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Franca López Barbera
On Design, Consent, and Uncertainty
Does the Tree Say No?
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Fig. 1. Quebracho Colorado. Source: Celulosa Argentina (1975), Li bro del Árb ol II, Buenos Aires:
Agens Publicidad. Wikimedia commons.
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is is the Quebracho Colorado tree, who will be our com-
panion in this talk. Quebracho trees can live up to 150 years
and grow as tall as twenty-five meters. ey blossom from
November to March; their interior is red (colorado means
red in Spanish), and they thrive in the sun and high tem-
peratures – that’s why they grow in the Gran Chaco forest
in South America, which covers sections of Bolivia, Para-
guay, Brazil, and Argentina. is forest is the second most
important territory of the continent in terms of biodiversity
after the Amazon rainforest. Now, I will tell you two stories
about the Quebracho: the first story is that in some areas
of the Gran Chaco in Argentina, it is known that before
approaching a Quebracho tree, one must salute him.1 We
say, “Buenos días, Señor Quebracho”, which means “Good
morning, Mister Quebracho”. is salutation is not only an
acknowledgement of the tree’s presence but also an asking
for permission to be physically close to him. Quebracho trees
can deny permission by “shooting” the person with a heavy
rash that makes their body itch. According to lo cal knowl-
edge and tradition, the way to cure this rash is to return to
the Quebracho tree, oer him a cake of ashes as an apol-
o, and tie a red thread to the trunk as a sign of respect
and a declaration of friendship. e second story of the
Quebracho is the history of the deforestation of Argentina.
During the first half of the 20th century, a British company
settled in the Argentinian Gran Chaco forest and exploited
the Quebracho trees, known for their hard and tannin-rich
wood (tannin is the substance that treats pelt and turns it
into leather). Quebracho wood was used for the extension
of railway tracks and tannin extraction – two key elements
of Argentina’s industrialisation (and deforestation) pro-
cess and what turned this British company into the world’s
biggest tannin producer. After felling 90% of the Quebracho
trees, the company left for South Africa to exploit the sec-
ond most tannin-rich tree in the world, the Mimosa. Today,
the Quebracho Colorado is in danger of extinction.
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WHAT’S IN A QUESTION:
BETWEEN CERTAINTY AND SCEPTICISM
e passage above is the opening of my presentation entitled
“When a Tree Says No: Towards a Consent Framework for
Design-Nature relationships”, delivered at the 5th NERD con-
ference (UdK Berlin 2023), whose contributions are collected
in this anthology. Taking the double hi/story of the Quebracho
as a guiding example, I went on to examine the gendered and
colonial underpinnings of the prevailing modern conceptual-
isations of both nature and consent that underscore design’s
role in reproducing extractive approaches to nature. e pre-
sentation then transitioned to introducing “more-than-human
consent” as a framework for design capable of attending to the
relational, plural, and uncertain dimensions and expressions of
all life, human and nonhuman. I emphasised the need to explore
non-modern principles of relation, acknowledging onto-episte-
mologies that oer alternative frameworks for engaging with
nature to the modern one that is destructive and violent. is
implies a shift from conventional notions of consent as an ex-
clusive human transaction to a more nuanced and generative
understanding of consent as something that can emerge within
more-than-human relations and (re)organise such relationships
in terms of power. is means that consent (or lack thereof)
reflects power relations and can be actively cultivated in and
through design (some aspects will be revisited and further elab-
orated here, others in López Barbera 2024). Drawing from past
presentations and anticipating reactions of suspicion, I incor-
porated the following:
For the sceptics, the focus is not, How can I be certain or
how can I prove whether the tree is “actually” consenting?
but rather to reframe the question: What can the Quebra-
cho story tell me about consent? How does consent manifest
here? How can it expand modern notions of consent and
design?
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In what felt like a déjà vu, the moment of questions ar-
rived, and I was asked:
But how can we make sure that tree consents?
I take the recurrence of this question with a genuine con-
cern, and I am interested in sitting with it here, continuing the
discussion initiated then and there. e double hi/story of the
Quebracho has been thoroughly explored in an earlier article
and mentioned in a paper (see López Barbera 2021, 2024), both of
which also share the first part of the presentation’s title (“When
a Tree Says No”) this essay follows up on. Using the same title
again and again is no accident; the origin of my research on
more-than-human consent is indeed the Quebracho tree, and I
extend my gratitude to him by continuing to share his hi/stories.
