The problem

ECOLOGIES are never homeostatic territories but are heterogenous, interdependent, dynamic, and punctuated open systems – with passing equilibrium moments that can be identities, events, situations. If we can expand the construct of ecology beyond composite biology of multiple parallel processes and draw from the history of science or the new eco-criticism to rethink ecologies, we might be able to overcome the categorical distinctions motivated through dialectics or difference in favour of likeness, affinities, and symbiosis.

Imagine that ecologies were both natural and conceptual, given live to the senses as streaming experience as well as immersive carnival. Then our senses could turn from processes of subtraction and extraction and negation towards processes of wonder and creative assemblage. The expanded conscious sensorium immersed in such hybrid ecologies would also become dynamic. In the individual moments of sensory immersion in local field conditions, of shifting micro-ecologies, we can find this rhizomatic fantastic hyper-natural nature, performing as systems of thought imbedded in the more-than-human worlds. These immersions can reveal hidden attunements – performing what Karen Barad would call an agential cut to reveal a conceptual substrate of ecologies across the biosphere, mythosphere, and most importantly the noosphere.

Ecologies exist both in the mind and in the world – transforming one another as they initiate a dialogue, an acknowledgement. This issue of Seminar is an attempt at proposing the carnival as a medium for this dialogue – to make strange the established ideas around ecologies by situating them within carnivalesque conditions. Carnival is most definitely a space for exceptions, a space where the weed doesn’t have to pretend that it is a flower out of place. Carnival is a space for differences to coexist and spurring transformations where each component, each participant becomes more of itself/themselves through their environmental interactions. These interactions happen across affective, atmospheric, performative registers in a carnival, giving rise to alternative epistemic possibilities. In these epistemic possibilities, science becomes strange, math is beautiful, art produces new subjectivities, longing creates new cartographies, permutations are only planetary, and time becomes its own image. Existing terminologies fail, new languages emerge, bringing new ways of being in the world.

A carnival is no space for positivist autopilot certainty. Methodologies like taking a stroll, inhabiting dream time, traversing the soft urban ecologies, crafting world-conceptions at planetary scales, erotic breath-work, tending to one’s secret garden all band together to make the world stranger. A strange world challenges the smooth progression of time. One cannot be in a strange world without pausing, without wondering, without sometimes failing. In a strange world, time is turbulent. Flows are never smooth but display whirlpools of intensities. In a strange world, time reclaims its generative capacities as these whirlpools of intensities become portals to futural worlds.

So, how do we make such a carnival?

We do it with the delirium writing of the machinic ecologies of the biomechanical world secretly organized by an unexplored machinic unconscious.

We make space for patterns of world-conception, as poesis with its home in the noosphere, as either fixed or resilient, informed by algorithmic and artificial intelligence generating the new thought feedback loops in the Anthropocene.

We trace how the lyrical and the social intertwine into soft urban ecologies within Indian Hip-Hop culture, to reclaim a space for non-conformist identities.

We stay with a clock, performing clock-time in an economics classroom, as it waits its own demise after knowing the time of forest-cultures and riverine settlements.

We walk with mathematical consciousness trapped inside an accountant subjectivity as it performs a séance to find hidden messages of beauty.

We watch a book in its persistence for presence, having escaped a library, its thought-system hidden from the current epistemic regime, prodding a mind to continue a life, continue a resistance.

We welcome the digital as it participates in the imagination of spatial and ecological transition as an epistemological and ontological condition.

We labour through the contemporary misdiagnoses of obsessions to reveal an emancipatory mental and social ecology that takes far from the selfsame everyday into a new focus.

But most importantly, to make a carnival is to make a community. A community of identities, subjectivities and desires that come together to create possibilities – possibilities of worlds to come, possibilities of words to come. And therefore, we centre the conversations for this issue, with people who have taken ecological thematics, concepts that have been widely known and accepted and transformed them into something new, something pliable to be worked with.

In Intimate Ecologies we encounter knowledge-making practices that take the form of loitering or shoaling, especially along archives and geographies where Black bodies, Black spirituality and Black relationality are already invisibilized. We understand how speculative works perform new languaging; and how with the centring of pleasure, a space for creation, exhaustion, appropriation and re-galvanisation, a space for healing is created. With Postnatural Ecologies, we see how a para-institutional attempt led by artists and philosophers is problematizing the idea of nature to propose postnature as a tool, a framework to reimagine our relationship with nature – through aesthetic provocations and interventions. In Oceanic Ecologies, we are introduced to cross-pollinating efforts across art-sciences where bodies, their inhabitation at sea, with sea and their associated materialities rescue the bodies from their positivist and sterile representations. It is important to note that these efforts at creating knowledges are also nascent epistemologies that challenge the existing paradigm through which the current discourse is making sense of ecologies. They ask us how are intimacies formed with our more-than-human kin, or how can the sea be more than the setting for lives to be lived and become a model to craft a form of living and what role institutional collaborations and disciplinary contaminations play; or if we are talking about postnatural, what IS natural?

With such provocations, we hope to introduce wider ecologies of listening, ecologies of staying with work in progress, ecologies of cross-pollination of ideas, of disciplines, of methodologies, and hybridization of subjectivities.

And thus, we present the carnival as a diegetic space in this issue – where hidden operations are made visible through careful and caring conversations, metaleptic thought-systems entangle one another through sequencing, provoking brave leaps of faith and flights of fancy, or even better, burrowing, digging, proliferating with others. In this multiplicity, we invite our readers to welcome an expanded sensorium, allow for language to falter or fail, and existing sense-making to stall or break down, and make their way through this deliberate and deliberated strange operations towards liberation.

ISHITA JAIN and THOMAS MICAL