Common Image: Towards a Larger Than Human Communism 9783839459393

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Ingrid Hoelzl, Rémi Marie Common Image

Image  | Volume 201

To our companions in this larger than human world

Ingrid Hoelzl is an independent scholar specializing in digital and environmental image theory, and the artistic director of the General Humanity collective bringing together theory, poetry, and performance. She holds a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a diploma in Fine Arts/Visual Culture Studies from the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has worked as a researcher and educator at universities and art academies worldwide. Her research on the soft- and postimage has been published in journals and anthologies, most recently in The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (2021). Rémi Marie is an independent writer and editor of the French online journal Art Debout. His work has been shown in museums, galleries, and theatres, such as the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, and Montevideo, Marseille, and published in reviews, such as Nioques and Le Quartanier. Since 2014, he has collaborated with Ingrid Hoelzl, coining the terms softimage and postimage. This work has been published in Photographies, Visual Studies, and Leonardo, among others.

Ingrid Hoelzl, Rémi Marie

Common Image Towards a Larger Than Human Communism

Text and illustrations if not mentioned otherwise: © 2021 Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie. Research for this work has been carried out with support by the EURIAS Fellowship Programme, co-funded by the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions, under the 7th Framework Programme.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Stone covered with lichen in Antronapiana valley, Italy. Color photograph, 2019. © 2021 Rémi Marie. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5939-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5939-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839459393 ISSN of series: 2365-1806 eISSN of series: 2702-9557 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Note to the Reader ...........................................................9 Introduction ................................................................. 11 Chapter 1 / Stone ............................................................ 17 Chapter 2 / Magic .......................................................... 29 Chapter 3 / Matter.......................................................... 37 Chapter 4 / Ocean .......................................................... 55 Chapter 5 / Points of View.................................................. 65 Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth............................................ 81 Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry............................................ 93 Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ ........................... 103 Chapter 9 / Travelling to the Warlpiri Country .............................. 117 Coda / Common Image .....................................................123

Appendix List of Illustrations .........................................................135 Bibliography................................................................ 137 Detailed Table of Contents .................................................153

  Through a multilingual, transtemporal process of “looking back, looking elsewhere,” Common Image collects from many cultures and historical moments the materials for creating a more just and more communal future. Its argument is deeply sensical: for the West to stop extracting and exploiting at the expense of untold others, past and present, widened perspectives built upon careful attending, respect for human and nonhuman agency, and a rediscovery of magic, myth and story will be required. A timely and important book. Jeffrey J Cohen, Author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) and coauthor of Earth: Object Lessons (2017)   The perspectival image, a powerful technology of humanist rationalism, which became invisible in its normalcy, is now disintegrating. The “I” composed by the two authors together maps the possibility of an image that comes after the image—to reshape the legacy of Western modernity towards mutualist ways of thinking the world. Forceful and broad in scope, the book proposes the common image through myths, magic, poetry, aesthesis, but also postcolonialism, community, ecology, multispecies, and many other dimensions. Can an image exist as a common relation? The book creates a concept and a figure—of a new, common image, as an ethical and aesthetic way of living. Olga Goriunova, Author of “Fermentation” for More Posthuman Glossary (2022) and (with Matthew Fuller) of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (2019)   Although in recent reinterpretations of communism the emphasis has shifted to the notion of the common, very little work has been done on the possibility of extending communism to other-than-human modes of existence. In Common Image, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie tackle this challenge with admirable thoroughness and theoretical breadth, while keeping an eye on the mediations—above all, images, which are not reducible to visuality—that render a larger than human communism possible. Michael Marder, Author of Green Mass (2021), Dump Philosophy (2020), and Plant-Thinking (2013)    

    Who said we were the dominant creature on this shit pile?   Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur         And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom? […] Only what is human can truly be foreign. The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.   Wisława Szymborska, Psalm

Note to the Reader

“To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I.”1 In this text, “I” is not a first person singular, but a first person plural; instead of a we— the gregarious mode of humans composed of segregated Is—this generic I incorporates plurality into a generic singularity. Instead of the myth of the Leviathan it follows the myth of a general humanity.2

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Gilles Deleuze and Fėlix Guattari, “1-Introduction: Rhizome,” in a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1987), 3. Originally published as Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 : Mille plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). The notion is also at the core of General Humanity, the eponymous collective for theory-performance that I co-founded in 2018. The fourth General Humanity Lab, PEAK HUMANITY, which took place in June 2021, brought together poetry and theory, music and dance to think and perform peak humanity and what may come after it: https://generalhumanity.org/general-humanity-lab-4-peak-huma nity/.

Introduction

It took us Westerners centuries to invent, improve, and perfect the thing we call the “image,” and it is difficult to imagine that, until forced into contact, non-Western cultures have not seen any need for it.1 The perspectival image has been a foundation of humanist ideology, which located Homo sapiens at the center of an inanimate, dumbfounded “world” in need of human ruling; it has been a foundation of the ideology of rationality, progress, and human exceptionalism on which we have erected an objective and predatory relationship to the world. With the collapse of the humanist episteme in the 20th century and the opening of a posthumanist episteme,2 the image, if still saturating our walls, minds, and screens, has become an empty, meaningless sign, whose only potency is to dissimulate networked processes of

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With “image” I mean the perspectival image that has fostered (centuries before the invention of photographs) the “photographic paradigm” of the image, the fact that we see the world as image and the image as world. See Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, “The Photographic Paradigm of the Image – What You See is What You See,” in SOFTIMAGE: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image (London: Intellect, 2015), 94-96. I refer here to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of humanism collapsing with the second world war. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Redwood City/CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). For Foucault and Deleuze, the figure of human emerges in the nineteenth century (coupled with carbon) to give way to a new figure in the late twentieth century (coupled with silicone). See Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990/2003), 137.

