presence. The soul-and-body, “conductor” model seems up to date because it has to do with management, ownership, and all kinds of things associated with the notion of private property that influence a lot of what we do on this Earth. But this turns out, as we have seen, to be a retweet of a Neoplatonic Christian concept.
Furthermore, the “on switch” model of action depends on a mechanical theory of causation that requires some kind of god-like being at the start of the causal chain, to get the ball rolling. After that, the ball hits the next ball in a mechanical way. So the mechanical theory is really just a variant or upgrade of the “conductor” one. And this is therefore merely a modification of our Neoplatonic retweet: the soul is the driver, the body is the chariot …
Let’s make a new word: alreadiness. This word is going to come in very handy, because now I don’t have to resort to a suggestive but rather clunky phrase from one of my favorite philosophical regions: deconstruction. This would be the famous always-already employed by Heidegger and then by Jacques Derrida, the inheritor of Heidegger’s approach, which he called Destruktion (“de-structuring”), and which Derrida calls deconstruction.
Alreadiness hints at our tuning to something else, which is a dance in which that something else is also, already, tuning to us. Indeed, there are some experiences in which it simply can’t be said which attunement takes priority; which comes first, logically and chronologically. One of these is the common experience of beauty. We can learn a lot from it: let’s go.
We could talk about our current historical phase in many ways: entering an ecological era, learning how to cope with global warming, and so on. But what all these labels have in common is transitioning to caring about nonhumans in a more conscious way. This talk is about that, and as you’ll see it’s a lot stranger than it sounds.
In November 2015 I participated in Ice Watch, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s installation outside the Panthéon in Paris. Ice Watch was designed to be seen by the delegates representing the nations of Earth in the COP21 negotiations, otherwise known as the global warming summit, which was held over thirteen days. Eliasson and I recorded a public dialogue about it in Copenhagen about one week before Ice Watch was installed, at the CPH:DOX film festival. One thousand people attended, eager to hear about ecology and art.
Ice Watch consisted of something like eighty tons of ice harvested from Greenland and shipped intact to Paris, where it was installed in twelve gigantic chunks, in a circle. From above, it readily resembled the little bars that stand for hours on a wristwatch. The chunks of ice were large enough to climb on to and sit in, or even lie in, and as there was no barrier protecting them, this is just exactly one of the things that people did. Part of the project was documentation of all the different ways in which you could access the ice. You could walk past it. You could ignore it. You could touch it. You could reach out toward it. You could talk about it. You could give a conference paper about it at a conference called Façonner l'avenir. You could sleep in it. This was especially easy once the sun had melted the ice enough for it to form smooth pockets and contours.
Part of the point of Ice Watch was an obvious visual gag: look, ice is melting and time is running out. But that was just the hook. What actually happened was much more interesting, and in a way that seriously stretched or went beyond prefabricated concepts, in a friendly and simple, yet deep way. Watches are things that humans read. But they are also things that flies land on, things that lizards ignore, things that the sun glints off. Dust settles on the glass shell of the front of the watch. A dust mite traverses the gigantic overpasses and caves on the underside of the watch between the watch and my wrist. And let’s return to something I just said about Ice Watch: the sun melts it. The sun is also accessing the ice. The pavement is also accessing the ice. The climate of Paris is also accessing the ice.
And the ice was accessing us. It seemed to send out waves of cold, or suck our heat, whichever way around. This kind of access was how Eliasson was thinking about it—the encounter with Ice Watch is in a way a dialogue with ice blocks, not a one-way human conversation in a mirror that happens to be made of ice. We’ve been having that kind of conversation with nonhuman things for thousands of years. It’s exactly the reason we are in this mess called global warming. And the climate factoids we hear on the news are echoed by much of the art that tries to address global warming and extinction. For example, several artists have compiled massive lists of lifeforms that are going extinct. But the risk here is of becoming just like those factoids: just a huge data dump. Art is important to understanding our relationship to nonhumans, to grasping an object-oriented ontological sense of our existence. Art fails in this regard when it tries to mimic the transmission of sheer quantities of data; it’s not artful enough. This isn’t just a matter of effective persuasion. As a matter of fact, that’s the trouble with ecological data art. The aesthetic experience isn’t really about data—it’s about data-ness, the qualities we experience when we apprehend something. (As I mentioned earlier, data just means “what is given,” and isn’t only about numbers and pie charts.) 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.
Eliasson wanted to do something that was logically prior to collecting data, let alone spreading it around. To collect data, you have to be receptive. You need the right kind of data-gathering devices for your project. You need to care. A global warming scientist needs to care enough about global warming for her to set up the experiments that find out about it in the first place. 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. Nonviolently coexisting with a being that isn’t you is a pretty good basis for that.
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 flavor 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. And you do it by increasing the amount of the very ingredient that makes the soup so tasty.
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. That’s why the sentence humans are causing global warming is actually not at all like God created Earth in seven days. You don’t need to believe it in a firm sense. You can just accept it as pretty much true. You can be 98 percent correct, and that’s better than threatening me with torture unless I admit that you’re completely right, because there’s no other way for you to be right than to hit me until I agree.
I’m also experiencing something magic and mysterious about myself when I have that beauty experience. The ice is a sort of Pandora’s box with an infinity within it. And so am I. It’s that mouthfeel again. I’m experiencing the texture of cognitive or emotional or whatever phenomena. I’m experiencing thinkfeel, or better, since I can’t tell whether it’s about thinking or feeling but I know it’s real and it’s happening, it’s truthfeel that I’m experiencing. It’s as if I could magically see around the corners of myself to the part of me that’s having the thoughts, because when I try normally, I just find another thought. I can’t see all of my phenomenological style, how I manifest in a complete way, all at once—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, but as we’ve seen, there’s no particular reason to hold on to these concepts.
I magically see the unseeable aspects of a thing, including the thing called Tim Morton. I grasp the ungraspability of a thing. Which is another way of saying, I see the future, not the predictable one, but the unpredictable one. I see the possibility of having a future at all: I see futurality.4
And in the case of the Ice Watch hunks of ice outside the Panthéon in Paris, Eliasson set this up so that you could see this future isn’t a container for the ice block. It’s coming directly out of the ice block itself—the ice block is creating the future. The ice really is a watch. And not a watch being set by humans. Or even better, it’s a certain kind of time structure—it is a temporality structure. It allows you x and y and z kinds of past and future. This is the paradox. Futurality isn’t some gray mist that is the same for a block of ice as it is for an excited proton underneath Geneva. Different objects, different futuralities. Unspeakableness or ungraspability can come in all kinds of flavors. It only sounds paradoxical 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.
So we have to be careful what we humans design, because we are literally designing the future, and that future isn’t in our idea of the thing, how we think it will be used and so on—that’s just our access mode. The future emerges directly from the objects we design. Right now, many, many objects on Earth are designed according to a one-size-fits-all, very old, way past its sell-by-date temporality template. It’s one we have inherited from Neolithic agriculture, that’s how ancient it is. And it’s the one that has given rise to industry with its fossil fuels and therefore to global warming and mass extinction. So designers should be careful what they design. Maybe they need to think at least on a number of different temporal scales when they design something. A plastic bag isn’t just for humans. It’s for seagulls to choke on, and now we can see that thanks to photographers such as Chris Jordan who photographs beings who get caught in the Pacific Garbage Vortex. A Styrofoam cup isn’t just for coffee, it’s for slowly being digested by soil bacteria for five hundred years. A nuclear device isn’t just for your enemy. It’s for beings 24,000 years from now. This Diet Coke isn’t just for me. It’s for my teeth and my stomach bacteria, and the latter may get slaughtered by the acids in there. This is why I created the concept of the hyperobject in my book The Ecological Thought. 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). Imagine all the plastic bags in existence at all: all of them, all that will ever exist, everywhere. This heap of plastic bags is a hyperobject: it’s an entity that is massively distributed in space and time in such a way that you obviously can only access small slices of it at a time, and in such a way that obviously transcends merely human access modes and scales.
Everything emits time, not just humans. 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? And in the end, which means already, designing stuff according to that template is going to damage humans as well, in a very obvious way, because of the unavoidable interconnectedness of everything we know and understand, and even everything we can’t know or see, too. When the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels heard the word culture, he reached for his gun. When I hear the word sustainability, I reach for my sunscreen.
Everything we’ve been exploring in the last few pages occurs to you as ethical and political fallout from the Kantian beauty experience; as wonderfully open-ended, because 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?
This isn’t quite the same thing as saying, along with the socialist William Morris, that functional things should be beautiful. That’s because, on this view, things are just lumps without some nice decoration. But we’re saying that there are no lumps. There are blocks of ice, humans, sunlight, the Panthéon, polar bears. The goal is not to take existing things such as sofas and houses and make them pretty in a way that working-class people can afford (for example). That kind of thing suffers from the same syndrome as sustainability: it’s anthropocentrically scaled.
Likewise we can’t do what we take to be the opposite, which is saying art is beautifully useless and if you can’t appreciate it, that’s your problem. Again, you are simply allowing its existing function for humans now—aka anthropocentric functioning—to be default. Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities. But this isn’t enough. One way this becomes obvious is when writing grant proposals that sound like pleading. Please, please don’t hurt me, Mr Funding Source, I’m a sort of educated PR guy who is going to decorate this boring cupcake of scientism with these nice human-flavored meaning-candies.
Realizing that there are lots of different temporality formats is basically what ecological awareness is. It’s equivalent to acknowledging in a deep way the existence of beings that aren’t you, with whom you coexist. Once you’ve done that, you can’t un-acknowledge it. There’s no going back.
So far I haven’t transgressed vanilla, basic Kantian Kant very much. Well, maybe the last bit. But now I’m going to push up some faders on the Kantian mixing desk that will add some more of the chili flavors that he only allows in tiny droplets. Let’s return to our poor grant applicant and indeed to our Arts and Crafts people, starting with William Morris. What is their language blocking? It’s blocking the fact that 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. Platonists accurately see the power of art, which is why some of them (such as Plato himself) want it to be banned or very heavily censored. An artwork does something to you, so if you think that only lifeforms can do things to you, this is a weird and challenging fact. If you think on top of this that only humans are empowered with the magical ability to impose meaning and temporality on things, then you are in for a bigger shock, because as I’ve argued, art emits time, which tells you something about how everything emits time. It’s designing your future as much as you’re designing its.
