`Author:` [[Timothy Morton]] `Availability:` [[Available Books]] ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ![[Being Ecological.jpg]] ## Highlights - 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. - But not being able to be in the subjunctive is also a big problem for ecological thinking - Note: What does subjunctive mean? - We live in an indicative age, an active one indeed - Note: What does indicitive mean? - Not being able to be in the middle is a big problem for ecological thinking - those of us who say they’re being ecological might be saying it in a mode that doesn’t have anything in particular to do with coexisting nonviolently with nonhuman beings, which is roughly what I take ecological ethics and politics to mean - A lot of thinking ecologically sounds religious, because it involves extremely profound and hard to express (at least at present) concepts and feelings. - Note: So maybe being truely religious is being ecolocical.. - The feeling of not-quite-reality is exactly the feeling of being in a catastrophe. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, or in that minor catastrophe called jet lag, you probably know what I mean. Indeed, editing out ‘may’ edit out experience as such. ‘You ARE’ means that if you don’t feel like it, if you don’t feel something officially sanctioned about [[Ecology]], there’s something wrong with you. It should be transparent. It should be obvious. We should deliver this obviousness in an obvious way, like a slap upside the head. ‘You may find yourself in’ includes experience - Note: To be indicative is to edit out the phenomenology of experience (I wonder if emotions are part of that..) - I think the same thing happens when we consider how lifeforms are interrelated. - Note: That is a great analogy, words are entangled like lifeforms are.. - From 2007 to 2008, Ecuador rewrote its constitution to allow for the ‘rights of nature’ - In a sense, it’s actually much stronger than a simple assertion. Because you can’t get rid of yourself. You can agree or disagree with all kinds of things – there you are, agreeing or disagreeing. In the words of that great phenomenologist Buckaroo Banzai, Wherever you go, there you are.1 - Note: We edit out the inner world, emotions and feelings.. - There are too many philosophers to mention, and I blush to name them, but you know the type: the kind of person who knows they are right and that you are talking nonsense unless you agree with them. Needless to say, this is a style I don’t like at all. - Note: So true! - Philosophy means the love of wisdom, not wisdom as such. - These two types of thought – about survival and bottom lines – are synonymous. - These two aspects form a manifold - Note: What is a manifold? A narritive and a narrator?.. - Getting a bit more granular, animal rights and environmentalism give reasons that are [[Reductionism|reductionist]]. - Note: What is reductionism?.. Philosophically - !’ (What I’m going to be calling ‘the beauty experience’.) That’s because beauty gives you a fantastic, ‘impossible’ access to the inaccessible, to the withdrawn, open qualities of things, their mysterious reality. - Note: The beauty experience is where we withdraw from the left brain hemisphere of self aware thinking and take a step back inti the wierdness if existence.. - Throughout this book, we’ll be seeing how the experience of art provides a model for the kind of coexistence ecological ethics and politics wants to achieve between humans and nonhumans - genomic expressions - Note: Wat does genomic mean? - And when you think of things like that, there’s really no difference between thinking about what is called an ecosystem and what is called a single lifeform. Problem solved. - Note: Thats so cool.. Even an insect is an ecosystem within itself. - Thinking about wholes and parts in this way is a key component of good old-fashioned art appreciation theory. - When we Google something, we are often trying to see what the ‘other’ thinks about it. Google is like the other, some kind of tangled spider web of expectations lurking just out of the corner of our eye, or just on the other side of all those links we don’t have time to click. We never have enough time to click all the links (as Google gets bigger, this becomes more obvious). Another way of saying this is that this weird thing, the other, is somehow structural: it doesn’t matter how you sidle up to it, you will never be able to grasp it directly. Its job seems to be to disappear whenever you look directly at it, but to feel like it’s surrounding you when you don’t – sometimes this feeling can be pretty creepy. - Note: More information is a kind of hyperobject.. - Kantian beauty is thinkfeel - You think you are about to hit that ball, but you have already hit it. Free will, as I keep saying, is overrated. - Something fascinating occurs if you start to think how the biosphere, as a total system of interactions between lifeforms and their habitats (which are mostly just other lifeforms), is also like the inside of a dreaming head. - Reading a poem introduces some wiggle room between ideas and ways of having them. Propaganda closes this space down. - 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. - Note: The Brain show - ‘Ecological information delivery mode’ has a certain flavour, a certain style – it happens in a certain possibility space. One of my jobs as a Humanities scholar is to try to feel out these possibility spaces, especially if/when we’re not very aware of them. - Note: When genres become tiresome and limiting. - It’s about time we figured out how to talk about the human species, while at the same time not acting as if the last few decades of thought and politics had never happened. We surely can’t go back to imagining some vanilla essence of ‘Man’ underneath our differences. But if we don’t figure out how to say we, someone else will. And as the Romantic poet William Blake said, ‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.’ - Note: We are all one and the same, yet unuiqe. - Actually, since I’m not Kant I’m going to say that beauty isn’t thinkfeel, it’s truthfeel. - Heidegger argues that there are no such things as truth and untruth, rigidly distinguished like black and white. You are always in the truth - Note: Link to Heidegger.. - You can’t sweep things under the carpet in the world of ecological awareness. - As the systems theorist Gregory Bateson implied when he wrote about ‘the ecology of mind’, mental issues are somehow ecological in this sense - Note: Look Gregory Bateson up.. - You can’t reduce the biosphere to its component parts, just as you can’t reduce your mind to its component thoughts - Note: Does this mean mind is the 'downward causality' of thoughts, like the biosphere is the downward causality of weather.. - And you can’t reduce your thoughts to what the thought is about, or to the way you are thinking about that thought: you need both, because a thought is a manifold. And this leads to a very interesting insight: maybe everything is a manifold. Or to use Bateson’s language, a ‘system’. The system is different from the things out of which it is made - can you think of anything more uncanny than realizing that you are in a whole new geological period, one marked by humans becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale? - Note: Exactly. Its the weirdest thing ever. - Extinctions look like points on a time line when you look them up on Wikipedia – but they are actually spread out over time, so that while they are happening it would be very hard to discern them - Note: Apart from the astroid extinction i guess.. - The aesthetic experience is about solidarity with what is given. It’s a solidarity, a feeling of alreadiness, for no reason in particular, with no agenda in particular – like evolution, like the biosphere. There is no good reason to distinguish between nonhumans that are ‘natural’ and ones that are ‘artificial’, by which we mean made by humans. It just becomes too difficult to sustain such distinctions. Since, therefore, an artwork is itself a nonhuman being, this solidarity in the artistic realm is already solidarity with nonhumans, whether or not art is explicitly ecological. Ecologically explicit art is simply art that brings this solidarity with the nonhuman to the foreground. - In the beauty experience, there is some kind of mind-meld-like thing that takes place, where I can’t tell whether it’s me or the artwork that is causing the beauty experience: if I try to reduce it to the artwork or to me, I pretty much ruin it. This means, argues Kant, that the beauty experience is like the operating system on top of which all kinds of cool political apps are sitting, apps such as democracy - Since the being that isn’t you is artwork, and so not necessarily human, or conscious, or sentient, or for that matter alive, we’re talking about the possibility of being able to expand democracy, from within Kantian theory itself, to include nonhumans. Which is a pretty scary thought for some people – Kant himself, for example, which is one reason why he is so careful to police the magic ingredient, the beauty experience, that actually makes the rest of his philosophy work (like Heidegger, he pulls back on his own thought, not carrying it through to its potentially radical conclusions). Instead, he sort of introduces a little tiny drop of it to flavour the anthropocentric – and pretty much bourgeois – soup – too much and the soup is ruined; it ceases to nourish anthropocentric patriarchy. It’s funny that the way to undermine Kant, as with Heidegger, is to take him more seriously than he takes himself, a tactic I’ve definitely inherited from deconstruction - Note: I want ti learn about deconstrutionism - Being mentally healthy might mean knowing that what you are thinking and how you are thinking are intertwined. - maybe mental health and ecological ‘health’ are interlinked. I believe that humans are traumatized by having severed their connections with nonhuman beings, connections that exist deep inside their bodies - Note: I believe this too - Maybe it would make it more obvious if we stopped calling it ‘global warming’ (and definitely stopped calling it ‘climate change’, which is really weak) and started calling it ‘mass extinction’, which is the net effect. - Note: True. #### Beauty - When you encounter the beauty experience, it’s not about anything in particular. If it really was a bowl of soup, you might want to eat it. Then you’d know what the thing was about: it was about future you, with a nice full belly. In a way, you would know the future of this entity, this object, this bowl of soup. But because beauty soup isn’t for eating – because it’s just this weird slightly telepathic mind meld between me and something that isn’t me – you don’t know the future. There is a strange not-yet quality built into how you access the thing you are finding beautiful. And because, from my point of view, beauty is sort of like having data, but the data isn’t pointing at anything but itself – I’m just experiencing the givenness of data, of what is given. I’m experiencing the way data doesn’t quite point directly at things. That’s why you need scientists, right? They figure out patterns in data that hint at things. That’s why science is statistical #### transcendental subject - that total happening called ‘me’ is only accessible in slivers. Some people call this thing that keeps disappearing around the corner consciousness, Kant calls it the transcendental subject, - because we’re used to time and space being box-like containers in which things are sitting, where we place and try to contain them (no matter whether this effort is an illusion or not), whereas for Kant, and those who come after him, time is something posited, it’s part of aesthetic experience, it’s in front of things, ontologically, not an ocean in which they are floating, but a sort of liquid that pours out of a thing. - vorhanden, which means present-at-hand - A Styrofoam cup isn’t just for coffee, it’s for slowly being digested by soil bacteria for five hundred years. - the hum of a huge orchestra, a biosphere has very specific qualities that can’t be reduced to the parts of the biosphere - Note: This makes me think, like a swarm if bees, that swarm is one, somehow, without being anything more than the sum of its parts! Similarly, we are not more than the sum of our thoughts (bees, instruments, weather events.) - . A hyperobject is a thing so vast in both temporal and spatial terms that we can only see slices of it at a time; hyperobjects come in and out of phase with human time; they end up ‘contaminating’ everything, if we find ourselves inside them (I call this phenomenon viscosity - So when we talk about sustainability, what we’re talking about mostly is maintaining some kind of human-scaled temporality frame, and this is necessarily at the expense of those other beings, and it’s very likely we didn’t factor them in at all. What exactly are we sustaining, if not the one-size-fits-all agricultural temporality pipe that has sucked all lifeforms into it like a vacuum cleaner, pretty much, over its 12,500-year run? - zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy - Things kind of disappear – they are merely there; they don’t stick out. It’s not that they don’t exist at all. It’s that they are less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. This quality of how things seemingly just happen around us, without our paying much attention, is telling us something about how things are: things aren’t directly, constantly present. They only appear to be when they malfunction or are different versions of the same thing than we’re used to. - Note: That describes the ordinaryness of life, yet we are missing so much. - We need all kinds of assumptions about what reality is, about what counts as real, what counts as existing, what counts as correct and incorrect. Thinking about these kinds of assumptions can take different forms, in philosophy one is called ontology, another is called epistemology. Ontology is the study of how things exist. