#Resource Being Ecological Ontology is the study of how things exist. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. I believe that humans are traumatized by having severed their connections with nonhuman beings, connections that exist deep inside their bodies (in our DNA, for instance; fingers aren’t exclusively human, nor are lungs or cell metabolism). We sever these connections in social and philosophical space but they still exist, like thoughts we think of as unacceptable and that pop up in nightmares. It’s not what you think but how you think that starts World War III. This is true in Buddhism, and in William Blake’s poetry: his Songs of Innocence and of Experience are all about what he calls ‘contrary states of the human soul’, which we could also describe as ‘different modes of thinking about believing’. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a cynic, everything looks hopeless and hopeful people look like fools. So you can lie in the form of the truth. You can say ‘We’re totally screwed’ in a way that contributes to being totally screwed, because you disempower your listener through cynical reason. Plenty of environmentalist speech gets stuck this way. That’s another way in which ‘Earth is dying’ is not a helpful thing to say at all, even if it’s somewhat true. It’s quite sensible – and ecological – to resist such jeremiads, and this doesn’t mean you support big oil corporations. You have started thinking about how you think as part of a dynamic manifold that includes what you are thinking about, along with things that aren’t just thoughts, such as forests and cities. we can’t really, not with a straight face anyway, reduce the whole – the ‘thing’ formed by the interconnections – to its parts. But we also find out that we can’t reduce the parts to the whole. ‘Reduce’ doesn’t mean ‘break into smaller bits’. Physical wholes are obviously bigger than their parts. What we mean by ‘reduce’ is ‘explain away in terms of something we consider to be more real’. What this means is that – wait for it – the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. Wait a second. This is crazy! Haven’t we been telling ourselves, all our lives, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts? Isn’t that the point of the blue marble photos? That if we don’t care for Earth as a whole, all the little things squiggling around on its crust will vanish? And doesn’t this mean that Earth is more important, in fact more real, than the squiggling things (blue whales, humans, slime moulds)? What’s happening? What’s happening is that we’re using logic in order to stop retweeting something we keep saying that we’ve never proved: that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. It has always sounded really mysterious to me, but somehow we keep saying it as if it’s true. This is a belief. It has to do with the legacy of monotheism. Even if we don’t believe in God, even if we’re agnostic, we keep retweeting monotheistic concepts. Or our concepts have a monotheistic form, despite what we think we believe. That kind of holism, which I’m going to start calling explosive holism (in which the whole is always bigger than the sum of its parts) is just like that. God is omnipresent and omniscient, so God must be way bigger than the sum of the parts of the universe that He created (assuming it’s a he). Or think about that fiery early American sermon: we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God.8 He’s so high, you can’t get over Him, He’s so wide, you can’t get around Him. My God is bigger than yours. The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. This sounds so crazy that we are going to have to think it through a few times. But once you get it, then it really does seem like a much easier way of thinking. And it’s a much nicer way of thinking – nicer to parts, which in our case, the ecological one, means nicer to polar bears and coral. The normal kind of holism is really a mechanism, though ecological thinking often dresses up this mechanism in nice green costumes, like a camouflaged soldier. The soldier still has a gun and could kill you. Mechanism with soft green bits is still mechanism. Mechanisms are things where the parts are replaceable. If your starter motor breaks, you can get a new one. The component itself doesn’t matter. This is a very dangerous idea, ecologically speaking. Individual species don’t matter. It’s the good of the whole that’s important. But if the whole and the parts are distinct in such a way that the whole doesn’t totally swallow up and dissolve the parts, the parts matter a lot. You think future and you think radically different from the present. You think I need to change my mindset, now, then I can really start making a difference. You are thinking along the lines of agricultural religion, which is designed mostly to keep agricultural hierarchies in place. You are trying to get the right attitude towards some transcendent principle; in other words, you are operating within the language of good and evil, guilt and redemption. Agricultural religion (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and