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

Abstract The article addresses the two central tenets of Yasuo Deguchi’s “WE-turn,” namely his rejection of single-sourced agency on the one hand and his requirement for the presence of a deliberative, rational (human) actor in any multi-agentic system on the other. These views are discussed first in comparison to Raimo Tuomela’s system of social ontology and then set against the “panagentic” theories of Jane Bennett and Mercedes Valmisa. The first section concludes that Tuomela’s arguments, though limited to an anthropocentric paradigm, can usefully complement Deguchi’s views and can indeed provide a grounding for the inclusion of some, but not all, of the presences in a situation as components of an agentic system. The second section argues that while Deguchi’s requirement of human presence increases the explanatory power of his theory on the local level and for the human perspective, it loses out to the more radical position of Bennett and Valmisa on the more general level and Deguchi’s theory could therefore gain from the adoption of a more pronouncedly processual ontology as well as the inclusion of a temporal axis into its basic set of terms.