A case study of an island and a port town in the Indian Sundarbans
The Human
Humanism arose alongside the European Renaissance. It was its psychological core, and represented a rebirth from earlier Hellenic Greek philosophies. Historically, it opposed the medieval European notion of transcendent origins of knowledge tied to the Christian Church and shifted the epistemological source to an immanent divine creativity centred in human rationality. This epistemic shift marked the triumph of the scientific method in acquiring knowledge and organising human life. Such nascent triumphalism fuelled the civilisational hubris (and the missionary zeal of the white man’s burden) accompanying colonialism from the mid-17th century. Meanwhile, practices of confession from medieval Christianity were transposed into modern institutions like schools, government offices, factories, clinics, and prisons, and enlightenment humanism entrenched itself in colonies through pedagogy and governance (Foucault, 1978).
Psychologically, this implied an extrusion and normalisation of the cogito as the defining human trait. The consequences of this are evident around us. Firstly, it led to a principled objectification of the world and its constituents, positioning the subject within an ordered phenomenological framework, with sight as the primary sense and reason as the highest mental faculty. The absolute separation of self and world brought clarity and precision to perception, prized today as high-resolution and an incessant drive for improvement. It also sparked an endemic drive for classification, motivated by power yet imbued with faith in an impersonal absolute—the finalism of a perfectly ordered world.
Depth or distance gained new reality, both as ontological/spatial separation from a rational centre and epistemic/temporal distance from teleological finalism. Perceptions and classifications adhered to the logical laws of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, extending the exclusivity of its ontology or technology of separation. Consequently, the self became exclusively individual, leading to separateness and alienation. Isolated amid alien objects, it sought consolidation through identity politics and competitive ownership—the expansion of me and mine and the conversion, exclusion, or elimination of they and theirs. Further ramifications have been detailed by Enlightenment critics, like Heidegger's (1977) concept of standing reserve: transforming the world into a static relational database, ready for use at a button's press and embodying the productive technological essence of such world ordering.
Once the glorified emblem of 19th and 20th century world civilisation and offered universally at the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1993), humanism began to lose its luster in the dawn of the 21st century and the Age of the Anthropocene. Instead, it was now held accountable for crises in global civilisation and the very habitation of Earth. At all levels of the geosphere, biosphere, and psychosphere—cultural, political, and economic—the exclusion, ownership, exploitation, and enjoyment of the others of the human have seemingly brought us to the brink of disaster, from which there appears to be little escape. Humanism now reveals its hidden dark underbelly: colonialism—the ontological colonisation of the non-human, defined exclusively by its own privileged centre.
What constitutes this colonised, marginalised non (or less than)-human?
There are the non-living and non-human entities of the Earth that are deemed worldless or impoverished of a world (Heidegger, 1995). The exclusion of these entities from human anthropocentrism has justified the colonisation and elimination of the geosphere and biosphere, leading to climate catastrophes and mass extinctions, including potentially our own.
Within our species, faculties other than reason—imagination, emotion, intuition, desire, will, sexuality, physicality — are deemed less than human if not aligned with the rational centre; forces to be controlled, segregated, isolated, or eliminated. This restrictive definition establishes what is worth saving or keeping alive and what is dispensable, forming the basis of thanatopolitics (Agamben, 1998, 2005; Mbembe, 2003).
In this cultural colonisation, there is also the othering and distancing within humanity itself on a scale from civilisation to barbarism, that relegates alternative psychic organisations to peripheral status. In our postcolonial era of independent nations, non-Western cultures maintain historical continuities of erstwhile colonial psychic organisations, engaging with the self-styled superiority of hegemonic humanism. Their relative psychic independence often masks how economically, culturally, and politically, the shadowy hum of modern humanist ontology (identical to colonialism) still rings amid all nations.
The political exclusivity of nation-states, another consequence of humanistic objectification, furthers exclusion through identity politics based on psychic organisation, whether in the name of a national religion or cultural essence.
The Capital
Near-central to all these mediations and compromises of humanity is that neon god — capital.
