We're all vermin: Tactical Predation, Interspecies Media Arts and Perspectivism (original) (raw)
Written in 2015 (!), when I was obsessed with ontological turn, perspectivism, interspecies media arts, posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and rats. Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks: post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’ Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism, the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
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Recently the concept of animism has been radically rethought at the crossover of postcolonial ethnography, environmental humanities and science studies. This reconceptualisation aims at decolonising western sciences, destabilising an anthropocentric world picture and articulating an environmental and animal ethics in the current context of human-induced climate change and practices such as factory farming. It decisively abandons the controversial colonial epistemology in which animism was first introduced as a primitive and regressive belief in the supernatural spirits. In this essay I would like to situate this current cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism into a genealogy of historical discourses, following scholarship that has theorised one aspect of Enlightenment secularisation processes as the internalisation of spirits and ghosts from non-human materiality on the outside into the space of the human mind. Building on this approach, I propose that the current, post-Enlightenment, posthumanist, cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism can be said to mark a certain historical reversal: an externalisation of what has been seen as within and of the human mind, which I will in this essay term ‘mindedness’, to the outside non-human materiality (again).
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