At the same time, they are a powerful representation of two
contrasting ways of understanding and relating with nature:
nature as a commodified resource, poised for transformation
into profit – and nature as an agential force that aects and
communicates; a subject-tree capable of consenting. e first
Quebracho story is a conceptualisation, an ethical attitude, a
tradition, and a relational practice, but not only;2 it suggests a
complex phenomenon that exceeds what this description tries to
signal whilst enabling “onto-epistemic openings” (de la Cadena
2020) for design. e armative grammar in the original title is
an unambiguous assertion of this possibility and a declaration
of principles. I intended to do no dierent in this essay, yet that
question continued to echo.
Swapping “When a tree says no” for “Does the tree say
no?” does not seek to cast doubt on the tree’s capacity to consent
but rather to stay with the question and examine its agency and
implications (what asking such a question does). Undoubtedly,
“But how can we make sure that tree consents?” holds significant
value and warrants careful consideration for various reasons:
first, the opening “But” insists on the implausibility of what has
been previously armed, which prompts us to ask: What kind
of knowledge has the power to object to others? Who controls
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knowledge about nature and how to relate to it? Secondly, “how
can we make sure” invokes a seemingly nondescript (universal)
collective authority (who are the “we” in that room?) in the pur-
suit of certainty through a (design?) method. irdly, while “that
the tree consents” does locate consent in the tree, it understands
consent as an individual pursuit instead of a collective practice.
What is more important than the question itself is the kind
of rationality and relationality it stems from and the epistemo-
logical limit that is revealed because of the ontological prejudice
and dogmatism from which that “we” inexorably thinks itself
and the world – the trap of being “reasoned by the reason that
has been reasoned” (Conradi 2021, 16), and a loop design must
escape. Indeed, this question exposes a crisis of design (Fry and
Nocek 2021) amidst broader onto-epistemological tensions. It is
symptomatic of how much design has assimilated the imperative
of modern/colonial logic as the sole descriptor and articulator
of reality and, in that move, reduced its horizon of the possible.
In other words, “it is symptomatic . . . of the forms of capitalist
relationship, for which, in truth, everything that makes up the
environment, the natural space, is taken as a ‘resource’, and
those who converse with the wind or listen to a tree are totally
crazy and lost” (Grosso 2016, 21).
Reframing design-nature relationships through more-than-
human consent marks a departure from conventional Western
perspectives on nature, design, and consent. I do not intend to
engage in a historical revision of the evolution of these terms
in Western thought here; rather, I aim to challenge them and
reconsider how they relate to each other by examining the un-
derlying logics that continue to govern nature, design, and con-
sent. In the following sections, I will problematise these terms
and the practices they invoke by thinking through the concepts
of silence, universality, and uncertainty as they relate to knowl-
edge production. e first section examines the gendered and
colonial/modern conceptualisation of nature and how silencing
local, situated, ecological knowledges has been pivotal in the
making and establishing of this conceptualisation worldwide.
e second section takes on this universalising logic to delve
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into the pervasive influence of scientism in design, highlighting
the challenges posed by ontological perspectives, ultimately ad-
vocating for embracing uncertainty as an emancipatory practice
that expands our understanding of the world beyond traditional
epistemological limits. e third section explores the historical
and contemporary understandings of consent as a transactional
phenomenon, revealing and critiquing its gendered and colonial
underpinnings and its role in perpetuating both human and
nonhuman unequal power dynamics. To conclude, I return to
the central question of this paper and outline what a more-than-
human consent approach to design entails.
DEAFENING NARRATIVES
AND THE PRODUCTION OF SILENCE
While a tension between universalising and situated onto-epis-
temologies (Barad, 2007) is represented within the double hi/
story of the Quebracho, the deforestation of the Gran Chaco –
and the world’s current environmental devastation – is proof
that certain knowledge systems have not been aorded equal
treatment, relevance, or legitimacy in their ability to make sense
of the world. is disparity raises important questions about
how hegemonic knowledge about nature (and how it establishes
a specific type of relationality) is constructed, valued, and dis-
seminated. e perception of nature as a resource derives from
a particular gendering of nature – a narrative and a historical
process that is both patriarchal and colonial and whose origin
is related to the invention and intersection of ideas of gender
and race as social categories, both constructed within and con-
structive of the colonial/modern project.
