Yasuo Deguchi’s “WE-turn”: A Social Ontology for the Post-Anthropocentric World

1 Introductory Remarks

The philosophical “WE-turn” advocated by Yasuo Deguchi^[1] has summarized what has been boiling in many disciplines for quite some time now. For example, in social ontology, the debate on collective subjectivity and agency has been gradually moving from methodological individualism to the recognition of collective agents.^[2] The “actor-network theory” developed by Bruno Latour gives primacy over particular individuals to “hybrid” agents that unite entities of different orders into wholes whose agentic capabilities are emergent and grounded in this unity.^[3] Mercedes Valmisa’s philosophy of action^[4] and Jane Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter”^[5] both rely on the de-anthropocentralization of agency and attributing the capability to act to the collective of humans and non-humans on whom the action depends. In heterodox economics, the atomic subject is being replaced by an embedded one.^[6] Similarly, relational sociology bases its whole discourse about the social process on the presumption that relations are more fundamental in it than relata.^[7] Feminist philosophy and care ethics in particular are arguing for the view that an ethical discourse can and should be constructed without postulating universal principles for autonomous agents, on the basis of bi- and multilateral relations in concrete life situations.^[8] The “4E” (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition theory sees the individual cognitive subject as a part of the environment in which cognition takes place.^[9] And so on. Although, as it is typical in the hyper-specialized academia of today, all of these disciplines do not talk to each other much, it is clear that together they reflect a general turn away from the lingering axioms of early modern European philosophy about what it means to be an agentic subject, and in the direction that has been prominent in Asian philosophy over millennia.

All of these disciplines and fields still have a lot to learn from each other. The main aim of this article is indeed to foster such an interdisciplinary and intertraditional dialogue by discussing the philosophical “WE-turn” advocated by Yasuo Deguchi in the context of some Western theories that make comparable claims. Let it be noted at once that I am going to look at these Western parallels in very broad terms, as systems of coordinates, so to say, rather than in their specific detail. My aim is precisely to point at structural resemblances and contrasts and not to note very particular theoretical reverberations and discursive choices.

There are, indeed, several features in Deguchi’s position that make it stand out among most of these related discourses. First, it is more radical than most of them (though not all) in its abandonment of the atomic individual. Its “we” is not a plural form of distinct, separately functional “I’s” that pre-exist its emergence. The individual is abstracted from the collective, not vice versa. It therefore does not limit the agentic capacities of that “we” to human or consciousness-endowed entities only. All involved elements of an agentic situation are parts of the “we,” including anorganic entities that constitute vital parts of ongoing processes in spite of not affecting their situations consciously. On the other hand, however, differently from the even more radical positions of Bennett and Valmisa, Deguchi maintains a special place for the human, rationally thinking subject as the centrepoint of what he calls a “multi-agent system.” For directed action to take place, a human element of the system is necessary. Both of these two theses – one radical, the other a bow towards the received view – have also been voiced before, but in Deguchi’s theory, it is their association that forms its core claim. A third characteristic feature of Deguchi’s system is that while most theories of relational subjectivity are inclined towards processual ontological views,^[10] Deguchi’s view is compatible with both the object-oriented tradition,^[11] which has constituted the mainstream in the Western philosophy since Aristotle, and with the processual tradition, which has been a minority position in the West, but predominant in East Asian philosophical systems and has been a major influence for the Kyōto school of Japanese philosophy, of which Deguchi himself is currently one of the most prominent representatives.

Deguchi recognizes, of course, the multiple sources of his way of thinking, often stressing his East Asian intellectual heritage alongside his Western influences. There are indeed components in his views that we can trace back to the Buddhist philosophy of the Tiantai/Tendai school^[12] as well as Dōgen’s thought, which Deguchi has studied in remarkable depth.^[13] It is very unfortunate that the rich intellectual traditions of Asian thought continue to have an exotic aura of spiritual or mystical quests for mainstream Western philosophy, which mostly refuses to recognize their rationality and thereby considers itself excused from getting even cursorily acquainted with them. Deguchi’s theory thus has the capacity to make a significant contribution also in the very necessary effort of legitimizing Asian thought in a broader global context, by formulating his developments of it in Western terms – something that the Kyōto school has traditionally been doing since its founding by Nishida Kitarō, whose “logic of place (basho)” arguably remains one of the most thorough philosophical groundings for many of the core claims the discourses listed above have been putting forward.

