Subjectivity and the more-than-human world

Geography has developed into a lively plurality of discourses that speak to a wide variety of social and environmental contexts. Geographers researches diverse topics from regional development to climate changes and pressing social problems. Recent development in geography shows a concern for materiality and hybridity (see Whatmore 2006, Massey 2005). This does not only concern possibilities for integrating physical and human geography but a particular interest in the particular and complex life processes that is found in nature, places, and bodies, in the livingness of the world, the “earthlife nexus” (Whatmore 2006). As Sarah Whatmore argues (2006:601): “The vital connections between the geo (earth) and the bio (life)” are “amongst the most enduring of geographical concerns”. She explains some ways to approach the more-than-human world in geography: 1) the re-animation of matter, 2) the joint co-fabrication of the world by both human and more-than-human “socio-material assemblages”, and 3) the dislocation of subjectivity from “the soul”, or “inside” a human person, to the world, to the “outside”.

These are areas of interest that are very promising. I am interested in understanding the role of subjectivity in human constructions of the matter of nature but I am also interested in the subjectivity of the matter of nature itself. Another way to put it is to ask what happens if we consider subjectivity to be connected to the world, not separate from the world, and which we want to know scientifically, as Evelyn Fox Keller argued many years ago (Keller 1984) through world-openness and dynamic objectivity. These concepts express a relational understanding of subjectivity and objectivity.

What remains problematic is the status of subjectivity in relation to knowing and in relation to “objectivity”. Who is the knowing subject, and who is granted such status, by whom and how? If the more-than-human world (originally a term coined by the American philosopher David Abram, 1996) is granted subjectivity, how can we know this more-than-human world’s “knowing” and presence? On this blog, I have started to explore this presence with reference to concept of place and place-making-processes. 

Documenting places as they really are

Belonging and sense of place, or the lack of it, is expressed in place-conscious art. Per Berntsen is one of Norway’s most respected practitioners of fine art photography and has an extraordinary eye for revealing the nature of culture in modern place-making.

Early in his career, Berntsen worked with landscape photography in the romantic tradition, influenced by American photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. After 1985, landscape photography had become routine and quite boring. Then he discovered New Topographics, which is a tradition and movement in photographic art named after the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in New York. Berntsens first work inspired by New Topographics was a project in 1987 together with three other photographers called Norsk Landskap, 1987 based upon a journey through Norway, actually covering most of Norway within three weeks in June that year. The result of the project was exhibited at Henie Onstad Art Centre at Høvikodden outside of Oslo. The photos are now at Preus Museum in Horten.

Topography is a word from geography and refers to the detailed and accurate description of a place, city, town, district, state, parish, or tract of land. As a tradition of photography, it adopts an objective approach to reality by viewing photography as a tool for creating catalogues and documents of reality; the man-made landscape or the human and social constructions and alterations of landscape. This tradition of photography avoids subjective themes of beauty and emotion and the traditional subject matter of landscape photography. The core of the subject matter is to reveal the tension between nature´s nature, as it is created through nature’s own agency and intent, and culture’s nature, as it is expressed through modernist architecture and industrial place planning. By doing this, this art also question the view of nature in modern societies. This quote by Nicholas Nixon from the New Topographics group sums up Berntsen´s project:

“The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it”.

Berntsen´s website can be found at http://www.perberntsen.com/

New European research network: COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability

The action will focus on the role of culture as a fundamental issue, even a precondition to be met on the path towards Sustainable Development (SD). In order to better define understanding of culture within the general frames of sustainability, the Action will conceptualise and mobilize the cultural dimension of sustainable development, examine and compare best policy practices and investigate frameworks and indicators for cultural sustainability assessments. The ultimate goal of this COST Action is to increase understanding of and determine the role of culture in Sustainable Development (SD) based on multidisciplinary principles. The work will be carried out 1) by investigating and operationalising the concept of culture in the context of SD through multidisciplinary approaches and analyses; 2) by examining the best practices for bringing culture into policy and practical domains, and 3) by developing means and indicators for assessing the impacts of culture on SD. The results of the Actions will be exploited by the scientific community, policy makers, administrative personnel and practitioners working with sustainability and culture from the EU to the local level. More information:

http://www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/isch/Actions/is1007

Place and Pedagogy

If there is one single research topic that has evolved from my work the last five years, it is the pedagogical aspects of place. This insight has come gradually. It concerns much more than what goes on inside schools. All cultural institutions are pedagogical institutions. By using place as an analytical and integrated frame it is possible to identify and facilitate good learning processes.

