Interrogating the fraught political concept of accountability, the Pinko Collective argues that, at its zenith, its aims were to create “new modes of relating, a new society, even a new world.” They derive this understanding from numerous Indigenous nations and their “emphasis on repair and rejection of punishment.”1 Stripped of accountability’s present punitive and legalistic dimensions, this is the hope for accountability politics that many would celebrate and wish to further.
But perhaps the term “responsibility” would be a more apt one to work with in relation to social movements and ecological struggles—especially given the problematic correlation of accountability with rights, and the correspondence of rights with the contestable outlines of the citizen, the human, and the individual. The rights-accountability dyad—in its normative sense—is one that presupposes a power able to adjudicate on behalf of claimants who must signify as belonging to a community, organization, ontology, or species. To illustrate this quickly, we can ask: Could animals be held accountable, and if not, then is this why they are also deprived of rights? While this notion might sound crazy at first (though there are numerous instances when animals were tried in human courts from the Middle Ages onwards), isn’t the implied difference between humans and animals that humans allegedly have free will and are conscious of, and therefore responsible for, their actions?2 Such a logic works to affirm human exceptionalism, thus acting counter to ecological sensitivities.
Accountability’s logic is also one of immunization. In other words, it offers protection and redress from harm or abuse by identifying, excluding, or possibly punishing the perpetrator of a transgression. As Pinko explains, self-initiated processes of accountability position “the community” as the “imagined basis and hoped for outcome of accountability.”3 Accordingly, the community should be healed through the confrontation with and potential remediation of those who do harm. So, as with immunity, accountability requires a preemptive outlining of who gets counted as an accepted community member and who does not, of the one held responsible and the one who is harmed. But as Roberto Esposito writes, immunity is a state of dispensation from communitas, i.e., from the relation which binds a community’s members “to an obligation of reciprocal donation.”4 Immunity defends against the “expropriating features of communitas,” the unmanageable reciprocities of the common. For Esposito, the effect of modernity’s tendency towards immunization is to split the individual from its reciprocal relationships, and the human species from its collaborative, but also endangering, assemblages.
If self-instituted or even abolitionist forms of accountability refer solely to the free will of the human being, how then do we account for the communal being or contingent and ecological dependencies of individuals, or rather “dividuals” (per Deleuze), in such a moral accountancy? How do we square this logic with an ecological one? I think this question is close to the one posed by Pinko, whose After Accountability investigates whether transformative justice processes can reach beyond what community activist Escobar Kelly describes as the act of putting someone “in the crosshairs of being called out.”5
“Responsibility,” by contrast, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “charge, trust or duty for which one is responsible. The state or fact of being responsible; the opportunity or necessity to be responsible.” Thus, this definition offers a more informal, yet essential, way of maintaining communal relations. It shares the same etymological stem with “response,” meaning “an answer, a reply” or “an action or feeling caused by a stimulus or influence; a reaction.”6 Although responsibility is often delegated, say by parents onto their children, the word captures the reciprocal, affectual, and self-assumed dimension of communal conduct. As Donna Haraway has taught us, it also emphasizes the capacity for responsiveness: being “response-able.”7 For her, this capacity has everything to do with understanding one’s profound entanglements, dependencies, and kinships in the tentacular networks of relations that constitute life on earth. Living beings are, and urgently need to become, more response-able across communities, species boundaries, eco-technological webs, and at myriad scales and temporalities of existence—not to mention at both the conscious and the unconscious levels. In other words, they need to get beyond the supposed rational intentions of free will. This is what Jennifer Gabrys has recently described as the urgent need to refine and evolve humanity’s “collective sensing practices.”8
But, here again, the capacity for responsiveness, which structures the ethical notion of responsibility, has conventionally been counterposed to that of sheer animal reaction. The ability to respond helps qualify the human being’s supposed capacity for free and sovereign will, an effect of our “higher” cognitive functioning. Nonhuman animals, on the other hand, have been thought only to possess the basic capacity for biomechanistic reaction. Even for Deleuze (writing in Difference and Repetition in 1968), animals are incapable of stupidity and therefore also cruelty. He writes, “The animal is guaranteed by specific forms which prevent it from being bête because it is not free and has no will.”9 As Derrida critically responds, for Deleuze “cruel bestiality and bêtise are proper to man and cannot be attributed to so-called animal beasts.”10 So responsibility, in an anthropocentric and non-Harawayian sense, can also be thought of as a biopolitical tool for drawing the outline between the human and the animal.