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ever increasing surveillance and control.3 This hijacking, accelerated by its most recent metamorphosis, the digital, forces us to reevaluate and readjust what was our primary mode of relation to the world. It forces us to search for an image that is coherent with the givens of the posthumanist episteme and its non-pyramidal cartography of ecosystem Earth; an image weaved with the multilateral and multidimensional strands between organic and inorganic beings, with the countless threads that compose the delicate and complex fabric of the Earth; a common image.4 If central perspective placed us humans (that is, the abstract, oneeyed subject) in a position of dominion over our fellow creatures allowing for the exploitation, pillage, and devastation of human and natural resources, the incipient apocalypse caused by the mutual imbrication of geological and human activity (carbon emissions, resource depletion, pollution, etc.) forces us to either technologically adapt to a damaged planet by way of transhumanism, geoengineering, and robotization, or abandon our “superiority complex.” This complex has its roots in the Jewish-Christian myth of Genesis, whereby humans are called to “lord

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4

See my article, “Image-Transaction”, in which I propose the term “image-screen” to refer to the conflation of image and screen in digital environments; and the term “transactional image” to highlight the bifurcation of the image into a representational (onscreen) part and an algorithmic (offscreen part); the latter is part of transactions of surveillance and control which the former obfuscates, acting as a “lure” and a screen in the sense of camouflage. Ingrid Hoelzl, “ImageTransaction,” in Networked Liminality, ed. Grant Bollmer and Yiğit Soncul, Parallax 26, no.1 (September 2020), 20-33. My call resonates with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s attempt to bring together feminist notions of care with posthumanism. Bellacasa draws on Joan Tronto’s definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3. Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993).

Introduction

over entire creation.” Closer reading, however, reveals that in the archaic story of creation (Genesis, book II) earthling Adam (derived from Hebrew Adamah, Earth) is “put inside the garden to cultivate it and care for it”—a gardener then, not a lord.5 Be it lord or gardener, both versions place humans apart from the rest of creation, a splitting that can also be found in non-Western mythologies. The belief in the boundlessness of human ingenuity in Western modernity, however, runs so deep that today’s Anthropocene discourse and its critique of modern technoscience and global capitalism is nothing but its flip side: the belief that anthropogenic geological change may be undone or at least mitigated with the help of “green” technology and geoengineering (cloud seeding, carbon capture, sun blocking, etc.).6 This is why we need to diffract our tales of origin with other, more humble cosmogonies. Techno-salvation or humility: Two divergent paths are open to us, both fostering a novel image of ourselves, the world, and our situation and role within the world. In my previous book, SOFTIMAGE, I anticipated the oppressive course of the first path whereby the image, with digitalization, becomes merged with software. “Operative images” 5

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Genesis integrates multiple versions. In the version that is latest chronologically, but first in the text (and which is called the priestly version because it was written by the priests after return from exile in Babylonia), Adam is made master and king of creation. In the following version of the text, the so-called archaic version that probably originated in an older Mesopotamian mythology, IHVHAdonaï Elohîms takes earthling Adâm and puts him in the garden of Eden to “cultivate it and care for it”. Genesis 2:15, in Complete Jewish Bible. Revised translation of the public domain 1917 Jewish Publication Society version of the Old Testament (Tanakh) by Dr. David H. Stern (Jerusalem: Jewish New Testament Publications Inc., 1998). There is consensus that the Anthropocene started with industrialization and increased carbon dioxide emissions. But beginning of the Holocene epoch set at 11.7 thousand years ago coincides with the so-called Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution that already marked human dominion over the entire creation, including themselves. For an insightful account of the Neolithic Revolution as the domestication of plants, animals, and humans see James C. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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execute corporate and government surveillance camouflaged beneath a representative and user-friendly surface, the screen.7 Only six years later, we are catapulted into an age of biosecurity and biodigital intelligence where the softimage is ushering in the dawn of softhumanity. With COMMON IMAGE, I seek to envisage a different future for the image and the human (different from that of a Martian elite and a Terrian proletariat).8 This means looking back, activating all our rational, imaginary and creative resources to question the roots of our civilization and its disfunctions (pace Freud). This means upending the dustbin of Western culture and reappropriating all the (religious, philosophical, and scientific) refuse of canonical thought; this means appealing to magic, to poetry, to fiction. Above all, this means looking elsewhere, turning to non-Western cultures and modes of thought in my pursuit of an image common to all constituents of ecosystem Earth.9 The first chapters of the book dig into the basic stratum of rational thought, exploring its separation and possible reunification in “common ground.” STONES looks at (or rather talks to) the lithic as a mediator between the living and the (supposedly) non-living; a mediator also between the world of reason and the world of magic: a corner stone, so to speak, for what follows. From stones and their (magical) agency, MAGIC delves deeper into a detailed search for the origin of the concept of magic: from the Zoroastrian priests in Persia to its labeling as “impious ritual” by the first philosophers in Ancient Greece, as heresy by the Christian Church Fathers, and as superstition by modern science. Back to Athens of the fourth century BC, MATTER revisits Plato’s 7 8 9

Hoelzl and Marie, SOFTIMAGE. See also Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s Evil Media (Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2012). See Hoelzl and Marie, “The Martian Image (on Earth),” Chapter 14, The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). In Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant (Marseille: Wildproject, 2016) environmental philosopher and wolf tracker Baptiste Morizot develops the notion of “animal diplomacy” meaning a generic ethology between different species (in particular, wolves and humans) that allows for cohabitation and mutualism instead of concurrence, exploitation, and extermination.

Introduction

famous cave, the origin myth of philosophy (and the prototype of cinema), reexamines Greek and modern origin myths of the image and proposes a materialist rereading of the cave allegory. Tim Ingold’s critique of hylomorphism (ideas “forming” inert matter) in favor of intelligence as a collective rather than individual capability, paves the way for my own hypothesis of the image as the inextricable intertwining of idea and matter through common activity. OCEAN scrutinizes Ursula Biemann’s video installation Acoustic Ocean (2018) to introduce my concept of the “sound image” as oceanic resonance based on Hartmut Rosa’s notion of “resonance” as a “vibrating wire to the world.” From there, the feeling of boundlessness and infinite connectedness associated with mystical experience known as “oceanic feeling” (and dismissed by Freud as a residue of infancy) opens up new aspects of the common image. POINTS OF VIEW takes off to the Amazon Basin in search of permanent decolonization of thought—the new mission of anthropology according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro—and alights in the space of crisis opened between philosophy and anthropology, a space of equivocation, of untranslatable thought in a post-geometric, ndimensional world where every being, every thing is its own point of view, yet partakes in a virtual or general humanity. Back to Europe and the Middle Ages, THE TIME OF THE MYTH recalls various human/animal transformations in its myths and poetry, then fast-forwards to present times with philosopher Baptiste Morizot and anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s framing of the emergence of hybrid species due to climate change as a resurgence of the “time of the myth,” where relations between species are not stabilized. FROM MYTH TO POETRY answers Ursula Le Guin’s call for an “art of the plant” in fostering the notion of the “image of the plant” as the ensemble of the sensorial, chemical, and electrical relations that plants create and maintain within their ecosystem, and, by inference, the notion of the image as the eco-relations that constitute ecosystem Earth. WINDJARRAMERU, THE STEALING C*NT$ moves to the Northern Territories, Australia, discussing the eponymous ethnofiction film by anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective to tighten the notion