Kant only wants you to hear about 10 percent of that, but it’s a very important ingredient of the overall mix that you can’t do without. But according to Kant, if you hear more than that, you are in danger of being charmed or enchanted, rather than experiencing beauty, and that, in his book, is not OK. It’s OK to be wordlessly smitten by something, as long as you don’t actually fall in love with it and ask it out on a date, or even worse, allow it to ask you out. He acknowledges that there is a mind meld, but only up to a point, and it really does have to do with how you’re a human being imposing reality on things. So really, for Kant, the experience is coming from you, not the artwork. Mystery solved. Disenchantment in effect. We can relax. Kant didn’t turn into Yoda. Which was in the cards, because he was fascinated with the paranormal (maybe in the same way homophobes are fascinated with homosexuality). He himself was entranced, but resented it or feared it. So while Kant had to allow the idea into his theory—mind melding with a nonhuman being is how the thing actually works—he did it in a contained way, not in a way that you’d notice, like a tiny subliminal droplet of Yoda-ness; a base to the soup whose ingredients you experience even if you don’t know what they are.
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.5
That’s the problem with art, isn’t it? It sucks you in, whether or not it’s telling the truth, it’s so truthy, it’s not right or wrong but still it’s giving off this incredible truth vibe, it’s pulling me into its tractor beam, in a moment it might say, “I find your lack of faith disturbing, Tim,” and strangle me, at a distance. 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.
Interlocked in the beauty experience, I might dissolve. The art thing might fit me so perfectly that I disappear. Turned up to 11, this My Bloody Valentine music will actually kill me. But I can’t tear myself away from it. Resonating perfectly with the physical structure of this glass, an opera singer’s voice causes it to explode. Maybe the beauty experience is like a little death warning light that goes off in my experiential space. Maybe beauty is death, in a way, just like the decadent aesthetes used to say. It’s a reminder that things are fragile, because when one thing envelops another thing, that other thing might be overwhelmed or destroyed. 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 color yellow shouldn’t matter that much, we think. By the way, the wallpaper won.
So when I experience beauty, I am coexisting with at least one thing that isn’t me, and doesn’t have to be conscious or alive, in a noncoercive way, in which the possibility of death is vivid yet diluted and suspended. We coexist; we are in solidarity. I’m haunted, charmed, enchanted, under a spell, things could get out of control, but they won’t, at least for now. The present moment collapses and I’m left with an uncertain, spectral futurality that is exactly what this chunk of ice happens to be. How it looks, how it feels, where it is sitting, its mass, its shape—all that, which we could call appearance, is the past. 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. I call it nowness to differentiate it from a reified atomic “present” that actually I don’t think truly exists. 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. All cookies crumble, you know. That’s why they can be cookies. Things are inherently fragile, they all contain a fatal flaw that allows them to exist, because they are always exactly what they are, yet never as they appear. They transcend all access modes but they are unique and distinct. The rift between being and appearing is ontological, in other words you can’t point to it, it’s intrinsic to a thing and it’s why cookies can crumble. Even black holes evaporate.
And because it’s not anthropocentrically scaled in particular, or ego-scaled in particular, when you have a conversation between beauty and disgust or ugliness, you can’t delete it. It is 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 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. And because you’re in truth space, you are having a conversation with actuality, even though it might not be your actuality or a human actuality. The artwork can’t simply be a representation. The thing might have designs on you, to use the common English phrase. You feel this in the gravitational pull, the telepathic charm of the thing. And because of that, you are also having a conversation between having a purpose or a function and being beyond purpose or function, because a thing’s function or purpose doesn’t exhaust it. It just might not be your design or function or a human purpose in particular. Which is the same thing as saying you are having a conversation with utilitarianism, which is saying that you are having a conversation about happiness—whose happiness, and what kinds of happiness? Which means that you are having a conversation with what is probably something you think of as an inanimate object, like a block of ice, which means you are allowing yourself to be in a telepathic mind meld with something that stands for the worst possible fate of a human subject, being turned into an object. And because the truth space is truthy, not obviously truth as such, but saturated with truthiness data, you don’t know whether it’s true or not—the artwork is a lie that is telling the truth, or maybe it’s a kind of truth that is lying. You are being telepathically seduced by a being that might be lying.
Actually beings, plural, so it’s much, much worse, or better. Because there are so many more parts in the artwork than there is the whole of it, by definition, and by definition you’re not allowed to discriminate either way—parts are more important than wholes, or vice versa, or one part is more important than the others—because that’s finding a definite purpose, and the experience doesn’t have that going for it. That would ruin it. This is due to that feature of OOO theory which we’ve already met (and which I’m advocating here), in which there is always a multiplicity of parts that exceed the whole, rather than the whole swallowing the parts perfectly. 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.
Those parts are also little temporality structures, little train stations within train stations, multiple tractor beams pulling you in, multiple hypnotists. Possibly an infinite regress of them—you can’t check. Because you know you can’t reduce that blob of paint to something it isn’t, such as its parts (like little crystals or whatever, or brushwork), you can’t delete its causal pressure on you. You decide that free will is most definitely overrated and we are going to need some kind of chemical to coexist other than rights and subjecthood and citizenship and free will. Infinity portals beckoning. Maximum aesthetic suction and repulsion, like a horror movie superimposed on a porno. And you still can’t stop looking. It’s not transcendent beauty, but it’s still beauty. Which is another way of saying, it’s not your bourgeois subject’s best friend, more like an anarchic revolutionary army of little squirming pieces crawling around and within that seemingly rigid and singular piece of cheese.
Kitsch is the subscendent part of beauty, ghosting official anthropocentrically scaled forms of beauty like a specter. In a way, kitsch or disgust is the X-power (as in the X-Men) of beauty itself. Without it, beauty can’t evolve.
You have gone crazy, maybe.
All those things that Kant tries to edit out are back in, without deleting the beauty experience as such. In fact, they are deeply how it works, what it can’t do without.
This isn’t the normal utopian or left way of critiquing theories about our relationship to arts, or aesthetics. The normal way is to say that art is only a construct and doesn’t really exist—for example, it’s just a bourgeois human ideology reproduction mode based on inherited ideas of taste. But 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. It’s not a glue that falsely fixes bourgeois dichotomies such as subject and object. 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. Since ecological entities are contradictory by definition (they are made of all kinds of things that aren’t them, they have vague fuzzy boundaries …), we had better permit ourselves to violate this supposed law, at least a bit.6
Art only half works as a human-scaled bourgeois ideology reproduction device if you put just a tiny drop of it into the soup, and don’t examine it too carefully or treat it as decoration. If you did, you would see all the subscendent little microbes squiggling around inside it, all of them trying to hypnotize you.
And this encounter with art tells us something about the encounter with any designed thing at all. Which is why you can sleep in an ice sculpture, which people were seen to do in Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch. Or why tourists can take selfies in front of it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A thing is bursting with parts and scales and temporalities and sexualities, so a thing is never totally keyed to our taste or to a standard of good taste, but somehow that doesn’t mean it’s always definitely only ugly or that beauty and ugliness are false categories. It means that beauty is wild, spectral, haunting, irreducible, uncanny. And causal. Which means that the art versus craft or art versus design distinction breaks down, while leaving the difference between what a thing is for and its openness, its futurality, intact. “Beautiful” is often said to be the opposite of “useful.” It’s held to be an unnecessary inconvenience, which is why so much of the modern world is so ugly. But beauty and usefulness and uselessness can’t be separated at all. So every decision is a political one. Allowing a watch to be a landing strip for a fly. Allowing a plastic bag to be a bird murderer. Allowing a painting only to be seen by people who can afford the entrance fee. Living in a building designed to shunt dirty air somewhere else, where now we realize that somewhere else just means nowhere else, because it’s on the same planet.
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. Including bunny rabbits means excluding diseases fatal to bunny rabbits. I mean this quite literally. Because of interdependence, when you take care of one entity or group of entities, another one (or more) is left out. Biocentric ecological philosophy is quite wrong to claim that the AIDS virus has the same right to exist as an AIDS patient. You have to choose. Obviously I’m going to choose the AIDS patient.
And because of the gap between being and appearing, to be a thing at all is to be deeply flawed; in order to exist at all you have to have an intrinsic invisible crack running all the way through you. So a network of things can’t be perfect, and a thing on its own can’t be perfect. You can’t seal off the futurality, you can’t stop time leaking out of things and misbehaving, you can’t reach the end of history, which now includes the history told by trees and geological layers and weather patterns. You just have to design your street knowing that, at some point, frogs are going to be crossing over it. At some point, it will be part of a geological stratum. At some point, a glint of light will reflect off a small puddle of water, blinding a driver and killing a pedestrian. At some point … The road is open, yet it’s just this exact road, this black tarmac thing with white stripes on it.
And this tells us something about design. Humans can do it. But nonhumans also do it, all the time. 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. My face has been designed by acne. 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.
So the question is, with whom or what are we going to team up, and what kinds of affordances are we going to allow future beings, and how do we allow the spooky suspension of violence, the possibly infinite vortices of pleasures and pains with us and without us, like an eye that turns out to be a bagful of hypnotic eyes, to happen without collapsing it so fast? Because we’ve been in the collapsing business for quite a long time, we’re really good at it, and now it’s not just killing the bees, it’s even killing us. So instead, I let the subscendent beauty of the artwork hold me in its infinite tractor beams, like a bagful of hypnotic eyes. What to do with these uninvited guests? Let them stick around, I guess.
Actual beauty has a “Christmas tree effect”: there is a greasy pathway toward kitsch, in which we become aware of beauty’s “disgust fringe”—there’s more subscendent beauty than normalized beauty can cope with. And 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.
And in turn, ecological awareness can’t just be pure and pristine and holy. Why can’t there be an ecology for the rest of us? For those of us who don’t want to go out camping in the fresh air, but would rather pull the covers over our heads and listen to weird goth music all morning? When can we start laughing, not just in a hale and hearty way, but with irony, a sense of the ridiculous, an excessive feeling of joy? What would an ecological joke sound like?
I’m going to start this section with a quotation from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: Les non-dupes errent. It’s a pun on his own phrase le nom du père (the name of the father) or le non du père (the no of the father).7 Both of these phrases relate to how we understand the symbolic order under which we live—how we internalize power structures such as patriarchy and give language to systems of power. So what Lacan means when he turns these phrases on their head is that if you think you’ve got it right, that you can see through everything, that’s when you’ve got it most wrong. Of course, the funny thing about the sentence is that it’s subject to its own truth.
Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a “merely” aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can’t be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being—it doesn’t stop.
