un/predictable environments
A space for conversation, analysis, and inquiry following the Un/Predictable Environments Conference, May 20-21, 2021
At our virtual conference Un/predictable Environments, I came across many thought-provoking statements. One was particularly evocative. It consisted of just two words: ‘Dear Forest’ Canadian anthropologist and novelist Hilary Cunningham Scharper chose them as the main title of her Keynote speech, a roller coaster of (imagined) sounds, images and silences that aimed to give voice to more than human worlds (Fig 1). She noted that ‘landscapes (...) are filled with other than human entities, manifestations and presences’, meaning that ‘we cannot comfortably assume that we are the most important species, standing above the rest of nature as a superior lifeform’. Consequently, we cannot claim single authorship or assume that we can translate nonhuman intensities into modes of speech. Throughout her talk, Cunningham Scharper wondered how she could explore nonhuman affectivity and describe processes of non/human co-becoming. Her utterance of the words ‘Dear forest’ embodied that attempt. She use the words to address the trees that she had encountered, acknowledging their active presence and approaching them as individual manifestations and beings. In the past two centuries, she argued, forests have experienced all kinds of human desires and impacts. They have witnessed the removal of first Nation people and their forced settlement in reservations, and have suffered from the extractavist actions of the relentless lumber industry. The trees around her, she said, indexed agency and co-authorship of place. The trees also encouraged her to reflect on the limits of conventional ethnographic representation. She responded to their twisted shapes, movements and changing appearances, and compared their meandering growth with her own professional struggles and her decision to turn to literature. I looked at the silent film clip of the forest that she showed as she spoke, and glimpsed at her face in front of a similar image that merged into one visual reality in Zoom space. I wondered if she noticed the virtual crossover (Fig 2). (click read more to continue) Aware of the person-centred bias of her association of twists and turns, she sensed that the forest looked back in anger, reminding her of the ‘ugly colonial past’ that had left traces of destruction, and called for justice. In another forest, she saw species of trees that had been untouched by humanity as their trunk shapes were ‘unprofitable as prospective pieces of lumber’. They stretched their branches up high, joyfully playing with the wind. She yearned to ‘understand the nature of their affection’, but realised the limitations of her capacity as human being. This is when she started writing a series of letters, all addressed to ‘Dear forest’, in which she further explored its authorship. When she ended her presentation, I was both spell bound and encouraged to think further about the possibility of ‘giving voice’. If we want to communicate with non-human entities, what kind of representational strategies can we develop? And what are the potential problems of the language of ‘giving voice’? I had started thinking about these issues when, early on during the first lockdown in March 2020, I wrote a short story in which I described a conversation between myself and a buoy that was floating in the harbour of my adopted hometown (Bangor, County Down) https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/happ/2020/04/26/encounters-in-lockdown/ (Fig 3). Up to then, I had explored questions around the agency and force of material artefacts, and had analysed the affective relationality of people, things and places, but had never animated an object in my writings (Svašek 2007; 2012; 2018; 2019; 2020; Svašek and Meyer; 2016 Komarova and Svašek 2018). My decision to evoke a human-like presence that could ‘talk’ reflected my longing for company, at a time when the town was eerily quiet and my body was becoming newly attuned to a landscape that was both familiar and strange. Material objects and non-human species like trees, however, are not human beings and don’t have the power to verbally express themselves. While it is useful to consider the interaction of physical and material intensities within a single theoretical framework, the analytical distinction between human and non-human actants must be maintained. The pandemic and its rising rates of infection and death have made this crystal clear: things don’t have the human capacity to reproduce, but have a quality that mortal bodies lack: they can potentially survive their makers, and often do. Unlike vulnerable humans, they are unaffected by the viruses they carry on their surface. Their potential to ‘communicate’ with people lies in their ability to attract their attention through material presence, and offer affordances that allow, shape and refuse human action and imagination. Hilary was captivated by the shape, movement and sound of trees. My eyes were drawn to the buoy because of its bright orange colour and its roundness that contrasted with the surrounding mass of water. Like Hilary, I did not really hear the sound of an actual voice, but, encouraged by sensorial perception, decided to ‘listen’ and imagine a conversation. "In the last few decades, an increasing number of scholars across disciplines have argued for ‘deeper and more sensitive listening as a means to recognising the “voices” of both human and nonhuman environmental ‘others’ (Revill 2021: 122). Christopher Manes (1992), for example, called for an environmental ethics to undo ‘the silence of nature’, and Bruno Latour (1993) suggested that the perspective of ‘a parliament of things’ would give a ‘voice’ to ‘nature’. George Revill (2021: 122), however, warned against a human-centric discourse that associates ‘voice’ with human consciousness and reflexive agency. Instead, he drew on Hegel’s approach to ‘communication’ that regards ‘subjects as intertwined with objects, selves as intertwined with others, and meaning as public rather than psychological’ (Revill 2021: 128). The analytical focus, he argued, should be on the ways in which species create common worlds. He called for an ‘expanded environmental politics’ that explores actions of ‘voicing’, ‘understood as a composite of intentions and contingent effects drawing together a multiplicity of interpretations, semiotised threads, affordances and agencies’ (Revill 2021: 132). 