What we are as humans is a question we will never stop answering. If a definitive answer cannot be given, we could, however, analyse how the question has changed in contemporary times, and especially how it has returned to the centre of attention in recent decades. The way in which we question ourselves today is a “reflex” way, that is, from our relations with what shakes our epistemological systems – the environment, “Nature”, and machines, including artificial intelligence.
Defining what we are is not a sterile intellectual exercise. On the contrary, it has everything to do with practical purposes: it is what co-implicates our relationship with the world and the form of relations it can take, the flows of power, domination, exploitation, but also collaboration, integration, permeability. It is not for nothing that the way the question is asked today is inverted: how to deal with living other-than-human beings, what distinguishes an artificial machine, what are the possibilities of interaction. The answers profoundly alter what several Indigenous cultures in Abya Yala call the “cosmovision”, the set of interpretations by which reality is constructed.
The feminist, anti-racist, post- and decolonial liberation movements, the environmentalist and pacifist movements, as well as the currents of postmodernism and post-structuralism have worked over the last century and a half to deconstruct the violent components of the Western cosmovision. A going to the root of our acting and being by observing what has been excluded from the human by definition. At the origin of the conflicts emerge the different aspects of what the ecofeminist theorist Val Plumwood has called the “Master Model” . In short, the symbolic system that interprets and orders reality through a vertical hierarchy by pairs of opposites that has structured not only the cultures of our countries but also what Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies have called “patriarchal capitalism”, the system of domination violently exported far beyond the borders of the West.
Consequently, as Greta Gaard well summarises in Critical Ecofeminism (2017), questioning today what we are (not) is a practical urgency involving two possibilities:
social justice, trans-species justice and ecological justice, [are] all rooted in whether humans conceive and perceive our identity as intra-agent (Barad, 2007) and kincentric (Salmon, 2002), or as separate from the rest of life, superior to other earthothers, and therefore free to control, reshape, manipulate, oppress or destroy.1
Rethinking the human according to justice requires depth work that rethinks the epistemologies and also the axes of “attention” according to which we have constructed our ontologies. To understand and modify, in other words, how we have drawn the lines between us and our surroundings – with what Gaard calls earthothers. Leading the way, then, are the concepts of kinship with the species we have co-evolved with and the history of these relationships, and intra-agency, the recognition of the fabric of co-implication and co-agency in which we are immersed. The former derives from the cosmovisions of indigenous thought2, the latter from the work of scientist Karen Barad3 within the New Materialism current.
There are five main mechanisms of the master model according to Plumwood. The first is backgrounding: the “Master” – that is, the privileged subjects and the cultural system itself – benefits from the exchange with otherness – human, animal, plant, ecosystem – but denies its dependence on it. This is followed by radical exclusion, according to which differences between the master and otherness are amplified and affinities minimised; incorporation, where the master’s own traits form a standard of normality against which everything else is defined by difference; and instrumentalisation, where otherness is described as having no other purpose than to serve the master. Finally, the homogenisation of all that is “other” into a uniform and undifferentiated whole.
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- G. Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism, Lexington Books, Londra, 2017, p. VIII. ↩︎
- Enrique Salmon, Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Naure Relationship, in «Ecological Applications», n. 10/5 (2000), pp. 1327-1332. ↩︎
- K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2007. ↩︎
Originally published as:
C. Diotto, Cosa (non ) siamo. Tra New Materialism e Pensiero della Differenza sessuale, in “Filosofia.0” n.1/2025, pp. 55-62.
Caterina Diotto 