Posthuman identity and the human–animal divide in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Hawks and the Sparrows and Pigsty

In this article, Ferrara puts forward the first analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) and Pigsty (1969) through the lens of posthumanist theory. She contends that by placing animal characters (raven and pigs) in close interaction with humans, Pasolini encouraged viewers to explore and overcome the human–animal divide. In doing so, he aimed to expose the faulty binary premises of Marxist ideology and construct a posthumanist identity that recognized the illusory separation between body and mind, and between the human and its related others. Drawing on concepts such as Marchesini’s ‘mimesis’, Cronin’s ‘tradosphere’, Nancy’s ‘co-ontology’ and Braidotti’s ‘becoming animal’, this article shows how Pasolini considers an exit from anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism via trans-species solidarity. Eventually, in Pigsty, animality turns into a metaphor for all alterity. As humans are silenced by pigs, a new powerful language of ‘otherness’ gives birth to the posthuman human.

Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

“Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

‘I wouldn’t want to be a cow’: An ethnographic exploration of more-than-human relational praxis on a New Zealand dairy farm

<p>This thesis aims to understand how industrial farmers perceive and relate to the nonhuman world. A small-scale ethnographic focus of a 250-cow dairy farm in New Zealand’s Rangitikei district is presented as a proxy for approaching the underexamined field of farming ontologies. A common narrative exists that western ontology is characterised by human exceptionalism, a belief in humanity as singularly subjective beings amid a mute and objective world. Contrary to this discourse, this thesis finds that farmer relations to the nonhuman world are multiple, complex and contingent. This thesis employs Annemarie Mol’s (2002) understanding of ontology as established through practice, and thereby multiple, in conjunction with a material analysis of the farm as a composite ecology of human and nonhuman agents. I argue that industrial agricultural practice is informed both by transcendent, objectivist logics, and by co-constituted, informal knowledge formed through co-habitation of multispecies lifeworlds. The unruly agency of lively materials, and the affective and intersubjective qualities of interspecies interactions, are shown to figure conditionally in farming practice. These components are managed within the bounds of industrial agriculture’s outwardly utilitarian and anthropocentric systems through responsive practices of care and attentiveness, revealing that an attribution of nonhuman agency and subjectivity is essential to industrial farming practice.</p>

‘I wouldn’t want to be a cow’: An ethnographic exploration of more-than-human relational praxis on a New Zealand dairy farm

<p>This thesis aims to understand how industrial farmers perceive and relate to the nonhuman world. A small-scale ethnographic focus of a 250-cow dairy farm in New Zealand’s Rangitikei district is presented as a proxy for approaching the underexamined field of farming ontologies. A common narrative exists that western ontology is characterised by human exceptionalism, a belief in humanity as singularly subjective beings amid a mute and objective world. Contrary to this discourse, this thesis finds that farmer relations to the nonhuman world are multiple, complex and contingent. This thesis employs Annemarie Mol’s (2002) understanding of ontology as established through practice, and thereby multiple, in conjunction with a material analysis of the farm as a composite ecology of human and nonhuman agents. I argue that industrial agricultural practice is informed both by transcendent, objectivist logics, and by co-constituted, informal knowledge formed through co-habitation of multispecies lifeworlds. The unruly agency of lively materials, and the affective and intersubjective qualities of interspecies interactions, are shown to figure conditionally in farming practice. These components are managed within the bounds of industrial agriculture’s outwardly utilitarian and anthropocentric systems through responsive practices of care and attentiveness, revealing that an attribution of nonhuman agency and subjectivity is essential to industrial farming practice.</p>

In Conversation with Vicki Kirby: Deconstruction, Critique, and Human Exceptionalism in the Anthropocene

In this interview Marc Higgins invites Vicki Kirby to dilate on the themes that have exercised her attention over the last thirty years. His questions address the received assumptions that shape political and ethical debate and the suggestion that their terms of reference require a radical shake-up. Kirby’s counter-intuitive treatment of familiar and accepted ways of thinking pays special attention to the nature/culture division and its myriad reconfigurations (body versus mind; primitive, or first, versus complex, or second; illiteracy versus literacy). She interrogates the routine and almost automatic logic that segregates what is deemed abstract and ideational from the pragmatic gravitas and political urgency that we tend to secure in empirical, “on the ground” evidence. For Kirby, this notion of material evidence and the weight of its truth claims, together with the corollary belief that the ideational and abstract are entirely other to physical and material reality, promote an insidious political agenda that sustains misogyny, racism, and ecological degradation as inevitable. By underlining the implicated ecologies of life whose dynamic cross-overs and impurities are also manifest in our thought structures, we are challenged to work with/in a sense of corruption that is irreducible and not simply negative.

Learning from Flint: How Matter Imposes Itself in the Anthropocene and What That Means for Education

In this chapter, we explore one aspect of the Anthropocene, the vital, vibrant connections between life and matter (Whatmore, Cultural Geographies 13(4):600–609, 2006.). Drawing on the effectivity of water as a solution and the “Flint water crisis,” we explore how humans tend not to notice matter unless it brings an effect upon them. Our approach follows Melinda Benson, (Natural Resources Journal 59:251–280, 2019) in seeking to decenter human exceptionalism and explore the chemical and biological actors relationally engaged in a system with humans engendering phenomena that are unpredictable as we demonstrate in a case study of the City of Flint and its access to drinking water for humans. As this case highlights, often matter only becomes noticed when it establishes an ontological disturbance forcing itself on human experience and becoming noticed in the process. Important elements of such “noticing” are tied up with the human-material intra-actions engendering phenomena that is shaped by race and geographic history. Rather than constructing Flint and other examples as emergencies or crises that need to be solved, education should explore the dynamic nature of these events and the intra-actions of all elements. This approach offers one strategy for transforming what K–12 science education looks like for both developing scientists and everyday citizens.

Affect Theory and Breast Cancer Memoirs: Rescripting Fears of Death and Dying in the Anthropocene

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities.

Insect-Thinking as Resistance to Education’s Human Exceptionalism: Relationality and Cuts in More-Than-Human Childhoods

This article discusses the “more-than-human” turn in qualitative inquiry and education, engaging with the critiques presented by philosophers, animal studies scholars, and educational scholars toward the “too easy” adoption of an inclusive relational ontology. Based on Barad’s concept of re-turning, the article develops a methodology of insect-thinking, which folds memories as well as scientific and “low theoretical” sources in and out the analysis to re-narrate child–animal encounters as entangled with place, time, class, poverty, displacement, imagination, and planetary futures. Insect-thinking produces irritations and interruptions to the human exceptionalism that underpins educational research and childhood studies. Based on conflicts, avoidance, and violence in child–insect relations, the authors discuss “cuts in relationality” and propose insect-thinking as means to approach more-than-human worlds as both shared and incommensurable.