The Problem of Nonhuman Phenomenology: or, What is it Like to Be a Kinect?

Abstract

New materialism presents an ambitious revision of key philosophical and political concepts, most notably that of the divide between human and nonhuman agents. In order to move critical inquiry outside of the labyrinths of language and subjectivity so that it might also attend to the material effects and actions of the nonhuman world, threads of human exceptionalism must be untangled from some of the West’s most basic ontological principles. From Bruno Latour’s expansion of the concept of agency to include nonhuman objects to Karen Barard’s concept of the post-human performativity of intra-acting matter there has been a rapid expanse of scholarship that attests to the influential role the material plays in the mechanics of human operations and indeed the need to dethrone the human from its central place in ethical, philosophical, and political concerns.1 This