"To some extent, the market has become a totality, or in any case our core moral experience. But so has technology. Both the market and technology now set the rules and procedures according to which we are obliged to live together as a connective body within new planetary limits."
"We see this in particular in the apparently endless development of digital ecosystems, which now form what is known as “platform capitalism” — once again, one of the main drivers of planetarization. Now the key question is, to what extent can we rely on these infrastructures as parts of the Earth become inhospitable to life in the near future.
Can we rely on infrastructures that have, to some extent, contributed to turning the world into a burning house? Can we rely on them to learn how to inhabit the planet anew, how to share it as equitably as possible? To foster a new consciousness that gives ample space to notions of bio-symbiosis — life in symbiosis with humans and nonhumans?"
"We need to begin by agreeing on what is at stake. From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. This precariousness is to some extent the result of the imbalances we have been discussing, yet at the same time, in the kind of archives I’m working with, life has been understood as a dynamic, positive and often risky exposure to the unknown and the unpredictable.
When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe, but we do not simply breathe individually. We also share the vital breath.
In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it, between the human universe and the universe of nature, of objects and so forth. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. It is a different ontology.
We start from the assumption that imbalances do exist, but fundamentally they never trump the sharing of agency — the fact that it is possible for something that might appear to lack power to affect that which we think has more power. It’s a different metaphysics of power and of agency. Therefore, the liberation of the vital forces, les forces vitales, is how imbalances are dealt with".
Can we rely on infrastructures that have, to some extent, contributed to turning the world into a burning house? Can we rely on them to learn how to inhabit the planet anew, how to share it as equitably as possible? To foster a new consciousness that gives ample space to notions of bio-symbiosis — life in symbiosis with humans and nonhumans?"
"We need to begin by agreeing on what is at stake. From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. This precariousness is to some extent the result of the imbalances we have been discussing, yet at the same time, in the kind of archives I’m working with, life has been understood as a dynamic, positive and often risky exposure to the unknown and the unpredictable.
When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe, but we do not simply breathe individually. We also share the vital breath.
In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it, between the human universe and the universe of nature, of objects and so forth. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. It is a different ontology.
We start from the assumption that imbalances do exist, but fundamentally they never trump the sharing of agency — the fact that it is possible for something that might appear to lack power to affect that which we think has more power. It’s a different metaphysics of power and of agency. Therefore, the liberation of the vital forces, les forces vitales, is how imbalances are dealt with".
"The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.” We have to institute an act of radical decentering that forces us to be born together again. It seems to me that that’s what a new planetary consciousness forces us to undergo — and I believe it is possible."
"The question then becomes, how do we listen to the planet? Does the planet speak for itself? It has to speak for itself before we can listen. And I think it does speak for itself.
To understand how it is that every single living being on Earth speaks for itself, we have to get out of a certain epistemology that has been premised on the fact that humans are the only speaking entity, that what distinguishes us is that we mastered language and the others didn’t. But we now have studies showing that plants speak, that forests speak: a de-monopolization of the faculty of speech, of language."
No comments:
Post a Comment