“We shall fall into the ditch.”

Beckett, All that fall

“I must hear the feet, however faint they fall.”

Beckett, Footfalls

The work of contemporary thinker Stacy Alaimo — especially their 2016 book Exposed — is an effort to present and recognize nonhuman desires, as well as our own. That is not only because of Bruce Bagemihl suggesting human sexuality and particularly the most fluid desires played a role in the emergence and development of language, Roger N. Lancaster (among many others) linking desire to artistic production, poiesis, or Luce Irigaray saying that desire can transform a simple territory into a world; desire — and Merleau-Ponty would agree — is our being open and in tension towards the world. 

We’re invited to recognize nonhuman desires, and therefore to give their agency, intentionality and creative potential the same dignity given to their “human” counterpart. Many times Brian Massumi uses the terms desire and immanent inventiveness almost interchangeably, and that is the capacity to surpass the given, shared by human and nonhuman beings, the transformative power shared by nature and art.

Last year I was asking Michael Marder if we could, then, make the categories of nature and culture finally obsolete, if that could be productive — not in the way some feminists have distanced themselves from nature and its images, more with a posthuman approach. Writing a book on ecology and posthuman pleasures and art and poetry seems to be doing precisely that.

It is still important to look critically at the term and concept of recognition. It has historically been positively progressive, especially in feminist and anti-colonial praxis, but it is not immune to the risk of “framing”, immobilizing the subjects of that same recognition. If this risk exists in human to human recognition, it can also be real in our relation to the nonhuman. Alaimo touches on this when commenting on La Tigresa’s documentary and the way the trees are never actually in the frame, and this is a question of representation, so perhaps we can use Merleau-Ponty again. He thought we could speak about things, about others, because they are in a way lodged in our flesh, our body and the body of other things are situated inside the visible and the tangible: the hand that touches is co-present with the hand that is touched. 

With feminist, critical lenses, do we believe that building a relational (and posthuman) net of care and caring that is not tied to control is possible? Can we care for plants, animals, people and places without having some kind of claim on them? And if so what does this kind of care look like? How do we act on it?

Alaimo also writes about the home and how it is one of many devices that shape and define the (western) human; about the production of “inside” and “outside”, of domesticity and about the search for a sense of security, of protection. They give many examples to show how shifting the significance and the material attitude we have towards homes and lived spaces is not only or not necessarily about living in a cave of skin (Hogan), but it can be about creating trans-species sculptures in one’s garden (Hull) or starting a vegetable garden by the sidewalk (Finley); even learning to enjoy the tastes of good food and the pleasures of the intimate practice of eating — this reminds us of people who hunt to eat recognizing personhood to other living beings. I’m also thinking about Irigaray and Marder discussing the possibilities we’re presented with in encountering and caring for plants (Through Vegetal Being, 2016). 

Alaimo’s latest book is even named after a care for the abyss, but this idea of expanded care, of going beyond our domestic walls to be at home in the world, together with nonhuman others, has to be approached carefully: Nancy Fraser explains how (what in the last decades has been referred to as) carework has been valorized by capitalism, just like Silvia Federici warned about in her famous article, in 1975. 

Now that we’re broadening the field of care, how do we resist capitalism’s incorporating force — seeing how it has already co-opted sustainability and companies are already updating to publicities and policies of care — even of nonhuman others? How do we avoid our extended carework to become yet another way to reproduce capital and a simple “taking in” of more things inside the walls of domesticity?

It seems that this is the main focus of Alaimo’s work: learning that we are- and how to be exposed, to avoid the risk of being domesticated and of domesticating others. We’re speaking of a different way of enjoying life on/with Earth but also a different way of caring.

