Technics and world-orders in perspectivism

In the article ‘Multiversalism: Animism, the science of law, and nonhuman world-orders’, José Antonio Magalhães seeks to outline perspectivism as a juridico-political metaphysics by interfacing modern legal theory, ontological-turn anthropology and Amazonian perspectivism. They take Hans Kelsen’s ‘pure theory of law’ as a model of modern juridico-political epistemology. Kelsen’s recourse to the outdated anthropological figure of the ‘primitive animist’ becomes an entry point through which Magalhães introduces the conceptual apparatus of Amazonian perspectivism. The result is the schema of a perspectival realism that is inseparable from the jus gentium (international law).

In this seminar, Magalhães will present the article, focusing on a question it touches on only briefly: how technics plays out in Amazonian perspectivism. In modern naturalism, technology is how natural means (understood as causally determined and unitary) are instrumentalized in the service of juridico-political ends (understood as free and multiple). In perspectivism, by contrast, society appears as a continuous plane linking discontinuous natural worlds: jaguars (and other nonhumans) see themselves as human, while seeing humans as prey animals or as spirits. Causal determinacy thus becomes internal to politically constituted world-orders, and technics appears not as the means of man’s control over nature, but as the milieu in which the distribution, stabilization and subversion of perspectival correlations (who appears as human or as nonhuman) are at stake.

We will analyse three technical paradigms in terms of how they distribute perspectival relations: the panopticon (Foucault), the drone (Chamayou) and the forest/shamanism (Viveiros de Castro). This will point towards future research on whether and how one might think, at the interface of the philosophy of technology, ontological anthropology and Indigenous metaphysics, not only a perspectivist cosmotechnics but also a cosmotechnical perspectivism.