Relational Skills for an Animated World

Today we’re talking more about being in relationship with a more-than-human world. We’re going to be thinking with two quotes from James Bridle’s book Ways of Being¹, which looks at supposedly “non-intelligent” beings like animals, plants, computers, etc to explore how how we might think more expansively about intelligence and consciousness.

Bridle writes a lot about a process of “unknowing”: “acknowledging the limitations of what we can know at all, and treating with respect those aspects of the world which are beyond our ken, rather than seeking to ignore or erase them.”

Lots of thinkers, like Timothy Morton, believe that a desire to deaden the world comes from colonization and, even further back, from agriculture: “agrologistics promises to eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction— social, physical, ontological— by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds and by reducing existence to sheer quantity.” Agrologistics is about control as an anxiety response, and so is deeming people or beings as less-than-alive² .

If we see other things as unalive, it becomes easier to justify controlling them, moving them around, and prioritizing our own agendas. It helps people feel powerful. Imagining the opposite– living in a world where things have their own resonance, agendas, and vibrations– can feel like powerlessness. 

But Bridle goes on, “to exist in a state of unknowing is not to give in to helplessness. Rather, it demands a kind of trust in ourselves and the world to be able to function in a complex, ever-shifting landscape over which we do not and cannot have control. This is a basic imperative of being human in a more than human world.”

Control and helplessness are not binary options. In the middle is relation.

More Bridle:

My process of learning how to be with other beings in a way that didn’t feel terrifying reminded me a lot of learning how to be non-monogamous. Leaving behind monogamy seemed like it would involve a loss of control or a loss of safety— would my needs be met? Would the people I care about being in stable relationships with leave me for others? In reality, having more meaningful relationships, and having relationships that broke the boundaries of what care and commitment “should” look like, made me feel more secure and more connected. And similarly, feeling more connected and in relationship to the place where I live, to the dead, to the trees and elements and items in my home has made me feel miles more secure and safe. It’s kind of an expanded non-monogamy; I’m no longer interested in relating exclusively to human beings. There is a whole world of being-ness to be in relationship to, to be curious about, to learn from and receive care from. There’s more of a safety in animacy, in being able to talk to things, than there is in trying to control the world. 

And there’s also a paradox here, that Bridle talks about above. Real animacy, or recognizing varied intelligences, is not “tralala all the trees love me”, at least not all the time. There is also violence and natural disasters and our ideas or agendas might not line up with other beings’, just like in human relationships. Giving up some control means, again, reckoning with strangeness and unknowing. Learning from different intelligences means recognizing the limits of our own type of intelligence and the limits of our own agendas.

And it comes with all the fears and problems of human relationships: am I actually listening well, or am I just imposing what I want to hear? Does this person/being actually want to spend time around me? Why would they? What if this TREE has a problem with me?

But these are much more fun, and much more interesting, problems to have.

¹ Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Picador, 2023.

² Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2018.