“Of all the liberation movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one succeeded without limit. It did not liberate a nation, or a class, or a colony, or a gender, or a sexuality. What it freed was not the animals, and still less the cyborgs, although it was far from human. What it freed was chemical, an element: carbon” (Wark, 2015, p. 11).
A question arresting contemporary aesthetic discourses is that of development and environment or the opportunity cost of privileging one over the other. While in theory, it is a contest between two equal priorities, the ever-increasing global population and accompanying demands ensure that the environment is almost always considered a given, as anumbed passivity that may be utilised to feed, clothe, and profit humanity. The concept of the Geological Anthropocene abstracts historical relations to highlight these biogeographical interactions between humans as a species and the biosphere.
However, radical thinkers and climate justice activists question this egalitarian attribution of responsibility for climate change, especially within a system characterised by sharp inequalities in wealth and power. From their standpoint, the term anthropogenic climate change tends to blame victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty by implying equal culpability across humanity.
This critiques the capitalocentric perspective on the environment, rooted in flawed evaluations of ecosystems. It understands capitalism as a connected geographical and historical system—a world-ecology of power and reproduction within the web of life: the Capitalocene (Wark, 2021; Haraway, 2015). It argues that to comprehend the current planetary crisis, we must view capitalism as an ecological system encompassing power, production, and reproduction because biogeological changes are fundamental to human histories of power and production. It criticises the cosmology of Man versus Nature presented by the popular Anthropocene narrative (Crutzen, 2002) not only as faulty analysis but as also complicit in histories of domination. It contends that, by refusing to acknowledge capitalogenic climate change, such narratives overlook how the problem lies not in humanity as a whole, but in specific individuals committed to profitable domination and destruction of most humans and the rest of nature.
Some Marxists categorise the climate crisis as the Capitalocene, where the economic base overrides the ideological superstructure (Hartley, 2015). Others view the Anthropocene as part of the ideological superstructure, functioning as myth (Malm, 2015) or fetish (Cunha, 2015). Contrarily, Wark (2006) reverses the Marxist paradigm, proposing that economic power flows from corporate control of intellectual property (the superstructure) down to material production (the base). He terms these intellectual property owners the vectoral class. For Wark, the Anthropocene shaped by the vectoral class represents more than mere myth or fetish; it can be seen as a problem, such as managing a risk society, or an economic opportunity for sectors like water, agribusiness, and green energy. Wark diverges from much posthumanist thought, which often relies on Spinoza’s (1985) monistic materialism, viewing it ambiguously as an unrealistic leap.
Capitalism's significant innovation since its origins after 1492 has been the practice of appropriating nature—not just as an idea but as a territorial and cultural reality that has encaged and controlled women, colonised peoples, and non-human life forms. Because the web of life resists the standardisation and homogenisation required for capitalist profit maximisation, capitalism has never been purely economic; cultural domination and political force have always facilitated the capitalogenic devastation of human and non-human natures. This capitalist geoculture perpetuates an extraordinary cheapening of life and work, essential to every major economic boom, yet inherently violent, degrading, and self-exhausting. A global system of power and capital perpetually seeks more Cheap Nature, (Moore, 2016), sharply widening class inequalities since the 1970s.
There thus exists a profound complicity between race thinking, economic logic, and the Anthropocene – a relationship that can only be uncovered through a posthumanism committed to epistemological analysis. It is insufficient to broadly oppose capitalism, criticise consumerism, or lament the numerous effects of climate change. Posthumanism can contribute by prioritising the need for an epistemic shift. It can expose the epistemological roots of the Capitalocene, its investment in racism, and its appropriation of nature, and promote a politics of resolute anti-racism accompanied by an earth-based ethics that respects complexity.
Posthumanism in the Global North, however, has failed to see racism as a hermeneutical tool to reveal the hidden stakes of asserting human ascendancy. This oversight stems from perceiving humanism merely as a vague ontological belief or ideology, rather than acknowledging its materialisation as political economy and everyday life. It ignores the role of racism as a non-human supplement to humanist political economy, especially when confronting climate change as an ethical and political challenge. It eschews the histories of most humans being practically excluded from humanity. The concept of the ecological footprint (Wackernagel & Rees, 1998), for instance, directs attention to individual, market-oriented consumption and neglects lacunae in the system.
