More-than-social movements. Politics of Matter, Autonomy, Alterontologies

Sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, soil depletion, oceans acidification, human displacement, forest destruction. The traces of the global ecological crisis are everywhere. The unpredictable consequences of the ongoing modifications of the chemical, biological and geophysical composition of the Earth are ungovernable. This condition of unpredictability forces us to stay with the ‘many intrusions of Gaia’ (Stengers 2017): all the environmental events and disasters that upset, interrupt, destabilise and threaten the human world mean that the inconvenient truth of the ecological crises will be part of our present and future. Gaia is the name of the Greek mythological deity, the primordial Mother Earth goddess, that shows a resolute indifference in relation to the effects of its actions: she does not act in order to punish someone or to restore justice. She acts, full stop. The ‘intrusions of Gaia’ interrupt any idea of historical progress, geocentric humanism, passive nature. As philosopher Michel Serres reminds us: ‘it no longer depends on us that everything depends on us’ (Serres 1995, p. 189). This statement is not an invitation to inaction. On the contrary it seems to contain a call for action, an invitation to experiment within new modes of doing by undertaking actions without guarantee. In this paper we focus on movements that, starting from situated practices, are constructing other ways of inhabiting our planet. The movements we refer to sit uneasily within the broader political category of social movements. They are more-than-social movements in the sense that their practices and aims are not only directed to challenge power relations or established institutions. Or better, they are doing more than that. By experimenting with other ways of engaging with the materiality of life more-than-social movements are making fragments of alternative common worlds beyond the dichotomy nature/society. Insisting on the emergency of more-than-social movements is for us a way to highlight the transformative power of such movements: their capacity to set up alternative material configurations and everyday practices that aim to materialise justice in the human-non human everyday continuum.