Minding Manners; Matters of Attunement
In the last two modules of Process and Difference in the Pluriverse we focused on Timothy Morton’s Humankind (2017) and Anne Fairchild Pomeroy’s Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectic, and the Critique of Capitalism (2004). During the time that lapsed between them I traveled north of San Francisco to Bell Valley Retreat Center in Mendocino Valley where the 5-day immersive course called “Nature and Eros” was held. The latter was/is co-taught by PCC professor and evolutionary cosmologist, Brian Swimme, along with Kerry Brady, founder of Ecology of Awakening. It was a wonderful context in which to deepen into the ideas we’ve been exploring this semester in Process and Difference, for “Nature and Eros” was posed by our guides as an invitation to let go of our conditioning in the techno-industrial sphere of expectation and ceaseless productivity.
Many people complain about the lack of immediate contact with fellow students and teachers in the online learning format. This is sound, but it is certainly possible to connect with others despite the disjuncture in space-time. We miss the subtext and subtly of presence, but in return we are gifted time to curate more rigorous reflections on the content we entangle with together. To curate, and to absorb the wonderful musing of others. The philosophical tenor of Process and Difference—at once emancipatory and implicating—was one that intrinsically honored each individual perspective in the class and encouraged us to feel like, together, we were all creating something as we entangled our thinking-feeling on the discussion board. Of course, I’m speaking for myself, and though I think my point about the philosophical tenor is true, it is equally true that this particular group made the class what it was.
I’m waxing on this because in the text below you will multiple times run across a certain Julie, a peer of my mine from the course whose insights had such an impact on my thinking. I encourage you to check out her website, Sacred Futures, and tangle yourself in the magical ideas she so inspired me with this semester.
Part I
Morton’s writing is electric with mischief and I always love thinking-with tricksters. But—having grown out of shock for shock’s sake—I appreciate mischief more (when the stakes are high) if it’s done with care. Like Julie, I critique Morton for his carelessness. His nonchalant use of the word “consumerism” (at least in the reading we’ve been assigned so far!) is like saying “BOO!” in a really scary way! I can imagine how some sensitive, well-meaning readers might drop Humankind and take off running from such a spooky prospect, such a ghoulish book. Therein, though (in the shimmering, in the flapping of the pages as the wind reads, rushing through it), whispers an alternative way to understand what he means.
Reading Pomeroy in between the two Morton selections led me to ask myself, “What kind of economic model would allow us to treat “objects” (e.g. goods, products, matter in general) concretely?” That is, with reverence—recognizing their spectral quality. Pomeroy is more concerned with misplaced concreteness as it relates to human creativity. She expresses her anthropocentrism clearly when she criticizes capitalism’s misplaced concreteness: “because all ontological being is both physical and conceptual, this [abstracting physical iteration from creative conceptuality in the dialectic sweep] is an abstraction even on the level of ‘things.’ Granted it is not as misplaced an abstraction as it is for the human being.” (Pomeroy, 157)
If we agree to release the correlationist copyright, to turn up the volume on the correlatee such that its appearance has some measure of command over us, and if we accept—in some fashion—Morton’s ontological flattening, then something of the sacred returns to what has hitherto been disparaged as “mere matter.” The problem with Pomeory’s ecological Marxism is that it exceptionalizes the metabolism of species-being human. Marxism can’t fully acknowledge ecology because doing so necessarily means trouble: all symbionts hover between help and harm. Morton wants to stay with the trouble and so he rightly affirms consumerism as the specter of ecology. Why? Because implicit in consumerism is the reality of humankind’s metabolism. This is why he describes rejection of consumerism as “acceptance-in-denial,” for if we are living, we are no doubt consuming, metabolizing Nature as we continue to become. (Morton, 69)
Our well-intentioned reader is, perhaps, hit with dissonance. Here is where my critique comes in: why not use another word?! Page 66 could have been an early (perhaps he overturns it later?) opportunity for Morton to re-name or re-frame consumerism (similar to Haraway with response-ability/responsibility) in a way that directly (rather than obliquely) connects it with our metabolic complicity and the ambiguity that enshrouds it! Those of us who have wandered down the rabbit-hole of “ethical consumption,” hoping we might eventually figure out the most just way to eat, might say “amen” to Morton when he declares that “we are caught in hypocrisy. We can’t get compassion exactly right. Being nice to bunny rabbits means not being nice to bunny rabbit predators.” (Morton, 69) Despite my balking, maybe Morton’s ambiguity about our ambiguous economic existence (organizing according to enjoyment) is part of his method of making sure we get it. I’m happy to hang on throughout the rest of his book for that, but somebody else might not have that kind of faith!