Finally, Deguchi’s preference for the analytical language of Anglo-American philosophy over the continental tradition, with which his Kyōto predecessors have primarily been engaged, again broadens the horizons of the dialogue his theory contributes to. This also makes it easier to bring him into contact with many of the authors, especially in the Anglophone world, who are engaged in similar pursuits across various disciplinary fields where a similar approach is now predominant. However, this does not limit the ability of Deguchi’s theory to engage with the discourses of the continental tradition, or the extensions thereof into other fields.

In this article, I will restrict my attention to two discourses that base themselves on what I identified above as Deguchi’s two main claims. First, I will discuss the ontology of the collective subject, or a view of subjectivity not as inherent in one individual person, but situationally emergent within the relational network involving many components, which in his view are semi-autonomous with regard to each other. Second, I will address the problems related to extending autonomous “agency” to non-human and non-conscious entities, a view that, as said, Deguchi does not fully endorse. This position is often called “panspsychism”^[14] but might perhaps more appropriately be termed “panagenticism” in that it can retain the distinction between conscious and non-conscious (or less conscious) entities while recognizing their agentic capacity.

2 The Collective Subject

The central question concerning the concept of a collective subject is whether we consider such a subject to be a new entity or an assemblage of pre-existing ones. A new entity would be one emerging from its constituent elements, which cease to be autonomous and individual inasmuch their being relates to the collective subject as a unity.^[15] An assemblage, in the sense Manuel DeLanda assigns to the term, is a grouping of autonomous unities whose being is not affected by the extrinsic relations they have to each other.^[16] Both ways of conceptualization have sufficient explanatory power to be taken seriously, and each has a range of situations where it seems more appropriate. It might therefore be asked if we perhaps need to say that collective subjects are met in two kinds, or, alternatively, that the notion is only applicable in a certain range of situations where our preferred way of defining it fares better than its alternative.

All that said, the discussion of collective subjects has hitherto for the most part been held on anthropocentric terms, with only human individuals considered as the constituent elements of a collective subject.^[17] This is no longer the case in Deguchi’s WE-turn paradigm: the “we” he is talking about is, as he puts it, a “multi-agent system” consisting of all of the elements that are necessary for a particular action to occur, including non-human ones (3.4).^[18]

In this section, I would like to have a look at Raimo Tuomela’s socio-ontological model^[19] with that shift of perspective in mind. Although Tuomela works in the habitual anthropocentric paradigm of his discipline, I will try to show that his core arguments are compatible with Deguchi’s views and even capable of usefully complementing them. According to Tuomela, collective actions differ from individual ones in that the actors participating in them switch from the so-called “I-mode” of activity into the “we-mode,”^[20] in which they conceive of themselves primarily as members of an agentic group rather than self-contained actors.^[21] The “we” of any such collective action is defined by what Tuomela calls an “ethos” – a sort of an implicit programme, code, or statute that defines the values of the group, which, in turn, are expressed in their coordinated activity.^[22] Thus, an ambulance brigade consisting of a driver, doctor, and nurses, each with their defined roles, all collaborate in getting medical help to those in need of it with maximum speed and precision. The knowledge of the doctor, the skills of the nurses, and the traffic-navigating capacities of the driver all contribute to this common goal. None of them could replace any other member of the team. Each of them is also supposed to play down certain features of their character or inclinations, and anyone unable to do that, for example, by being unable to operate under stress, is disqualified for the job.

While in Tuomela’s model the human agents are those who make up the collective subject, in Deguchi’s model, we need to add a number of other presences to the team: the ambulance car, equipped with signalization that it uses to communicate to other cars its need to move more quickly than the laws allow; the medical equipment needed to deal with trauma, severe bleeding and other often-met injuries; the selection of painkillers and other medicines that are most often needed in such situations, stretchers for carrying injured patients, and so on. Even the clothes worn by the doctor and the nurses, which signal their role and help them, if need arises, to pass through the crowds to the actual site of the emergency, are elements of the agentic whole. These clothes also effectuate the switch of Tuomela’s modes: when a doctor puts on their white coat, this means they have left the “I-mode” of the private person and entered the “we-mode” of the medical collective. The role of the non-humans in shaping the situation at hand becomes even more evident when, for example, a gang of criminals impersonates an ambulance brigade to facilitate the escape of one of their members from prison: the presence of the appropriate car, medical paraphernalia and uniforms on people communicates to the police and guards that a medical team has arrived, without their having to say so, and may help the gang to accomplish its mission without resorting to violence. In this situation, the non-human elements of the grouping are precisely those that are responsible for the successful completion of the job.