so on) is implicitly hierarchical: there’s a top tier and a bottom one, and the very word hierarchy means the rule of the priests. By framing ecological action this way, you have been sucked into a gravity well, and it’s not an especially ecological space down there. In many ways, it’s not helping at all. For instance, there’s really no reason to feel individual guilt: your individual actions are statistically meaningless. Free will, as I keep saying, is overrated. But it’s even more strange and interesting. Consider an actual scenario. The fastest cup-stacker on Earth (a young boy) competed with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, on his show, The Brain, which ran on PBS in America in 2015. They are wired up to brain scanners. The neuroscientist’s brain is working overtime and he loses. The boy’s brain is hardly working at all.3 It’s as if he is a zombie. He isn’t intending to stack the cups and there isn’t a puppet master inside his head pulling the strings. Something else is happening. His ability to stack the cups is all in his ‘body’. Is the brain more like some kind of starter, which gets things going, then sits back? Well, we’ve just refuted that – the feeling of having made a decision might arrive slightly after you’ve made it, whatever it is. So the brain isn’t even that, some kind of prime mover of a mechanism that keeps going once you’ve pressed a button. It looks as if what we’re observing is neither mechanical (the latter option) nor orchestral (the former one). Some boss doesn’t start the machine, and some conductor doesn’t need to ‘intend’ everything all the time – as any concert musician will tell you (my father, for example), the conductor is never actually driving the music like that anyway. Both these models have to do with a myth. The myth is that for something to exist, it must be constantly present: the metaphysics of presence. The soul-and-body, ‘conductor’ model seems up to date because it has to do with management, ownership and all kinds of things associated with the notion of private property that influence a lot of what we do on this Earth. But this turns out, as we have seen, to be a retweet of a Neoplatonic Christian concept. The ecological space of attunement is a space of veering, because in such a space, rigid differences between active and passive, straight and curved, become impossible to maintain. When a ship is veering, is that ship pushing against the waves, being pulled by them, deliberately steering, or accidentally? Consider for example the phenomenon of adaptation. We all think we know what that means. But on reflection, adaptation is a complex and curious event. An evolving species is adapting to another evolving species, since what we call rather glibly ‘the environment’ (that which veers around) is composed of nothing but other lifeforms and what one Darwinist calls their ‘extended phenotypes’, the results of their DNA mutations, and that of their symbionts, such as spiders’ webs and beavers’ dams.8 A moving target is adapting to a moving target, which in turn is caught in a constantly morphing adaptation space. By definition, this process simply cannot be ‘perfect’, because perfect means that motion stops – but adaptation just is movement in adaptation space, and perfection would mean the end of adaptation, which is functionally impossible as long as evolution, which is to say lifeforms, continue. So when we talk about how lifeform x is ‘perfectly adapted’ to the swirl of phenotypes – including those that are ‘its own’ such as its also-constantly-evolving bacterial microbiome – we are saying something absurd, something on the level of squarely circle. We are trying to contain or stop the veering of attunements of lifeforms to one another, if only in thought. Teleology – the idea that things happen in line with some kind of end goal (or, by extension, that the ends justify the means) is the gasoline of ‘perfect adaptation’, and teleology, namely Aristotelian concepts of species development and depletion, is precisely what Darwinism liquidates. An octopus takes on the palette of the surface on which she is resting. A stick insect disappears into the foliage, to avoid predators. And at a basic level, to be alive is to adapt, without disappearing completely – to be protected by one’s attunement, but not to the point of dissolving altogether. These brief glimpses of how what appears ‘only’ aesthetic to our eyes should be enough to suggest that attunement is not a case of having a blank, block-like substantial being whose superficial qualities are tuned while the substance remains the same – like what we think happens when we tune a violin: forgetting that the strings and the wood and the curvature of the violin form a unit such that tuning the strings by turning the pegs at the top of the instrument is not like arranging the apps on a smartphone, because the ‘platform’ is being altered by the tightening or loosening of the strings. The way attunement is deep rather than superficial is why the legend has it that Buddha taught meditation as a form of tuning: just as a