At the last Bioneers conference I sat through an astrological sermon with astro-poet Caroline Casey. As one might expect, she story-told our ecological moment in lieu of the planetary dance, but there was one thing she said that especially stuck with me. It rang in my ears (a tinny sound) as I took in Morton’s avowal of consumerism: “Animism is about manners.” Manners imply a code, a system of cosmic ethics. Revolving around what, though? I liked Haraway’s use of the Navajo word “hózó,” or “right relations,” an aim so general that it needs a process-relational context to give it shape. I’m heartened by what Julie mentions in her post about Morton’s tricky way of inspiring care on behalf of our common home. It’s something one can feel in Morton’s literary effort, I think, if it’s attended to with care. But that takes some effort! Perhaps a little more effort than it would have taken him to re-contextualize consumerism apart from the pathological form it takes in the Capitalist-Rat-Race?! Who knows! Maybe I’m way off!
Part II
Monday I returned home from the PCC retreat course (this time held at Bell Valley) led by Brian Swimme and Kerry Brady titled “Nature and Eros.” That “Nature” and “Eros” appear as two distinct ideas was protested by one of my peers as an arbitrary separation. Does Nature not imply Eros? To some it may, but that entirely depends upon who is thinking Nature and their associative context for the word. We can understand the separation as a practical way of communicating to those of us who, though we may endeavor to reach beyond a world view of severance, nonetheless remain constrained by it.
Thus, Morton’s neologism, “The Symbiotic Real,” that undulating, excess of spectrality we vibrate-with. Though I may have re-thought the concept of Nature in a way that more or less resembles Morton’s concept, Promethean neologisms like his help to push bifurcated associations to the periphery. Who knows, maybe his term will even replace “Nature” one day! I find his style of eco-philosophy refreshing. Sensitive and sardonic at once, I think-feel him relating from a place of real insight, the only place wherefrom truly practical wisdom can flow.
Take his notion of Ecoclaustrophobia—the paranoid flipside of Sunny Interconnection—and its truism: “All tactics are hypocritical,” from which he derives the necessity for communism(s) as opposed to a universal communism that would reign over all beings. “Something is always missing from the ethical and political ecological jigsaw,” he tells us, “which means that there can be no top-level political form to rule them all” (Morton, 163). Another great example is Morton’s reframing of violence as “micro-violence(s)” and his re-locating of its causal character, formerly a quality of the indifferent whole (Mother Nature, or The Universe Machine), to the “fragile contingent.” Solidarity means nonhumans always impinge on us, and vice versa.. “Ecological awareness means that in any political grouping something is necessarily excluded,” something is unknown, eaten, stomped upon—“there is a fundamental fragility and inconsistency about any set of political beings.” Solidarity post-severance—“the structural position of wishing it could encompass more [beings]”— is tantamount to feeling compassion (Morton, 179).
But how do we get there?
What must we do?
Refreshingly sardonic and sensitive, Morton also makes things confusingly simple. I say confusing because our engrained ways of being make thinking solidarity so expensive! So much energy, so much mental toil spent in the effort to heal the trauma of severance! But subscendence thinking refuses allegiance to explosive Overlords, even down to our introjected General.
