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Tag: interdependence

Climate Production Anyone? Why We Need to Be Collaborating on Everything, Everywhere, at the Same Time

Posted on October 10, 2023October 10, 2023 by admin

Article originally comissioned by Berliner Gazatte: https://berlinergazette.de/why-we-need-to-be-collaborating-on-everything-everywhere-at-the-same-time/

We live in an unprecedented historical moment. As a species deeply entangled in the world we have shaped as much as it has shaped us, we face a set of problems and challenges that are unprecedented in scope, scale, and complexity: Mass extinction of species, forced migrations, resource depletion, pollution of rivers and waters, unequal concentration of wealth, loss of biodiversity, political polarization, proliferation of microplastics, growth of fascism and extremism, spread of new forms of mental illness and civil unrest, extreme climate events, ocean acidification, precarization of work and life, to name just a few of the most notable trends. Many of these problems appear to be closely interrelated and interdependent, yet we face them separately. We have inherited a set of world views and epistemic categories that seem inadequate to face the present moment.

Paradoxically, in the face of the acute need to articulate forms of organization and struggle, we seem to lack political imagination. Despite the multiplicity of resistance movements and the sporadic creation of strategies and spaces from which to articulate conflicts and unrest, the years of exposure to a neoliberal regime have left their mark on the subjectivities of many people, leading us to confuse structural problems with individual discomfort. Systemic causes have been confused with personal failures, and structural and endemic forms of precariousness are lived as a form of personal failure and anxiety. This contributes to the growth of political disaffection. Faced with increasingly complex problems, it seems that we can only come up with individual responses. Techno-solutionism and the growth of corporate-based solutions seem to be the other side of the coin.

The personal vs. the universal

The neoliberal emphasis on the autonomy of the subject, the prominence of the idea of the person as independent of the environment, and the gradual erosion of forms of political organization in favor of narratives centered on the self and the individual identity of subjects have contributed to the particularization of many of our common problems. Massive problems can only be addressed at the micro level. Every problem seems to occur on a personal scale. As a result, larger frames of reference, the ability to understand the systemic nature of certain struggles or the structural nature of the inequalities we face, are lost. In this context, it is essential to reflect on new ways of understanding and dealing with current problems and challenges. We need to articulate these problems in broader contexts where we can see and understand the interconnections and structural causes that underlie them.

Materializing the problems by taking into account the structurality of power relations, the institutional frameworks that reproduce them, the infrastructural designs and production models on which they are based, are some of the necessary steps to overcome the limitation of focusing only on particular and individual effects and to address the full range and complexity of the problems unfolding before us. In what follows, I will suggest that this ability to see the particular as part of a dense web of relationships, connections, and determinants implies adopting an ecological perspective on reality. This is not new.

Merging multiple scales and temporalities

In 1989, the anti-psychiatrist, philosopher and activist Félix Guattari, inspired by the ideas of Gregory Bateson, published the book “The Three Ecologies”, in which he explored what he considered to be an ecosophical vision of reality, that is, “an ethical-political articulation (…) between the three ecological registers, that of the environment, that of social relations and that of human subjectivity.” The author wrote this book as a response to the ecological crisis facing planet Earth, which had not yet been named “climate change.” The intuition that guides Guattari’s work is that there is no solution to the ecological disaster we are facing that does not involve changes that take place at three different levels: the personal, the social and the environmental. Three ecologies that are deeply interconnected but imply different scales and temporalities.

Multi-layered collage: Upside-down image of workers installing a 5G radio mast and the image of a refugee camp on Lampedusa, connected by an image of a mountain and lake landscape in Switzerland, reduced to a narrow strip; a black charging cable pushes into the image on the right. Artwork: Colnate Group, 2023 (cc by nc).
Artwork: Colnate Group, 2023 (cc by nc)

For Guattari, the response to a problem of such magnitude “can only be made on a planetary scale and on the condition that an authentic political, social and cultural revolution is carried out that reorients the objectives of the production of other material and immaterial goods.” The author argues that this revolution can only come from the transformation of these three spheres: the personal, the social and the environmental. In doing so, he challenges two different traditions: the more traditional materialist ecological visions, which put all the emphasis on the transformation of production models, and the environmentalists, who yearn for a return to an idealized pre-industrial world. Thus, in the face of the ecological crisis, Guattari does not opt for environmentalism, but for the development of a way of thinking that is also ecological in its mode of operation. A way of thinking that is capable of articulating different spheres and realities that condition and determine each other.

