contamination

‘The attempt is not to put human thought heirarchically above the ability of other species and things to think or produce knowledge. This does not mean that we are always able to access these other knowledges, although scientists, and in particular quantum physicists, do not attempt to learn them- how, for example, photons dance and think together- but it gives a special perspective onto our own thinking. It makes us more humble, able to see the partiality of human agency, encouraging a point of view that is less anthropocentric. It is important that today an alliance is forged between, on the one hand, progressive social thought, traditionally anthropocentric due to its engagement with social and economic injustice in human communities, and, on the other, the current legacy of ecological perspectives. This is important so that current ecological thinking around autonomy and sustainability is not misunderstood, or at risk of being trapped within nationalistic and traditional localisms.
Feminism in the 1970s articulated the notion that the private sphere was not separate from the public sphere and that, in that private world, lay a fault line of politics. It worked through questions of "othering", at times in antagonism with leftist intellectual groups that preferred to discuss politics only in terms of class struggle and the sphere of production. Time proved that the bio-political fault line was indeed an essential terrain of contestation, and that out innermost subjectivity, both physical and mental, had become the space of colonisation, down to the smallest gene. Today, following Donna Haraway and other thinker, that fault line seems to have shifted once again. The emancipatory potential for thinking in new ways without producing constituted knowledge that is instrumental and easily transformed into negotiable investments could lie in an accord between human and the many non-human intelligences, affects and beliefs, emotions and forms of trust, that can be established among all the life-forms on the planet. This does not indicate less interest in humanity and people, their lives and cultures, their art and imaginations. It is based instead on the principle that more potential lies in "becoming with" than in mistrust, fear, and competition over resources and possibilities.
Philosopher and scientist Vinciane Despret argues,

The rat proposes to the student, as well as the student proposes to the rat, a new manner of becoming together, which provides new identities: rats giving to students the chance of "being a good experimenter," students giving to their rats the chance to add new meanings to "being-with-a-human," a chance to disclose new forms of "being together."

She adds that truest is another form of love, and that the sense of trust enables the potential to become real. One puts oneself in the position of openness, of belief, of passion:

'To "depassionate" knowledge does not give us a more objective world, it just gives us a world "without us"; and therefore, without "them" - lines are traced so fast. And as long as this world appears as a world "we don't care for," it alse becomes an impoverished world, a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interestes, a world of enthusiastic autonoma observing strange and mute creatures; in oter words, a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating world).'

A worldly intra-action with materials, objects, other animals and their perceptions, suggests forms of de-symbolisation and disowning knowledge and notions of property, as well as providing the possibilities of a slower form of time- the time of materials. This involves reconnecing people with their ancienct knowledge of directly caring for their own sustenance and food, (and severing that from the corporate production of food, which can dramatically disempower humans in ways nt seen in the past ten thousand years), as well as forms of de-growth, alternatives to financial exchange, as in time banks or barter economies, establishing possibilities for relations and intra-actions with all things that are not digital, sharing artworks and objects from different places and time, objects that are not always filmic.' - Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 'The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time' p 31-2