Why is this important? One way to talk about the valuation of community in society is to talk about place. Place is also a concept that can be used to transform our people-centred notions of community to include the more-than-human parts of community, to stress that community is created through social and eco-social relations. We live in a multicultural world where globalized, horizontal relationships and bonds between people, goods, things, images are valued more than the verticality of inhabiting place, by living in, of, and for place. I regard place as a profound, pedagogical phenomenon.

Ecology and psychology

Ecopsychology brings psychological principles and practices to research on landscape and wellbeing. According to Jungian analyst Mary-Jayne Rust (2004), ecopsychology is a movement that has emerged in the last two decades, attempting to connect psychological and ecological worlds in order to speak about the psychological roots and impact of the current environmental crisis. Rust shows that psychology has entirely been concerned with human relationships “not acknowledging the part that the other-than-human world may play in our lives” (Rust 2002). Ecopsychology argues that not knowing the relationship to the more-than-human world, and acting as if being set apart from this world, has disastrous consequences that are not only ecological, social and economical, but psychological. Most of its practitioners and theorists are based in the USA, and are rooted in humanistic psychology (Searles 1960), and so far research in ecopsychology has come very short, since most work so far is either directed towards its therapeutic relevance OR consisting of theoretical works with little empirical evidence.

Why is ecopsychology important? National health policies in the western world express that the population shall be granted good quality of life and have access to positive environmental qualities. Is it possible to have good quality of life if our environments are poor? From an ecopsychological view, questions of health and wellbeing does not stop with the body’s limit, but extends to the material and immaterial wellbeing of both humans and more-than-human lifemodes. Relationships between humans, society and nature are difficult to understand and study, due partly to the disciplinary division between the natural and the social sciences and differences in theory and method. The emerging discourse ecopsychology, which represents an integration between ecology and psychology, and the new interest for transdisciplinary research practice, for example with a reconceptualization of place, is both important and promising in this respect.

Posthumanism and the nature-nurture debate

”A new pedagogy – and therapy - of time and place is beginning to take shape” (Birkeland 2005: 59). This new pedagogy of place is concrete and subjective, with an origin, a history and geography of lived life. It is a new pedagogy for human beings for resituating our selves (”nurture”) in ecological terms and the non-human (”nature”) in ethical terms. It means to stop treating the nature-nurture debate as an either-or question and instead ask how human beings are becoming alongside many other species and life-modes.

Is it too much for hope for? Well, it depends on whether we avoid a gynocentric view of society, or an uterine social space, which Henri Lefebre (1991) calls it, and how the transition from modernity´s abstract space to a utopian, differential space develops. There is a potential connected to a restoration of meaning in space and the feminine principle that started with the women´s movement some decades ago. A reawakening of the female principle seems, however, today to take the form of a symbolic revenge that only reverses the problem, by creating just another form of repression. Sadly, what I see is that it is possible for women to harass men publicly and still be judged politically correct. (It is impossible for men to do the same against women without being blamed sexists and male chauvinist pigs). And, it is politically correct to insist on the social construction of gender. (It is a corresponding taboo to talk about the natural becoming of sexed bodies). Yes, I am referring to the nature-nuture debate in Norway this winter, and the enigmatic absence of wise woman talk. Please, where are the posthumanists and the ecohumanists among feminists and social scientists in Norway? Read Donna Haraway´s book "When Species Meet" and let us have a more constructive debate.

