Michael Marder – författare

This book documents Lerin/Hystad s meetings with more than a hundred different plants through sketches, text, and music. The otherness of the non-human is by nature inexpugnable. The baseline of our sharing the planet with them, at this point in its evolutional history, entails making kin while negotiating distance. In line with the mounting environmental concerns, artists began to nurture the desire to present less mediated encounters with nature. Central to Lerin/Hystad s modus operandi is a principle of ecological interconnectedness that manifests the undeniable presence of more than human worlds. The main objective has been that of dismantling the anthropocentric view that humans are the most perfect and intelligent species on this planet while inviting us to reconsider non-human intelligences and complexities as valuable diversity. Lerin connects sensors to the plants that Hystad has carefully drawn in their environment. The sensors register electrical currents that plants produce through their biological rhythms and that form a communicational network with animals, bacteria, and fungi.

Genom teckning, text och musik, samlar den här boken Lerin/Hystads möten med över hundra olika växter. Det icke-mänskliga är, till sin natur, ofrånkomligen annorlunda oss. För att vi ska kunna samexistera på jorden krävs det därför, vid denna punkt i evolutionshistorien, att vi knyter an till det främmande samtidigt som vi också aktivt förhåller oss till dess ofrånkomliga annanhet. I takt med att miljöhoten har ökat har också konstnärerna uttryckt en ökad vilja att genom konsten möta naturen direkt. Lerin/Hystads modus operandi vilar på den ekologiska sammankopplingens princip och förutsätter att det existerar fler världar än människans. Viktigast av allt har varit att nedmontera den antropocentriska bilden av människan som planetens intelligentaste och mest fulländade varelse för att i stället lyfta fram det icke-mänskligas många komplexa intelligenser som delar av en rik mångfald. Lerin kopplar sensorer till de växter som Hystad så noggrant har tecknat i det vilda. Dessa sensorer känner sedan av alla de elektriska impulser som orsakas av växternas egen biologiska rytm och som bildar kommunikationsnätverk tillsammans med djuren, bakterierna och svamparna.

Western philosophy has been dominated by the concept or the idea—the belief that there is one sovereign notion or singular principle that can make reality explicable and bring all that exists under its sway. In modern politics, this role is played by ideology. Left, right, or center, political schools of thought share a metaphysics of simplification. We internalize a dominant, largely unnoticeable framework, oblivious to complex, plural, and occasionally conflicting or mutually contradictory explanations for what is the case.

In this groundbreaking work, Michael Marder proposes a new methodology for political science and philosophy, one which he terms “categorial thinking.” In contrast to the concept, no category alone can exhaust the meaning of anything: categories are so many folds, complications, respectful of multiplicity. Ranging from classical Aristotelian and Kantian philosophies to phenomenology and contemporary politics, Marder''s book offers readers a theoretical toolbox for the interpretation of political phenomena, processes, institutions, and ideas. His categorial apparatus encompasses political temporality and spatiality; the revolutionary and conservative modalities of political actuality, possibility, and necessity; quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of political reality; the meaning of political relations; and various senses of political being. Under this lens, the political appears not as a singular concept but as a family of categories, allowing room for new, plural, and often antagonistic ideas about the state, the people, sovereignty, and power.