I
As Tim Ingold writes, “apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it.”(*) This does not only mean that all knowledge is, by definition, situated; it also means that being is always-already “being-with.”
Thus, for example, among the Warlpiri and other Aboriginal Australian groups, what we call “humans,” “animals,” “plants,” “rocks,” “winds,” and other “natural phenomena” belonging in a particular ecosystem are “children” of the ancestral network-like dynamic principles that, through their active manifestation, once shaped, and keep shaping, that particular ecosystem, of which humans are bestowed the role of “guardians,” in the sense that they are those who must responsibly care for it. Indeed, no one must camp anywhere without first singing and dancing to those dynamic principles and without painting their ongoing “dreaming” (Tjukurrpa), of which everything is the expression. Sylvie Poirier calls this a “poetics of dwelling.”(**)
We lack dwelling as much as we lack poetry, and vice-versa. For to “dwell” means for us, mortals, to live “poetically” among the living, feeling awe before that which shines forth and singing to it before it dies, because we know it dies.
II
We are persuaded that “dwelling” and “care” is, precisely, what philosophy must think today, to counter our worldless wandering through what, by force of a u-topian nightmare, has become a dystopian wonder-less un-world instead of a worlded earth.
Making of “dwelling” and “care” today’s object of thought implies, therefore, moving beyond “modernity.” For “modernity” is that nightmare. By “modernity” we mean: the admixture of Rome, Christianity, and what is commonly called the modern era.
We do not want to be part of this nightmare which, visibly, the earth and its human and other-than-human inhabitants can no longer stand.
III
We no longer recognise ourselves as “moderns,” then. But we do not recognise ourselves as “post-moderns” either. Why? Because “postmodernity” seems to be modernity’s “playtime,” and its spirit the “ultra-modern” spirit of late capitalism, in which everything is commodified at will.
Would “anti-moderns” do, then? Clearly not, for the term “anti-modern” carries with it little more than anxiety, despair, absurdity, and nihilism, i.e. the ultra-toxic reverse of modernity’s ultimately-toxic fraud. (Modernity as a fraud? Well, look around yourself and see…)
What, then, about the term “trans-moderns?” We are tempted here to respond to this question with another question: is it about redistributing modernity’s cards among new players?
But then, what? Should we recognise ourselves as “pre-moderns?” This would make no sense, as it is not possible to go back in time. Unless one manages to somehow go through what opened the time one is living, willing to re-start from it in an altogether different direction, that is. That one can do, but it would not be called to go “back” in time, in the sense of becoming what one “was” but no longer “is”: it would amount to loop forward otherwise by first looping backwards, briefly but essentially – is this not what Heidegger suggests when he speaks of “another beginning?”
In a nutshell: we do not recognise ourselves anymore inside modernity, against modernity, or before modernity, but, more simply, we would like to be able to place ourselves, and to work to place ourselves, outside modernity.
Consequently, we aspire to one day see ourselves as “extra-moderns,” or as “non-moderns,” which is what we all were once and, most importantly, what a good many of us remain despite all – in direct proportion to our capacity to “poetise” the earth and to “dwell” on it.
Someone may object that, in many respects, whether we like it or not, we are condemned to remain inside modernity, which is, to one extent or another, ultimately inescapable. Well, we are seriously trying to leave that skin of ours behind – or should we say our modern straitjacket? And it is difficult to fancy we may ever succeed in it if we do not try.
IV
It is for this reason that we do not look at indigenous peoples in exotic terms. But it is also for this reason we do not look at them as being radically different from us, i.e. as people we would have nothing to learn from, as people whose otherness we should respect and maintain at bay. The way in which, under the excuse of granting everyone legal protection, Anglo-American legalists pretend to transform us all into self-referent subjects with legal rights, is just another facet of modernity’s nightmare.
Indigenous peoples, that is to say, “extra-modern” peoples, are those who can teach us how to become “extra-moderns,” or, better, to re-become “extra-moderns.” We should learn as much as possible about their conceptual worlds (on which see: “Derrida’s Mistake,” “If God Loves You, It Means He is Your Enemy,” and “How Does an Indigenous Concept Look Like?” “Those Who(se Bodies) Do Not Look Like Us” “Humanity and Cannibalism as Problematic Notions,” “Animism as a Question of Bodies,” “When Binary Thought is Not What you Think“) and social practices (“Cruelty and Tenderness,” “What Socialism Owes to the Tupinamba,” “On Extramodern Stateless Societies“) and we should learn from them. Above all perhaps, we should learn from their “poetics of dwelling.”
V
Our great men […] usually address the people of their house a little before dawn or shortly after dark. […] They tell about the beginning of time […] and they speak with wisdom. We call this hereamuu. Only the oldest men speak like this. […]
[…] This is the heart of our talk. When we say things solely with our mouths, during the day, we do not truly understand each other. We do listen to the sound of the words addressed to us, but we easily forget them. But during the night, […] words […] enter deep into our thought. They reveal themselves in all their clarity and can truly be heard. […]
To be able to make hereamuu speeches firmly, one must acquire the image of the kãokãoma loud-voiced falcon we call Kãomari. It gives the words of our exhortation their strength. […] [T]he great men whose chest is inhabited by the kãokãoma falcon’s image truly know how to make long and powerful exhortations. They are skillful at convincing young people to follow their words. […]
[…] [O]ften the elders only discourse with wisdom […] so that those who hear them can become wiser. This way when an old man wakes before dawn, at the hour of the dew, he will name in hereamuu the old forest where his fathers and grandfathers lived […] He will speak about the place where he was born and those where he grew up. […] He will tell what he observed of the lives of the long-ago elders during his youth […]
For their part, the shaman elders’ hereamuu mostly recall the time of the yarori animal ancestors. They often open their speeches by saying: “In the beginning of time, our ancestors became others, […] they turned into deer, tapirs, monkeys, and parrots.”
[…] When I was younger, I often asked myself: “Do the white people possess words of truth?” […] [For] we saw them destroy the forests and the rivers. We know they can be greedy and evil. […] They have lost their ancestors’ words. They have forgotten what they were in the beginning of time, when they also had a culture.(***)
The Yanomami shaman and spokesperson Davi Kopenawa invites us here to remember what we once were and to become it again. Is there truly nothing we can learn from these words? Should we see in them an expression of his own culture? And if we still feel moved by his words to one degree or another, which may well happen, should we not ask ourselves what is there in us capable of tuning with them despite all?
VI
Let us be very clear: we are far from advocating here a picturesque or bucolic spirit. Nor are we simply talking about ecology, understood as an attitude of respect for the natural world.
In the last instance, the question of “dwelling” is a political question, in the sense that a “poetics of dwelling” is a “politics of dwelling.” And a dwelt-in earth in which being is “being with” cannot be defined exactly as “nature.”
While, at the core of modernity, capitalism devastates the earth, extra-modern peoples approach it as an infinite source of life and meaning. Through their songs the shining-forth of the earth remains visible and the song of the earth remains audible. But this means that through their words the earth is given back its politics, the very politics modernity removed from the earth by declaring the earth to be only “nature.”
The earth as politeia, then, or as a republic – instead of the earth as our imperium, or the earth as a set of resources.
Thus the words of the young Innu poet and filmmaker Réal Junior Leblanc and their accompanying images, form which we can learn too a good deal too, and whose addressee is what the wonder-less and world-less wanderers we call “moderns” would, in turn, call a “tree”:
Embrace me with your roots / While the wind rocks me in your branches / Protect me from the tempests / and the enemy / While telling me your life / Sing me a song with your leaves / So I can finally dream of the time before / Accept me under your shadow and in your sap / Look at me like I were one of your sons / The sound of the wind is your language / You are the crown of life / Only you can understand the mountains / Your skin is cracked up with time / Your thoughts are older than a rock / Your presence calms our hearts / Your smell intoxicates our souls / You are the first of all the children of the Earth / Listen to your daughters and your sons singing for you / Feel their sorrows and the riddle hearts / Invite their souls to find their way again / Gather the bark and the skin together.
Réal Junior Leblanc, Chevelure de la vie (Crown of Life), 2011
@ wapikoni.ca. Wapikoni Mobile is a non-profit organisation based in Montreal, Quebec, that hosts educational workshops and film screenings to raise awareness and educate the wider public about Indigenous cultures, issues and rights.
(*) Tim Ingold. “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment (in Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, ed. R. Ellen and K. Fukui [Oxford: Berg, 1996]), p. 121.
(**) Sylvie Poirier, A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams and Events in the Australian Western Desert (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 60.
(***) Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 183, 261-281, 299, 302, 304-305, 312.