Relating to the Living

an inquiry into the living and liveable worlds

Life is a connected phenomena, a living system on the surface of the earth, to say it with the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Yet, the mechanistic view of the Earth, that is still predominant within the currently prevailing thought collective, continues to separate humans and nature, where a human is a subject acting on the dead matter of objects (classified as resources) or using more ‘inferior’ beings (again, in a self-proclaimed classification) for the benefit of some humans. Such worldview of separation has justified the exploitation of the living world, including the human community at large and mistreatment of each other.

Lynn Margulis promoted and pioneered a very different view of life on Earth: symbiosis. All living organisms exist in interconnected ways as living systems, in complex patterns and feedback loops, rather than in direct cause-effect lines. Symbiotic view of existence is focusing on emergent properties that are born in relationships, in which all the living beings interact with each other and the surroundings to form synergetic, self-regulating, complex systems that maintain and perpetuate the conditions for complex life, and that make planet habitable.

Also philosopher and physicist Karen Barad is proposing to refer to the mutual constitution of entangled agencies on the planet as “intra-action”, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their relating. Hence the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede but rather emerge through their interconnected existence. 

Yet we often don't notice the patterns of interdependencies and ecosystems within ecosystems, because of what some have called "trained incapacities" - we don't see what we're trained not to see, as part of the predominant social imaginary and narratives we believe to be true, important, and meaningful. And partly, because of our own narrations of what is the ‘world’ and who we are in it.

Our wish with this series is to engage into an ongoing collective process of reframing how we relate to the diverse communities of life. The need for new dynamics between the living, for care as discernment to become the base of all relating, for making space for nonhuman agencies and for the potential for earthly flourishings to be mutual, is imperative in the current conditions of multiple crises, both within human communities as well as on the planetary level.

Excessively and rather inattentively interfering within outer and inner environments, it may have escaped us how intertwined they are, how we are composed by the soil, the air, the water, how we take the outside in each time we breath, eat, drink, and just walk around, our porous skin touched by the wind, how our bodies have inner organs and outer organs (to resonate with the artist’s Joseph Beuys’ mythological connections), how our words and deeds impact others and vice versa, how the dead are not disappearances, and how everything exists together, with each other and for each other.

Scholar and writer Donna Haraway speaks of sympoiesis as “making-with”, speaking of cells, bacteria, mammals, plants, mushrooms as multispecies contributors of one co-becoming process. Sympoiesis is potentially infinite. We know very little of the boundless creativity of the Earth. Those bacteria that got together hundreds millions of years ago, gave birth to this incredible diversity that we are also part of, to all the plants, animals, insects, mushrooms, all the existing and extinct species, all Earth beings.

In this series we follow inquiries into collective cultivation of planetary imaginaries, which attend to our systemic entanglements with all our contemporaries — the many societies of Earth beings. Together with other thinkers and practitioners we are reflecting on how, contesting to historically imposed hierarchies, we could soften the hard borders of and within our worlds. It is our hope that when living creatures connect, join forces, interact and complexify together, hopeful practice for possible futures may begin, or continue, towards potentialities for planetary imaginaries otherwise.

Who makes the planet habitable and in what ways? How can we practice care within relations that are unequal, already damaged, inherited as broken or extractive? What deepens our respect for the families of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, humans, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations? How do we deal with being interdependent creatures within living systems that include predation, decay, competition, disturbance, grief, and loss?

There are myriad ways in which people are connected to the broader webs of life, and this fundamental connection has a potential to deconstruct reductionist ideologies that are projected onto human and other-than-human communities and change our understanding of what it might mean to be human at this stage of our being on Earth. What may we be learning from the growing presence of AI? What may other creatures be telling us about the potentialities for more reciprocal relationships, and how do we develop a more attuned sensitivity towards them? What worlds can we then make possible together? And what may that have to do with recuperating relationship with our bodies, not as something that we have but as someone(s) that we are, gently inviting our embodied subjectivities back into the spaces of our attention?

“Nature” is never merely a physical phenomenon, the ecosphere is not a mute physical background to human action, to say it with the philosopher Bruno Latour. “Nature” is inner and outer, objective and subjective, visible and invisible, personal and collective, and far beyond the binaries. What could then be ways to think and practice an earthly ethics of reverence and wonderment, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty phrases it, that would honour such Nature within and without? It may only be poetry that can do justice to our understanding of the living and guide our sensitivities towards a more attentive, respectful and balanced living together on this planet. This video book is a poem that thinks through encounters.

Images: Foresta Collective (from the upcoming video book Woods in the Sound)