Notes on perspectivism and ‘giving voice to nature’ in design

Author: Cristiano Storni

The following discusses the work of Viveiros De Castro to offer a theoretical framework to critically consider 'giving voice to nature' in Participatory Design, and from a more-than-human perspective. 

1. Perspectivism in Giving voice to Nature

The idea of giving voice to nature to engage more meaningfully with it, seems to be predicated from the human perspective. Related ideas of more-than-human design or de-centring the human are not different in this regard. I argue that this human exceptionalism can lead to either an 'animistic' or a ‘naturalistic’ way of ‘giving voice’ to nature. I argue that perspectivism (Deleuze, 1988: 27; in De Castro, 2012) offers a third way beyond naturalism or animism which can constitute a solid non-human centred theoretical framework to re-think how to give voice and to design with nature.

2. Giving voice to nature as a form of animism or realism

Considering the centrality of language in humans, the idea of attributing a voice to entities that are non-human can be seen as a form of animism, “founded on the attribution of human dispositions and social characteristics to 'natural beings'” (De Castro). From this human-centric perspective, to give voice to nature means to give nature a human voice. That is, what we experience as humans (as subjects, as cultures) is projected into/attributed to what we see as non-humans (seen as objects, as nature). An example of this is animals talking in folk stories (animism).

Naturalism (here taken as a synonym of realism) stands opposed to this and would offer an opposite (Western-centric this time) view of giving voice to nature. Naturalism posits that everything exists and arises from natural properties and causal relations. Science, Western science, is what makes us capable of knowing nature objectively and offers the possibility to use this knowledge to give an “objective” voice to nature. That is, our (scientific knowledge of) non-humans (seen as objects) is projected onto the non-human objects themselves. An example of this could be augmenting natural entities with scientific information.

These might be both viable approaches to giving voice. Both, however, are still human-centered as they seem to be built around the same model of reality that sees nature (the object) as one, central, independent, or out-there, and culture (the subject) as multiple, developing different often divisive views on nature. Naturalism and the scientific approach reinforce the ‘there is only one nature out there’ thesis (mono-naturalism), while animism as a mere projection of human experiences onto non-human entities reinforces the ‘there are many cultures’ claim (multi-culturalism): one nature that unites us, many cultures that divide us. 

In the next pages, I try to outline how perspectivism might give us a different look at the relationship between nature and culture based on the intriguing idea of multi-naturalism (one culture for many natures), which suggests a different way of giving voice which, I believe, can open up new interesting ways to think about the idea of more-than-human in design. For this, I will manly draw on a series of lectures by post-structuralist anthropologist Viveiro De Castro (2012).

3. Perspectivism

De Castro has for long studied the Ameridians and, in my reading, he suggests that the Ameridians view of the relationship between nature and society, humans and non-humans or animals represents an instance of 'perspectivism' already elaborated in post-structuralism philosophy by Deleuze in his book on Leibniz (1988: 27): "Such is the foundation of perspectivism. It does not express a dependency on a predefined subject; on the contrary, whatever accedes to the point of view will be subject." 

Central to perspectivism is the notion of perspective or point of view. According to this philosophy everything that access/attain a point of view becomes a subject who see itself as a human together with all the other individuals who belong to the same group (who share the same point of view). Within this group, the categories of and separation between nature and society remains, but only from the in-group perspective. One of the cases discussed to introduce this notion draws on Levy-Strauss study of Spanish invasions (org. 1952), 

In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, whilst the Spanish were dispatching inquisitional commissions to investigate whether the natives had a soul or not, these very natives were busy drowning the white people they had captured in order to find out, after lengthy observation, whether or not the corpses were subject to putrefaction. (1973 [1952]: 384) 

In commenting this passage, DeCastro suggests:

Indians, like the European invaders, consider that only the group to which they belong incarnates humanity; strangers are on the other side of the border which separates humans from animals and spirits, culture from nature and supernature. […], the nature/culture opposition appears to be a universal of social apperception. 

So Indians like Spanish have a perspective on what is human (themselves) and what is not-human. Both parties see (as in perceive!) a society and a nature (or supernature), but what they refer to is different. For the Spanish, the Indians might be non-humans; for the Indians, the Spanish might be humans.  Moving to animals, De Castro exemplifies succinctly: salmon are to salmon as humans to humans, namely, human.

He elaborated further that if one:

were to go and become an animal (- namely if someone had to acquire the perspective of the animal –), a salmon for instance, one would discover that salmon people are to themselves as human beings are to us, and that to them, we human beings would look like naxnoq [supernatural beings], or perhaps bears feeding on their salmon. […] For instance, the leaves of the cotton tree falling in the Skeena River are the salmon of the salmon people. I do not know what the salmon would be for the leaf, but I guess they appear what we look like to the salmon - unless they looked like bears. (1984a: 141)

Differently from animism/relativism, perspectivism is not "a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals, but rather expresses the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves: salmon are to (see) salmon as humans are to (see) humans, namely, (as) human."

In this view, human (as adjective) should be seen in deictic terms (it is from a perspective, like speakers saying here, there, now, before, later), relational (in relation to something else), and not reduced to a fixed referent (e.g., us, “the human”). In perspectivism, Humanity is a reflexive property of the subject position; it is not a privilege of the human species but the universal mirror of nature (actually of all natures). It is not that animals are subjects because they are humans (humans in disguise, as animism would suggest), or objects to be studied for what they really are, but rather that they are human because they are subjects inhabiting a point of view and experiencing and acting in a different nature with the same culture as us. This is to say culture is the subject's nature.

De Castro's strong claim revises our notion of human, which is no longer limited to people (essentialized, reduced, normalized as humans) but rather as the condition of those who have acquired a perspective on all the other things in the world. With reference to Guedon 1984, He explains: Animals impose the same categories and values on reality as humans do: their worlds, like ours, revolve around hunting and fishing, cooking and fermented drinks, cross- cousins and war, initiation rituals, shamans, chiefs, spirits. . . . "Everybody is involved in fishing and hunting; everybody is involved in feasts, social hierarchy, chiefs, war, and disease, all the way up and down" (Guedon 1984a: 142). 

And continues: If the moon, the snakes, the jaguars and the Mother of Smallpox see humans as tapirs or white-lipped peccaries (Baer 1994), it is because they, like us, eat tapirs and peccaries, people's food. It could only be this way, since, being people in their own sphere, non-humans see things as "people" do. But the things that they see are different: what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; what to us is soaking manioc, the souls of the dead see as rotting corpse; what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house 

Back to the idea of the subject as a deictic and relational term, differences in natures are referential, not perceptual ('salmon' refers to different things for humans and for salmon, but both salmon and humans inhabit a world (a nature) where they see and experience both humans and salmon). So, we have one culture (where the universal categories of fish, fishing, human, and humanity exist), and many natures, one for each existing perspective, where all the cultural categories (fish, fishing, human, humanity) refer to something different. With one culture and many natures, we avoid relativism, but the problem becomes ontological.

4. From Multiculturalism to Multinaturalism in Giving Voice to Nature

Thinking about the multinaturalism opens up interesting questions about what it even means to give voice to nature in PD. Perspectivism is neither relativism nor realism, as both assume one nature (perhaps scientifically accessible) and infinite cultures (representing natures in different ways, each one having its own truth). It assumes one human culture (that of all terrestrials) and multiple natures, each one ontologically similar (same society, same values, same entities such a salmon or humans) but referentially different things. From this angle, we are suggested that all entities already have a voice (should not be ‘given,’ which of course opens up issues of power and authority and reaffirms the very human exceptionalism which we want to criticise with the more-than-human perspective). It also suggests that for us, these voices are likely to be perceived as something else. However, it suggests that our culture (our subject nature, the categories we have as humans living in a world viewed by humans) is a good reference for the non-human voices to be identified and perhaps translated into our own nature. The question for us, and for anthropology (where this view is currently debated), is ontological, that is, understanding the entities that populate our universal culture as terrestrials who want to continue to (co)exist and to find correspondences that would enable genuine voices to be heard in a culture that is natural to us. Giving voice in this new vest might start to look like a shamanic design/research practice which, I argue, can be an important way to go beyond the western divisions that make it difficult for us to think of multinaturalism. 

de Castro, E. B. V. (2012). Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere (Vol. 1). Manchester: HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

https://haubooks.org/cosmological-perspectivism-in-amazonia/

Latour, B. (2011). From multiculturalism to multinaturalism: What rules of method for the new socio-scientific experiments?. Nature and Culture, 6(1), 1-17.