So what must we do? We must queer our action!
Morton’s treatment of authenticity reminded me of Module 8 when I expressed my thoughts about it. “Authenticity,” I mused, “must have more to do with at least witnessing (if not honoring) impulse, inclination—how desire speaks itself through “my” participation in rhizomatic entangling.” Authenticity, for Morton, is not an Easy Think Substance, it is, rather—and for all things—“futurality, a not-yet quality that resides in front” of things (Morton, 132). It is that spectral shimmering of which we all partake.
The reason I began this post with “Nature and Eros” relates to authenticity and queered action directly: “Do what you feel” we were instructed (in so many words). Indeed, we did have a loose schedule, but the disclaimer at the beginning of the course was that we needn’t comply with it. Our primary task was to queer the action/inaction binary by becoming aware of how, as Morton describes during his kundalini references, “this energy [i.e. what is bifurcated as the the binary of in (mind) against out (body/world)] appears to be moving, all by itself” (Morton, 184). This was SO hard for me! For so many of us there! Miles away from city-milling, the hustle still hollering in our minds, the General shouting “Should this, should that, SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD!”
Stop shoulding me, Mr. General.
Shut UP, mr. general!
But as Morton tells us, “one doesn’t act awareness, it happens to one. It seems to have its own kind of existence, form its own side. It is not something you manufacture.” Awareness is like the phantom feeling we’re left with after a day frolicking with ocean waves. Like that somatic echo of back and forth, “awareness oscillates or undulates or vibrates all by itself, neither doing or feeling exclusively, neither active or passive” (186). Timothy Morton the Mermaid. Multi-scalar consideration reveals that seemingly static objects like rocks—all things—exhibit “a ground state…of shimmering without mechanical input” (Morton, 187). Brian Swimme might designate this as an expression of the cosmological power he calls “Radiance.” All things radiate their existence as light, coming into resonance in certain ways, reverberating with each other in communion.
To enter into resonance is to realize compassion; to behold the being who impinges on us in all its numinosity; to be inspired toward “kindness.” How do we get there? Along with Morton, Matt tells us in his lecture that consciousness doesn’t have to do. We’re already in the space-time cave of aesthetic causality. Just let go. As Rilke says in his poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing,”
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”
Let go! Allow! Notice what arises! As in Julie’s Poetic Dimension—play!
How confusing! But, ah, what a relief…like waking up from the Nightmare of Reality (as the General would have it), and instead, waking back into another Dream, the Dream so many of us remember nostalgically as the promise of childhood. If indeed “philosophy requires a new theory of action…to help us slip out from underneath physically massive beings such as global warming and neoliberalism,” simply blinking open our Child’s Eyes to the fragility of certain Subscendent wholes might restore that early understanding of magic (Morton, 188). Of the world-shaping power of fictions—now you see me, now you don’t!
But to really get anything “done,” the letting go comes first—so that we may feel, as we become attuned, solidarity in all its treacherous and blissful ambivalence. Let us open to our erotic undulating in the larger undulation that is the Symbiotic Real. Nature-and-Eros.
Björk is sharing Dreams of Humankind’s spectral potential for enjoying maximized pleasure among other specters in the Symbiotic Real. Notice how in the video the typical delineations of animal//plants/machine/land/human/etc. are strangely enmeshed. A utopic vision of mucus membrane blissing-together.
But like Morton, Björk knows that the Symbiotic Real means pleasure and suffering. The next song on her album (Utopia) reflects, as I interpret it, the sobering affirmation of both and all the woes of history that we face post-Severing. “Body Memory” is about getting real, even as we Dream up possible futures:
“First snow of winter
I’m walking hills and valleys
Adore this mystical fog
This fucking mist
These cliffs are just showing off
Then the body memory kicks in
I mime my home mountains
The moss that I’m made of
I redeem myself
I’ve been wrestling with my fate
Do I accept this ending?