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of the common image as the (re)invention of a shared world at the meeting point between two cultures. TRAVELING TO THE WARLPIRI COUNTRY takes the reader further inwards encountering the Warlpiri “major religious belief, the Jukurrpa” and more specifically, the Warlpiri term kuruwarri—literally translating as image, trace, mark, imprint, life, and force—for which anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski has coined the term “image-force.” The chapter concludes by bringing together Aboriginal thought with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of Life/zoe as the generative vitality that encompasses life and death; it posits that the common image is not a sign, but an aesthetics involving the living and the non-living; that it is not a framing of the world by and for humans, but a shared ethics, a way of living. COMMON IMAGE returns to the point of departure and recapitulates the book’s journey through magic, matter, perspectivism, myth and poetry, art and animism. It ponders (with Marie-Alice Chardeaux) the complex etymology and legal history of the words “common” and the “commons,” opposes (with Roberto Esposito) the notions of community and immunity, and discusses (with Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser) the notion of the “uncommons” as the continuous negotiating of difference. The final chords of the coda sound the “practices of communization” (Rafanell i Orra) always-already at work in the world. When the silence falls, the common image is there, around and between us.

Chapter 1 / Stone

To be sure, some geologists have long thought that although rocks cannot exactly die and definitely cannot be murdered, they do come into existence. In the massive twilight of these gigantic earthmovers it is hard not to be seduced by the figure of the Desert, not to imagine that the Anthropocene, the geological age of the Human Being, will be the last age of humans and the first stage of Earth becoming Mars, a planet once awash in life, but now a dead orb hanging in the night sky.   Elizabeth Povinelli, “Can Rocks Die?”1 I like picking out books at random in libraries, browsing through shelves. At Central European University’s library in Budapest, where I started to put into writing my ideas about what a non-perspectival, non-humanist image could be, the works of fiction occupy a very small part of the library. There can be found an eclectic mix of mostly Eastern European fiction, donated by departing faculty, stocked according to country. After having worked through some Hungarian volumes, I began picking to the left and to the right and ended up taking home a collection of poems by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. Reading through them was a strange exercise; their deep humanism touched me as much as I found it out of date. But what exactly is out of date? The 1

Elizabeth Povinelli, “Can Rocks Die? Life and Death inside the Carbon Imaginary,” in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 43 and 36.

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hope that humans can improve and with them, the state of the world? The humanist values of freedom (of speech), of equality, of fraternity? At the same time, the poems carry a critical humanist undertone, critical of the humanist hubris that we are the center of the world, that we can understand the world through science, that we master the world through technology, that there is a natural hierarchy of god, men, animals, plants, and all the rest. One poem in Szymborska’s collection, entitled Conversation with a Stone—originally published in 1962 in the volume Salt—particularly struck me.2 Or, let’s say, it resonated with a conundrum that I had been struggling with for the previous two years, the conundrum of new materialism’s attempt to dissolve the dichotomy between nature/culture in a mutual subsumption: all matter is meaningful, and all meaning is matter3 —relationality, creativity, and expression not being the distinctive mark of the human, but disseminated across animate and inanimate matter.4 Conversation with a Stone is a communication about the refusal of communication that puts forth—in the form of a dialogue between a human and a stone—all the arguments against the possibility that a human may ever truly converse with its absolute other, a stone.5 It starts with the narrator knocking at a stone’s front door, asking to enter its inside, to have a look, to breathe it. The stone refuses, arguing that it is shut tight, and that even when ground to sand there would

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Wisława Szymborska, Conversation with a Stone, in View with a Grain of Sand. Selected Poems, trans. Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 30-32. Vicky Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Serenella Iovina and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014). See in this context Eugene Thacker’s chapter “Dark Media” that deals with the paradox of communications of refusal to communicate, of announcing the end of communication (“there will be no more communication”), in Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication. Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 77-149.

Chapter 1 / Stone

be no entry point. The narrator knocks again and insists that she wants to enter still, out of curiosity, as much as she wants to enter a leaf, a drop of water, and that her mortality should touch the stone. The stone answers that being a stone means it has no emotions: it keeps “a straight face,” it doesn’t “have the muscles to laugh.”6 The narrator pleads with the stone, elucidating the beauty of its great empty halls—vain beauty if unseen, soundless if not echoing anyone’s steps, unknown even to the stone itself. The stone answers that there may be great and empty halls, but that there is no room in them; that they may be beautiful, but not to her poor senses; that its surface is turned towards the narrator, but that its insides are turned away. The narrator insists, arguing that she is quite happy to return to her world, that she won’t take anything away from the stone, that her proof of having been there will be only words that nobody will believe. “You shall not enter,” says the stone. “You lack the sense of taking part. No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part. Even sight heightened to become all-seeing will do you no good without a sense of taking part. You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be, only its seed, imagination.”7 The narrator begs the stone again to let her in on the grounds of her mortality. The stone answers that she should ask a leaf, a drop of water, and even a hair from her own head, and that they would all tell her the same; and that it is bursting with laughter, even if it does not know how to laugh. The narrator knocks at the stone’s front door one last time, asking to be let in. “I don’t have a door,” says the stone.8 [End of conversation] 6 7 8

Szymborska, Conversation with a Stone, 30. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32.