Another question we should pose is: isn’t this still putting a lot of focus on individual and/or small scale action, with the risk of creating patches of change and spaces to imagine a different future, that come like a breath of fresh air, but are still somewhat isolated and experienced only by a certain “we”? Alaimo already talks about Beckett’s art of failing well and Kant would probably repeat to us that by employing means accordant with our end, we’ll undoubtedly come closer to it, but the book ends by saying that “there’s only modest protests and precarious pleasures in spaces that are compromised and darkened by futures that will surely need to be fixed” — and so we ask, what will it take to fix them? What if modest protests are not enough? What if they are “just” allowing “us” to live better while we can? Is this where art (or guerrilla/gardening?) comes into play? If, as we’ve suggested elsewhere, aesthetic education is the condition of possibility of the common, what will it take to make it happen on a larger scale? It feels almost naive to talk about revolution, especially in some scholarly environments, but why is that?

Maintenance, keeping things alive, is the groundwork for any community. Both having and helping to create a group of people that are intentionally organizing together makes us more aware of our agency; there’s a sense of learnt agency in being able to not experience the world by ourselves, which often breeds a feeling of impotence, “doomerism” or resentment instead, and it has probably happened to most of us to have lived on both sides of this. To participate, to have a hands-on effect on the way the community is run, builds more agency than just showing up to community events entirely facilitated by someone else: it feels like, and is, a kind of world-building.

The space itself, thanks to how it’s built, teaches its people to get used to jumping in, lowers what Granata calls “the bureaucratic barrier” and the imaginary distinction between the organizers and the participants (or the teachers and the students, the artists and the viewers), so that everyone feels almost compelled by the ability to have an idea and to put it into action, to desire something and move towards it.

It’s interesting to pay attention to Alaimo’s notion of science and specifically the importance of listening to it — and by it we don’t mean a scientific authority that, for example, transforms sexuality and desire into something manageable, or again “nature” as a problem to be managed. For Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing science is translation, notably because it is international, and is often tied to specificities and contingencies (we’re far from the supposed universal science). Translation creates patches of incoherence and incompatibility in science but these aren’t closed nor isolated, and it is the assemblage that enriches science.

In The mushroom at the end of the world Tsing goes on to say that no patch is “representative”, no single group fight alone will stop capitalism. Assemblages, in their diversity, show those that in the book are called “latent commons”, that could be mobilized for a common cause. For her this mobilization is dependent on what she calls the art of observing or, in other pages, a listening practice (we are perhaps back to aesthetic education), and can be achieved using science. Is the answer simply to keep hybridizing art and science (and philosophy and political action)?

The issue might still be with representation: representing oneself as an activist or a politically active scholar is enough for some to stop challenging themselves to really keep changing and to give their life the same dignity and rigor (which is not the opposite of fun!) that their theory has; we’re far from being technophobes but can recognize that sometimes “exposing” ourselves online stops us from putting ourselves out there, actually exposed. And the same goes, for example, for representing ourselves as caretakers to our friends and taking on all the weight of their problems, enabling them to represent themselves as ‘the ones with the problems’, instead of helping them by challenging, offering a different perspective.

There’s the need to queer our life, to entirely embrace its permeability, which is scary and honestly difficult. I’m sure “we” are prepared to enjoy a life free from the cruelty and harshness of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, if we’re already fighting, protesting, studying and living in a way that is as close as possible to what is in accordance with the (fixed, healed) future we imagine… but who is this “we”? Are we all prepared to stop representing ourselves as activists and put every effort into changing the material conditions we find ourselves in and at the same time enjoy all the pleasures that we can encounter/create/multiply? The question is also: what are we not prepared to do — or not doing — that could make the difference? Or how do we expand our “we”?

We are going to cite Tsing again, because her questions on precariousness resonate here. She asks: what if our times are ripe for a sensibility towards precariousness (the condition of being vulnerable before others, of living in a world without teleology)? What if precariousness, indetermination is the centre of that systematicity we’re looking for? 

We then have to ask, does everyone feel this precariousness? Sometimes it seems like the answer is an obvious yes — and this is why many are defensive and desperately looking for stability, safety, security; sometimes it looks possible that people just don’t feel it, don’t think about it, and should then be carefully exposed to it (and in this case, yes, the times would be ripe).

Elisa Mancioli