Watching Myself Watch Birds
Abjection, Ecological Thinking, and Posthuman Design
Sustainable human computer interaction research recently has begun to ask how human subjects are constructed or imagined by technology, and how, in the face of climate change, they might be reimagined toward more relational configurations, ecological care, and inter-species collaboration. Using posthuman theory, which critiques enlightenment values of the human as individual and superior to non-humans, I conducted an autoethnographic birdwatching practice which includes making practices to ask how noticing differently could build different relationships to my local ecology. I then translated my experience and findings into insights for reimagining how technology builds subjects and mediates relations to nature.
This photo shows my ‘minimum viable birdwatching tool kit’ consisting of a birding book, a journal, and binoculars. I took the photo from my normal watching perch which looked out into the stand of trees behind my house.
Publications
Watching Myself Watching Birds: Abjection, Ecological Thinking, and Posthuman Design
R. Biggs, H., Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2021, May). Watching Myself Watching Birds: Abjection, Ecological Thinking, and Posthuman Design. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411764.3445329
Project Description
In response to the Anthropocene Era, the current geological epoch where humans are the leading cause of change on earth, and climate change, recent work in sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) has called for “design[ing] to unseat humans from the center of the universe and support a more equitable gaze” (ref). In this work, I explore how one might ‘decenter’ oneself through posthuman birdwatching, and relate those findings into reflections for design and human computer interaction.
Following calls for decentering, this project asks whether or not posthuman arts of noticing, or ‘noticing differently’ could shift my relationship to my local ecology. I had just moved to Indiana from the Pacific Northwest and noticed the local birdlife was different closer to the east coast. I therefore decided to conduct an autoethnographic birdwatching practice of the local auvifauna of Indiana to test how posthuman noticing would act in practice.
Posthumanism is a broad category of theory that has close ties to feminist new materialism and object oriented ontology, all of which challenge the supremacy of human subjectivity, and notice its entanglements with more-than-human factors like climate, materials, and other lifeforms. It is potent in addressing and re-imagining human life in light of climate change and the anthropocene era as it stresses the limits of ecology and the ecological contingencies of human life on ecological health and flourishing. With this in mind, one might conclude non-human wellbeing and human wellbeing are entangled — and that to support this way of seeing, new human subject positions must be forged. Arts of noticing is one such attempt.
However, in this project something interesting happened. While the idea of more horizontal relations works in theory, in reality, while trying to enact such relations there is friction and nuance that I capture in my autoethnography and making practices. In this project, I end up arguing that posthuman philosophers have skipped a vital step of examining what has vehemently held the subject/object organization of the human/non-human relationship in place so successfully for so long. While we agree that there is promise in constructing different, more entangled, and horizontal relationships to ‘nature’ and non-humans, we leverage the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva to examine what holds the subject/object relationship in place, or what can be found at the murky border of this division.
I was first drawn to the concept of abjection as it was used to describe an ecological awakening by Timothy Morton in his book Dark Ecology. Morton asserts that part of the process of coming to awareness of our own imbrication in ecology as a state of abjection: “the feeling of being surrounded and penetrated by entities that I can’t peel off” [67:123]. He borrows this concept from Julia Kristeva, who defines abjection as a primal and visceral rejection of things that are (or have been) actually part of the self, a rejection that is made by the self, for the purpose of establishing that self.
Through autoethnographic research and making practices, I crafted a posthuman reflective practice that asks questions about the orientations technologies take toward noticing and nature, and consider that making may be a posthuman research practice. I assert that abjection critically questions the subject/object division and asks how it might be more subject/abject. This critical places pressure on the subject to recognize themselves in an other, and ask what discomfort polices those boundaries, moving from pure networked visual metaphors of posthumanism to a phenomenological, felt, psychological framing via feminist psychoanalytic theory.