No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself) [author's pre-print]

AUTHORS PREPRINT (For citation purposes, please consult the forthcoming official version)A. Neimanis, 2015. “No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself)”

forthcoming in SOMATECHNICS Vol 5. 2 Missing Links and (Non)Human Queerings.

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No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself)

Astrida Neimanis

Is representation always colonisation? This question has high stakes for feminist and

anticolonial theories and practices. On the one hand, a more privileged we 1 may be wary of

usurping the voices of marginalised and oppressed others in an arrogant assumption that we

might know what those others want or need; but on the other hand, we balk at staying silent in

the face of injustice. When we extend these concerns into the domain of environmental

stewardship, we encounter a similar conundrum. In our efforts to protect non-human natures, is it

not a similar arrogance to presume to be able to faithfully represent the interests of these

others—rendered passive and mute by our representing impulses? And is it not a similar fear that

a lack of representation will lead to further incursion and devastation, in which we are thus

complicit? In each case, technologies of representation trace a fine line between the much-

needed redress of injustice done unto others, and the various violences that accompany speaking

for them.

While only occasionally theorised in such terms, this ‘problem of speaking for others’

(Alcoff 1991) is inevitably mired in the dilemma of representationalism. In Karen Barad’s

helpful parsing, representationalism holds that matters represented are distinct and independent

from their representations (Barad 2007: 46-48). As Barad underlines, representationalism is thus

an ontological position: ‘representationalism’s claim [is] that there are representations, on the

one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation, on the other’ (2007: 49,

my emphasis).2 A cut, or a gap, always remains. Any claim of representation to give us



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unfettered access to the real should therefore be treated as suspect, as no representation would

ever be adequate to the entity represented. So, we are caught between a representationalist rock

and a hard place of complicit silence. The question I am thus interested in here is this: can we

articulate an alternative to representationalism, but one in which the ethical need for

representation is not, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, simply ‘disown[ed] with a flourish’ (1988:105)?

To put my proposal in context, we note that the problem of representationalism has

generated a variety of groundbreaking responses, most notably from post-positivist positions,

These aver that representations construct, rather than passively mirror, the real.3 Yet as Barad

points out, even such post-positivist critique can still maintain a key feature of positivist

representationalism, namely, an ontological distinction between representation and a pre-

representational reality (2007: 48). Rather than privileging the real thing over a mere

representation (adequate or not), post-positivist views can end up elevating the representation

over an ultimately inscrutable ‘real.’ As long as this ‘taken-for-granted’ ontological gap (47)

remains, we can never really leave the problem of representationalism, and its ontological

hierarchies, behind. In Barad’s view, we need more fully developed alternatives to

representationalism that challenge this ontological bifurcation. She offers agential realism–what

she calls a ‘realism without representationalism’–as one response. Barad’s important

intervention, to which I return in more detail below, can be counted among recent theoretical

developments in so-called ‘flat ontologies.’ These include new materialist and posthuman

positions with varying theoretical emphases, but which generally understand all entities to have

ontological significance, and to be in relation to one another in non-hierarchical ways. On such

views, entities do not enjoy a higher ontological status than their representations, but nor is the

reverse true. While debates on the varying merits, problems and differences between these many



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theories must be relegated to other discussions, what arguably sets Barad apart from some other

versions of flat ontological thought is her feminist insistence that even a flattened ontology must

retain a clear concern for the ethics it supports. The agential realism she develops ‘is not about

representations of an independent reality but about the real consequences, interventions, creative

possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world (2007: 37).

Barad’s flattened ontology demands non-hierarchical understandings of difference as a process—

a coming-to-matter rather than an ontological a-priori—, but this refiguring also demands that we

‘take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming’ (2007: 396).

That is, flat ontology should not necessarily mean flat ethics (where entities may differ, but these

differences may not matter much).4

We seem to have come some distance from this article’s opening, and its concern for

representing feminist, anticolonial and ecological others. My suggestion, however, is that we

might weave these concerns back into the debates on representationalism that Barad expounds,

as another way of developing the ethical frames to which she attunes us. My argument thus

moves transversally across feminist, ecofeminist, anticolonial and posthuman positions,

gathering up various insights on the problem of representation. This gleaning not only highlights

how these positions might collectively refigure technologies of representation, but also

emphasises the important continuities, overlaps and shared concerns in these theoretical

engagements. What emerges is the possibility of posthuman representation of non-human

natures—in other words, a representation without representationalism, where the notion of a pre-

representational reality as ontologically distinct from and hierarchically ordered in relation to its

representation is rejected. The kind of representation I seek would remain concerned with the

urgent need to advocate for the interests of others (non-humans, in this case), but also with the



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risk of capture and appropriation that runs alongside the impetus to ‘speak for others’ highlighted

by feminist and anticolonial debates. Drawing on but extending these discussions, I link the

problem of representationalism specifically to a tenacious nature/culture dualism. Here,

posthuman feminist theories, and the work of Vicki Kirby in particular, prove helpful for

navigating a path through the ontological quagmire of representationalism as intimately bound to

the nature/culture split. Following an elaboration of Kirby’s flattened ontological schema where

all matter is ‘nature writing itself’ differently—that is, as a difference differing— I return finally

to the fraught ethics of representing others (human and more-than-human). Accepting that

representation is necessary, but that it should not entail mastery, I advocate paying closer

attention to the lessons of anticolonial feminism, where the stakes of such representations are

particularly high. Here, posthuman representation becomes a question of planetarity (Spivak

2003) as well.