Will I accept my death
Or struggle claustrophobic?
Fought like a wolverine
With my destiny
Refused to accept what was meant to be
Then the body memory kicks in
And trust the unknown
Unfathomable imagination
Surrender to future”
Bibliography:
Morton, T. (2016). All Objects Are Deviant Feminism and Ecological Intimacy. In K. Behar (Ed.), Object-Oriented Feminism (pp. 65-81). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pomeroy, A. F. (2004). Marx and Whitehead Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Why Bother with Metaphysics?
This Thursday (5/3/18) I participated in a panel with my peers Emily Wright and William Dowling. The panel arose out of the course we’re currently in, titled Religious Metaphysics After Modernity, instructed by Professor Jake Sherman, and was part of the PCC roundtable series that Aaron Weiss and Adam Robbert have been organizing—a series I plan to absorb into the PCC Forum once its up and going next fall!
We covered a wide gamut—discussing topics ranging from recent work in neuroscience (e.g. microphenomenology) to storytelling and performative cosmology. I hope those of you reading find our musing and discussion stimulating. I’ve included a transcript of my talk below the video in case anyone is interested in reading it. It’s been challenging, but a joy to participate in speaking events like the last two without much preparation. I plan to continue that, to ease my way into a more spontaneous form of poetic-philosophizing.
“Why Bother with Metaphysics?”
Disclaimer: The “we” I speak with is an invitational one. If you feel as though my remarks don’t apply to you, then they don’t—my intention is not to swallow you up.
So, Why bother with metaphysics?
Before I answer, let me first situate myself: I write to you now from the Robert Heyns Reading Room at University of California, Berkeley. If look up from where I type, I see gilded ceiling—a long expanse of bronze ornament stretches out, deepening my thoughts. Roving-my-head-round, I see a series of nametags emblazoned at the meeting place between wall and roof. The first I compute,
Descartes,
then there’s Kant across the way,
Voltaire,
and Goethe… among other Giants of the Western Story.
Why bother with metaphysics?
Things just are the way they are. All the work has been done, just look up! The nametags—as large as I am—say it all! Let’s be gracious to our forebears—their Discoveries—some more than others, have built the foundation of the house through which we window-gaze upon the World.
I for one am not an undutiful Son!
Thank you, dear Forebears.
So why metaphysics? Well, what if things could be otherwise?
True, I do feel a bit drafty. I don’t know that I can ignore the cracks in the floorboard much longer. And yes, the word Discoveries I used earlier was sort of triggering. Decisions sounds a bit more apt. What if things could be otherwise…?
It compels me to admit something…
I’ve lied to you all. I’m not actually writing this from Robert Heyns Reading Room. I’m really in the historic North Reading Room, across the hall. On my way to the bathroom I passed Robert’s Room and was spellbound by its ceiling, more elaborate than in the North. Then I noticed Descartes’ nametag and a lightbulb went off:
A way to begin this talk!
But I didn’t want to sit in Robert’s room, the light wasn’t bright enough.
No need, I thought to myself, they’ll never know the difference!
And then, another lightbulb went off:
Why bother with metaphysics? Well, what if things could be otherwise?
So far I’ve got two stories running. I’m either writing to you from Robert Heyns Reading Room, or I’m writing to you from North Reading Room. Which one is more real? Does it matter? I think it does, and I promise you the latter is the Real one—though you won’t ever know for sure. So just go with it for now!
Two stories so far—stirring two different sets of associations, shaping and reshaping each individual future of you who listen, even—perhaps—for those of you tuning me out—the vibrations of my voice still acting upon your eardrums. Maybe the futural differences are negligible, but who really knows?
The historic North Reading Room, taken from lib.berkley.edu.
What does this have to do with metaphysics, though?
