Due to human inactivity during the lockdown, in late March mountain goats were seen roaming the streets of a Welsh town. Events like this have provoked four different types of reaction in the social media. Some (A) celebrate such events (too naively?) as a return of nature to places from where it had been exiled. Others, in turn, (B) take advantage of it to make up fake images of nature’s supposed return with a deceitful purpose. Others (C) mock (too insensibly?) A’s enthusiasm, as, in their view, it is no longer possible to tell the difference between the natural and the human, and pretending that it still is must be seen as a naive prise de position. The image below reflects this mockery.
Image retrieved from the American news website www.buzzfeednews.com. Other visual jokes displaying therein include fake images of e.g. drunk elephants sleeping peacefully in an abandoned crop field after having eaten too many of its vines; their intent is to mock, in a more-straightforward manner, the aforementioned A-claims about nature’s alleged return
Lastly, others (D) label (too unnuancedly?) A’s enthusiasm “eco-fascist.”
Based as they are on naiveness, deceptiveness, sarcasm, and exaggeration, these noisy reactions contrast with riveting-experiences like that of a Brazilian friend of ours who shared with us a piece he had written on his daily encounters over the past weeks with a group of monkeys that ventured themselves to descend from the trees and come close to his kitchen every morning to ask him for food. We quote first the Portuguese original, then offer our translation:
“Aos encontros comparecemos com medo, com curiosidade e determinaçao talvez, mas com medo. Nós e os micos. Os corpos são o lugar da diferença. […] Nossos corpos são diferentes – e diferentes ao ponto em que nossas almas (e a fome, o medo, a coragem e a responsabilidade) não podem saber tudo o que precisam sobre os corpos dos outros. […] É a interioridade comum que pretende ser o ponto de triangulação entre corpos diferentes – entre eu e o mico da janela, há a fome (e o medo) em comum. […] Trata-se de uma transparência cubista, talvez, mas de uma transparência. Essa transparência se projeta na simetria entre o sistema econômico que me separa da banana do supermercado e a janela que separa o mico da banana na cozinha […] A transparência que resta aqui tem a seguinte fórmula: O mico é para mim o que eu sou para ele. Somos simétricos, somos como instâncias de uma (mesma) interioridade paradigmática. Meu encontro com o mico pode não ser exorcizado pelo conhecimento que eu tenho de sua sociologia, etologia, antropologia ou neurologia, mas tampouco é um mergulho em uma transcendência em que as dinâmica da negociação é desconhecida. Aliás, um encontro não é exatamente uma negociação – é antes uma ampliação de horizontes, uma interrupção da parte de alguma coisa externa. […] [Mas então] o outro não pode ser um outro eu, mas é aquilo que eu não sou. […] [É] preciso [combinar] a postura de Levinas acerca da exterioridade incorrigível do outro […] com a doutrina de Whitehead de que a experiência é ubíqua, uma espécie de pan-psiquismo que se aproxima de alguma forma de animismo.”(*)
“We encounter ourselves with fear; with curiosity and determination perhaps, but with fear. We and the monkeys. Our bodies are the locus of difference. […] Our bodies are different – to the point that our souls (our hunger, fear, courage, and responsibility) cannot know as much as they would need to about the others’ bodies. […] It is our common interiority that functions as the triangulation point between our different bodies – the monkey at the window and me have hunger (and fear) in common. […] There is between us a sort of cubist transparency perhaps, but transparency after all. A transparency which is reflected in the symmetry existing between the economic system that separates me from the bananas in the supermarket and the window that separates the monkey from the bananas in the kitchen of our house […] This transparency responds to the following formula: The monkey is to me what I am to the monkey. We are symmetrical, we are like two instances of a (single) paradigmatic interiority. My encounter with the monkey cannot be exorcised by the knowledge I seem to have of primate sociology, ecology, anthropology, and neurology; nor can it be a plunge into a some kind of transcendence that would render unknowledgeable the dynamics of trading, though. Besides, an encounter is not exactly a negotiation – it is rather a broadening of horizons, an interruption brought about by something necessarily external. […] [But then] the other cannot be an other I; it must be what I am not. […] [It is] [therefore] necessary [to combine] Levinas’s take on the other’s radical exteriority […] with Whitehead’s view that experience is ubiquitous and, thereby, his animist-like panpsychism.”
