What does it actually mean when we talk about “man-made” climate change? How much human activity is actually involved in current developments when we look at the big picture? In the MORE WORLD interview, Fiji-based poet and philosopher Sudesh Mishra reflects on the role of humans and discusses indigenous cosmologies as a source of inspiration for dealing with environmental destruction.
In one of your recent papers you state that, “If modernity defines itself through a process whereby it relationally relegates to areas of darkness what is, in fact, constitutively necessary to it, then it is time to shine a light on these dark areas in order to transform the ‘death drive’ driving surplus accumulation.” Speaking of relegating to areas of darkness what is, in fact, constitutively necessary to neo-liberal modernity, I would like to focus on an aspect that you repeatedly address in your work: the fact that humans lack a sense of taking part, something you call “human apartness”. In my view, this lack is constitutive of the neo-liberal subject that has been established as decoupled from others, even decoupled from the rest of the world, if not from the world as such. Could you let us know more about this problem?
At some point in our very brief history, we decided to stop thinking of ourselves as being a participatory component in an ever-changing assemblage – or, more precisely, zoē-assemblage – that includes other entities on the planet, including organic and inorganic forms: frogs, trees, rain, stones, fish, light, bacteria, dust, etc. In fact, we started to sequester ourselves from our planetary others (who are not our others in the first instance) by drawing a line between the zoē status of non-human life-forms and that of our own.
We started to conceive of ourselves as being surplus to zoē. In short, we turned ourselves into a distinct biopolitical species whose zoē status was disremembered. It is this consciousness of our apartness as biopolitical actors that gave rise to a uniquely human hubris.
Here my thinking revolves around an egregious human disability, that is, our self-conscious understanding of the apartness of our consciousness from the moment of being which, incidentally, can never be decoupled from the dynamic of becoming. Gilles Deleuze made this point eloquently and repeatedly. I am not sure when this happened, but it did happen (as I show in my examples from Ovid, Aristotle and the Old Testament) and became progressively naturalized.
We started to believe in a fallacy. Surplus accumulation and neo-liberal modernity thrive on the fallacy of human apartness (and I’ll explore this ruse shortly) because everything around us becomes subject to an extractive logic which sustains the commodity form: extraction, conversion, fetishism, accumulation and reproduction.
The sorry yet marvelous thing is that our seeing is a type of blindness. We have failed to acknowledge that which is not in hiding, has never been concealed, but which we ourselves have hidden in plain sight. I speak of our being as it transits through the space-time that is life, that is, as it becomes existentially. What is this becoming being if not a more-than-human assemblage which is also, at the same time, a less-than-human assemblage? For are we ever not a dynamic assemblage inclusive of non-human beings and things?
These questions articulate challenges that all of us need to confront. It seems important that you are able to develop such a thinking of the world in Fiji where you work as the Head of the School of Language, Arts and Media at University of the South Pacific.
That’s right. As we communicate, I sit on a chair with my fingers on the keyboard. I’m wearing steel glasses and my eyes are fixed on a black and white screen. I rest the balls of my hands on a wooden desk while my shod feet are on a tiled floor. The ceiling fan blows wind through my hair and past my shirt collar. Outside, I can hear the birds singing in the trees. I take a sheet of paper. I breathe in the stench of a stink bug and so on. I never exist as a subject separate from the present assemblage.
In fact, my entire existence at this moment consists of all kinds of beings and things (chair, keyboard, steel, screen, wood, shoes, moving air, cotton, birdsong, paper and the smell of bugs), and the repertoire of this assemblage is constantly changing, as the dynamic of becoming never comes to rest. When I hear someone knocking on the door, I take the door handle in my hand and then become the door, while at the same time the door also becomes me.
In our daily becoming, we are always an assemblage of non-human beings and things, among other things. For some reason, however, we have convinced ourselves that this is not the case. To put it more simply: the moment I remember that the door becomes me and I become the door, my relationship to the door and to myself changes radically. If, as an assemblage, I am simultaneously a being that transcends the human and one that is also less than human, I must treat all elements of the assemblage – both organic and inorganic – as I would treat myself, for these elements are never separate from me. If you extend this principle to our entire planet, all subject-object relationships dissolve. Furthermore, all hierarchies of value, on which both the concept of the human and modernity are based, dissolve. The concept of the human is the problem, and the problem is therefore ultimately human.