Since the 1970s, ecofeminist theory has been directly con-
cerned with identifying, challenging, and dismantling the con-
nections between the domination of women and the domination
of nature. Ecofeminist positions (Plumwood 1993; Merchant
1989; Mies 2014) locate the woman-nature association in the
Western intellectual tradition and consider the Enlightenment
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period, guided by rationalised patriarchal science, as the be-
ginning of a series of dualisms that positioned the “human”
(which human?) not only as hyper-separated from nature but as
antagonistic and superior to it. In most pre-modern European
societies, the image of nature was two-sided: nature as a nur-
turing mother, a benevolent and generous female figure (a per-
spective that provided a certain ethical relationality towards
nature) and nature as wild, chaotic, hostile, and violent. Even
though both conceptions of nature were female, the second
one became more prolific after the scientific revolution, as it
called forth the need to control it. To paraphrase Bacon (1624,
as cited in Merchant 1989, 169), nature needed to be forced out
of her uncontrolled state, subdued, and moulded by the hand
of man and technology. A new mechanistic model thus swiftly
defined nature as inert, passive, and dead – a move that became
fundamental in reducing (female) earth to a mere resource for
economic production and justifying her exploitation.
On the flip side, the nature/woman association con-
structed the conceptualisation of the male not only as a biolog-
ical dierential but of the “masculine” as an epistemological
position and orientation defined by the rational scientific mind
not only separate from nature but in complete denial of any
relationship with or dependency on it (Bordo 1986). Western
culture and its intellectual traditions dating back to classical
Greek philosophy have historically conceived the markers of
humanity as masculine (reason, mind, culture) as a means to
control and oppress every body that does not possess them. is
encompasses nature, women, and colonised peoples, as will be
explored below. As they are considered less than rational, they
do not possess full humanity. From this, a set of interrelated
and mutually reinforcing dualisms will organise relationships in
terms of domination-subordination: human-nature, culture-na-
ture, man-woman, reason-emotion, mind-body (mental-manual),
civilised-primitive, subject-object:
e identity of the underside is constructed instrumentally,
and the canons of virtue for a good wife, a good colonised,
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or a good worker are written in terms of usefulness to the
centre. In the typical case, this involves setting up a moral
dualism, where the underside is not part of the sphere to be
considered morally but is either judged by a separate instru-
mental standard (as in the sexual double standard) or seen
as outside morality altogether. (Plumwood 1993, 53)
However, the emergence of European science and
technology and the border of its discourse is not in Europe.
Concurrently, this is the period of the colonial domination of
the Americas. ese were not only simultaneous as historical
parallels, but the former was built upon the latter. Martinican
political scientist and philosopher Malcom Ferdinand (2022)
highlights an under-explored historical phenomenon, which he
calls “the double fracture of modernity,” in which ecology is
separated from decolonial thought. Ferdinand acutely points
out that the former could only unfold on the condition that
colonial history remains silent – a setting that enabled the de-
velopment of discourses and concepts that do not account for
the experience of those colonised. us, concepts such as “the
Anthropocene”, in homogenising the category of human (an-
thropos) as a species, mask the power dynamics and injustices
inherent in ecological devastation, failing to account for the
inequalities of its colonial causes.
e colonisation of the Americas marked the beginning
of the colonial/modern project, a system of domination aect-
ing all aspects of life rooted in the invention of “race” as a
social category that would establish European conquerors as
“naturally” superior to colonial peoples (Quijano 2000). rough
this logic, Whiteness too became a “marker of civilisation”
and, conversely, colonial peoples were constructed as beings
of nature. When race intersects with the gender categories
mentioned above, it positions colonial peoples as outside of the
men-women normativity and thus as outside of humanity: they
were described as possessing gender but in a manner akin to
an animal, devoid of the dichotomous so-called masculine and
feminine traits such as rationality and softness (Lugones 2012).
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e dehumanisation of certain peoples through race and gen-
der is essential for establishing power structures and asserting
dominance over all spheres of existence of those colonised and
enslaved, including their sphere of knowledge.
Colonial/modern knowledge is founded on the very si-
lencing and erasure of Indigenous, local, situated, ecological
knowledges. While arising from a distinct cultural context,
Eurocentrism projects itself as universal. Modern science has
successfully imposed itself globally as the only knowledge re-
gime capable of understanding and describing the world through
the colonial expansion of Europe and the suppression of any
alternative episteme that does not follow Western rationality.
is professed universality could not have been achieved with-
out the exploitation of nature in the Americas, which provided
Europe with endless “natural resources” to continue pursuing
its colonial expansion over other regions of the world (Dussel
2000 via Ciriza 2018, 67) and over other ways of understanding
and relating to the world. Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (2021)
eloquently asks, “Could it not be said that for a tree, it is the
human who is mute?” What this question does is to challenge the
limited Western understanding of the meaning-making capa-
bilities of nonhumans, while simultaneously bringing attention
to the construction of what he calls “the myth of the voiceless”.
