Cosmopolitics and Place in More-than-human Worlds

The concept of world in its universalist sense of all nations, or the globe, would suggest a singular unit superseding all places. A similar argument has been made about multiculturalism being framed by the assumption of a single nature (Viveiros de Castro, 2012). Yet if we refer to world in the sense of umwelt, worlds are multitudes of lived experiences (Schroer, 2019). Where the one world world reduces difference to different ways of knowing the same assumed reality or to one space containing many places, world-as-umwelt raises the problem of this assumed knowability, making neutral space itself into a manufactured kind of place among many. The question remains: how can we know, for instance, what the lived world of a tick is like? As Morita and Jensen (2012) argue, this question of incommensurability or absolute difference was much more pronounced in the European reception of the ontological turn in anthropology. What is reflected in the first NatureCulture series More-than-human Worlds is instead various attempts to locate cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2010) in more-than-human worlds: not radical incommensurability but practicing a pluriverse in the risky interplay of existences without guarantees of a single shared reality. Each of these entries, I argue, take the diversity of worlds seriously and show us ways of knowing what these lived worlds are like.

Scott Simon (2018), in his contribution to the More-than-human Worlds series, raises a similar question to that of the tick I mentioned above through a parable about Daoist philosopher Zhuangzhi. Zhuangzhi is walking along the river with a companion, when Zhuangzhi comments on how the fish are joyful. His companion asks how he knows the fish he sees are joyful, to which he replies he knows it from the Hao River. Simon’s analysis of the language suggests that a shared experience of traveling leisurely along the Hao river, attentively watching the fish allows him to say this. Simon expands Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall teaching about “two-eyed seeing” (Marshall, 2017) and Gregory Bateson’s (1979) “binocular vision” to say that beings with different knowledges can and do learn from one another by being in place together over time. Slowing down and being with is where working towards coexistence with others can become possible.

Thorsen argues that in the work of Sonia Levy, space is what is opened up for slipping and sliding between worlds: “place is displaced, it becomes a space in-between indiscernible worlds and ways of knowing them” (Thorsen, 2019). In particular, the audiovisual piece I Roam, places the viewer at the intersection of human language, technologies and the point of view of a whale - displaced through a camera, and a narration from a 19th century book written by a whale hunter itself reinterpreted to be from the whale’s perspective. Drawing on the philosophy of Rancière, Thorsen sees in this aesthetic engagement the potential for stories and speculative affinities between worlds to explore more-than-human connections and multiple, layered ways of knowing. The potential of this uneasy in-between afforded by making space also resonates with Stengers’ cosmopolitics. Perhaps just as something had to happen in the world of physics in the late nineteenth century when experimental physics gained access to once invisible forces, new ways of relating are already percolating in the space afforded by new ways of using audiovisual capture and reinterpretations of historical texts, allowing us to slow down and be with another’s world. 

Capture is also a metaphor and a way to relate to more-than-human worlds. Chakad Ojani (2019), drawing on Debaise’s interpretation of Whitehead, argues that capture, as a relation that transforms rather than reduces to the same through force, is generative of worlds. In the hills near the Peruvian capital Lima, biologists studying the fog-capturing ability of trees found their hydrological models overturned, as they realized that a river in these lomas was not in fact sourced in land but continuously replenished by the cycle of fog capture. The traps here, Ojani argues, function as a material interface between worlds, not simply connecting but also disconnecting: changing scientific knowledge to become more fog-like and the unexpected power of fog traps to become more invested with ecological importance.

Cosmopolitics, similar to nature-culture, is not rooted to place as it is indeed defined by the potential of in-betweens. Yet it also has a specific focus on practices for an “openly constructivist approach that affirms the possible, that actively resists the plausible and the probable targeted by approaches that claim to be neutral” (Stengers, 2010: 57).  As Simon, Thorsen and Ojani argue, these worlds are already there: this is not a liberal politics of recognition, but rather one that assumes and takes seriously the reality of these other worlds and builds its relations on this possibility of existence.