ABSTRACT
From air to algae, from birds to bats, non-humans are gaining recognition as actors in elds as diverse as geography, philosophy, and anthropology. Two philosophers, Peter Sloterdijk and Isabelle Stengers help us to approach these emerging relationships. Sloterdijk coins the term “explication” to describe the process by which hidden subjects and our hidden relationships with them are made visible:
Discussing such ideas in an architectural context, Sloterdijk underscores the constructed or designed quality embedded in the term: “An explication covers only those parts of the context of life that can be technically reconstructed” (Stengers 2005: 995). Twentieth-century gas warfare, in Sloterdijk’s example, revealed that the atmosphere itself became a subject of intention. Consider aging, industrial food animals, psychotropic drugs and the denition of species: each of these topics reects the incursion of human technology into the environment; each oers an ethical problematic worthy of explication; and each is a topic that we have explicated through our performance-installations.