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. - Note: Ontology and epistimology - the kind of futurality a piece of artwork opens up is unconditional: in other words, it doesn’t have a rate at which it decays to nothing. You don’t ever exhaust the meaning of a poem or a painting or a piece of music, and this is another way of saying that the artwork is a sort of gate through which you can glimpse the unconditioned futurality that is a possibility condition for predictable futures. Art is maybe one tiny corner in our highly (too highly) consciously designed – and way too utilitarian – social space where we allow things to do that to us. What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us? - 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’ - Being present is secondary to just sort of happening, which means, argues Heidegger, that being isn’t present, which is why he calls his philosophy deconstruction or destructuring - Note: Heidegger and deconstruction.. Being and precense - Stuff happens without us paying much attention (readiness to hand), yet the same stuff looks peculiar when it malfunctions (presence at hand) - Note: Presence and readiness.. - In Western philosophy, it was the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who started us off thinking in this ‘manifold’ way - art isn’t just decoration. It’s causal. It does something to you. The Platonists were right: art has an inherently disturbing (in a nice or not so nice way) effect, an effect that you don’t intend and can therefore strictly be called demonic, in the sense that demons are the messengers of the gods: it’s a message from somewhere else. - In fact, it seems like ‘just knowing stuff’ is never just knowing stuff, according to what I’ve been trying to argue. ‘Just knowing stuff’ is a way of living things too. And knowing that there is a way of living things implies there could be other ways too. If you have tragedy, you can imagine something like comedy. If you live in New York, you can imagine living in not-New York. - Note: knowing stuff is never just knowing stuff.. - By Yoda-ness I mean the actual Force, the one that eighteenth-century German physician Franz Anton Mesmer talked about, and which fascinated Kant: a sort of animal magnetism, a Force, argued Mesmer, was generated by lifeforms; it surrounds and penetrates them – it is like when Darth Vader makes a gripping movement with his hand, and not unlike how they used to mesmerize people with hand gestures, causing someone to believe they had been strangled – without touching them. Animal magnetism is to all intents and purposes identical with the Force of Star Wars fame; it is, as Obi Wan Kenobi observes, an ‘energy field’ that ‘surrounds’ and ‘penetrates’ us, and we can interact with it, with healing and destructive consequences - Art is telepathic – it’s spooky action at a distance, which is also what Einstein didn’t like about quantum theory. It makes things happen without needing to touch things. But art is also profoundly ambiguous: we can’t tell whether it’s telling the truth or lying. Ambiguous and powerful at the same time for the same reasons. - Maybe when Oscar Wilde said, on his deathbed, ‘This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death; either it goes or I do,’ he was telling the literal truth, and it only sounded like a joke because of our prejudices: the idea, for example, that appearances are superficial, while essences are fundamentally beyond appearance. - The ice chunk is a sort of train station in which past and future are sliding past one another, not touching, and what I mistakenly call present is a kind of relative motion between the two sliding trains of past and future - A thing is exactly how the cookie crumbled, and how the cookie might crumble some more, and I get to coexist in this slightly sad, melancholic space where the crumbling happened, and where an uncertain future opens out - The more we know about objects from the OOO point of view, the more we realize that we can’t cleanse them of their ‘abject’ qualities, because they aren’t pristine, pure things, but pockmarked and pitted and oozing with all kinds of inconsistencies and anomalies – just like human beings - a conversation between objects and abjection, which is a technical term some thinkers use to describe the functions of the body and the body’s relation with its symbionts, against which the traditional Western human subject has learned to distinguish him- or herself - The artwork can’t simply be a representation. The thing might have designs on you, to use the common English phrase. - Heidegger argues that it’s a mysterious being called Dasein. - Note: What is Dasein? - There is something transcendental about reason. You can’t point to it, but it’s real - Note: So this is what is meant by transendental, in Kantian terms.. Reason, truth, has its own.. Objectivity? - Infinity portals beckoning. Maximum aesthetic suction and repulsion, like a horror movie superimposed on a porno - An artwork is subscended by its parts. We’ve already been exploring the concept behind this term quite a bit. Recall what I’ve been arguing already: that wholes are bursting with their parts; in a basic but strange-seeming way, wholes are less than the sum of their parts. - what I’m saying is that art is actually a tiny but still recognizable fragment of the kind of larger world, the mostly nonhuman world of influences and designs that go beyond us and violate our idea of who ‘owns’ what and who is running the show, such that causality seems to have something animistic or paranormal about it - I’m talking about a substance that is a dangerous toxin to anthropocentrism and mechanical causality theories and the law of noncontradiction and default utilitarianism. The law of noncontradiction, for example, is an important lynchpin of Western philosophy, but it’s never been proved, only stated, first by Aristotle in section Gamma of the Metaphysics. It is easy to violate and also easy to draw up logical rules that allow for some things to be contradictory - We are so used to thinking in a dualistic way, that the implications of the fact that thoughts are independent of the mind sound unbelievable - Note: Is dualism just seperting the mind and 'things?' - where now we realize that somewhere else just means nowhere else, because it’s on the same planet. - What you experience in jet lag or inside a Haim Steinbach installation is precisely about exactly how things are. - Note: Things are not at hand, they are out of hand? - What all this amounts to is that it’s the normalization of things that is the distortion. - Note: Normal is the background - vorhanden. - The explicit content of the data seems so urgent: it’s as if it is screaming, ‘Look, can’t you see? Wake up! Do something!’ But the implicit content of the mode in which we send and receive this data contradicts this urgency in a stark way: ‘Something is coming but it’s not here yet. Wait – look around, anticipate.’ Can you see how the message is two-faced? One face is shocking, urgent; the other face is an anti-shock blister. What does this mean? It means that no amount of refining the data or data dump mode will ultimately work. It’s impossible to get a PTSD dream to line up with the fright it’s trying to transmute. In exactly the same way, ecological information dump mode (it doesn’t just affect global warming) is, and I need to say this in the most contrastive way possible, exactly the opposite of what we need in order to comprehend where we are and why – to start to live the data. - Note: The contradictions of climate 'infornation dump' mode.. - And irritatingly or wonderfully, this inbetween-ness means you can never have the perfect design. Because interconnectedness doesn’t mean that there is an obvious whole that obviously transcends its parts and is bigger and badder and better than the parts, and the parts are just components in the machine of the whole. A political system is also a designed thing, so this definitely affects what kinds of future politics we want - A glass has been designed by glass blowers and cutters. A black hole has been designed by gravitational forces in a gigantic star. And in particular, things are definitely not unformatted surfaces that can only be formatted by human shaping or desire projection. - Note: We have to be more aware things just happen, independntly of our awareness! - Think about evolution. It’s design without a designer. And in a larger sense, nothing is un-designed. There is no such thing as unformatted matter, waiting for someone to stamp a form on it. That’s an ecologically dangerous fantasy of so-called Western civilization. In truth, anything at all is in part a story about what happened to it. - Note: Robart Spotolsky like thoughts.. - this lack of attention has been going on for about twelve thousand years, since the start of agriculture, which eventually required industrial processes to maintain themselves, hence fossil fuels, hence global warming, hence mass extinction. - Note: We ignore the background, and thus avoid presence. - Ecological facts are, at present, very often facts about the unintended consequences of human actions. Exactly: the vast majority of us had no idea what we were doing, on some level. It’s like the noir movie where the lead character discovers that all along she was working for a hostile secret agency. - Note: Interesting! And trueI think... All climate change facts tell us we have been driving with our eyes shut. - Agrilogistics means the logistics of the dominant mode of agriculture that started in Mesopotamia and other parts of the world (Africa, Asia, the Americas) around 10,000 BCE. Agrilogistics has an underlying logic to do with survival: Neolithic humans needed to survive (mild) global warming, and so they settled in fixed communities that became cities, in order to store grain and plan for the future. They began to draw distinctions between the human and the nonhuman realms – what fits inside the boundary, and what exists outside of it – that continue to this day. They also drew distinctions between themselves (the caste system). Very soon after the agrilogistical programme began, all kinds of phenomena we associate with life in general showed up, in particular patriarchy and social stratification, various kinds of class systems. It’s important to remember that these are constructs of history, the consequence of nomads and hunter-gatherers settling down and establishing cities based on a certain form of survival mode. - Note: I love his idea if an agricultural mindset that permeates or culture - It’s never the case that you think first, then act. You can’t see everything all at once. You just sort of muddle around, and then you get some kind of snapshot of what’s going on, with more or less accurate hindsight. Foreseeing and planning are strangely overrated, as neurology is now telling us, and as phenomenology has been telling us - Note: Phenomonology tells us we never really think first then act.. - Ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences. - Note: Great quote! - a ‘control society’, a useful term invented by philosopher Gilles Deleuze to describe our contemporary world. An ecological control society - Note: Gilles Deleuze - truthiness rather than rigid true versus rigid false - The ecological society to come, then, must be a bit haphazard, broken, lame, twisted, ironic, silly, sad. Yes, sad, in the sense meant by a character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who: sad is happy for deep people.8 Beauty is sad like that. Sadness means there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on. You can’t quite grasp it. You have no idea who your boyfriend really is. This is not my beautiful wife. Which means in turn that beauty isn’t graspable either, beauty as such – which means that beauty must be fringed with some kind of slight disgust, something that normative aesthetic theories are constantly trying to wipe off. There needs to be this ambiguous space between art and kitsch, beauty and disgust. - Note: Ambigous loss! - Nazism for Heidegger was a way for him to cover over and ignore and keep anthropocentrically safe from the most radical implications of his own theory. In fact, many Western philosophers since – and including – Kant have sought refuge from the outer-limits weirdness of their own theories in all sorts of ways, to avoid them outstripping what they think they want their thoughts to do – maybe they are afraid of what people might think, or maybe they’re just afraid of what they might think, which could be out of step with how they otherwise live their lives. - Note: Yes, many philosophers are afraid and impose self