Report or activist project
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ppt.pptxBats and cosmopolitics
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Opening thoughts
Isabelle Stengers
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The cosmopolitical proposal: Isabelle Stengers
How can I present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought; one that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to “slow down” reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us? How can this proposal be distinguished from issues of authority and generality currently articulated to the notion of “theory”? This question is particularly important since the “cosmopolitical” proposal, as I intend to characterize it, is not designed primarily for “generalists”; it has meaning only in concrete situations where practitioners operate. It furthermore requires practitioners who – and this is a political problem, not a cosmopolitical one – have learned to shrug their shoulders at the claims of generalizing theoreticians that define them as subordinates charged with the task of “applying” a theory or that capture their practice as an illustration of a theory.
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Definfing ‘cosmopolitical’
In the term cosmopolitical, cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace intended to be final, ecumenical: a transcendent peace with the power to ask anything that diverges to recognize itself as a purely individual expression of what constitutes the point of convergence of all.
The cosmopolitical proposal therefore has nothing to do with a program and far more to do with a passing fright that scares self-assurance, however justified.
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Organisms and ecosystems
‘Human ecologist Alf Hornborg (2001) reflects on this vision: Each organism and species exists by virtue of its capacity to perceive and interpret the world around it. An ecosystem is not a machine, where the various components mindlessly fulfill their functions as a reflection of the external mind of the engineer. Ecosystems are incredibly complex articulations of innumerable, sentient subjects, engaging each other through the lenses of their own subjective worlds’. (p. 125)
Cosmopolitics: An Ongoing Question Paper delivered at The Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA Political Theory and Entanglement: Politics at the Overlap of Race, Class, and Gender October 25, 2013 Adam Robbert and Sam Micke
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Cosmopolitics and bats: the players
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Bats as pests in the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden
In downtown Sydney, just behind the iconic Opera House, lies the Royal Botanic Garden, 75 acres of flowers, trees and grassy areas first established in 1816 on the site of Australia’s first farm, Farm Cove. The gardens are a place for tourists and the people of Sydney to explore and enjoy, and they’re also a site for conservation research. Because this is one of the biggest green spaces in the city, the gardens are home to plenty of wildlife, including flocks of cockatoos and bats with wingspans a yard wide.
While the cockatoos can be annoying (especially if you’re stupid enough to feed them), the bats—called grey-headed flying foxes—have become a real problem, at least in the eyes of garden management. These mammals are herbivores and leave the human visitors largely alone (though they can at times be incredibly creepy). However, they damage the garden because they defoliate trees. In the more than 20 years since the bats took up residence in the gardens, they’ve killed 28 mature trees, 30 palms and many other plants and damaged another 300. Most worrisome, they settled in the Palm Grove, site of many of the oldest trees in the garden, including historic, exotic species collected from places such as Malaysia and New Guinea. So several years ago the management of the garden decided that the flying foxes had to go.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bats-lose-out-to-historic-trees-in-sydney-124145115/
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Bats as pests in the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden
But was the removal of the flying foxes from the Sydney gardens really necessary? When I first heard of this plan, shortly before my latest trip to Sydney in March, I was sad to hear that the bats would soon be gone. They were one of my favorite memories from my first trip there—looking up on a beautiful fall day to see hundreds of these little Draculas hanging above me. While I was in Sydney this year, I met with Tim Cary, a bat researcher at Macquarie University. He made a good case for why stressing out these animals was akin to torture and contended that the plan was doomed to fail. (Cary suggested tenting the Palm Grove with netting to keep the bats out.)
I also met with Mark Salvio, director of the Royal Botanic Garden, and we spoke at length about the level of destruction, the plans to get rid of the flying foxes and the levels of review and restructuring that the plans had gone through over the years. This isn’t something that is being done without any consideration for the consequences to the grey-headed flying fox species. And as much as I enjoyed the bats during my visits, I could understand that the Garden had placed its foliage as a higher priority–that’s why it exists, to preserve the gardens and their history. (After all, I doubt that the Smithsonian Institution would let its collections be destroyed by, say, insects in the warehouse, even if those insects were an endangered species.)