In a very simple way, the differences matter, because the difference could mean a different future, a different story. So far, my storytelling has been concerned with choice and behavior at the level of conscious awareness. Though, no doubt, stories always reach deeper. The deeper we go, the thicker the entrenchment of story. What we know before we know we know—those overarching narratives stubbornly looping on and on.
It is at this level—the deep unconscious, keeper of Cosmologies—that Story derives its force,
The Rootbed of the “Why bother:”
I am possessed by certain assumptions about myself and the World:
I am a subject set against the World as Object. I am a Princess locked forever in a Tower. I am lonely, and my loneliness leads me to question this Story. I rebel against my forebears, yet eventually I realize that only because of them have I been led to ask such questions:
Thank you, dear forebears.
Perhaps there’s no bridging Kant’s transcendental divide—that gap between my experience and things-in-themselves—perhaps we are bound to Quentin Meillassoux’s correlationism, the life-sentence of only being able to speculate from our unique perspectives. But maybe, following Timothy Morton, we ought to consider how unique to human beings that gap truly is. Have we rushed to copyright something that is and always was part of the commons? Or are we porous, pervious, perforated bags of water like Morton has it? It has been three hundred and eighty-one years since Descartes published his “Discourse on Method.” Though it pre-existed US copyright laws, I imagine the gap has long since entered the Public Domain. So can we ease up on our skepticism about experience and the experience of other beings?
Meanwhile, Our World is heating up, unraveling and revealing the taken for granted connections of our stable Holocene—that quaint period of periodicity, reified into cyclical cosmology and calendar, coming to an end. Incomes the Anthropocene, a concept which signals the time whereof the thumbprint of human activity stamps itself boldly across and deeply into the planet. We have become a geologic force. Yet, paradoxically, “the Anthropocene,” Timothy Morton tells us, is at the same time
one of the first truly anti-anthropocentric concepts because via thinking the Anthropocene, we get to see the concept of “species” as it really is—species as a subscendent hyperobject, brittle and inconsistent…The Anthropocene is the moment at which species become thinkable in a non-metaphysical way, such that humankind cannot rigidly exclude nonhumans. The human becomes smaller than the sum of its (human, bacterial microbiome, prosthetic) parts. Humankind is, as I said before, intrinsically disabled without hope of a “healthy” (explosive) wholeness.[1]
Subscendence is Morton’s favorite form of holism, what he calls implosive holism. In contrast to explosive holism, the perspective which hoists the transcendent Whole over the less than parts, implosive holism has it the other way around—the parts are many and they make up the fragile whole. Both are equally real, but the latter is wholly dependent upon its parts, or partial connections, for existence. Morton is in league with other thinkers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour who claim that taking the ecological crisis means challenging metaphysical assumptions, assumptions like explosive holism which undercut the significant role connections play in constituting the whole. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is often misattributed this kind of scheme, wherein Gaia is thought to be a soul-like self-organizing system maintaining planetary disequilibrium, our benevolent Earth-Mother keeping house. As Latour explains, a closer reading of Lovelock reveals that what Gaia refers to “is only the name proposed for all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interest by manipulating its own environment.”[2] Morton won’t even touch the term Gaia, and instead refers to the relying-on of the biosphere as the “symbiotic real” “in which entities are related in a non-total ragged way.”[3] “Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something,” Donna Haraway tells us.[4] She’ll call this, among other names, Ongoingness, that tangling mess of sympoeisis, or becoming-with, that makes up Earth systems.
Each of these tricksters defies the ontic separation between mind and world because the ecological crisis makes it a political matter. Together they wait on the other side of the gap, taunting us to make the leap. And with their own neologisms, each trickster urges us to consciously practice re-linking with our creaturely fellows—each of us, partial connections, participating in the constitution of the biosphere. For Haraway it is about cultivating response-ability; Morton calls it attunement, and Latour wants us reflexively looping and re-looping forever, treating the Whole we seek as Sisyphus does his boulder. We are to aesthetisize ourselves; to realize a Cosmopoetics of ecological belonging. The story of a transcendent Whole, taken for granted, is stale and outworn. Metaphysical systems tell stories, and vice versa. Because of this, Haraway admonishes us to realize that “it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of caring and thinking.”[5] Given that human life and the capacity to spin stories derives in the first place from ecological being, it’s not a far stretch to say that—though we can tell many—some stories are better told than others. Some hit closer to home.