1. The Problem of Representation: Impossible Necessities

In feminist contexts, ‘representation’ is a genuine conundrum—one arguably

foregrounded during Western feminism’s so-called second-wave. Women of colour, women

from non-Western contexts and cultures, lesbians, and working class women, among others,

expressed concern that the dominant voice of feminism (and academic feminism certainly) did

not ‘speak for’ them—as signalled in paradigm-shifting texts such as the Combahee River

Collective Statement of 1977.5 This hegemony of white, straight middle-class voices thus also

gave rise to a ‘strong, albeit contested, current of thought’ within feminism that maintained that

‘speaking for others—even other women—is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically

illegitimate’ (Alcoff 1991: 6). As noted in the introduction, however, the stakes of not



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representing others seemed just as high. In Catriona Sandilands’ apt phrasing, the salient feminist

question is: ‘How can the recognition of the limits of representation coexist with the desire to

include—to represent—other voices more fully?’ (1999: 181).

But interestingly, while Sandilands’ work is grounded in feminist debates, here she asks

this question from an ecofeminist perspective, and specifically in relation to the representation of

non-human matters and natures. I want to trace this particular more-than-human site of inquiry as

contiguous with feminism’s concerns with the representation of human others, as a way of

beginning to explore one possible response to Sandilands’ question, and in the broader frame of

this article, to begin mapping how these concerns will meet up with posthuman critiques of

representationalism.

Responding to Sandilands’ query might begin by acknowledging that non-human natures

are lively and agential. While this idea has been demonstrated across a swath of contemporary

new materialist feminist theory (e.g. Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ [2003, 2007], Stacy

Alaimo’s ‘material agency’ [2010], Nancy Tuana’s ‘interactionism’ [2008]), Jane Bennett’s

‘vibrant matter’ [2010]), these current debates can be connected to both earlier and

contemporaneous ecofeminist interventions into questions of nature/culture dualisms, or what

Val Plumwood has more specifically called a ‘human/nature dualism.’6 As Plumwood notes, this

tenacious dualism not only strips humans of all of their ‘natural’ dimensions, but also installs the

idea of ‘dead matter’ whereby ‘all elements of mind and intelligence [are] contracted to the

human’ (2009: n.p.). Plumwood thus insists on a nature ‘in the active voice,’ where concepts of

agency and creativity are extended to non-human natures. As vibrant, agential or social, nature

speaks in all sorts of ways.



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In order to highlight these speech acts, Plumwood endorses writing practices that help us

‘think differently’ about nature’s agency. Human writers, she argues, are key to helping us

address the ‘rethink deficit’ that constrains the development of new imaginaries of and relations

with non-human natures. But what are the ethics and politics of humans who position themselves

as spokespeople or translators of non-human matters? Due to a Western mindset that perceives

nature as only instrumental, a resource to be used, or a silent backdrop, non-human natures suffer

many harms at the hands of such-thinking humans, and thus seem to demand that we speak for

them. Yet if non-human natures as agential express themselves in myriad ways—that is, if nature

speaks for itself—what mistranslations or further colonisations are taking place as these voices

are channelled by human tongues?

Sandilands acknowledges the important ethico-political impetus for recognizing the

unrepresentability of nature. For her, this is a necessary counter to the mastery that accompanies

a worldview of nature as human resource, and thus knowable and controllable. In Sandilands’

words, ‘Nature cannot be entirely spoken as a positive presence by anyone; any claim to speak of

or for nonhuman nature is, to some extent, a misrepresentation’ (1999: 180).7 There is an ‘Other-

worldliness and a ‘wildness’ in nature, writes Sandilands, that is unspeakable by us (1999: 184).

Stacy Alaimo similarly insists that a representational break between human and non-human

nature might be ethically crucial: ‘It may still be best,’ she writes, ‘to embrace environmental

ideals of wilderness, or the respect for the sovereignty of nature ..., both of which work to

establish boundaries that would protect nature from human exploitation and degradation’

(Alaimo 2008: 258). Like Plumwood, both Alaimo and Sandilands deliberately work against a

nature/culture split—yet ‘unrepresentable nature’ still figures importantly in these two theorists’

work as a way of rejecting its full representational consumuability.



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The technologies of representation become even more complex when we consider that

this perpetual failure of representation for Sandilands ‘does not absolve ecofeminist politics from

the responsibility of producing alternative conversations about human and non-human nature

(1999: 180). ‘If the truth of nature is unspeakable,’ she offers, ‘then it is even more important to

link struggles over nature with struggles for social justice ... The nature of politics must be

spoken by humans who are cognizant of the limits of speech’ (1999: 185-186). Alaimo,

referencing Sandilands’ work, also notes that environmental politics demand that we speak for

nature, not only in spite of but because of the impossibility of the task; she implores us to seek

modes of representation that are directed toward ‘an environmental ethos in which the natural

world nonetheless exceeds and chafes against its representations’ (Alaimo 2010b: 23). In other

words, there is an excess to nature that we cannot assimilate, but from an ethico-political point of

view, we must represent nature, even if it is always destined to fail. For Sandilands, this failure is

not a problem to be overcome, but a crucial part of a radical politics whose promise lies in its

very unfinishedness.

