We’re all vermin: TacTical predaTion,
inTerspecies media arTs and perspecTivism
Bogna Konior
Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de
Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In
what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition
of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of
colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of
themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of
interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese
collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and
kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates
situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory
loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The
article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks:
post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’
Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal
relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics
are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with
animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism,
the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks
and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
Keywords: anthropocene, ontological turn, media arts, animal studies
… a predatory animism: subjectivity is attributed to human and nonhuman
entities, with whom some people are capable of interacting verbally and
establishing relationships of adoption and alliance, which permit them
to act upon the world in order to cure, to fertilize, to kill.1
In Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert considers
what might happen if half of currently extant species die out by 2050.2 In
her book, the environment is no longer best defined by its opposition to
technology but rather its function as an accelerating graveyard filling up
with threatened populations. As the horizon of existence seems to be rapidly
receding, environmental debate throws itself head-first into moralising
speculation: no longer pondering the mysteries of life, it increasingly asks,
‘what right do we have to live’?3 In this crisis that interpellated humanity
itself – the anthropos – as its subject, we face ‘the sensations of a definitive
DOi: 10.3898/neWF:103-104.01.2021
We’re all vermin
15
1. Carlos Fausto,
‘A Blend of Blood
and Tobacco:
Shamans and
Jaguars among
the Parakana
of Eastern
Amazonia’, in N.
L. Whitehead and
R. Wright (eds),
The Anthropology
of Assault Sorcery
and Witchcraft
in Amazonia,
Durham, Duke
University Press,
2004, p502
[epub].
2. Elizabeth
Kolbert, The Sixth
Extinction: An
Unnatural History,
Bloomsbury, New
York, 2014, p167.
3. Claire
Colebrook, Death
of the Posthuman:
Essays on
Extinction, vol. 1,
Open Humanities
Press, London,
p186.
4. Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro
and Deborah
Danowski, Ends
of the World,
Cambridge, Polity
Press, p31.
5. Heather David
and Etienne
Turpin, ‘Art
and Death: Life
Between the
Fifth Assessment
and the Sixth
Extinction’, in
H. Davis and E.
Turpin (eds), Art
in the Anthropocene:
Encounters among
Aesthetics, Politics,
and Epistemologies,
London, Open
Humanities Press,
2015, pp3-31.
6. Donna
Haraway, Noboru
Ishikawa, Gilbert
Scott, Kenneth
Olwig, Anna
L. Tsing and
Nils Bubandt,
‘Anthropologists
Are Talking
– About the
Anthropocene’,
Ethnos, 2015, p7.
7. Alexander
Galloway, ‘Warm
Pride’, 2014,
http://cultureand
communication.
org/galloway/
warm-pride,
accessed 2
October 2019.
8. Jason Moore
(ed), Anthropocene
or Capitalocene?
Nature, History
and the Crisis of
Capitalism, Kairos,
Oakland, 2016.
9. Zoe Todd,
‘Indigenizing the
Anthropocene’, in
H. Davis and E.
Turpin (eds), Art
in the Anthropocene:
Encounters among
return of a form of transcendence that we believed transcended’, something
beyond us that we used to call ‘nature’.4 Climate change and the inhuman
intelligence of technologised capital, both seemingly created by humans but
also curiously out of our control, redefine how we think about human agency
and about the division between nature and culture. The proposed starting
points of the Anthropocene – the invention of agriculture, the colonisation of
the Americas, the invention of the steam engine, the Great Acceleration, the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – delineate how human actions altered
global climate and geological reality.5 The Anthropocene denotes either that
we ‘are elevating ourselves by thinking that humans are making a geological
epoch’,6 confusedly trying to take responsibility for our ontic sins,7 such as,
some argue, capitalism8 or colonialism,9 or that we are delusional about the
importance of the short human era in the history of this planet.10 Humanist
thought seems to be in crisis and post-humanist thought is rapidly normalised
as a form of ethical piety,11 a way to pay for our perceived ethical failings with
ontological and poetic re-definitions of the powerful Cartesian subject into a
disempowered actant among many others.12 What we once defined as realism
– naturalistic portrayals of individual human consciousness – is increasingly
perceived as ill-equipped to describe our reality.13 We are witnessing an
intellectual ‘nonhuman turn’,14 where ‘nature is not inert, the human/nonhuman divide is breaking down, events and actors are no longer confined
to slices of place and time, and the seemingly enclosed and orderly world is
interrupted by external, uncanny powers’.15 As frameworks for studying the
Anthropocene multiply before our eyes, one would be justified in asking:
why should we pay attention to animism? Even outside of tense though
necessary discussions around animism in anthropology, there are reasons
to pay attention. From its complicated history to its current resurrection,
animism can illuminate how the current techno-geological paradigm shift
is changing our ideas about the relationship between humans, animals, and
machines. In its understanding of nonhumans as social and anthropomorphic
persons, animism goes against the grain of contemporary trends in American
and Western European scholarship (such as defining nonhumans as vibrant
matter)16 while drawing on a complicated lineage of thought that encompasses
ancient Greek philosophy, indigenous philosophy, Marxism, and colonial
anthropology, to name but a few. In the incarnation I will be investigating
here, which I take as distinct from vitalism, new animism asks, in what way
could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman
persons’ to escape the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where
humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others?17
For the sake of intellectual history and our ongoing debates about (post)
humanity, the current revival of interest in animism cannot be overlooked.