Under these circumstances, ideas of the Capitalocene or Econocene capture the culpability of industrial and financial capitalism, rooted in slavery and colonialism, in driving climate change. They argue that this overarching concept of the economy primarily functions to obscure and trivialise the connections between race, the economy, and climate change, rendering unthinkable the complexity of being a citizen of planet Earth. Race, obscured by the economy, dangerously precipitates a confrontation with Earth's interconnected complex systems – a reality that posthumanism, fermented outside the boundaries of the West, has the potential to address.
The Sundarbans
Where is the field where these percepts negotiate, proliferate, and play?
Moonfall and Sundogs presents a portrait of nights in Ghoramara and Haldia, separated by 18.36 nautical miles, Nayachar, and the inequitable ambitions of capital. It explores the ecological and social rift that widens between an endangered island in the Hooghly River as it plunges into the Bay of Bengal, and an industrial town harbouring a major port in West Bengal as it onloads and offloads millions of tons of steel, iron ore, coal, petroleum, chemicals, and parts.
The island, its forests, waters, chars, and lives coalesce into hydrosocial networks, negotiated by the relentless transmutability of the milieu. Its inhabitants are rendered ecological refugees amidst devastating, uncontrollable, and overwhelming riverine constellations. Rising sea levels, magnifications of salinity, disintegrating lands, and recurrent tropical cyclones create a shared sense of disassociation, dislocation, and alienation. As its expanse dwindles to 28% of itself in merely over the last sixty years, its inhabitants battle deprivations of civic goods and insecurities of health, food, education, and employment as consequences of anthropogenically hastened deep time on vulnerable human histories. Death is endured amidst invading waves, dwellings are ramshackled to be washed away, mighty trunks submerged gasp for air, and the sky is goldened by nearby industrial fires and planetary plays of moonlight and mist, amongst scattered concrete debris of hope.
The dock complex and the rapid diminishment of contiguous islands were both conceived in the 1960s. Dynamised by the forces of national assertion and international trade economy, Haldia has unfolded into three-laned roadways, streetlights, apartments, universities, hospitals, and all other accompaniments that sustain the vital core (Alkire, 2003) of life. Yet all is not well. Migrant populations dwell in tin-roof homes beside those roads, the city’s water supply is dangerously replete with heavy metal pollution, the marine biota is intruded, and the air is thick with sulphurous smog as smoke and particles settle on flowers, terraces, and lungs. The riverbed is dredged to allow the ingress and egress of heavy vessels, entrenched shipping lines disrupt wave patterns, displaced silt forcefully deposited elsewhere interrupts the flow and life of water, and erosion exacerbates on nearby islands in an inevitable orchestra of coastal decrepitude.
This work is interested in questions of colonial disfigurement, governmental apathy, unsustainable industrialisation (Gandhi, 1908), resource capture, ecological marginalisation (Homer-Dixon, 1994), and possibilities of resurgence (Tsing, 2018) through embeddedness with inhabitant communities. Drawing from convictions that all earthly fates are intertwined and that unimpeded growth insensitive to holistic empowerment is overarchingly deleterious, it seeks to understand not only the sharp disparities between the island and the town but also their conjoint genealogies and tomorrows.
Pursuing an exploration of the manifold ecologies amid these spaces in polysensorial ways, I hope to develop Moonfall and Sundogs into a meditation that may be felt in intrinsic, intuitive, and instinctive ways.
The Posthuman in the Sundarbans
Local ecologies assemble planetary ecologies. This site becomes a pulsating cartographic excel of value, apprehension, and agency. It engages with ecology as a whirling paradigm of experientialities, and understands ecology as inherently constitutive of the social, and the social as visceral to ecology. As the years deliver transformations gradual and sudden, amidst grasping fingers and distant pity, the land and its people collapse into each other like suicidal stars in time and tide.
The unique realities of the Sundarbans demand and impel the posthumanist framework.