This idea of representation as a ‘can’t yet must’ technology becomes even more overtly

framed in another essay by Alaimo (2013) where, from the perspective of posthumanism, she

considers the ethics of photographing jellyfish – an act that certainly captures them and

commodifies them, in the form of coffee table books and screen savers. As she notes, some

scientists and photographers advocate for such artistic representations as a means of giving voice

to these jewel-like creatures whose habitats are critically endangered. Jellyfish, notes one

photographer, are ‘citizens of the sea ... these creatures [must be] treated as suffering citizens

whose voices need to be heard’ (2013: 158). The idea here is that representing these strangely

stunning creatures will evoke a politics of curiosity and care for oceans. In Alaimo’s estimation,



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‘As weird and anthropocentric as it may be to imagine salps and other pelagic denizens as

citizens, such figurations may, possibly, contest the sense that the sea should remain global

capitalism’s treasure chest for legal plunder.’ (158). She reminds us that ‘ocean conservation

movements and organizations disseminate images of ocean creatures in order to battle this

otherwise invisible plunder of the seas’ (2013: 156). Here, artistic and political senses of

representation are explicitly drawn into a tense but inextricable relation: representation as re-

presenting in a mimetic way (through an artistic medium—photography, painting, text) and as

advocating on behalf of (as in legal or political representation) ambivalently merge. In the case

of the jellies, we realize these different senses are not easily disentangled. Where one kind of

representation relies on another, to represent these jellies is a vital, but fraught act. We must

represent in the name of these ‘citizens,’ even as we also commodify and misrepresent them.8

The complexity of representing non-human natures as a form of advocacy is further

underlined if we turn to a legal context. Even here—not unlike in the ecofeminist and posthuman

feminist theory discussed above— the distribution of voice between ‘nature in the active voice’

and well-meaning human advocates is not easily parsed. We find a telling example of this

difficulty in the 1972 landmark decision by the US Supreme Court in Sierra Club vs. Morton.

Maintaining that a proposed development project would adversely affect the ‘aesthetics and

ecology’ of Mineral King (a subalpine glacial valley in the Sequoia National Park), the Sierra

Club brought a case against the National Forest Services that intended to allow the development.

The majority ruling of the Supreme Court, however, sided against the Sierra Club. Crucially,

their ruling did not focus on whether or not the development would cause damage, but rather on

the question of standing—that is, of who has the authority to claim injury in a court of law.

Because the Sierra Club did not demonstrate that itself or its members would be negatively



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impacted, they were deemed unable to ‘speak for’ Mineral King. Arguing on behalf of the

valley’s non-human natures for the damage that would inevitably be incurred was ruled

inadmissible.

The lasting effect of Sierra Club vs Morton did not come in the ruling itself, however, but

in the dissenting opinion of Justice Douglas, who argued—quite radically—for recognition of the

‘voice’ of non-human natures in the form of legal standing, in ways that resonate strongly with

Plumwood’s argument for nature’s ‘active voice’: ‘The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological

unit of life that is part of it,’ Douglas argues. Moreover, ‘The voice of the inanimate object ...

should not be stilled ... That is why these environmental issues should be tendered by the

inanimate object itself (US Supreme Court 1972: n.p.). Yet upon a close reading of his opinion,

we note that Douglas seems unable to decouple the notion of nature-as-plaintiff from its human

representatives. For example, in speaking of rivers, Douglas also argues that ‘those people who

have a meaningful relation to that body of water – whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a

zoologist, or a logger – must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which

are threatened with destruction.’ Or further on: ‘Before these priceless bits of Americana (such

as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or transformed as to be reduced

to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these

environmental wonders should be heard’ (my emphasis). In other words, despite his calls to

listen to non-human natures, Douglas almost immediately retreats to the position of a human

‘speaking for.’ He even goes so far as to relegate the object whose voice initially ‘should not be

stilled’ to silence: ‘the inarticulate members of the ecological group cannot speak, but those

people who have so frequented the place as to know its values and wonders will be able to speak

for the entire ecological community’ (again, my emphasis). What emerges in Douglas’s carefully



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crafted text then is a strange slippage, such that when he gets to the climax of his argument, the

bearer of the ‘active voice’ is obscured: ‘Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of

“progress” will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present

question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?’ While this may be the question, it

is not at all clear to whom the ‘they’ in the first sentence refers: the river, the human

beneficiaries of what we would today call its ‘ecological services,’ or the human proxy acting for

the interests of the ecological community? None of these options is exactly the same thing, and

the slippage again raises the question of representation and its colonisations.