Writing chora

The ideas that I present here take outset in my book "Making Place, Making Self", where the concept of place is rewritten in non-dualist and non-androcentric ways (Birkeland 2005). By working with biographical interviews with individual holiday makers to the Northern parts of Norway, and the North Cape, I have sought understandings of the meaning of place and how place is created in both external and internal worlds of individual human beings. Such understandings can work as a foundation for developing sustainable concepts of subjectivity and self, and for forming sustainable relationships to place and to nature for humans.

When I use the word sustainable here, I am treating it in a very loose sense. I am not using it in an instrumental sense of the word but evoking a flow of maternal thinking – thinking about things and people in a way where everything is related to everything and that everything affects everything. Re-inscribing place with new meaning needs place-writing. This is what geographers do, place-writing - chorography. But instead of relating to – and writing - place and nature through treating place and nature as object, I suggest we relate to – and write – place and nature as subject, treating place and nature as a she, as fore-mother, and affirm the dependency to her as the seat for our becoming. This project is not chorography, but choragraphy, writing chora.

Agency of nature

"To build an ecological consciousness, we do... need to question systems of thought that confine agency to a human or human-like consciousness and refuse to acknowledge the creativity of earth others".

These are the words of a favorite philosopher of nature of mine, Val Plumwood, in an article from Ethics & the Environment in 2006. In her last years before her sudden death in 2008, she was very interested in the agency of nature, perhaps fuelled by the experiences and thoughts that came after an attack by a crocodile while canoeing in Kakadu National Park in Australia in 1985. It has been described as a near-death experience. I am amazed by the attack which she described in the article "Prey to a Crocodile", published in the Aisling magazine in 2002 (and other places). The sudden experience that she was nothing more than food for an other animal let her realize that humans are edible, but also more than edible. In early June 2006 Val Plumwood was one of the key note speakers at a symposium in Trondheim, where she made a stronger claim for viewing the more-than-human world as co-creator and to nourish that which nourishes us, because as she concluded, "the earth, place, grows you". Do we need a climate crisis to understand that what nourishes us, may stop nourishing us one day and rather eat us? I tell you, I talked to Val Plumwood for many hours in Trondheim in 2006 and I saw her eyes. She had crocodile eyes. And she viewed crocodiles as a test for us.

What sort of community is the rural world?

How do we see life? How do we sense life? Instead of treating nature as a consequence of the social realm, we should view human beings as created in relationships that are both human and more-than-human. Human beings are connected to the more-than-human world in terms of being part of the same world in a deeper sense, but in modern societies there is a lack of understanding of these connections and their relevance for socialization and human development.

Our human situation or reality is that we are part of, and a product of, community. Being a human being, is to be a part of a community. But what is a community, really? Rural communities are populated by human and more-than-human life in complex ways. One classical way to distinguish a rural community from a non-rural community is by looking at the density of the population. If we say that rural communities are scarcely populated by human nature, what do we then exclude and marginalize? Who talks about density of more-than-human nature? Nobody. It does not count in our definition of rurality.

The late environmental philosopher Val Plumwood is very right: rural areas are in the frontline of our western culture’s relationship with nature and place. I think people living in rural areas experience the marginalization of nature in a more acute way than people living in non-rural areas. How is it possible to unthink the density of nature in a rural setting?

Place making works...

Sense of place: If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.

To inhabit the earth: Do you know the rhythms, possibilities and limits of the earth? Those who know these rhythms are more able to take responsibility for the earth.

Your region: Learn about the region where you live. How much do you know about it?

To live in, of, and for place: Seek to meet your needs from within the place and region where you live.

Maps: By mapping your own place you may create a renewed understanding of place and sense of place.

Community: Create new place-based communities that take responsibility for the welfare of both humans, society and nature.

The power of place: Place planning for both humans, society and nature.

Storytelling

Margaret Somerville at Monash University writes that “changing our relationship to places means changing the stories we tell about places”. I wish changing place is that simple, it is more, but engaging with the myths and stories already written - already told - about place will tell much about human relationships to place and how humans can be tied to places in the world, as a subjective world. World-making is related to word-making.