Ghosh argues that the core issue of the current planetary crisis
is the result of a particular group of people having historically
actively marginalised others by portraying them as “brutes” and
thus as “incapable of articulation and agency”. Being conflated
with nature, he explains, “also meant that this part of humanity
was excluded from ‘History’, which was the exclusive domain of
the civilised or ‘historical’ nations” (Ghosh 2021, 187). In turn,
the erasure of forms of knowledge that are capable of relat-
ing with “nonhuman forms of agency and expression” renders
nonhumans as lacking epistemological capabilities, too (Ghosh
2021, 203). is implies the delegitimisation of gendered ways of
life; the forms of knowledge related to community, care, crafts,
planting, reciprocity, and the like (Lugones 2012) – any ontology
of continuity and interrelation with nature that considers non-
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humans epistemological partners, like in the first Quebracho
story.When we talk about environmental devastation, it is not
only nature in its Western (gendered and colonial) reductionist
conceptualisation as a material resource that faces destruc-
tion but also and essentially nature in its broader non-modern
ontological sense, as an interrelational place for the produc-
tion of life and where relationships and knowledge are shaped
(Escobar 2015). In the case of the Gran Chaco’s deforestation,
it is not only the material presence of Quebracho trees that has
been destroyed but also their agency and their voice. Relating
to a Quebracho as a being capable of consent entails engaging
with a vision of the world that Western rationality not only fails
to comprehend but actively obliterates.
SPOILER ALERT: WE CAN’T MAKE SURE
What we call nature – or the lack thereof – and how we relate
to it are a testament to models and processes (designs) of pro-
duction (and destruction) that created both the material and
conceptual landscapes of the present. Design theorist Anne-
Marie Willis (2006) argues that ontological designing “implies
dierent ways of understanding how we, as modern subjects,
‘are’ and how we come to be who/what we are in the modern
world” (80). Ontological design deals with the condition and
behaviour of design (what design is and does) and outlines
that designing is a an inherent part of being human across
cultures; “a decision and direction embodied in all things hu-
mans deliberately bring into being” (Kalantidou and Fry 2014,
1). erefore, things designed can be objects, systems, or pro-
cesses, both material and immaterial (buildings, manufactured
goods, communication systems, as well as systems of thought
and habits of mind or language). rough our interaction with
the designed, we are also designed (Willis 2006); the agency of
the designed is not only embedded by but actually beyond the
designer’s conscious intention. As such, ontological designing is
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a human-decentred practice (things as well as people design) and
an all-encompassing activity that creates and configures ways
of being, experiences, values, and ways of relating (Fry 2007),
i.e., worlding (Haraway 2008) or design as active world-making.
Design theorist and historian Clive Dilnot synthesises this by
claiming that “what design designs are the relations between
things and persons and things and nature” and points out that
“nonethical design reduces these to commodity [or] utilitarian
operative relations” (Dilnot 2009, 183).
Modernity/coloniality is a project and a process directed
to bring into being a particular world (a design) based on a
relation of control and exploitation of nature at the service
of capitalist modes of production and social reproduction. In
turn, design (as discourse and practice) emerged and has been
configured (itself designed) by coloniality (Kiem 2017). In other
words, “all modern notions of design are products of the rise
of post-Enlightenment reason. Design’s development is insep-
arable from the attempt to rationally order the world, to com-
mand ‘nature’ ” (Fry 1988, 17). An ontological perspective, thus,
entails a more profound and broader understanding of, first
the Quebracho (nature) in a non-modern sense, as an agential
subject as well as what enables relations to emerge, develop,
and be sustained; and second, of the relation between design
and nature not only from the material aspect of the tree as a
means to a material or nonmaterial end, but the material and the
immaterial as mutually constituted and constituent of a world.
When design encounters a tree and transforms the tree (e.g.
into railway tracks and tannin), it transforms a world. How can
design – a discipline that works within and normalises modern
capitalist and extractive logics – relate with nature otherwise?
