## Metadata - Author: [[Anab Jain]] - Full Title: Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics - Category: #articles - Summary: A Field Guide to help us move towards the practice of a More-Than-Human Politics - URL: https://medium.com/@anabjain/calling-for-a-more-than-human-politics-f558b57983e6 ## Highlights - Today the constructs that form our understanding of the world are being continually out-paced by the sheer force and speed of technological, political and social change. Modernism’s methodologies of mapping, designing, planning, for controlling and changing deeply complex systems may not be the answer to the challenges we face. Maybe we need to go underground — working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1208zt5hejq064h7180vp1h)) - As we sway between doom and denial, we are stuck in what [Lauren Berlant](https://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/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*. Philosopher [Isabelle Stengers writes](http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/in-catastrophic-times/) how such a state of impasse is actively produced by the managers of the status quo — or the ‘Guardians’: *When choices are presented by Guardians, they are infernal alternatives — a series of non-choices presented as choices to their various ‘publics’; the choice between doing nothing about climate change or geoengineering the climate; the choice to do nothing about deforestation or the choice to trade forests as commodities in order to preserve their ‘value’. This production of two bad alternatives, where one is ‘less bad’ than the other, is a means by which Guardians make problems inaccessible to anyone other than themselves. And so, a “cold panic” and an impotent fear of the future sets in, functionally demobilising people.”* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h120jcdvta8k66ep5et2m599)) - Whilst this idea of creating alternate experiential futures sounds great, it’s quite an uphill battle. We find that the desire to [package these futures into neat solutions](https://medium.com/superfluxstudio/stop-shouting-future-start-doing-it-e036dba17cdc) and roadmaps is overwhelmingly strong. But more than that, we have learnt that it is very difficult for people to not jump to immediate conclusions. There is a tendency to see this particular instantiation of a future presented in front of them as *the* future, and therefore a ‘prediction’, or be completely dismissive of it as it doesn’t align with their ideological worldview. The possibility of sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty and being open to multiple views of the world is difficult. Our prospective brains are not quite trained to maintain multiple worlds and views when simultaneously being forcefully told by all media possible what we should see, hear and believe. But, we all know, very well, the dangers of a singular narrative. Modernism was essentially an unquestioning pursuit of a 'better future ' — and that is perhaps the reason we are in this situation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h120rv9hecdf5j9mhzedtgb5)) - Pitting people, ideas and ideologies against each other is a well established, divisive, political strategy. Denialism vs doom around the climate crisis is one that I mentioned earlier, but this perpetuates down to every level. Intentionally confrontational messages and memes keep us fighting, deflecting from the attention that could be given to things that matter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h120y99q43hgv6nzvbn8hq20)) - What I have understood with the idea of staying with the trouble is the opening of possibility space. If you can move beyond quick fixes, we become open to the strange and the unknown, the ambiguous and the uncertain, the weird and the provisional. What does this mean? That attacking somebody having different views is the same as attacking yourself for feeling differently about something on a different day or realising that stripping an ecosystem, the natural resource that everyone depends on, is tantamount to cutting a piece of your flesh off to feed yourself. We are a collective body of many parts, both inside and out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1213jmd07wa5xavd2y7fcr7)) - 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. I think this would be a kind of politics that does not rely on oppositional, binary, artificially constructed world views, one that is not obfuscated by the right and left or the neoliberals and communists, or whatever it is that you choose to follow. 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1215c1mncxbapek948h472p)) - Note: NVC as a politics of care that goes beyond binary opposites. - **Extinction → Precarity **Whilst the big headlines focus on the fact that we are currently in the midst of a sixth geological extinction event, and could lead to the extinction of the human species, along with many other species, I want to find other conceptual tools that might help us move forward. Not because I don’t believe that extinction could be one rather convincing, plausible future, but because I want to explore alternate proposals for working with the challenges we face. The philosophical construct of considering ‘life as precarious’ (Ann Tsing) foregrounds both life and death. It focuses on how human existence is deeply interdependent with other life and therefore necessitates the need for *care of others*, the need for *being vulnerable to others* and to put *unpredictable encounters at the centre of things*. Rather than consider a singular endpoint such as extinction, could we instead explore the possibility of life without stability, to begin with, and see where we arrive? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h121ex3ckg96kk9tsaxn51np)) - Moving towards the practice of a more-than-human politics is a revolt that I can get behind, because it feels like 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. It is time to acknowledge the limits of anthropocentric capitalism and embrace the burden of a world that is precarious and challenging. To use our deep resourcefulness and imagination to stay with the trouble, and keep the revolt alive. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h121jxet70pgpcvjaevva7kg))