There is a growing conviction that engendering forms of collective existence beyond, alongside and despite the crippled, yet lasting hegemony of neo-liberal modernity is an urgent intellectual and political priority. In this context I wonder how indigenous cosmologies can offer a different approach to how humans can relate not only to each other but to the world as a whole?
I think the moment you treat a singular life, mine or yours, as an ever-changing zoē-assemblage, you cease normalizing human exclusivity which, as I said, is a downright fallacy and a key justification for extractive practices that underpin surplus accumulation. Anthropocentric thinking has always been based on the sorcery of metamorphosis where non-human entities are measured on the normative scale of becoming human.
So hierarchies arise once you have a norm that governs forms of value attribution. What was recognized about colonial forms of value attribution where the colonized subject is perpetually and perfidiously in the process of becoming human has its genesis in the taxonomic isolation of entities – animals, plants, rock, minerals, etc. – for the purpose of value attribution with the human as the default norm. Hierarchical thinking is founded on our general disregard for the assemblage in which we are an element among others.
Ovid, for instance, cannot think in terms of assemblages because each act of mythical transformation devalues the human norm. When I turned to pre-Christian iTaukei cosmologies, I was gratified as I came across examples where the human was not the norm; in fact, normative humanity becomes the source and cause of narrative disorder and anxiety. In the legend entitled “The Great Flood”, the desire to attribute normative value to the human causes the great serpent, Degei, to destroy the world in a deluge in order to initiate a new beginning. When Turukawa is killed by Degei’s two sons, both human, because to them it was merely a hawk, their world is wiped out for daring to think of the zoē-assemblage as a domain of hierarchical value attribution informed by biological difference.
How can indigenous cosmologies “remind homo sapiens that they are a participatory element” in the web of human and non-human relations and life forms that you call “planetary assemblage” or “zoë assemblage”?
I’ll cite an instructive example I recently discussed in a paper. In ‘The Woman who Emptied the Sea’ we are given a compelling account of a woman who evolves a sense of taking part in an ecological assemblage. The woman in question is from inland Lovoni. After resolving to cook her food in saltwater, she walks down to the coast for the first time in her life. Upon catching sight of the sea in flood-tide, she marvels at the large quantity of brine in the lagoon, fills up her gourd and proceeds to return home.
By the time she scales the mountaintop, however, it is ebb tide and the woman, alarmed by the diminished sea, retraces her steps and empties her gourd into the lagoon. She does so because of an innate understanding that she is just one element in the general assemblage. Between the surplus sea of the flood tide and the deficit sea of the ebb tide, the act of putting back is the balancing gesture of a woman who, in a moment of supreme epiphany, senses value not in terms of independent units but in relation to the whole planetary assemblage. She has a sense of taking part in the assemblage, not of being apart from it. In contrast, we are only just learning how to return carbon dioxide to the rocks from which they have been so catastrophically extracted.
What ideas and impulses from indigenous cosmologies can be mobilized as a starting point for developing a sense of taking part?
As an example, I would like to mention two concepts that are essential to iTaukei culture. The first concept is “vanua” and the second is “tabu”. In a simple sense, vanua simply means land in the sense of land or territory. However, if one examines this concept in terms of how it functions in practice, one realizes that vanua cannot be separated from the genealogical ties that bind the dead to the living and both to those not yet born.
The land also cannot be considered separately from the ethical care of land and sea resources, or from community ties, spiritual guardianship, or the duty to care for all that vanua inhabits. Vanua is therefore another word for “complex assemblage”. The term “taboo” describes the practical application of a sacred prohibition and is closely related to vanua because vanua – here meaning the collective, consensus-based will of the community – is the basis for imposing a protective taboo over a reef system, a mangrove estuary or a forest. Respecting a taboo that can last for many years is future-oriented and based on a philosophy that sees vanua as an irreducible assemblage.
Taking a recomposed notion of the human as a “participatory element in the planetary assemblage” as a starting point, I wonder how indigenous practices, in concert with scientific knowledge, could offer a pragmatic response to the climate-related crisis generated by modernity?
