At the Australian Posthuman Summer Lab
How do we measure a stone? We can’t. And yet, at two different posthuman summer camps this year, that is what happened. We cannot speak of the posthuman unless it’s completely absorbed and without a trace of hierarchy. But for many it still remains theory without praxis, a grappling of ideas while bound to a toxic anthropocentrism. In the Australian Posthuman Summer Lab, the facilitators removed rocks from sacred Indigenous land and brought them to RMIT University for the purpose of quantifying them, weighing them in machines, and then poetically speaking of them in order to reach towards a qualitative attribute. They forgot the quality was already inherent. We were then asked to take the stones home with us, and bring them along to the campsite the following day where at some point we’d be informed of the place to return them. But we were never informed. Only the true posthumans remembered and we each restored our stones with mindful devotion, while the question of organised extraction hung heavy in the air. In ‘A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None’, Kathryn Yusoff writes that “geology is a mode of accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on which side of the geologic colour line you end up on.”
The Anthropocene, therefore, is built on an erasure of its racial origins, a mechanical monocultural extraction so systemic that not even a posthuman administration had the foresight to consider the ethical concern of what they were doing, so indelible is a whiteness of mind. “No geology is neutral,” writes Yusoff (2018, p. 111). To deprive geology of its context is to deprive it of its historicity and ontology. Resituating matter then becomes the colonialist tendency to resituate the human above nature instead of thinking through co-existence as materially symbiotic.
Translating Nature at the Italian Summer Camp
Later at the Italian camp, a workshop was given on “translating nature.” We were told to go outside and to bring something back from the landscape, like a flower or twig, and then we’d form groups and join our discoveries into a collective artwork to create new meaning from their displaced amalgamation. The exercise gave me a feeling of unease because of the objectification of the more-than-human, and I almost didn’t participate altogether having walked back empty-handed. Then suddenly another participant pointed out to me a piece of black plastic lying on the ground. Wonderful, I will gladly provide a fragment of the human for an anthropocentric exercise, to de-extract our presence from an extractivist project, and clean the environment of litter. The participants then discussed the potential meaning of their plant-based creations.
This, however, is not the translation of nature but the translation of an abstract artwork comprised of nature. The human continues to apply its own agency over nature, provides its own meaning for its own ends. I argued that you reduce nature to an object and a mere abstraction, while Eszter pointed to the impossibility of translating nature in this way because you can’t escape the inherent anthropocentrism of humans attaching their own interpretation. Debashish then gave a remarkable analogy about the African masks tourists purchase to hang on their walls where it loses all meaning and remains colonialist. Together, us three formed an interconnected constellation as we debated against others fighting for their artistic freedom.
The Extraction Tendency
We never observe from the source. We extract and then create a new centre around the extraction as if that humanly defined centre is the source itself. It’s prescriptivist instead of descriptivist. Imagine if I took all your words, jumbled them up and rearranged them to create new meaning. That would be me supplanting my agency over yours. Your subjectivity would be completely lost and our relational entanglement denied because we would no longer be in a true dialogue.
The human denies relationality when it reduces relationality to an abstraction. It’s only by allowing all of life to materially co-exist without hierarchy that it becomes posthuman. If posthumans are to ethically incorporate nature with art, then they can only do so by representational abstraction. Otherwise, the question remains whether nature can co-exist as both itself and artwork without being completely subjugated to the human. But even this consideration feels deeply anthropocentric because nature can never speak for itself. The problem is much vaster than reductivism; it’s abstraction itself that’s the issue, which becomes an escape from what is real. The cessation of thought ends in silence, and in silence we begin. It’s not enough to reworld, we must also re-be.
The posthuman needs to become pre-human by grounding ourselves in life beyond abstraction. Nature cannot be nature if it’s being controlled. Life can only flourish when the abstract isn’t placed above the material. Look at the way the tree offers their presence. The tree never asks, Who am I? They just say, I am, I am.
Do not label and reduce; experience it all by becoming the breath of the tree. I have already forgotten my name, the division between self and nature erased. Multiplicity has no beginning or end. I’m deep in the jungle of our entanglement, a labyrinthine relationality without centre. Can you see it? Let go. Unsee the vision and fondle the world. Learn to experience our co-existence intuitively by unravelling the self and gifting your presence to one and all. Reification is the new deification. We do not soil the material with the abstract—we soil it with soil. Remove the weeds of abstraction and water the earth. Nature is already beautiful, its own divine artwork. We don’t need to give any meaning; its value and meaning are already intrinsic.
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