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Aesthetics for post-human worlds: Difference, expertise and ethics
Abstract
This short commentary briefly flags and develops three dimensions of an `aesthetics for post-human worlds', which are suggested by Dixon et al.'s (2012) paper. The first relates to questions of non-human difference – encouraging the authors to focus on what might be gained from comparing the different ontologies offered in their two case studies. The second examines questions of expertise, dwelling on the skills recounted in the paper under discussions and the epistemological politics that underpin science-art collaboration. The third observation explores the relationships between post-human aesthetics, ethics and politics. In short this commentary suggests that the authors have perhaps been a little humble about the import of their analysis. There are wider implications for geographical thought and practice after the relational turn raised here that are worthy of more extensive discussion.
... Rather than thinking about nature as an entity external to the human, according to numerous authors (Castree, 2013;Menga and Davies, 2020;Peluso, 2012;Swyngedouw, 2011;Williams, 1972) and in line with the perspective of several post-human geographers (Lorimer, 2012;Margulies and Bersaglio, 2018;Panelli, 2010), it is more productive to think about and to politicise natures (plural) by exploring and imagining different possibilities of living together with the other elements and entities populating this planet. Such a take on collective sustainability is coherent with our position as authors of this paper: we maintain that it is useful not to think of sustainability as a single, well-defined condition, one that implies a strict distinction between the two what is sustainable and what is unsustainable. ...
This paper mobilises the idea of impossible worlds to conceptualise and explore inconsistent and illogical visions and ways of living sustainably. Specifically, the paper focuses on an understanding of sustainability based on classic Kantian universalistic ethics (suppose everyone did the same) and relative feelings of responsibility and guilt for the environment. By mobilising three vignettes, the paper argues that impossibility is present in current environmental thinking, and narratives of impossibility have an emotional and political role in shaping popular discourses concerning environmentalism and responsibility. It suggests that exploring glitches, impossibilities, contradictions and inconsistencies may contribute to understanding the role of personal guilt in sustainability narratives, and potentially trigger change.
... The first domain of theory I want to explore is the practical engagement literature. There are without question a number of sub-literatures within this catch-all term, for instance, the environmental perception literature represented by Ingold (2000Ingold ( , 2011 and Eduardo Kohn (2013), the more-than-human wing of non-representational theory, represented by Hayden Lorimer (2006), Jamie Lorimer (2012), Whatmore (2002) and Hinchcliffe (2008), as well as the material engagement movement in archaeology, represented by Renfrew (2004), Knappett (2005) and Malafouris (2013). For simplicity sake, much of the discussion here revolves around Ingold who operates as a strategic anchor for discussing the significance of the practical, the material and the corporeal in the constitution of social life. ...
There has been increasing interest in recent years on the non-cognitive nature of human existence. Self-conscious thought and reflective action are no longer seen to be the defining feature of the human condition nor an anchor for social life. On the contrary, material practice and habitual engagements are the abiding mechanisms by which everyday life is sutured. One of the consequences of this perspective is its abbreviated conception of human consciousness. In the literature on habit and practical engagement, consciousness is conceptualised primarily in terms of self-perception and awareness. The aim of this article is to put forth the thesis that human consciousness is not just an awareness of the self – it is also a ‘claim’. Drawing upon the psycho-analytic work of Jean Laplanche, the paper argues that consciousness emerges as subjects reckon with existential problems that are as imminent to everyday life as the concrete problems and practical tasks. In this framing, consciousness emerges as a desire to claim oneself as a self in the face of problems that exceed our practical capacities. Consciousness is a claim in the sense that it marks a desire to be a self-standing, self-possessed subject, within a precarious and enigmatic world.
We develop the term “the Anthropo-obScene” to show how various discourses on “the Anthropocene” have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and render some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. Examples include consensual narratives of adaptive, resilient, and geo-engineered governance, but also more-than-human ontologies that, in spite their purported radicality, could lead to a problematic strengthening of technomanagerial discourse. With the Anthropo-obScene, we seek to interrupt the deepening of “immunological bio-politics” and a politicization of the socio-ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-humans.