'Listening to environmental voices in the broadest sense (…) becomes much less about the human capacity to empathise, relate, or feel the experience of others and more a recognition of alterity and multiplicity. This acknowledges that others and particularly nonhuman others live in worlds and through sensoria which may remain very substantially unknowable to us even when we can undertake some form of meaningful exchange with them. It draws our attention to the way things escape human intentions and highlights our limited capacity to represent and predict without simply trying to reduce these encounters back into familiar human terms' (Ibid. 133). The suggestion to listen to the environment reminded me of my interview with Milah van Zuilen, a Dutch artist whose work I discussed in my own conference contribution. Speaking about her project, Terrafuturism (2021) (Fig 4) she explained that she was exploring the question of co-authorship as a maker. 'I asked myself how I could share my human perspective with the perspective of the landscape. In art, two approaches to the landscape have dominated. It has either been romanticised as a study object or appropriated as ‘material’, shaped by the artist. In both cases, the landscape is subjected to the will of the artist, which means that the human perspective remains dominant. In my current work, I ask how I can share parts of the creative process with nature itself. I am still exploring whether this is possible' (18/05/21, personal email) As several contributors demonstrated, one possibility is to turn to local communities who live in rural and mountainous areas, and explore how they relate to and visualise the affective interactions within more than human environments. In his paper ‘A Bricolage of Expressions: An Art in Hiding and a Sustainable Aesthetic’, Suramya Dasgupta presented a study of visual and auditory ethno-aesthetics in a Zeme Naga Village in India, employing a ‘bi-sensorial approach to delve deeper into the world of gradients, resonances and silences, to rediscover the landscape as a form of sustainable art and the soundscape as an eco-sensitive song’ (Fig 5). The question of voicing and nonhuman authorship is indeed urgent, especially in the context of climate change and human population growth. As Peter Cannavò argued in his Keynote address, if we want to create a more ‘equitable, humane, and resilient society’ that avoids the need for future climate lockdowns, we need to accept that the fate of humans and nonhumans is interconnected (Fig 6). To take action, we must draw on our shared vulnerability and listen carefully to all kinds of predictable and unpredictable voices and manifestations. While I agree with Revill that the analysis of interlinked human and nonhuman forces should not be reduced to a human perspective, I also believe that literary writing can be a useful tool to draw attention to the urgency of climate change. Talking with trees (and other nonhuman actants), in our heads or on paper, is one way in which we can express our very human concerns about rapidly changing environments and call evocatively for an end to destructive unsustainable activities. References Komarova, M. and M. Svašek (eds) 2018 Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space. Place-making in the New Northern Ireland Oxford: Berghahn. Revill, G. 2021 Voicing the environment: Latour, Peirce and an Expanded Politics. Society and Space 39(1): 121–138. Svašek, M. 2007 Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. London: Pluto --- 2012 Affective Moves: Transit, Transition and Transformation. In: Moving Subjects, Moving Objects. Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. (ed. M. Svašek). Oxford: Berghahn. Pp 1-40. --- 2018 ‘Ageing Kin, Proximity and Distance. Translocal Relatedness as Affective Practice and Movement’, in: Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt and Jan Slaby (eds) Affect in Relation. Families, Places, Technologies. Essays on Affectivity and Subject Formation in the 21th Century. London. Routledge. --- 2019 ‘Affective Arrangements: Managing Czech Art, Marginality and Cultural Difference,’ in Durrer, Victoria and Henze, Raphaela Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times. Palgrave Macmillan. --- 2020 ‘(Memories of) Monuments in the Czech Landscape: Creation, Destruction, and the Affective Stirrings of People and Things’ in Negotiating Memories from the Romans to the Twenty-first Century: Damnatio Memoriae, edited by Ø. Fuglerud, K. Larsen and M. Prusac-Lindhagen. New York: Routledge. --- 2020 Encounters in Lockdown, 26/04/2020, A Changing World, https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/happ/2020/04/ Svašek, M. and B. Meyer 2016 Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across the Globe. Oxford: Berghahn.
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