sitar string should be neither too tight nor too loose, so one’s mindful focus on the meditation object – a mantra, your breathing, whatever single object is the focus of your meditation – should be alert but relaxed. The conversation between ‘alert’ and ‘relaxed’ forms a dynamic system that simply can’t remain still: hence the phenomenon that many beginning meditators experience, that their thoughts are rushing, because they are simply observing the intrinsic, rather than superficial, qualities of mind as such – mind thinks (in the largest sense of that word), mind ‘minds’, just as the ocean has waves. Movement is intrinsic. This fact becomes especially interesting when the meditation object is mind as such: when mind tunes to mind. What is experienced here is not absolutely nothing, but rather a strange beingness that cannot be pinned down to a presence I can point at.11 There is a very deep ontological reason for this: appearing (waves) is intrinsic to being (ocean), yet different. While modernity allowed agricultural logistics to destroy Earth even more successfully than it had done beforehand, it also unleashed, ironically and unwittingly, the non-agricultural (‘Paleolithic’) idea of an interconnective, causal–perceptual aesthetic force. Phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy (some of the ingredients of this book) rediscovered attunement – more on this in a moment. Modern humans have recently rediscovered nonhuman beings outside the flattening, reifying concept Nature, which almost seems to have been designed to dampen our awareness of attunement space... Objects thus have what is called timbre, and this is not an optional extra. Appearance is like that: appearance is better thought not in an eye-centred manner as candy decorating a cupcake, but rather as an object’s timbre – its solitary quality, made up of a vast array of internal and surface qualities, that make it what it is, while also connecting it to where it is and the other objects around it. We have rediscovered the veering brotherhood and sisterhood of nonhuman beings, once smoothed and packaged as Nature and indeed as ‘the environment’. Kinship, as in sisterhood, as in humankind, precisely has to do with an uncanny intimacy, which is why the manufactured humanoid, the ‘replicant’ Roy shouts that word (‘Kinship!’) as with one arm he lifts his bleeding enemy up on to the roof of the tall building at the end of Blade Runner, an enemy who is his own kind (unbeknownst to both), in the form of agent Deckard. If writing really was invented during the agricultural age (and at least a certain very recognizable kind of writing was indeed invented then, the discourse of accounting), writing is a double-edged sword, a poison and a cure (pharmakon) as Derrida liked to argue.17 Writing seems to be part of the drive to manipulate, to codify and assemble for easy demarcation purposes. But the very attempt to do so – and OOO would argue that this is because it is ontologically impossible, let alone linguistically impossible – summons the spectre of the radically free, unmanipulable playfulness of things, now observed slipping and sliding around within language as such, as the carefully ploughed intentions go haywire, as contradictory weeds begin to force themselves through the cracks in the social and philosophical sidewalk. Pest: is it a verb, or a noun? Do we need some kind of philosophical insecticide or herbicide to spray on words and objects to get rid of their ambiguous penumbra, their bacterial films, their trickster quality? Trick: is it a verb, or a noun? The paranormal is what religion was already excluding, religion being the way Neolithic society around 12,000 years ago monopolized what Weber calls charisma, taking it to mean a quality inherent to those that are already powerful, restricting it to the King who has the direct line to the god whom he hears ringing in his ears, telling him to tell the people what to do, what to do never being ‘dismantle agricultural society, which has created patriarchy and tyranny in the name of sheer survival, and return to hunter-gathering and a less violent, less hierarchical coexistence with nonhuman beings’. Because that would be absurd. Heaven forbid we drop the anthropocentric equal temperament by which everything else becomes keyed to our teleological reference tone. That would be ridiculous primitivism – right? It is not just the upholders – the benefactors – of Neolithic society who are steering us away from veering. Those on the supposed other side of the fence – the so-called deep ecologists and the anarcho-primitivists – are only perpetuating agrilogistics and its devastating Nature concept, the idea that humans and nonhumans are profoundly different, based on needing to categorize human social space as a war against such things as ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’ – because their theories of a radical distance from the norm are still based on this norm being the norm. These approaches still work alongside a duality. Such concepts of difference as a rigid separation between humans and nonhumans are