Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013

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Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011. 165 pp, ISBN 978-0-8223-5073-6, Paperback Price £14.99

 

Reviewed by

Christine Boyko-Head

Mohawk College, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

 

In 1979, Jonathan Culler identified Jacques Derrida’s work as a major force disrupting contemporary literary and philosophical discussions. Outlining Derrida’s deconstruction project, Culler carefully avoided predicting the legacy Derrida’s work would have on the literary and philosophical continuum come twenty to fifty years into the future. At the end of his 1979 article, however, Culler offers a good natured nudge “to all those who have the interest and patience to follow the argument of texts which displace or undo the most fundamental categories of our intellectual life” (p179).

 

Approximately 30 years later, Vicki Kirby accepts Culler’s challenge and applies the deconstructive agenda to contemporary fields, such as biology, forensics, mathematics, physics, and cybernetics argument in Quantum Anthropologies: Life at large (2011).  Kirby’s dense text energetically mines Derrida’s riches in an attempt to “re-cast the question of the anthropological – the human – in a more profound and destabilizing way than its disciplinary frame of reference will allow” (x). Her agenda questions the “identity of limits” by re-instating Derrida’s “no outside of  text” in order to expand this concept to Nature, Culture, language, interpretation and the world. Kirby states that these contemporary issues need not only be viewed through the lens of contemporary theorists; past theorists, such as Derrida, are not obsolete relics limited to specific usage. Rather, Kirby argues that her recasting of the anthropological question through deconstruction’s de-stabilizing frame “might be said to have scientific and quantum implications”(3).

 

In Quantum Anthropologies: Life at large (2011), Kirby hinges her refreshing argument on the expansive opportunity of seeing an “and” rather than the traditional “or”, or / within debates on reality, nature, the human. Deconstruction’s challenge to binary structures and philosophical chiasms ignited debates in the late 20th century. Kirby laments deconstruction’s diminished state in the 21st century. Disengagement, academic complacency and the morphing of Derrida’s concepts into a methodology imposed on particular texts has reduced deconstruction’s reach to “the signifying signature of a certain school of criticism rather than provocations for an urgent reassessment of how we comprehend reality” (2).

 

Using deconstruction as her tool, as well as her subject, Kirby adds a new challenge to the binary conventions that Derrida dislodged. Like birds disturbed from their treetop perches, the binary structure defining our world was only temporarily dislodged by deconstructive shaking. Kirby argues for another shaking of the tree in order to open contemporary technological and scientific complexities to the contributions of Derridean interventions.

 

She  meanders her argument across six intertwining chapters. Beginning with Saussure’s “marvelous contradictions” and progressing to the pillars of philosophical potentiality  – Butler, Kristeva, Irigaray, Merleau–Ponty, Kirby explores theories and concepts as “compromised” entities displaying cracks and stresses under the pressure of deconstructionist questioning. Further to this, Kirby emphasizes “entanglements” that suggest a criss-crossing of “epistemological intertextualities [dispersing] authorship, identity and causality” (77). In fact, these “entanglements” signify Kirby’s main theoretical goal with this book. She enthusiastically evokes the rigid alignments inadvertently generated by muddled deconstructionist enquiries in order to “rewrite” their implications. Thus, Kirby uses the tenets of deconstruction to revisit the limits imposed through philosophical and theoretical complacency showing that there is no outside of nature, language, identity; most significantly, she argues how “both” visions, approaches, positions can be true: cultural criticism and scientific insight, nature and culture, matter and form.  

 

Quantum Anthropologies: Life at large (2011) is a complex challenge to the complacent philosophical and theoretical environment that followed the aftermath of

deconstruction’s seismic disruption. Through skill and proficiency, Kirby ambles through arguments that she shows to be fundamentally compromised (70); yet, she restrains herself from completely annihilating their value. Kirby’s intent is not to destroy in order to replace: “surely the more interesting point is to consider how cultural criticism and scientific insights can both hold true: the value of one is not necessarily secured by proving the error of another” (91). Hence, the theoretical arguments she exposes reinforces the “quantum resonance” (xi) and theoretical relevance of Derrida’s “always/already” (93) in the contemporary arena, thereby celebrating the  “divided phenomenon” (127), the “mystery of simultaneity” (136), the bridgeable-ness of the previously defined abyss, the articulation of an “and”, rather than the separation of an “/”, leading to a “ plenitude of possibilities” (88).