“Oppression Olympics”

It is important to take into account that this problem of articulating realities and problems has been attempted from other fields and perspectives, notably in the same year that Guattari’s book was published in France, in the United States, the activist and researcher Kimberlé Crenshaw published “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), in which she proposed intersectionality as a method of highlighting the different matrices of oppression that can traverse a subject.

Committed to developing a form of feminism capable of understanding and addressing the specific problems faced by racialized women, she developed a system that allowed forms of discrimination to be articulated and integrated into a single perspective. The author argued that people’s lives are intersected and determined by different axes of power, and that it is a mistake to analyze them separately; rather, we must be able to see how these axes reinforce each other, creating matrices of oppression that are not easily disentangled. We need to be aware of how the intersections between different systems work. This tool for exploring social justice processes has been widely used and discussed with the intention of undoing the effects of racism, sexism, classism, economic inequality, or colonialism that are prevalent in our societies.

Unfortunately, in the context of contemporary neoliberal subjectivation, intersectionality, instead of serving as a tool to make visible the power relations and mechanisms that structurally perpetuate inequality, can sometimes become an individual competition to accumulate supposed forms of oppression. This tendency to particularize the axis of domination that runs through our societies has been sarcastically described by Elizabeth Martínez in a 1993 conversation with activist Angela Davis as participating in the “Oppression Olympics.” When intersectionality deviates from its original purpose as a framework for analyzing forms of inequality and becomes a theory that legitimizes particularist identitarianism, it can lose its analytical and explanatory power. As mentioned earlier, neoliberalized subjectivities confuse the structural with the particular, the systemic with the individual. An inappropriate or self-serving use of intersectionality theory can exacerbate this problem, and instead of contributing to changing power dynamics, it reinforces neoliberal forms of identitarianism.

Developing an ecosophical vision of the world

We also encounter a problem in Guattari’s approach because, unlike the theory of intersectionality, which seeks to provide a clear method for analyzing and addressing specific problems, Guattari’s project operates at a more abstract level, sometimes even too poetic to be practical. The author understands that social problems are conditioned and intersected by personal and environmental problems, so he wants to develop ways of thinking that allow us to integrate these different spheres. He believes that we need to learn ecosophically. This means changing many of our assumptions and ways of being. To do this, he first suggests working at the level of the self, that is, influencing and inventing new ways of sensing and feeling. To do this, it is important to work at the level of desires, subjectivities, personal needs, or what the author calls the “existential territories.”

Likewise, he considers it necessary to develop a social ecosophy, that is, “specific practices that tend to modify and reinvent ways of being within the couple, within the family, in the urban context, at work, etc.” In other words, to develop an ecological perspective capable of transforming social life. Finally, he believes that struggles must be articulated at the environmental level, fighting against pollution, desertification, loss of biodiversity, etc. These three spheres of reality, or ecologies, are interrelated and, for the author, only by integrating them into a more general framework can we develop an ecosophical vision of the world. In this sense, he gives us some indications on how to approach these problems from a more than human perspective. A perspective capable of integrating the needs and limits of the environment, of non-human beings, and of more-than-human desires and energy flows.

Guattari, being a child of his time, spends much of his work focusing on personal transformation, leaving aside broader strategies for social transformation and the complex dynamics that govern the environment. Institutional transformation and how to deal with different path dependencies are not at the center of his work. For him, revolution begins at the “molecular level” and then extends to the “molar dimension.” Subjective transformation leads to social transformations, and these lead to productive changes and changes in relationships with the environment. Somehow, this hypothesis has never been proven. The focus on individual transformation has had its worst consequences in New Age cultures, where work on the self ends up reinforcing personal identity and disconnecting from the collective dimension of life. The first realm of the three ecologies can end up being a therapeutic space instead of a place of struggle.

