Abstract
My paper investigates the concept of the agency of landscapes as theorized and practiced within embodied critical thinking. I will draw on insights gained through participation in Training in Embodied Critical Thinking (TECT) and I will consider the validity of those insights for developing posthuman theory, as well as academic philosophy in general.
Due to many factors, including the ongoing climate crisis and a growing realisation of our disconnection from nature, there is growing research interest in the affectivity of landscapes and what environmental psychologist Herbert W. Schroeder calls "The Felt Sense of Natural
Environments". TECT is an interdisciplinary attempt to develop more systematic investigations into these matters through the use of a particular methodological toolkit. These methods include Thinking At the Edge' and 'Focusing', inspired by Eugene Gendlin, as well as 'Micro-phenomenology' drawn from the work of Francisco Varela. My paper asks whether they offer new philosophical insights concerning the agency of landscape and if so, whether they can be accommodated within scholarly, academic discourse and engaged with critically.
Thus, I consider whether these new ways of thinking and noticing provide an adequate response to posthuman calls to embrace material embodiment and embeddedness and recognise them as constitutive in one's thinking. Rosi Braidotti, in Posthuman Knowledge speaks of the "many forces that compose the distributed agency of an event", which "cannot be reduced to social conventions of language and representation, but must be approached as components of a relational continuum with natural, terrestrial, climatic and cosmic forces, as well as interspecies connections and intercultural relations." What is the relation between such concepts of distributed agency and the agency of a landscape that unfolds in an encounter? The most recent work of Donna Haraway draws on "embodied mindful encounters" with nonhuman animals. Might similar practical and theoretical opportunities be found in encounters with natural landscapes? If so, how can this be accommodated within dominant forms of academic philosophy and what does this mean for both embodied critical thinking and posthumanism?