This is not because the agency and centrality of the non-human is unfamiliar to the inhabitants of the space: ecological insecurities are awash in the elegy of encroaching tides and mutating contours, and they feel intrinsically how plural ecologies amid these riverine constellations are co-constitutive and structurational. The call for an indigenous posthumanist perspective is rooted in the failure of other conceptual frameworks – often developed in faraway ivory towers – to acknowledge what the inhabitants implicitly and generationally know. This oversight is perhaps also due to the marginalisation of these communities; being poor and socially excluded, they are relegated to the less-than-human within capital and governmentality – their epistemes disregarded, and their realisations disappeared.
Ecosystems possess value autonomous of how they may serve the interests of individuals. In India, and West Bengal in particular, the Sundarbans mangrove system in the Gangetic delta is victim to similarly inaccurate ecosystem valuation. Historical records reveal the intensified exploitation of the 4,200-square-kilometer forest and river ecosystem during the colonial era, driven by settlement, resource extraction, profit-making, and tourism. These tendencies have only increased over the years, even as the area continues to suffer the deleterious impacts of capitalogenic environmental degradation and climate change. Deforestation, aridification, cyclonic weather events, rise in sea level, tidal incursions, increasing salinity ingress, soil erosion, and excessive siltation engender repetitive devastation to life and sustenance not only for its environmental diasporas with conflictual histories inhabiting in close proximity but also its rich and diverse flora and fauna.
Efforts to mitigate these challenges have been largely inefficient and unsuccessful. A significant explanation as to why is the overwhelming apathy to the intrinsic ecological value possessed by these ecosystems. The Sundarbans mangroves possess immense indirect use, existence, and bequest value. While they certainly perform provisioning services through the production of food, fuel, raw materials, and other biotic resources, a disproportionate preoccupation with merely their use value divorced from the other services they perform has endangered their preservation. The mangroves perform essential regulatory services toward maintaining and bolstering environmental quality. This includes climate control through around 4.15 crore tons of annual excess carbon sequestration in its rich organic soil, stabilisation of sediment and retention of soil organic matter as its aerial root systems resist tidal currents over the soil, protection against coastal tsunamis and typhoons, shielding against tropical storms and floods, and generation of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous through nutrient recycling. Not only do the Sundarbans protect generations of human populations from various natural vagaries, but they also comprise a holistic natural habitat for existing flora and fauna and safeguard marine and terrestrial biodiversity. If pathways are designed to appraise the ecosystem in ways appropriate to its myriad functions, there is hope that it may be protected from further harm.
Posthumanism thinks about how to include the claims, needs, and agencies of diverse living beings, habitats, and ecosystems. It recognises organisms from microbes to jellyfish as ecosystem engineers that mingle the currents, engender habitats, and vitalise the water. It acknowledges the complex chorography of life — from the vapour that arrests heat in the air to earthworms that tunnel the soil - to enliven, sustain, decompose, and replenish all beings. It not only draws attention to the dynamic interactions in natural environments but also reminds us that they are far from passive backdrops or abstract spaces. Barad (2007) argues that such an ethics of mattering involves not a responsibility to an entirely externalised other, but a form of responsibility and accountability for the lively interconnections and processes of becoming, of which we are inherently a part. This challenges the notion of the world as a mere storage unit for inert objects awaiting future use. It advocates instead, for an ongoing accountability to a materiality that is active, emergent, and continuously shaping ourselves and others. Relph’s (1981) concept of environmental humility aligns with this, proposing a way of engaging with the world where things, places, landscapes, people, and other living beings are respected for simply being what they are. This respect for all forms of earthly life serves as an important foundation for posthuman relations, embracing both positive and negative dimensions of interconnectedness.
Posthumanism also seeks to reevaluate our subjectivity concerning other life forms and agencies. New materialist ontology, meanwhile, shifts attention away from essentialist concerns with defining what entities like bodies, animals, fossil fuels, atmospheric conditions, and governments are, toward exploring what these entities can accomplish in interaction with other matter (Delanda, 2006; Deleuze, 1988). Events and interactions are understood as assemblages (Bennett, 2004) or arrangements of matter that are inherently fluid and continually evolving (Deleuze, 1988; Lemke, 2014). Instead of attributing agency solely to humans, new materialism suggests that all the distinct materialities within an assemblage possess an affective quality—they have capacities to influence and be influenced by other elements in their surroundings (Deleuze, 1988). Thus, human bodies are no longer viewed as the primary actors in events. Rather, the collective economy of these affects within an assemblage determines what it and its human and non-human components can achieve (Clough, 2004).