In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.
Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored the natural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a `humanist remain'. Here, we want to make a stronger claim for the value of the aesthetic as a stepping off point for thinking through post-human geographies. We begin by acknowledging a productive tension within Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of sense-making: that is, a series of questions that speak directly to the post-human have been raised by dwelling upon how the aesthetic can be related to bodily needs and desires, as well as a feeling that emerges from the exercise of judgement. Then, we make the argument that, as a means of developing our aesthetic sensibility, geography can usefully further its engagement with art theory and practice. This leads us to ground our own exploration of the post-human in a discussion of two projects created by artist Perdita Phillips. Moving from a consideration of bowerbirds in the savanna to thrombolites in a saline lake, and from evolutionary biology to a Deleuzo -Guattarian geophilosophy, we ask, where is the artistry?
A strategy to understand the microbial components of the human genetic and metabolic landscape and how they contribute to normal physiology and predisposition to disease.
Clever Hans, the famous horse who was believed to be able to count, is generally cited as the paradigm of the influence of the observer. Psychologist Rosenthal has illustrated this phenomenon with his well-known experiment about ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ maze rats. Hans, however, achieved something much more interesting. Hecould not only read human minds through their bodies: he could also influence his questioners to produce gestures he could read as cues for finding the answer. Hans could make human bodies be moved and be affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their owners’ knowledge. The question of ‘influence’ when we read this case becomes therefore far more complicated and interesting. It involves the question of the way bodies can attune, affect and transformeach other. We may follow carefully how scientists of ethological practices create access to the creatures they study, how they are moved by their subjects of interest, and how they give them a chance to be interesting andto articulate other responses. Doing so, we notice that the signs that define subject and object, what talks and what is talked about, subjectivity and objectivity, are redistributed in a new manner. These practices offer a new and pragmatic definition of the body, close to James’s theory of emotions: to have a body is to learn how to feel.
This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.
This ambitious book considers social scientific topics such as identity, community, sexual difference, self, and ecology from a microbial perspective. Harnessing research and evidence from earth systems science and microbiology, and particularly focusing on symbiosis and symbiogenesis, the book argues for the development of a microontology of life.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
There is a growing interest in cultural geography in the potential of moving imagery and moving image methodologies for grasping the more-than-human and non-representational dimensions of life. This paper explores this potential to develop moving image methodologies for witnessing and evoking human-nonhuman interactions. Drawing on recent work in film theory, anthropology and ethology, it develops both a practical methodology and a critical, affirmative vocabulary for unpacking the work done by circulating imagery and engaging with its micropolitical power and promise. This analysis is illustrated through a focus on elephants and images of their behaviours, ecologies and interactions with diverse humans. It outlines how video techniques can be used to witness and make sense of elephant encounters. It then maps and compares four of the many affective logics according to which elephants are evoked in popular moving imagery. It reflects on the techniques and the micropolitics of such evocations, before examining what they offer for new ways of engaging with nonhuman difference. Elephants provide an accessible, popular and telegenic nonhuman case study.
This article reflects on the traditional distinction between scientific laboratories experimenting on theories and phenomena and a political outside where non-experts make do with human values, opinions, and passions. Since today all people are engaged in emerging collective experiments on matters as varied as climate, food, landscape, health, urban design, and technical communication as consumers, militants, and citizens, they can all be considered co-researchers. Co-researching has consequences for our understanding of nature and demands a renewed attention to “multinaturalist” politics. It also questions the division of labor between experts and nonexperts. The article finishes with a call to “dis-invent” modernity so that we “moderns” can finally become ordinary humans again.