The ecological space of attunement is a space of veering, because in such a space, rigid differences between active and passive, straight and curved, become impossible to maintain. When a ship is veering, is that ship pushing against the waves, being pulled by them, deliberately steering, or accidentally? Consider for example the phenomenon of adaptation. We all think we know what that means. But on reflection, adaptation is a complex and curious event. An evolving species is adapting to another evolving species, since what we call rather glibly “the environment” (that which veers around) is composed of nothing but other lifeforms and what one Darwinist calls their “extended phenotypes,” the results of their DNA mutations, and that of their symbionts, such as spiders’ webs and beavers’ dams.8 A moving target is adapting to a moving target, which in turn is caught in a constantly morphing adaptation space. By definition, this process simply cannot be “perfect,” because perfect means that motion stops—but adaptation just is movement in adaptation space, and perfection would mean the end of adaptation, which is functionally impossible as long as evolution, which is to say lifeforms, continue. So when we talk about how lifeform x is “perfectly adapted” to the swirl of phenotypes—including those that are “its own” such as its also-constantly-evolving bacterial microbiome—we are saying something absurd, something on the level of squarely circle. We are trying to contain or stop the veering of attunements of lifeforms to one another, if only in thought. Teleology—the idea that things happen in line with some kind of end goal (or, by extension, that the ends justify the means) is the gasoline of “perfect adaptation,” and teleology, namely Aristotelian concepts of species development and depletion, is precisely what Darwinism liquidates.9
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.10 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. 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. These brief glimpses of how what appears “only” aesthetic to our eyes should be enough to suggest that attunement is not a case of having a blank, block-like substantial being whose superficial qualities are tuned while the substance remains the same—like what we think happens when we tune a violin: forgetting that the strings and the wood and the curvature of the violin form a unit such that tuning the strings by turning the pegs at the top of the instrument is not like arranging the apps on a smartphone, because the “platform” is being altered by the tightening or loosening of the strings. The way attunement is deep rather than superficial is why the legend has it that Buddha taught meditation as a form of tuning: just as a sitar string should be neither too tight nor too loose, so one’s mindful focus on the meditation object—a mantra, your breathing, whatever single object is the focus of your meditation—should be alert but relaxed. The conversation between “alert” and “relaxed” forms a dynamic system that simply can’t remain still: hence the phenomenon that many beginning meditators experience, that their thoughts are rushing, because they are simply observing the intrinsic, rather than superficial, qualities of mind as such—mind thinks (in the largest sense of that word), mind “minds,” just as the ocean has waves. Movement is intrinsic. This fact becomes especially interesting when the meditation object is mind as such: when mind tunes to mind. What is experienced here is not absolutely nothing, but rather a strange beingness that cannot be pinned down to a presence I can point at.11 There is a very deep ontological reason for this: appearing (waves) is intrinsic to being (ocean), yet different.
A lifeform is like that must-have eighteenth-century equivalent of the iPod and Bose speakers, the Aeolian harp. It’s a string instrument that you place in an open windowsill. It resonates to the breezes that veer around the house. The haunting, harmony-rich, phasing sound this attunement system produces is strangely contemporary, as if Jane Austen characters were listening to a drone piece by Sonic Youth while they sipped their tea and played cards and wondered about the intentions of Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. But sipping tea and playing cards are also attunement systems, exemplifying in this case the upper-class mode of consumer performance, in which establishing and maintaining a certain sense of “comfort” is the basic tone to which the system is tuning: everyone must feel at ease, disturbance to the status quo must be minimized. All aristocratic attunement is about drones, sustained tones that waver as little as possible. If converted into sound, the space of polite interaction would indeed resemble a Sonic Youth drone piece.
Or consider “bohemian” or Romantic (namely reflexive) performances in consumer space—the top-level performance we call consumerism, which now engulfs all other modes.12 Reflexive consumer performance is just like meditation, insofar as one is tuning one’s experience: one primarily consumes experiences, which are always of the other, as in the phenomena of window shopping or Internet surfing. It is correct to claim that this attunement is a kind of “spirituality,” exemplified in the use of drugs or the nomadic wandering of the flȃneur or the psychogeography of the radical French Situationist of the late 1960s.
How you appear and what you are intertwine deeply. In every single-celled organism there is a chemical representation, more or less accurate, of the realm in which it is floating. A perfect match—exactly the same chemicals—would equal death, which in a sense is a term for when a thing actually and wholly becomes its surroundings. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a startling consideration of this fact.13 Copying, mimicry, influencing and being influenced by, being tuned and tuning, things we do all the time in our environments, with other people, as we grow and learn to be adults and participate in activities—something causal is happening when these attunements happen, which is why we think “primitive” (not-us) people imagine that photographs are stealing their souls. Representing and doing aren’t so far apart. If I take a photo of you, haven’t I in some sense snatched a part of you? In one way I have done so quite literally—photons that got influenced by your body, reflecting off it, have landed on my lens as I pressed the shutter.
Perhaps photographs really do steal your soul. Or perhaps photographs show you that your soul isn’t yours in the first place, and that it certainly isn’t inside you like a vapor in a bottle. The realm of attunement is thus like the mesmeric realm of animal magnetism. It is a force simultaneously discovered and repressed at the inception of modernity. When in the film Dark City the protagonist finds out that he can “tune,” what this means is that he can telekinize: he can do spooky action at a distance (Einstein).14
While modernity allowed agricultural logistics to destroy Earth even more successfully than it had done beforehand, it also unleashed, ironically and unwittingly, the non-agricultural (“Paleolithic”) idea of an interconnective, causal–perceptual aesthetic force. Phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy (some of the ingredients of this book) rediscovered attunement—more on this in a moment. Modern humans have recently rediscovered nonhuman beings outside the flattening, reifying concept Nature, which almost seems to have been designed to dampen our awareness of attunement space, perhaps just as the “well-tempered” keyboard is designed to reduce the spectral harmonics that haunt a sound owing to its necessary physical embodiment: there is no sound as such, no pure tones, only the sound of a string, the sound of a sine wave generator. Objects thus have what is called timbre, and this is not an optional extra. Appearance is like that: appearance is better thought not in an eye-centered manner as candy decorating a cupcake, but rather as an object’s timbre—its solitary quality, made up of a vast array of internal and surface qualities, that make it what it is, while also connecting it to where it is and the other objects around it.
We have rediscovered the veering brotherhood and sisterhood of nonhuman beings, once smoothed and packaged as Nature and indeed as “the environment.” Kinship, as in sisterhood, as in humankind, precisely has to do with an uncanny intimacy, which is why the manufactured humanoid, the “replicant” Roy shouts that word (“Kinship!”) as with one arm he lifts his bleeding enemy up on to the roof of the tall building at the end of Blade Runner, an enemy who is his own kind (unbeknownst to both), in the form of agent Deckard.15
So in a weird ironic twist, humanity’s flight from “veering,” which is the flight from our material embodiment, the timbre that haunts us with our affinities to chimpanzees, fish, and leaves trembling on the tree outside the window, has ended up in a return to veering. Hegel describes the way history works via its shadow side, when he announces that the Owl of Minerva (the totem of justice, symbol of Athens) flies at dusk.16 But Hegel’s Owl didn’t just fly at dusk. She flew straight out of a dream into the dreams of sleepers convinced they had woken up from every last trace of the so-called primitive. When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there: ecological intimacy, which is to say, intimacy between humans and nonhumans, violently repressed with violent results.
To begin to track this flight, then, is to veer toward a veering. And the first question that we might ask, in the context of an essay collection on veering and ecology, is whether nouns really are uninteresting until we make them more like verbs—give them the potential for action or force—because nouns denote things, and things are static entities that underlie appearances, which I have been arguing is fundamentally motion. Consider this noun: future. The future, or what Derrida called decisively l’avenir—the radically open future that is a possibility condition of the predictable future: is this term future unmoving? What happens at the end of this sentence? Does its meaning arrive? Arrive fully? This sentence means something, but you don’t quite know what yet, as if the meaning, which is to say the tone to which it is tuning, were lying just off its end, elephant, seaweed, gamma ray burst. Is the future a thing? What is a thing? Haven’t we already smuggled in a basic, default ontology before we start to think or talk about thinking, if we say thing is a noun and noun is static, and must be put in motion to be worthy of inclusion in a collection of essays on veering? All the objects in the world must be rounded up and forced to march and march until they drop, because that’s the kind of work that makes them free?
Underlying this, isn’t there a binary between moving and staying still, one that underlies most default (and incorrect) mechanical causality theories? A binary, moreover, that is part of the built, social space of Neolithic agriculture that eventually required carbon emissions to reproduce itself? A foundational drive (static or in motion?) to limit (a verb, therefore good?) ontological ambiguity (a noun, therefore suspect?), a drive that is structural (which side are adjectives on?) post-Neolithic social space, with its drastic tempering of attunement space into a sepia, anthropocentric consistency with the telos of “survival.”
Object-oriented ontology is a way of thinking that wants to re-confuse us, much like deconstruction, about the status that we take for granted. Language as such is part of this taken-for-granted world, and myths of the origin of writing talk about how it is the bad neighbor, the uncanny weird sister of speech, that motile, fluid, “living” force field that the legend says connected us face to face before the Fall, before the modern city state. Neolithic society, with its Linear A and Linear B (forms of writing) accounting for cattle—long lists of nouns, like receipts or bookkeeping—is an autoimmune disorder concerning its own ontological protocols. It reduces the world to anthropocentrically scaled manipulable stuff, and it doesn’t like what it’s doing—isn’t that the content of agricultural-age religious origin stories? We have to farm now, and farming sucks, it separates us from the beasts and from our own life beyond survival (toil and sweat), but we do have to farm. We don’t like the undead motility of writing, its spectral differentiation and deferral—the way it exceeds just accounting, just making lists of stuff that you own. What we like are clean boundaries between writing and speech, my field and yours, Heaven and Earth, God and Man, human and nonhuman (otherwise known as Nature), king and peasant, verb and noun. But the columns of double-entry bookkeeping tell us something about accounting, which never stops, unlike our fantasies about zeroed-out invoices and bottom lines. As credit attunes to debit, debit is attuning to credit: we have an intrinsically dynamic attunement system. Sentences never completely zero out. These phenomena are perhaps why we say that only two things are certain, death and taxes.
If writing really was invented during the agricultural age (and at least a certain very recognizable kind of writing was indeed invented then, the discourse of accounting), writing is a double-edged sword, a poison and a cure (pharmakon) as Derrida liked to argue.17 Writing seems to be part of the drive to manipulate, to codify and assemble for easy demarcation purposes. But the very attempt to do so—and OOO would argue that this is because it is ontologically impossible, let alone linguistically impossible—summons the specter of the radically free, unmanipulable playfulness of things, now observed slipping and sliding around within language as such, as the carefully ploughed intentions go haywire, as contradictory weeds begin to force themselves through the cracks in the social and philosophical sidewalk. Pest: is it a verb, or a noun? Do we need some kind of philosophical insecticide or herbicide to spray on words and objects to get rid of their ambiguous penumbra, their bacterial films, their trickster quality? Trick: is it a verb, or a noun?
Language doesn’t want to stay put. Why? OOO argues that this is because things in general won’t stay put, even when they are for all intents and purposes utterly still.
A perfume veers deliciously between verb and noun: the “notes” emerge in time, so that a perfume evokes the future—how long will it stay? Into what will it be transformed? Perfumes tantalize because they veer and attune to human skin. Perhaps it would be better to think of OOO objects as all perfume-like in this respect. The word essence can mean intrinsic being and intrinsic flavor both at once, which is why perfumes can be called essences, as in essential oil. Perfumes attune to skin, releasing different smells at different moments depending on who is wearing them. We let perfumes veer, and they make us veer toward or away from them. Why not pencils, ash, and star-nosed moles?