I flag Douglas’s ambivalent argument here because it overlaps with Plumwood’s call,

noted above, for human writers to provide a way to voice agential natures. While both insist on

‘nature in an active voice,’ these calls seem inextricable from the notion of humans as nature’s

writing or speaking representatives. This entanglement could be seen as grounds for critique,

particularly in terms of anthropomorphism (or linked to what Alaimo, above, gestures to as a

potential anthropocentrism in terms of citizen-jellies): are both of these examples not simply

cases of humans extending human language to non-human natures, or presuming to know what

these natures would want, or say, in just another act of colonization? Perhaps. But as Plumwood

astutely points out, this kind of critique often functions as a red (slightly greenwashed?) herring,

and a backdoor means of reinstating a material reductionism that seeks to uphold a human/nature

dualism and its argument for ‘dead matter.’ That is, for Plumwood, charges of

anthropomorphism can function as a way to continue denying non-human natures an active

voice.9 To this I would add: ‘crying anthropomorphism’ again reinstates a firm

representationalism where the representation (human cultural practice –law, photographs, or

other advocacy) is ontologically distinct from what is represented (‘nature.’) Here, we begin to



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sense the connection between an ontological bifurcation of nature and culture, and the

ontological gap instated by representationalism—to which I return below. In the meantime,

instead of going the anti-anthropomorphism route, I want to hang on to this slippage that

Douglas and Plumwood enact, coupled with the ‘can’t but must’ relation that Sandilands and

Alaimo evoke, as productive. Might it even facilitate a different kind of representation that

eschews the ontological separations of both representationalism and anthropomorphism?

Before moving in this direction, however, we need to return to the context of coloniality

that remains a key driver in feminist debates on representation. In fact the ambivalences around

representing non-human natures should ring a postcolonial bell—harkening back to 1988, when

Gayatri Spivak famously asked, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ After a complex journey through the

politics and pitfalls of postcolonial representation, Spivak concludes this landmark essay by

noting that the ‘subaltern cannot speak,’ yet ‘Representation has not withered away. The female

intellectual as intellectual has a task which she must not disown with a flourish’ (1988: 105).

Prefiguring the discussion above, Spivak highlights the slippage in Western technologies of

representation between what in German is differentiated as darstellen and vertreten—political

speaking on behalf of others, and reproduction of things, where both are complexly implicated

(1988: 71-74, 84). While she chastises Foucault and Deleuze as writers of the elite class for

refusing to ‘represent’ (because it can never be adequate), Spivak nonetheless maintains that

representation cannot ‘bypassed’; we must rather attend to the workings of power that deem

entities as either representable or unknowable.

As Donna Haraway (among others) reminds us, facile analogies between colonised

peoples and non-human natures are always problematic, and even a sophisticated conversation

between these two concerns can be risky (Haraway 2008). Clearly, in a Western dualist



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ontology, the connection of non-human natures with colonised people serves to reinforce a

presumed inferiority of both. At the same time, when this risk of dehumanising colonised people

is countered by separating them from (elevating them above) nature, this only returns us to a

position where nature is left in the unrecuperated position of passive, sub-human, non-agential,

etc.. Moreover, to suggest that anticolonial and environmental critiques cannot or should not be

engaged together would foreclose the urgent need for coloniser societies to recognize the way

these two violences are intimately imbricated and part of the ‘master model’ of domination about

which Plumwood writes. Indeed, many indigenous scholars have made this inextricability

abundantly clear (e.g. LaDuke 1999, Smith 2005). For these reasons, I argue that an ethics of

representation of non-human natures must pay attention to and learn from anticolonial positions

on representation. After all, is it not telling that precisely those groups that have historically been

most violated by misrepresentation are also the same voices that most forcefully resist dismissing

the problem of representation as irredeemably mired in representationalism? In other words, the

‘others’ of a representing intellectual elite are also those who are most reluctant to let go of

representation altogether, even as they might also be its harshest critics. Bearing these important

considerations in mind, let us finally turn to the project I have already amply foreshadowed—

namely that of articulating a kind of representation that relies neither on an ontological gap

between representation and the real, nor on the nature/culture split that is its fellow traveller.

2. Representation without Representationalism

As noted above, posthuman feminist theorist Karen Barad has recently offered a critical

appraisal of the problem of representationalism, wherein the distinction between ‘representations

and entities to be represented’ (2007: 46) is cast as ontological. This holds not only for positivist



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representationalism that privileges reality over potentially inadequate representations, but also

for post-postivist social constructionism that risks only flipping this ontological hierarchy on its

head. Barad turns to the work of philosopher of science Joseph Rouse to make this point.

According to Rouse, in representationalism, the representation—that which we control, master,

and direct—becomes the privileged site of investigation. We presume ‘that we can know what

we mean, or what our verbal performances say, more readily than we can know the objects those

sayings are about’ (Rouse, quoted in Barad 2007: 49). Meanwhile, ‘reality’ becomes oblique,

rarefied, and ultimately inscrutable. Barad does not explicitly take up the history of

representationalism within feminism in terms of nature/culture, but in drawing on Rouse, the

connection between representation and nature/culture becomes clearer: not only does

representationalism, like the nature/culture cut, posit an ontological hierarchy of value, but these

two frameworks evidence a convenient overlay: language aligns with culture, while some (often

unacknowledged) pre-discursive ‘reality’ aligns with nature or matter.10 In other words, these are

not just analogous couples. In a quiet conflation, nature (oblique, rarefied) comes to be that

which is unrepresentable, and representationalism becomes an alibi for the nature/culture divide.