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What strikes me in this poem is the ease with which the problem is posed through a seemingly naive rhetorical strategy: personification. The stone here is a human-like person endowed with the capacity to speak, but it converses with the narrator only to categorically refute any possibility of encounter. The entire poem is an elegy to the profound otherness of the stone, which “does not have a door,” and a blow to the all-too-human hubris of thinking otherwise. We may know its surface, but we will never find a point of entry, even if we grind it to sand. Humans may have senses, but humans and stones lack what I’d like to call “common ground.” And yet, we do share common ground, and we do share our material ground, except that this ground is polarized along an arbitrary subject/object axis. The relation between the narrator and the stone is a unilateral relation from subject to object; it is a soliloquy about an object. Yet the human is also an object for the human. Does it have a door? It does not! Even if we have a plethora of techniques to enter it, be these the common techniques of food, sex, and drugs, or the more invasive techniques of surgery, psychoanalysis, and psychopharmacology or the diverse imaging techniques that render the body permeable and measurable, we still cannot fully know its insides, while its thoughts, emotions, and actions remain (for now) unpredictable. In The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) eco-phenomenologist David Abram writes that we are not only living on the earth but dwelling in a complex entity, composed of a solid part, the ground, and a fluid part, the atmosphere.9 Could we not say the same about the stone? Is the stone only a solid and impenetrable thing? Doesn’t it also include the atmosphere around it, and plants growing on it or in its shade, and insects feeding on and pollinating those plants, thus constituting a micro-Mitwelt whose members engage in a constant give and take? What if we now invert the tale, with the stone asking to enter the human? This move will lead us straight to mythology, as in the story of the Titaness Rhea,

9

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World (New York: Vintage, 1997).

Chapter 1 / Stone

daughter of the Earth goddess Gaia and sister and wife of Cronus. Fearing being overthrown by his own child like he himself overthrew his father Uranus, Cronus devours his children at birth. Rhea saves the last of them, Zeus, by providing Cronus with a stone also known as the Omphalos Stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly swallows. We share not only common ground but also common air with the stone, and much more if we live in a cave or a house made of stones, or when we climb a cliff, etc. As Elizabeth Povinelli relates in “Can Rocks Die?”, the second chapter of her book Geontologies (2016), sacred rocks can hear and smell Aboriginal people passing by, a belief that is very difficult for Western people to adopt: We stood listening to Betty Billawag describing to the land commissioner and his entourage how an important Dreaming site nearby, Old Man Rock, listened to and smelled the sweat of Aboriginal people as they passed by hunting, gathering, camping, or just mucking about. She outlined the importance of such human-Dreaming/environmental interactions to the health and productivity of the countryside. At one point Marjorie Bilbil turned to me and said, “He can’t believe, eh, Beth?” And I answered, “No, I don’t think so, not him, not really. He doesn’t think she is lying. He just can’t believe himself that that Old Man Rock listens.”10 In “Can Rocks Die?”, Povinelli argues that the differentiation between life and non-life which is one of the fundaments of Western culture, is no longer defensible—neither at the symbolic level at which the question if Old Man Rock can hear and smell cannot be answered, nor at the scientific level where the chemical interactions between life and non-life are innumerable.11 But hers is not a call for a generic animism

10 11

Povinelli, “Can Rocks Die?”, 34. “But these days the more we press on the skin of life the more unstable it feels for maintaining the concept of Life as distinct from Nonlife, let alone the existence of any particular life form. Take, for example, the biochemical reactions that have allowed biologists to understand the distinctions between and in-

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which would englobe all other modes in our own human mode of existence (life). For Povinelli, animism, at base, is a reassuring anthropomorphism which refuses to acknowledge alterity: The Animist says, Life no longer needs to face its terror—the lifeless, the inert, and the void of being—because we can simply refuse to acknowledge any other way of existing than our own. We can simply extend those attributes that some regions of human existence define as the most precious qualities of life (birth, becoming, actualization) to all forms of existence, to existence as such. We can saturate Being with familiar and reassuring qualities. We do not have to face a more arduous task of the sort Luce Irigaray phrased as moving from being the other of the same to becoming (being) the other of the other.12 This judgment on the part of an anthropologist who has been working over the last decades with Aboriginal communities stands in contrast to the pro-animist stance taken by structuralist anthropology (LéviStrauss) and its heirs (Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro who I will discuss later in this book); attributing qualities such as intention and the power to act to non-living beings such as stones may

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terdependencies of metabolic processes across the categories of life, namely, the two major forms of biological redox: plant-based photosynthesis and animal respiration. Plant-based photosynthesis uses solar (light) energy to convert carbon dioxide, its source of carbon, and water into glucose (C6H12O6), its source of internal energy. The chemical equation is 6CO2 + 6H2O + light energy → C6H12O6 + 6O2. The glucose is stored in plants and, as enzymes remove hydrogen from the glucose, is used as energy for growth and reproduction. Animal-based life uses organic compounds such as plants as its source of carbon and uses redox reactions as its energy source. Its cells consume organic compounds containing stored and processed carbon, C6H12O6 + 6O2, and then expel 6CO2 + 6H2O through a series of redox reactions based on respiration. […] Respiration is, indeed, one of the fundamental qualities of living things—“respiration” in humans is a mode of bringing oxygen into the system and expelling carbon dioxide, a form of taking in and getting rid of that indicates a self-oriented aboutness if not consciousness.” Povinelli, “Can Rocks Die?”, 40. Povinelli, “Can Rocks Die?”, 55. Povinelli refers to Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaka/CA: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Chapter 1 / Stone

indeed—if we follow Povinelli—be as anthropocentric and problematic as the exclusion of those very beings in the name of the superiority of human reason; both approaches may simply hallucinate a world “in the image of the human.” But remember, not so long ago we Westerners considered stones to be capable of acting on our behalf. Pîtres in Brittany,13 for instance, where late twelfth century poet Marie de France situated her lay The Two Lovers, was a ritual site of stone worship until the nineteenth century. Pilgrims walked around the stone, making their devotions and offerings. In order to be cured of sickness, they also rubbed themselves against the stone or lay down on it.14 And in remote regions of Europe where ancient pagan practices survive, stones are still considered to act on our behalf. In “About a Stone. Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality” (2016), Hugo Reinert addresses such practices involving a Sami sacrifice stone in Northern Norway. The article, published in the journal Environmental Humanities, combines the author’s personal account of the complex relation to a recently acquired piece of land and its vegetal or animal inhabitants with a reflection on the different magical practices connected to the stone—such as the offerings made by Sami people to the stone, and how these practices are part of a relation that the local people cultivate with that particular stone, and with that particular place. As a magical stone, it is part of a complex ecology involving a specific (multispecies) site and a specific (magical) culture; as a stone, it is part of a geological era that started millions of years earlier than the current epoch of resource capitalism also known by the name of the Anthropocene. This fragile conjunction of magic, biology, and geology is threatened when the coastal mining company that exploits the region

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Pîtres (medieval Pistres) is a commune in Normandy in north-western France. It lies on the Seine. Historically, it had a bridge to prevent the Vikings from sailing up the river to Paris. It was here that King Charles the Bald promulgated the Edict of Pistres in 864. Philippe Walter, note to the lai Les deux amants (The Two Lovers), in Marie de France, Lais: texte et dossier. lecture accompagnée par Jean-Pierre Bordier, traduction en français moderne par Philippe Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 461.

