Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics

The Anthropocene → The Dithering: The Anthropocene continues to be the endearing term used — popular, specifically in academic bubbles. “We, human people everywhere, must address intense, systemic urgencies; yet, so far, as Kim Stanley Robinson put it in 2312, we are living in times of “The Dithering”, a “state of indecisive agitation.” Perhaps the... See more

We realised that the tools we have created to master the world are re-mastering us. But more importantly, it became evident, that the desire for mapping, tweaking and ultimately, controlling, deeply complex systems is hubristic. As Tega Brain writes in her exceptional essay “we must acknowledge how deeply entrenched we are within a computational wo... See more

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

As we sway between doom and denial, we are stuck in what Lauren Berlant calls a ‘State of Impasse’ — a moment where existing social imaginaries and practices no longer produce the outcomes they once did, but no new imaginaries or practices have yet been created.

Systems → Assemblages; Nodes → Knots: Social theorist Manuel Delanda adopted the term ‘assemblage’ to argue that social bodies on all scales are best analysed through their individual components. Assemblages are diverse, indeterminate and precarious. Our journeys through assemblages are drawn in numerous, ever-changing knots, rather than static nod... See more

A politics that gives us a new kind of relational agency to help us imagine alternatives for living with and through global warming. A politics which allows us to invent new practices of more-than-human care, humility, imagination, interdependence, resistance, revolt, loss, mourning and resurgence.

now, more than ever, we need to reject the division within ourselves, between ourselves, and from the deep ecology that sustains us. Because we don’t exist in isolation, we never have. And we are now entering a time where we face our own destruction if we continue to live in the illusion of isolation.

ideologies are more like memetic infections than philosophical choices: self-replicating ecologies of ideas looking for the right psychological conditions to parasitise their hosts and reproduce.

We are a collective body of many parts, both inside and out. By seeing the self not as an individual hero, but as one among many — human and non-human — a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species politics of care might emerge, as Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre would argue.