At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive to say that the non-humans involved in the situation might also switch between an “I-mode” and a “we-mode,” but this is not necessarily so. A van just out of the production line becomes an ambulance car by being painted in the appropriate colours and equipped with signalization, just as a person with a medical degree situationally becomes a doctor by putting on a white coat and hanging a stethoscope around their neck. Both of them go through a switch from their “I-mode” into the “we-mode” through a reorganization of their situation, with corresponding consequences for the relevant part(s) of their existential trajectory. It might be argued that in the case of non-humans, the switch is not agentic – they do not make the decision to become elements of a multi-agent system themselves. But the same argument very often applies also to humans. Recruits drafted to the army and turned into soldiers by uniforms and weapons are quite often not very happy about this happening to them, and would have pursued some other life course, given the choice.

It can thus be argued that we should not confuse the degree of autonomy that an individual has with the basic distinction between the “I-mode” and the “we-mode.” The first, following Tuomela, should denote the activities that the agent undertakes on their own, and the second, those performed as a member of the group. But Deguchi has alerted us to the fact that no actions can be assigned to a single individual – nobody ever acts alone (3.19). The “I-mode,” with this correction, might correspond to the entirety of what I have elsewhere called the “possible futures”^[23] available to the single agent at any given moment, while the “we-mode” determines a smaller circle of possible futures, contained in the larger, “I-mode” one, which are the ones available to the agent as a member of the group. The switch from the “I-mode” to the “we-mode” entails the acceptance of a set of constraints (that is, the practical realization of Tuomela’s “ethos”), which makes only certain courses of action possible and excludes a multitude of other chains of events that could have unfolded, had the switch not taken place. In other words, the switch occurs as the result of an act of framing (oneself, someone else, or something) as an element of an agentic situation, and thereby limiting their range of future trajectories. Following Deguchi, we have to note that just like any other act, the framing, too, cannot be carried out solely through the actions of a single individual. For the present purposes, we can say that the rest of the framing situation is what is needed for this act to occur. But the act is necessarily reciprocal: the other elements of the situation, by participating in the framing, are simultaneously transformed themselves. A driver is assigned to an ambulance car, which thereby becomes mobile. By sitting behind the wheel of an ambulance car, the driver is excused from following a certain part of traffic regulations. An act of framing is always simultaneously an empowerment towards certain actions and a limitation that cuts certain other possible futures off.

Moreover, we know that skilled craftsmen regularly prefer to work with their own tools, or at least tools they are familiar with, and even the adaptation to hand of a new tool or technology always takes some time of adjustment. In that sense, we can turn around the saying “a bad workman quarrels with his tools” – a good workman befriends his tools, and as in any friendship, it is the relation established between the parties that allows them to turn into a “hybrid” in Bruno Latour’s sense,^[24] an acting whole composed of heterogeneous elements.

I said above that the “ethos,” on which the “we-mode” of Tuomela is based, can be taken in actual practice to consist in the constraints that a situation places on its elements. This needs to be looked at in a bit more detail. The ethos, according to Tuomela, comprises values and principles, including a code of conduct, which is willingly endorsed by a member of the group who has switched to “we-mode.”^[25] I think this claim is somewhat overreaching. It is not necessary for a human member of a we-group to be completely aware of what the ethos consists in. For example, it is hardly likely that the thousands of recruited peasants who participated in Mao’s Long March of 1934–35 were sufficiently acquainted with Marxist theory to make an informed choice in its favour. Indeed, we know from Mao’s own life history that he only started to study Marxism in earnest after the Long March was completed and he was forced into inaction at Yan’an.^[26] But the group had nonetheless an ethos, or more appropriately a set of shared attitudes, which were framed by the situation: the recruitment of peasants into the communist army, the fight against (and hatred of) the Guomindang, admiration for Mao’s practical leadership skills, solidarity in resisting the hardships of the march, and so on. I think it is reasonable to say that most of these attitudes emerged situationally and were produced by the collective action, rather than being a prerequisite for it. Strong, motivating ideas and values may, from the start, be a part of the principles that hold the group together, but they need not be. In fact, it may even be more appropriate to think of these ideas and values, too, as an element participating in the situation, rather than as components of an “ethos” that ranges over and above it.

On this view, ideas and values themselves are also subject to modification when they go through the switch from the “I-mode” (the form in which they are met on the pages of books) to the “we-mode” (the form in which they are shared between the participants and motivate them to joint action). In many situations, they have to be interpreted for the purposes of the particular context, adapted, and developed. Indeed, the Marxist ideas went through a thorough transformation in Mao’s thought, where peasants, considered to be a reactionary class by both Marx and Lenin, suddenly emerged as the driving force of the revolution for Mao.^[27] The compositional principles of the situation clearly have precedence over the set of ideas that the situation claims as its basis of legitimation.

