Preview
Issue 2/2023
The world is everything that can be divided. This was the dominant thought for the longest time – as geopolitically fatal separations were made into first, second and third world, into developed and less developed regions, into worlds before and behind the curtain. On the ontological level, this corresponded to the prioritization of the human sphere over all non-human life forms, whether animals, plants, atmosphere or climate. And recently, one must add, also machines have become a disputed bone of contention of this kind of “world division”. Mostly one assumes, as with flora and fauna, a largely decoupled sphere here, while the entanglement of all these areas is in fact becoming more and more obvious over time. Nevertheless, nobody really wants to admit the actual intermixing of these partial worlds, since this would shake the supremacy or exceptional state of those who came up with this division in the first lace (and still profit handsomely from it).
But what if one tried to understand this dividing [“teilen”] differently? If one did not look for what separates, but for what unites (despite all differences)? If coexistence and new forms of cooperation, even symbiosis, between radically different ontological and cultural, even geostrategic spheres, were brought to the fore?
springerin 2/2023 asks for backgrounds and blueprints of such (emphatic, not exclusionary) sharing, for stratagems of bridge-building between divergent regions of being, indeed for intersections among all those whose ability to conduct a cultivated conversation with each other is usually put in doubt. Without succumbing to the temptations of a hasty “one-world” harmony, the focus here is on test runs and rapprochements – on what it means to overcome generalizing attributions such as “Global South” or “the West”, but also on the still stubborn demarcations between human and more-than-human concerns.
Publication date: 15th June 2023