Cooperating on “everything, everywhere, at the same time”

For this reason, we need to think about what it would be like to merge these two systems, the three ecologies, and an intersectionality perspective, with the aim of proposing a framework for action that allows us to address our current problems from a more complex perspective that does not lose sight of the goal of ending the forms of injustice that shape our lives.

We need to focus on developing models of intersectionality that can integrate injustices and systems of oppression that operate on more than human scales. We need to ask ourselves how to articulate specific labor or union struggles with matrices of oppression that operate on temporal scales far beyond institutional or human temporalities. And we need to ask ourselves how to extract the intersectional analysis of the second ecology, that of the social, to understand how it shapes and determines the set of the three ecologies analyzed.

Our aim should be to show that power relations are intertwined with structures of desire and aesthetic frameworks that condition their potential for transformation. For example, poor air or water quality affects both humans and nonhumans. Moreover, our goal should be to show that power and production relations determine human lives, social environments, and more than human societies. We must leave the narrow confines of individual identity, closed academic disciplines, and human-centered perspectives to learn to work on “everything, everywhere, at the same time” (to paraphrase the title of a famous movie).

It is important to learn to work on the structurality of problems in a context in which they are experienced as particular affronts. We need to understand that climate problems are also problems of forced migration and conflicts over access to basic resources; that modes of resource extraction determine working conditions that permeate people’s lives; that health is never a personal but a collective matter; that there is no problem of the self that is not intimately rooted in a we; that there is no form of life that is not determined and conditioned by the quality of the air, access to energy resources, or the fertility of the land; that resources exist only to the extent that they are densely embedded in systems of extraction and production; and, last but not least, we need to understand that, to quote Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, it is as important to generate new radical imaginaries as it is to collectively design institutions capable of thinking and operating in more than human times and scales.

The struggle against neoliberalism goes beyond challenging it not only as a system of production, but also as a regime of subjectivation and a model for the production and exploitation of nature. In other words: We have to challenge the means of production as means of climate production and question ourselves as climate workers. Adopting an ecological perspective can help us transcend the particular and begin to accept that, deep down, we have never been individuals, we have always been multiple, entanglements, assemblies, collectives, that we have always been multitudes.

Editor’s note: This article is a contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s “Allied Grounds” text series. For more content, visit the “Allied Grounds” website. Take a look: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/allied-grounds

en busca de la intimidad perdida

Posted on December 7, 2020December 7, 2020 by admin

El pensamiento ilustrado llegó a Europa trayendo consigo, e imponiendo, una forma de entender y hacerse cargo del mundo basado en la razón y la objetividad.

Con esto y de forma progresiva se fue menospreciando la capacidad de pensar/entender/vivir el mundo de otras maneras más mágicas, esotéricas o creativas. Con la racionalidad llegó la capacidad de percibir la realidad como entidades discretas, como un conjunto de entes que se podían disociar unos de otros. Todo se podía escrutar, descomponer y comprender en un laboratorio. Esto chocaba con las dos formas epistémicas hegemónicas de la época, el pensamiento mágico y la fé. El primero está caracterizado por tramar vínculos entre entidades heterogéneas (oro—>dios←- pelo rubio) creando conexiones improbables y en ocasiones fabulosas. Pero este no era el objetivo principal de la ilustración. El pensamiento ilustrado llegó para enfrentarse de forma específica a un marco epistémico basado en la fé (las cosas son como Dios ha determinado y la única opción es creer en su palabra), y las relaciones de poder que esta forma de entender/ordenar el mundo traían consigo. La objetividad transmutaba la realidad en objetos medibles, cuantificables, demostrables y datos objetivables. No había que creer en la ciencia para que esta pudiera demostrar sus hipótesis. El mundo se podía diseccionar, racionalizar y explicitar. Con esto se estableció de forma clara la distinción entre los sujetos, quienes piensan/analizan/entienden y los objetos, que inertes esperan a ser comprendidos por quien tenga agencia y subjetividad.