But animism is a complicated framework. In the simplest possible terms, an
‘old’ approach to animism in anthropology was concerned with the idea of
‘the soul’,18 placed within a religious context and defined as an unconscious
16
neW FOrmatiOns
and primitive projection of human qualities onto nonhumans.19 A term
coined by colonial anthropologists, who were at the time under the sway of
vitalist philosophy in Europe and spirit seances they visited on the streets of
London and Paris,20 this pejorative idea of animism was later criticised for
projecting the colonial dualism of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ onto the practices of nonmodern peoples.21 A new reading of animism instead argues that concepts
in anthropology should stem from the imaginative power of the collectives
it studies, rather than from a ‘learned analysis’ of these seemingly primitive
practices.22 No longer an epistemic fallacy, animism is now understood as a
‘relational epistemology’ that describes human-nonhuman relationships as
social and materially situated rather than preoccupied with the idea of ‘the
soul’ (Animism Revisited, pp79-80). One of the most influential contemporary
studies is by Philippe Descola, a student of Claude Levi-Strauss. In Beyond
Nature and Culture, he distinguishes four ontologies that map the general
properties of social life throughout the history of human civilisations –
animism, naturalism, totemism and analogism. Instead of relying on the
concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, which are tied to the history of European
thought, he proposes ‘interiority’ and ‘physicality’, arguing that each ontology
distributes the two in a different manner between humans and nonhumans.23
Interiority can include, ‘intentionality, subjectivity, reflexivity, the aptitude to
dream’, and physicality, ‘form, substance, physiological, perceptual, sensorymotor, and proprioceptive processes, or even temperament as an expression
of the influence of bodily humors’.24 Naturalism, the ontology that Descola
defines as authoritative in European modernity, posits that humans are the
only persons possessing an interiority, while nonhumans together create a
purely physical outside. Animism, to which we could argue both totemism
and analogism both actually belong,25 invalidates this separation. Laura Rival
notices on the basis of her fieldwork with the Huaorani,
there are no words in huao terero … to say nature, ecology, religion,
animals or plants. Abstract reified categories that separate the body
from the mind, belief from perception, or human society from the
nonhuman environment are absent from huao terero, as they are from
most indigenous languages.26
Descola tells us that in animism, ‘human and non-human persons have an
integrally cultural view of their life sphere because they share the same kind
of interiority, but the world that they apprehend and use is different, for their
bodily equipment is distinct’ (Human Natures, p19). Animist ‘culture’ means
that human and nonhuman persons follow certain rules of conduct common to
all, just as in naturalism ‘a single, unifying nature [exists within] a multiplicity
of cultures’ (Human Natures, p21). In animism, our interiority unites us
with plants, animals or machines, just as in naturalism our physicality does.
Animism can thus describe all such situations, rather than a specific religious
We’re all vermin
17
Aesthetics, Politics,
and Epistemologies,
Open Humanities
Press, London,
2015, pp241255; Françoise
Vergès, ‘Racial
Anthropocene’, in
G. T. Johnson and
A. Lubin (eds),
Futures of Black
Radicalism, Verso,
London, 2017
[epub].
10. Benjamin
Bratton, ‘Future
Trace Effects
of the PostAnthropocene’,
Architectural
Design, 89, 1,
2019, pp15-21.
11. Roisi Braidotti,
The Posthuman,
Polity Press,
Cambridge, 2013.
12. Timothy
Morton, The
Ecological
Thought, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, 2012;
Bruno Latour,
Reassembling
the Social: An
Introduction to
Actor-Network
Theory, Oxford
University Press,
Oxford, 2007.
13. Amitav
Ghosh, The Great
Derangement:
Climate Change and
the Unthinkable,
University of
Chicago Press,
Chicago, 2016;
Timothy Clark,
Ecocriticism on
the Edge: The
Anthropocene as a
Threshold Concept,
Bloomsbury, New
York, 2015.
14. Richard
Grusin (ed), The
Nonhuman Turn,
University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis,
2015.
15. Fa-ti Fan,
‘Imagining
Ourselves out of
Modernity and
Climate Crisis’,
in J. Thomas, P.
Parthasarathi,
R. Linrothe, F.
Fan, K. Pomeranz
and A. Ghosh,
contributors,
‘Round Table on
Amitav Ghosh,
The Great
Derangement:
Climate
Change and the
Unthinkable’, The
Journal of Asian
Studies, 75, 4,
2016, p945.
16. Jane Bennett,
Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology
of Things, Duke
University Press,
Durham, 2010.
17. Graham
Harvey, Animism:
Respecting the
Living World,
Columbia
University Press,
New York, 2005.
18. Marvin
Harris, Cultural
Anthropology,
Harper and Row,
New York, p186.
19. Jonathan
Frazer, The Golden
Bough, Macmillan,
1983; Edward
Tylor, Primitive
Culture, 1958;
Emile Durkheim,
‘The Dualism of
Human Nature
and its Social
Conditions’,
in R. Bellah
(ed), Durkheim
on Morality and
Society, University
of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1973,
belief. Catherine Degnan’s study of British animism among gardeners and
their plants criticises the oft-heard argument that in the modern world,
because of the supposed dominance of the inert idea of nature, humans
have lost the sense of continuity with nonhuman persons while ‘non-modern’
people ‘live in a social and natural world that has a decidedly human shape
and feel to it’.27 When animism is approached broadly as a practice that treats
nonhumans as persons, it invalidates such assumptions. Descola’s ontologies
do not map easily onto specific geographical and temporal spheres – they
are ‘spatially discontinuous archipelagos rather than rigorously delineated
countries’.28 Tim Ingold writes that animism ‘is more typical in western
societies who dream of finding life on other planets than of indigenous
peoples to whom the label of animism has classically been applied’.29 Manuel
Vasquez tells us that we live inside ‘a global polymorphous hyper-animism
that is emerging out of the ruins of Western modernity’, complete with
ritual football ceremonies and towering mega-churches.30 On the basis of
her research in international robotics labs, Kathleen Richardson proposes a
‘technological animism … a conceptual model of personhood that emerges
in the interaction between fiction, robots, and culturally specific models of
personhood, which may already include non-human persons’.31
Animism is also recuperated within the field of traditional indigenous
knowledges, even though the term was coined by colonial scholars. Linda
Hogan says that in addressing climate change ‘we need the new animists’
to intersect with traditional kinship ethics, where both humans and animals
are considered as indigenous to a land because all animals are considered
citizens.32 Vanessa Watts writes that while modern theories focus on general
nonhuman interconnectivity, in the Mohawk/Anishnaabe view ‘habitats and
ecosystems are better understood as societies’ with ethical structures and interspecies agreements that must be understood in a located and social manner
rather than as an abstracted life force.33 There is little doubt that indigenous
scholars have the authority to clarify the actual meaning of the practices that
anthropology presumed to once define. Yet, outside of this colonial dynamic,
‘animism’ is a polyvocal term, with its ‘western’ lineage encompassing the work
of early Greek philosopher Empedocles,34 Italian philosophers who wrote
about the anima mundi (the soul of the world), and the pantheism of Giordano
Bruno, who described celestial bodies as persons with animal souls. Wolfgang
Kapfhammer draws our attention to the history of ‘Western animism; [an]
alternative occidental tradition contesting the much-maligned Baconian and
Cartesian dominance’.35 The North American transcendentalists, for example,
spoke of the soul of the land, and the biocentric land ethics of Aldo Leopold
hold that we should ‘[enlarge] the boundaries of the community to include
soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’.36 Graham Harvey,
whose edited collection of essays on animism is the most versatile source on the
concept, argues that we must let animism continue its hard work of ‘referring
to more than one thing or theory while also aiding our efforts to understand
18
neW FOrmatiOns
the meeting-points of shared interest and difference’ (Handbook, p1). Marisol
de le Cadena advocates a strategy of ‘partial connections’, such as reading
Marilyn Strathern’s rendition of Melanesian practices of dividual personhood
alongside Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg.37 Juanita Sundberg also
wants us to broaden the ‘posthumanist’ frame of reference, usually confined
to American and European scholarship.38 Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes
that we need to engage an ‘ecology of knowledges’, cultivating ‘an invitation
to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges, granting
equality of opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in
ever broader epistemic disputes’.39 Contrary to these arguments, Eve Tuck
and K. Wayne Yang are against using these knowledges outside of context.40
It remains to be seen whether ‘animism’ will finally be judged as a futile
appropriation that extends colonial dynamics, or as a useful platform for a
dialogue between diverse traditions, which were very often in an open conflict
with one another, and an opportunity to disrupt the canon of posthumanist
frameworks currently used.
