Decolonial leaps in more-than-human geographies

Abstract

This commentary illuminates how Whitehead's vitalistic ethos and speculative philosophy mobilises decolonial leaps in more-than-human geographies. These risky leaps that unsettle apocalyptic, commonsense western literacies of planetary crises call for daring and experimentation. Amid the ongoing brutality of a racial, colonial, and capitalist logics, perhaps Whitehead and Roberts are accomplices in decolonial leaps that contribute to a planetary consciousness.

Dazzling engagement

Tom Roberts illuminates the dazzle of geographical thought that can mobilise potent political engagement and ethical responses to ‘pressing planetary issues’ (1) such as climate change, ecological collapse, and new technologies. The article shows the ‘perennial’ (Chandler 2018) nature of Whitehead's speculative philosophy and non-anthropocentric theory of experience that intervenes in contemporary debates on matter, affect, life, and more-than-human geographies. These debates at the intersection of nature and society as well as life and non-life in the so-called Anthropocene continue to mobilise ‘knowledge controversies’ (Whatmore, 2013: 36) as well as tensions between a politics of affirmation and negativity (Dekeyser and Jellis, 2021; Yusoff, 2024). I therefore approach the writing of this commentary with the ongoing ‘intellectual enthusiasms’ in cultural geography highlighted by Sara Whatmore (2006: 605) more than 20 years ago. In her exploration of ‘more-than-human’ worlds, Whatmore's (2006: 601, 602) aim was to recharge the ‘earthlife nexus’ or ‘livingness of the world’ in the ‘Anglophone research community’ of cultural geographers through a focus on energies that connect more-than-human bodies and geophysical worlds. But Kathryn Yusoff (2024: 49) engages with the materiality of this ‘geos/bios border’ between earth and life through a geophysics of race that renders Brown, Black, and Indigenous worlds as extractable insentient matter and ‘inhuman’. But rather than strengthen this negative ontology by reinvesting in devaluation, Yusoff (2024: 486) argues that it is optimism in the generosity of the earth and cosmos or ‘cosmontology’ that decolonises inhuman materiality.

As a cultural geographer and first-generation migrant who encounters the breathlessness in more-than-human ocean worlds in Australia and India, in particular, it has never been enough to reproduce ‘white eco-apocalyptic’ (Gergan et al., 2018: 15) literacies of anthropogenic climate change and extinction that centres ‘space[s] in crisis’ (Smiles, 2023: 3). Rather, it is heterogenous worlds of ‘black livingness’ (McKittrick, 2021: 3), rebellious methodologies and ‘decolonial dreamwork’ (Hanchey, 2023: 4, 19) that awaken a planetary otherwise or futures rendered impossible. Attuning to this difference that moves beyond intersectional identities becomes philosophically rich through Roberts’ critical engagement with new materialism, affect theory, and (neo)vitalism in contemporary geographies. Roberts argues that Whitehead's ‘vitalistic ethos’ (16), or material realities as experiences that ‘both precede and exceed the human’ (16), which even though empirically rare, are ‘most alive with originality and a sensitivity towards difference’ (15). Therefore, rather than celebrate the agency, will, resilience, mastery, and experience of some humans, Roberts takes a speculative leap with Whitehead in an intellectual adventure that recuperates the vitality of earthly matter, technical objects, and affective forces.

There is a risk, however, that leaps into geophysical, technical, and affective worlds that challenge animacy hierarchies might also produce deracinated notions of vibrant matter amid the brutality of colonialism, genocide, and ecocide (Chen, 2012; Puar, 2017; Yusoff, 2024). Yusoff (2024: 47) argues that the vitality of this earthly matter or geos (together with objects and forces) is never neutral if the Human (white, heteropatriarchal society) continues to be placed at the apex of bios (life) but Brown, Indigenous and Black subjects and their worlds become ‘extractable “others”’. But these risky adventures in more-than-human geographies are necessary to make decolonial leaps beyond the institutional whiteness of geography. But then why engage with thought advanced by white men to make these decolonial leaps? Perhaps it is Whitehead's ‘diffusion of life throughout the universe’ (12) that invites such engagement. For example, in explorations of songspirals and songlines that animate and bring Bawaka Country et al. (2022: 448) into existence in settler colonial Australia, the Indigenous-led more-than-human Yolgnu Collective makes connections to Whitehead's (1978: 21) conceptual exploration of creativity and the ‘production of novel togetherness’. They write:

It is not just humans who sing. Animals, plants, trees, the wind, all the beings of Country sing. They sing for themselves and they sing to us. Early morning, the calls of the bird, they are singing their songspirals. They, too, sing our world into existence (Bawaka Country et al., 2022: 448).