denying and self limiting constructs within their philosophies. - the ambient openness and strange distortedness of many of its forms talk about the Earth out of which they are ultimately made - Note: Post modernism, openness and strange distortions talk about the earth that bore it.. - Of course, all art is ecological, just as all art talks in various ways about race, class and gender, even when it’s not doing so explicitly. But ecological art is more explicit. - Note: More ecologically explicit.. How does post modern art do this by consciously incuding its environment(s)? - correlationism, has been popular in Western philosophy for about two centuries. - Note: What is correlationism..? - But something funny has happened to this idea. For reality to be correlationist, there has to be a correlatee as well as a correlator: there is a violin sonata, not just a violinist. It’s like two faders on a mixing desk. Over time, the correlator fader has been turned way up, while the correlatee fader has been turned all the way down. And this has given rise to the actually rather boring (and definitely anthropocentric) idea that the world is exactly how humans make it, with the correlatee turned all the way down, so down that it sounds like the correlator is doing a solo, not a duet - Note: I need more examples of the correlator and the corelatee.. Maybe i can use the metaphor of employee and employer - You are glued to the biosphere phenomenologically. - Note: Phenonomology - That’s what scientists do: they look for patterns in data. Looking at patterns: it’s a lot more like appreciating art than you might think – more on this later. - Note: The patterning instinct - we never fully know, we estimate - Data simply means what is given - In truth, data isn’t really the same as facts, let alone interpretations of facts. In order to have a fact, you need two things: data, and an interpretation of that data - Scientism is the worship of factoids - Your mind is wherever you put it. You are ‘in’ the biosphere in a much more powerful sense than Google Maps points out when it locates you ‘in’ a particular street. You are ‘in’ the biosphere in the sense of being ‘into’ it: you are concerned about it; you care about it. You are locked together with the thing you are concerned about. You form a unit, no matter how spatially close or far you are from one another: you are phenomenologically near even if you are on the other side of the Galaxy. - Correlationism is true: you can’t grasp things in themselves, facts are different from data, and data is different from things. But that doesn’t mean that what gets to decide what’s real – the correlator, the decider – is more real than those things, whether the decider is the Kantian subject, Hegelian history, Marxist relations of human production, Nietzschean will to power, or Heidegger’s flickering lamplight of Dasein. So while ‘traditional’ postmodernism, informed by Kant, still relies on this correlationalism, what I’m talking about here, and what underlies OOO, is the idea that this very relationship may not be what we think it is. It may not exist at all. - Note: If everything is a construct, but Kant says you can trace the cause and effect, but actually... You can't?.. - Yelling at people that we are making lifeforms go extinct isn’t nice, because it deletes the strangeness. And saying conversely ‘Who cares? Everything goes extinct anyway’, which is sort of what the right wing often says, and also what some extreme forms of supposedly environmentalist stance say, such as ecological thinker Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, isn’t nice either, because that also tries to delete the strangeness. This kind of bleak certainty misses how things are. - Note: Sperb anylasis, seems convey how i view things.. - You don’t even need to make your relevance lasso wider. Just the mere idea that there is a relevance lasso is enough to make you notice. Because world is always a bit ragged and broken, because the lasso is never nice and neat and circular - Note: Relevance lasso - write a song about that. - Light is splashy and blobby, as quantum theory tells us. And it can’t reach everywhere all at once, as relativity theory tells us. It’s like when you die in Tibetan Buddhism. When you die, you see the light – but unlike in some other religions, it’s not an obvious light and it’s not at the end of a tunnel, and you aren’t heading towards it and it isn’t the end. In fact, you probably don’t notice it at all. It just sort of flickers on, in an incidentally by-the-way sort of a way, and you delete that experience of the nature of mind, then you find yourself being reincarnated. In the traditional literature it lasts for about three seconds, or as the esoteric manuals put it, as long as it takes you to stick your arm into a sleeve three times. - You are not deleting some constantly present logos and falling into blurry confusion. In a way you are deleting a wonderful blurry confusion and falling into a fatal certainty. - Note: Left brained! - hyperobjects: things that are huge and, as they say, ‘distributed’ in time and space – that take place over many decades or centuries (or indeed millennia), and that happen all over Earth – like global warming - When you feel your woolly hat, what you are feeling is woolliness – you are receiving hat data, not the actual hat. - Such things (evolution, biosphere, climate, for example) give us a clue about how things are – everything, according to our modern way of looking at them - The members of wholes are always in excess of those wholes. - You have arrived at a way of organizing things based on what some philosophers call [[contingency]] and what some linguistics call metonymy. - Note: No umbrella big enough to contain everything.. - This interconnection without an edge or centre is what French philosopher Georges Bataille calls a general economy - Note: Economy and ecology _ how do these 2 words and concepts align?.. - Global warming denial is actually a displaced sort of modernity denial - Note: Does he mean denial of the great accelaration.. - The human species caused global warming, not the octopus species, let’s be very clear about that. But species is exactly what you can’t point to. I find that I am and I am not a human, insofar as I did and did not contribute to global warming, depending on what scale you think I’m on, so these scales don’t have a smooth transition point between being one human and being part of the total population of humans – suddenly we find ourselves on one scale or another. It’s that paradox again - Note: We are part responsible, accountable, and part totally not! - There is an uncanny gap between little me and me as a