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decides that the stone be removed as the place it occupies is coveted for further mining and profit-making. Yet before the plan can be carried out, the chief engineer dies and the project is halted. The stone has acted, so the rumor has it.

Figure 1: Mihail Siergiejevicz. Saami seid in the mountains of Nyavka Tundra in Russian Lapland. Color photograph, 2019. Creative commons license.

Source retrieved from: wikimediacommons

The chief engineer, dismissing its alleged magical powers as superstition, had proposed to displace the stone, but when he dies, the event is perceived as (and in fact creates) a subversion; the formerly suppressed way of magical thinking resurfaces within the hegemonic space of rationality, rendering the latter temporarily vulnerable. Magic, then, is not only a complex of beliefs, knowledges and practices that a vicious alliance of Christianism and capitalism with modern science and technology violently suppressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a historical period that feminist writer, activist, and self-des-

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ignated witch Starhawk calls “the time of the stakes.”15 It is an entire way of thinking that is indifferent to the subject/object binary as well as to the cause/effect logic, a way of thinking that rationalist philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Popper has violently discarded. Periodically being rediscovered by the alter-philosophies, following a thread which leads from Spinoza and Nietzsche to the processual philosophies of the early twentieth century (Whitehead, James, Dewey) and the late twentieth century (Simondon, Deleuze, Foucault), it thrives today in the philosophy of science (Stengers), in feminist materialism (Haraway, Braidotti, Barad, Bennett), and in ecofeminist philosophy (Irigaray, Hache).16 Jeffrey Cohen, a medievalist who co-edited a special issue of the journal postmedieval on ecomaterialism, which included a response essay by Jane Bennet,17 also wrote the book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015).18 His research generally “examines phenomena at once alien and intimate, exploring what monsters, misfits, foreigners, refugees, inhuman forces and objects, and matter that won’t stay put reveal about the

15 16

17 18

Starhawk, “Appendix A,” in Dreaming the Dark. Magic, Sex & Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 183-219. See, for instance, Irigaray’s In the Beginning, She Was (London/New Delhi/Singapore: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also her book co-authored with Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). For Emilie Hache, see her seminal anthology RECLAIM. Anthologie de textes écoféministes. Traduit de l'anglais par Emilie Noteris. Postface de Catherine Larrère (Paris: Editions Cambourakis, 2016), and her recent text “Born from Earth: A New Myth for Earthbounds,” in Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2020). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Ecomaterialism, special issue postmedieval 4, no. 1 (Spring 2013). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). See also his more recent publication Earth: Object Lessons, co-authored with Linda T. Elkins-Tanton (London/New Delhi/Singapore: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

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cultures that dream, fear and desire them.”19 Drawing on posthumanism and ecocriticism Stone investigates medieval stories of stones and magic and particularly insists on the myth of Stonehenge as recounted in The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (written in Latin in 1136) and its adaptation by the Norman poet Robert Wace, twenty years later. Cohen shows how Geoffrey’s text and Wace’s adaptation (Roman de Brut) launched two literary genres, the roman (with Chretien de Troyes) and the lay (with Marie de France), both authors writing shortly after Wace in around 1170-1180. But let us first read Cohen: Enter the magicians. These magi, the first in the text, and the first therefore in mainstream Arthurian myth, are charged by King Vortigern with finding a way to bring durability to a fugitive life. The magicians declare that such permanence can be found only in the creation of “a very strong tower” from stone. When a suitable site is chosen at Mount Snowdon, however, whatever blocks the masons erect are swallowed into the earth overnight. The magicians declare that to lay secure foundations the mortar must be sprinkled with the blood of “a young man who had no father”—with blood, that is, that carries none of the patrilineal history that has so far structured Geoffrey’s text, obsessed with genealogy and regnal persistence. A lad without a father is found, a surly and precocious boy named Merlin. […] His origin is vexed. In the form of a very handsome youth an incubus once made secret love with a nun in her chamber’s solitude. Eventually she bore a child. […] Enter the magicians. What Vortigern’s magi have unwittingly demanded is the shattering of that border between the quotidian (the ordinary world where people remain in the times and places history allots to them) and the extraordinary (the space of possibility where a cloistered nun can find love in the embrace of a mysterious, handsome knight). These magicians transport the History of the Kings of Britain into a new realm, where the rules that have so far structured the narrative’s unfolding shatter and are remade. Enter the magicians,

19

Personal website of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, http://jeffreyjeromecohen.com.

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enter stones that demand humans work in companionship with their obscure agency, and enter the genre of romance.20 (emphasis mine) The entering of the magicians marks the apparition of the literary genre of the roman, but it marks also the irruption of stones into (hi)story. One could say that the magicians introduce the pebble over which the carriage of history will stumble. As writes Cohen, what we have before is a history of lineage, of blood, but with the entering of the magicians, and in particular of Merlin, a young man without lineage and without history, a “true magician” if ever there was one, things change. The vertical time of history (of lineages, of genealogy) encounters a temporal breach in which a horizontal time of magic resurfaces, an instantaneous time that connects remote stories with each other; stories that evolve in non-chronological, non-linear time. Can we now think of the Sami sacrifice stone in a different way; not along the question of its magical capabilities, but rather as the confrontation of two mutually exclusive ways of relating to the world? Can we think of it as the site of confrontation of rationality, engineering, and the exploitation of resources where stones and other entities that do not move/grow are considered to be inert, dead matter, on the one side, and magical thought where stones, water, fire, plants, and animals are all considered to have, as much as humans, intention and the power to act, on the other?

20

Cohen, Stone, chapter “FORCE. The Adventure of Stone,” section “Improbable and Natural.” Kindle.