Let us then begin by veering between these reified categories. Reified, objectified, turned into a mere “thing”—there we go again, we just think being a thing must be the worst fate imaginable. OOO’s use of object is a mirror in which you see reflected your own prejudices about what objects are. If you think they are objectified, static, manipulable lumps of pure extension decorated with accidents—if you think they need verbs to get them going or adjectives to make them pretty—then you are going to think I am quite a mixed-up person.
Hesitation. Is it a verb or a noun? Is it movement, or stillness? Veering hesitates: in a way, hesitation is a quantum of veering. So we will start this veering process by seeming to veer off course altogether, hesitating to begin. And you may find yourself examining the protocols of the discipline we now call sociology, and you may say to yourself, how did we get here? And will this rhetorical veer, this assay of bias, as the Hamlet character Polonius puts it, this curveball, catch the slippery carp of truth, as Polonius also puts it?18 If it does catch something, would it be more like seizing (thrusting your hands into the cold water, grasping a fish) or being seized? In that latter sense, I’m mesmerized by the little fish, I track its darting movements with my eyes that begin to dart, fish-like, in their sockets. When I catch a fish perhaps I need to have been caught by it.
Max Weber was one of the pioneers who inaugurated the discipline of sociology over a century ago, but sociology’s structuring principle excludes the foundational concept on which it is based: charisma. Weber argued that societies based around charismatic authority—leaders that emit a sense that they have the ability to lead because of some inherent power (think of early Christianity or Islam)—give way to “disenchanted,” bureaucratic societies: modern European states, for example. 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.”
Sociology is afraid of its founder’s concept, which was a little scary at the time too, since charisma has to do with forces that many described as supernatural or paranormal. Weber, like Kant, was himself fascinated by the paranormal. In general, one can think of modernity—world history since the later 1700s—as a profoundly awkward dance of including and excluding the paranormal. Freud, for instance, developed his theories as a way to bowdlerize the theory of hypnosis, which was in turn a bowdlerization of the idea of animal magnetism, Mesmer’s hypothetical force (as we were seeing). Marx argues that capital makes tables compute value as if they were even weirder than the dancing tables of the quasi-religion of spiritualism that appeared to move when a spirit possessed the medium.19 And so on—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
The paranormal is what religion was already excluding, religion being the way Neolithic society around 12,000 years ago monopolized what Weber calls charisma, taking it to mean a quality inherent to those that are already powerful, restricting it to the King who has the direct line to the god whom he hears ringing in his ears, telling him to tell the people what to do, what to do never being “dismantle agricultural society, which has created patriarchy and tyranny in the name of sheer survival, and return to hunter-gathering and a less violent, less hierarchical coexistence with nonhuman beings.” Because that would be absurd. Heaven forbid we drop the anthropocentric equal temperament by which everything else becomes keyed to our teleological reference tone. That would be ridiculous primitivism—right?
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 …).
This raging wall of resistance is directly proportional not to how impossible or difficult such a dismantling would be, but rather to how easy it is. It’s not as if we would be giving up all control over our lives. We would just have different kinds of control. We could still do agriculture, for example—plenty of hunter-gatherers do; you don’t have to cleave to the Neolithic model.
It is also easy because the logic underpinning Neolithic logistics is very obviously (when you study it) riddled with unsustainable paradoxes that result in cognitive and social violence (in the conventional sense, between humans) and ecological violence (in the conventional sense, regarding nonhumans). Equal temperament is riddled with awkwardly cramped and fudged frequencies, precisely to eliminate “beating,” the production of rhythmical pulses between tones, because the human manipulator of the instrument should be in charge of beating it according to what the human telos of the tune happens to be. It is biologically true that we aren’t totally Neolithic—we have three-million-year-old bodies infused with Neanderthal DNA, and so on—but it is also philosophically and politically true. Because it is never true that there can be a perfect adaptation to one’s phenotype, such that the search for perfection, now visible in seeds genetically engineered for tolerance to pesticides, must be destructive on numerous levels. Equal temperament dampens the haunting harmonics of an instrument’s timbre, 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. 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, the idea that humans and nonhumans are profoundly different, based on needing to categorize human social space as a war against such things as “weeds” and “pests”—because their theories of a radical distance from the norm are still based on this norm being the norm. These approaches still work alongside a duality. Such concepts of difference as a rigid separation between humans and nonhumans are intrinsic to agrilogistics, the survival-at-any-cost strategy that began in the early Holocene and that has given rise to the feedback loops we now recognize only too well via the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, namely the fact that, among other things, 50 percent of what biology calls animals (as opposed to fungi and viruses, for instance) have been wiped off the face of Earth in the last fifty years, because of anthropogenic global warming. Ecological thought requires a different kind of difference. Surely it’s obvious that a slug is different from a panda. But it’s different in the way a distant family member is different; not different in the sense of black versus white, or here versus there, or good versus bad.
It is too easy to dismantle the philosophical basis of our “world” (aka “civilization”). Without this basis, that world would collapse. The only thing inhibiting us is our habitual investment in that world, visible in the resistance to wind farms—we like our energy invisible, underground in pipes, so that we can enjoy the view. The very mention of changing our energy throughput raises the specter of the constructedness of our so-called Nature. Think of the birds the turbines will kill! (Think of the entire species wiped out by not having the turbines.) (Are birds “perfectly adapted” to oil pipes?) Think of the dreams we will be disturbing! We spent all this time tuning the world to anthropocentric tones, then delimiting attunement space. We might have to teach birds to tune to wind turbines, and this will be a drag. We want to be comfy in our unwavering, thanatological world.
Death is comfy, as Freud observed: the tension between a thing and the beings that veer around it is lowered to zero. A cell wall is ruptured and the cell’s insides spill out into its surroundings. A glass shatters and the difference between itself and the space around it collapses. It’s life that is disturbing and uncanny, all those energies flowing around, exchanges happening between the inside and the outside of an organism, exchanges between organisms, in every possible physical and metaphorical (and metaphysical) sense. Death means either totally not existing at all, or going around and around exactly the same all the time, like a perpetual motion machine—here’s what I mean. Pop songs often have plenty of death in them, because death is very smooth and goes down easy; when I say death in pop, I mean the obvious, dull to some four-to-the-floor rhythms, the regular rhymes, the easy-to-hold-on-to earworms. As an artist you can either cheat death, or you can become death. Many a pop singer is death incarnate, because death always goes to number 1. Don’t mistake those upbeat lyrics and dancy tunes for life. The frantic, maniacal repetition is exactly what Freud calls death drive. That kind of song is trying to parcel life energies into nice neat death packets. From this point of view, the trouble with some pop isn’t that it’s low or bad taste. It’s that it’s death warmed up enough (but not too much) to be a bit tasty. Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery. Cancer cells are maniacal and can reproduce (repeat themselves) much, much better than normal cells—they are more alive than normal cells, which is why they kill you.
The funny thing is, if you try to avoid death, you can end up bringing it on. Think about eating burgers and fries literally to avoid the bitter taste of tannins. Bitter is a taste that infants have, without cultural training—they can all make the wincing face of tasting bitterness from birth. Bitter is a sign of poison. But in low doses, some poisons are essential—think of vitamins, too much of some of them can make you very seriously sick, but if you avoid them altogether, you also get sick. Perhaps you choose to eat burgers because you don’t like that bitter taste. So you die more quickly of a heart attack or a stroke. 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.
Dismantling the underpinnings of agricultural logistics involves dismantling the “metaphysics of presence,” the idea that to exist is to be constantly present: to exist is to be a lump of extended stuff underlying appearances. Reality is a plastic, unformatted surface waiting for us (humans) to write what we want on it: “Where Do You Want to Go Today?” (the 1990s Windows ad); “Just Do It” (Nike); “I’m the Decider” (George Bush); “We create realities” (Iraq War press conference, 2005). There is the regular flavor of this metaphysics, basic default substance theories. We scholars all think we are superior to them, but they shape our physical lives which we happily reproduce, and we retweet them in the cooler flavored upgrades, which speculative realism calls correlationism, which is the Kantian (and post-Kantian) idea that a thing isn’t real until it has been formatted by the Subject, or History, or human economic relations, or Will to Power, or Dasein … In a way it’s a worse (in the sense of more ecologically destructive) version of the regular substance ontology flavor. This is because it treats things not like lumps, but like blank sheets or screens. Lumps are at least three-dimensional. Imagine arguing, as some do, that there are only blue whales when we say there are (they are cultural constructs, they are discursive products of epistemic formations, they are concepts we project onto certain lumps of marine matter) … And lo, it came to pass, there were no longer any blue whales …
OK, so happily that particular extinction hasn’t yet occurred. It hasn’t yet occurred because people became enchanted by recordings of whale sounds in the mid-1970s. Enchanted. What does it mean? In terms of charisma, it means some of us submitted to an energy field emitted by the sounds of the whales. The fact that in my line of work (the academy) this is a wholly unacceptable, beyond the pale way of describing what happened is a painful and delicious irony. You can’t say things happen because of vibes. That’s what hippies say. And we’re not hippies. We’re black-clothes-wearing cool kids who wouldn’t be seen dead in what one comedian calls “multicolored, ill-fitting, vaguely ethnic clothing.” We spend most of our time trying not to sound like Yoda.
Just as attunement is the fuel of veering, so charisma is the fuel of attunement. Charisma makes us hesitate, wavering in its force field.
What if charisma were actual? What would the emission of such an energy field imply? It would imply, for a start, that art isn’t just decorative candy. It would imply what “civilized” philosophy from Plato on has been afraid of, the fact that (shock horror) art has an effect on me over which I am not in control. Art is demonic: it emanates from some unseen (or even unseeable) beyond in the sense that I am not in charge of it and can’t quite perceive it directly, in front of me, constantly present. A dangerous causative flickering: magic. Magic is taboo cause and effect, or unthinkable cause and effect: either ridiculous or dangerous or impossible, or some weird borrowed-kettle combination of all three. (How can something be impossible and dangerous?) What we are talking about is what Einstein called spooky action at a distance, by which he meant quantum entanglement, but which also means what happens if you try to visualize the Rothko Chapel even if you aren’t there, even if you have never seen the Rothko Chapel in real life, or perhaps even if you have never actually seen a Rothko painting, or a postcard of a Rothko painting, but have only heard about Rothko.
The Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational space in central Houston, is one of Mark Rothko’s final works, and it’s located just behind where I live. It’s a cool, dark space where the walls are adorned with gigantic versions of Rothko’s characteristic abstract fields of vibrating color, in a range of dark purples, blues, and blacks. We might conventionally argue that the charisma of the Rothko painting is bestowed upon it by humans: this would be the acceptable Hegelian way of putting it. We make the King be the King by investing in him. Investing what? Psychic energy—which, if you recall, is a bowdlerization of the Force-like animal magnetism. What if this attitude were not only masochistic in the extreme, but also—incorrect? After all, as Schrödinger has already argued, the one thing you can rely on is that at the very least two tiny things (an electron, a photon) can be “entangled” such that you can do something to one of them (polarizing it, changing its spin), and the other will, for instance, polarize in a complementary way instantly—which is to say, faster than light. And this complementary behavior happens at arbitrary distances. You can now observe two particles separated by kilometers behaving this way; one is on the other side of town; one is onboard a satellite, and so on—arbitrary means “even if that particle is in another galaxy.” And now physicists are experimenting on scales trillions of times bigger than electrons and photons, with positive results. For example, you can entangle clusters of carbon atoms called “buckyballs” because of their shape, which resembles Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. You can smear a tiny but visible tuning fork into quantum coherence, where you can see it (with the naked eye) vibrating and not-vibrating at the very same time. You can cool a tiny but visible mirror down toward absolute zero and isolate it in a vacuum—in other words, nothing at all is pushing it mechanically—and you can observe it shimmering, moving back and forth without mechanical input.21 And there are to date no loopholes; there is not some underlying substance that means the two particles are really one, for instance.22 The entities are different. But they’re not totally separated. (This idea resembles what I was saying a little bit earlier about ecological thought requiring a different kind of difference.)
Causality just is magic. But magic is precisely what we have been trying desperately to delete.
Magic implies causality and illusion, and the intertwining of causality and illusion, otherwise known in Norse-derived languages as weirdness. Weird means strange of appearance, and it also means having to do with fate.23 Neolithic ontology wants reality not to be weird. Eventually weirdness is confined to Tarot cards and vague remarks about synchronicity. What does it mean, though, to entangle illusion and causality? What it means is that how a thing appears isn’t just an accidental decorative candy on an extension lump. Appearance as such is where causation lives. Appearance is welded inextricably to what things are, to their essence—even “welded” is wrong. Appearance and essence are like two different “sides” of a Möbius strip, which are also the “same” side. A twisted loop is exactly what weird refers to, etymologically speaking. The minimal topology of a thing is the Möbius strip, a surface that veers all over, where a twist is everywhere. This is because the appearance of a thing is different from what it is—yet the appearance is inextricable from it, too. There is no obvious dotted line between what a thing is, and thing-data. Attuning is like studying a Möbius strip, a special object in the form of a twisted loop. It’s not hard to make one: tear a thin strip of paper, twist it, and join the ends together. You will see that when you trace your finger around the shape, you land on the “other side” to where you started, but you never actually “flip” to an “other” side. This is weird; it means that the shape only has one side.
Unfortunately for the scientistic ideology that dominates our world and the neoliberalism that forces us to behave in scientistic ways to ourselves, one another, and other lifeforms, the idea that appearance is where causality lives is also just straightforward modern science. Hume’s argument was precisely that when you examine things, what you can’t see directly is cause and effect. All you have are data, and cause and effect are correlations of those data. So that you can’t say “humans cause global warming” or “cigarettes cause cancer” or “this bullet you are firing at point-blank range at my temple will kill me.” You can say “It is 97 percent likely that … ”—thus opening the door to the deniers, who are in fact modernity deniers, unwilling to let go of the clunky mechanical, visible, constantly present causality that you can point to.
And as we have seen, Kant underwrote this devastating insight: all we have are data not because there is nothing, but because there are things, but these things are withdrawn from how we grasp them. Kant’s example: raindrops fall on your head, they are wet, cold, spherical. This is raindrop data, not the actual raindrops. But they are raindrops, not gumdrops. And they are raindroppy: their appearance is entangled with exactly what they are.24 What art gives us, argues Kant, is the feel of data, the data-ness of data, otherwise known as givenness. This data-feel is, he argues, an attunement space, the one place in the whole universe where mesmerizing hesitation can happen—a very important mesmerizing hesitation, because it underwrites the existence of a priori synthetic judgment, because in this experience I get a magical taste of something beyond my (graspable) experience, a transcendental beyond-ness that Kant wants to restrict to the transcendental subject’s capacity to mathematize. But Kant’s analogy—he was afraid of analogies for just this reason—is the raindrop, and the raindrop’s mathematizable properties such as size and velocity are also, he states, on the side of appearance.
The aesthetic dimension is a necessary danger, a tiny bowdlerized zone of mesmeric attunement, without which we couldn’t know that there is a weird gap between what things are and how they appear, which is why we know we should treat the beings we call people as ends and not as means, because your uses of me never exhaust me in principle. Through this attunement, I get to discover that my inner space is infinite, like The Doctor’s TARDIS. But it’s equally likely, according to the implicit logic of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, if not its explicit argument, that the beautiful thing is also bigger on the inside. The experience tells us that maybe everything is a TARDIS. For the beauty experience is precisely that phenomenon in which I find it impossible to tell who started it: was it me or was it the thing? Yet Kant concludes that this secretly means, we (the subject) started it. That means that I’m not especially different from other things, such as crickets and even cricket bats. But it also means that crickets and cricket bats are kind of special in the way I think I myself am, as a person. It means therefore that cricket bats might be a little bit “alive” in some way, and crickets (and maybe the bats too) might be “people” in some way. Crazy, right? No wonder you’re not allowed to say this out loud in a university cafeteria.
A small piece of mesmeric, magical dynamite is embedded at the crucial point in modernity’s architecture: a tone that is rich with harmonics “disgustingly” not quite keyed to human teleological reference frames. The self-transcending subject is underwritten by a mysterious power emanating from the non-subject (the “object”). I may be the one who gets to decide whether the light is on in the refrigerator or not (correlationism); but there needs to be a refrigerator in the first place, and for some reason I find myself drawn to it. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia have long been oppressed by corporate greed and nation-building. Why then are the Sami people reluctant to cast counter-spells to those woven by global corporations? Because that would involve their culture with corporate culture in a mutual attunement space: their culture would be distorted by the attempt.25
Things are exactly what they are, yet never as they seem, and this means that they are virtually indistinguishable from the beings we call people. A person is a being that veers in just this way. Once we start embracing difference not as rigid separation but as uncanny affinity, as I’ve been suggesting, we see that humans are more like nonhumans, and nonhumans are more like humans, than we like to think—and those two phrases do not quite add up. It is radically undecidable whether we are reducible to nonsentient, nonconscious, nonperson status—or whether things that aren’t us, such as foxes or teacups, are reducible upward to conventional personhood. I might be an android—this android might be a person: that’s the best we can do. Deleting the hesitation by reducing either one to the other is what is called violence. If I decide you’re just a machine, I can manipulate you exactly as I want. If I decide you’re a person, and person means “not a machine,” then I can decide that other things are just machines by contrast, and manipulate them.
I am playing a tune called myself to which you are attuning, but which is itself attuned to you, so that we have an asymmetrical chiasmus between myself and me, between me and you.26
We live in a world of tricksters. How we conduct ourselves in this world, the ethics of the trickster world, has to do with respecting that subjunctive, hesitant, might-be quality. It has to do with attunement. As I was saying before, in the context of thinking about life, attunement is a dance between completely becoming a thing, the absolute camouflage of pure dissolution (one kind of death) and perpetually warding off that thing (another kind of death), the mechanical repetition that establishes walls, such as cell walls. Between I am that and me me me: in other words, between being reducible to other stuff (I’m just a pile of atoms or mechanical components) and being totally different from other stuff (I’m a person, and only some beings get to be people). What is called life is more like an undead quivering between two types of death, a deviance that is intrinsic to how a thing maintains itself, or metastable as some like to say. Some things need to deviate to stay the same. Think of how a circle is how a line deviates from itself at every point, thanks to the seductive force of a number existing in a dimension perpendicular to that of the rational numbers (pi).
My experience of showing guests around Rothko Chapel has provided me with beautiful examples of how, if you’re scared or critical of art (perhaps you have been taught it’s always a product of political oppression, or bourgeois sensibility, or a mystification designed to confuse you, or something like that), you find the sort of attunement that happens in there very uncomfortable. It’s because you can’t shrug it off or dismiss it as some unreal, ideological effect. Something is really happening—oh no, get me out of here! Because the Chapel is “religious,” you can’t just put the paintings in a box with the label “art.” Because the “religious” quality is not specific, but more like a free-floating “spirituality,” you can’t put that in a conceptual box either. Religion is turned into something like appreciating art; appreciating art is turned into something like spiritual contemplation. And those two transformations don’t neatly map on to one another. So you can’t dismiss what you’re feeling as purely a social construct quite so easily.
The upshot? Some scholars have only lasted two minutes in the Rothko Chapel. Some other friends, such as Björk and Arca, another musician friend, stay in there for ages and ages, soaking it up.
Why is this feeling of attunement scary for some? It’s because it appears not just to be something they’re in charge of, but something that’s emanating from the paintings and the space itself. We attune to the gate-like rectangles of aubergine space, because they are already tuning to us, waiting, beckoning. A Rothko Chapel painting is a portal: just what might come through? Such a painting is a doorway for what Derrida calls l'arrivant (verb or noun?), the future future, the irreducible, unpredictable one. Philosophy, which is wonderment (hence horror, or eroticism, or anger, or laughter) in conceptual form, is an attunement to the way a thing is a portal for the future future. The love of wisdom implies that wisdom isn’t fully here, at least not yet. Perhaps if it ever succeeded in teleporting down perfectly, it would cease to be philosophy. Thank heavens philosophy isn’t wisdom. If it is, I want nothing to do with philosophy.
We might want to contain the aesthetic experience by framing it as “art” in some predictable, preformatted sense. Going further, we might think art is a reflex of the commodity form, which would really help us to keep our suspicious distance: heaven forbid we be seduced by anything. Art shows us how a disturbingly ambiguous pretense is woven into aesthetic experience: wonderment is based on the capacity to be deceived. The more we are OK with being lied to, the wiser we might become. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” (John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, once said onstage during a Sex Pistols concert). So perhaps we could dismiss a Rothko painting, as art critic Brian O’Doherty does in his famous essay on the commodification of art space, the dreaded “white cube” of the contemporary gallery, now replicated in a million minimalist townhome interiors.27
We want art to make us sure that we aren’t being conned or ripped off or pitched to or prostituted or sold to: tuned. But this is exactly what art can’t do. Art theory in modernity tends to want to distinguish art from conning or selling or ripping off, and from the dreaded status of “object”; and this results in art’s confinement to a tiny experiential region, sophisticated beyond sophistication, purer than the white cube purity of the philistine buyer and owner, hanging on the white walls but above anything that smacks of gross consumerism.
