence, he is woven in throughout the essay as an interlocutor. His immanence with bodies and affects is contrasted to Braidotti’s monism of immanence without bodies and without affects. I suggest that, counter-intuitively, flat relational ontologies cannot account for affects and affections and observe that Morton’s ecology with objects, too, is without affects. I propose that whereas Spinoza’s ontology of immanence of Nature/God is half flat because it is populated by bodies with natures, Haraway’s ontology is flat and not flat, symmetrical and asymmetrical, in line with her pursuit of contradictions.
PARSE Issue 15: Violence: Environment
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