The posthumanist project is encapsulated in the concept of zoë (Agamben, 1998) which encompasses all living things, including both bios (human-organised social life) and technology. Posthumanism is not about moving beyond the human or being after it; instead, it aims to broaden our understanding of what it means to be human by placing humans in a balanced relationship with the rest of the living world. Central to this is Braidotti's (2019) multi-scalar relationality, where posthuman subjects engage at three levels: with their inner selves, with other humans, and within the larger world. By acknowledging this third relational level explicitly, posthumanism does not diminish humanity but instead elevates all forms of life to equal importance. Here, equal does not mean the same as and never has. Posthumanism responds to a broader affective turn within the social sciences and humanities (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). It views humans not as passive objects but as active agents who continually interact with both human and non-human entities. It emphasises fluid, continually redefined individual identities formed through open-ended interactions (Lorimer, 2009), and challenges the rigid tendencies of humanism which elevate humans as the exclusive agents of transformation (Wilson & Jeevaraj, 2023).
Such a perspective fogs the boundaries between physical and human realms (Lorimer, 2009), and between nature and culture. It fosters an ethics of care at individual, interpersonal, and more-than-human levels. Affirmation here is not just about joy; it is about valuing our potential for growth and transformation. In the context of climate change, this translates into an inherent capacity to live productively and reject self-destructive tendencies, while acknowledging that different people and places have varying capacities for such regenerative living. It is here that the productive aspects of mourning (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018) become valuable and involve moving from vulnerability and fear toward affirmation and meaning. Mourning reinforces the significance of our relationship with what we have lost or are in the process of losing, and reframing climate anxiety as ecological grief offers a meaningful psychological response.
Climate anxiety often expresses a fear that climate change could destroy humanity due to our dependence on natural resources—a dread over the possibility of environmental collapse. Ecological grief, on the other hand, centres on the fate of zoë, the more-than-human world, and suggests a broader mourning that considers the potential loss of the non-human world, not just humanity. Psychological interventions that seek to transform climate anxiety into ecological grief engage in a process-oriented approach. Verlie (2022) observes that "climate anxiety emerges from our transcorporeal (inter-bodily) enmeshment with disordered planetary atmospheres," and that we have yet to fully embrace what climate change feels like, especially as body subjects (Seamon, 2013). Instead of perceiving climate anxiety as an internal, psychological human phenomenon, what is needed is a subjective metamorphosis – a reimagining of the self from an isolated individual to a distributed, atmospheric, more-than-human becoming.
This view challenges us to see climate anxiety not only as a mental state but as an embodiment journeying across the continuous surface of planetary time. Consequently, posthuman wellbeing must develop new questions, methods, sites, and ways of knowing that include less-than-conscious bodily experiences, allowing for a more nuanced understanding and response to climate anxiety that integrates cognitive and embodied responses to the environmental crisis. Rather than being a solution to climate anxiety or climate change, therefore, posthumanism offers a path toward more hopeful futures where we better appreciate our interdependencies within the more-than-human world. Shifting from a human-centric perspective toward a more inclusive, relational understanding of the world, it brings valuable insights and strategies to foster resilience and ethical responsibility amidst environmental challenges.
The Violence
There are many ecologies in the Sundarbans, pulsating and alive, bleeding into each other. Local fields of vision, live, trip, and traverse through generations of experiential memory and daily recognition of abrupt topographical disfigurements. These memories form personal navigational maps of intimate exchanges with the natural and built ecologies, crucial to the social metabolism of inhabiting communities. These personal ecologies are inseverable from the planetary – from the moon, the tides, the fog and wind, the roots and soil, all perpetually mutable and yet momentously still. As more powerful and profitable ecologies intrude into those that are cosmic-personal, they rupture and foment lasting harm to the environment. Economic ecologies propelled by urgencies of capital formation result in varied proliferations, ensconced in swelling insular ecologies, and made more vigorous by them. Conventional comprehensions spurred by governmentality collapse ecology and devastation into legible computational binaries that may be measured, calculated, and exploited into occupation and manipulation by anthropogenic agency.