As we take stock of biodiversity loss, part of the challenge has been to ‘make present’ those barely visible sites of life and death that characterise this extinction event. In this act of making present is the question of how non-human beings come into being through representational acts. While there are numerous attempts in conservational practices to bring to the fore the relational ties between beings to stress care or affinity across human–non-human worlds, the difficult relations of loss and violence are often excluded from the scene. But, in giving up on violence, which is so clearly part of the relation in biodiversity loss, what do we forego? If, as Judith Butler suggests, grief itself can be made into a resource for politics, which rather than rendering inaction instead cements a commitment to identification, and thus gives itself to relation, might violence lead us somewhere other than into the dark night? Rather, this paper suggests that we consider violence as a constitutive part of our relation to the diversity and dynamism of life on earth. Two things crucially change when we allow violence to be part of the frame; firstly, we begin to understand some of the risks associated with our conceptualisation of relations and the framing of subjects; secondly, by shifting the visual and conceptual frame we begin to address how non-human populations are indirectly targeted and thus can begin to reconstitute our relations in ways that eschew this violence. I argue that an engagement with economies of loss challenges us to reconfigure our understandings of relations beyond our social to our worldly sensibilities. In conclusion the paper suggests that relational approaches to biodiversity loss must be attentive to the ties that are uncovered through violence as much as those made through care.
This paper contributes to a rethinking of the ethical sensibilities of geographical research in the context of an emerging interest amongst geographers in non-representational registers of thinking and moving. Rather than undermining geographical engagements with questions of the ethical, the paper argues that this emerging interest in questions of the non-representational actually extends the range and repertoire of empirical contexts and conceptual vehicles within and with which such an engagement can take place. The paper argues that attending to and through the relation between affect and ethics is particularly important to this effort. The importance of affect in this regard is illustrated through a series of examples drawn from an 18-month participatory encounter with a specific therapeutic practice, Dance Movement Therapy. Drawing upon such examples, the paper offers some lines of ethical potential that might provide orientation to further geographical research. In doing this, the paper concentrates in particular on the necessity of cultivating a fidelity to the affective event of geographical ethics as much as remaining faithful to the subject or object of an ethical code.
Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists. An emergent cohort of “multispecies ethnographers” began to place a fresh emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of organisms whose lives are entangled with humans. Multispecies ethnography emerged at the intersection of three interdisciplinary strands of inquiry: environmental studies, science and technology studies (STS), and animal studies. Departing from classically ethnobiological subjects, useful plants and charismatic animals, multispecies ethnographers also brought understudied organisms—such as insects, fungi, and microbes—into anthropological conversations. Anthropologists gathered together at the Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit, where the boundaries of an emerging interdiscipline were probed amidst a collection of living organisms, artifacts from the biological sciences, and surprising biopolitical interventions.
This paper is about the relationship between nature conservation in theory and nature conservation in practice. I argue that in theory nature conservation is concerned with revealing presence and rendering the present eternal. In practice, the spaces and times of conservation are less clear. Conservationists work with matters of concern that are neither self-evident nor unproblematically co-present. Presence has to be made and re-made. These matters of concern, like rare species, do not always announce themselves to political ecology and they do not always perform to type. Such difficulties are analysed through discussion of practical work conducted in a UK city with field ecologists and nonhuman inhabitants. It is argued that a careful political ecology is one that is intent on making spaces for others that are not simply about presence, inclusion or accumulation. It also involves uncertainties, precautionary measures and looser forms of assemblage.
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in producing a politics for urban wilds. In order to do this we learn how to sense urban wildlife. In learning new engagements we also learn new things and in particular come to see urban wilds as matters of controversy. For this reason we have borrowed and adapted Latour’s language to talk of wild things. Wild things become more rather than less real as people learn to engage with them. At the same time, wild things are too disputed, sociable, and uncertain to become constant objects upon which a stable urban politics can be constructed. So a parliament of wild things might be rather different from the house of representatives that we commonly imagine. It may be closer to what Stengers (1997, Power and Invention University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) has characterised as cosmopolitics, a politics that is worked out without recourse to old binaries of nature and society. Using empirical work with urban wildlife-trust members we muddy the clean lines of representational politics, and start to grapple with issues that a reconvened wild politics might involve.