There is not only a beautiful story here: that of an encounter. There is also a formidable philosophical reflection sensible to the experience of the encounter itself, which obviously lies at its core; and sensible, too, to a number of important discussions in contemporary philosophy, anthropology, ethology, ecology, and post-capitalism studies.
Yet despite their, in contrast, complete lack of philosophical value, the aforementioned reactions (A, B, C, D) are, in different ways, indicative of the conceptual noise on which our lives are based, or rather must, imperatively (as we shall see), be based:
A may look to some like an essentialist view that overlooks, first, that, like human technology, what we conventionally call “nature” is made out of connections (on which see our post on life’s sympoiesis), even “machinic” connections (in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, whose influence can be found almost everywhere today); and, secondly, that (as we have written too) certain technologically-produced materials like, for example, Styrofoam™, should be incorporated (no matter how weird this may sound to us) to the catalogue of the earth’s “natural” ecosystems (inasmuch as there are bacteria capable of transforming Styrofoam™ into degradable plastic).
In both cases, it is easy to see that the nature/culture divide has become fuzzy at best, or, to say it with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “iridescent” – for some distinction between the two terms must be made anyway, due, among other things, to the difference that exists(however unfashionable it may have become to talk about it) between the raw and the cooked; let this be our little homage to Lévi-Strauss.
Overall, however, nature/culture iridescence is very good news, in the sense that it can help us to pay due justice to the cultural complexities of many animal species (e.g. different groups of the same species of whales present dialectal variances) and to refrain from pretending we are exceptional and called to stand above “nature.”
On the other hand, it must be stressed that the term “nature” (Latin natura) is an extremely-poor term even for what we have commonly labeled “nature,” as it means “that which is born.” A rainforest is not just “born.” Rhythmically, all that lives in it springs up and forth thus becoming fully alive; and it does so auto-poietically (i.e. self-creatively), without anyone ordering it to happen. This is a crucial point. And it is this free emergence that the Ancient-Greek word φύσις (physis), from the verb φύω (phyo), “to arise,” “to spring up,” and consequently “to be,” conveys.
But then again, is there not a difference between that which springs up and forth without being ordered to do so (let’s call it physis) and that which is ordered to do so by being produced in a fabric? Perceptibly, the nature/culture divide, which we thought we had got rid of, re-enters here the picture. Consequently, can it not be affirmed that the Ancient-Greek distinction between “nature” (physis) and “technology (τέχνη) remains meaningful, despite all?
What makes us dislike the Ancient-Greek view that there is something beyond the sphere of any political, social, cultural, and economic transaction, and thereby too beyond ourselves? Why do we see the existence of an absolute difference beyond the nightmarish extension of universal sameness as something scandalous, and the fact that such absolute difference was put in Ancient Greece under the protection of a light-bringer goddess (Artemis) that nurtures clear thought as something superfluous?
Even if “nature” is made out of as many connections as, say, a transatlantic or a hydroelectric plant, are we sure its connections resemble the technological connections of these? There is room for doubt here, to put it mildly. For the non-symbiotic material and electric connections needed to build a hydroelectric plant and to keep it functioning differ, whether we like it or not, from the symbiotic connections of the different living organisms that form a coral reef. But let’s look at it more closely.
“The hydroelectric plant,” writes Heidegger, “is placed in the river. It imposes upon it for water pressure, which sets the turbines turning, the turning of which drives the machines, the gearing of which imposes upon the electrical current through which the long-distance power centers and their electrical grid are positioned for the conducting of electricity. The power station in the Rhine river, the dam, the turbines, the generators, the switchboards, the electrical grid—all this and more is there only insofar as it stands in place and at the ready, not in order to presence, but to be positioned […]. [So that it can said that] [t]he hydroelectric plant is not built in the Rhine river, but rather the river is built into the power plant and is what it is there due to the power plant’s essence.” Furthermore, adds Heidegger, “only what is so ordered that it stands in place and at the ready persists as standing reserve and, in the sense of standing reserve, is constant. The constant consists of continuous orderability within such a conscription.”(**)
Conversely, the connections established between the living organisms of a coral reef, are based on alliance rather than domination, and are balanced so as not to disrupt “livability” (to use here Anna Tsing’s term). Take a look at the following image, for example:
Image: Coal mining in the Rhine Valley, Germany
Compare it to this other image:
Detail of the Great Barrier Reef, near Australia
If you are unable to tell any difference between the two, then you can be sure that you are entirely fashionable, for today’s fashion consists in saying that the logic behind what comes to the fore in both photographs is one and the same.
