Introduction: New Materialism(s) and the Question of the Non-human

Abstract

[...]contexts and encounters remind us continuously of the ethics of response-ability that we as a species share with other organisms and things within a co-constitutive habitat, and alert us to the urgency of realizing the need of learning from and acknowledging co-dependence with matters beyond the human species. The cover image of this issue is also taken from a remote part of that archaeological site, in which we see the thick mesh of human-nonhuman intra-actions happening even within a desolate site otherwise 'restricted' from the human visitor's entry: the ancient rocks telling the stories of the rise and fall of many human civilizations, the cosurvival of different species within those rocks, sites of anthropocentric biopolitical control and regulation of human bodies, vibrant agency of mountains, rocks and pebbles, agents of environmental and climate change (for example, the presence of plastic bottle in the image), the reminder of the coexistence of microorganisms and their intra-actions with human civilization (the presence of a surgical mask in the image), and so on. Mythologically the grotto was associated as a site where slaves were kept, which was later changed into a prison for political dissidents and was known for its acoustic potential using which eavesdropping and surveillance on the captives were maintained, and interestingly the same site is now transformed as hearing the multispecies echoes of capitalocene and climate change, thereby renamed again as "The Ear of Filosseno": Today, in Sicily, at the door of Europe, new material and immaterial prisons multiply. (Extracted from the website piece "The Ear of Filosseno", np) While the site of the Archaeological Park of Neapolis reminds us of some of the essential concerns of our present generation that new materialist scholarship helps re-connect from multispecies and planetary ethics, it also reminds us of the necessity of the coming together of disciplines to realize the shared points of concerns.