I discovered such a concept more or less by chance when I was studying the theories of Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, i.e. the Frankfurt School. For both Bloch and Adorno, the archaic forms an essential unity with modernity, since the archaic is a necessary precondition of modernity. Bloch even regards the archaic as a “prevented future” or as a possibility that continues to exist within modernity. He raised the following questions: What would happen if archaic practices were to combine with the techno-scientific present?
Would this then open up the prospect of a future that has so far been prevented, which is prevented precisely by a ruthless present geared towards over-accumulation? Many people on our planet are addressing this important question by taking a serious look at so-called archaic indigenous practices. In Fiji, for example, scientists at my university began to show the indigenous population how to scientifically record marine life back in the 1990s.
They also suggested that taboos be imposed or lifted based on the analysis of this data. The results came as a positive surprise to everyone, because the science reaffirmed and supported an indigenous practice of conservation that is now experiencing a renaissance throughout the Fijian archipelago. The link between “noncontemporaneous” taboos and “contemporaneous” (i.e. contemporary) scientific knowledge could indeed be a source of inspiration for the future-oriented revival of an unfinished past. However, science and technology should be used in the context of existing indigenous practices that view life as an assemblage and dispense with anthropocentric hierarchies and anthropocentric values.
Against the backdrop of what you have developed in our discussion so far, I wonder: If not only the devastations of climate change arise from a planetary web of interdependencies, but potentially also capacities to collectively counter global warming, then how can we progress from passive to active entanglement? How can we progress from the everything and everyone is connected condition as one which tends to paralyze us to a state of interconnectedness that enables new forms of cross-border cooperation?
These are of course important issues. I think we need to act – simultaneously – both individually and collectively. However, this will certainly have to take place in different contexts (as we live in different climate zones) and in different ways. We must therefore also act individually because we as individuals have an ethical, ecological and (in relation to all species) survival-oriented duty to look after our “atmospheric commons” (Dipesh Chakrabarty).
So I have to make an effort myself to take effective and concrete measures to reduce my personal carbon footprint, for example by taking care of mangrove trees, saying goodbye to the electricity grid, cycling to work, growing carbon-absorbing ferns, giving up meat and so on.
Even if all the unknown multitudes were acting alone and in isolation in their respective contexts, we would still be acting together with the goal of serving the planetary assemblage. I recently looked at a Reuters report on the so-called “wood wide web”. According to it, there are carbon absorbing ectomycorrhizal fungi in high altitude forests that form an underground communication network in the forest. I like the idea of humanity living as a carbon-absorbing fungal assemblage, with each individual initially working alone, but ultimately together with the others towards a common planetary goal.
How can we cultivate cooperative practices for the interplay between communal, state and global approaches adapting to climate change?
I believe that we need to find out what the most modern ecological practices (including carbon-reducing practices) are everywhere, no matter where they are applied. We then need to demonstrate to government stakeholders what the benefits of these practices are. On a global scale, we need to engage science and technology to support, scale up and apply these practices. Here in the tropics, an adaptation strategy is useless. We need concrete measures to reverse the effects of climate change. We also need to address the problem that the market economy has destroyed ecologically sound practices; these practices need to be revived globally.
I remember reading recently about plastic-eating bacterial enzymes and that scientists are currently researching how these enzymes can be used to speed up the biodegradation of plastic. I immediately thought of the fruit vendors in Fiji: not so long ago, they sold their produce in baskets made from woven coconut leaves. There are plenty of coconut trees here, and harvesting their leaves from time to time doesn’t harm the trees. Someone used to weave these baskets locally and earn a living with them. That really was an intelligent ecological practice in the tropics. The baskets made from coconut leaves have of course since fallen victim to the plastic spirit of capitalism.
Editor’s note: Sudesh Mishra was the keynote speaker at the Berliner Gazette-Konferenz MORE WORLD, which took place from October 10 to 12 at ZK/U Berlin and explored the following question with workshops, performances and discussions: How can we work together across borders to tackle climate change? A comprehensive documentation of the conference with projects, audios and videos can be found here. The interview questions were asked by the Berliner Gazette editorial team as part of the MORE WORLD-initiative Translated from English by Anna and Edward Viesel. The photo above is by Mario Sixtus and is licensed under a CC license (by nc sa).