It goes without saying, moreover, that “human” technologies are not everywhere the same either. The difference, for example, between an indigenous bow and an iPhone should be clear: in the two cases a human hand has fabricated an object with a purpose, but in one case (the iPhone) the production of the object in question demands that the earth be violently transformed into labour force (like in the case of the hydroelectric plant) so as to extract from it aluminium, arsenic, bismuth, carbon, calcium, chlorine, chrome, chromium, cobalt, copper, gold, iron, gallium, hydrogen, potassium, lithium, magnesium, molybdenum, nickel, oxygen, phosphorus, lead, sulphur, silicone, tin, tantalum, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, and zinc, whereas in the other case (the indigenous bow) livability set its limits to the “extraction” (if it can be called so in the absence of the orderability distinctive of modern technology) of those materials (usually wood and rawhide or some vegetable fibre like linen or silk) needed for its fabrication.
Yet with all this in mind, would it not be possible, or even reasonable, to view mountain goats roaming the streets of any otherwise humanly-overpopulated town, or bees intruding into inactive car parks, as something like a (minimal, provisional, anecdotic, you name it) return of the earth to those areas whence it has been expelled and gradually replaced by buildings containing abundant plastic, which, as everyone should know by now, is a material produced out of transuranic and, therefore, extra-terrestrial chemical elements linked to post-World-War-II nuclear experimentation?
Behind C’s irony, in turn, it is not difficult to perceive the desire to reconcile oneself (in a Buddhist way) with the fact that one must coexist with toxicity, without the need to question it anymore.
A significant trend in contemporary thought, defined by its proponents as Object-Oriented Ontology (henceforth OOO), revolves around this ironic acceptance of the alien and its potential transformation into an aesthetic playground. Paraphrasing Proudhon, then, we are tempted to re-label OOO as today’s “philosophy of misery.” And today’s OOO-inspired art, as today’s new Arte Povera free from the politically-insurgent traits characteristic of at least some Arte Povera of the 1960s and early 1970s. For there where the latter aimed, eventually, at denouncing the effects of industrialisation, OOO-driven art aims at awakening our (Neronian, in the sense of excessively self-indulgent if not necessarily cruel?) sensibility to the (decadent?) coolness of feeling a silicone carpet with our naked feet, or of breathing atmospheric sulphur-dioxide nearby a malfunctioning industrial complex; and all this with a smile, of course.
Let’s make it clear: we do not intend to deny the virtues of humour, which can bring with it both human warmth and some critical distance vis-à-vis self-referentiality and self-enclosure. And we surely need both. But how not to interpret C in terms of post-political self-complacency?
By the way, post-political declarations are as frequent among OOO authors as pro-Buddhist confessions. We find none of this casual. Plus surely there is no need to underline that “post-politics” is a tricky term anyway, since there is a politics to post-politics: a politics of surrender to dominant politics.
Thus, in a forthcoming academic paper(***) we talk of “worldlessness” instead. Of OOO “wordlessness,” which results from the “unworlding” of the earth carried out by modernity over the past centuries and still practiced today, since the earth is daily “unworlded” by extractive practices and industrial production that continue to provoke biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, etc.
Is it possible to say that it is the alleged funniness of our current “worldlessness,” then, that C implicitly endorses in its mockery of A? An OOO-fan friend of ours says we are wrong to interpret C-humour in this way. He emphasises that OOO-inspired humour (read: C) can actually help to “reworld” reality and enhance “responsibility” vis-à-vis the non-human world. We honestly fail to see how. There is no denying that practices of “re-worlding” to counter the modern “un-worlding” of the earth and its subsequent “worldlessness” demand inventiveness and creativity, including defamiliarisation with any self-centred perspective on what things are (rocks, plants, animals, and objects have their own “stories”), and thus the willingness to push the limits of the imaginable beyond any conventionalism. But “weirding” even more (instead) what is being completely destroyed (to make it look even more like ourselves), and thereby downplaying any supposedly-romantic nostalgia of a world in which humans would not haveself-indulgently given themselves to a sort of narcissistic ὕβρις (hybris, “excess”) can hardly help to bring back to life that from which life has been either removed or else circumscribed into the category of blind necessity (be it in terms of mechanical concatenation or biological instinct).
Prevention of hybris was precisely the fundamental aim of of Ancient-Greek tragedy, which is far from being a “literary genre” on “fated behaviour,” and on whose complex educational purpose we have written elsewhere. For tragedy served, in Ancient Greece, the goal of inducing, by the combination of fear and pity, human modesty and self-restraint. On its part, Ancient-Greek philosophy aimed at inducing intellectual amazement towards the non-requisitioned shining forth of life into the unconcealed. And both tragedy and philosophy drew on Greek “religion,” which inspired due awe before the ever-living forces or the world that remain beyond our reach. Yet seemingly too many centuries of Christianity and its modern re-enactment, for which everything is produced either by God or by us, have made us fatally forget all this. And it seems we are sadly willing to do anything but to remember it.
As a consequence, not only things, but also ideas, which were once the province of philosophy, are mixed today in the most confusing way possible. Thus, for example, “weirding,” “queering,” and/or “deterritorialising” become synonyms for “(re)worlding.” Logically, however, they cannot be so: they can only become so at the price of giving up all conceptual coherence and of ignoring the very basic principles of thought: the principle of identity (A = A, not B) and the principle of non-contradiction (A ≠ not A). Any form or “deterritorialisation,” and by the same token any form of “weirding” and “queering,” aims at “decoding” and thereby “liberating.” In other words, their essence (their being-ness) is “negative,” in the sense that it is “negational”: it stands agains something from which it thus attempts to free or unbound something captured in it, giving it back its freedom and, with its freedom, the power that has been taken away from it. “De-territorialising” is “de-wording” or “un-worlding,” not “(re-)worlding.” Even if it may be necessary at first so as to then “(re)world” otherwise. But in any event, the two terms cannot be equated: at most, they stand as the two moments of a two-part process.
Additionally, it is legitimate to ask today whether it is “deterritorialisation” or “rewording” that we need most in the present condition. In the “disciplinary society” studied by Foucault (roughly, the European society of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries) the very possibility of a counter-politics vis-à-vis modernity and capitalism required to “deterritorialise” all which was enclosed by its different “disciplinary” powers. But we are not longer there. Deleuze was well aware of this, and coined the expression “society of control” to define ours instead. In it, all mechanisms of control have become more subtle insofar as we have internalised them and stoped perceiving them as such. Instead of someone reminding us what we need to do, we do it ourselves, making sure, for example, that our bodies are fit to be reproduced as labour force, or being connected at all times with our smartphones so as not to lose any single chance to be the permanent consumers and providers of commodified pictures, opinions, affections, relations, projects, and events that we are.
Surely, against these subtle forms of control some “deterritorialisation” – the term is originally Guattari’s, but Deleuze made it his too – is needed to free all that is constantly put into circulation in an unprecedentedly-invasive-and-pervasive market. But the problem is that capitalism is in itself, as Deleuze and Guattari conveniently highlighted (if without extracting from it the necessary implications, it would seem), a “deterritorialising machine.” For capitalism “unworlds” everything in order to commodify it and in this way it produces endlessly new “worlds of possibles” (Guattari) and draws between them infinite possible connections that grow in proportion to the increase of conceptual noise which they entail: world-wide locally-adapted units of yoghourt + sustainably-produced-mango & chewing-gum flavour + superhero trading cards + concert raffle tickets + charity donation option + 3 for the price of 2 within the next 48 hours, etc.; a quasi-fractal process that can be formulated thus:
⎨{[n x (… + … + n) ⊂ n x (… + … + n)] ⊂ n x (… + … + n)} ⊂ n x (… + … + n) …
i.e. the potentially-limitless combination of whatever with whatever else is only a potential subset of another potentially-limitless combination of whatever with whatever else, and so on and so forth endlessly
Such is the general formula for the “deterritorialisation politics” of post-Fordist (or late) capitalism.
So, more and more, the possibility of a counter-politics seems to rely instead on the possibility of “re-wordling” and “re-territorialising” what capitalism has “un-worlded” and continues to “un-world” and “de-territorialise,” be it by restituting it to its pre-capitalist state of being or by allowing new possible “worlds,” that is to say, new ways of “dwelling,” which is on what any “world” is based, to emerge from within capitalist ruins. But new “worlds,” or what amounts to the same, new “territories,” will inevitably require new “limits” and “rules,” for there is simply no “world” without them, however agreed upon and flexible we may want them to be. Hence “deterritorialising” and “wordling” cannot be synonymous.