I previously wrote about animism as a type of non-representational
anthropomorphism, analysing inter-species biometric media artworks that
operate across ‘technology’ and ‘ecology’.41 There, I argued that unlike in
standard anthropomorphism, in animism the human remains radically
underdetermined and generic – an ‘x’ that cannot be defined through any
specific quality and therefore cannot be psychologically projected onto others.
Because animism operates in multiple contexts, I want to clarify that in this
paper I am interested in a particular operationalisation of this term found
in perspectivism, especially as described by Rane Willerslev, who considers
hunting, predation and antagonistic mimesis as a basis for personalisation.42
In an admittedly unusual attempt to read ontological ethnography of postSoviet Yukaghir hunting rituals alongside an example of contemporary media
art practice in Japan, I want to show a surprising reverberance across these
two settings, where animals are treated as persons not despite but because of
the antagonistic and violent relationships they enter with humans. While I do
agree with Bird-David’s observation that scale and size matters when thinking
anthropologically about animism, and human communities that hunt are
very small compared to large urban human-animal groups,43 I nevertheless
am interested in whether the Anthropocene in its distinct post-Fukushima
dimension can produce a parallel practice to predatory animism. Obviously,
one practice cannot be transposed onto the other but does that mean we
should ignore conceptualisations of human-animal relations that fall outside
the lineage of our intellectual history? Zooming in on the hyper-cynical and
ethically controversial practices of Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom, who
break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of
scavenger crows out of their hiding spots in Tokyo, I also raise questions about
alien and indigenous species, migrants and citizens, refuge and homelessness,
empathy and predation. Rats, crows, or vermin of all kind do not usually
We’re all vermin
19
pp149-166.
20. Erhard
Schüttpelz,
‘Animism meets
Spiritualism:
Edward Tylor’s
“Spirit Attack”,
London 1872’,
in A. Franke (ed),
Animism Volume I,
Sternberg Press,
Berlin, 2010,
pp154-169.
21. Nurit BirdDavid, ‘Animism
Revisited:
Personhood,
Environment,
and Relational
Epistemology’,
Current
Anthropology, 40,
1999, pp79-80.
(Hereafter Animism
Revisited.)
22. Eduardo
Viveiros de
Castro, Cannibal
Metaphysics,
University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis,
2015, pp4043. (Hereafter
Cannibal
Metaphysics).
23. Philippe
Descola, Beyond
Nature and Culture,
University of
Chicago Press,
Chicago, 2013.
24. Philippe
Descola, ‘Human
Natures’, Quadrens,
27, 2011, p18.
(Hereafter Human
Natures.)
25. Marshall
Sahlins, ‘On
the Ontological
Scheme of Beyond
nature and culture’,
HAU: Journal
of Ethnographic
Theory, 4, 1,
pp281-290.
26. Laura Rival,
‘The Materiality
of Life: Revisiting
the Anthropology
of Nature in
Amazonia’, in
G. Harvey (ed),
The Handbook
of Contemporary
Animism,
Routledge,
London,
2014, pp9495. (Hereafter
Handbook).
27. N. ScheperHughes and M.
Lock quoted in
Cathrine Degnen,
‘On Vegetable
Love: Gardening,
Plants, and People
in the North of
England’, The
Journal of the Royal
Anthropological
Institute, 15, 1,
2009, p153.
28. Eduardo
Kohn, ‘A
Conversation with
Philippe Descola’,
Tipiti: Journal of
the Society for the
Anthropology of
Lowland South
America, 7, 2,
2009, p144.
29. Tim Ingold,
‘Rethinking
the Animate,
Re-animating
Thought’,
Ethnos: Journal of
Anthropology, 71,
2006, p9.
30. Manuel
Vasquez, ‘Deprovincializing
Oprah’, The
Immanent
Frame, 2011,
https://tif.ssrc.
org/2011/04/18/
de-provincializingoprah, accessed 2
October 2019.
31. Kathleen
Richardson,
populate the stereotypical alleyways of environmentally-minded green art or
the noble alleyways of eco-criticism. They instead emerge within a predatory
loop of damage and toxicity: an animism for the era of urban waste.
WE’RE BOTH VERMIN: PREDATORY MIMESIS
In a meeting facilitated by the notorious Japanese artist, Makoto Aida, six
Chim↑Pom members, Ellie, Yasutaka Hayashi, Okada Masataka, Inaoka
Motomu, Ushiro Ryuta and Mizuno Toshinori formed the collective in
2005, when they were in their early twenties. They consider themselves as
activists who respond immediately, intuitively and transgressively to the
immediate concerns of our times. Labelled as neo-dadaists, l’enfant terrible
of contemporary Japanese art or ‘prank artists … with a mischievous punk
attitude’44 (the group’s name sounds like ‘penis’ in Japanese, causing endless
embarrassment to journalists), they perceive themselves as historians of the
present, capturing the strange realism of the present for the benefit of future
historians.45 Describing the earthquake in Tokyo in 2011, they recall that it
felt as if reality was ‘reversed’, a feeling that they consider to be the ‘real of
our times’ (The Influencers). Exemplifying the immediacy of their practice,
they organised an exhibition titled Never Give Up just twenty days after the
earthquake, and just two months after the meltdown at the nuclear plants
in Fukushima they travelled to Soma City, located 50 km away from the
site, in order to make an uplifting improvised video-art KI-AI 100 with the
participation of a few local fishermen. Their methods could be considered
extreme. They like transgression. They believe that art can only influence
society if it ‘can go to places other things can’t. And we’ve always gone to
the heart of things’.46 Besides their most recent work Don’t Follow the Wind,
a simulated exhibition staged in the no-entry zones near the Fukushima
power plant that materially exists only as a website, they are most known
for their debut, Super Rat. This morally questionable work of taxidermy was
an installation in Shibuya consisting of dead rats painted neon yellow to
resemble the fictional character, Pikachu. In the early 2010s, the famously
crowded hi-tech Shibuya district of central Tokyo dealt with a rat infestation.
