Towards a More-Than-Human Consent Framework for Design.*


Panel for the NERD – New Experimental Research in Design Conference, Berlin, 6th May 2023.
*This is a working paper in the form of a transcript of a conference session; it is a not a peer-reviewed journal article yet.



This is the Quebracho Colorado tree, who will be our companion in this talk.

This is the Quebracho Colorado tree, who will be our companion in this talk. Quebracho trees can live up to 150 years and grow up to 25 meters high. They blossom from November to March, their interior is red (Colorado in Spanish means red), and they like loads of sun and high temperatures — that’s why they grow in the Gran Chaco forest in South America which covers Bolivia, Paraguay, a bit of Brazil, and the north of Argentina. This forest is the second most important territory of the continent in terms of biodiversity after the Amazon rainforest.

Now, I will tell you two stories about the Quebracho:
 
The first story is that in certain regions of the Gran Chaco in Argentina, it is known that before approaching a Quebracho tree, one must salute him. We say “Buenos días Señor Quebracho,” which means “Good morning, mister Quebracho.” This salutation is not only an acknowledgment of the tree’s presence, but it is also an asking for permission to be physically close to him. Quebracho trees can deny permission by “shooting” the person with a heavy rash that makes their body itch. According to local knowledge and tradition, the way to cure this rash is to go back to the Quebracho, offer him a cake of ashes as an apology, and tie a red thread to the trunk as a sign of respect and declaration of friendship.

The other story of the Quebracho is the history of the deforestation of Argentina. At the beginning of the 20th century, a British company settled in the Argentinian fraction of the Gran Chaco Forest, stayed for about 60 years, and exploited 90% of all the Quebracho trees. Because the Quebracho wood is so hard and rich in tannin (tannin is the substance that treats pelt and turns it into leather), the wood was used for the extension of railway tracks and tannin extraction — two key elements of Argentina’s industrialization (and deforestation) process. And what turned this British company into the world’s biggest tanning producer. After having felled all the trees, the company left for South Africa to exploit the second most tannin-rich tree in the world, called Mimosa. In Argentina, nowadays, the Quebracho Colorado is in danger of extinction.

So these two stories speak of two different ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and relating with a tree, with nature. In the first one, the Quebracho is capable of communicating and affecting humans: a subject-tree that can enforce consent, to whom we respond with respect, and with whom we can establish reciprocal relationships. In the second one, the Quebracho tree is just matter ready to be transformed for profit; it’s a resource. And the depletion of Quebrachos is proof that one conceptualization, one way of relating to nature, prevailed above the other. Unsurprisingly, the countries with the biggest rate of deforestation all belong to the global south to the benefit of the global north.

In this research, I attribute the perception of “nature as a resource” to a particular gendering of nature — a concept that is both patriarchal and colonial.


The Feminisation of Nature
Patriarchal because the nature-woman association is key to the human-nature divide that declared nature as dead. The ecofeminists explain that in most pre-modern European societies, the image of nature was two-sided: nature as a nurturing mother, a benevolent and generous female — this was a perspective that provided (some) moral restraints on how to relate to nature —, and nature as wild, chaotic, hostile, and violent. Even though both conceptions of nature were female, with the rise of modern science, the second one became more prolific because it meant the need to control it. So here we have not only a nature that is female but the beginning of gender as an instrument of power that would define relations in terms of domination/subordination where it was not only about the male as a biological differential but about "the masculine" as an epistemological orientation defined by the rational scientific mind separated and independent from nature.
But the border of this discourse is not in Europe; this is the period of the colonial domination of the Americas and the beginning of the Modern Project.


The Colonial Politics of Consent
Part of that was the fictional binary construction of a “primitive” State of Nature that is chaos and violence and of a “civilized” State of Society that is peaceful and just (this is philosopher Thomas Hobbes and we are in England in the 17th century, one of the intellectual centers of the colonial world).

The State of Nature was initially a hypothetical description of the way of life of people before organized societies existed (a speculative exercise to put in words we can recognize) where there is no sense of right and wrong and of ownership. Faced with such a dystopian scenario, Hobbes argues that the natural thing is to move from the State of Nature to the State of Society, which would bring order and many other great advantages. According to this logic, all of humanity not only aspires to but also naturally consents to transition from one state to the other through another fictional figure which is the Social Contract. With the invasion of the Americas, Indigenous people were ascribed to the State of Nature and Europeans to the State of Society, and therefore, it was assumed that it was in indigenous peoples’ best interest to enter into the Social Contract through colonial imposition. So what was created as a speculative trajectory became a real project of social transformation from the "primitive" to the "civilized" as an expression of progress legitimized by the “Social contract” — the ultimate “act of collective consent.”