The discussions of Sandilands, Plumwood and other feminists on the nature/culture

question, when it comes to representation, are both sophisticated and satisfying—the way

Sandilands dwells in the ambivalence of the ‘can’t but must’ of representing non-human nature,

and Alaimo’s suggestion that we look for representations that ‘chafe,’ both hold on to a tension I

support as very productive (for my thinking in this paper, at the very least!). But even while

ecofeminist and material feminist positions argue for an understanding of nature as agentic,

changing and transformative, requiring human representatives to speak for a nature that is

ultimately ‘Other-worldly’ risks reinstating the very hierarchised binary they seek to thwart. This



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is also to wonder: is the question of representation at its root just another guise of the

nature/culture problem, even slipping into arguments by those (like ecofeminists) who otherwise

steadfastly challenge this dualism? My aim is not to reject these ecofeminist positions, but to

think alongside them, exploring additional ways of dealing with these tensions that might

respond to both the ontological and ethical quagmire of representation.

I mentioned briefly above that Barad’s proposed solution to the problem of

representationalism moves away from representation per se to instead explore a posthuman

performative ‘realism without representationalism’ (Barad 2007: 50). In this account, reality is

not figured as ‘beyond representation’ nor is it simply given. What is real are not a priori ‘things’

(‘realness,’ she stresses, ‘does not necessarily involve “thingness”’ [2007: 56]); rather,

phenomena come into being through intra-actions. Such entanglements do not re-present what is

‘there,’ but constantly, in their on-going entanglement, elaborate and perform the reality that is

purportedly represented. If we recall the close overlay of representationalism with the

nature/culture split, then we can also see how Barad’s’ account contributes to the release of

matter and nature from a prison of brute inertia. Nature is not ‘awaiting representation’ by

culture/humans; rather, both are entangled in the coming-to-matter of the world.

Because of the ontological divide that representation seems to inevitably install, as well

as the hierarchising of these bifurcated sides that seems to always sneak back in, despite our best

intentions, Barad moves away from talking about representation. Importantly, this is not to say

that Barad eschews the ethico-political questions that representation raises. As explained in this

article’s introduction, she confronts the ethics of onto-epistemologies head on. Insisting on the

inextricable ways in which an onto-epistemology of entanglement and co-emergence is always

ethical in that we play a role in facilitating certain materialisations but not others, Barad indeed



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offers ground-breaking feminist contributions on this matter. But taking seriously the insistence

of anticolonial and ecologically-oriented feminists not to let go of representation altogether leads

me to ask: might Barad’s important contribution be complemented by a slightly different one—

one that articulates a ‘representation without representationalism,’ thus explicitly holding on to

the urgent questions that representation in its many senses demands of us?

To take up this challenge, I turn to the work of Vicki Kirby. Her work on ‘nature writing

itself,’ I suggest, provides a way of thinking representation that both refuses the ontological split

between ‘reality’ and ‘re-presentation,’ but equally importantly, leaves behind the nature/culture

divide altogether. I propose that in asking, ‘What if Culture Was Really Nature all Along?, Kirby

implicitly entertains the possibility that everything is representation. Before I unpack this

proposition, though, it is worth underlining that the close kinship between Kirby’s position and

Barad’s performative realism. Both espouse flattened ontologies where neither nature nor culture

(nor reality nor representation) pre-exist an entanglement of the two. Kirby moreover explicitly

acknowledges Barad’s key contributions to thinking ‘ontoepistemological entanglements’ as

alternatives to the temerity of binary and copular logics. But at the same time, Kirby also

underlines that such alternatives are ‘most difficult to think because thinking presumes cuts and

divisions of simple separation’ (2011: xi). In other words, Kirby’s quarry—an attempt to think

nature and culture as consubstantial but without an underlying dependence on these

separations—can be read as an implicit development or further pushing of Barad’s thought that

in elaborating the mattering of nature-culture entanglements could arguably still have one foot in

a dependence on their existence as ontologically distinct entities11. To be clear: Kirby’s

proposition is not fundamentally different from Barad’s. What Kirby offers us is a different

thought-image—a new figuration of terms that affords the possibility of imagining what we call



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‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as truly consubstantial. It is this thought-image, I propose, that suggests

representation is possible without the representationalist ontological split. Let us examine

Kirby’s proposal in more detail.

According to Kirby, attempts to negotiate the nature/culture binary often get stuck in

reinstating the same binary they are trying to overcome: where culture is purported to write

nature, there is still a ‘prediscursive’ nature somewhere out there to be either written over (think

of Barad’s reading of Butler [2007]) or left alone (think of how Sandilands’ or Alaimo’s call to

respect nature’s ‘wildness’ might be read). Or, even in the case of Barad’s own work, where

nature and culture are entangled, there is still something called ‘nature’ to be entangled with

something called ‘culture’—hence begging the question of where we make the cut, and on what

grounds. Again, without rejecting Barad’s important contributions, we could instead extend

them, and wonder, alongside Kirby: what if nature writes, thinks, is literate and numerate,

produces patterns and meanings, expresses sociality, intelligence, changeability, invention? That

which various views of representation position as the purview of (human) culture is always

already there, in the complex unfoldings of ‘life at large.’

