Module II.
More-than-human Ecologies and Coexistence
Mar. 11th — Apr. 10th 2024
Within the framework of the Phonocene, described by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret as a possible era of sound, we will explore how active listening allows us to access new ways of inhabiting the territory and create new modes of care and kinship among critters, human or not. Through the lens of queer ecology and non-western cosmologies, we will explore different topics that promote new ways to rethink our relationship with non-human entities and ecosystems in order to generate new possibilities for the recomposition of terrestrial ecological communities. These types of non-binary thinking and embodiment function as tools to break the taboos of coexistence and social constructions that come with inhabiting human cultures.
Sessions Module II.
De-anthropocentric ontologies and anti-humanism
Decentering the anthropos is not enough to overcome the lethal ideals of humanism and build a genuinely solidary multispecies alliance based on the productive and immanent force of all human and non-human life on Earth. What is crucial, moreover, is a profound reconceptualization of subjectivity that does not confuse it with rational and conscious human autonomy or with neoliberal, self-referential, and self-indulgent individualism, but recognizes our historical, material and situated embeddedness with non-human agents as always already constitutive of our dynamic identities. We need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human (including the millions of symbiotic microorganisms that compose it), animals, fungi, plants, bacteria, and the planet as a whole.
Affect and coexistence
The politics of affect and interrelation traced from some of the most far-reaching contemporary feminisms are indispensable to destabilizing the socio-political layers implicit in the inherited image of the natural that we are constantly trying to destabilize. In a context presided over by genetically rigid and techno-directed subjectivities, we need to foster new theoretical frameworks from which to reclaim radical imagination and artistic or cultural creation as an engine for envisioning new ways of co-inhabiting and co-existing on a severely damaged planet. We must open our sensibilities to difference and establish post-Darwinist and feminist ethics as tools to rewrite the history of that which escapes the norm as another of the histories necessary to understand the cartographies and genealogies of the present.
Phonocene: Ecologies of listening
The temporality of non-ocular sensories can sensitize us to other forms of care and kinship that we are not so used to, culturally. Within the framework of the Phonocene, described by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret as a possible era of sound, listening, and sound are reclaimed as vehicles to access new ways of inhabiting the territory and the current ecological crisis. From this perspective, the first act and the basis for the implementation of coexisting ecologies lie in actively listening to the voices of those who surround us, humans and non-humans, artificial and organic, imagined and real. Field recording research and sound art thus emerge as important performative and artistic practices for the dissolution of the human/animal binomial. By switching away from the supremacy of the visual, they can generate empathy, care, and sensibility towards “otherhood”.
Perspectivism and non-western cosmologies
Viveiros de Castro and Adolfo Chaparro describe the ritualistic anthropophagus act of Amerindian societies as leading to an incessant proliferation of subject positions in perpetual becoming that endowed with meaning a social whole including various types of deities and spirits and excluding neither nonhuman forms of life nor the dead. For these cultures, which took the war as a primordial metaphysical fact, all beings (alive or dead, human, vegetal, spiritual or animal...) were conceived as integral parts of a cosmic reality in which they could potentially be devoured by others, thus participating in the interspecific –and never exclusively material– exchange of creation-predation. Thus, humans did not hold a master position: they took part in an eco-cosmological complex of which they temporarily incarnated just one of the many possible perspectives. Being human depended on the point of view.
Queer worldings and rituals
Recent theoretical-critical and scientific interest in queer ecologies and animalities demonstrate the connection between the control of sexuality and the increasing destruction of non-human life forms, as well as the way in which these kinds of queer attachments and becomings, far from undermining the reproduction and continuity of species, help to strengthen them: the more diverse the species, the more resistant it is to external threats and disease. Moreover, according to these approaches, queer exuberance –broadly understood– would be the main engine of life, since it is precisely this form of desire and existence that generates the experimental, co-adaptive, and symbiotic conditions that constitute evolution.
De-anthropocentric ontologies and anti-humanism
Decentering the anthropos is not enough to overcome the lethal ideals of humanism and build a genuinely solidary multispecies alliance based on the productive and immanent force of all human and non-human life on Earth. What is crucial, moreover, is a profound reconceptualization of subjectivity that does not confuse it with rational and conscious human autonomy or with neoliberal, self-referential, and self-indulgent individualism, but recognizes our historical, material and situated embeddedness with non-human agents as always already constitutive of our dynamic identities. We need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human (including the millions of symbiotic microorganisms that compose it), animals, fungi, plants, bacteria, and the planet as a whole.
Affect and coexistence
The politics of affect and interrelation traced from some of the most far-reaching contemporary feminisms are indispensable to destabilizing the socio-political layers implicit in the inherited image of the natural that we are constantly trying to destabilize. In a context presided over by genetically rigid and techno-directed subjectivities, we need to foster new theoretical frameworks from which to reclaim radical imagination and artistic or cultural creation as an engine for envisioning new ways of co-inhabiting and co-existing on a severely damaged planet. We must open our sensibilities to difference and establish post-Darwinist and feminist ethics as tools to rewrite the history of that which escapes the norm as another of the histories necessary to understand the cartographies and genealogies of the present.
Phonocene: Ecologies of listening
The temporality of non-ocular sensories can sensitize us to other forms of care and kinship that we are not so used to, culturally. Within the framework of the Phonocene, described by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret as a possible era of sound, listening, and sound are reclaimed as vehicles to access new ways of inhabiting the territory and the current ecological crisis. From this perspective, the first act and the basis for the implementation of coexisting ecologies lie in actively listening to the voices of those who surround us, humans and non-humans, artificial and organic, imagined and real. Field recording research and sound art thus emerge as important performative and artistic practices for the dissolution of the human/animal binomial. By switching away from the supremacy of the visual, they can generate empathy, care, and sensibility towards “otherhood”.
Perspectivism and non-western cosmologies
Viveiros de Castro and Adolfo Chaparro describe the ritualistic anthropophagus act of Amerindian societies as leading to an incessant proliferation of subject positions in perpetual becoming that endowed with meaning a social whole including various types of deities and spirits and excluding neither nonhuman forms of life nor the dead. For these cultures, which took the war as a primordial metaphysical fact, all beings (alive or dead, human, vegetal, spiritual or animal...) were conceived as integral parts of a cosmic reality in which they could potentially be devoured by others, thus participating in the interspecific –and never exclusively material– exchange of creation-predation. Thus, humans did not hold a master position: they took part in an eco-cosmological complex of which they temporarily incarnated just one of the many possible perspectives. Being human depended on the point of view.
Queer worldings and rituals
Recent theoretical-critical and scientific interest in queer ecologies and animalities demonstrate the connection between the control of sexuality and the increasing destruction of non-human life forms, as well as the way in which these kinds of queer attachments and becomings, far from undermining the reproduction and continuity of species, help to strengthen them: the more diverse the species, the more resistant it is to external threats and disease. Moreover, according to these approaches, queer exuberance –broadly understood– would be the main engine of life, since it is precisely this form of desire and existence that generates the experimental, co-adaptive, and symbiotic conditions that constitute evolution.