The theory of the Social Contract based on consent became the cornerstone of Western political philosophy and went in different directions. For example, if we start to pull from another thread, there’s another philosopher Locke, who, inspired by Hobbes, uses consent to promote private property through land appropriation, which also helped explain why colonization was not regarded as invasion. And if we pull the thread a bit more, we find out that, unsurprisingly, both Hobbes and Locke were shareholders in colonial trade companies.

Coloniality of Power, Coloniality of Gender, and Coloniality of Knowledge
So from then on, relations between Europe and non-Europe were naturalized as “civilizing missions” through the path of development. The addition of the colonial invention of “race” as a social category created racialized hierarchical relations of production (global extractive regimes), where development meant that waged labor was exclusively reserved for White Europeans who profited from the plunder and exploitation of the land and the oppression of those colonized first and rural communities after, while keeping the control of the world market and accumulating capital in Europe, in the case of the Quebracho among the British.

When race intersects with the gender categories I talked about before, it positioned colonial peoples as outside of the men/women normativity: they possess gender but like an animal possess it, not in the sense of having the masculine and feminine human traits like rationality or softness (I’ll loop back to this later). So this renewed gender arrangement along racial lines worked to dominate and negate the entire sphere of existence of those colonized and enslaved. And this includes the sphere of knowledge — knowledge in modernity is also gendered — so things related to community, to care, to crafts, to planting; any ontology of continuity and interrelation with nature that also considers nature an epistemological partner, like the first Quebracho story.

The deforestation of Quebrachos, or any extractivist practice, produces a double movement of destruction: a material destruction of Nature and an onto-epistemic destruction of nature as alive, full of agency, and as a collective subject — a worldview and a way of relating to the world that does not follow the Eurocentric rationality of nature as dead and as separate from humans. Here lies the idea that if there is a forest there is nothing, but if there is technique there is progress — and the railways and bulldozers are at the service of this process.

So when design encounters a tree and transforms the tree into railways tracks and tannin, it transforms a world.


Ontological Design
To expand my disciplinarian comfort zone and the disciplinary extent of what pertains to design, I speak of design in an ontological sense. “Ontological Design” is a discourse that has its roots in cybernetics — mainly the idea of the feedback loop: what we design designs us back. So from this perspective, designing is a subject-decentred practice: things as well as people design and an activity that creates and configures ways of being, experiences, values, and ways of relating. This is what is called “worlding” or design as active world-making. So things designed can be objects, spaces, and buildings but also languages, systems of thought, habits of mind and of the body. And if designing is the articulation of how we want to live, then design should not entail the denial of a world but rather the possibility of the creation and coexistence of many.

Thinking about the kind of logic of relation that brought the almost extinction of the Quebracho tree and deforestation into being — mainly how colonial/modern logics affect how we think and do design (designs design) — I ask, how can design be otherwise?


Posthuman Design
I’m not alone with this question. More recently, within the field of design and spatial practices, some scholars and practitioners have been concerned with challenging design's anthropocentrism and attending to the relational dimension of life by reaching to other discourses, specifically to the Posthumanities. Within this framework, the natural world (plants, animals, rivers) is conceptualized as active participants in design activities and processes and described as co-creators of our social and epistemological worlds. Here we have concepts like “more-than-human design” or “multispecies design,” for example. In their search to overcome human-centredness, some even go so far as to recruit nonhumans as “collaborators” in these design activities. And here is where it all truly starts for me because I ask myself, is every participation a collaboration? This question comes from observations of the practices that I find myself theoretically in proximity to and trying to make sense of them.

In many of these practices, even if nonhumans are considered alive, complex, and agential entities, they continue to be objects for human use. So these activities can, even without knowing, reproduce the same modernist logics (“mastery of nature”) it seeks to overcome. Can we call it a collective if parts of the system do not consent to their participation? To me, theoretical or semantic accuracy does not suffice. I argue that mobilizing — let’s call it “multispecies collaboration semantics” — without explicitly investigating the power relations at play (human and nonhuman) within that “collaboration” masks the differences and uncertainties that exist, giving ultimately power to the one over the other.


Research Project
Inspired by the story of the Quebracho, which is “not only” a story but a conceptualization, an ethical attitude, a tradition, and, most importantly, a relational practice based on consent, I ask, what would it mean to think and practice design in terms of consensual relationships with nature?