The problem of transcendence is one of the reasons metaphysics has been rejected. Like my disclaimer at the beginning suggested, employing Wholes like the term “we” has historically swallowed important differences, sacrificed to the totalizing project of what William Desmond calls determinative curiosity.
Determinative curiosity though, is an orphan,
lost and very insecure.
It has forgotten its home and throws tantrums for absolute certainty,
It believes that to be is to be intelligible.
But curiosity is not born in a vacuum—rather, in a totally opposite manner—curiosity first derives from what Desmond calls original astonishment.
Its home is in wonder and to wonder it will always return.
Astonishment – when we are overcome, possessed by Excess. Patience with wonder.
Perplexity – “troubled mindfulness…” What could this indefiniteness mean?[6]
Curiosity – the movement to overcome the trouble through intelligibility and definition.
“Why is it important to distinguish these three?” Desmond asks “Because in the main we have tended to think of the process of mindfulness, whether philosophical or scientific, in terms of the third possibility,” reducing the astonishment and perplexity as merely hurdles in the process of determinative curiosity.[7]
Brought home to itself, curiosity, what we might also call Reason, realizes that not everything may be intelligible. This is important for our metaphysical struggle to think the Whole. Implosive holism may be a helpful critique for providential laziness. We keep living business as usual as if Gaia or Mother Nature will clean up our mess.
But I think there is something about the call of our trickster to re-sensitize ourselves to what we might still call Nature (or Gaia, or the Symbiotic Real, or Ongoingness) that still whispers of a more majestic Whole, a holy kind of Whole.
Morton is not down with transcendence, but his neologism “hyperobject” – an entity massively distributed in time and space like the Symbiotic Real or Global warming – is something we might call transcendent if we rethink how its conventionally understood.
What if we thought transcendence, as Jake puts it, “as the superlative mode of immanence?”
Transcendence understood this way is something we actually experience, what generates our experience of astonishment. Desmond links it with the hyperbolic or overdeterminate nature of Being itself – the sheer excess that catches us up in wonder.
Awe then becomes a way back to a Whole, a route for us to tread as we re-sensitize ourselves to our ecological becoming-with other creatures. Rooted back, curiosity realizes that not everything can be circumscribed by concepts. “The Whole,” Raimon Pannikar tells us, “is not the sum total of substantial selves, is not an object, and thus is impervious to any episteme that aims at objective knowledge. Furthermore, it is not the proper field of any exclusive ontology, that is, of any approach to Being exclusively by means of logos. Our attempt requires also the pneuma, the spirit, love, not as a second fiddle playing to the echoes of reason, but as a loving knowledge…”[8] (17)
The call to aesthetisize ourselves to our involvement with the partial connections that make up our biosphere is a call to re-member the Whole in a more playful way. It is a call back to metaphysics, revived and fleshy.
The language we use to tell the story matters – and some words won’t do. Totalizing concepts of the Whole must give way to more playful, symbolic expressions – images that approach the whole, yet are humbly understood as our best sketches of the inexpressible.
Cosmopoetics can then be understood as the effort to take philosophical language playfully serious, an effort to create aesthetic rituals of thought resonant enough to make doing metaphysics tantamount to passing through a conceptual birth canal.
Why bother with metaphysics?
Because some stories are better told than others. The Princess agrees,
Let me out of this Tower!
[1] Timothy Moton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London, Verso, 2017), 113.
[2] Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime (Medford, Polity, 2017), 142.
[3] Morton, Humankind, 1.
[4] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, (Durham, Duke University, 2017), 31.
[5] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 37.
[6] William Desmond, “Being, Determination, and Dialectic: On the Sources of Metaphysical Thinking.” The Review of Metaphysics, 48, no. 4 (1995): 731-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20129761.
[7] Desmond, “Being, Determination, and Dialectic: On the Sources of Metaphysical Thinking,” 738.
[8] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2013), 17.
(Header image titled “Song of Songs V” by Marc Chagall)
Cosmopoetics: What Does It Feel Like?
Hi friends,
Here is my latest post from module 5 of Matthew Segall’s course, Process and Difference in the Pluriverse:
Whether we designate its emergence as before or simultaneous, a Cosmopoetics is essential to the development of a true Cosmopolitics. A politics without a poetics—I imagine—would be a schizoid performance; truly split. Regardless of the rhetoric, I (and I extend this to an invitational “we”) typically know a genuine performance when I feel it. Truth (however contingent) is much more than the neutral enumeration of facts. This is Bruno Latour’s call to arms! We are at war! The bounty? A conceptual framework:
Instead of a difference in principle between the world of facts and the world of values…we see that we have to become accustomed to a continuous linkage of actions that begin with facts that are extended into a warning and that pointtoward decisions…This claim of descriptive neutrality made it possible to forget that one never plunges into description expect in order to act, and that, before looking into what must be done, we must be impelled to action by a particular type of utterance that touches our hearts in order to set us in motion — yes, to move us (49).
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Latour’s critics disparaged his writing as hyperbolic; to such statements I would say: you missed the point. And what is the point? The needle that pricked Sleeping Beauty’s finger, the needle that sent she and the rest of the Kingdom to sleep! The point is the historical severance of Nature from Human Culture, Fact from Value. But “from now on,” Latour resounds throughout Facing Gaia(in an electrifying mission of italics and exclamation points), “if you speak of any part of the Earth to humans…we all find ourselves in the same boat — or rather on the same bus” (48). What does this mean? This means the claim to neutrality is null: there is no view from nowhere. And so, to combat the climate skeptics, the climate scientist must be—simultaneously—poet (or join ranks with one) and honestly fuse the pathos of her/his knowledge with its description. As Latour echoes Haraway, scientists must become response-able. They must aesthetize themselves.
But if there is no longer a neutral point of view from which to derive the laws of Nature, what happens to objectivity? That we find ourselves in a moment of collective dissonance—wherein facts are held against “alternative facts” and the word “natural” blurs into head scratching as we shop for groceries—indicates the need for a redefining of objectivity: “objectivity,” Latour tells us (in footnote 14 on page 47), “is neither a state of the world nor a state of mind; it is the result of a well-maintained public life.” Implicit in his understanding of objectivity is a process-relational metaphysics. Facts are facts because the measurements from which they derive stand firmer than other statements against objections arising from their community of origin. Knowledge, as Matt described per an aesthetic ontology, consists of appearances all the way down. There is no final, gleaming jewel of Truth at the core of the Universe that we are to extract and possess! Rather, in a Pluriverse, “Truth” is always contingent; partial; situated. Moreover, it is multi-faceted, necessitating (until, perhaps, a more synthetic means of communicating arises) constant translation across the different streams of knowing (e.g. poetic, religious, etc.).
In the quest to realize a Cosmopoetics, the central question one must ask—I think—is: what does it feel like? The profuseness of my post this module expresses the freedom I have progressively grown into over the course of this semester as we make our process-relational descent. What does it feel like to live into a process-relational metaphysics? For me, this means no longer being so stressed out when I read philosophy, or when I go about learning anything for that matter. Released from the illusion of objective Truth as Neutral, I can trust that my partial perspective is enough, that Knowledge is not something I am to conclusively uncover and possess (and maintain, in competition against other perspectives). Rather than fear exposing my thinking to others, I can look forward to and genuinely engage with others, knowing that my partial perspective is always informed by the metamorphic field and enriched by entangling with the perspectives of others. I have nothing to hide, nothing to lose, for everything I am is forged in relationship anyhow! Each of us possesses a unique vantage point, a unique jewel never to be repeated. We are all little bubbles of seafoam, sparking forth to shine out a never-to-be-repeated perspective. What a gift to be in philosophical dialogue! To be in community in general!