In other words, this ‘life at large’ for Kirby is a generalisation of human (cultural)

capacity, or what she refers to as an ‘originary humanicity’ (Kirby 2011: 20-21). This does not

place the human at the beginning or centre of it all, but rather suggests that the assumed

capacities of humanness are generalised ‘in a way that makes us wonder about their true content;

after all, what do we really mean by agency ..., or by intentionality and literacy?’ (2011: 87).

Neural plasticity in brains; natural selection in evolutionary biology; or the ‘code-cracking and

encryption capacities of bacteria as they decipher the chemistry of antibiotic data and reinvent

themselves accordingly’ (Kirby 2011: 73) all attest to creativity and ‘language skills’ always



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already there. ‘Life at large’ has always been ‘reading and rewriting itself’—representing itself,

we might say—in a ‘universal genesis and reproduction’ (Kirby 2011: xii).

For Kirby, this approach firmly rejects any understanding of nature as ‘the dissembling of

Culture’ (Kirby 2011: 93). Even as Kirby is determined to find a way to think of nature as

agential and intelligent, this cannot be accomplished by a reversion ‘to the logic of assemblage,

Nature and Culture’ (2011: 93)—in other words, a ‘simple sense of “and” that necessarily

recuperates an uncritical understanding of identity even as it claims to interrogate it’ (2011: xi).

Kirby shares a poststructuralist conviction ‘that there is “no outside of language”’ (2011: 83),

insofar as she is interested in an expansive ‘interiority whose articulating energy is the entire

system’ (2011: xi)—a flat ontology, if you will. But in a bid to get out of the problem where such

a view of culture still relies on a prediscursive nature that is always before it, Kirby flips the

axiom to suggest ‘there is no outside of Nature’ (2011: 87). For Kirby, ‘the point is not to take

away the complexity that Culture seems to bring to Nature but to radically reconceptualise

Nature “altogether”’ (2011: 88). I suggest that in doing so, Kirby implicitly proposes a way to

hold on to representation as an instance of originary writing—of Nature writing itself. In Kirby’s

words: ‘Could the generalised origin of re-presentation ... be thought as the Earth’s own

scientific investigations of itself?’ (2011: xi). Not only the non-human scribblings of plastic

brains, hungry microbes, and eroding coastlines, but even—and especially—‘the tiny marks on

this page (2011: xi) (or click of this camera, or law in this book) all become a rendering, an

iteration, a re-presentation of various natures finding ways to contract and offer life anew.

3. Planetary Ontologies, Against Mastery



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Like others discussed above, the question for Kirby is not one of solving the ‘problem’ of

representation. She is more interested in how we negotiate it. Acknowledging the risks in any

negotiation, she asks: ‘What do we forfeit and what do we gain by claiming Nature’s

“textuality,” its literacy, as our own?’(2011: xii). This question of forfeiture brings us right back

to the dilemma with which Sandilands and Alaimo presented us. With nature always already

representing itself, and representation by humans included within these natural scribblings, how

do we acknowledge nature’s own withholding of itself—what Sandilands calls its ‘Other-

worldliness’ and ‘wildness,’ or what Alaimo notes as its necessary protective ‘boundaries’ against

human exploitation? Put most basically, can a Kirby-inspired view of representation avoid the

ontological cut and still hold on to an ethical need for separation or just simply letting be? While

‘nature writes/represents itself’ certainly troubles the privileging of language and representation

over ‘reality itself,’ Kirby’s shepherding of us into the ‘expansive interiority’ of an ‘originary

humanicity’ might nonetheless raise concerns of another kind of backdoor anthropocentrism (in

addition to that noted by Plumwood) where nature is splayed out before us, and the human

representation as a part of this nature is granted infinite reach. Is nature’s unknowability what

Kirby’s position asks us to ‘forfeit’?

Anticipating such questions, Kirby notes that in rethinking humanicity as always already

there, we risk affirming the world as human-shaped, or as modelled on human being—the

‘purported error and pomposity of anthropomorphic projection’(Kirby 2011: 20). But it is just as

possible, Kirby suggests, that ‘originary humanicity’ might ‘refute’ or even ‘entirely redefine

what we mean by “anthropomorphism”’ (2011: 20). Really, she writes, it is a question of ‘how

we approach this phenomenon (which includes us)’ (2011: 21, emphasis added). To take Kirby’s

suggestion and weave it back into my own problematic, we might say that where nature is



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representing itself always already, in myriad ways and to varied effect, the question is no longer:

‘what is representation?’ or even ‘is representation possible?’ but: what does (this) representation

do? What are the effects of specific writings/representations on bodies, polities, discourses,

imaginaries, times? Recalling Barad’s insistence on attuning ourselves to the ethics of our

ontological schemas, we might ask: what bodies and knowledges come to matter?

