Navigating Knowledge Frameworks at the Intercultural Interface

Abstract

As we emerge not altogether unscathed in 2022 into what optimistically might be called a postpandemic world, we are confronted by the pressing need to address global and climate instabilities against a general backdrop of complexity. Potential solutions must be balanced against environmental and societal concerns that cannot take for granted that any system is somehow isolated. Here then is the crux of new materialist and post-humanist approaches – a shift “away from Kant”1 and away it seems, from humancentric understandings of who, or what, has agency in the world.

Despite acknowledging the agencies of non-human others, such as electrical grids2 and quantum entanglement,3 or proposing new speculative realist frameworks by which to engage with such agentic capacities,4 finding workable solutions within such dynamics remains stubbornly difficult. What does become clear, at least, is that these Eurocentric traditions, arising from the European Enlightenment project, have not served the environment particularly well. Newtonian physics can no longer claim mastery over the tangible world through recourse to universal laws acting in isolation, and liberal humanism is revealed to be underpinned by Eurocentric cultural traditions of human exceptionalism and the rights of the individual exceeding the rights of the collective. As I have argued elsewhere,5 such traditions within the European imaginary arise from Judeo-Christian notions of dominion over the nonhuman and are reinforced by successive bifurcations between nature and culture through Plato/Aristotle-Descartes-Kant metaphysical trajectories.