Posthumanist-performative relationalities

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Please find the discusion page for posthumanist-performative relationalities HERE.

Often in dialogue with systems-analytical approaches, a growing number of scholars have brought perspectives from feminist care ethics, new materialism, posthumanism, and practice theory, among others, to bear on research and action towards sustainability transformations (Hertz & Mancilla Garcia 2021; Walsh et al. 2021; Böhme et al. 2022). ****While there are substantial differences among these theories we highlight their mutual resonances here with the general term ‘posthumanist-performative’ (following, e.g. Sundberg 2014). Posthumanist-performative relationalities tend to highlight the string of related dualisms inherent to modernist knowledge practices – including nature and society, mind and matter, subject and object, and knowledge and action – as fundamentally linked to unjust social-ecological relations of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and environmental degradation (Fox & Alldred 2020; Staffa et al. 2022). Posthumanist-performative relationalities argue that these dualisms and associated assumptions are not given or pre-existing but are enacted or ‘performed’ through practices or modes of engagement (Cooke et al. 2016). ****Consequently, posthumanist-performative approaches emphasise the importance of performing alternative practices capable generating realities that are more just and conducive to sustainability, and advance relational understandings that view humans and nonhumans as emerging through their relatedness (Dedeoğlu & Zampaki 2023). ****Posthumanist-performative approaches to transformation have emphasized contextual and place-based actions (Böhme et al. 2022), ethics and practices of care (Moriggi et al. 2020), support for rights and governance systems of Indigenous and local peoples (Foggin et al. 2021), and arts-based methods and novel pedagogies (O’Neil 2018; Hertz & Mancilla-Garcia 2020).

Human-nature interconnectedness

Posthumanist-performative relationalities begin from an ontological assumption that reality consists of entangled processes (O’Neil 2018; O’Brien 2023). The unfolding and coming together of processes produce ‘events’ or ‘entities’ (where entities are understood as events experienced by a being) (Hertz et al. 2020). Human understandings of the world are therefore produced from how we engage with it (Cooke et al. 2016). In their account of transformation in Baltic Sea fisheries, Hertz & Mancilla-Garcia (2021:2) draw on the work of philosopher Karen Barad to identify these forms of engagement as “material-discursive arrangements” or “practices” through which “a ‘part’ of the world becomes intelligible to another ‘part’ of the world.” These practices do not discover a world that is pre-existing ‘out there’ but actively help to produce it, and are thus “ontologically inseparable from, or entangled with what they produce” (Hertz & Mancilla Garcia 2021:2). While such practices are exceptionally diverse around the world, the interlinked material-discursive practices associated with modernism – which perform separable social and ecological entities with distinct sets of properties – have become dominant, particularly in the Global North (Fox & Alldred 2020). Therefore, from a posthumanist-performative perspective, ‘humans’ and ‘nature’ are not pre-given or inherent categories of the world, but are generated through particular performances of reality (West et al. 2020).

Agency and leadership

In posthuman-performative relationalities the concept of agency is not treated in terms of conscious or intentional action but in the broader sense of the ability to affect or ‘do things’ – thus expanding agency beyond the human to nonhumans, ecologies, and infrastructures (e.g. García-López et al. 2021). For example, Hoffman & Loeber (2016:706) develop a practice-based approach to explore the networked agency around the ‘closed greenhouse’ in Dutch agricultural transitions. Meanwhile, Contesse et al. (2021:7) draw on actor-network theory to highlight the active role of the Bagrada hilaris bug in initiating agricultural transitions in Chile, including destabilising existing pest management regimes and catalysing new relationships and forms of organisation among farmers. Taking this a step further, O’Neil (2018) draws on the work of Barad to argue that agencies do not ‘pre-exist’ in entities before then interacting with each other, but are only realised through their mutual relating or ‘intra-action’ as part of the unfolding phenomena itself. In the context of developing transformative climate education, Verlie (2017:569) writes that “climate as an entanglement foregrounds how climate, climate knowledge, and climate knowers coemerge through intra-action. Rather than focusing on knowing about climate – which implies a disconnected knower and a static world – the focus of an entangled climate pedagogy might be on practices of climating.”

