The question of reality and anthropologists’ political responsibility
What is reality is a seemingly simple question. However, this question and its subsequent aporia around reality have confounded social sciences and driven philosophers to madness. Think of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Feyerabend and David Hume, among many others.
This simple question is interlinked with questions of ‘who am I?’, ‘do I exist?’, ‘do you exist?’, ‘what is life?’ and every other question that addresses how we locate and define our locations within the cosmos. However, this simple question eludes the definition and Federico Campagna, in his book, Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality (2018), gives a ‘speculative’ try to offer a definition of reality. Campagna’s systemic thinking competes with Manuel DeLanda, a leading Mexican philosopher, but Campagna, unlike DeLanda, flirts and touches shadowy and magical borders of life. He delightfully surprises readers by calling on philosopher-ancestors whose names are almost forgotten due to the epistemic injustice and the citational injustice practised by some Eurocentric philosophers (including cuddly Marxist leftist ones). Campagna journeys into questions around reality and writes for ‘those who lie defeated by history and by the present’ (p. 1). He rephrases his definition of what is reality in the book, but this one spoke most to me:
Reality is the space that is available to our existential experience of life in the world, oscillating between pure contemplation and pure activity, while never truly reaching either extreme pole. (p. 105)
This definition spoke most to my anthropologically trained eyes and theoretical antennas because pondering, wandering and chasing eluding dimensions of social life such as emotions, fears, loves, hopes, believes, rivers, plants, sensations and tastes always occur in the pendulum confusion between contemplation and activity. Anthropological thinking occurs in the pendulum confusion between writing/analysis (contemplation) and ethnographic field-working (activity) while analytical storytelling/writing takes over. In other words, anthropological contemplations (which include remembering field experiences) is the after-taste of ethnographic experimentations and immersions; think of the pleasant or maybe odd after-taste of a wine that it sits somewhere in-between olfactory organs and taste buds, somewhere between lips, inner parts of mouth, tongue, upper palate and nose. Anthropological contemplation is rooted in ethnographic activities; it is rooted in activities that occurred and again reoccurred during contemplation through remembering. Therefore, anthropologists create, construct, craft reality while oscillating between their ethnographic experiences and analyzing those experiences. And, it is here at these moments of oscillation where the question of what is reality becomes the most critical question for anthropologists. The question of what is reality exceeds theorization and conceptualization. Questioning reality points at the ethical and political responsibility of anthropologists to ask whose reality they narrate, craft and discuss.
This political responsibility shimmers in Campagna’s book and his take on reality. He expresses the philosophical anxiety that everyone must feel as we sink deeper into the ecological breakdown. He writes:
‘The cosmology of Technic brings human and imagination to a state of paralysis…the annihilation of existence and the compression of the space of reality to the non-spatial point of nigh-pure essence (according to the cosmogonic wishes of absolute language), entails a dramatic mutilation of the world and of our existential experience of/within it.’ (p. 110)
The dramatic mutilation of the world is not merely a dramatic expression and exaggeration of a philosopher, but it is the state of the world felt by those who care and take the political responsibility of critically assessing reality. Steve Chimombo, the late Malawian poet and writer, stressed on mutilation of the world in Riddles and the Reconstruction of Reality (1987). Chimombo uses the very word mutilation like Campagna and explains British colonial masters’ penchant for renaming places, locations, people and the world at large. Their penchant for renaming defaced and mutilated Malawian’s reality. The colonial mutilation of reality made violence a banal reality across the African continent. For instance, Sharpeville is a township named after Alfred Sharpe (1853-1935) who massacred Malawians and others in Zambia to further the British empire. The everyday usage of the name, its repeat again and again and glorifying the name masks the dark history of Alfred Sharpe as the name invades reality and mutilates the existence of the colonized. Michael Jackson, in his Ethos’ commentary (2012), echoes Chimombo and my rephrasing of Chimombo. Jackson writes, ‘traditional African thought tends to construe the conscious as a forcefield exterior to a person’s immediate awareness’ (p. 115, emphasis original). The forcefield exterior to the colonized is/was invaded, shattered, re-organized by ‘white’ desires and accordingly, their reality is mutilated.
I juxtaposed Campagna, Chomombo and Jackson to stress the question of what is reality is not really about reality, but instead, it is a question that jumps to identify the conditions under which reality emerges, how it is constructed, imagined, mutilated and finally whose reality is it any way. What is reality is the first step toward taking on a political responsibility toward the world, losing hope in change and finding solidarity in grief for the lost hope.
Here, you can listen to my podcast series Hopeless World of Reality , the first episode discuses what is reality in connection with writings of Campagna and Chimombo.