Did Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden make the right choice? Is stressing the bats a truly horrible thing to do? Will it even work?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bats-lose-out-to-historic-trees-in-sydney-124145115/
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Who is involved in the Garden?
Writer in above slide
Visitors-picnics, runners, walkers, parents and children, babies, office workers
Admin and on ground staff
Cars, workers in carts and buses driving around the Garden
Animals- mammals
Non-mammals
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Defining cosmopolitics
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another definition
The meaning of the simple phrase “cosmopolitics” seems almost self evident: Cosmopolitics refers to the politics of the cosmos. But this definition begs further investigation—for what kind of “cosmos” has a “politics”? These two terms, distinct in everyday language, need to be brought together. But how?
Cosmos in this context designates the multitude of beings—human and nonhuman, living and nonliving—that together construct reality and form a collective society—a society that has always included the nonhuman despite frequent attempts to see things otherwise. Cosmos becomes attached to politics by means of the many associations continually forged and broken between humans and nonhumans. The cosmos in this sense is itself a historical being not juxtaposed to the history of human beings
Cosmopolitics: An Ongoing Question Paper delivered at The Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA Political Theory and Entanglement: Politics at the Overlap of Race, Class, and Gender October 25, 2013 Adam Robbert and Sam Mickey
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Cosmopolitics as an integrative practice
If the political cosmos means anything it means the ecology of everything, human and nonhuman. In this sense cosmopolitics emerges as an integrative practice for navigating today’s fractured landscape of knowledge (Stengers, 2010, p. vii). For Isabelle Stengers this fracture refers to the fissure between facts and values, subjects and objects, nature and society, time and history, or world and representation. This fissure—a bifurcation of nature if there ever was one—places us in a bind because the task of political ecology demands that we think facts and values together; however, the bifurcation leaves us unable to bridge the gap that would allow us to see facts and values as two sides of the same integral ontology. It is as though the domains of aesthetics, values, and subjects belong to a different universe from facts, objects, and data, forever irreconcilable.
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Multiplicity of associations
In the bifurcated view, subjects and objects form two separate spheres of reality whilst at the same time colliding everywhere. Cosmopolitics suggests a unique practice of relating to these bifurcations: acknowledging our participation in multiple, irreducible worlds—not just at the level of knowledge and concepts (epistemological pluralism) but at the level of being itself (ontological pluralism). Such pluralism indicates the pervasive influence of Whitehead (1978) on cosmopolitics, as it echoes his “ontological principle”—that is, the reason for anything is always one or more actual entities. Thus instead of spatializing reality by positing two separate containers—one called nature and one called society—cosmopolitics suggests that there are as many modes of reality as there are entities. The task is to trace the multiplicity of associations between entities as they participate in a common, ecological collective—where nonhumans also have a voice in society—rather than to deliberate between the vacuous abstractions of nature and culture.
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Ontology of knowledge
By suggesting an ontological pluralism, cosmopolitics renders an account without a giant gap between two separate spheres (Nature and Society), and instead navigates a terrain filled with innumerable tiny gaps and crossings between beings. Without reifying the knowledge-world gap, cosmopolitics nevertheless sees the gap between knowledge and being as indicative of a problem of relations in general. In Latour’s (1999) words, “the immense abyss separating words and things can be found everywhere,” (p. 51). The shift from one enormous gap to countless tiny ones is significant: By not having to cross a huge gap between worlds cosmopolitics returns us to the wild diversity of things themselves without appeal to subject-object, nature-culture dichotomies. Here “the fragile gulf of reference” Latour (2004, p. 85) warns puts so much pressure on language to represent an entire world does not disappear entirely, but becomes only one of many links that mobilizes the collective in certain ways. Thus, rather than thinking of knowledge exclusively as a tool for epistemic inquiry, cosmopolitics describes the ontology of knowledge by approaching knowledge as one of the many links that creates associations between beings, instead of as a unique mode responsible for representing all of them.