Certainly, modern/colonial logics are as pervasive as they
are elusive, and design is also riddled with scientistic biases.
Scientism, in essence, is the conviction that the understanding
of reality can only be derived from science and rational logic
(including questions on ethics). Scientism is not simply appre-
ciating science as a valuable form of knowledge (and the tech-
nological advancements it has produced); it is instead holding
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science as the only form of knowledge to have epistemic value
(van Woudenberg et al. 2018). Although it may be inadvertently
embraced, scientism leads to severe epistemic implications as
it entails not only the exclusion of any other form of knowledge
but, conversely, that what cannot be achieved by scientific rea-
soning is neither real nor true and therefore not worth examin-
ing further either (Gasparatou 2017). It often follows that if an
exploration resorts to non-empirical Western forms of knowl-
edge and methods – for instance, historically gendered prac-
tices such as the ones outlined above – it is not only met with
disdain but may be relegated to the realm of “belief” rather than
truth or facts. Feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway
(1997) critiques the tendency to uphold modern science as an
unquestionable authority and challenges the idea that scientific
knowledge can provide absolute certainty. She argues against
the idealisation of objectivity; a narrative claiming that science
oers a neutral, value-free understanding of the world (and
here I ask, who is this neutral, “epistemologically invisible” yet
credible we that seeks to make sure?).3 Haraway emphasises the
importance of acknowledging not only the partiality and com-
plexity inherent in scientific inquiries but also that the pursuit
of certainty in science often involves the exclusion of multi-
ple perspectives and a lack of reflection on the situatedness of
scientific practices within their specific cultural and historical
contexts. While it is (widely but not suciently) acknowledged
that “scientific knowledge is a particular kind of knowledge”
and has its limits (de Ridder 2018, 190) and that knowledge is
always contextual (Feyerabend 1987) and situated (Haraway
1988), scientism is still – however implicitly – invoked, denot
-
ing an unchecked reliance on modern scientific methods and
a fascination with the quest for “universal truths” and, in the
case of the central question motivating this text, an uncritical,
ahistorical, and un-situated conception of nature and design.
Bound by Western epistemologies, design defaults to an-
thropocentrism (the very one Ferdinand critiques above) and
struggles to think itself outside of it, let alone envision alter-
native horizons. Faced with a tree that consents, the modern
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impulse expresses itself first by objecting (“But”) and then by
putting the (hu)man (“we”) back at the centre (both grammat-
ically and epistemologically) and towards a place of certainty.
Indeed, absolute certainty is a modern preoccupation and de-
lusion. In other words, “How can we make sure?” is a self-con-
straining follow-up question because it thinks the question of
nature, design, and consent from the modern relational logics
(and the modern nature) that more-than-human consent tries to
escape. What is the exit strategy?
Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2021) pro-
poses “not knowing” as a disposition for when one is confronted
with what seems “beyond the limits of the possible” in terms of
the requirements of modern epistemology (247). De la Cadena
explains that to practice not knowing comes from her collabo-
ration with her friend Mariano Turpo, a Quechua speaker who
“would insist that what to [her] was (for example, a mountain)
was not only that. And it was possible that [she] could eventu-
ally not know what it not only was!” (de la Cadena 2020, 389).
Not knowing is a sort of suspended state (of modern disbelief)
and a space where that which exceeds her capacities to know
what is, is as real as it is inaccessible for her (and may forever
remain so). Not knowing is not “not knowing yet”; rather, it is
a practice and a method, “a dierent form of knowing […] that
accepts the challenges posed by that which it interrogates” (de
la Cadena 2021, 250). In this way, not knowing is also an emanci-
patory practice as it escapes the modern loop of only validating
reality through the standards that this – fully graspable and
thus restricted and restrictive – reality considers valid. To exist
in that space, she explains, requires “a dierent kind of we”
that does not depart from an “us-them” distinction that estab-
lishes epistemic hierarchy, but rather a we that is made with and
through a shared onto-epistemological contact zone and keeps
the conversation going:
... a fractal space where [Mariano’s] practices and mine
overlapped and diverged. ... It implied the composition of
a “we” that maintained radically present the divergences
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that made our encounter: “we” would not have been able
to converse without those divergences, or our conversation
would have been another. (de la Cadena 2021, 250)
Allowing and embracing one’s practice to be aected by
that which is and at the same time is unknown to me/us (a nd,
above all, resisting the modern urge to interpret it is an experi-
ence of cognitive dissonance that needs to be resolved) can be
generative as it creates the onto-epistemic openings (as a condi-
tion of possibility) for the emergence of modes of relating that
not only do not meet but defy current empirical requirements of
modern epistemology (de la Cadena 2021). So, it is not certainty
but quite the opposite that can bring us closer to more-than-
human consent. In other words, more-than-human consent is as
uncertain and seemingly unattainable as it is possible.
AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EVERYTHING
OTHER, TOWARDS THE POSSIBILITY OF THE MANY
Human persons (or the specific collectives they form) have his-
torically constituted the paradigmatic subjects of consent, and
almost all of the literature is based on and representative of
this model (Kleinig 2010). Since its inception, from Antiquity to
Modernity, consent has been central in the organisation of the
Western world’s political, social, and economic relationships.
For the Greeks and Romans, consent played a fundamental role
in shaping social, political, and economic relations and devel-
oping their robust systems of law. e idea that government
is legitimised by the “collective consent” of the governed was
integral to their political organisation, and “individual consent”
was fundamental to expanding the economic power of the
Roman Empire (Lee 2018; Sullivan 2016). However, collective
consent was not necessarily a reflection of the will of the peo-
ple but of a few wise men, and consensual transactions among
individuals were restricted to free men. Women and enslaved
people were not considered capable of and did not have the
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right to consent, either entirely or to some degree. Women could
participate in some transactions through the representation of
their husbands, and enslaved people would only participate in
transactions as humans (otherwise as the objects being trans-
acted) when acting on behalf of their owners (Lee 2018). So,
although consent was central in Antiquity’s political thought, it
emerged in relation to masculinity, citizenship, and reason, and
it was only the privilege of a few.
During the Enlightenment, there was a strong revival of
Antiquity’s writings as a way to emancipate thought and morals
from the control of the Church. Greco-Roman rule of govern-
ment and society is the foundational model of Western political
thought and legal sciences through which the basis of Modern
Western ideas of “liberty”, “equality”, and “democracy” has been
built. But what kind of freedom and democracy? Dominican
historian Dan-el Padilla Peralta points out that “Classics is a
Euro-American foundation myth” (Poser 2021). What he means
by this is that the historical White-leading interpretation of
Antiquity that started during the Enlightenment has been not
only a model for modern ideas about power, ethics, and nature
but also deeply instrumental to the invention of Whiteness and,
thus, in justifying slavery, race science, and colonialism. English
philosophers Hobbes and Locke were central figures in devel-
oping political thought during the Enlightenment. Unlike the
medieval period in which government was legitimised by “col-
lective” consent through representative bodies, Hobbes argued
that consent should come “voluntarily” from each “naturally
free and equal” individual (Lee 2018). For Hobbes, voluntary
consent can be expressed by “words spoken” (Hobbes 1991 [1651],
120) or inferred either by silence or by an action – any of these
three cases would indicate “the will of the contractor” (Hobbes
1991 [1651], 94): “even submission secured through fear, threats,
or sheer coercion ... always counts as a valid form of consent
resulting from rational calculation” (Lee 2018, 16). Hobbes
argued that authoritarian regimes or “a de facto power of a
usurping conqueror – a commonwealth ‘by acquisition’” – are
still technically governments based on consent “so long as the
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conquered subject does not resist” (Lee 2018, 16). But who are
these free and equal subjects? While presented as an abstraction
with universal applicability, consent was very much embodied:
being human, which meant being a European, Christian, white,
heterosexual, upper-class, cisgender man, was a prerequisite of
reason and being worthy of moral consideration and, therefore,
capable of consenting. e early modern discourse surrounding
consent was dominated by an elite group of European men who
defined it in relation to masculinity and Whiteness in order to
protect and privilege the institutions and structures of moder-
nity while masking and perpetuating unequal power dynamics
instead of distributing power and making many worlds possible,
which is one of the most significant capabilities and, to me, the
core purpose of consent.
Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2015b) asks,
“Can design become a means for fostering the pluriverse?” e
pluriverse is a vision that promotes the coexistence of many
ways of understanding, doing, and being in the world – as spo-
ken by the Zapatistas, it is a world where many worlds fit (“Un
mundo donde quepan muchos mundos”). is question, which
is an ontological design concern, is posed in the thick of a so-
cio-ecological crisis within which design is not only embedded
but also responsible for (Fry and Nocek 2021). To do so, Escobar
argues, design needs to break free itself from its modern/colo-
nial legacy and redirect itself towards practices that “interrupt”
these anthropocentric, rationalistic, and universal binary logics
towards alternative modes of existence, knowledge, and action.
