Pluriversality & Freedom

If indeed we are to take seriously the idea that beings do not merely have different perspectives on a single world, but rather manifest in and through different worlds, then we must develop a manner of being together that not only honours these multiple perspectives, but also one that can negotiate between worlds such that all beings are afforded the relative freedom to move through their world in ways that promote the freedom of all.

The future is radically undetermined; “we” create it through our living.  The ferocity with which many social movements are waged is due to the (unconscious) belief that we are fighting not only for particular social issues, but for “our own” future.  This intensity stems of course, from a limited, individualist perspective in which we feel that freedom is a zero sum game.  It says: I need my future to be arranged for me, otherwise I will suffer and die.  What this overlooks however is the basic fact that freedom for the individual, is freedom for all, and that freedom for all, is freedom for the individual.  This, it is important to note, includes the worldings of those more-than-human others who have been subjugated in the name of human “progress” and “autonomy”.  Without a deep and profound acknowledgement of the worldings of not only birds, whales, insects, trees etc., but also the elemental realities that they are constituted with(in), we will be moving towards a future without oikos, without a home.  Which is to say, no future at all.

Possession

We move through our lives as if in full possession of ourselves.  We like to think our choices are our own, our feelings our own, and that the world happens to us.  To be possessed however is always a dual articulation.  We possess the world as it possesses us.  We are inhabited by perceptions, spirits, affects.  Rather than being that which precedes and occurs to us, they inhabit us and we become them, even as they become us.  Perceptions become affects become spirits.  Spirits have a life of their own and may show up in undesirable ways, and in undesirable places (though so too may they show up at just the right moment).

By thinking through our expressive selves in this way, we are afforded a new mode of relation – not to a self that must conduct itself differently, but rather to a relational mode of being-with incorporeal entities that surround, permeate and emerge from/as us.  This is not “self help” but rather neighbourly relations; getting to know the forces from without as they manifest from within, greeting the stranger.  As outside forces, they must be respected as such.  We are not in control, we are not absolute, we are not identities.  We are caught up, and as such cannot fully negate, only affirm and (re)orient in an ongoing dance of transformation.

What are the extant cultural containers for such a (re)orientation?  Where are the rituals that are capable of addressing this level of transformation?  Given the pervasive patterning of many contemporary spirits, it presumably requires a level of commitment, attunement and practice, necessary to form the new beats and sound the new harmonies in which both parties seek consonance.  A consonance, it is interesting to note that is both temporal (rhythm) and spatial (harmony).  And as good listeners, we must attend to the largest phenomena of universal evolution and the smallest moments of social enactment alike.  For just as in a symphony it is the form that makes sense of the melody and the melody that creates the form.  Our attention must span across dimensions, while bringing those dimensions into relation by centering, entering and blending.  Spirals, fractals, waves, not points, lines, collisions.

This is not a teleological journey.  No perfect cadences, only an ongoing improvisation.  This is not to absolve ourselves of responsibility however, as everyone is playing their part.  And as in any good symphony we must first listen, before playing, while also understanding that some play repetitive contra bass, others lilting melodies, others pizzicato flourishes and still others a single resonant triangle hit at an opportune moment.  There is no “right” note in this song, only a relatively context bound range of possibilities for participation.  The measure of “success” then is not whether something is Correct, Right, True, but rather if it is remarkable, interesting or beautiful.  It is an affective/aesthetic/expressive process, not a calculative/logical/representational one (though it is also worth noting that logical analysis is also an aesthetic phenomenon, not more/less representationally accurate – as there is of course nothing to represent).  A “wrong” note, does not disrupt the entire performance but rather ripples through with creative dissonance, likewise a “right” note does not lift the performance to another plane, but rather harmonizes and resonates.

For, as Massumi (2002) would have it, “the relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence but rather of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening” (p. 25).  Or more simply “nothing is prefigured in the event” (p. 27).

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.

Huddling

Why when critters are forced to endure the long cold night, do they so often huddle together?  There is of course a relatively straightforward thermodynamic answer to this question: in close contact bodies can better circulate heat through transduction, a simple surface area to volume optimization.  There is though, a perhaps less obvious answer that to be meaningful, must account for the experience of huddling; an experience of comfort, of a capacious closeness that engenders sleep, a sense that one is not alone, that there is a world that is worth living in.  An experience whose evolutionary roots linger in every hug, caress and gentle pat on the back.