What does it feel like? It feels like much more than I wish to take any more of your precious time describing. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, Latour’s suspenseful (and hilarious) prose had the aestheticizing effect he calls us ourselves to create. Suffice it to say that I feel mobilized, broken of the spell of Providence. If Gaia is sensitive, fragile, “touchy,” we must take care. I have begun to see the World (I still like the word Nature, especially if we extend Culture to all other forms of actual occasions) with new eyes. Enjoined back with “the family of things,” I feel like Aurora awakened, wiping away slumber crust, like when, in “Sleeping Beauty, all the servants in the palace, until then passive and inert, awoke from their sleep, yawning and began to move frenetically about — the dwarves and the clock, the trees in the garden and also the knobs on the doors. The humblest accessories henceforth play a role, as if there were no more distinctions between the main characters and the extras” (93).
Latour’s comparison of re-enchantment, of realizing the animation of the World (and, consequently, a partial de-animation of the ratiocentric human identity) with Sleeping Beauty was especially profound for me; it was the fairytale I connected most intimately with during a period of self-discovery and artistic transmutation. In 2016 I underwent a rite of passage in the process of making my capstone film, Areté Already, a project I consider to be the most mature example of my creative life and thought thus far. Through it I sought to ritualistically enact a movement from disenchantment to re-enchantment. My life has never been the same since. Eventually I will write more about it.
I spent the last weekend alone, saturated with Latour’s ideas, and went to Point Reyes where I had experiences that contributed more to the question, “what does it feel like?” Below you will find a video wherein I express those feelings as I recorded them in my journal during my time there.
Much love,
Ashton
References
Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia. Medford: Polity Press.
Techno-artistry and Entanglement
In module IV of Process and Difference in the Pluriverse, a course at CIIS being instructed this spring by Matthew Segall, we explored works by Anne Fairchild Pomeroy (Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critque of Capitalism) and William E. Connolly (Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming). In this video I muse about “techno-artistic” applications of the scientific and philosophical insights which point to our ontological entangledness. How might we better feel into the reality of our radical hanging together?
Joanna Macy’s “Milling” exercise from “The Work that Reconnects” workshop (the entire workshop is an example itself) along with Marina Ambravoić’s performance “The Artist is Present” are wonderful examples of “Subjectication.”
I ended up taking longer than I expected (of course) and didn’t have time to suggest some more examples of tangible techno-artistic experiments. Here are some ideas below:
Entangled hikes (hiking with a storyteller/naturalist), collabrative futuretelling (Haraway and her The Camille Stories), dramatized enactments (like Ghandi’s salt stunt, but specifically tailored to entanglement, poetry, personifying micro-modes within us (archetypal astrology).
I’m especially interested in creating some kind of collaborative-poetic-performance experiences that could be repeated (though always unique to the context) and which might be wonderful vehicles of transformation at demonstrations and other large events. Storytelling a bumpy, fragile cosmology of perspectives somehow… Anyone want to riff on this with me?
Much love,
Ashton
a Birth
The first post on this website is—to me—its real initiation. Its subject characterizes what I think is the most appropriate way to begin anything: with Mother.
Back in May I joined a group of wonderful people on stage to share stories of Motherhood in a production called “Listen to Your Mother.” I saw this as a chance to thank and acknowledge my own Mother for all she’s given me in life—for life itself. Of course, there’s no way to capture that kind of gratitude… But at large, the impossible has never stopped the human from grasping at infinity!