The Japan Times delivered sensationist headlines, such as ‘Alien Invasion:
Vexatious Foreign Species are Increasingly Taking up Residence in Japan’
and ‘Rodent Population Thrives on Tokyo’s Misfortunes’.47 Introducing this
project at the 2013 Influencers Festival in Spain, Ellie, herself dressed in a
Pikachu costume, explained that while a lot of Japanese teenagers in Shibuya
wear this recognisable neon yellow outfit in tribute to the cute rodent in
Pokémon, they have little respect or regard for ‘real’ super rats, whose powers
include resistance to extermination. She added that she perceived both rats
and teenagers as rodents – ‘they are both rats’ (The Influencers). She described
how in the contemporary hyper-tech city like Tokyo, humans and rats are both
vermin, locked in a territorial struggle in a world filled with waste:
20
neW FOrmatiOns
One day I saw all these girls hanging out [by a MacDonald’s in Shibuya]
and there were rats everywhere, eating the leftover MacDonald’s burgers
too. There were so many rats in Shibuya, the pest control people have tried
to kill them, but they’re becoming resistant to poison and cleverer than
the traps. Then one day I saw a girl wandering down this street, dressed
up as Pikachu, it was so funny, to see this girl dressed up as this cartoon
rat, surrounded by all these real, super rats (The Influencers).
She confessed that Chim↑Pom respect and admire the rats who adjust to toxic
conditions through accelerated cultural evolution, outsmarting humans. Ellie’s
attitude is then much different from the alarmist rhetoric in the press warning
of invasive, alien, foreign communities taking the place of righteous citizens.
Rather than consolidating the borders of human identity, antagonistic territorial
relationship between humans and rats allows for partial identification: ‘We like
wild animals living in the city because they are the same as us’ (The Influencers).
Describing themselves as vermin, Chim↑Pom write in a statement accompanying
the artwork: ‘We may be the recent young people/ as being frowned upon by
adults/ feel sympathy for Super Rats/ emerging out of urban life and/ maintaining
crooked coexistence with human beings’.48 This contemporary urban ecology
of human and rat vermin is a damned comradeship, delineated by paradoxical
relations of sympathetic violence, more akin to hunting, predation or black
magic that those typical of environmental restoration or green art that portrays
animals as innocent and possessing a mythical, unchanging essence, impervious
to technological acceleration. But these statements can easily be taken as
metaphors – what does it mean, to be vermin? – or as ‘old’ animist projections
of human traits onto animals. For Chim↑Pom, however, their relationship to
urban vermin is far from metaphorical. They engage with these animals in
a provocative and visceral manner. In another artwork, Black of Death, they
want to engage with death, garbage and waste as a connective tissue between
different species of vermin in Tokyo:
Garbage always reflects the paradox of our society … At night, rats roam
around in the garbage but, in the early morning, crows gather to pick at
it as well, so this garbage bag becomes the symbolic medium that connects
human beings to these animals; it is the link between mass consumerism
and disposal (Chim↑Pom).
While crows are not usually considered to be pests, Tokyo has been struggling
with particularly territorial and clever crow communities over the last years.
The New York Times described the situation as ‘straight out of Hitchcock … the
growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of the more
wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for the crows,
which are scavengers.’49 In admiration of Tokyo crows, the first time Chim↑Pom
staged the Black of Death performance was in the Japanese capital. Video
We’re all vermin
21
‘Technological
Animism:
The Uncanny
Personhood
of Humanoid
Machines’, Social
Analysis, 60, 4,
2016, p111.
32. Linda
Hogan, ‘We Call
it Tradition’,
in G. Harvey,
The Handbook
of Contemporary
Animism,
Routledge,
London, 2015,
pp19-21.
33. Vanessa Watts,
‘Indigenous
Place-Thought &
Agency Amongst
Humans and
Non-humans
(First Woman and
Sky Woman go
on a European
World Tour!)’,
Decolonization:
Indigeneity,
Education &
Society, 2, 1, 2013,
p2.
34. Albrecht
von Haller, ‘The
Great Biological
Problem: Vitalism,
Materialism, and
the Philosophy of
Organism’, New
York State Journal
of Medicine, 86, 2,
1986, pp81-88.
35. Ernst
Halbmayer,
‘Debating
Animism,
Perspectivism and
the Construction
of Ontologies’,
Indiana, 29, 2012,
p18.
36. Wolfgang
Kapfhammer,
‘Amazonian
Pain. Indigenous
Ontologies and
Western Ecospirituality’,
Indiana, 29, 2012,
p151.
37. Marisol de
le Cadena, Earth
Beings: Ecologies
of Practice across
Andean Worlds,
Durham, Duke
University Press,
2015, pp31-34.
38. Juanita
Sundberg,
‘Decolonizing
Posthumanist
Geographies’,
Cultural
Geographies, 21, 1,
2013, pp33-47.
39. Boaventura de
Sousa Santos (ed),
Beyond Northern
Epistemologies,
Verso, London,
2008, p14.
40. Eve Tuck and
K. Wayne Yang,
‘Decolonization is
not a Metaphor’,
Indigeneity,
Education & Society,
1, 1, pp1-40.
41. Bogna
Konior, ‘Generic
Humanity:
Interspecies
Technologies,
Climate Change,
and Non-Standard
Animism’,
Transformations:
Journal of Media,
Culture, and
Technology, 30,
2017, pp109-126.
42. Rane
Willerslev, Soul
Hunters: Hunting,
Animism, and
Personhood among
the Yukaghirs,
University of
California Press,
Berkeley, 2007.
(Hereafter Soul
Hunters).