intrinsic to agrilogistics, the survival-at-any-cost strategy that began in the early Holocene and that has given rise to the feedback loops we now recognize only too well via the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, namely the fact that, among other things, 50 per cent of what biology calls animals (as opposed to fungi and viruses, for instance) have been wiped off the face of Earth in the last fifty years, because of anthropogenic global warming. Ecological thought requires a different kind of difference. Surely it’s obvious that a slug is different from a panda. But it’s different in the way a distant family member is different; not different in the sense of black versus white, or here versus there, or good versus bad. Unfortunately for the scientistic ideology that dominates our world and the neoliberalism that forces us to behave in scientistic ways to ourselves, one another and other lifeforms, the idea that appearance is where causality lives is also just straightforward modern science. Hume’s argument was precisely that when you examine things, what you can’t see directly is cause and effect. All you have are data, and cause and effect are correlations of those data. So that you can’t say ‘humans cause global warming’ or ‘cigarettes cause cancer’ or ‘this bullet you are firing at point blank range at my temple will kill me’. You can say ‘It is 97 per cent likely that …’ – thus opening the door to the deniers, who are in fact modernity deniers, unwilling to let go of the clunky mechanical, visible, constantly present causality that you can point to. And as we have seen, Kant underwrote this devastating insight: all we have are data not because there is nothing, but because there are things, but these things are withdrawn from how we grasp them. Kant’s example: raindrops fall on your head, they are wet, cold, spherical. This is raindrop data, not the actual raindrops. But they are raindrops, not gumdrops. And they are raindroppy: their appearance is entangled with exactly what they are.24 What art gives us, argues Kant, is the feel of data, the data-ness of data, otherwise known as givenness. This data-feel is, he argues, an attunement space, the one place in the whole universe where mesmerizing hesitation can happen – a very important mesmerizing hesitation, because it underwrites the existence of a priori synthetic judgement, because in this experience I get a magical taste of something beyond my (graspable) experience, a transcendental beyond-ness that Kant wants to restrict to the transcendental subject’s capacity to mathematize. But Kant’s analogy – he was afraid of analogies for just this reason – is the raindrop, and the raindrop’s mathematizable properties such as size and velocity are also, he states, on the side of appearance. Why is this feeling of attunement scary for some? It’s because it appears not just to be something they’re in charge of, but something that’s emanating from the paintings and the space itself. We attune to the gate-like rectangles of aubergine space, because they are already tuning to us, waiting, beckoning. A Rothko Chapel painting is a portal: just what might come through? Such a painting is a doorway for what Derrida calls l’arrivant (verb or noun?), the future future, the irreducible, unpredictable one. Philosophy, which is wonderment (hence horror, or eroticism, or anger, or laughter) in conceptual form, is an attunement to the way a thing is a portal for the future future. The love of wisdom implies that wisdom isn’t fully here, at least not yet. Perhaps if it ever succeeded in teleporting down perfectly, it would cease to be philosophy. Thank heavens philosophy isn’t wisdom. If it is, I want nothing to do with philosophy. So perhaps we could dismiss a Rothko painting, as art critic Brian O’Doherty does in his famous essay on the commodification of art space, the dreaded ‘white cube’ of the contemporary gallery, now replicated in a million minimalist townhome interiors.27 We want art to make us sure that we aren’t being conned or ripped off or pitched to or prostituted or sold to: tuned. But this is exactly what art can’t do. Art theory in modernity tends to want to distinguish art from conning or selling or ripping off, and from the dreaded status of ‘object’; and this results in art’s confinement to a tiny experiential region, sophisticated beyond sophistication, purer than the white cube purity of the philistine buyer and owner, hanging on the white walls but above anything that smacks of gross consumerism. The nineteenth-century writer John Ruskin was a great scholar of architecture who argued that the modern tendency to want to clean old buildings, very much in effect today, was a sacrilegious erasure of what he liked to call the stain of time.30 In a sense Ruskin was aiming at something like an ontological redescription of things: to remove the time stain is to harm the actual thing, because a thing actually is this temporal staining. To want to cleanse a building of what is taken to be a supplementary stain is to assume that a thing underlies its appearance, the old default