The ‘we/us/our’ of Bawaka Country (2022: 436) illuminates creativity, that for Whitehead is not just ‘subjective evaluation’ (Stengers, 2011: 263) or a ‘romantic figure’ (Stengers, 2011: 261) that focuses on the spontaneous. Instead, creativity is always emergent from the animation and reanimation of Earth, Sky, and Sea Country that is relational, material, sentient, sacred, more-than-human, and always becoming (Bawaka Country et al., 2022; Hunter and Lobo, 2024). Roberts shows how this ‘becoming of experience’ (13) which is ontological, affirmatory, differential, and embodied, is the affirmative gesture (15) that produces novel togetherness across more-than-human difference in living worlds. These are the experiences that can contribute to a planetary consciousness.

Planetary consciousness

Decolonial leaps orient more-than-human geographies to the matter of the living world, the planet a ‘new historical-philosophical entity’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 3) and the multiplicity of the planetary produced through an ‘endless process of transformation of its ‘animate and inanimate forms’ (Mbembe, 2022: np). Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe (2022: np) conceptualises the living world as le vivant, a French word for the symbiosis of ‘spiritual and biological energies’ that entangles humans and nonhumans but shows the influence of animist and precolonial African intellectual traditions. Planetary consciousness is the capacity to participate in these ‘vital flows’ of energy and the sharing of the ‘vital breath’ of the planet that is increasingly being enchained and suffocated (Mbembe, 2022). Such a consciousness decentres white possessive subjects who have plundered the planet and contributed to the onset of the Anthropocene (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Poelina et al., 2024). Nyikina Warrwa woman Anne Poelina (2024: 25) from the Kimberley region of Western Australia forcefully argues, however, that participation in a planetary consciousness is possible through ancient wisdom or First Nations Law that focuses on kin-centric ecologies.

Intervening with Whitehead's speculative philosophy, Roberts offers a provocation to engage with the plurality of these Indigenous, Black, Brown, and subaltern traditions of thought that entangle ecological interdependency with matter that lives and breathes. I recall it was quite ‘fashionable’ some years ago to read Whitehead's texts among scholars who began to explore the affective forces and intensities or the ‘nonsensuous ‘life force’ (3) that escape conscious thought and reflection at the SenseLab, Montreal led by philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Reading and gathering with academics, artists, writers, and dancers, I read these dense digitised materials that offered different modes of response to the ‘problems’ of planetary crises beyond perception, cognition, understanding, and subjective experiences of western liberal human subjects. Amid geostories of climate change and extinction, perhaps a space opens up for geostories of matter, life, and abundance which are ‘pushed in to erasure’ (Fujikane, 2021; Todd, 2016; Yusoff, 2024: 3). These material past-present-futures can be brought into the public imaginary through immersive storytelling enabled by the decolonisation of digital technologies (Harle et al., 2018; Todd, 2019).

Tyama (cha-muh) an immersive geostory of Earth, Sky, and Sea Country curated with Gunditjmara women storytellers and whale dreamers Vicki Couzens and Yaraan Couzens Bundle was a wonder-full experience at the Melbourne Museum (2022–2023) during the Covid recovery phase. The immersive, cinematic experience of Gunditjmara Sea Country as material, spiritual, sentient, and kin, enabled by digital technologies (including artificial intelligence-driven applications) produced a shift from phenomenological to ontological registers. Affects, sensations, and feelings were ‘throbs of experience’ (9) that brought together ‘vectors’ of emotional energy exceeding the spatiotemporal coordinates of the present moment’ (9). These generative forces ‘from the penumbral region of experience’ (Whitehead, 1978: 67) decentred the white liberal human subject as well as techno-dystopian and catastrophic planetary futures Decolonising the digital through the crafting of virtual, augmented and extended realities, opened up possibilities to disentangle and temporarily liberate Country from white possession (Harles et al., 2018).

Whither decolonial leaps?

Unlike the dazzle of knowledge that is blinding and shuts down controversy, I see Roberts’ thinking with Whitehead as a provocation for geography to engage in decolonial leaps. But these leaps into ‘black livingness’ and a planetary consciousness enabled by a ‘vitalistic ethos’ are parallelled by the turn to negativity (Dekeyser and Jellis, 2021: 320) in cultural geographies that calls for ‘moments when existence comes apart or breaks down’. Such breakdown resonates with the breathlessness and exhaustion amid black brutality, death, and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But thinking with Black cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2013: 742), celebration and optimism continue to be the essence of black thought, the emergence of fugitive publics and ‘life in common’. Following Moten, perhaps it is possible to say that (neo) vitalist geographies and negative geographies can exist alongside each other, but they are asymptotic (i.e. a curve and a line that move towards each other but never meet at any finite distance) with different imaginaries of the political subject. Perhaps Whitehead's vialistic ethos that emerged in the 1920s may be conceptualised as parontological in the way it emerges ‘by way of but also against and underneath the ontological terms at our disposal’ (Moten, 2013:742). In other words, the vitality of matter becomes the condition of possibility for the ontogenesis of shared planetary breathing. Is this a decolonial leap?