43. Nurit
Bird-David,
documentation shows the artists driving a scooter while carrying a decoy crow
and a megaphone that emits local bird calls. Using this lure, they were able
to get large numbers of crows to follow them around iconic city landmarks, to
the confusion of the citizens of Tokyo, where they photographed the birds and
created souvenir postcards, showing what they believe to be the real image of the
city – a battleground between vermin species. This intervention amplifies the
crows’ visibility in the city: they are lured out of their usual life on the margins.
Chim↑Pom admire the sense of community among Tokyo crows, they marvel at
how living in a modern city strengthened their bonds and made them meaner.
Unlike the crows in Lithuania, where the project was re-staged, ‘[Tokyo crows]
didn’t give up’, Ellie said, ‘they have an amazing sense of fellowship’ (The
Influencers). Humans and animals dwell together in this toxic, inhuman world,
filled with garbage and e-waste. Rather than creating aesthetic representations
of animals who share our urban lives with us, Chim↑Pom stage rituals and
directly engage the animals. Their art is a platform of co-emergence, where
human and animal personhood is co-constitutive: we are all vermin.
In broadly understood and simplified post-Enlightenment ‘European
metaphysics’, ‘nonhuman animals are assumed … to be above all else inferior
to humans, having been constructed as passive, ahistorical, unfeeling, or
unthinking’.50 Against moralising calls to take care of our little brothers, it
seems unintuitive that in predatory animism, respecting animals as persons
means admitting that we are in relationships of animosity with them. This
is, however, what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro identifies as one of the tenants
of Amerindian perspectivism, which ‘is rarely applied to all animals, instead
it is applied to predators and scavengers’ (Cannibal Metaphysics, p57). In
perspectivism, personhood and cultural practices pervade the world of
hunters rather than being specific to the Homo sapiens. Human culture is thus
one variation of a larger supra-species culture: animals see themselves as
humans and see humans as nonhumans, just like we see ourselves as human
and them as animals. Rane Willerslev’s book Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism,
and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs, an unorthodox work that wants
to ‘reverse the primacy of Western metaphysics’ by cross-reading Yukaghir
hunting practices and creation myths with perspectivism and European
phenomenology, zooms in on the relationship between humans and the elk
which they hunt (Soul Hunters, p3). While Viveiros de Castro writes that when
humanity is the common denominator, inter-species kinship arises from a
temporary suspension of predation (Cannibal Metaphysics, p59), Willerslev
adds that animosity can itself be the kernel of personhood: when hunting,
‘the hunter is forced to recognise himself as an animal, and is forced to see
[the animal] as a person’ (Soul Hunters, p135). Predation – the ability to harm
and hunt each other – must be reversible: humans can fall prey to animals, or
animal spirits, just like animals can fall prey to human hunters and shamans.
This is why in perspectivism, predators and game are recognised as persons,
while other animals may not be. Such reciprocal or unilateral violence does
22
neW FOrmatiOns
not fit easily into the colloquial misinterpretation of animism as a vitalist
or joyous project. Kinship or camaraderie between species is instead about
regulating acceptable ways to co-exist, kill or consume each other in specific
social contexts. For example, anthropologist Axel Köhler describes how Baka
hunters personalise or objectify animals. On the one hand, they explained
that gorillas, chimpanzees, and elephants were persons because they behaved
as such – ‘when showing me the leafy beds of gorillas, Baka acquaintances
commented, “Only a person makes a bed like that to sleep in”’.51 As such,
Baka hunters generally abstained from harming these animals. However,
within the paradigm of capitalism and private ownership, personalisation
often gives way to objectification – the Baka at times work for their Bantu
patrons, who pay well for gorillas and elephants. Otherwise considered
as ancestors and hunted very sparingly, the same animals are killed when
perceived as a source of profit. Danny Navey and Nurit-Bird David sum it up
thus: ‘Once these animals are hunted on a large scale for money rather than
for self-consumption shaped by immediate needs for meat, their perception
as vivid persons is concealed by a utilitarian perspective’.52 This tells us that
naturalist or animist approaches to animals can be entertained within the
same day, depending on the context, even with regards to the same animal.
If animism cannot be taken out of context, we need to ask, what is
the context of Chim↑Pom’s practices today, and why would they parallel
perspectivism? Their case is not about predators and prey but rather vermin
and scavengers. Chim↑Pom admire crows that stick together and learn to
thrive in toxic conditions of contemporary urban life, characterised by the
annihilation of refuge and multi-species homelessness.53 Henry Sussman calls
this moment of anthropogenic crisis ‘post-globalism’, where globalisation
failed in its promises but the ecological crisis that it brought upon us is
global, if not planetary. The ‘post-global’ is marked by the exhaustion of
every resource, including human and nonhuman life:
In place of promised global economic integration is the planet’s largest
landfill, a toxic multinational legacy erupting in the center of the Pacific
Rim, invisibly proliferating outward across the biosphere, and bioaccumulating as we speak throughout planetary food-webs, conventional
and organic alike. . . [a] carcinogenic breeding ground for future birth
defects, genomic mutation, trophic cascades, species explosions, dead
zones and other ecological no-nonhuman’s land. More than merely
contaminated food for thought, the silence, invisibility, and pervasiveness
of these spills intertwines an ecological with a representational problem,
since its detection eludes the eye and satellite image alike.54
‘Ours is an epoch of squandered energy,’ writes art critic Nicolas Bourriaud,
‘nuclear waste that won’t go away, hulking stockpiles of unused goods, and
domino effects triggered by industrial emissions polluting the atmosphere
We’re all vermin
23
‘Size Matters!
The Scalability
of Modern
Hunter-Gatherer
Animism’,
Quaternary
International, 464,
2017, pp305-314.
44. Ellen
de Wachter,
‘Chim↑Pom’,
Frieze, 2015,
https://
ellenmarade
wachter.
com/2015/11/02/
chim%E2%86
%91pom, accessed
2 October, 2019.
(Hereafter
Chim↑Pom.).
45. Chim↑Pom,
‘The Influencers’,
2013, https://
theinfluencers.org/
en/festival/2013,
accessed 2
October, 2019.
(Hereafter The
Influencers).
46. Felix Petty,
‘Chim↑Pom:
The Subversive
Collective Shaking
Up Japan’s Art
Scene’, i-d, 2015,
https://i-d.vice.
com/en_us/article/
d3vxvk/chimpomthe-subversivecollective-shakingup-japans-artscene, accessed 2
October 2019.