In fifty years since Deleuze’s remark, however, zoology and cognitive science have abundantly demonstrated that many species, such as cephalopods, are capable of types of meta-communication like play, deception, foresight, planning, and mischief. Conversely, researchers have also come to understand the degree to which, as Carey Wolfe argues, it never was possible “to unscramble the egg and separate the ego from what surrounds and indeed overdetermines it.”11 In other words, the idea of a pure egoic subject of will (the responsible subject) who is able to act without the influence of their milieu was always an idealization.
So, in light of this, the individual subject of accountability, or the accountable subject, like the free will–based agent of responsiveness, is a fiction. Returning to the question of accountability, one can conclude that it, along with the notion of free will it rests on, belong to the outline of the Cartesian subject whose historical invention must be held responsible for the conversion of the natural world, and its black(ened) communities, to borrow Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s term, into a set of objects for “Man’s” extraction, enjoyment, consumption, domination, and exhaustion.12 Is it possible to have responsibility (or autonomous, non-individualizing forms of accountability) without this Cartesian model of the subject and all the biopolitical violence such a subject has historically implied for the excluded, the nonhuman animal, or more-than-human worlds? This seems crucially important from the point of view of an ecological ethics in the present conjuncture, when all human activity seems to constitute an abuse of “planetary space.”13 Furthermore, how can one allocate ecological accountability and adjudicate on matters such as climate debt without mistakenly falling into this Cartesian framework? After all, this is the very framework that provides an alibi for the most egregious perpetrators of global ecocide because, through its universalization of a genre-specific human ontology, it accuses the “human species” of ecocide without specifying the capitalist economic system in which we are historically, not naturally or essentially, caught.
Despite this philosophical reservation, the need to create alternative and autonomous forms of justice seems as vital as it is unavoidable. The blatant hypocrisy of the legal system in societies stratified by race, gender, and class can be disastrous for those who fall outside the biopolitical frame of favor. Saidiya Hartman delineates the harrowing conversion of the law into a weapon of persecution wielded against young Black American women in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, where she offers the example of the 1901 Tenement House Act in New York State: though it had been introduced to protect tenants from negligent landlords—so-called slumlords—it functioned to also expand vagrancy laws that targeted already vulnerable, criminalized subjects. The result of this was that in 1914, 36 percent of women convicted of prostitution via the vagrancy clause of the Tenement House Act were Black.14 As with the penal system in all spaces of racial capitalism, the law itself is criminal.
Rights do not attach to the naked human being, let alone to the naked animal, as the figure of the refugee tragically demonstrates in the work of Hannah Arendt. But how about Gaia herself? In 2008, Ecuador took the historic step of giving legal rights to Nature. Article 71 of the so-called Pacha Mama Constitution states that “Nature, or Pacha Mama … has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes.”15 As activist-lawyer Vernon Tava sums up, this comprises “a fundamental change in the way that anything that is not human is treated in the law.”16 However, while Ecuador’s new constitution may have secured small yet meaningful victories against state and capitalist extractivism, these laws are always already overwhelmed by capitalist rapaciousness and political collusion. This is the sad reality of the law’s global subjugation to the superior power of capital—an impotence tragically exemplified by the International Court of Justice’s failure to convict Israel’s leaders of the genocide committed against Palestinians in Gaza, as charged by South Africa.
Given that the law doesn’t transcend human power relations but partakes of them, we need to expand ways of becoming both responsible and “response-able” in order to multiply forms of relating, sensing, imaging, and caring for those other communities of life with whom we share our planetary home. Aldo Leopold, an early American developer of environmental ethics and wilderness conservation, wrote that “we can only be ethical in relationship to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in.”17 Relation depends upon this capacity to sense and make sense of the other. It is through this formulation that we can connect the politics of that striving for “a new mode of relating,” as the Pinko Collective proposes, to both ecological ethics and the aesthetic politics proposed by Jacques Rancière.
For Rancière, the aesthetic regime of modernity is marked by a freeing of form and sensation from fixed significations. Through this, “it devotes itself to the invention of new forms of life.”18 This act of freeing creates a reordering of the meaning accorded to things—one might say the order of things—through a different mode of appearing and perceiving. As Rancière explains, the aesthetic regime dismantled the old correlation between “subject matter and mode of representation” that had allocated history painting to the nobility, and genre painting to the comic depiction of working people. Through a freeing of representations from standard meanings, new types of experience and thus new communities of sense were established, leading to new forms of political thought and action. Importantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the laboring classes were accorded dignified forms of visibility in painting, which, he argues, contributed to increased political recognition of worker’s rights, amounting to a “distribution of the sensible.”19 Changing the logic of sensation and perception changes common sense and therefore the world—for better or for worse, of course.
