Lucky Aesthetics: Multinatural Perspectivalism and (Divinatory) Semiosis

Abstract

This essay will describe the critical importance of developing a posthuman aesthetic pedagogy capable of integrating what Eduardo Kohn (2013) has described as multinatural perspectivalism in How Forests Think . Multinatural perspectivalism describes the multiplicity of beyond-human perspectives staked on an event. An aesthetic system capable of integrating this beyond-human multiplicity poses the problem of forms of signification and semiosis which transcend the socialised register constructed by anthropocentric experience and should define signs which can be meaningful across the diverse levels of consciousness associated with more-than-human subjectivity. In this essay, I will describe this as a lucky aesthetic, capable of producing lucky signs. I will associate lucky signs with ecological practices oriented around stewardship such as regenerative farming and forestry, whereby the steward is tasked to identify and interpret lucky signs expressive of beyond-human experience. I argue this postulates an aesthetic pedagogy derived from our relationship with nature and is modelled by animist ritual practices like Capoeira Angola. I thereby conclude by arguing that animist ritual models forms of environmental education expressive of a beyond-human view of art practice.