Nothing orders the past. It shimmers in the lawlessness between what is spent forevermore and what is yet to be found. Yet, as difficult as it is to truly reconstruct the bygone, as vulnerable as these reconstructions are to annexation and appropriation, living societies entwine themselves in the permanent evolution of regularities oscillating between recollecting and disremembering. The collective realisation of patterns becomes a soteriology amidst the relentless solitude of traversing through time. These patterns forged in the effort to touch ephemerality, these registers of remembrance, become memory. Yet, memory too – emotive and magical, nurturing only that which is valuable in the eternal now – is frothy, communicable, and construed only through the mediation of myths. These symbolic, cultural, and ocular archetypes inject meaning into memory and concretise its slippery fluidity through irrealism and the trauma of brutal history.
This work aims to voice and weave together a cohesive narrative of these lives on the loneliest side of the intractable forces of climate change, embattled in subterranean, subdermal, and subneural violences. A normalisation of catastrophe stems from the language of the encroaching tides, painting liminal spaces in the geography of stress. Untethered from homeland by constantly mutating topographies at unpredictable intervals, the erstwhile impudent mangrove wilderness and the ecological refugees battle challenges to basic standards of life amidst recurring tropical cyclones and the aftermath of an intense and inundating hopelessness. The island will disappear, its diverse human histories will evanesce, and I will visit them in the cartographic imprecision of collective memory.
This normalisation of catastrophe under exertions of violence may also be viewed through psychoterratic emotions (Albrecht, 2019) within the Anthropocene. These earth emotions allow ecological grief to foster a pathway to hopeful action. They acknowledge grief for the non-human world to enhance climate discourse. When we engage with this grief, we deepen our relationship with the natural world, even amid environmental decline (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017).
At the core of this is solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005): a deep emotional and existential distress tied to environmental loss, which arises from a gradual disappearance of solace and an increasing sense of desolation associated with one’s home or territory. It reflects the psychological impact of negative environmental change as communities experience a chronic loss of identity and belonging related to their surroundings. This also contextualises the current climate and ecological crises amid the long-standing ecological trauma faced by indigenous communities worldwide. Their experiences refute the notion that the Anthropocene’s burdens are evenly shared among all humans; its most severe impacts become violences typically inflicted by certain groups to imperil others disproportionately (Yusoff, 2019).
Understanding how social bodies become sites of violence requires an exploration of the interplay between power dynamics, knowledge practices, and modes of subjectivation. It involves scrutinising the epistemologies and systems of indexing that inform interpretations of the world and the ways in which bodies are described, evaluated, and subjected to control in various institutional settings. It entails examining how individuals internalise and enact knowledge about the body prescribed by scientific, medical, psychological, religious, and moral authorities (Foucault, 1978; Lemke, 2011). It also necessitates hermeneutics of defamiliarisation and subterraineanity to lay bare the violence of the everyday, un-locatable in any particular time and space. Subterraneanity unearths that which operates or is located behind the calmness and familiarity of daily life. Defamiliarisation disrupts familiar patterns of thought by presenting ordinary things in a manner that renders them unrecognisable, and is akin to the distancing effect (Brecht, 1964) and the pursuit of new modes of alienated aesthetic analysis amidst the age of technological reproducibility (Benjamin, 1968).
Violence not only externalises itself onto the body but also infiltrates the very fabric of societal and physiological structures, shaping our nerves, bones, and blood into contested terrains of control and brutality. This subdermal violence operates surreptitiously as our identities and actions are shaped by the societal inequalities and injustices we assimilate at a molecular level (Rose, 2007). Such slow violence (Nixon, 2011) unfolds harm subtly yet destructively over time. It targets marginalised communities, accumulating alongside and complementing structural violence (Galtung, 1969) and the suffering caused by social inequities. As this slow degradation—or necropolitical injury (Mbembe, 2003)—takes its toll, some communities are forced to endure ongoing harm, deeply affecting their well-being and sense of self.