As noted, nature writing itself supposes a flat ontology. It not only recalibrates the

hierarchy between nature and culture, but also addresses the ontological schism between

representation and ‘reality.’ The representation is not the privileged text of culture, but rather

another instance of nature figuring and reconfiguring itself. Human bodies themselves are one

iteration of nature making itself legible, but so too are our speech acts. A very specific instance,

for sure, but one that is neither ontologically nor materially cut off from that which we seek to

listen to, describe, and even represent as non-human nature. Our commonality with non-human

bodies is scripted not only in what Alfonso Lingis might call our mammalian movements, our

insect-like buzzing and humming and squeaking, our oceanic moods, and our swampy and

humid sex (Lingis 2000), but also in our ways of writing, acknowledging, and re-presenting

others. The important point here of course is that not all of these scribbles and echoes of other

bodies in and through our own are the same, nor are they all written to the same effect. Flat

ontologies are as dangerous as they are liberating. Just as flatness cannot mean sameness,

commonality cannot mean subsumption, and intimacy cannot mean mastery—these are precisely

the risks that motivate Sandilands’ and Alaimo’s arguments. If we are going to develop an

imaginary in which nature and culture are flattened, then it is crucial that we simultaneously

acknowledge the risk of colonisation that is at the heart of the question of representation.



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At this point a return to Spivak’s work is again helpful. Planetarity, as discussed in Death

of a Discipline (2003), is a term that also takes up the impossible necessity of representation.

Spivak uses it to describe the ‘species of alterity’ that cannot be mapped by an image of world as

‘globality’ (Spivak 2003: 72). ‘The global’ according to Spivak ‘allows us to think we can aim to

control it, (2003: 72) but planetarity, she continues, ‘opens us up to embrace an inexhaustible

taxonomy of the names [of radical alterity]’ (2003: 73). Although she develops the term as a way

to think with and against the disciplines of world literatures and Area Studies, more generally

planetarity is a fecund concept for thinking the incommensurable circulations of power, bodies,

ideas, cultures, and matters in a global context without falling into the neatly mappable discourse

of ‘globalization.’ I propose that Spivak’s planetarity also provides a germane way of

confronting the risks of flat ontology, and its relation to ‘Nature represents itself.’ It is a way of

thinking otherness that inheres in commonality, and a way of thinking the unknowable that does

not necessitate an ontological split.

‘To be human is to be intended toward the other’ (Spivak 2003: 73), but as Spivak

teaches us, this other-ness cannot be easily displaced onto a transcendental alterity (mother, god,

nature), derived from us as our not-I. But if we embrace what she calls ‘planet-thought’ a new

means of imagining this otherness opens up:

If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than

global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much

as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we

metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our reach is not continuous

with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves into this

peculiar mindset (Spivak 2003: 73).



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My hunch is that Kirby’s position is kin to this ‘peculiar mindset.’12 Planetarity allows us to

imagine ‘nature represents itself’ in a way that can still resist the risk of ‘purported error and

pomposity of anthropomorphic (read also: Eurocentric) projection’ that Kirby acknowledges.

Planetarity for Spivak is ‘(im)possible’ (2003: 72) to represent because of its inexhaustibility—

the parenthetical ambiguity signaling both the ‘must’ and the ‘can’t’ inherent in the task of

representation. Importantly, planetarity does not suggest that while some natures reveal

themselves to us, others remain hidden; it rather insists that just as nature, in Plumwood’s terms,

has an undeniably ‘active voice,’ all nature also partakes in unknowability—and hence,

unrepresentability—as woven into its ontology.

‘Nature represents itself’ doesn’t solve the problem of representation—we happily learn

from Sandilands, Spivak and others that solving it is not the task; the task is rather living

ethically with the problem. We are not exonerated from representation's ethical quandaries.

Nature representing itself does, however, recast this problem. It is no longer primarily an

ontological question (is representation possible?), but a decidedly ethical and political one. Of

course representation is possible: nature, brains, humans, bacteria, clouds – we have all been

doing it all along. In a way, all there is is representation. The question is rather: how? What cuts

will I make between what can be represented and what cannot, and how will I take responsibility

for them? This ethico-politics demands that we make imperfect choices, and account for them. In

Barad’s terms, ethics is ‘not about right response to a radically exterior/ised other, but about

responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’

(Barad 2007: 393). An ethics of ‘nature represents itself’ supports this, where accountability

should also involve desisting from mastery.



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We might sum up: Nature—in the most expansive sense developed above—represents

itself all the time, but with what sort of responsibilities and accountabilities will we take up its

pen? We might also note, in closing, that this demand for accountability is something that joins

all the positions I have reviewed—Plumwood and Douglas, Sandilands and Alaimo, Spivak,

Barad and Kirby. But importantly, the idea of planetarity as an anachronistic response to the risk

Kirby only identifies emerges from anti- and postcolonial thought—a site where the ethico-

political stakes of developing theories that can assert a commonality while firmly rejecting

mastery and consumption run quite high. It is from these sites that an intellectual representing

elite—including this body typing these words—has the most to learn.

REFERENCES

Alaimo, Stacy (2013), ”Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of

the Sensible” in Cecelia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (eds.), Thinking

with Water, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 139-163.

Alaimo, Stacy (2010a), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Alaimo, Stacy (2010b), ‘The Naked Word: The Trans-corporeal Ethics of the Protesting Body.’

Women and Performance 20(1): 15-36.

Alaimo, Stacy (2008), “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Alaimo,

Stacy and Hekman, Susan (eds.), Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University

Press. pp. 237-264.