Here, I am centering consent because relationships of control and domination (the modern colonial relations I mentioned before) are fundamentally anti-consensual relationships, even if they were, paradoxically, to say the least, described and promoted as such throughout Western history. And also, relational practices with nature based on consent are not unique to Argentina or the Americas. There are similar traditions all around the world: asking for permission to the Elder Tree in Denmark, to the Oak tree in the UK, or the Teak tree in India. And this has to do also with taking on board, thinking from, and thinking with non-academic knowledge practices; learning from local, situated, historically suppressed knowledges that are still very much alive. So here I join the call of Haraway and many other scholars to look for these stories that offer us a different framework to relate to nature than the modern one that is destructive and violent.

And, to me, that framework is consent.


Consent
O.K., so what is consent now? And what can it be for design?

Contemporary Western conceptualizations and applications of consent do come from the long tradition of political philosophy I described through the Social Contract. Consent is now widely understood within ethical, legal, and political sciences as something that a person gives to another in order to make an action permissible that would otherwise be forbidden. It is defined as a transaction between A and B over something XYZ. A person may consent to a friend borrowing their car, to having a friend over for dinner, to another’s sexual advances, or to go under surgery. If consent is not present, these actions would constitute robbery, trespass, rape, and assault. So consent is the thing that is given, and it is the act through which the consent is given, and is presented here as a criterion for delimiting what is right and what is wrong.  

The existence or absence of consent defines and transforms relationships in the present and in the future. So consent is like an agreement between parts about something that sets in motion certain exchanges, permissions, responsibilities, rights, and obligations — like consenting to marriage or signing a work contract. Which, in turn, also defines the scope and limits of that which we are consenting to. Consent is everywhere, from ordering at a restaurant, whereby we implicitly consent to pay after the meal, to signing a mobile phone contract or voting. Consent can be implicit, explicit, verbal, in writing, or through a certain behavior. It happens all the time, in many ways, and at many different scales.


The Gender Politics of Consent
But this standard idea of consent as a transaction is also gendered and based on the differentials that the Ecofeminsts observed govern the dualistic worldview that defined relations in terms of domination/subordination. For consent to occur, there is an active part that initiates it and asks and a passive part that gives it or withholds it. If we bring back the two images of nature, only the passive was given some more moral consideration while the other, even if “aggressive,” because it was still feminine, deserved total subjugation — with coloniality, this last version of nature included all colonial people. So in terms of consent and gender, only a passive femininity would be capable of consenting, and this is a femininity (or a nature) that is generous and giving, so it is an assumed yes.

I am saying this because these logics not only define who is worthy of moral consideration — so who is allowed to participate in a consent situation — but, once that consent situation exists, the way in which consent operates also signals the status of the parties involved by paying attention to who is the requesting part of the consent and who is the receiver of that consent and, therefore, the power hierarchies between them. So the presence or absence of consent and the way it operates are determined by the power relations of a society at a moment in time. Consent is a situated practice that cannot be separated from the conditions that make a consent act possible, which also includes how consent is conceptualized and by whom. At the same time, consent incarnates these power relations, boundaries, and obligations that it itself determines and makes possible. Consent is a situated practice that embodies and simultaneously produces a whole network of power relations, making worlds possible or not.

When we look at consent in the way it was presented historically (what I talked about before), it seems closer to an abstract metaphor, like a horizon that was never meant to be attained. And I say it not because it was but, on the contrary, because the way consent manifested was very much embodied: being human, which meant being cis, male, White, and European, was a prerequisite to being worthy of moral consideration and, therefore, capable of consenting. And this particular articulation of consent as the founding act that legitimized the unfolding of a particular world had very real material and spacial ramifications too. The early modern consent discourse was dominated by an elite group of European men who defined it in relation to masculinity and whiteness to protect and privilege institutions and structures of modernity and mask and perpetuate unequal power dynamics instead of to distribute power and make many worlds possible, which is one of the greatest capabilities and, to me, the core purpose of consent.


Towards a More-Than-Human Consent Framework
So my main aim is to go from consent as a discursive operation — and I mentioned discursive operations not only with the “social contract” but with the “multi-species collective” rhetorics too, as supposedly consent situations — to a generative framework for design-nature relations. And within this framework, I propose to go beyond the idea of consent as a mere either permission or restriction to access (beyond this yes/no standard transactional idea of consent) and to understand it as a site (that can be a very material/spatial site) and as a mode of relating to the presence of difference (the natural, the nonhuman) and uncertainty (is consent actually happening?) in a way that is respectful, generative, and plural rather than violent, destructive, and universal.