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Let us now dive a bit deeper into the genealogy of magic and of its dismantling, which is marked by the apparition of the word “magic” in Greek and Latin. What we retain from Homer on the subject is mainly linked to Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios who, like her sister Pasiphaë and her nieces Medea and Hecate, is a magician famous for turning humans into animals. But in fact the term itself never appears in The Odyssey, the oldest known text in which Circe is mentioned. When relating her meeting with Odysseus, king of Ithaca on his ten-year errancy after the siege of Troy (subject of another Homeric epic, The Iliad), Homer calls her πολυφάρμακου: Ὣς εἰπὼν παρὰ νηὸς ἀνήιον ἠδὲ θαλάσσης. Ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ἄρ᾽ ἔμελλον ἰὼν ἱερὰς ἀνὰ βήσσας Κίρκης ἵξεσθαι πολυφαρμάκου ἐς μέγα δῶμα, ἔνθα μοι Ἑρμείας χρυσόρραπις ἀντεβόλησεν ἐρχομένῳ πρὸς δῶμα, νεηνίῃ ἀνδρὶ ἐοικώς   But as I walked through the sacred grove, towards the great house of Circe, a goddess skilled in magic potions, Hermes of the Golden Wand, in the likeness of a young man at that charming age when down first covers the cheeks, met me as I approached. (Trans. A. S. Kline)1 1

“Odysseus tells his tale: Help from Hermes,” in Homer,The Odyssey, Book X: 251301, trans. A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2004, https://www.poetryintranslati on.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey10.php#anchor_Toc90267911.e's Open y.

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The god Hermes warns Odysseus about Circe, giving him an anti-potion which makes him resistant to her magic. He forces Circe to change his men, whom she had transformed into pigs, back into human form, but her female charms (sic) are still operative. She seduces him, and Odysseus and his crew remain a year with her. When I look closer at the term πολυφαρμάκου, what I find is “knowing many drugs or charms.”2 In what some scholars believe to be the transcript of an ancient oral poem, Homer (a name that most probably stands for an entire tradition of reworking the Iliad and the Odyssey)3 never uses the term “magician,” probably because the term is not part of the Greek vocabulary of the late eighth/early seventh century BC, believed to be the time of composition.4 Homer’s Circe is a goddess and she traps her victims thanks to her knowledge of remedies and poisons. Drugs are present in Homer’s work and knowledge of their properties and uses was certainly widespread. Nevertheless, almost all translators use the terms “magician,” “sorcerer,” “enchantress,” etc. It seems that the text and the myth have evolved through time, transforming the herbalist goddess into a magician. This evolution, this new sense introduced through the translation process, is what interests me. Where does the term “magic” come from? Where does this idea of magic, of magician come from?

2 3 4

Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ), https://lsj.gr/wiki/Main_Page. Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. Matthew W. Dickie, “Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World,” in The Formation and Nature of the Greek Concept of Magic (London: Routledge, 2001), 23.

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Figure 2: John William Waterhouse. Circe offering the Cup to Ulysses. Pencil on wove paper, 1891.

Source retrieved from: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The oldest reference to magicians is “known to appear” in a passage from Heraclitus at the end of the sixth century BC. “Known to appear,” or rather supposed to appear, for the actual text is lost. Later, in the fifth century BC, the Avestan term magâunô is used by Herodotus in reference to a sacerdotal caste of the Medes.5 At the end of the fifth 5

Herodotus, The Histories, Book 1, Chapter 101, Section 1, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920). According to the encyclopedia Britannica, “Media first appears in the texts of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858–824 bc), in which peoples of the land of ‘Mada’ are recorded. The inhabitants came to be known as Medes.” The Median tribes were united into a kingdom around 625 BC. In 612, they stormed Nineveh, putting an end to the Assyrian empire and taking over a large part of Iran, northern Assyria, and parts of Armenia. https://www.britannica.com/place/Media-ancient-region-Iran.

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century BC, Euripides, in his Orestes, relates “magus art” with drugs and gods (as we have seen with Circe, the herbalist goddess). Orestes decides to kill Helen, but at the very moment when he wants to strike, she disappears:6 Ἄφαντος, ὦ Ζεῦ καὶ γᾶ καὶ φῶς καὶ νύξ, ἤτοι φαρμάκοισιν ἢ μάγων τέχναις ἢ θεῶν κλοπαῖς. Gone! Zeus! Earth! Light of Day! Dark of Night! Maybe drugs, maybe magus art, maybe stolen by the gods! (Trans. George Theodoridis)7 Drugs, magus, art, and gods appear here as interchangeable powers of the extraordinary, the supernatural. The term magus (μαγοσ), which appears in Greek between the end of the sixth and the end of the fifth century, has several possible origins, all from Avestan, the language of Zoroastrian sacred texts. Magâunô, according to Herodotus, refers to the priestly caste of the Medes. Moghu, according to Robert Zaehner, refers to “a member of the tribe” (the moghus being the name of one of the Median tribes). A third term, magavan, or the one who masters the maga, refers both to the Zoroastrian teaching and the community

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With Euripides also appear new substantives, μαγεύμα for magic, μαγεύων for magician and μαγεύουσ for magical. In his Iphigenia in Tauris one finds: […] ἀνωλόλυξε καὶ κατῇδε βάρβαρα μέλη μαγεύουσ᾽, ὡς φόνον νίζουσα δή.μέλη (vase) μαγεύουσ᾽ (from μαγεύω, using magical means), φόνον (blood) νίζουσα (slaughtering). Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, in Euripidis Fabulae, vol. 2., ed. Gilbert Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1913), 1337-38. Available online: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999 .01.0111%3Acard%3D1327 And in The Suppliants one finds: βρωτοῖσι καὶ ποτοῖσι καὶ μαγεύμασι παρεκτρέποντες ὀχετὸν ὥστε μὴ θανεῖν βρωτοῖσι (foodstuff), ποτοῖσι (beverage), μαγεύμασι (magical charm) παρεκτρέποντες (lead astray), θανεῖν (to die a natural death). Euripides, Suppliants, in Euripidis Fabulae, 1110-1111. Available online: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A19 99.01.0121%3Acard%3D1080. Euripides, Orestes, verse 1490-1503, trans. George Theodoridis, Demonax Hellenic Library, 2010, http://demonax.info/doku.php?id=text:orestes.