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Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan (2008), “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in

Feminist Theory,” in Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan (eds.), Material Feminisms.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Alcoff, Linda (1991) “The Problem of Speaking for Others” Cultural Critique 20: 5-32.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Engtanglement of

Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna (2008) ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.’ Material

Feminisms. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds.) Bloomington: Indiana University

Press. pp. 157-187.

Kirby, Vicki (2011), Quantum Anthropologies, Durham: Duke University Press.

LaDuke, Winona (1999), All Our Relations. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Lingis, Alfonso (2000), Dangerous Emotions, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press.

Plumwood, Val (2009) “Nature in an Active Voice” Australian Humanities Review 46.

Sandilands, Catriona (1999), The Good-Natured Feminist: Feminism and the Quest for

Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Andrea (2005), “Ecofeminism Through an Anti-Colonial Framework,” Karen Warren

(ed), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

pp.2 1-37.

Spivak, Gayatri, C. (2003), Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri (1988), “Can the Subaltern Speak?” C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism

and the Interpretation of Culture, Macmillan Education: Basingstoke, pp. 271-313.



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Tuana, Nancy (2008), ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’ in Material Feminisms. Stacy

Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 188-213.

US Supreme Court (1972), SIERRA CLUB v. MORTON, 405 U.S. 727.

I would like to thank the organizers of the Somatechnics conference in Linköping (2013), where a version of this

paper was first presented, and Cecilia Åsberg and the Posthumanities Hub for facilitating my participation there.

Thanks also to Iris van der Tuin, Vicki Kirby, and Stacy Alaimo, who all provided comments on this paper at

various stages of its development. Particular thanks to Marietta Rodomska and Line Henriksen for their patience

and editorial skills.

1 I intentionally interpellate both author and reader into a position of relative privilege in relation to any number of

possible others that they might seek to represent; I assume that no one reading this article will be exempt from

having to grapple with the ethics of representing others. I also acknowledge that author and reader may differ

considerably in the extent to which they inhabit the site of the represented other. “We” is always the most difficult

but necessary question.

2 Barad (2007) also argues that the ontological is inevitably epistemological; how we know co-constitutes what we

know. I fully support this position, but for my purposes here, I put these important epistemological considerations

aside to focus on the presumed ontological separation between representation and the represented.

3 As Barad notes, the work of Judith Butler, drawing on Foucault, is an excellent example of such contributions

(Barad 2007: 46-47). Barad lucidly agues, however, that even Butler’s sophisticated position on the performative

mattering of bodies retains a post-postivist representationalism, insofar as it still posits some kind of a priori and

ultimately inaccessible body that precedes its coming to matter differently through representation/discourse (Barad

2007: 150-153).



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4 Recent years have evidenced both productive conversations and disagreements between feminist-oriented flattened

ontologies and so-called object-oriented ontology theorists. My objective here is not to adjudicate between these

positions (which in this short article would inevitably oversimplify and homogenise each) but to offer additional

resources for tackling questions that are relevant for both.

5Full text available at http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html.

6 I use the term ‘ecofeminist’ as a loose identifier of feminist theories that are explicitly ecologically-oriented, and

which connect sex/gender systems to human relationships with non-human bodies and environments. Despite being

(often undeservedly) caricatured as essentializing women as ‘close to nature,’ ecofeminism is an important source

for contemporary thought on the non-human, and still provides a helpful way of designating a certain conversational

space.

7 A key point for Sandilands—related to but distinct from the point I am making here—is that any human attempt at

totalizing representation misses the languages generated in human/non-human interaction and entanglement.

Representation is always unfinished or open for Sandilands because this capaciousness makes room for these

(quoting Haraway) other-worldly conversations (Sandilands 1999).

8 The example of jellyfish is particularly useful here as representing them as ‘suffering citizens’ is almost certainly a

misrepresentation. By and large, jellyfish are thriving and may even benefit from some anthropogenic ocean

pollution. Alaimo nonetheless argues that re-presenting them might elicit concern for oceanic habitats—which are

under threat—more generally.

9Anthropomorphism ‘is such a highly abused concept,’ Plumwood cautions, ‘one often used carelessly and

uncritically to allow us to avoid the hard work of scrutinising or revealing our assumptions.’ Instead of taking this

route, Plumwood advocates for writing as a way to ‘re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to find



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ourselves in dialogue with and limited by other species' needs, other kinds of minds’ (n.p.) I support this call but

bring my argument here in a different direction.

10 As Alaimo and Hekman note, ‘Far from deconstructing the dichotomies of language/reality or culture/nature,’

they have problematically “rejected one side and embraced the other” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 2-3)—evidencing

a clear relation between the two sets of terms.

11 Barad does not purport to offer ‘a unified theory of cultural and natural forces’ but instead wants to inquire ‘into

the very practices by which they are differentiated’ (2007: 66). This is also a necessary task, but one that arguably

risks reinstalling their separation.

12 Both Spivak’s and Kirby’s deep engagement with Derrida may be the red thread here, but I would argue that their

mutual longstanding engagement with feminist theory and questions of Otherness is at least an equally significant

shared genealogy.

No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself) [author's pre-print]

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