Right. But, what does this actually mean?

This is what I’m working on right now, so here is where this presentation moves into the realm of potentialities.

Consent as a framework for design has two main dimensions: an analytic one and a generative one. So consent as something that we think with and also practice.

Consent as a concept-analytic for more-than-human design means to use consent (or the absence of consent) as a lens to identify and unpack instances in which unequal relations of power (modern/colonial logics of imposition, destruction, and universality) have been put in place and vice versa. Because to speak of consent is to speak of boundaries and limits (boundaries and limits that are, in fact, like we just saw, designed), so spotting where and when these limits are created or start to be surpassed is to spot consent too. And on a meta-level, identifying, as well, the tensions between the discursive and the practice, ultimately, to point out how we are embedded in certain material/spatial relationships that are seemingly consentful, but they are not — some of which I just did in this presentation.

Consent as a generative practice means first problematizing and expanding modern notions of consent and then exploring how to actively practice consent or create the conditions for consent to occur. And here is where the Quebracho story comes in again: (1) The Quebracho story prompts us, or at least prompted me, to think more-than-human relations through consent and consent through the more-than-human. How can thinking consent beyond the human change our behaviour towards nature? For the skeptics, here, the focus is not, how can I be certain? How can I prove or trace whether the tree is “actually” consenting or not? But to flip that question into, how does consent help me trace power relations? That’s the analytic operation from before. And also, what can the Quebracho story tell me about consent? How does consent manifest here? How can it expand the notions of consent we already have?

So what I’m interested in is thinking with these stories. What kind of non-modern principles of relation do these stories invoke? What can more-than-human consent (as a lens) do for design? And to look for these principles in design activities that already exist and that can be identified as consentful, as instances of a consent situation, as enablers of consent, as elements of consent. So then, what can consent (as a lens) do for more-than-human design?

For example, if we think with the Quebracho story, a salutation is an instance of consent; it’s an expression of consent. Going back and offering a cake of ashes as an apology for not honouring this consent situation is also an instance of consent. So a gift is an expression of consent. Let’s think, for example, in an engagement situation. A promise is an instance of a consent situation that will continue to unfold in the future, with marriage as another consent situation. And these are supported and enabled by a material exchange, for example, of rings and a verbal exchange of particular words. Any contract is a material expression of consent, and so on.

Therefore, to think consent as a more-than-human emergence. Because I argue that consent does not reside exclusively in humans, nor in nonhumans, but that it emerges from the interaction between humans and nonhumans. So to think of consent as a site where difference meets to come together, a place of encounter, dialogue, and possibilities. And this is where consent appears as generative, where it is full of potential. And that is supported by all the elements (material, spatial, behavioral) that are involved.

(2) This means to think consent as something that is generative, but also that can be produced. These elements (material, spatial, behavioral) are also the conditions that make a consent possible, that nourish a consent. It’s all about creating the conditions for consent to flourish. That is, not to think of consent only as that which guarantees a defined event and the way in which that event is presented but to think of consent also as the process through which that event is created. How can consent be brought into existence through design? How can design activate, support, hold space for consent? And also help us navigate it? Not in the sense of fabricated or simulated consent, like the colonial gendered version/rhetorics of consent, but on the contrary, how can it be genuinely made together? And this is a design concern. What can design do for more-than-human consent? Therefore, to think consent through design, how does consent manifest materially? Spatially? What are its principles?

(3) And then, we can go back to thinking and practicing design-nature relations through consent. How can design be practiced as a form of consent? How can consent be brought into being by design? Or, how can we, at least, get closer to it?


Closing Remarks
I’m closing with more questions than answers because this is what I have found so far, and I think this is precisely the issue with consent and the more-than-human, and, even more so, with more-than-human consent. We lack so much research beyond normative notions of consent, we lack critical engagement and languages of consent, and we lack critical practices of consent.

To sum up, I’m trying to develop a consent framework for design, or a more-than-human design theory of consent, or a design theory of more-than-human consent — I’m still thinking about what’s the correct phrasing, which is great because I think a lot through grammar — against the exploitation of nature, always looping back to the human power relations it brings about. But also a consent practice for design that attends to the relational, plural, and uncertain dimensions and expressions of all life (human and nonhuman), where consent is understood as a way to construct, or as an instance of the construction, of situated more-than-human relationalities, and, therefore, as the affirmation of multiple possibilities of existence. Consent not as the categorical confirmation or denial of “a” world but consent as a framework within which a plurality of design-nature relationships can emerge.

Thank you.




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