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gathered around this teaching.8 Within one century, Greek language performs a synthesis out of a family of terms which refer to a vague entity. Did a priestly caste or tribe ever exist among the Medes? We do not know for sure, but we know that religiousness is part of the notion of the magus, and that it is linked with the Zoroastrian religion. Little by little, deriving from the art of the magi, a new concept emerges, then becomes autonomous. In naming it, the Greeks expelled magic from the field of thought and by the same token purified thought from all that is non-rational. The Greek term μαγεια (magic) thus refers to an emptiness, an absence, a non-truth and becomes the name for both diabolic trickery to be feared and superstition as a sign of mental or civilizational backwardness.9 Can there be true (good) magic? Magic is the false; this is how the concept was forged—as the art of the magi, those false priests accused of practicing impious rituals stemming from a foreign, hence false, religion. The Greeks charged the words μαγοσ (magician), μαγεια (magic) and the verb μαγεύω (to practice magic), with all those thoughts and practices that threatened to undermine the dominant religious and political power. Christians from the first centuries onward would do exactly the same, as the confrontation between Simon Peter and Simon Magus shows, as related in The Pseudo-Clementines and the Acts of Peter, both part of the New Testament apocrypha.10 Simon Magus, who founded the sect of the Simonians, considered by Peter as a mere illusionist, is later condemned by Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies as

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10

Robert Charles Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: MacMillan, 1961), 163. The term “civilization” emerged in the eighteenth century to designate people living in cities and thus freed from feudal law). The English word “civilization” comes from the sixteenth-century French civilisé (“civilized”), from Latin civilis (“civil”), related to civis (“citizen”) and civitas (“city”). Sullivan, Larry E., The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2009), 73. Virginia K. Peterson, “Simon Magus: History Versus Tradition,” in Apocryphal Writings and the Latter-day Saints, ed. C. Wilfred Griggs (Provo/UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1986), 241–53.

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a dangerous magician.11 Throughout Church history, any kind of cure not accepted by the Church as a wonder performed by the power of God has been considered magic, sorcery, or witchcraft, and associated with heresy and political opposition.12 This strategy culminated in the brutal witch hunts which lasted until the eighteenth century. The birth/death of magic somewhere between the end of the sixth and the end of the fifth century BC happened just before Socrates was sentenced to death and forced to drink the poison hemlock in 399 for corrupting the youth and “not believing in the Gods of the state” (of Athens).13 But with Socrates also emerged a new caste of priests, the philosophers, who, in their worship of logical truth, contributed to the death of magical, non-rational thought, thereby laying the grounds for the implicit alliance of religion, modern science, and politics in persecuting and silencing difference. If we consider (as did most Western historians until very recently) that the birth of Western culture took place in Athens between the seventh and the third century BC, devoid of any influence from the East, this is the somber picture we arrive at.

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Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book I, Chapter 23, “Doctrines and practices of Simon Magus and Menander,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). Exceptions exist, such as Saint Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth century writer, composer, mystic, and famed herbalist. See Michael Marder’s beautiful meditation on St. Hildegard’s “ecological theology,” Green Mass. The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen (Redwood City/CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). It is said that the last words of Socrates were to his friend Crito, asking him to make an offering to Asclepius, the god of medicine. According to J. Crooks, these last words were meant sincerely, not ironically. J. Crooks, “Socrates’ Last Words: Another Look at an Ancient Riddle,” The Classical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1998): 117–25. See also Debra Nails, Chapter 21, “The Trial and Death of Socrates,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought (Hoboken/NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).

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But if we move backwards and enlarge the picture—if we “open the lens of time,” as James C. Scott puts it,14 —we open up a space where the opposition between the two modes of thought (rational vs. magical) no longer holds and where the former appears as a brief (if profoundly devastating) variation of the latter. In this space, humans and other species do have common ground; they do communicate across species borders; or rather, they “commune” beyond human language. In this space, magic—as the negation of its negation—is the name for a reconquered totality of thought, a totality of which rational science is only a small part (where humans, up to the present day, play the dangerous game of the sorcerer’s apprentice, if I dare say, and, in saying so, turn the tables). In this undivided, uncensored space of thought we no longer simply converse about stones or converse with them in our imagination; we do not simply see them (as part of a landscape) and feel them (their surface, texture, weight, temperature, the way they diffract air or water, etc.); in this unified space of thought we are literally convivial with other Earthly beings, sharing what Sophie Gosselin and David gé Bartoli call the “terrestrial condition” or what David Abram calls the “animate earth.”15 It is not by coincidence that the first chapter of Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous is called “The Ecology of Magic.”16 It is no coincidence that, before turning ecologist and philosopher, he earned his living by sleightof-hand magic. Enter the magicians!

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James C. Scott, “A Short Account of the Deep History of State Evasion,” Lecture at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, June 17, 2017, https://www.hkw.de/en/prog ramm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_134071.php. Sophie Gosselin and David gé Bartoli, “La condition terrestre en luttes,” Terrestres, October 9, 2018, https://www.terrestres.org/2018/10/09/la-condition-ter restre-en-luttes/. David Abram, “The Ecology of Magic. A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry,” The Spell of the Sensuous, Chapter 1, 13-26.

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“Ça a débuté comme ça,” wrote Céline when he put down on paper the first words of his Voyage au bout de la nuit.1 Ça a débuté comme ça; it started like this, but what started, exactly? What started is the tale, of course, and only the tale, or the lay.2 Ça a débuté comme ça; it started like this, the image, in a cave, perhaps. Let us take a closer look at the well-known story of the “invention” of the image related here by Pliny the Elder: Fingere ex argilla similitudines Butades Sicyonius figulus primus invenit Corinthi filiae opera, quae capta amore iuvenis, abeunte illo peregre, umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit, quibus pater eius inpressa argilla typum fecit et cum ceteris fictilibus induratum igni proposuit.3 [...] modeling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter [Kora of Sicyon], who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew 1 2

3

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Denoël & Steele, 1932). “Lay, also spelled lai, in medieval French literature, a short romance, usually written in octosyllabic verse, that dealt with subjects thought to be of Celtic origin. The earliest lay narratives were written in the twelfth century by Marie De France; her works were largely based on earlier Breton versions thought to have been derived from Celtic legend.” Britannica, “Lay,” https://www.britannica .com/art/lay. Pliny, Natural History, Volume IX: Books 33-35, trans. H. Rackham (Harvard/MA: Harvard University Press), Book 35, § 151, 152.

