UNESCO TALK 1. Posthumanities as Multispecies Tales: STORYING EXPOSURE

Cecilia Åsberg

In an all too humanized world, environmental storytelling finds itself in desperate times but also in times of opportunity. It matters what stories tell stories, stated Marilyn Strathern (1992:10), a feminist anthropologist of science already in the 1990s. Building on that embrace of storytelling, Donna J Haraway (2016 a:12), famously continued: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters /…/, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions […]. It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories.” Put simply, wording is a conduit of worlding. In this very interdisciplinary scenario, all kinds of story-telling matters. From various perspectives to responsive posthumanities that I bring together in this talk, I wish here to give some theoretical and empirical examples of the practices I have come to term storying exposure. 

Threats and fears of looming environmental crisis instils a conservative emergency response in people (Mbembe & Roitman 1995), to look out only for themselves and not for others, to stay in line. This means we need today to work harder than ever before to produce stories and expositions that instil a sense of wordly belonging and local community. Literature, reading and vulnerability studies have a special role in this. Recent works in environmental humanities, ecocriticism and place-based storytelling (Haraway 2014; Alaimo 2016; van Dooren 2014; DeSilvey 2017) have explored many types of exposure stories. From The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin to Animal’s People by Indra Sinha. There is even a growing tendency in Environmental Humanities to seek accounts for giving polarized debates and heating climates, stressed environments and communities storied form in ways that might eschew the trap of focusing only on “damage stories.” Vary of the performative power of storytelling, a stance of proud pessimism and cynicism (disguised as criticism) is rejected because it may hinder unexpected possibilities social change. There is always more afoot, and reasons for surprise. Many seek expressions instead of ways of living well with and caring for, in the words of queer eco-critic Cate Sandilands, the “wounds of the world.” Indeed, experimenting with the triangular relation between self, word and world is itself a form of exposure. In academic and extra-academic settings, I have come to call such affirmative practices posthumanities – for how they bridge arts and sciences, natures and cultures, words and worlds. Storying exposure is here understood as methodological umbrella term for such “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al) that we can jointly explore and develop for very interdisciplinary research, in-field philosophies, eco-critique and place-storied forms of situated knowledges.

             References:             

Mbembe, Achille, and Janet Roitman. 1995. "Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis."  Public Culture 7 (323-352). 

Alaimo, S. (2016) Exposed: environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times (University of Minnesota Press)

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curating Decay (University of Minnesota Press)

Haraway, D. (2014) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press)

van Dooren, T. (2014) Flight Ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction (Colombia University Press)