Authoritarian practices not only shape our discursive capacities through rigorous disciplinary measures, stringent control mechanisms, and meticulously orchestrated rhetoric management, but also infiltrate the depths of our psyche. They become subneural violence ingrained deep within the intricate neural pathways that govern our cognition. These indelible imprints murmuring the fungibility of individuals and human relations transcend the boundaries of individual existence to become genetically encoded and transmitted across generations. They are encrypted into our unconscious and imaginations as the inequality inherent to capitalism pervades the logistics of computation and shapes the real-time organisation of our practices and thought (Beller, 2018). The symbolic and structural violences of computational capital and neuropower therefore, render us all complicit. They impact the neural plasticities of the brain, memory, sensation, and the construction of what we perceive as real, fair, and secure (Vygotsky, 1978; Rancière, 2006; Deleuze, 1992; Lazzarato, 2006). They permeate us through socialisation and enculturation, shaping how we view communities as significant or trivial, and cruelty as illegitimate or justified. They breed conditions ripe for the enactment of epistemic-hermeneutic violence, injury, and death (Medina, 2017; Rabaka, 2015; Fricker, 2007).
The case study is thus a circumstance of subterranean, subdermal, and subneural violence. The denunciation of planetary naturalities of tidal ebb and flow and terrestrial mutation, endeavours to acquit the crystallisation of government, industry, and community elites into apathy, venality, and negligence. It also announces how transactionalities of profit and loss weave convincing cognitive, emotive, and material inescapabilities of devastation, disinheritance, and disillusionment amongst those least lucrative and most vulnerable, so that the transgressed social contract of monopolised power conditional on everlasting deference to the common good of all is slowly standardised.
These Collective Scripts of Empathy
This essay intends to understand how these axes of subterrainianity, subdermality, and subneurality configured by violence may be re-envisioned and re-harnessed to touch, feel, and become collective scripts of empathy (CSoE).
It will perceive the kinesis of empathy as collective practice, drawing from embodied conversations, confluences, discourses, and rituals to realise how agencies of exchange, co-creation, and convergences engender disruptions and redefinitions of power. It will declare that the knowledges, affections, and interminglings fostered by regimes of production and power may also be rethought to undermine them. It will introspect defiance as shared doing-thinking, negotiation, legacies, and the interwovenness of all fears. It will unfold the sedimentations of impossibly artificed conformity, assemblage, and spectacle, and find amidst them something resolutely inimitable, autonomous, and free.
The conceptions of empathy and collectivity draw from perceptions of care as value and practice. Its emphasis on relationality, materiality, and emotion (Held, 2006) allows it to cohere to the collective manner, and to not only legitimise but care with all life through attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness, and competence, facilitating social trust and solidarity (Tronto, 2015). Indeed, care is most possible in the collectivity because it can effectively coordinate and satisfy large-scale and heterogeneous basic needs like safety and security, clean environment, and public goods through the equitable allocation of collective empathy toward the inevitable dependencies of human life (Engster, 2007). This is tied to struction or co-presence without coordination or disorder, as plural and incommensurable forms of lives prevail and are equitably conserved within the radical contingency of community (Nancy, 2015) and multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2005).
Intervention into the dialectical hierarchies of stratified signifiers may thus be imagined through collective, shared, interwoven discoveries of shared scripts of commonality that allow for the comingling and coexistence of difference not through its subsidence into uniformity but through its dynamic potentialities of synthesis. It may be conceived through the perception of empathy as the motive force of dialogic coming-together that also possesses capacities of subterrainianity, subdermality, and subneurality and suffuses beyond territory, skin, and thought.
CSoE is the causal bind of empathy and copresence that challenges the capitalistic pedagogies of intolerance, homogenisation, and disrespect to imagine communities of potentiality, love, and hope. CSoE as envisioned is intentional, affective, granular, associative, and interpretive, challenging the fissures that are splintered between the individual and the collective in thought, art, and knowledge, and seeking the co-construction of agency and structure. It acknowledges the inherent contingency of reality and our positions in this world; it demands the awakening of an empathetic culture of commons that integrates the local and global, human and non-human; and it dissents those polymorphic forces that conjure fabricated fantasies of the consumable everything, everywhere, all at once, upon the fatality of what naturally ought to have been. It ruptures and renegotiates time and space, takes them apart, and reconstitutes the assertions of violence for its revolutionary, praxiological purposes.