substance ontology. To allow things to get dirty is to allow that things are not at war with time. Further still, the ‘dirty’ Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo is similar today to how it would have been seen in flickering candlelight. What is the difference between tolerate and appreciate? It is all about this theme of coexisting. Tolerate means that within my conceptual reference frame, I allow something to exist, even though my frame doesn’t really allow it. Appreciate means that I just admire it, no matter what my reference frame is. That’s why we use the term appreciate to talk about art. No one says ‘I really tolerated that Beethoven string quartet’ in a positive way. But you can easily say ‘I really appreciated that disco tune’ and people will know that you mean something positive. When you think about it like this, you can see why being able to appreciate ambiguity is at the basis of being ecological. And do you know what this means? Your indifference to ecological things is exactly the sort of place where you will find the right kind of ecological feeling. This is one big reason why deleting the indifference too aggressively and too fast, by being preachy, doesn’t help at all. You don’t know why you should care: isn’t that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful? How come this chord sequence is making tears run down my face? When you tolerate another lifeform, it’s like leaving them in the Uncanny Valley, although you admit that you need to go down and help them – returning afterwards to your peak. When you appreciate a lifeform, for no good reason, it’s as if you made the Uncanny Valley a bit shallower. If you carry on like that, the Uncanny Valley starts to flatten out. It flattens out into something I like to call the Spectral Plain. What is the Spectral Plain? It’s a region that seems totally flat, and it extends in all directions. And on this plane, I can’t distinguish very easily between alive and not alive, between sentient and non-sentient, between conscious and non-conscious. All my categories, which excavated the valley, start to malfunction. And they malfunction deeply. If they just went away, I would have my answer: I would be able to collapse life into nonlife, for example, so that really, there are no living beings, just bunches of chemicals (this is a popular materialist reductionist solution to the problems of knowing a lot). According to this, the malfunction can be fixed: I can eliminate ambiguity. In that case, what was wrong with the Uncanny Valley was precisely that it made me feel ambiguous. But I don’t think that’s what’s wrong with the Uncanny Valley. I think what’s wrong with the Uncanny Valley is the peaks on either side of it. What’s wrong is that we aren’t in it ourselves – nor are the robots we like to think of as lovable toys. Remember, this is an experiential valley where beings such as zombies live in between peaks: we ‘healthy’ humans live on one peak, and all the cuter robots on the other. Zombies live in the Uncanny Valley because although they embody Cartesian dualism of mind and body, which is how we like to think about ourselves, they do so not in the standard, ‘nice’ way: they are animated corpses. It is as if they are mocking this dualism – they are a parody of this dualism – as if when we look at them we have a fantasy concept that shows us that there is something actually very wrong with mind–body dualism. The Uncanny Valley concept explains racism and is itself racist. Its decisive separation of the ‘healthy human being’ and the cute R2D2 type robot (not to mention Hitler’s dog Blondi, of whom he was very fond) opens up a forbidden zone filled with uncanny beings that reside scandalously in the Excluded Middle region. The distance between R2D2 and the healthy human seems to map quite readily on to how we feel and live the scientistic separation of subject and object, and this dualism always implies repressed abjection as we have just seen. R2D2 and Blondi are cute because they are decisively different and less powerful. It is this hard separation of things into subjects and objects that gives rise to the uncanny, forbidden Excluded Middle zone of entities who approximate ‘me’ – the source of anti-Semitism to be sure, the endless policing of what counts as a human, the defence of Homo sapiens from the Neanderthals.33 Racism, to name but one instance of prejudice, is when you try to pretend that there is a clean difference between you as a human and other, friendly beings ‘over there’ on the other peak, the one we call Nature. Because that means you have created a steep and profound valley in which all kinds of related beings are trapped so that you can’t see them. If you like, you can have subjects (us) versus objects (Hitler’s dog, R2D2, those faceless industrial robots, stones) because you have abjects (the beings in the valley) and you have ‘disappeared’ them. You look across the valley at R2D2 and see that he’s very different from you (speciesism) because you have hidden all the uncanny intervening beings in the shallow valley between you and the cute