member of what is called species. - Note: Do we have to identify as human? like that philip k dick story about an alien species taking over an arsehole.. - This interconnection without an edge or centre is what French philosopher Georges Bataille calls a - Natural’ Means ‘Habitual’ The Romantic poets, who lived around the time of Hume and Kant, got a handle on this quickly. They realized that when you get really up close to things, they start to ‘dissolve’. This is another way of saying that when you let go of a normalized reference frame, the strangeness of things, the way you can’t access them directly, becomes very obvious - Note: The Romantics, especially Blake, were anti scientism.. Anti rational minded thinking. - ‘All you touch and all you see / Is all your life will ever be.’2 - Note: Roger Waters lyrcs for 'Breath.' - Funnily enough, living in a scientific age means that you realize more and more that you are shrink-wrapped in your experience - By comparison, ecologically aware criticism opens up a vertigo-inducing abyss of potentially infinite, overlapping contexts. So that by definition, there can be no one context to rule them all. - Note: Yes, this speaks to my understanding of not wanting to fit into a steriotype of art.. Of liking 'chaotic' style in everything, you can't pin point the origins or meaning of anything really. - Picture postcards are descendants of what came before Romanticism in art, namely the picturesque. In the picturesque, the world is designed to look like a picture – like it’s already been interpreted and packaged by a human - Note: This is what i mean when i talk about art that us too concerned with 'realism.' - And funnily enough, this is pretty much what humans saw in the savannah millions of years ago. Having a body of water nearby and some shade (those trees), encircled safely by mountains where you know there is water descending to feed the lake (for instance), is pretty handy if you’re some kind of ancient human. The picturesque is keyed to a fundamental human-centred way of looking at things: it is anthropocentric. - the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. - Ecological beings such as lifeforms and global warming require modal and paraconsistent logics. - Note: What are model and paraconsistent..? what do they mean¿ Seems they allow some ambiguity and flexability - 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, and it affects so many things. We might think of consciousness as something that emerges from the ‘hum of its parts’ as it were, the operation of all the brain firings. It’s popular to think this way in the philosophy and science of artificial intelligence, the idea that intelligence or consciousness can be manufactured in some way, for instance by software. Karl Marx thinks of capitalism proper emerging from the collective whirr of enough machines. When enough of them are connected and whirring away, pop! Out comes industrial capitalism. Ecological philosophers definitely think of Gaia like that, Gaia being the more or less personified whole that emerges from the functioning of Earth systems such as the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle, as the scientist James Lovelock first argued - Appearance is the intrinsic twist in being. - Note: Good quote.. If somewhat meaningless.. - Time stops being what it actually isn’t – namely, a human interpretation of time. - If everything exists in the same way, that means that wholes exist in the same way as their parts, - which means that there are always more parts than there is a whole - But there’s no reason to think that way. When you draw a set of things, the circle you draw around those things is always going to be bigger than that set, physically speaking. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to encompass them. But how a drawing looks isn’t what it logically means - Note: The fundamental explaination of the fallacy 'the sum is greter than its parts.' - which means that the whole is always less than the sum of its parts - Note: The whole is less than the sum of its parts - So how come it’s so hard to accept? It has to do with the legacy of monotheism - Note: Bloody religion - tragedy, which is an agricultural-age way of computing the damage caused by an agricultural age. - Note: That is nice, a way to explain tragedy. - 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). - our concepts have a monotheistic form, despite what we think we believe. - The idea of sinners in the hands of an angry God sums it up. We are small, and furthermore we’re ontologically small: we don’t matter as much as God does. Naturally His human stand-in on Earth, the King, matters a whole lot more than us too. Kings and gods emerged in early agricultural (Neolithic) society. - Note: Thus is just what Osho would say too - The Romantic poets figured out that when you get ‘scientific’, as I was just describing, when you become open to all kinds of data, not just clichéd stuff, you must also get ‘experiential’. You end up writing poems about the experience of encountering the rock, and how strange that actually is - Note: The romantic poets were experiential - When you settle down and start farming you get a picture of the static social space you’re in (hence the concept of ‘the state’ – hunter gatherers wouldn’t think of organizing things in this way). - Note: Yep, agricultural life was the fall - This social space seems obviously bigger than your little part of it, and there’s a strict social hierarchy (that emerged, along with patriarchy, within a short time of the beginning of the Neolithic Age). And there’s division of labour: the King is the king, you’re the blacksmith, that guy over there is the sesame merchant - Note: Wow, I think just the same ideas as this.. - So all this bludgeoning business – all these information dumps – are exactly how not to live scientific data - Note: William Blake would agree - we have to experience life, not analise it. - Ecologically speaking, I think the pathway is likely to lead us from guilt down into shame, and from there down into disgust, whence to horror; from there begins ridicule, which dies out in melancholia, whose enabling chemistry is sadness; in turn, sadness is conditioned by longing, which implies joy. - Note: I dont think i can engage with the necessary emotions until they become more universal and comminplace.. - Funnily enough, twisty, weird, possibly postmodern art is much more up to speed with living in a scientific age than sentimental ‘obvious’ images of majestic big cats or lush rainforests in one of those glossy photos in a calendar - Note: He is saying modern art has the potential to depict reality better, more acuratly, than