CSoE therefore, is a posthumanist answer – from this part of the world, and in as much as anything can be. It peers through the more-than, less-than, and other-than but equally human, introspects how we may embed ourselves in our planetary communities not through immersion but through discursive selfhood, and fathoms how transformation is only possible amidst empathy, revolution is only possible amidst love.
To access the mind map, sign in below.
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. University of Chicago Press.
Albrecht, G. (2005). “Solastalgia.” A New Concept in Health and Identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3, 41. https://doi.org/10.4225/03/584f410704696
Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press.
Alkire, S. (2003). A Conceptual Framework for Human Security . Oxford: Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity, University of Oxford.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Beller, Jonathan. 2018. “The Computational Unconscious.” boundary2.
Bennett, J. (2004). The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372.
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, by John Willett, 91-99. New York: Macmillan.
Clough, P. T. (2004). Future Matters. Social Text, 22(3), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-3_80-1
Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(6867), 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a
Cunha, D. (2015). The Anthropocene as Fetishism. Mediations, 28(2). https://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/anthropocene-as-fetishism
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
Cunsolo, A., & Landman, K. (2017). Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP.
De Spinoza, B. (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1. Princeton University Press.
DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Deleuze, G. (1988). “A philosophical concept . . .” Topoi, 7(2), 111–112.
Deleuze, G. (1992). “Postscript on the Societies of Contro.” October 59: 3-7.
Engster, D. (2007). The Heart of Justice: Care Ethics and Political Theory. Oxford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books .
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1993). The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin UK.
Galtung, Johan. 1969. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6 (3): 167-191.
Gandhi, M. K. (1908). Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin.
Hartley, D. (2015, May 30). Against the Anthropocene - Salvage. Salvage. http://salvage.zone/in-print/against-the-anthropocene/
Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Facsimiles-Garl.
Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Indiana University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvswx8mg
Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.
Homer-Dixon, T. F. (1994). Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases. International Security, 19(1), 5-40.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006. “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” In Deleuze and the Social, by Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, 186. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lemke, T. (2014). New Materialisms: Foucault and the ‘Government of Things.’ Theory Culture & Society, 32(4), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413519340
Lemke, T. (2011). Biopolitics. An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Lorimer, J. (2009). Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Vol. 8, pp. 344–354). Elsevier.
Malm, A. (2015, March 30). The Anthropocene Myth. https://jacobin.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11
Medina, Jose. 2017. “Varieties of hermeneutical injustice .” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, by José Medina, Gaile Pohlhaus and Jr. Ian James Kidd, 41-52. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Moore, J. W. (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2013). Of Struction. Parrhesia, 17, 1–10.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. London: Harvard University Press.
Rabaka, Reiland. 2015. The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, LeonDamas, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Franz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea. Lanham: Lexington.
Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum.
Relph, E. (1981). Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. In Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (pp. 15–23). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315672601-10
Rose, N. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Seamon, D. (2013). Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology: implications for human rights and environmental justice. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4(2), 143–166. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2013.02.02
Tronto, J. C. (2015). Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Cornell University Press.
Tsing, A. (2018). Holocene resurgence against anthropocene plantation. Multitudes, 72(3), 77-85.
Verlie, B. (2022). Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation. Routledge.
Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind in Society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Wackernagel, M., & Rees, W. (1998). Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society Publishers.
Wark, M. (2006). INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE (BUT IS EVERYWHERE IN CHAINS). Cultural Studies, 20(2–3), 165–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380500495668
Wark, M. (2015). Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso Trade.
Wark, M. (2021, April 5). The Capitalocene - Public Seminar. Public Seminar. https://publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/
Wilson, K. D., & Jeevaraj, A. E. (2023). Philosophical Posthumanism: A Renewed Worldview and a Methodological Framework for Critical Analysis. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 7(2), 170–190. https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.7.2.0170
Yusoff, K. (2019). A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None.