47. Daisuke
Kikuchi, ‘Alien
Invasion:
Vexatious Foreign
Species are
Increasingly
Taking up
Residence in
Japan’, The Japan
Times, 2015, www.
japantimes.co.jp/
life/2015/12/05/
environment/
space-invadersvexatiousforeign-species-
increasinglytaking-residencejapan, accessed
2 October
2019; Rob
Gilhooly, ‘Rodent
Population
Thrives on Tokyo’s
Misfortunes’,
The Japan Times,
2000, www.
japantimes.co.jp/
news/2000/11/19/
national/rodentpopulationthrives-on-tokyosmisfortunes,
accessed 2
October 2019.
48. Chim↑Pom,
‘Super Rat’, http://
chimpom.jp/
project/superrat.
html, accessed 2
October 2019.
49. Martin
Fackler, ‘Japan
Fights Crowds of
Crows’, The New
York Times, 2008,
www.nytimes.
com/2008/05/07/
world/
asia/07crows.
html, accessed
2 October 2019.
(Hereafter Crowds
of Crowds.)
50. Cynthia
Willett, Interspecies
Ethics, Columbia
University Press,
New York, 2014,
p30.
51. Axel Köhler,
‘On Apes and
Men: Baka and
Bantu Attitudes
to Wildlife and
the Making of
Eco-Goodies
and Baddies’,
Conservation and
Society, vol. 3, 2,
2005, p417.
and oceans’.55 Bourriaud writes that criticism today must operate on the
axes of waste and exclusion, where there is friction and conflict, because the
spectres animating socio-cultural structures are the unproductive, the wasteful,
the never-decomposing, those who have been uprooted and abandoned,
extinct species: ‘social energy produces waste; it generates zones of exclusion
where the proletariat, popular culture, the squalid and the immoral pile
up in a jumble – the devalued ensemble of what one cannot bear to see’
(Exform, p15). In 2011, Black of Death was restaged in Fukushima. After the
nuclear disaster, crows proliferated in the no-entry danger zones, feasting
on decomposing carcass. Flocks of crows were spotted occupying abandoned
human houses. Fukushima, a symbol of irradiated waste, became the stage of
revival: while the robots that were sent there for research could not withstand
radioactivity,56 rumours had it that around the irradiated site grew a beautiful,
mutated species of daisy.57 Animal and plant life blossomed after human
departure. ‘All around the world,’ writes Fred Pearce, ‘alien species are on
the march, often with human help. Mostly they are moving into places we
have messed up’.58 Chim↑Pom are interested in this ability to adapt and resist
displacement, to co-evolve with our techno-environmental condition rather
than decelerate and come back to the state of nature. Chim↑Pom shows us
that interspecies culture is a battleground and that considering animals as
cultural and social beings, which perspectivism invites us to do, includes
recognising them as engineers of their urban environment, which they seek
to modify to their liking, sometimes sabotaging human technologies in the
process. ‘Equality’ and ‘unity’ within conditions of territorial animosity in the
Anthropocene can be actually more conductive to objectification, a capitalist
utopia of ‘frictionless exchange: a universe where commodities – beings and
objects alike – circulate without encountering the slightest obstacle’.59 By
acknowledging animosity and competition, perspectivism is a way out. In
Fukushima, Chim↑Pom led the crows to decomposing cattle carcass so that
they could feed on the remains, re-initiating a cycle of predation that was
disturbed by the nuclear explosion. ‘You cannot put nuclear waste anywhere’,
the artists say, ‘the products enable us to move society ahead, but there is
always some rubbish left behind’, even in the form of persons, human and
nonhuman, discarded in the process of industrial development (Chim↑Pom).
When nowhere is free from human industrial history, other species learn to
adapt to an unintentionally geo-engineered planet.
Such predatory animism challenges stereotypical and straightforward
assumptions that ‘personalisation’ is ethical while ‘objectification’ is not. A
healthy respect for the enemy aids in personalisation. The closer and fuller the
relationship between predator and prey, the more possible is one’s eventual
demise. Anette Watson and Orville Huntington write:
52. Danny Navey
and Nurit BirdDavid, ‘Animism,
Conservation, and
Non-natives most often employ the verb ‘to take’ to describe hunting; this
is the verb employed in Federal subsistence legislation: ‘fish and wildlife
24
neW FOrmatiOns
resources taken for personal or family consumption’ (US Fish and Wildlife
Service (USFWS) 2006). But the Koyukon believe that hunters do not ‘take’
anything; instead, animals choose to give themselves to the hunter. The
‘gift’ is made as a result of the ‘luck’ of the hunter, and a hunter has luck
when he has been respectful.60
Because the animals offer their lives as gifts, their killing is regulated by
elaborate moral codes: no one should hunt the calves, even if ‘the moose
population were so high that biologists and wildlife managers condoned the
hunt’; no one should call the animals stupid or make fun of them (They’re Here,
p261). In the absence of such ritualised practices within western modernity,
animist frameworks invoke absent and devalued labours, the painful
construction of moral codes around necessary violence. As Deborah Bird-Rose
writes about animist ethics, ‘unethical killing is [that which is] undertaken
outside the system of kin and accountability. It may be a case of killing an
animal that is taboo and thus initiating an act of hostility. It may be a case of
wanton killing – killing more than can be eaten, or killing and leaving dead
bodies to rot’.61 Admitting the full extent of other species’ humanity in their
interactions with us includes seeing them as enemies, friends, predators and
prey. We might argue with these practices from an ethical standpoint but they
certainly do not reduce animals to commodities. When Chim↑Pom carry a
taxidermied crow on their motorcycle, they attempt to get the attention of
the flock: a predatory invitation. This cycle is open-ended. Crows can vilify
and attack humans in turn. Tokyo crows, for example, began building decoy
nests in order to draw the attention of the Kyushu Electric Power Crow Patrol
away from their actual homes. The patrol was established because crows had
been sabotaging Japan’s urban infrastructure, with almost 1400 reported
cases of crows cutting fibre optic lines and closing down high-speed train
services, or jamming their beaks into power lines. They were also spotted
attacking humans in order to acquire food and are generally seen as disruptive.
While some have proposed to build a sustainable habitat for crows outside
of Tokyo, it is unlikely that the animals would move in light of the orgy of
garbage available to them in the capital. They prefer living in accelerated
technological modernity to the less opulent nature reservoir. They stay in the
city: ‘despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since
they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have
blackouts’ (Crowds of Crows).
TACTICAL MEDIA, VERMIN MEDIA
A young hunter who was somewhat annoyed at my perpetual questions
about spirits [said], ‘It is like the way you use your computer. You write on
it, but you do not think about how it actually works’ … Whether computers
or spirits, they are employed to get something done, and so they manifest
We’re all vermin
25
Immediacy’, in
G. Harvey (ed),
Handbook, p34.
53. Donna
Haraway,
‘Anthropocene,
Capitalocene,
Plantationocene,
Chthulucene:
Making Kin’,
Environmental
Humanities, 6,
2015, pp159-165.
54. Henry
Sussman and
Jason Groves,
‘Introduction’, in
H. Sussman (ed),
Impasses of the
Post-Global: Theory
in the Era of Climate
Change, Volume 2,
Open Humanities
Press, London,
2012, p12.
55. Nicolas
Bourriaud, The
Exform, Verso,
London, 2016,
p12. (Hereafter
Exform).
56. Justin
McCurry, ‘Dying
Robots and Failing
Hope: Fukushima
Clean-up Falters
Six Years After
Tsunami’, the
Guardian, 2017,
www.theguardian.
com/world/2017/
mar/09/fukushimanuclear-cleanupfalters-six-yearsafter-tsunami,
accessed 2
October 2019.
57. Brian
Howard, ‘Are
‘Mutated’ Daisies
Really Caused
by Fukushima
Radiation?’
National
Geographic, 2015,
www.national
geographic.com/
news/2015/07/
150723-fukushima-
mutated-daisiesflowers-radiationscience, accessed 2
October 2019.
58. Fred Pearce,
The New Wild: Why
Invasive Species
Will Be Nature’s
Salvation, Icon
Books, London,
2015, p23.
59. Nicolas
Bourriaud, The
Exform, Verso,
London, 2016,
p12.
60. Annette
Watson
and Orville
Huntington,
‘They’re Here—I
can Feel Them:
The Epistemic
Spaces of
Indigenous
and Western
Knowledge’,
Social & Cultural
Geography, 9,
3, 2008, p261.
(Hereafter They’re
Here).
61. Deborah BirdRose, ‘Death and
Grief in a World of
Kin’, in G. Harvey
(ed), op. cit., p143.
themselves as ‘tools’ that are used in prosaic and matter-of-fact fashion in
order to accomplish concrete objectives (Soul Hunters, p150).
Willerslav’s study, informed as it is by phenomenology and the idea that we
define things by their use, describes Yukaghir hunting as an embodied and
pragmatic ‘technique for manipulating the environment’ by modulating the
behaviour of other species (p136). This technique is not innocent, in fact, it
is perceived as an explicitly seductive and erotic process in which the dance
of attraction between hunter and prey culminates in the latter’s death. The
hunters refer to it as pákostit, ‘playing dirty tricks’: ‘when transforming itself
into the image of his prey … the hunter is attempting to seduce an animal into
“giving itself up” by creating a performance that somehow resonates with the
animal’s mood, senses, and sensibilities’ (p86). In addition, Viveiros de Castro
and Willerslev stress that in perspectivism, humans and animals share the same
culture but occupy different natures – our sociality with our conspecifics is the
same as among other species, only our bodies are different. To cross-culturally
communicate with animals requires a language that translates across bodies.
Willerslev posits that nonhuman personalisation within predation operates
through mimicry and mimesis. In hunting as described by the Yukaghir, mimesis
is distinct from metamorphosis. Metamorphosis makes predation impossible
because the prey would become ourselves, thus forcing us into cannibalism
(p29). The goal is instead not to become the other but to take power over it
using a strategy of partial identification. Such mimesis preserves difference,
without which predation is impossible (p28). The key to achieving this state, as
the Yukhagir explain, is to mimic the bodily behaviour of the animal: mimesis
happens in body-to-body communication rather than through psychological
projection.
In behavioural sync with crows, or identifying themselves with rats
dwelling in a ‘garbage town’, Chim↑Pom’s recognise that species are locked
in a territorial battle and remain in hostility, which nevertheless allows
them to admit the personhood of their opponents. Black of Death provokes
flocking by mimicking flocking, and also by deploying a more direct tool of
mimicry: a faux crow that emits crow calls through a megaphone. Given the
tricksters they were dealing with, Chim↑Pom utilised deceptive techniques of
decoy, detour and manipulation. Through coercion, they tricked crows into
following them. When adjusting their driving speed so that the flock can
keep up, or when imitating crow sounds, the collective engages in ‘mimetic
empathy’, which Willerslev describes as the everyday, pragmatic dimension of
perspectivism (p124), which is both aesthetic and embodied: ‘mimesis involves
both copying and sensual contact’ (p26). Such mimicry is the only way for the
hunter to empathise with the hunted animal (p123). ‘This empathy functions
even when there is an objective conflict of interest’ (p121). While, unlike in
hunting, Chim↑Pom’s trickery does not involve ‘erotic’ manipulation, it also
configures the animals as far from innocent. In an interview, Ushiro suggests
26
neW FOrmatiOns
that the title Black of Death makes him think of the ‘funeral of a mafia leader,
or crows circling above a bad man about to die’ (The Influencers). If animals are
persons, they have vices. Kaeli Swift, a scientist who studies crow thanatology
and mourning, undertook research into burial rituals in crows, describing
how upon spotting one of their dead, they noisily flock to the deceased bird.
Although crows can show appreciation for those who treat them well (mostly
in the form of gifts), they can also be vengeful and remember the face of a
person who harmed them, even teaching their young to recognise it.62 For
this reason, just like Chim↑Pom use a decoy in order to engage with the crows,
researchers at the University of Washington who study crow mourning rites
wear masks to hide their faces. When Swift’s team brought a taxidermied crow
to a site to observe how the animals mourn, they wore realistic facemasks
with a neutral expression so that the crows would not associate any of the
researchers with dead conspecifics.