En paralelo, el auge del capitalismo transformó a todos los seres, materiales o entidades en objetos susceptibles de ser comercializados. Con el capitalismo se inventó un tipo de objeto muy concreto, la mercancía. Se establecieron circuitos globales de intercambio por el que animales, plantas, minerales o incluso personas, podrían acabar circulando. No hay cosa en el mundo que no pueda ser transformada en mercancía. Así, la transformación epistémica que transformó la realidad en objetos, se vió acompañada por un sistema capaz de determinar el valor económico de cada uno de ellos. El mundo fenoménico se convirtió en un gran bazar. El valor económico acabó por transformarse en la única medida de valor abstracta y estandarizada. El mundo se sometía a los principios de la utilidad. Así, de forma paulatina fuimos determinando relaciones instrumentales con las cosas. Todo podía ser medido, comprendido, producido o intercambiado. Nos creímos que las personas estaban por encima de las cosas. Que la realidad estaba desplegada frente a nosotros lista para ser usada, medida o comercializada. Perdimos la intimidad con el mundo material, que se nos presentaba como un conjunto de objetos distantes y distintos a nosotros. Todo se podía explotar.

Todo esto ha cristalizado un mundo marcadamente utilitarista. Un mundo en el que el valor de las cosas está en relación directa al uso que les podemos dar. Si las cosas no sirven, parecen perder todo su valor. Inconscientemente clasificamos y valoramos a los animales dependiendo del uso que les podamos dar: el caballo vale más que el saltamontes, el gato vale más que el lince, en buey vale más que un calamar gigante. Lo mismo hacemos con los minerales, las plantas e incluso, con las personas. A medida que lo hacemos, nos vamos desvinculando afectivamente del mundo fenoménico. Podemos llegar a creer que somos autónomos de la realidad en la que vivimos. Que nuestra capacidad para nombrar, categorizar y definir, nos eleva sobre el agua, la sal, los geranios o las sardinas. La ficción de la autonomía nos ha hecho creer que estamos por encima del mundo material al que pertenecemos y del que dependemos para sobrevivir. La creencia en nuestro yo, nuestra unicidad, nos ha hecho olvidar que somos con los alimentos que ingerimos, somos con el agua que bebemos, somos con el oxígeno que respiramos, somos con las bacterias que nos habitan, somos con las comunidades en las que crecemos. La creencia en la supremacía de la humanidad sobre el mundo material nos ha hecho olvidar gran parte de las relaciones íntimas que nos vinculan y nos hacen parte de ese mundo material. Como nos recuerda Donna Haraway en su libro “Seguir con el problema”, se ha impuesto un imaginario basado en la independencia, en lugar de la interdependencia. 

Escribe George Bataille, en su excéntrico tratado de economía denominado “La parte maldita”, que sólo en los actos sagrados somos capaces de reconocer el poder que tienen las cosas sobre nosotros. En los rituales, las liturgias, las ceremonias, prestamos atención y aceptamos que los objetos con los que convivimos tienen poder. Empezamos a ser conscientes de la energía de las cosas. Sólo venerando al sol, a la luna, a la lluvia o a algún artefacto, nos damos cuenta que ese poder que pensamos que tenemos sobre la realidad es ficción. En la destrucción de algo que nos resulta útil reconocemos la agencia de la cosa. Su importancia va más allá del uso que le demos. Sólo escapando a lo útil, empezamos a reconstruir la intimidad perdida con las cosas. Cuando no vemos a un animal, planta o persona como un fin para conseguir algo, ya sea alimento, placer, energía, etc., se empiezan a abrir nuevas vías de ser/conocer/vivir en comunidad. Sólo perdiendo el principio de sospecha acontecen las confianzas que permiten que lo íntimo empiece a surgir. 

