The world is everything that can be divided. This was thought for the longest time – and geopolitically fatal separations were made into first, second and third world, into developed and less developed regions, into worlds before and behind the curtain. A decisive cornerstone of this disastrous world division had long before been the colonial division and occupation of entire continents. The violent self-aggrandizement that accompanied this divide-and-rule on the white, Western side still represents a syndrome of world-political machinations that is difficult to overcome. It is still a disastrous hubris, which in the meantime people like to renounce rhetorically, but which in reality (see Russia) is as deadly as ever.
On the ontological level, this division mentality corresponded – and still corresponds – to the prioritization of the human sphere over the non-human sphere, regardless of whether animals, plants, atmosphere or climate are meant. And recently, one must add, machines and forms of “artificial” intelligence have also become the controversial bone of contention of this world division. After all, they are the epitome of that which currently casts doubt on human supremacy, and here not least on the aforementioned Western-white division fantasies. Overall, people still like to cling to the phantasm that these are all largely separate areas, despite their “entanglement” with each other, which is becoming more and more obvious in the present. Nevertheless, hardly anyone wants to admit the actual intermingling of all these sub-worlds, since this would shake the exceptional status of those who created this division in the first place (and, it should be added from a socio-economic point of view, still profit handsomely from it).
But what if one tried to understand this “dividing” [teilen] differently? If one did not look for what separates, but for what – despite all differences – connects? If coexistence and new kinds of cooperation, also symbiosis, between radically different ontological and cultural spheres were brought to the fore?
The springerin issue 2/2023 asks for backgrounds and blueprints of such emphatic, non-exclusionary sharing, for stratagems of bridge-building between divergent regions of being, indeed for common intersections of all those who are hardly trusted with a cultivated conversation with each other. Anuradha Vikram, for example, takes the concept of “entanglement” as a starting point and asks how it can be applied to the establishment of freer, anti-hegemonic forms of life. On the basis of an exemplary exhibition about queerness, she asserts a transitional moment that is itself difficult to delimit, namely that from a “power over” to a “power together with” – a kind of communal participation that does not want to hastily disregard what separates. The work of the Karrabing Film Collective, which has to defend itself against all kinds of (white) claims to power in the Australian Northern Territory, is also committed to a culture of learning about such a transition. In the conversation with Karrabing members Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Cecilia Lewis included in this issue, the focus is on the practice and theory of an ongoing anti-colonial struggle for survival, which strives to override what Povinelli, in her theoretical approach, calls “geontopower.”
Other contributions take a closer look at current manifestations of this “geoontological” power. The artist Oleksiy Radynski, for example, presents 24 territories that are still occupied within the Russian Federation today. Anna Karpenko devotes her essay to the delicate status of cultural identity and belonging in Belarus, which she sees as located in a precarious in-between-ness contrary to sovereign decree. The particular tests of social and political coexistence are illuminated – from a historical perspective – in Helmut Lethen’s contribution and – with reference to the current climate debate – in the essay by Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki. While Lethen recapitulates the historical lessons of (and differences from) the division of society 100 years ago, Taube and Woznicki reflect on the extent to which bringing together the environmental and workers’ movements is an indispensable requirement with regard to a new “communism.”
The fact that this “communism” is also decisively rooted in the geographical realm is elaborated by Carlos Roberto Bernardes de Souza Júnior in his critical outlook on more-than-human forms of coexistence. Complementing this, Susanne Karr’s interview with artist and animal activist Carol Gigliotti and Thom van Dooren’s article on a highly endangered bird species in Australia shed light on these more-than-human entanglements. Finally, the artists Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán imagine the last untouched places on earth in their image series “The Delusion of the Commons” – another indication that all traditionally cultivated “sharing/separating” comes up against existential limits at some point.
In sum, the “Sharing Worlds” issue contains test runs and approximations – of what it means to overcome the still stubborn demarcations between human and more-than-human concerns, and thus to counteract sweeping divisions of the world. Without succumbing to the temptations of an ominous “One World” harmony, the focus is on charging “sharing” and “participating” with new, as yet unused meaning.