From the Scheldt to the Mediterranean region: beyond the Natural/Human dualism
(2023) Post-extraction territories in transition #2 — Location: EPFL Lausanne (2.September.2023)
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- Abstract
- The distinction between anthropic and ecological elements is the basis of the contemporary urban project. Historically and culturally, Nature has been understood as opposed to and complementary to the built environment. Reflection moves around these themes to focus on the meaning of words: what does “human” mean? What does “natural” mean? The ecological emergency and the progressive anthropisation of the territory have brought to light a series of questions, first and foremost the indefinability of an effective boundary between the human product and the ecological product: environmental and social, economic, cultural dynamics have always been correlated and now we can see the actual changes they have brought to the territory. The proposal is therefore to move beyond the definition of human and natural and try to understand how these two dimensions are linked, to the point of dissolving any effective distinction between them. The initial step therefore requires a redefinition of subjectivity, which draws on post-human studies: the human and the non-human are not defined by an identity-based subjectivity, therefore determined, but a relational one, therefore determining and self-determining. This means that the human subject and the non-human subject exist as a relation, and that one would not exist without the other. The result is clearly an unhinging of the traditional Man/Nature binarism that has always driven the contemporary project and conception of the territory, in order to consider the latter as an effective open system in which subjects-relationships contribute together to the management, transformation and resolution of the territory. Taking a direct cue from Rosi Braidotti's Posthumanism, these subjects can be defined as Postnatural: departing from the anthropocentric Humanism that has historically pioneered the transformation of the territory, Postnaturalism has the ambition of defining a new paradigm, in which the non-human is not just one more subject to be taken into account in the management of the territory, but a true agent, capable of self-determination, a leading part of the decision-making process (Latour, 2018). The focus then shifts to relations of power, which, whatever one may say, have indeed led to an unequal relationship between the human (clearly white, male, western) and non-human contribution: the question at stake is therefore, at the moment when the project is thought, represented and read, that of how to read, see, express the unheard voice of the non-human, intended as subaltern subjects (Spivak, 1988). What means? What tools? Could the tools the human being possesses for reading and monitoring the territory be used in an alternative key to help the non-human obtain a voice?
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Ventimiglia, R. (2023). From the Scheldt to the Mediterranean region: beyond the Natural/Human dualism. Post-extraction territories in transition #2, EPFL Lausanne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/273777