As anyone who is vaguely familiar with the very high-stakes and high-priced art industry will attest, this abstinence (and abstinence from abstinence) is exactly the top level of consumer space: the self-reflexive, “Romantic” mode of bohemian consumerism, in which we are all caught. Think of how we all like to say we no longer follow fashion, but instead select our very own style. One style can then be sampling everyone else’s style, and this can seem as if you are floating above everyone else, the poor fools, trapped in consumerism. Yet this performance, which we could call “I Am Not a Consumer,” is the ultimate consumerist performance. O’Doherty has no time for what he thinks is the abstracting, reifying “Eye” induced by the white cube space itself. But he has even less time for the poor corporeal “Spectator,” the comical, humiliated body dragged around by this eye.28 O’Doherty is saying that the way art galleries are set up, we are moved around them in a passive way, watching ourselves from an abstract distance. This means that being passive is bad, because being passive means being an object, which means not being a subject. Heaven forbid that we become an object, heaven forbid that we ever become passive—that would be a fate worse than death.
Attunement is the feeling of an object’s power over me—I am being dragged by its tractor beam into its orbit. And yet we are told that we are not to be manipulated. We write essays such as Inside the White Cube about how white cube spaces inevitably seduce us all—except for me, the narrator of the white cube essay, and you, the sophisticated reader whom the essay is interpellating, rising above it all, exiting the poor beastly body and the abject world of objects, like the Neoplatonic soul transcending the body. “Obey your thirst” (advertisement for the soft drink Sprite, 1990s) has no effect on us. Everyone gets conned by objectification, except for me, the one who writes the sentence Everyone gets conned by objectification. All sentences are ideological, except for the sentence All sentences are ideological. Can you see how this works?
Critique mode is the mode of the pleasure of no-pleasure, the sadistic purity of washing your hands of the crime of being seduced, as if detuning were about exiting attunement space rather than what really happens, which is only retuning. In this mode, the worst thing that could happen is that you could make or enjoy kitsch. Happily, children have never heard of such things. My son Simon tells me that if you cross your eyes and stare at a Rothko painting just so, the red lines will start to vibrate and float toward you, and you will feel nauseous and giddy—and that these are exciting, oddly pleasant sensations, like spinning in a swivel chair. Apparently the paintings aren’t just commodities sitting primly in a shop window. Apparently they even exceed their human-keyed “use value.” For O’Doherty, the best kind of art, which he calls postmodern, is an endless conversation between (human) subjects about what good art might be, as if tuning up were not part of the orchestral performance—a myth rapidly dispelled by the first few seconds of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”29 Actually letting yourself enjoy a thing is pleasurably avoided. And yet to a six-year-old child, it’s obvious that Rothko is trying to blow your mind.
Art sprays out charismatic causality despite us. And unlike a lot of things in our current world, and within limited parameters (sophistication, taste, cost), we still let it in. Art is a realm of passion for no reason: I just like this particular shade of blue, I want you to feel the weight of this metal toe, come in to this installation, look, peer through the curtain. The time of novels is the time of lust—the first novels were necessarily pornography (Aretino). So when we talk about art, we are talking in the region of love and desire, those unsteady, uneasy, wavering partners.
Let us widen our gaze from the artwork to a more general description of this region. Love is not straight, because reality is not straight. Everywhere, there are curves and bends, things veer.
Per-ver-sion. En-vir-onment. These terms come from the verb to veer. To veer, to swerve toward: am I choosing to do it? Or am I being pulled? Free will is overrated. I do not make decisions outside the universe and then plunge in, like an Olympic diver. I am already in. I am like a mermaid, constantly pulled and pulling, pushed and pushing, flicked and flicking, turned and opened, moving with the current, pushing away with the force I can muster. An environment is not a neutral empty box, but an ocean filled with currents and surges. It environs. It veers around, making me giddy. An aesthetic wormhole, bending the terrestrial and ecological into the cosmological. The torsion of deep space, beaming into the cold water of this stream like bent light, the stream where I was caught by the fish I was catching a few pages ago.
Spacetime as such is a bending, a curvature. It isn’t correct to say that spacetime is first flat, then distorted by objects. Objects directly are the distortion of spacetime: spacetime is the distortive force field that emanates from them. Curvature, lumps and bumps, a strange plenitude everywhere, no dead air. Spacetime isn’t a flat blank sheet that gets disturbed. Spacetime is disturbance. A disturbing lens of matter-energy, we see as much as we can see, always less than all, through the convex kaleidoscope of spacetime. A thing is dappled with time. But not a lump coated with time, improved by the makeup of motion. Better: a thing is this temporal dappling.
The nineteenth-century writer John Ruskin was a great scholar of architecture who argued that the modern tendency to want to clean old buildings, very much in effect today, was a sacrilegious erasure of what he liked to call the stain of time.30 In a sense Ruskin was aiming at something like an ontological redescription of things: to remove the time stain is to harm the actual thing, because a thing actually is this temporal staining. To want to cleanse a building of what is taken to be a supplementary stain is to assume that a thing underlies its appearance, the old default substance ontology. To allow things to get dirty is to allow that things are not at war with time. Further still, the “dirty” Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo is similar today to how it would have been seen in flickering candlelight.
Newton’s world is a realm of straight love, instant beams of gravity that are God’s love, everywhere, all at once, outside time, the omnipresent force of an omniscient being acting on static extensional lumps, exciting them, pushing and pulling them around like cattle.
We do not live in Newton’s world.
Einstein’s world is a realm of perverse desire, invisible ripples of gravity waves that make up spacetime, the invisible ocean in which the stars float submerged. We love the dead. We love fantasies. Do they love us back? We are pulled toward them and as this happens, time expands and shrinks like a polymer. No God could be omniscient in such a world, where time is an irreducible property of things, part of the liquid that jets out of a thing, undulating. There are parts of the universe that an observer will never be able to check. They are real. Things happen there. But some observers will never know where they are happening, or when they are happening. Some people in the universe will never know you are reading this, because they never can know. Just as you won’t be able to know them.31
In a universe governed by the speed of light, parts are hidden, withdrawn, obscure. The dark Dantean forest of the universe, an underwater forest of rippling weeds. You should find this idea extremely comforting. It means that you cannot be omnipresent or omniscient. It means that you cannot look down on the poor suffering beings of the universe from a position outside time, and smile sadistically at their pain, a smile we often call pity. This is what we sometimes call the abstract gaze of the Enlightenment, that period in the early history of modern Europe and America in which universal values were articulated, unfortunately at the expense of urgent particularities such as race, class, and gender. Many artworks of this period, such as C. F. Volney’s The Ruins of Empires or Shelley’s Queen Mab, are staged from precisely this position outside of the universe as a way to judge it.
Each entity in Einstein’s universe is like the veering turbulence in a stream, a world tube or vortex that cannot know all. There is a darkness that cannot be dispelled.
Consider now the even stranger, and even more accurate, description of things we call quantum theory. In quantum theory, the binary between moving and staying still—between a certain concept of verb and noun, or between a certain concept of object and quality—becomes impossible to sustain. Objects isolated as much as possible from other objects still vibrate without being pushed, that is to say, without being subject to mechanical causation.32
The idea that I’m outside the world, looking in, wondering which choice to make, is the ethical equivalent of the substance ontology that separates being from appearance with firewalls and fungicides. But the traditionalist “conservative” versions of this line of thought, called “environmentalism,” also try to contain wavering, the hesitation filled with the vibrations of attunement. It’s called environmentalism, but it’s not en-vir-onmental enough.
And this isn’t surprising, because “traditional” agrilogistics ends up as our current version, so that there is a line from the notion of the guiding weight of tradition to the play of infinite (human) freedom and “choice.” The aesthetic dimension is commonly imagined as a special glue that sticks these two poles together, by allowing humans to impose the proper form, to adapt their world perfectly to their requirements. But this is not how it works. We have seen that this dimension is deeply entwined with things as such, not with (human) formatting. There is a certain courage of letting yourself fall asleep and allowing dreams to come, which resembles the courage of allowing art to affect you. Hallucinatory phantasms are a condition of possibility for seeing anything at all. Hearing is a chiasmic crisscross between sounds emitted by my ear and pressure waves perturbing the ear’s liquids from the outside. The not-me beckons, making me hesitate.
When we examine lifeforms, we find that they are much stranger than we take them to be, in part because the concept of “life” is much stranger than we take it to be. Biology, a discipline whose name was coined in 1800, is the science of life, and one of the results of being scientific about life is that it becomes more and more difficult to draw, with a straight face, a boundary between living and nonliving things. We are, after all, made of chemicals.
We’ve been talking about causal connectivity between lifeforms, how things are interrelated in what we sometimes call the web of life. Now let’s take a look at something more in the region of aesthetics and ethics: how does connection feel and what does connecting look like?
Saying that things are connected doesn’t necessarily mean the same as saying that they are totally mashed together. Things are dependent on one another: that means that some things might be more dependent on some things and less dependent on other things. It’s a loose, wobbly system of connection, rather like a large model made of Lego or an unstable mobile where thin wires connect cut pieces of card that float above your bed. If everything was totally mashed, then connection would be no problem, either causally or ethically or aesthetically. But connection is a big problem. For instance, environmentalist charities are known for encouraging us to donate money by depicting what are sometimes called “charismatic megafauna”: big cute animals such as pandas. What about slime molds or worms, or for that matter, bacteria? Global warming is tough for bacteria too in ways that might be disastrous for the soil and so disastrous for humans.
Whether we’re thinking about how lifeforms look or how we behave toward them or what we know about how we relate to them in the realm of cause and effect, we are dealing with wonky, fragile systems. We seem to have developed a particularly lopsided way of perceiving lifeforms—the aesthetic part. It’s not that our connection to them in this domain is like a flat plain with a smooth slope: at the top of the slope are lifeforms with whom we can identify, at the bottom are those who don’t turn us on in the slightest. It’s not a smooth slope. It’s more like what in robotics design is called the Uncanny Valley.
What is the Uncanny Valley? Imagine you are standing on top of a hill. You are looking across a valley toward the hill on the opposite side. On the opposite side of the hill is a cute little robot, possibly the classic Star Wars character R2D2, or the more recent Star Wars cute robot BB8. The theory of the Uncanny Valley says that these sorts of robots are cute because they don’t remind you of yourself at all, so that when they communicate, you experience it as charmingly nonthreatening to your sense of who you are. You don’t feel like they’re trespassing on your turf—the turf that says you’re human and they’re not.
Further away, behind the peak, are robots that have nothing to do with anything obviously human, such as industrial robots. You couldn’t care less about them. They don’t try to talk to you, but R2D2 is trying to talk to you. He is more along the lines of a stuffed animal toy. Then, as you look down into the valley, you see all kinds of beings that become more and more disturbing the longer you look. There are robots that are unnerving for their human qualities, their similarities to us. And there are corpses somewhere down there. And right at the bottom of the valley we have animated corpses, zombies. They are dead and disgusting and also disgustingly alive. Really lifelike puppets inhabit the slopes of the valley nearest to you, further up from the zombie level.
Somewhere in the Uncanny Valley are all the humanoid, hominid, hominin-type beings, beings we define as genetically close to us, or designed to resemble us. The theory runs that we are disturbed by them because they resemble us too closely. It has only recently been admitted, for example—because you can’t really ignore DNA evidence—that not only were we, Homo sapiens, much closer genetically to Neanderthals than we like to think, but we had sex with them to the point where a significant sliver of our DNA right now is derived from Neanderthals. Again and again we have told ourselves the story that although Neanderthals are like us, they are enough unlike us at the same time for there to be a comfortable distance between us and their “primitive” nature—but maybe the truth is we know that Homo sapiens are closer to Neanderthals than we would like to think, that we might even be slightly Neanderthal … and this freaks us out. We have also been telling ourselves that they are not as sapiens (wise) as we like to call ourselves. So that we “had” to wipe them out, because they were basically getting in the way of our projects, which were far more forward-thinking than they could possibly handle. Or we tell ourselves that they couldn’t have been conscious like us, because if they lacked a powerful sense of the future, they also had little or no imagination. That’s why they weren’t looking when we ambushed and exterminated them. This sounds a bit circular. We can prove that Neanderthals weren’t that great, because we got rid of them, because they weren’t that great. The irrational circularity has to do with how we think and feel about lifeforms, including ourselves, right now: the unconscious or semi-conscious or otherwise structural attitudes that shape how we behave in this moment.
How steep your valley is might be a good indicator of syndromes such as racism and speciesism. A very steep valley would indicate that you have done a lot of work banishing the uncanny beings to some nether domain of your thinking or feeling or awareness (or what have you). You are so freaked out by them, so disgusted, that you have almost forgotten them. Or you might be a bit more tolerant of them, and your valley might be quite shallow.
Yet whether it is steep or not, there is still a valley. You are still distinguishing yourself in some way from the beings in that valley. Why are they in there? I think the defining characteristic is ambiguity. Are they related to me or not? When I look at them, they seem to have recognizable features. But something about them is very strange: perhaps they are androids, for example, and if they are androids and I’m so like them, maybe I myself am an android. And this is what really disturbs me about them: I might have more in common with them than I think I want to. When you start to think this way, the valley becomes an artifact of anthropocentrism, racism, and speciesism—of xenophobia, a fear of the “other,” which is, often, really a fear of what we have in common with the “other.” A sneaking sensation that we are not as distinct from these robots and zombies—or people from different cultures or genders—as we like to say we are. This proximity is what causes that uneasy, uncanny feeling. Instead of recognizing it for what it is, most often we push it away, trying to keep the distance between our peak of distinction and the valley below.
We want to have clean, rigid distinctions between beings: it’s called, quite rightly, discrimination. But just because something is distinct and different, doesn’t mean we can distinguish it from us in some ethical or ontological way. That’s the trouble with our poor Neanderthal. She looks like us, an awful lot, but she is pretty distinct too. She falls between categories.
If you go to your local natural history museum these days, you may see, as I do when I go to the one in Houston, a wall-sized graphic of many tens of lifeforms that are linked to us in the immediate history of the evolution of humans, from lemurs to ourselves. The graphic will be a sprawling, uneven net. It’s like your family and this is like looking at a family tree. The lifeforms are like you, enough like you and enough connected to you for you to feel cognitively comfortable or at least familiar, as they say, if not comfortable all the way, like you can tolerate being at their house for dinner.
But precisely because of this, the lifeforms are also unlike you. Uncle John always had this disconcerting habit that really disgusts you. You have no idea why she is your sister, you might as well be from different planets. These beings are familiar and strange at the same time. In fact, the more you know about them, the more strange they become. You don’t get rid of the strangeness by knowing more about a thing, necessarily. Isn’t science a way of realizing that? Our universe is so much more strange now that we know more about it.
The word for familiar and strange at the same time is uncanny. We are racists and homophobes and sexists when it comes to beings who we put in the Uncanny Valley—because we put humans down there too. It’s not exactly otherness that we are working with here. Ethics and politics might not be about tolerating, appreciating, or accepting otherness. Ethics and politics might be about tolerating, appreciating, or accepting strangeness, which boils down to ambiguity: how things can appear to be oscillating between familiar and strange, for example.
Doesn’t appreciating art have to do with allowing things to be ambiguous? It’s not just that there are all kinds of paintings and sculptures and books and pieces of music in this world, with all kinds of cultures to do with how these things are made, received, and interpreted (and so on). What it is, and this is the most basic thing perhaps, is that you have no idea what this artwork will “say” to you next: it’s especially obvious when you’ve lived with a favorite piece for several years.
Deeper still, there is something strange that happens in the appreciation of art, which many philosophers have found disturbing. It’s disturbing how the experience of relating to art, for example, makes it difficult—sometimes impossible—to sustain the valley across which we see other entities as “other.” Let’s see how. It’s pretty obvious that art has an effect on me, and this effect is to a large extent unbidden: I didn’t ask for it, which is part of the fun. I had no idea I could be affected in precisely this way. My whole sense of what “affect” means has been transformed by this artwork—and so on. When I love an artwork, it is as if I am in some strange kind of mind meld with it, something like telepathy, even though I “know very well” (or do I?) that this thing I’m appreciating isn’t conscious, isn’t sentient, isn’t even alive. I am experiencing unknown effects on me coming from something that I am caught up with in such a way that I can’t tell who “started it”—am I just imposing my concepts of beauty on to any old thing, or is this thing totally overpowering me?
The real feeling of experiencing what we sometimes call beauty is neither about our putting a label on to things, nor of our being absolutely inert. Instead it’s like finding something in me that isn’t me: there is a feeling in my inner space that I didn’t cook up myself, and it seems to be sent to me from this “object” over there on the gallery wall, but when I try to find out exactly where this feeling is and what it is about the thing, or about me, that is the reason why I’m having this feeling, I can’t isolate it without ruining what precisely is beautiful about it.
What is the difference between tolerate and appreciate? It is all about this theme of coexisting. Tolerate means that within my conceptual reference frame, I allow something to exist, even though my frame doesn’t really allow it. Appreciate means that I just admire it, no matter what my reference frame is. That’s why we use the term appreciate to talk about art. No one says “I really tolerated that Beethoven string quartet” in a positive way. But you can easily say “I really appreciated that disco tune” and people will know that you mean something positive.
When you think about it like this, you can see why being able to appreciate ambiguity is at the basis of being ecological.
And do you know what this means? Your indifference to ecological things is exactly the sort of place where you will find the right kind of ecological feeling. This is one big reason why deleting the indifference too aggressively and too fast, by being preachy, doesn’t help at all. You don’t know why you should care: isn’t that what we are all feeling when we experience something beautiful? How come this chord sequence is making tears run down my face?
Reasons for being nice to other lifeforms abound, but around them there is a ghostly penumbra of feelings of appreciating them for no reason at all. Just loving something never has a great reason attached to it. If you can list all the reasons why you “should” love this particular person, you are probably not in love. If you have no idea, you might be nearer the mark. This ambiguous spectral aesthetic halo around ethical decisions doesn’t tell us how to act, or even whether or not to act. It has a “passive” quality about it, as if even our distinction between active and passive were not that thin and rigid, and that what is often meant by passive is in fact the penumbra we are talking about. Is how you relate to a beautiful artwork active or passive? You certainly don’t want to eat it, because that would get rid of it, and you like it. But it’s not clobbering you either. It’s affecting you, but in a nonviolent way.
When you tolerate another lifeform, it’s like leaving them in the Uncanny Valley, although you admit that you need to go down and help them—returning afterward to your peak. When you appreciate a lifeform, for no good reason, it’s as if you made the Uncanny Valley a bit shallower. If you carry on like that, the Uncanny Valley starts to flatten out. It flattens out into something I like to call the Spectral Plain.
What is the Spectral Plain? It’s a region that seems totally flat, and it extends in all directions. And on this plane, I can’t distinguish very easily between alive and not alive, between sentient and non-sentient, between conscious and non-conscious. All my categories, which excavated the valley, start to malfunction. And they malfunction deeply. If they just went away, I would have my answer: I would be able to collapse life into nonlife, for example, so that really, there are no living beings, just bunches of chemicals (this is a popular materialist reductionist solution to the problems of knowing a lot). According to this, the malfunction can be fixed: I can eliminate ambiguity. In that case, what was wrong with the Uncanny Valley was precisely that it made me feel ambiguous.
But I don’t think that’s what’s wrong with the Uncanny Valley. I think what’s wrong with the Uncanny Valley is the peaks on either side of it. What’s wrong is that we aren’t in it ourselves—nor are the robots we like to think of as lovable toys. Remember, this is an experiential valley where beings such as zombies live in between peaks: we “healthy” humans live on one peak, and all the cuter robots on the other. Zombies live in the Uncanny Valley because although they embody Cartesian dualism of mind and body, which is how we like to think about ourselves, they do so not in the standard, “nice” way: they are animated corpses. It is as if they are mocking this dualism—they are a parody of this dualism—as if when we look at them we have a fantasy concept that shows us that there is something actually very wrong with mind–body dualism.
The Uncanny Valley concept explains racism and is itself racist. Its decisive separation of the “healthy human being” and the cute R2D2 type robot (not to mention Hitler’s dog Blondi, of whom he was very fond) opens up a forbidden zone filled with uncanny beings that reside scandalously in the Excluded Middle region. The distance between R2D2 and the healthy human seems to map quite readily on to how we feel and live the scientistic separation of subject and object, and this dualism always implies repressed abjection as we have just seen. R2D2 and Blondi are cute because they are decisively different and less powerful. It is this hard separation of things into subjects and objects that gives rise to the uncanny, forbidden Excluded Middle zone of entities who approximate “me”—the source of anti-Semitism to be sure, the endless policing of what counts as a human, the defense of Homo sapiens from the Neanderthals.33 Racism, to name but one instance of prejudice, is when you try to pretend that there is a clean difference between you as a human and other, friendly beings “over there” on the other peak, the one we call Nature. Because that means you have created a steep and profound valley in which all kinds of related beings are trapped so that you can’t see them. If you like, you can have subjects (us) versus objects (Hitler’s dog, R2D2, those faceless industrial robots, stones) because you have abjects (the beings in the valley) and you have “disappeared” them. You look across the valley at R2D2 and see that he’s very different from you (speciesism) because you have hidden all the uncanny intervening beings in the shallow valley between you and the cute little robot.
As the valley flattens into the plain, everything gains back a little bit of the abjection you were trying to dispose of down the toilet of the valley.