If systems of accountability are liable to be misused due to their reliance on the rigid outline of the individual that excludes complex bio-entanglements, then can we imagine different forms of response-ability arising from different types of sensation—another word for which could be “aesthesis”? In my book Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse I argue that art can play a role in sensitizing us to the biospheric emergency, thus helping to awaken us from the numb fatalism of capitalist realism into the underlying planetary real. Capitalist realism, as Mark Fisher argued, is a state wherein it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This fatalism is supported by a “depressive hedonia” that, unlike the “anhedonia” that characterizes the depressive’s inability to experience pleasure, is “an inability to do anything except pursue pleasure.”20 But whether pleasure or its lack, capitalist realism has produced a sensorial monoculture within which the diversity of potential sensations and experiences are flattened out and rendered equivalent. They are quite simply commodified. Even the most gut-wrenching spectacles get consumed on the sofa along with a ready-made meal.
I want to turn to an example of how sensation has been redistributed in two artworks by Anishinaabe artist and activist Rebecca Belmore, in ways that provide small openings of redress for Canada’s Indigenous communities through an intensification of relation to Gaia. In these works, separated by some thirty years, Belmore uses the related horn-like forms of the megaphone and the ear trumpet to forge channels of sensation and communication through the sensible order of the settler-colonial state to an underlying planetary real. The first is her work Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), which was made in response to the 1990 Oka Crisis that resulted in an exchange of gunfire between law enforcement and Mohawk protesters as the latter defended a sacred grove and burial site from the expansion of a golf course. Belmore created a giant wooden horn with a megaphone embedded inside it that could be moved from community to community, giving Indigenous people the means to “address the land directly.”21 Through this powerful action, Belmore parted the sensible regime of the state, creating a channel of unconditional belonging between Indigenous people and the land. As a result, the mutual belonging of the earth and human beings, not colonials over land rendered property, was also made tangible. This work shows how there are other ways of counting—signifying, being heard, and belonging—beyond Cartesian accountancy. Or perhaps we should say that the planet is the ultimate accountant, the ultimate maker and destroyer of all communities of sense and sensibility.
In 2017, Belmore created a rejoinder to this piece when, ironically enough, she was commissioned to celebrate one hundred and fifty years of the Canadian state through the creation of landmarks. In her sculpture series Wave Sound, she made four horn-like sculptures for four national parks across Canada, all next to bodies of water. The sculptures are based on hearing trumpets through which the park visitors can hear sound captured from the opposite shoreline. As Kathleen Ritter writes, “This oscillation between near and far sounds seemed to parallel how I imagined sound across time.”22 Through the trumpet’s isolation and amplification of the wind playing across land, water, rocks and plants, the listener shifts attention to what Heather Davis calls “the deep time of the land” and all its “innumerable bodies.” As with the megaphone, these sculptures cut an auditory channel through the time of colonial history to the infinitely deep time of the earth. In Davis’s estimation, “the land, in this work, is the authority. It is the land to which we must answer.”23 This work, as with many Indigenous calls to respect forests, rivers, mountains, and landscapes as “sacred living, intelligent and conscious beings,” as encapsulated by the Ecuadorian Sarayaku people’s concept of Kawsak Sacha, parochializes the nation-state and its laws, as well as all attempts to bestow rights upon nature.
Beyond its sidelining of Canada’s colonial history as a historical blip, Wave Sound also attunes us to the eternal polyphony of the planet. We listen and are affected by the bouncing sounds of water, wind, and innumerable creatures, in ways that open the outlines of the self to collective sensing practices. For bio-philosopher Andreas Weber, such movement across selves is the “very logic of the organic world,” which accounts for the biosphere’s material-semiotic autocatalysis—its self-creation.24 Following biologist Francisco Varela, who developed the theory of autocatalysis, he claims: “All the characteristics that other beings possess are capable of becoming potentialities of our own aliveness and possibilities for our own feelings.”25 The planet, in other words, is a gigantic work of aesthesis, constantly distributing the sensible. Or to put it the other way around, aesthesis and aesthetics are substantially world-making. Making different worlds, therefore, depends on redistributing the sensible, over and over.
