Reflection Blog
Aishwarya Tiwari, First Year Masters, Integrated Digital Media.
Week 2
Let’s talk about anthropocentrism, also rightfully known as humanocentrism and is known for hugely favoring (edited:) human-centered design. Attributing thoughts and emotions to higher forms of life has led us to the belief that human beings are the most important entity in the universe. Heidegger even coined the term “world-forming” beings for us and believed in the theory of world disclosure which claims only humans can see potential and unique possibilities of creation in other, living or inanimate, things. He also talked about a very interesting concept called “worlding”, which is similar to Gibson’s theory of affordances; affordances being an object’s properties that show the possible actions a user can take with it, thereby suggesting how they may interact with that object.
On a tangential note, it’s also interesting to think about the affordances of virtual objects. Apart from immersion and presence, I think virtualisation also affords a reality which diminishes the negative aspects of the physical world. In military or pilot training, for example, the trainees could freely make mistakes and learn to avoid them without the serious and long-lasting consequences that would have taken place in the physical world.
In Uexkull’s umwelt theory, where umwelt represents the organism’s model of the world, he talked about how organisms create their own umwelt when they interact with the world. Uexkull thought anything that’s alive is capable of thought, simply because thinking doesn’t require a sense of “self”. An organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. In the restricted world of a tick, for example, they would be blind to, say, a kite flying in the sky.
For humans, everything in the environment matters, we eventually gain knowledge and expertise to help us see the potential in things. Sure, the restricted realities of plants and animals are usually bound by biology; but our realities are also bound by history, culture and context, blinding us in a very different kind of way.
Which brings me to Donna Haraway’s narrative of domestication. Domestication is a funny thing in today’s world. We think we’re the only ones capable of domesticating other beings and view our animals, plants and even cell phones as our pets; never realising that it’s actually a two way street. Donna’s philosophy of “companion species” was her way of deconstructing the boundaries between human and animal, self and other. According to her, “taking themselves to be the only actors, people reduce other organisms to the lived status of being merely raw material or tools.” This thought process separates humans beings from nature, leading us to atrocities like the meat-industrial complex of transnational factory farming or using animal skin and other parts as fashion accessories. If it is not moral to treat humans like animals, is it any more moral to treat animals like “animals”? The fact that other creatures may not understand us, and we do not understand them, does not mean our “intelligences” are at different levels, or that we are superior to them in any way. They are not other kinds; they are intimate relations, companion species.
When it comes to plants as well, we take the same approach and draw another “us vs. them” divide. It didn’t take much for us to begin burning down the Amazon rainforest, but the same happening to humans would be treated as a bigger tragedy. That also brings me to the global initiative about moving people (only an elite group of billionaires), to Mars. It’s again reflective of the notion of superiority and believing we’re the only species worth saving, which sounds ridiculous because what, in fact, does it mean to be superior? Do we consider ourselves better based on tests we designed for ourselves? Do we really believe Mars is the only way towards survival or is it just us running away from our problems again, the problem here being the destruction of a 4.6 billion years old planet consisting of several different life forms? And most importantly, how can we be so sure we wouldn’t end up doing the same to the next planet too?