There are some basic rules of politeness on the Spectral Plain, and these have to do with the idea of hospitality to strangers. On what does such a hospitality depend? Ultimately, it depends on the weird idea of being hospitable to some being you couldn’t possibly be hospitable to. There is a sort of impossible, spectral hospitality to the inhospitable that haunts the more straightforward kinds of hospitality, without which it would be sunk.
The deep reason for the necessarily veering quality of attunement, its oblique, slipping and sliding style, is that the beings to which it attunes are themselves slippery and uncanny. Evolution presents us with a continuum: humans and fish are related, so that if you go back far enough, you’ll find that one of your very, very distant grandmothers was a fish. Yet you are not a fish. Wherever we slice the continuum, we will find paradoxes like that. Lifeforms are irreducibly uncanny—this means that the more we know about them, the stranger they become; science doesn’t make it better, science makes it worse. This is why I coined the term strange stranger to refer to them. We find ourselves in the position of host, permanently. And hosting depends on an uneasy sense of welcome—who’s going to show up through the door? The word host stems from a Latin word that can mean both friend and enemy.34 We literally host all kinds of beings that can flip from friend to enemy in a moment—that’s what having an allergic reaction is all about. Symbiosis, which is how lifeforms interconnect, is made up of all kinds of uneasy relationships, where beings aren’t in total lockstep with one another.
There is a sort of ethical and political Uncanny Valley too. What happens when we let the specters out of that Valley, the specters that haunt us with supposedly divergent versions of what counts as human? What happens when it becomes an ethical-political Spectral Plain?
When care is ramped up, stripped down, simplified in order to boost its energy—so we think—it loses some very precious qualities. Let’s think again about that CARE/LESS calligraphy I was describing toward the start of this book, a beautiful encapsulation of the issue, in which seeming “careless” might blend into being “carefree,” and where some modes of “care” might end up being too heavy-handed. I’m not saying you can save Earth by playing videogames on the couch. I’m saying that being ecological, which is what this book is all about, isn’t the same as being religious in a tight way, even though it isn’t the same as being an atheist in a tight way either—because that’s just upside-down religion. Since organized religion is an agricultural-age way for agricultural society to understand itself, it is riddled with the kinds of bug that have helped to destroy Earth. “Store up your treasure in heaven” (as Jesus advises) means you don’t need to worry so much about what happens down here, because it’s less real and less important. Heidegger observed that Christianity was Platonism for the masses. I’m observing that, historically speaking at least, Platonism is Neolithic theism for the educated elite.
It’s the same as how truthiness haunts truth. You could imagine this ambiguous care/less care/free quality as a specter, like the specters on the Spectral Plain, a sort of ethical specter. It weirdly shadows and doubles and undermines and reinforces it. In short, it’s a bit of a problem: but trying to shave this penumbra off and achieve a more smooth-looking form of care creates bigger problems. The care/less-ness of indifference haunts care. But if we exorcise that ghost, we’re back to survival for the sake of survival, and how’s that been working out so far for life on this planet? We are so busy, and our current neoliberal machinations are just the latest upgrade to a busy, busy mentality that has been gripping us since 10,000 BCE. The one emotion we love to hate in the media is apathy.
I recall, as a proud (?) member of Generation X, how we were being told we didn’t care enough about anything through the 1990s. It’s funny, because as I looked around as the twenty-something me, I saw a lot of care in the “civilized” world: people getting depressed by modern working conditions, people going into despair about environmental issues, nuclear families going subatomic, teenage years now extending to the age of thirty. Against the happy-happy enforcement of care, seeming a bit slack (a term we now use as Richard Linklater’s film Slacker uses it) was a wonderfully refreshing stance.35 I guess we could distinguish between claustrophobic, plastic forms of care, and more aerated, flexible ones.
I love being an X-er. The advertising, PR-type people who come up with these labels didn’t know what label to slap on us, because we weren’t behaving as we should. It’s interesting if you are in the lineages of deconstructive philosophy as I am (Heidegger, Derrida, and on). When Heidegger writes the word Being he puts it under a letter X, a gesture that Derrida calls putting under erasure. You can’t say Being positively with a straight face, it makes Being look all bloated and solid like a huge blank bar of bland soap.
The CARE/LESS is the halo of care, its aura. When it gets hand-wringing, ecological talk retains a strong smell of the agricultural-age machinating that got us into this mess—it’s that huge blank bar of bland soap again. I don’t want to live in the world that kind of machinating would bring about. It would make the ways in which this current world sucks (to use a Gen-X term) look like the best thing that ever happened to anyone. I’m talking about a world based on greater and greater efficiency, greater and greater control of energy. You can see this is how some people think about an ecological society. Instead, I think it’s a world in which we can be so much more generous and creative than we’ve ever been, so much less “caring” in that way that is hostile to actual lifeforms: survival mode.
Plastic care, stripped down and efficient, is highly toxic, especially when you scale it up to Earth magnitude and operate like that for 12,500 years. What is required instead is playful care. This doesn’t mean care that is cynical. We actually have quite a lot of that: big corporations now enforce “fun” in a most coercive manner. You are supposed to sing company songs or participate in collective team-building activities, or use videogame-like interfaces for working (“gamification”). We need something like the inverse, something like a playful seriousness. This mode would have a slight smile on its face, knowing that all solutions are flawed in some way. Expanded care, care with the care/less halo, is more likely to include more lifeforms under its umbrella, because it is less focused on sheer survival. The contrast we sometimes draw between selfishness and altruism is made from within a streamlined care outlook. You think there is a self and that therefore it needs protecting and boosting, and that caring for things that aren’t the self would therefore involve some almost impossible to imagine emptying of the self, which in some agricultural-age religious domains is called kenosis, the Greek for “emptying.” That doesn’t sound fun and it doesn’t even sound possible. It’s a setup. It’s like how people are scornful about Buddhism—how can you desire to get rid of desire?
If I don’t get behind this expanded care idea, then really, this whole book has been a big waste of time. Because while I’ve been letting myself off the hook and not yelling factoids at you, secretly I’m not letting you off the hook and secretly I’m preaching to you, trying to convert you in a sneakier way. I’m machinating, but under the radar. That would mean that the whole way I wrote this was actually the opposite of playful seriousness: it was serious playfulness, goal-directed and “fun.” I’d be trying to persuade you, and I think believing means holding on for dear life, and this is just a sales pitch.
So, in fact, I meant it all along, dear reader. I meant it when I said you didn’t need to delete your indifference. You are quite right. You work so hard and you get so little in return, you have to smile relentlessly at work, you have to be your own paparazzo and upload a selfie to Facebook every five minutes, you have to “Like” (that button) the right sorts of thing. In Freudian terms, your poor little ego is under attack from both sides, from the impulses of the id and the demands of the superego, both irrational and often superimposed, in our culture of “repressive desublimation.”36 And now I’m asking you to get all frantic about polar bears too? On top of everything else? So much frantic clicking, so much preening of exactly the right thing to say, a goal whose posts change every day, like the statistics. The thing about the superego is, it’s impossible to fulfill its demands. Is it a feature of our psyches or a bug? Whatever the case, it’s been inflamed by agricultural-age religion and its current ecological incarnation is therefore, however well-meaning, a way of perfuming ecology space with exactly the wrong smell: the smell of busy, busy, zealous, industrious, “just keep swimming, just keep swimming” intensity.37
Perhaps some of us care in all the wrong ways—too aggressively, too melancholically, too violently. Heidegger argues that even indifference is a form of care.38 Perhaps indifference itself is pointing to a way to care for humans and nonhumans in a less violent way—simply allowing them to exist, like pieces of paper in your hand, like a story you might appreciate—or not—for no reason.39
I meant it, dear reader. Your indifference contains ecological chemicals, so don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Actually, maybe you need to keep the baby and its ambiguous bathwater, and throw out the idea that you need to throw things out at all. In the final chapter, we’ll be examining a few current styles of throwing-out in the name of being ecological, and we’ll be contrasting these with being ecological in a way that doesn’t reject ambiguity.
1. The documentary Crude is worth watching to get a sense of what happened in Ecuador: Joe Berlinger, dir., Crude (Entendre Films, Radical Media, Red Envelope Entertainment, 2009).
2. Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 29.
3. David Eagleman, “Who Is in Control?,” The Brain, episode 3 (PBS, 2015–).
4. The work of Jacques Derrida has been devoted to this theme in numerous ways.
5. George Lucas, dir., Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977).
6. One of the best places to start is Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
7. The phrase is the title of Lacan’s twenty-first seminar.
8. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
9. Gillian Beer, “Introduction,” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), xxvii–xxviii.
10. The glass example is explored in detail in Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 193.
11. Timothy Morton, “Buddhaphobia: Nothingness and the Fear of Things,” in Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 185–266.
12. Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 40–57; Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia, 2016), 120–123.
13. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick, intro. Mark Edmundson (London: Penguin, 2003), 43–102.
14. Alex Proyas, dir., Dark City (New Line Cinema, 1998).
15. Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner (Warner Bros., 1982).
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Stephen Houlgate, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.
17. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171.
18. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer, intro. Anne Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 2.1.63 (p. 99).
19. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1.163.
20. Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
21. Aaron D. O’ Connell et al., “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator,” Nature 464 (17 March 2010), 697–703; Amir H. Safavi-Naeini, “Observation of Quantum Motion of a Nanomechanical Resonator,” Physical Review Letters, art. 033602 (17 January 2012).
22. The recent work of Anton Zeilinger has been devoted to eliminating loopholes in nonlocality theory, in other words, maintaining the paradox of two entities tuning to one another simultaneously.
23. Oxford English Dictionary, “Weird,” adj. http://www.oed.com, accessed 9 April 2014.
24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), 84–85.
25. I am grateful to Tanya Busse for discussing this with me.
26. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in Margaret A. Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 40–66; René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. and intro. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 2000).
27. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, intro. Thomas McKevilley (Santa Monica and San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1986).
28. O’Doherty, White Cube, 35–64.
29. The Beatles, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967).
30. John Ruskin, “The Seven Lamps of Architecture: The Lamp of Memory,” in Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16–27 (25).
31. This is a deep implication of Hermann Minkowski’s geometrical proof of relativity theory.
32. See, for example, O’Connell et al., “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator”; Safavi-Naeini et al., “Observation of Quantum Motion of a Nanomechanical Resonator.”
33. Giorgio Agamben argues about this in The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33–38.
34. There is a very profound essay by Jacques Derrida on this topic: “Hostipitality,” Acts of Religion, ed., trans., and intro. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 356–420.
35. Richard Linklater, dir., Slacker (Orion Classics, 1990).
36. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, intro. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2002), 75–78.
37. I am quoting Dory from Andrew Stanton, dir., Finding Nemo (Buena Vista Pictures, 2003).
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 40–41, 113–114, 115, 116, 127.
39. Some serious ecological philosophy points in this direction. See, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).