There is too a dynamic aspect, as in the case of penguins who each “take turns” being at the centre of their huddle, a simple algorithm producing complex patterns of spiralling motion in which the survival of the whole is paid for by the temporary discomfort of a few.  Do they know, when taking their turn providing the bulwark against the arctic wind that they will once again find comfort in the centre of the huddle, as they likely have many times before?  Or are they simply trying as they might to reach the centre, against the will of those already there? 

Before entering the battlefield, in the war room, on the American football field a kind of huddle occurs in which bodies and minds come together to make plans.  So too in gatherings around the campfire, chantings in the temple.  How shall we orient ourselves, comport ourselves to achieve the best possible outcome?  To what end might we aim together?  These questions each in their own way implicate proximity not only as a minimization of geometric space, but also as a socio-ontological reality.  A diminishment of space yes, but also contact of skin, blending of voice, sharing of resources and ideas, entering into a shared perceptual space where we become both subject and object, player and played, giver and receiver. 

This sense of proximity is of course relative.  The huddle of the solar system when seen in terms of the vast expanse of galaxies in which it rests, is not unlike those mice in the burrow, occupying a shared gravitas (weight, heaviness, pressure).  So too is our earth a community in contact.  Each cell, just as each penguin, mouse, human, musician, wide receiver, are folds in Flesh, a certain differentiation, an “ephemeral modulation of the world” (Merleau-Ponty).  They are styles of being, resonating in proximity that includes the most distant celestial phenomena just as that which is most apparently immediate.  So too is there a sense in which the “distance” of ancestral, historical-evolutionary is not measured in eons, and can instead be found in the immediacy of perception, here and now.  How else can a hug calm the trembling body, the colour red (before being identified as such) inspire passion, the apple provoke grasping, chewing, satisfaction?

Where is the line to be drawn between the gravity of the moon, its “presence” in the tides, the illuminated night, and the movements of our own heart, lungs and vital fluids.  Each can be more or less overlooked, more or less brought into awareness, and thus made more or less proximate.  While we may describe these phenomena being separated by a Cartesian distance, we may nonetheless also find them enjambed in a relationship of depth – a depth we might add, without bottom (or perhaps an “end” that finds itself once again at the beginning – a chiasmatic intertwining of self with itself).  There is thus a sense in which even the most ostensibly remote phenomena are huddled in the here and now; the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower.  And just as Blake continues here (Auguries of Innocence), “A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage”, so too should we take care that we do not supplant the experience of huddling, the immediacy of perception with thermodynamic equations (Blake again: “We are led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye”).  There is no conceptual scheme that can account for the perpetually creative ground of nature naturing where the many become one and are increased by one…

Death with Dignity

The world has “ended” many times before.  Whether in terms of major extinction events, socio-political upheavals, outbreaks of disease, war, famine or in terms of paradigm shifting breakthroughs in science, technology, medicine etc., natural-cultural patternings have been disrupted in such a way that we can speak of a particular world regime ending, and another beginning.  In The Ends of the World, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro stress that the end of the world per se can only ever be presented as a “mythical fabulation… …a schematization of certain transcendental conditions in empirical terms” and we must take care that our emphasis on “such supremely empirical sciences as climatology, geophysics, and biochemistry” (p. 6) does not obscure the meaningfully symbolic and revelatory dimensions of the current socio-ecological crisis.  For we require along with our representations and “accurate” models of nature a means to creatively participate in its perpetual becoming and ongoing processes of living-dying. 

The Intrusion of Gaia

To name is not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for…
(Isabelle Stengers)

For Stengers, the intrusion of Gaia is an event that forces the recognition that Gaia is “blind to the damage she causes”, that Gaia “holds together in its own particular manner”. We can no longer afford to conceive of nature as the stable backdrop for human affairs upon which we can isolate likewise stable entities (whether atoms, ideas, Truths) and thereby secure a predictable future for ourselves. As Latour forcefully expresses it, “it is as if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors [and] from this moment on, everything changes in the way stories are told”. With the intrusion of Gaia and concomitant breakdown of ecosystemic functioning, the limitations of a worldview implicitly motivated by certainty and control becomes evident.  It is here that we are invited to reimagine earth and our role therein. 

Bridge Over Troubled Water

The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power”. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other… The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows… Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more… The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals… Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. (Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking)