From Anab Jain’s essay, Calling for a More-Than-Human-Politics

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” (Hunter S. Thompson). Coronavirus seems designed to get intellectuals and academics producing wildly - kept indoors at their keyboards, by a global catastrophe… So we’re just sampling pieces of prediction and scenario-anticipating on recommendation from pals and peers.

What would a “more-than-human” politics be like, asked Anab Jain (and then it happened)

The first time we heard the phrase “the New Normal” - now beloved of leading politicians trying to tell a story about life during pandemic - it was from futurist Anab Jain in 2012. Anab is co-founder of Superflux, a design agency that specialises in realising future scenarios, whether simulated on screens or in a physical location (mentioned on A/UK before here).

The list at the top of the post comes from a presentation Anab made a few months before the onset of the pandemic, Calling for a More-Than-Human-Politics, to accompany an exhibition in Singapore called Mitigation of Shock [prescient enough, already!]. The exhibition imagined that city in 2219, reacting and adapting to dramatic changes in climate. Note her words below, and the ones we’ve bolded:

Looking out (of the apartment window), one can see a different, very wet and humid Singapore, that despite rising sea levels and flooding, is thriving within a seemingly re-wilded landscape. Whilst extreme weather conditions, economic uncertainty and broken global supply chains have changed the world as we know it today — the sheer ingenuity of the inhabitants, their tools, artefacts, plants and new ways of living tell a hopeful story of extreme adaptation taken to prosper in a post-climate-change future.

Anab seems to have anticipated at least one of the conceptual consequences of the Covid-19 event - that now, at last, we cannot imagine our human existences insulated from the non-human world around us:

We need to reject the division within ourselves, between ourselves, and from the deep ecology that sustains us. Because we don’t exist in isolation, we never have. And we are now entering a time where we face our own destruction if we continue to live in the illusion of isolation. [from the essay]

Jain’s “from-to” list of shifts above, between a human and a more-than-human politics (one that doesn’t deny our entanglement with the biosphere) is intended as a provocation, rather than a programme.

But she fleshes out some of the shifts interestingly, a few quoted below (especially to our eyes, which constantly looks for prompts to action and building from intellectual endeavours like this):

Fixing → Caring I start by moving away from the techno-deterministic pull of the language around ‘fixing’ and instead urge the use of ‘caring’. And here I don’t mean fixing as in fix-a-broken-website or fix-my-bike, but more in a ‘democracy is broken, no, your app will not fix it’ sort of way. Forever invoking Cedric Price, ‘Technology is the answer, but what is the question?’. When we foreground the idea of care, it inherently embodies ideas of fixing, building, making — everything necessary to-take-care-of that particular thing, person, tree, insect, bird, animal, us, them, everyone.

Planning → Gardening Numerous people from architects to permaculturists have advocated the move from top down ‘planning’, towards the nurturing practice of gardening, when we design cities. For me this is exemplified by Chandigarh, the only city in India planned by Le Corbusier, which is highly regarded for its architectural genius, but is apparently a nightmare to live in.

A top-down grid plan for a country and a people who do not live by such fixed rules, but rather have a rich history of continually adapting private, semi-public and public spaces to suit their communal needs. The most successful cities and public spaces in India are the ones where people have been able to carve out their own spaces — around banyan trees, tea stalls and at the thresholds of narrow streets.

Almost like how a permaculturist might go about planting her farm.

Innovation → Resurgence Innovation is a tricky one, unfortunately, co-opted by the association-of-move-fast-and-break-things as (infinite) growth, addition and mutation. Innovation fixates on new; different; change. On the other hand, ‘resurgence’ (renewing, restoring, regenerating) focuses less on endless growth and more on cyclical forms of nurturing, growing, dying and renewing…

Extinction → Precarity Whilst the big headlines focus on the fact that we are currently in the midst of a sixth geological extinction event, and could lead to the extinction of the human species, along with many other species, I want to find other conceptual tools that might help us move forward.

Not because I don’t believe that extinction could be one rather convincing, plausible future, but because I want to explore alternate proposals for working with the challenges we face.

The philosophical construct of considering ‘life as precarious’ foregrounds both life and death. It focuses on how human existence is deeply interdependent with other life and therefore necessitates the need for ‘care of others’, the need for ‘being vulnerable to others’ and the need to put ‘unpredictable encounters at the centre of things’.

Rather than consider a singular endpoint such as extinction, could we instead explore the possibility of life without stability, to begin with, and see where we arrive?

For more of these shifts explained, go to Anab’s startling essay. But we noted her recent tweeting (@anabjain) on the topic of Corona (posted to the left here).

The passing storm, lone wolves, good company, sunrise in the East

Now, at a somewhat more workaday level… Here’s what the major corporate accountants Deloitte, and business services giant Salesforce, think are the prospects for business under four distinct scenarios, derived from two axes - whether the pandemic is more or less severe; and whether there is more or less cooperation (within and among countries) to fight it. Download full PDF here.