Scale and scaling

Posthumanist-performance approaches do not view scales as fixed or pre-given phenomena – as in hierarchical notions of local, national, and international levels – but rather as an emergent product of material-discursive practices that perform relations in particular ways (e.g. Schmid & Smith 2021). Consequently, scale in practical transformative processes is understood in a pragmatic sense, open to redefinition in line with unfolding processes of problem-solving and the corresponding evolution of aims and intentions (Hertz et al. this issue). For example, Grandin & Haarstad (2021:289) draw on the work of human geographer Doreen Massey to explore scaling processes in the transformation of Addis Ababa’s transport systems, developing the concept of ‘relational mobilisation’ to show “the interconnections at work in exchanging and negotiating sustainability interventions between cities and across scales.” Likewise, Contesse et al. (2021:10) critique rigid interpretations of niche, regime, and landscape levels in the Multi-Level Perspective on transitions, showing in the case of agricultural transformations in Chile, “niche boundaries are not so clear cut but fluid, continuously (des)enrolling new actors […] and redefining the links that hold the network together.” These fluid and interconnected notions of scale, tied closely to material-discursive practices, provide what Grandin & Haarstad (2021:289) and O’Brien et al. (2023) describe as a “hopeful perspective” that highlights the potential value and significance of supposedly ‘small’ actions in initiating transformative change.

Time and change

From posthumanist-performative perspectives, time is not treated as a ‘container’ or a ‘backdrop’ within which things happen but is rather emergent from relations (Cooke et al. 2016). For example, Barad (2010:162) writes that “Spacetimemattering are the ongoing rematerializings of relationalities not amongst pre-existing bits of matter in a pre-existing space and time, but in the ongoing reworkings of ‘moments,’ ‘places,’ and ‘things’ – each being (re)threaded through the other.” O’Neil (2018) incorporates such understandings into transformative sustainability education around food systems, writing that “learning is not static nor is it a dualistic, rational process as the predominant Western educational paradigm suggests. Learning is an entangled experiential process of the past, present, and future: it constantly changes.” This intertwinedness of past, present, and future leads to a vision of sustainability as “interconnectedness that grows in all temporal dimensions rather than in the linear terms of a succession of generations” (Cielemęcka & Daigle 2019:77). Forests, for example, are entangled ecologies where survival depends on “an ability to live-with and co-depend on other creatures and unfolds against a twisted temporality in which death is a foundation for the future, and the [anticipation of the] future impacts the present” (Cielemęcka & Daigle 2019:77). Posthumanist-performative approaches suggest that transformations should not be thought of as a linear progression to a ‘sustainable state’ in a given number of years, but rather as a continual struggle (Stirling 2015) or as Fox and Alldred (2020:124) write, a “flow of multiple affects that produces capacities and potential in (post)human and nonhuman matter.”

Knowledge and action

Posthumanist-performative relationalities argue against linearly sequential views whereby knowledge is presented as a cognitively derived product that necessarily comes before effective action (West et al. 2019). Rather, knowing is understood as an embodied process situated within practices and inextricably interwoven with governance action and intervention (Stirling 2016). There is less emphasis on proposing specific interventions and more on nurturing contexts and conditions of possibility where innovations and alternatives might arise and be better supported (e.g. Shove & Walker 2010; García-López et al. 2021). For example, Staffa et al. (2022:46) draw on the work of philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa to develop a feminist ethos for knowledge co-production towards transformation, including caring practices of ‘thinking-with,’ ‘dissenting-within,’ and ‘thinking-for.’ In a complementary vein, Stirling (2016:279) highlights a variety of progressive and reflexive ‘knowing doings’ that may open-up opportunities for transformative change, including “talk[ing] about power,” “privileg[ing] direct engagement of the most marginalised interests in analysis and action,” and “highlight[ing] alternative ends.” Meanwhile, Hertz & Mancilla Garcia (2021) advocate for greater use of arts-based methods including storytelling and theatre and O’Neil (2018) describes the importance of developing transformative approaches to sustainability education. Finally, Foggin et al. (2021:11) emphasise the need for “greater recognition, appreciation, and understanding of local, traditional, and Indigenous” knowledge, governance, and legal systems.

References

Barad, K. 2010. Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come. Derrida Today 3.2:240-268. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1754850010000813

Böhme, J., Walsh, Z., & Wamsler, C. 2022. Sustainable lifestyles: towards a relational approach. Sustainability Science 17:2063-2076. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01117-y

Cielemęcka, O. & Daigle, C. 2019. Posthuman Sustainability: An Ethos for our Anthropocenic Future. Theory, Culture & Society 36(7-8):67-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419873710

Contesse, M., Duncan, J., Legun, K., Klerkx, L. 2021. Unravelling non-human agency in sustainability transitions. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 166:120634. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120634