traditional depictions.. - for quite some time we have been designing and interpreting and executing things so as to make sure humans are in a top or central position in all the domains of existence (psychic, philosophical, social). Ecological facts are about the unintended consequences of anthropocentrism - Another way of saying the same thing is that we are starting to trust that we are in a catastrophe, which literally means a space of downward-turning. It’s much better to think you are in a catastrophe than to think you are in a disaster. There are no witnesses in disaster. Disasters are what you witness from the outside. Catastrophes involve you, so you can do something about them. - Note: A good, or at least pertinent, moto. - ‘To see the world in a grain of sand … Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.’9 Blake understood the pitfalls of agricultural-age religion, how oppressive it could be. In the same poem, he talks about the horribly broken state of England, which at the time was on a war footing, by analogizing it with how humans treat animals: ‘A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate, / Predicts the ruin of the state.’ - getting perspective about yourself, interrogating your way of doing and seeing, is one of the hardest things to do – and difficult to swallow, intrinsically - Scientists call this fact ‘confirmation bias’ and philosophers call it ‘the hermeneutic circle’ and ‘phenomenological style’. - Note: Look these up.. - if we go extinct it means that many, many lifeforms have also gone extinct or are about to. Opposing anthropocentrism doesn’t mean that we hate humans and want ourselves to go extinct. What it means is seeing how we humans are included in the biosphere as one being among others. - Note: Makes me think of the frog i accidently blew with the blower.. How i felt sad and mornful.. I think feelings always, to some extent, are reflections of our own perceptions of ourselves.. So, i was really mourning us, humans, myself, being blown away.. - This gives rise to a strange insight, which is that living in a scientific age doesn’t mean you are living in a cold world of objectivity. It means that you realize you can’t achieve escape velocity from your phenomenological style or embeddedness in data interpretation or confirmation bias (three different ways of saying the same thing). We cannot get out. - Note: This sounds very similar ti what UG says, a Though without the anger, more acceptance - Funnily enough, living in a scientific age means we have stopped believing in authoritative truth - Note: ... Very tue, i am thinking, the role of an artist is to delve as deep as possible into the issues, complexities, if everythig.. - Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet different from them - Note: Thats why I find it hard to irganjse tasks and projects, because they can merge into each other, and so it should be! - Teaching involves working with all kinds of emotional energy, but basically there are about three main flavours, and you relate to them in sequence. They are strawberry, chocolate and vanilla, otherwise known as passion, aggression and ignorance, just like the general Buddhist emotional typology - Note: What is the buddhst emotional typography? - Things are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct - Note: Like people.. - we call this way of thinking holism, and what holism means normally is that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. - Finally, you end up working with ignorance or indifference, which is the hardest energy to work with, because the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s this vanilla feeling of not caring all that much - The normal kind of holism is really a mechanism, - Ecological awareness is shaking our faith in the anthropocentric idea that there is one scale to rule them all – the human one - Note: Is this the modern existentialism?.. We doubt even ourselves? Or is it more to do with the realisation that we, now alone with just our rationalism, are afraid of all the chaotic nature..? - 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. - I think we have simply been passing on the normal form of holism without thinking too much. We do this because we are unconsciously reproducing good old agricultural-age theism that way. - It would be better, more logical and requiring fewer beliefs to see everything – even now – as history and to see history as not exclusively human. - Note: Exactly, i have thought just that myself.. - If you measure it, obviously it’s much bigger: it’s the whole of Earth. I mean that it’s ontologically smaller. Ontologically means having to do with its being, not with exactly how it appears, with data that you can point to on a screen or measure with a ruler or touch with the tip of your tongue. Earth is one. A polar bear is one. There are lots of polar bears and coral reefs and parrots. There is one biosphere. Simple. The whole is less than the sum of its parts, because the whole is one, and the parts are many, and things exist in the same kind of way, if they exist at all. Let me explain. - Note: I thunk thus explains ontology... Being.. - Numbness is a feeling of protecting yourself from a shock - And once again we stand in awe of gigantic entities massively distributed in time and space, in such a way that we can only point to tiny slices of them at a time. Once again we find our faith shaken, and now it has clearer contours: it’s not about the disappearance of an agricultural-age god. It’s much, much worse. It’s about the flip side, the unconscious, the unintended consequences of our faith in progress, which far precedes agricultural-age gods, as a matter of fact, and is their condition of possibility. - Note: Yes! Much worse than the disapearance of avricultural age gods.. This time we are realising that everything we believed in, our progress, our philosophy, is all upside down and wrong headed. - Things aren’t related as in some flavourless stew where the ingredients have totally dissolved. Modern physics is starting to say the same thing, which is encouraging. There are electrons and there are Higgs bosons that give the electrons mass. But the electrons aren’t reducible to the Higgs bosons. - Science never claims that atoms are more real than tomatoes – it restrains itself from ontological arrogance. - the philosophical term is phenomenology – because you’re never going to get at them in themselves. No access mode will work properly - OOO argues that nothing can be accessed all at once in its entirety.3 By access is meant any way of grasping a thing: brushing against, thinking about, licking, making a painting of, eating, building a nest on, blowing