Indeed, what is at stake in this transition is a re-design of de-
sign. With this in mind, a more-than-human consent approach
to design seeks to articulate sustainable, less prescriptive, and
more just ways of relating with nature. It identifies consent as
a situated practice that is respectful, generative, and plural in
contradistinction to the universalising and eacing ambition
of the modern/colonial project, where more-than-human con-
sent is not a solution, a method, or a tool but a condition of
design. Ultimately, the overarching question that concerns me
and drives this project is, How can design be practised as a
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form of more-than-human consent? But first, what is up with
consent today?
Contemporary Western conceptualisations and applica-
tions of consent draw heavily from the long tradition of politi-
cal philosophy (Müller and Schaber 2018), as elaborated above.
Consent is now widely understood within ethical, legal, and po-
litical sciences as something that a person gives to another to
make an action permissible that would otherwise be forbidden;
it is defined as a transaction between A and B over something
XYZ (Kleinig 2010). For instance, a person may consent to a
friend borrowing their car, to having a friend over for dinner, to
another’s sexual advances, or to undergo surgery. Without con-
sent, these actions would constitute robbery, trespass, rape, and
assault. e existence or absence of consent defines and trans-
forms relationships in the present and in the future. Consent
acts like an agreement between parts about something that sets
in motion a series of exchanges, responsibilities, rights, and
obligations – like a marriage or signing a work contract. ese,
in turn, define the scope and limits of what we are consenting
to. Consent is both the thing that is given and the act through
which this consent is given, and it is used broadly to refer to a
moral phenomenon (Dougherty 2021) that can turn a wrong into
a right (Hurd 1996). Consent can be implicit, explicit, verbal, in
writing, or through a particular behaviour; it happens all the
time, in various forms, and at many scales.
However, this standard (and historical) conceptualisation
of consent as a transaction is also based on the gender dif-
ferentials that the ecofeminists observed govern the dualistic
worldview and define relationships in terms of domination-sub-
ordination. For consent to occur this way, it requires an active
part that initiates it (asks) and a passive part that gives it or
withholds it (Pateman 1980). When we re-examine the two im-
ages of nature mentioned earlier, only the passive one was given
moral consideration, while the other deserved total subjuga-
tion – with coloniality, this second version of nature included
all colonial peoples. Feminist considerations argue that delving
into the uncharted narrative of women and consent unveils the
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underlying paradoxes and double standards within consent the-
ory; while women embody those who have been deemed unable
to consent, they have been portrayed as “always consenting”
with their explicit nonconsent often dismissed as irrelevant or
reinterpreted as a form of consent (Pateman 1980, 150). Only
a passive femininity is seen as capable of consenting, and this
is a femininity (or a nature) described as generous and giving,
resulting in an assumed “yes”.
e modern colonial/gendered logic of consent not only
defines who or what is worthy of moral consideration and thus
allowed to participate in a consent situation, but if and when
that consent situation exists, it also indicates the status of the
parties involved. By considering who requests and who receives
it, consent reveals the power dynamics between them. So, the
presence or absence of consent and how it operates are deter-
mined by the power structures of a given society at a given time.
Anti-consensual logics perpetuate a notion of otherness as infe-
rior and subordinate, a dynamic reinforced by what Argentinian
feminist anthropologist Rita Segato calls the fundamental pre-
cept of extractivism: “the reification of life”. is principle, she
continues, intertwined with and articulated through patriarchy
and coloniality, forms “the perfect equation of power” for the
domination and exploitation of gendered (human and nonhu-
man) bodies, knowledges, and practices (Segato 2021). Consent
cannot be separated from the (material and immaterial) condi-
tions that make a consent act possible, including how consent
is conceptualised and by whom. At the same time, consent in-
carnates these power relations, boundaries, and obligations that
it itself determines and makes possible. Consent is a situated
practice that embodies and simultaneously produces a whole
network of power relations, making worlds possible or not.