little robot. So when we think about the environment now, something interesting happens. When you look for the environment above and beyond lifeforms, you don’t find it. Even the rocks and even the air you are breathing are part of some lifeform’s phenotype. You are breathing because of an environmental catastrophe called oxygen. The Oxygenation Catastrophe occurred because oxygen is bacterial excrement, if you like – it’s an unintended consequence of their success that anaerobic bacteria actually made their own environment poisonous long, long before humans did the same. (That’s not the same thing as saying that humans should destroy their environment because they’re successful or that destruction is inevitable.) So they eventually evolved to hide in other single-celled organisms, and these became the mitochondria, the animal energy cells, and the chloroplasts, the plant energy cells (and are the reason why plants are green). That’s interesting in itself, isn’t it? In a way, the fact that you are breathing is also a bacterial phenotype. And how green everything looks, in our idyllic picture of Edenic ecological utopia, is a bacterial phenotype. It’s so amazing that you might accidentally hit your head on an iron railing while thinking about it, and since iron is another bacterial phenotype, you still wouldn’t be free of our friends and enemies, our hosts and parasites, the bacteria. Governing or mastering through tracking, tacking, adhering to … such concepts also evoke fantasies of mastery. The idea is that one could ‘get it right’. But if the system is dynamic, temporal, getting it right never stays still. The idea is close to the more open concept of attunement, which is like what happens when one is playing music with others: you figure out that music is first and foremost a kind of listening. But the difference is that the efficiency approach must always be based on some kind of pre-established parameters as to what counts as efficient. The idea is to eliminate mistakes, which boils down to the elimination of the difference between the pre-established past and the open future. Efficiency stifles creativity, which is a more basic way of thinking about attunement. Thus might be born a certain kind of ecological ‘lifestyle’, a way of constructing a certain kind of world that appears to function smoothly, based on a fantasy that something close to perfectly smooth functioning could ever be achieved. Artists of all kinds and practitioners of esoteric spiritual traditions intuit this problem. In those traditions, the aim is not so much to get rid of or even to transform negative emotions, but to embrace them and discover the energies within them that transcend the ego: the ego is taken to be the big problem, not the perceptions or the kinds of phenomena that are arising, such as anger. Again, it’s not what you’re thinking, it’s how you’re thinking that causes suffering. Anger can happen, and if you don’t cling to it, it becomes just another colour or flavour of energy. This isn’t about pushing away or denying one’s emotion, but rather about exploring it without too much clinging. If you do cling to it, it feels just awful; it’s ‘my’ anger, how am I going to get rid of it … Something like this insight needs to be part of being ecological, otherwise the risk is that humans will create a control society (to use the technical term from Deleuze) so intense that, as I said earlier, the current one, already very hard to bear, will seem loosey-goosey by comparison. Moreover, the ultimate horizon of efficiency is petroculture: the fact that oil, a precious toxic resource, dictates how we conduct ourselves. In a world without oil, we shouldn’t be imagining ecological action in the key of oil. That would be behaving according to an energy economy that no longer exists. And this wouldn’t be fun at all. I think that ecological politics is about expanding, modifying and developing new forms of pleasure, not restraining the meagre pleasures we already experience because we are only thinking in ways that our current modes of doing things allows. What would pleasure look like beyond the oil economy? Last year I switched my house’s energy plan from one that relied on fossil fuels to one that relied only on wind (Texas has a surprisingly vast array of wind farms). For the first three days of being on this new plan, I felt incredibly smug and virtuous. I felt pure and efficient. I felt as if I understood finally what sustainability meant. And then … An awful lot of ecological speech is actually oil economy speech. In fact, almost all ecological speech isn’t ecological speech at all. Ecological speech is deeply distorted by the oil economy we live in. All that language about efficiency and sustainability is about competing for scarce highly toxic resources. But if you think modern life is tight and restrictive and full of all kinds of police and policing, hold on to your hat. Imagine what an ecological society based on those principles of restriction and efficiency would feel like. I would like very much not to live on Earth if that is the direction in which we go.