With this we are suggesting two things. First, that “re-territorialisation” is Deleuze and Guattari’s unpicked bone, for they tended to view “re-territorialisation” from the standpoint of their own emancipatory agenda as a dangerous regression. In this, Deleuze and Guattari remain modern. Secondly, we are suggesting that to “re-world” what is needed is care, rather than derogatory mockery against those who would like to witness the return of a world which is not only made of us.
It can be objected that the motivation behind the picture of the plastic duck reproduced above, and other similar pictures, is actually to show, in a dystopian way, that even if we may want the earth to return, what we will get is, ironically, even more plastic; and that, in this sense, such images encourage responsibility in us vis-à-vis the nonhuman world. Or that, more generally, humour is a form of worlding insofar as no human world can dispense with it since humour is something inalienably human and, therefore, something that needs to be present in any world formed by humans.
Of course. Also, what is needed for a world to be worlded, what one may call its ground, is different from what can just be in it. That is to say, there is a difference between necessity (which is the province of philosophy) and contingency (which is the province of art and literature) in the making of any possible world. And interestingly enough, humour thus seems to fall on both sides. Still, is it at this point of modernity about keeping dreaming with our exclusive-and-exclusively human world? Or should we begin asking ourselves about its potential otherness, like our Brazilian friend before the Other (the monkey) that he is not?
As for the first objection, we are almost sure – to say it elegantly – that the purpose of the aforementioned C-pictures was rather to mock those who would like to dream with a world not only made out of humans and their litter. Consider, for instance, this other picture, which belongs in the same set of photographs:
Image retrieved from the American news website www.buzzfeednews.com
How exactly can this image be said to encourage, or even to participate in, the “re-worling” of the world? Likewise, how can it be said to induce responsibility vis-à-vis the nonhuman world? Ultimately, does putting all these notions together not amount to producing conceptual noise?
One thing is sure anyway: conceptual noise is the key to the music behind both B and D.
For to deceitfully fake images of, say, dolphins swimming back into the Venice canals (= B), with the purpose to deceive, or drunk elephants sleeping peacefully after having eaten too many vines in an abandoned crop field, is to pretend (regretfully, we are so used to it today) that that which is not can substitute for that which is, in the conviction that being and truth, on the one hand, and appearance, on the other hand, are easily exchangeable.
As for D, it should be evident that to stress (metaphorically) that moderns have become a “virus” for the earth, and to celebrate the latter’s hypothetical return, too quickly and naively, during the COVID-19 lockdown, is of an altogether different nature, obviously, than to build gas chambers and having several millions of humans killed in them. The very possibility of merging both things in a single notion is indicative of the mental diarrhoea that pervades the social media, as well as a telling barometer of the combined consumerist readiness to brand everything and the legalist promptness to vindicate such or such rights – two originally-North-American qualities, to say it all.
Coda: Tired as we are of so much conceptual cacophony, probably because we are too fond of Parmenides and his démodé insistence that truth and non-truth ought not to be confused even if in the capitalist market everything can be indistinctly exchanged, we feel terribly out-fashioned (but philosophers are, usually).(****) Also, if a monkey ever reaches our window, we will likely not feel inclined to put on a plastic-made monkey grimace and look at it with indifference; will it be because we lack sense of humour?
(*) Hilan Bensusan, “Minha virada animista,” http://anarchai.blogspot.com/2020/04/minha-virada-animista.html
(**) Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 27-28.
(***) Sofya Gevorkyan & Carlos A. Segovia, “Post-Heideggerian Driftt: From Object-Oriented-Ontology Worldlesness to Post-Nihilist Worldings,” https://www.academia.edu/42923669/Post_Heideggerian_Drifts_From_Object-Oriented-Ontology_Worldlessness_to_Post-Nihilist_Worldings_2020_Upcoming_Scholarly_Article.
(****) Let us add that we do not understand “truth” as “norm” and “rectitude” (veritas), and its opposite, “falsity,” as something “fallen” or “diverted” from it (falsitas), as it has become customary in Western culture since Roman times. Instead, like the Ancient Greeks, we take truth to be ἀλήθεια (aletheia) or “disclosure” of being, and the deceiving appearance of the “dissembling” (ψεῦδος, pseũdos) that endangers the clearing in which all truth then consists, respectively.