In their recent play Fossils, artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv also imagine the world as a gigantic work of accountancy. A decomposing skeleton imagines the cycles of life and death in such terms: “Nature is basically warehouse management,” Mr. Skeleton reflects, “with death as its integrated logistics system. The cosmos is just a gigantic balance spreadsheet, rolling over assets of short-lived energy bursts into the liability column for eternal and thoroughly slow decay. We don’t really die, we simply swap positions on the sheet.”26 This comic image resonates strongly with what has been proposed as “degrowth economics” which seeks to realign human economic activity with the so-called “planetary budget” by reducing human society’s “material and energetic throughput,” to regain ecological balance with the living world, reduce inequality, and improve human well-being.27
The efforts of social movements to handle their own accountability processes, while they may be flawed, are nevertheless an instance of what could be considered a degrowth praxis that, I believe, is intrinsically connected to a planetary redistribution of the sensible. Degrowth is not just a matter of rebalancing economic systems to reduce negative emissions; it is also about the democratic redistribution of social, creative, and political agencies and the recovery of communal self-sovereignty. Processes of communal justice are part of a wider resistance to the monocultural and monotonal logics and sensations of growth-addicted commodity culture and capitalist nation-states. While experiments in accountability risk lapsing into an immunitary logic, the prospects for sharing in the rich reciprocities of communal being—and thus harmonizing with Gaia’s “accountancy”—are still greater here because they are self-created. The scaling down of cultural practices, together with social production and reproduction, must inevitably lead to the creation of different experiential, sensorial, and intellectual worlds which foster lively response-ability. As anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing so insightfully claims, in times of systematic precarity, it is the art of noticing that preempts responsiveness, or response-ability. Therefore, degrowing the scale and speed of experience, and of the distances between production and consumption, between creation and spectatorship, and between communities and their representations, means regrowing the sensory demos and hence the prospect for planetary responsibility.
Pinko, After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy (Haymarket Books, 2025), 27.
The animal trials that took place from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century can be understood as the twilight period of more entangled relations between humans and animals, which were perceived as collaborators with humans in production as well as occasional perpetrators of wrongdoing. See Leigh Claire La Barge, “Animals,” in Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, ed. Torsten Andreasen et al. (Goldsmiths Press, 2024).
Pinko, After Accountability, 207.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 50.
Escobar Kelly, “Escobar Kelly: Interview,” in After Accountability, 103. “People really forget to even have a shred of empathy for someone, forget about whether or not it happened, whether or not they’re quote unquote ‘guilty,’ for someone who is in the crosshairs of being called out, period. It fucking sucks. And when you sit down with multiple of those people every month, it starts to become really clear. Like, if my end goal is you taking accountability, we gotta back all the way up.”
Oxford English Dictionary. Emphasis added.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
Jennifer Gabrys, “Sensing a Planet on Fire and Listening with Forests,” in Common Sensing: CRA#3 ed. Ricardo Badano et al. (Spector Books, 2025).
Cited in Carey Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 65.
Cited in Wolfe, Before the Law, 65.
Wolfe, Before the Law, 66.
“Black(ened)” means to express “the confluence of animality and racialization” as a tool to secure colonial white supremacy. Jackson aims not to redraw the lines of humanity in order to include those who were formerly denied it, but to open it to its trans-special belonging in order to transmogrify our ontological categories and the politics they produce. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020).
This formulation was used in the symposium abstract for “Finite Future: Accountability and Sanctuaries” at the Art Hub, Copenhagen in June 2025, in which I participated. See →.
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 222.
Article 71 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, October 20, 2008 →.
Cited in Norrie Huddle, “World’s First Successful ‘Rights of Nature’ Lawsuit,” Kosmos, Fall–Winter 2013 →.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford University Press, 1949), 214.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Continuum, 2004), 25.
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 32.
Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0 Books, 2009), 22.
See →.
Cited in Heather Davis “The Breathing Land: On Questions of Climate Change and Settler Colonialism,” in Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, ed. T. J. Demos et al. (Routledge, 2021), 211.
Davis, “Breathing Land,” 211.
Andreas Weber, Enlivenment: Towards a Poetics for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2019), 85.
Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), 89.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s Fossils was performed at Chemist Gallery, May–June 2025. This excerpt was sent to the author by the artists in a private correspondence.
Jason Hickel, “What Does Degrowth Mean? A Few Points of Clarification,” Globalizations 18, no. 7 (2021).