This move enables us to investigate a further parallel between Tuomela’s model of social ontology and Deguchi’s multi-agent system. Let us assume, as suggested above, that ideas and values are elements of the situation on par with its human and non-human participants and that the glue that holds the situation together consists in its compositional principles, themselves subject to modification in the course of events, rather than a well-formulated (or tacitly acknowledged) “ethos.” On this view, we can think of these structural principles, not the shared values, as the force that tests each element of Deguchi’s multi-agent system for being both necessary and sufficient, which he has stipulated as its characteristic feature (3.5). But why should we not include the entirety of a situation in the multi-agent system, which makes action in that situation possible? During the early hours, when there are no cars on the streets, the ambulance can race through the city to save the life of a patient without meeting any obstacles, but during the rush hour, the situation may be quite different.

And yet Deguchi insists on extracting, from the totality of circumstances, only those elements into his system that he deems both necessary and, collectively, sufficient for the action to occur. In Tuomela’s terms, these are the elements that have gone through the switch from the “I-mode” to the “we-mode” – in the present, modified terminology, they have been framed into the situation, and its compositional principles have placed constraints on them, limiting the set of possible futures available to them in principle. All the while, however, they preserve a degree of autonomy and are not subordinated to the central will of a (human) actor who claims to rule supreme over the whole situation. A collective subject is thus internally in tension, and its need to resolve these internal tensions can indeed be identified as one of the motivations for its actions.^[28]

This view enables us to suggest a tentative answer to the question posed at the beginning of this section: are collective subjects situationally emergent new entities, or should they be considered assemblages of elements that only have extrinsic, non-transformational relations with each other? When we consider a situation as a whole to be the source and starting point of a change, then the assemblage explanation has the upper hand. In such a case, absolutely everything present in a situation should be included in the description (such as the absence or multitude of other cars on the streets through which the ambulance races). When, however, we try to describe the collective subject as selectively extracted (by the external observer who identifies it) from the environment it has been embedded in, then we should favour the emergence-based explanation. In such a case, only those entities that have gone through the switch from the “I-mode” to the “we-mode,” and framed as elements of the situation, can be properly designated as the elements of the collective subject. Deguchi favours the latter model (and so do I), but both interpretations are feasible.

All in all, I believe that looking at Deguchi’s theory of “WE-turns” through the insights derived from Tuomela’s social ontology helps us to clarify his emphasis on the necessary and sufficient elements of his multi-agent system, and also to place it on a temporal axis, showing how it emerges, is transformed, and also how it ceases to be. Indeed, by opting out of the “we-mode” – by taking off the white coat, so to say – an individual element of the situation can revert to its “I-mode” and a larger spectrum of possible futures thereby becomes available again, even if only until the start of the next shift – or their next moment of framing into a situation of a different type, such as having dinner with their family.

3 Conclusions

In this article, I have compared the principles of Yasuo Deguchi’s “WE-turn” on the one hand, to the socio-ontological model of Raimo Tuomela and, on the other hand, to the panagentic models of Jane Bennett and Mercedes Valmisa. I hope to have shown that Tuomela’s distinction between a “we-mode” and an “I-mode” of action, between which an agent can switch, can, with a few amendments, usefully complement Deguchi’s view of multi-agent systems and can also serve as the legitimating basis for the extraction of particular happenings as actions from their background process. By identifying certain structural constraints of the situation, with which an entity must align itself to count as an element of the agentic system, we have also set in place the criterion by which we can distinguish the parts of such a system from irrelevant presences, their influence on the outcome of the action notwithstanding. This move makes it possible to assess the successes and failures of agentic systems, which would be impossible if all actions were considered equal.

Deguchi’s choice to keep the traditional opposition between actions and events while refusing any single agent to claim the involved agency for themself sets him apart from the received mainstream view on agency, but also distinguishes his position from that of here discussed Bennett and Valmisa (as well as many others), who assume a more radically “panagentic” position than Deguchi allows for. I hope to have shown what Deguchi gains and loses by this move: his system of views gains in explanatory power on the local level and provides coherence to any set of actions that is described from the point of view of the human agent(s) involved, but loses on the more general level, where this perspective is just one among many possible ones. Finally, I have suggested that the ambivalent position of Deguchi regarding the ontological foundations of his system may ensure the compatibility of his discourse with both object-oriented and processual ontological views, but becomes an obstacle in the discussion of the “I” and its role in the multi-agent system – a more pronouncedly processual view, which would entail the positioning of the “I” on a temporal axis, might be helpful for showing how past interactions participate in the present decisions and acts that the “I” is an element of, as well as let Deguchi’s system of “WE-turns” evolve into a more comprehensive theory of social ontology for the post-anthropocentric world.