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A WILLFUL ETHICS OF UNCERTAINTY4
Let us now return to the last part of our question: “that the
tree consents?” Granted, the tree may consent here, but this
fragment references the tree as the “object” in a question wholly
formu late d in wh at de la C adena w ou ld c al l “a habitu al sub-
ject and object grammar” (de la Cadena 2019, 49). In this binary
logic of separation, three things manifest: (1) a we-human-sub-
ject asks for consent, and a tree-nonhuman-object gives it or
withholds it. is scenario reflects the transactional gendered
model explained above where consent is (expected to be) passed
on from nature to humans in a yes/no operation; (2) consent
occurs through a sort of “on demand” logic where only a we-hu-
man-subject is capable of summoning it; and (3) on a meta-level,
this we-human-subject must (as a requirement) and can (as a
condition of possibility) validate a tree-nonhuman-object agency
for the consent transaction to “actually” occur. According to
the logic that the question presupposes, consent would occur
as long as it is recognised and thus legitimated by he-who-asks.
A more-than-human approach to consent seeks to think
outside modern grammar. It refuses to separate human agency
from nature’s agency, it refuses to think of consent as a trans-
action, and it refuses the impossibility of what is uncertain,5
which – and this is critical – does not mean assuming “yes”;
that would be thinking shortcuts through the gendered/colonial
logics of imposition that it tries to escape. More-than-human
consent does not reside exclusively in humans or nonhumans
but is distributed within more-than-human assemblages (hu-
mans, the natural, and the artificial). For instance, in the case
of the Quebracho, a greeting that implies acknowledgement is
an instance (and an expression) of consent. Returning to the
tree and oering him a cake of ashes as an apology for not
honouring this consent situation (i.e. making amends) is also an
instance of consent. Hence, a gift is an expression of consent.
Here, consent is not only distributed among a person and a
tree but also among the salutation, the cake of ashes, and the
red thread. More-than-human consent is a relational (material
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and spatial) practice both enacted by and made through hu-
man-nonhuman interaction. is means that consent can also
be actively produced. e components mentioned earlier enable
the realisation of consent; they create the conditions that make
a consent situation possible. at is, not to think of consent as
that which declares and guarantees the occurrence of a defined
event and that which determines how that event is supposed to
occur but to think of consent as the process through which that
event is created and shaped.
“But, how can we make sure that the tree consents?” A
more-than-human approach to consent refuses to answer this
question altogether and reformulates it by thinking through de
la Cadena’s grammar: a we that encompasses both the human
and the Quebracho, as well as the relation between them, the red
thread, the cake of ashes, and the Gran Chaco forest; a we that
is made through relating, through the salutation, making the
cake of ashes, returning, and gifting; a we that not only attends
to and stays with the onto-epistemological uncertainties of this
relation but is also nurtured by it. Let me end by conjuring that
we and ask instead, How can we bring more-than-human con-
sent into being?
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ENDNOTES
1 Here, t he Quebracho is u nderstoo d as a
male subject. To speak of the Quebracho
from a situated perspective, I use the
pronoun “him” instead of “it” from this
point forward.
2 de la Cadena proposes “not only” as a
practice and a strategy to acknowledge
both the multiplicity and the limits of
description and translation between
worlds (see de la Cadena 2020). is is
fur ther elab orate d in Se ction 2.
3 is question follows Haraway’s figure of
“the mode st wi tness”, who se “se lf-inv isi-
bility” is instrumental in the fabrication
of objectivity but is, in fact, embodied in
“the specifically modern, European,
masculine, [and] scientific form” (Har-
away 199 7, 23).
4 I use “wilful” here as defined by Sara
Ahmed, denoting an act of disobedience
against imposed structures and norms.
Ahmed posits that the distinction
between “will” and “willful” has to do
with where power is located; a “gram-
mar,” she says, that “order[s] human
experience, [and] distribut[es] moral
worth” (Ahmed 2014, 2).
5 Here, it is worth noting that most of the
literature on consent has primarily
drawn from legal, medical, and psycho-
logical frameworks. e standard view is
that for consent to occur, it must fulfil
the requirements of “valid consent”:
voluntary, informed, and competent.
However, it is increasingly recognised
that this model may not adequately
capture the complexities of consent
transactions, particularly in cases where
consent, while technically “valid”, may
lead to harmful outcomes for the con-
senting party (Bullock 2018). Addition-
ally, scholars have referred to concepts
such as “defective consent” and “hypo-
thetical consent” to address situations
where the conditions for valid consent
are not fully met but occur nonetheless
(see Miller and Wertheimer 2010). ese
discussions highlight the need for more
nuanced approaches to understanding
consent beyond traditional criteria.
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