Central to my work is a recognition of the hyper-intimacy we have with the nonhumans all around us. Our bodies, our technology and science, and our very cultures and identities are co-constituted out of countless nonhuman agents and relations. Climate mutation is forcing a confrontation with this reality, one that is proving not only to be materially devastating for many populations of humans and nonhumans, but intellectually uncomfortable for many Westerners. We're learning that humans can have no separate existence from the nonhumans that surround us (and that essentially are the world). In fact, human beings can have no existence at all without nonhumans, separate or otherwise. The Enlightenment humanist concept of the idealized “Man” is questionable--the human being is just one variety of nonhuman. What this means is twofold: it means that intimate contemplation of the nonhuman has a liquefying effect on static, anthropocentric worldviews; boundaries are violated, idealizations are subverted, categories become gelatinous--what was stable and hygienic becomes slimy, porous, and complicit. Second, it means that the figure of the human dissolves. Humans, as a class of thing, become less discrete subjects than a set of diffuse, hybrid biological/geological forces. Humans become symptomatic--traceable primarily by the consequences of their presence (especially from the perspective of nearby nonhumans). In both cases, the figure and ground dissolve into one another--disintegrating in order to fully integrate, with the human being finally thinkable as yet another demon that haunts the planet.