While Black of Death finds most of its audience as a video uploaded to
YouTube, the performance itself does not involve new media: there is only a
scooter, a stuffed crow and a megaphone emitting local crow sounds. The lowtech quality of Chim↑Pom’s interactions with these animals poses interesting
questions about technology. What Willerslev calls hunting ‘techniques’, here
would be more properly labelled ‘tactical media’, which Geert Lovink and
David Garcia describe as:
… what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself ’ media made possible by
the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution
… are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or
excluded from the wider culture … Tactical media are media of crisis,
criticism and opposition.63
Tactical media are ‘hit and run’ media, temporary, intense and often
spectacular interventions, owing much to the Situationist method of
détournement and the Surrealist tradition, which exposes reality as stranger
than it seems. The term has been recently expanded to include bio-art and
other environmental art interventions. Jacqueline Stevens writes that tactical
interspecies art uses technology to reveal ‘refreshing and astute reconceptions
of the banal nature/nurture debate. If people are like other organisms, then
that is only because the other creatures also have their own lively communities
and cultures that shape their health and environments’,64 while others point
out that governance today includes not only humans but also ‘the circulation
of disease, water, insects, weather patterns, fires and animals’ to determine
how ‘life is reproduced’.65 Black of Death, the video, gives us an insight into
the confused, stunned and disturbed reactions of Japanese citizens to the
performance. The artwork aimed to disrupt the rhythms of daily urban life
by leading crows to major city landmarks, such as the parliament, creating
surreal scenes and attracting attention of bewildered passers-by. The way
We’re all vermin
27
62. Kaeli Swift and
John Marzluff,
‘Wild American
Crows Gather
Around Their
Dead to Mourn’,
Animal Behaviour,
109, 2015, pp187197.
63. Geert Lovink
and David Garcia,
‘The ABC of
Tactical Media’,
1997, www.
nettime.org/
Lists-Archives/
nettime-l-9705/
msg00096.
html, accessed 2
October 2019.
64. Jacqueline
Stevens, ‘Biotech
Patronage and
the Making of
Homo DNA’, in
B. da Costa and
K. Philip (eds),
Tactical Biopolitics:
Art, Activism, and
Technoscience, MIT
Press, Cambridge,
2008, p57.
65. Michael Dieter,
‘The Becoming
Environmental
of Power: Tactical
Media After
Control’, The
Fibreculture Journal,
18, 2001, p197.
66. Donna
Haraway,
‘Anthropocene,
Capitalocene,
Plantationocene,
Chthulucene:
Making Kin’,
Environmental
Humanities, 6,
2015, p161.
67. Peter del
Tredici, Wild
Urban Plants of the
Northeast: A Field
Guide, Cornell
University Press,
Ithaca, 2010.
68. Fred Pearce,
The New Wild: Why
Invasive Species
Will Be Nature’s
Salvation, Icon
Books, London,
2015, p11.
that Chim↑Pom plug into this everyday strangeness echoes the critique that
animism advances the idea that the social (human) domain constitutes a
fundamental reality from which all our representations of nature are drawn.
In this Durkheimian model, culture produces representations of nature and
nature is only passively described by them. Chim↑Pom’s practice instead shows
that crow cultures and communities are already pervasive in Tokyo, rather
than a passive state of nature awaiting artful representation.
We can extend this predatory dynamic to the whole of Chim↑Pom’s
practice, which often brings attention to the status of human and nonhuman
persons as disposable, with waste as the connective tissue between humans
and animals. In Fukushima, they filmed themselves trespassing on land near
the TEPCO nuclear plants in hazmat suits, climbing a nearby hill where they
installed a white flag, which they then turned into a Japanese flag, which
they then turned into the symbol of nuclear energy. ‘Media is not allowed
to go there,’ they explain, ‘but regular people still work there and no one
minds’ (The Influencers). For I Want to Go to the Landfill, their first project
outside of Japan, they flew over Bali’s waste dumps in the mountains, and
had Ellie drop plastic bags off a tourist charter plane, while Inaoka stayed
on the ground with local rubbish pickers to help them catch and monetise
the bags. Some artefacts were then sold at a reverse charity action: with time,
the prices drop, so that the donors are challenged to stop the countdown
and pledge as much as possible to the charity. Chim↑Pom are interested in
displacement; they reveal communities in a state of suspension. Human
and nonhuman persons are equalised in their status as the disposed-of. At
Fukushima, they installed several scarecrows dressed up to resemble factory
workers on an empty field that no one will use anytime in the near future.
A community of ghosts. On a global scale, the state of homelessness and
precarity that defines the Anthropocene – ‘ask any refugee, of any species’66
– is upheld by erratic economy, growing displacement and destruction of
the biodiversity from which life on Earth could be reconstructed. In this
vulnerable time, the narrative of progress masks an unstable condition of
forced nomadic life, unpredictable weather patterns, temporary labour and
volatile markets. Chim↑Pom use personalisation tactically, posing questions
about the relationship between human and animal vermin, us and other
species, against or alongside whom we struggle for territory, whom we seek
to preserve and displace, or who displace us.
CONCLUSION
Despite the collapse of social-ecological life, we are also witnessing a re-wilding
of urban territories, rapid evolution of entire species and hybridisation of
nature and technology.67 Pearce argues that there is a certain xenophobia
in how classic environmentalism, focused on preservation, vilifies ‘rogue
rats, predatory jellyfish, suffocating super-weeds’.68 We need, he argues, a
28
neW FOrmatiOns
new wild rather than a revived old, which is too far gone to be recovered.
Perspectivism can become a suitable lens through which to view the
accompanying change in the relationship between humans and animals. While
indigenous frameworks cannot be directly transposed onto relationships in
urban and post-nuclear spaces, if treated as philosophical systems rather than
ethnographic descriptions of cultural traditions that cannot travel, they enrich
the current canon of critical thought attuned to human-animal relationships
in urban and technologised spaces. Maybe they are better suited to the
task than ‘mainstream’ posthumanist scholarship, which is currently more
preoccupied with minimising the ontological standing of the human than any
other task. Rather than fixating on how to define the human, perspectivism
takes humanity as an axiom, a unifying tendency across species. This allows
it to grasp relationships with other species through the lens of animosity,
where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict rather than ‘care’, or
rather the boundary between ‘conflict’ and ‘care’ is not as strict. While there
cannot be a simple equivalence between Chim↑Pom’s ‘vermin animism’ and
perspectivist predatory animism in Siberia or Latin America, reading the two
together can perhaps aid in ‘translating between lifeworlds that, although
different and distinct, remain partially and asymmetrically connected’.69
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at New York
University, Shanghai.
We’re all vermin
29
69. Marisol de
le Cadena, Earth
Beings: Ecologies
of Practice across
Andean Worlds,
Duke University
Press, Durham
and London,
2015, pxii.