Es en lo inútil, en la experiencia estética por ejemplo, en donde empezamos a sentir florecer vínculos con la realidad de la que somos parte. Muerta la utilidad, surge la intimidad. Dejamos de ahondar en la idea de autonomía neoliberal y se nos abre un mundo de interdependencias. De conexiones y vínculos afectivos y energéticos. Muerto el deseo aparece la erótica que nos articula con el mundo. Muerta la ficción de que el humano está por encima de las cosas, se nos dibujan ontologías más horizontales para con la realidad. Se empiezan a establecer intimidades desconcertantes. Vínculos improductivos. Amores sin apego. Sólo escapando de lo útil, nos acercamos a un mundo exuberante y absurdo en el que el orden biológico y geológico se funden, objetos y sujetos se confunden, las categorías y taxonomías científicas se desdibujan. El aire que entra por nuestra nariz se vuelve yo. El calor de los animales es también el nuestro. Los cambios estacionales nos afectan. Las lunas nos conmueven. Nuestros egos se disuelven y apreciamos más a las demás personas. Cuando abrimos el mundo a la intimidad, lo que nos parecían desiertos yermos e improductivos se desvelan como lugares llenos de vida. Lugares en los que podemos re-aprender formas de ser y de sentir. En los que predomina la intimidad perdida. La intimidad con todo lo que podríamos llegar a ser.  

texto originalmente publicado en Joya: Arte+Ecología

Designing the Present

Posted on May 10, 2020May 10, 2020 by admin

In the early 1970s, designer and pedagogue Victor Papanek banged his fist on the table of modern design and urged us to start designing “for the real world”. The days were now numbered for design in which form prevailed over function – for unsustainable design at the service of the market and not the user. The hermetic and elitist design world opened its gates, giving way to social, political and environmental concerns. Design had to be less individualistic and more collective. It could no longer continue being an exercise in aesthetic virtuosity at the service of a few wealthy consumers. From now on it was to be considered as a tool to start transforming an ever changing world. Designing for the real world presented us with a great challenge: firstly we had to understand people’s needs, possibilities, limitations and desires. Secondly, we needed to offer solutions to alleviate or improve their lives. As a consequence, the designer transitioned from practitioner to researcher – before designing for the real world, the designer had to understand it.

Many real worlds

With the distance of time, it is easy to dispute some of the ideas that underlie Papanek’s work, and we could quickly fall into complacency and point out the mistakes of the past. This is not the aim of this article. But, facing a crisis whose magnitude we can barely glimpse, it is important to think about what it will be like to design for the real world after confinement. We cannot stop wondering about the world that this pandemic will leave to us. Can we still think that there is only one world? Will we have to design for a broken world or for a world in which everything remains the same? Was our old normality leading us relentlessly into a world in danger of extinction? The real world that Papanek was telling us about is increasingly complex. Faced with the need to understand it, we have to accept that in each society, each geographical area, in each world, there are many worlds, many societies, many different realities whose interests will not always converge. There is no one real world; the world instead houses multiple worlds.

What I mean by this is that, as soon as we start to pay attention, we notice worlds crossed by power relations, very unequal living conditions, privileges, forms of poverty and precariousness. Human and animal societies. Societies of bacteria, private societies and corporations. Worlds marked by very different interests, in which the well-being of one social group, unfortunately, implies the discomfort of others. The excesses and privileges of humans have too often been at the cost of environmental degradation. Technological progress is paid for with the destruction of mineral resources. The world of tuna is different from the world of people with functional diversity. The world of migratory birds is different from the world of informal garbage collectors. The world of nursery schools is different from that of nursing homes. The world of those who have is completely different from the world of those who hardly have enough to eat. Paradoxically, these worlds are interconnected, united in ways that are twisted and difficult to imagine. We go from one universe to the pluriverse. It has been said that the flap of a butterfly’s wings, occurring at a given moment, could alter a sequence of events of immense magnitude in the long term. A bat from a Chinese market can affect the global economy. Learning to design for the real world implies learning to design for a plurality of interdependent worlds. We must stop seeing a fragmented world, our world, to be able to understand the links and tensions that structure a common world. A world, as the Zapatistas used to say, where many worlds fit. A world in which our actions will have consequences on the others’ worlds. A constellation of worlds that we have to learn to care for.

Continue reading “Designing the Present”

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Este obra de jaron rowan está bajo una licencia Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 3.0 Unported.

la letra con sangre entra

La letra con sangre entra
La letra con sangre entra
Rosi Braidotti: Lo posthumano
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