to bits … OOO also argues that thought is not the only access mode, and that thought is by no means the top access mode – indeed, there is no top access mode. What these two insights give us is a world in which anthropocentrism is impossible, because thought has been extremely closely correlated with being human for so long, and because human beings have mostly been the only ones allowed to access other things in a meaningful way. - I think that object-oriented ontology is really useful for an age in which we have come to know much more about ecology. One way is that it doesn’t make thinking, in particular human thinking, into a special kind of access mode that truly gets at what a thing is - We confront a blank-seeming wall in every dimension of our experience – social space, psychic space, philosophy space. - Existence above and beyond qualities. This supremacy of existing is a default ontology and a default utilitarianism, and before any of it was philosophically formalized, it was built into social space, which now means pretty much the entire surface of Earth. - Note: Is that why existentialism is the fear of our age? Because we realise, for all our capabilities, we have created a society that exists only to exist? Making redundant all our necant capabilities... - After all, guilt is scaled to individuals. But individuals are in no sense guilty for global warming. - But is this hoping for a new way to see or be really ecological, or is it just a retweet of the agricultural-age monotheism that has got us to this stage in the first place? And if agriculture is in part responsible for global warming and mass extinction (which it is), wouldn’t it be better not to use a monotheist reference frame or monotheist language? Wouldn’t it be better to stop with the sermonizing, the shaming and the guilt that are part and parcel of the theistic approach to life that arose in the agricultural age? - Note: Agrologistics.. Lets look for a totally new way to understand ecology. - What is global warming anyway? The correct answer is that it is mass extinction - when I talk about art, it is not just as a metaphor for us to understand the quality of existence. The subscendent nature of art means that ecological art that calls itself as such can’t be about Sierra Club-style uplifting poster-type grandeur. It must include ugliness and disgust, and haunting weirdness, and a sense of unreality as much as of reality - Note: What is subscendant? - 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 - Note: This is a very interesting chapter.. - We are trying to contain or stop the veering of attunements of lifeforms to one another, if only in thought. - 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 - Note: Evolution is more strange, or at least cinstant change, than we think. - Think of how in the Paleolithic Era, painting or dancing a nonhuman was considered part of the process of hunting the nonhuman. The shaman follows the movements and habits of the prey, bringing them into her or his body, allowing his or her body to resonate with nonhuman capacities and qualities - The phenomenon of adaptation should be sufficient to force us to recognize that attunement is the mode in which causality happens. Causality at all: a ball hitting another ball, a photon incident on a crystal lattice, an army invading a territory, the stock market plunging. As before, consider what happens when an opera singer’s voice attunes to a wine glass. If done with the greatest accuracy, the wine glass explodes - 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.9 - Note: Interesting, so it took Darwin to dismantle Aristotle in thus regard. - Humans aren’t necessarily Pac Man-like beings that munch everything into nonexistence – a fashionable way of thinking over the past few hundred years of modern Western philosophy (especially the dialectical philosophy of Hegel). Humans are sensitive chameleons. - We find a special and revealing adaptation mode in the syndrome we call camouflage. 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 - Note: This image of an octopus encapsulates the whole udea of thus book to me, if what it is to be ecological - appearing (waves) is intrinsic to being (ocean), yet different. - Phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy - the non-agricultural (‘Paleolithic’) idea of an interconnective, causal–perceptual aesthetic force. - OOO’s use of object is a mirror in which you see reflected your own prejudices about what objects are. - But sociology does not explore enchantment. Sociology itself is disenchanted, and acts just like the bureaucratic society that Weber argues is disenchantment’s birthplace; sociology is part of the logistics of what Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. - Note: Max Weber - examples of this secret, almost completely untold history of modernity – of the tension-filled dance between the known and the unknown, the seeable and the unseen, the normal and the paranormal – are everywhere once you start to look.20 - Note: Para-normal - Well, we are all still Mesopotamians. We are Neolithic humans confronting the catastrophe wrought by the Neolithic fantasy of smoothly functioning agricultural logistics, and we want to hold on to the philosophical underpinnings of those logistics for dear life, because otherwise … Well, it’s unthinkable, it’s woo-woo New Age obscurantist neo-fascist primitivist (find some more kitchen sinks to throw in here …). - We think we don’t like veering – until an electric guitarist bends a note. 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 - monoculture dampens biodiversity, logocentrism dampens the play of the signifier … and the dream of ‘ecological’ society as immense efficiency (the fantasy of perfect attunement) dampens the uneasy coexistence of lifeforms - 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. - Note: But i dont understand what is wrong with anarchistic primivutism.. - We want to be comfy in our unwavering, thanatological world. - Many a pop singer is death incarnate, because death always goes to number 1. Don’t mistake those upbeat lyrics and dancey tunes for life. The frantic, maniacal repetition is exactly what Freud calls death drive. - Life is a balance between completely avoiding stuff and dosing yourself with stuff over and over again. - Many of our maniacal compulsive activities – such as washing our hands with soap all the time, and nowadays antibacterial soap – is precisely what brings on death in various ecological forms (such as upgraded superbugs). The maniacal flight from death is death. That’s the weird feedback loop our kind of society is in. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`