“No, we are not so exceptional; we are not the only ones endowed with the capability to see, read or write: the wind traces its musical partition over the waves of the sea and the dunes of the desert; running water weaves rich branches of river-like arborescence; dust engraves cliffs that are already sculpted or drawn by erosion; by their distinctive style, earthquakes, fractures, hot spots, the low plate tectonics define the higher relief. The living leave their remains, be it only bones. Magnetism marks itself and remains etched on soft rock on its way to crystallization, indicating the time of its hardening; radioactivity counts time; the climate leaves traces in dust buried in the deep ice of the poles and the ice sheets; evolution deploys itself on organisms, more disparate than systemic. We are not the only ones endowed with the capability to count or remember; the trees calculate their years, crowned in their wood. Nor are we the only ones endowed with the capability to code; everything ultimately gets spelled out in the language of mathematics. I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us.”
Serres, M. (2017). Information and Thinking, in R. Braidotti and R. Dolphijn (eds.), Philosophy After Nature, Rowman & Littlefield, p. 16.
At the urban scale of design, I suggest that the humanist tendencies of objectification and isolation, which are productively challenged by posthumanism, also reveal themselves in the increasing incoherence of city fabrics and public spaces. Here, the rise of individuality and the atomisation of the collective architectural project by the individual icon can be seen in the cleaving of building from city (building/city). This cleaving, I propose, represents a dualism conceptually equivalent to the nature/culture divide. In both cases, by focusing on the object, we limit ourselves to single isolated performances and reduce the environmental capacity of our projects both culturally and ecologically.
Dalziel, M. (2022). Towards a Posthuman Practice for Architecture and Urbanism? Nordic Journal of Urban Studies, 2(1), p.90.
There is something inherently weird, even disgusting, about beauty itself, and this weirdness gets mixed back in when we consider things in an ecological way. This is because beauty just happens, without our ego cooking it up.
Morton, T. (2021). All Art is Ecological. Penguin Random House, p. 50.
A primordial swerve says that the world is not determined, that an element of chanciness resides at the heart of things, but it also affirms that so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, p. 18.
‘opus they’ seeks to draw attention to communal processes of becoming at a time when human actions have dramatically reshaped the earth’s ecosystems. The research reflects about how we can respond meaningfully to this crisis. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti has written about the process of ‘becoming’, underlining the interconnectedness of different life forms and the ethical implications of this interconnectedness. The relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements. Braidotti’s thought displaces essentialist definitions of identity and stresses transformation and the fluid nature of subjectivity, challenging traditional human-centric frameworks. The self is reconceptualised in relation to the broader ecological and technological contexts, promoting ethical responsibility and creative potential in a world in flux. In place of the hierarchical systems that have dominated human understandings of ‘normality’ and pushed ‘otherness’ to the limits of existence, Braidotti proposes posthuman interrelations that are symbiotic and affect the middle ground of both humans and non-humans. This interrelational state of becoming permits new modes of thinking and existing together, as the voices, behaviours and agencies of non-human entities, as well as other people, are acknowledged. These transformations of relations are held back by conventional categories separating the healthy from the pathological or the natural from the cultural.
Political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett also promotes the recognition of the agency and vitality of non-human materials. Objects and natural entities possess a kind of agency that influences human and non-human interactions. Bennett's work challenges the traditional anthropocentric worldview, encouraging a more ethical engagement with the world and a reevaluation of political systems. Implications for artists and designers include the possibility of incorporating the dynamic and often overlooked contributions of the material world in their work. As Bennett underlines the active role or vitality of material forces, she calls for our attentiveness to this vitality, to challenge the more destructive and instrumentalising habits of using and conquering matter, land, and so on. She traces the possibility of heterogeneous ‘assemblages’ that are not only characterised by constructivist understandings of human subjects shaping their knowledge of the world and reality. A naïve or childlike speculation on animate beings in the world might be one way of using the power of art and the imagination to draw attention to what Bennett calls the ‘material vitality’ of things.
‘opus they’ proposes that artists and other participants in collective action consider a wide network of relationships and entanglements, both socially engaged and enmeshed in ecological forms of solidarity. This openness to empathy and multi-species perspectives is reflected in visual, sonic and spatial investigations that highlight integrated thinking. When multiple perspectives contribute to an ‘opus’, the notion of a ‘work transforms into an evolving form that grows as it integrates a polyphony of voices, soundscapes, spaces, and processes.
Travis Holloway (2022) writes about a new form of aesthetics that emerges in many works of contemporary art: this is an art that does not only reject humanism and individualism but also announces a different relationship between humanity and the earth. As we acknowledge the vulnerability of everything that surrounds us, we search for new forms of solidarity and communal ways of life. Art jolts us into recognising the severity of the situation and the importance of envisioning alternative futures.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity.
Holloway, T. (2022). How to Live at the End of the World. Stanford University Press.
Raphael Vella, 2024
The dialectics of otherness is the inner engine of humanist Man’s power, who assigns difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance. All other modes of embodiment are cast out of the subject position and they include anthropomorphic others: non-white, non-masculine, non-normal, non-young, nonhealthy, disabled, malformed or enhanced peoples. They also cover more ontological categorical divides between Man and zoo-morphic, organic or earth others. All these ‘others’ are rendered as pejoration, pathologized and cast out of normality, on the side of anomaly, deviance, monstrosity and bestiality.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity, p. 68.