Vicki Kirby,Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large

Reviewed by: Matthew Helmers, University of Sydney, Australia

In Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large, Vicki Kirby deploys the oft-cited axiom ‘there is no outside the text’ in order to guide her readers through a reconceptualization of the Nature/Culture dichotomy. With intricate extrapolations of theories from deconstructionism, feminism, phenomenology and science studies, Kirby unrolls the potential imbedded in investing Nature with the qualities of creativity, communication, and agency – qualities constructivist theorists wish to relegate to the exclusive purview of Culture. Kirby skilfully deploys metaphor and hypothetical examples in order to guide her reader through some of the most difficult philosophical texts of the 20th century. Combining an often confessional tone with logic-based arguments, Quantum Anthropologies is a joy to read and moves with an energetic pace towards intriguing speculations.

However, once we ignore the exuberance of the writing and stop accepting the conditional propositions of the arguments, we encounter a text that quickly disintegrates. In this non-sympathetic reading, Quantum Anthropologies becomes a steadily less convincing collection of six essays that hang together only in their differential treatment of Derrida’s ‘no outside the text’ axiom. What we are left with is exactly what we begin with, an assertion that ‘no outside the text’ can be rethought of as ‘no outside Nature’: a promising premise that Kirby does little more than propose and speculate around, leaving it to future researchers to discover the potential productivity in again redistributing the constituent qualities with which we imbue Nature and Culture. Yet, whether such a project will ever materialize is doubtful, as Kirby never provides us with the answer to one of her most repeated questions: ‘what might I gain?’

In approaching Kirby’s text, we might need to first step back and instead ask the question ‘what must I assume?’ Perhaps ironically in a text so invested in deconstructive principles, we as readers are asked to take a fair bit of the argument on good faith, hoping that by solidifying a certain group of first principles we will eventually be rewarded with a solid conclusion that justifies these shaky premises. Yet, time and again Kirby rehearses a conditional if/then logic that at the best of times fails to come back around to consider alternate first-principle possibilities, and at the worst of times leads to alienating non-sequiturs that chip away at her lock-step arguments.

A similar slight-of-hand is at work in Kirby’s continual invocation of a sympathetic audience in the form of ‘us’. Her central premise, of our replacement of Nature with Culture as the origin, leads to fascinating attempts to rethink the positions we ask Nature and Culture to take up. Yet it is routinely unclear who this ‘us’ is that has committed the egregious sin of replacement. At times we are Cultural Theorists, academics in the Humanities, deconstructionists, linguists, poststructuralists, scientists and/or laypersons. From this ‘we’ position, seemingly common-sense statements arise, as in ‘If it is in the nature of biology to be cultural—and clearly what we mean by ‘cultural’ is intelligent, capable of interpreting, analysing, reflecting, and creatively reinventing and memorialising—then what is this need to exclude such processes of interrogation from the ontology of life?’ (p. 75). While granted an intriguing question, I am unclear of the parties involved in this debate. Who is this ‘we’ who so ‘clearly’ means here? Similarly, in the ‘then’ statement, whose need to exclude is represented here? There seems to be a large gap between the two cogent fields of ‘us’, and yet there is a similar lack of population in both camps. While Chapters 5 and 6 will ground claims like these in readings of Butler, Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, often these readings once again reproduce these thinkers as unproblematic metonyms for the respective fields of constructivism, deconstruction and phenomenology. While in Chapter 5 Kirby does briefly footnote other important thinkers involved in the constructivist debate, the rest of her text is devoid of the nuance, fracture and messiness present within these fields, if they can even be rendered in as cogent a term as ‘field’.

It is thus at the end that I find myself applauding Kirby’s commitment to, as Karan Barad puts it, ‘new materialist approaches to feminism’ and yet attempting to figure out what we really gain by once again reshuffling the constituent elements of this Nature/Culture binary. Unfortunately with regards to these answers, Quantum Anthropologies offers little more than conditional speculation. As Kirby herself puts it: ‘In sum, the provocation I am offering, albeit in a sketchy fashion and without the caveats that its apparent simplicity betrays, might be to interpret ‘there is no outside of language’ as ‘there is no outside of Nature,’’ (p. 83). Had Kirby avoided this ‘sketchy fashion’ of argument and fleshed out the caveats implicit in her simple premises, this text could have provided a vital rethinking of the morality of fleshiness after the Naturalization of Culture. As is, there is little here to recommend beside a premise on Nature that might find more fertile grounds in the fields of other thinkers.