Zoönomy
zoönomy
Zoönomy makes no fundamental distinction between a human economy and economies of other-than-human life. It sidesteps the near-fatal historical mistake of separating human and other-than-human existence. Zoönomy deals with networks of exchange
of matter, energy, and meaning that sustain bodies of
any kind.
Human economic activity should be reconsidered and transformed into a functioning, supportive zone of a larger zoönomy. Consequently, it would no longer be capitalist. Zoöps are a testing ground for putting zoönomy into practice.
The practice of zoönomy starts on the inside of late-capitalism (as an outside presently only exists in theory). At the same time, it conceptually surrounds and exceeds the latter's notion of economy by paying qualitative attention to detail, to movement, to beauty, to violence, in short, to other things than quantity and currency.
Zoönomy aims to address the poverty of the capitalist logic, i.e., its metaphysics of one-dimensional quantification. But the issue is not economy per se. Zoönomy includes material exchanges. Like economy in its predominant understanding, zoönomy is a sphere of value. Contrary to mainstream economy, its concept of value cannot be reduced to single, quantifiable, abstracted commodities. Zoönomic value is rooted in a multiplicity of life-worlds, in notions and experiences of variety and richness in relations. Zoönomic understanding is about qualities of relation and form and pattern, aided by quantity only where relevant.
Zoönomic understanding does not operate from a preconceived distinction between physical, material exchange on the one hand and informational or symbolic exchange on the other. In other words, it is not performing any categorical distinction between theory and practice. Zoönomic knowledge lives in all semiotic hot zones: in the indexical exchanges of hormones and chemistry, in the iconic exchanges of empathy across bodies and species, and in the symbolic exchanges of stories and aggregated, distilled experience that, as it turns out, is not an exclusively human practice either.[1]
There is not even a potential end state for the evolution of zoönomic knowledge, as it needs to work from the perspectives of ever more, always different bodies. By this principle, zoönomy is and will have to remain stubbornly open to widely divergent knowledge practices, including those from other-than-human life-worlds, whose realms of existence may only be accessible to human bodies’ experience by way of extended metaphor.[2] (And who is to deny the vital role of metaphor in knowledge practices?[3])
The reason we need zoönomy is that under the pervasive semantics of capitalist economy, bodies are only informed by financial signs, designating capitalism’s poverty. In opposition, the zoönomy of a place includes its material, thermodynamic, and trophic relations, it includes exchanges of materials and energy, it includes symbolic, aesthetic exchanges: the various ways in which bodies inform and impress each other; how that which can be exchanged, translates from some bodies to some other bodies.
The practice of zoönomy requires that all those proliferating relations are not separated from each other by jargons or institutional traditions, but are perceived and treated as part of the same ontologically flattened, but otherwise exuberantly multidimensional sphere. This means that zoönomy as a knowledge practice hybridizes (conceptual) tools, lenses, ways of doing—from ecology, thermodynamics, economy, cultural analysis, political science, the arts, design, indigenous cosmologies and practices, various older and more recent technologies—hell, even quantum physics! And not in any particular order.
The aim of zoönomy is to develop knowledge practice of bodies that are always collective bodies. Applying zoönomic tools and methods, these bodies will perform[4] a local, distinguishable zoönomy. This zoönomy is both a network of actants, with no clear centre or border,[5] as well as a finite volume, a sphere.[6] Diverse bodies are enrolled in constituting a locally situated zoönomy. This zoönomy is not yet all-inclusive, it still has an inside and an outside. After all, we have to start somewhere.
Zoönomic knowledge is developed and aggregated in response to particular, motivated curiosities of certain collective bodies. Calling this knowledge an effect of curiosity is to say that there is no talk here of a grand theory of zoönomy. There may never be such a theory and certainly not in what is understood as ‘theory’ today. Zoönomy faces its questions in the field and in the flesh, where there are always open windows, ground fog, creaking hinges and funny smells, membranes, hair roots.
Zoönomy not only has no grand theory, it also does not have a language of its own yet, although it for sure has a liking for biological metaphor. Best we can say is that at the moment, it is in a state of critical making do—an ontological pidgin. The first actual Zoöps that will speak this pidgin, will grow it into a proud creole.
The concept, the practice and the language of zoönomy always have some particular task and are being shaped by performing this task. This task is always situated[7]—it is always a task, an urgency at hand in one or the other Zoöp. The knowledge practice of zoönomy should be capable of adapting to this task at hand, while increasing its integrity, like bone, like nervous tissue. The work is to make it work.
The practice of zoönomy fosters ecological integrity of multispecies communities, of collective bodies. The practice starts with Zoöps and their surroundings, and from there intends to spread,
like a beneficial pandemic, across planet Earth.
- ↑ Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 38–42; and Eva Meijer, When Animals Speak, Towards and Interspecies Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 2019).
- ↑ Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 61–84.
- ↑ George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- ↑ Kara Barad, ‘Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003), pp. 801–31.
- ↑ Bruno Latour, ‘Some Experiments in Arts and Politics’, e-flux journal 23 (March 2011).
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575–99.