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cosmopolitics
. For Stengers and Whitehead the relationship between laws and phenomena is complex: laws are not external or unified containers acting from outside, below, or beyond the level of phenomena; rather, they are powers that emerge from within the qualities and interactions of phenomena themselves. Thus instead of trying to anoint an absolute sovereign from which a feudal hierarchy of knowledge can be built, cosmopolitics suggests a different, more democratic, way forward: Cosmopolitics approaches each territory of entities as populated by distinct possibilities, qualities, and obligations. Each territory produces its own “habits” or “customs” that take the shape of immanent laws influencing the behavior of individuals. To put it in Whitehead’s (1978) words, “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures” (p. 50). But how do we approach these distinct territories in a way that integrates their respective values without assimilating them, including them without enclosing them? Cosmopolitics offers us a series of practices and concepts to help orient us towards this diversity
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Ecology of Practices
A key concept addressing the dynamic between constraints and obligations is the ecology of practices. “Ecology” in this context refers to the study of the complex and uncertain interactions between more than just organisms and environments but, more generally, between any beings, and where interactions are never merely material but always involve value and the production of meaning. Thus ecology is, to quote 4 Stengers (2010), “the science of multiplicities, disparate causalities, and unintentional creation of meaning” (p. 34). By linking ecology to causality itself, cosmopolitics takes a much broader, metaphysical approach to ecological relations than is considered in the regular, scientific use of the term. The cosmos from this view is itself an ecology of interacting beings, ideas, practices, and technologies. “Practices” here refer to ways of cultivating new relations between human and nonhuman members of a community, as opposed to methods for representing or accessing an external, unified world
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Knowledge as a link
Knowledge, from this view, is not what is achieved when researchers are able to detach from the worlds they study like disinterested observers; rather, knowledge is a powerful link between researchers and the subjects of research. Knowledge attaches and entangles rather than clarifies and separates; it multiplies relations between beings, and foregrounds the way concepts and ideas capture researchers just as much as it is researchers who produce concepts and ideas.
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Multispecies cosmopolitics
If we take seriously the insights of cognitive ethology, we find a new view of the ecosystem as a whole that any practice of cosmopolitics must take seriously: All organisms from bacteria to mammals, to divergent extents and degrees, possess some level of mind or sentience. Human ecologist Alf Hornborg (2001) reflects on this vision: Each organism and species exists by virtue of its capacity to perceive and interpret the world around it. An ecosystem is not a machine, where the various components mindlessly fulfill their functions as a reflection of the external mind of the engineer. Ecosystems are incredibly complex articulations of innumerable, sentient subjects, engaging each other through the lenses of their own subjective worlds. (p. 125) Multispecies cosmopolitics does not just recognize the multiple universes of value activated by different human practices, but also recognizes those universes of value that belong to the entangled worlds of nonhuman specie
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companioning
What cosmopolitics tries to describe is that ecologies are irreducibly complex societies of value-emitting organisms, technologies, and abiotic beings that are also centers of valuation. Technologies, no less than organic species, generate their own systems of values, constraints, and obligations that need tending to. Technologies, 6 not unlike living beings, are never value-neutral, tools empty of their own content or characteristics. Technologies of all kinds—no matter what their use—are dynamic and lively agencies, bringing forth a series of unpredictable constraints, requirements, and possibilities that cannot be theorized in terms of their human usefulness alone. Here our comprehension of and responses to ecological phenomena are not determined from on high by detached observers, but emerge in the act of companioning with as many species as possible—participating in the materialsemiotic networks of all the beings involved in the situation, human and nonhuman, corporeal and incorporeal, natural and artificial, familiar and uncanny
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Finally…..
Finally, cosmopolitics also honors the unique role played the ecology of ideas and knowledge. Stengers (2013) in particular juxtaposes the “knowledge ecology” to the “knowledge economy” to foreground the power knowledges—including concepts and fictions—have in shaping humans and human practices, as well as the effects these practices have on nonhuman communities. The idea expressed here is that, much like the ecology of practices refers to the way in which different activities fold back to encourage certain identities, thoughts, ideas, and knowledges are also “captured” by one another, exerting influence on each other and upon the psyches that deploy them. The Earth is wrapped in a writhing ecology of ideas and concepts; we are captured by ideas just as we capture them. The central claim is that ideas, to quote Haraway (2008), are “themselves technologies for pursuing inquiries. It’s not just that ideas are embedded in practices; they are technical practices of situated kinds” (p. 282).
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