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in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery [...].4 As an origin myth the story durably links “imago” (a term used for the golden mortuary face masks made of Egyptian pharaohs and noble Romans) both with desire and absence—two powerful motives that have grounded and infused all succeeding image technologies, from painting to photography and film. Even live video, despite its near synchronicity, and computer-generated imagery, despite its artificiality, remain tied to them. Another origin myth, this time supported by solid evidence, or at least traces—a word which in French means marks or remnants, and in the passive participle tracé, drawings—is told by archaeologists. The Lascaux cave drawings date back around 17,000 years, while dating back even further are the Chauvet cave drawings in Ardèche (35,000 years old), the Sulawesi cave drawings in Indonesia (about 40,000 years old), and finally the Blombos cave drawings in South Africa (about 73,000 years old). Here, researchers from the French National Research Centre (CNRS) have discovered, on a four centimeter short piece of silcrete rock, a pattern constituted of nine intersecting lines... So much for the invention of the image by Kora of Sicyon! But Blombos may not be the oldest existing cave drawing by far, and portable symbolic representations date back to much earlier periods (a shell carving found in Java and carbon-dated back to 430,000-540,000 years ago is attributed to Homo erectus now extinct). Caves collapse, rocks crumble, and durable materials such as rocks or shells may not be the only materials that Paleolithic humans chose to draw on—most certainly there were also drawings in sand, mud, and on bodies... But because caves were often used for shelter and dwelling, and because caves are the best places for preservation, caves are closely linked to Paleolithic art. In light of the recent discoveries of archaeology, the myth of Kora of Sicyon’s invention of drawing in the seventh century BC sounds

4

Pliny, Natural History, Book 35, § 153.

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like one of the origin stories that make Western civilization appear with the Ancient Greeks as if ex nihilo—denying all influence from the East, from Persia, Mesopotamia, and India in particular. According to MarieJosée Mondzain, the first “drawings” were most certainly not obtained through the delineation of a person’s shadow but by delineation of a personʼs hand. The origin of the image, then, would not lie in the projection of light (requiring the invention of fire) but in the projection of breath (requiring only the discovery of dye).5 But what is interesting with Pliny the Elder’s tale is that Kora’s father, Butades of Sicyon, is supposed to be the first modeler of clay, so that the inventor of the image, Kora, is the daughter of the inventor of clay portraiture and together they are the inventors of the image-memory in a dual form of drawing and pottery. Pliny doesn’t furnish a date for this memorable event but it has been situated during the sixth century BC, about two hundred years before Plato’s invention of the shadowimage, and a new stage in the history of the image. I am talking here about “The Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic (Book 7, 514a-520a). In this text, constructed as a dialogue between Glaucon, Plato’s brother, and his mentor, Socrates, the latter draws the following picture: In a cave, a group of men (women are generally absent in this version of the history of civilization; another myth!) are chained and immobilized. They cannot see anything but moving shadows that appear on the wall in front of them. The prisoners take the shadows they see for real objects. Socrates argues that even if one of them is forced to look behind him directly at the objects he will first be blinded by the light and not see them, and if dragged to the outside of the cave into the sunlight, he will need much time to adapt before being able to look directly at the things themselves, then at the sun, the “cause of all things.” Upon his return to the cave, he will remain blind for a long time and nobody will

5

Marie-José Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?”, Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (December 2010): 307-15.

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trust him. If his fellow prisoners could put a hand on him, they would probably kill him.6 A modern version of this first, dystopian argument can be found in The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick, in which humanity is living hidden underground, gleaning insight into what is going on above ground through a television system which provides them on a daily basis with images of atomic war.7 At ground level, a handful of humans prosper on huge properties with the help of the robots built by the workers (prisoners?) underground... One day, a worker escapes and discovers the truth; namely, that the war ended a long time ago and the president they see every day on TV does not exist at all. At the end of the story the worker comes back to his people and the novel ends with a question: Can he tell them the truth? Or only the penultimate truth? But let us get back into the cave. The scenery is complex and often explained through a graph. The prisoners have been detained in this cave since their childhood and are chained at their legs and necks so that they can’t move or turn their heads (Republic, Book 7, 514a-b). They cannot see themselves or the others—only what is in front of them; that is, the shadows of objects that people walking by on a path between them and the fire carry on their heads. (These “puppeteers” are hidden by a wall so that their shadows are not projected.) Socrates explains that the prisoners—not having any basis for comparison—necessarily suppose that the shadows they see are the things themselves, not the shadows of things. This complex dispositif of deception requires, however, an almost perfectly plain surface in front of the prisoners. It is not a surprise then that it has been compared to a cinema hall. Alain Badiou, for his part, adds yet another aspect to it: sonic immersion, with the spectators’ heads being “fixed by rigid headphones that cover their ears.”8

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Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave,” in Republic, Book VII, translated from the New Standard Greek Text, with Introduction by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 516c,1. Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth (New York: Belmont Books, 1964). Alain Badiou, La République de Platon (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 149 (my translation).

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Figure 3: Bernard Suzanne. Graph illustrating “The Allegory of the Cave.”

© 2015. Courtesy Bernard Suzanne.

Badiou, in his rendering of the dialogue, insists on the carnivalesque and boisterous part of the dispositif: a plethora of automata (sic) pass back and forth, among them animals, cars, swans, cultural animators, and naked women (sic): “Some scream, others speak, others play the valve or the bandoneon, others scurry by in silence.”9 In Plato’s dis-

9

Badiou, La République de Platon.

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positif, the voices of the passing people echo from the wall and Socrates explains to Glaucon that the prisoners could not fail to think that these voices were emanating from the shadows they saw in front of them (“Or could they think differently, Glaucon?” / “Of course they couldn’t, Socrates!”)10 But what they could make of the original sound behind them, or why they would not try to communicate with those who are walking by is left unanswered… Nevertheless, as a philosophical dispositif it has exerted a continuous fascination, while as a media dispositif it can be seen as the precursor to shadow theater (invented two centuries later in Ancient China),11 magic lantern projections (evidence of image projections in the West date back to the early fifteenth century), and, finally, cinema. The strangest feature of Plato’s dispositif is that, although Plato takes art for a poor simulacrum of reality, the shadows projected on the wall are not shadows of human faces or objects but of “statues of people and other animals, made of stone, wood, and every material”;12 in short, art! As a result, the shadow projections that the prisoners accept as real are double simulacra that occupy the lowest level in Plato’s pyramidal ontological system. The prisoners are not only wrong, but they are doubly wrong, and so are we, since Plato’s prisoners stand for the entirety of humanity. But why this insistence on our common and dual delusion? Now, if we follow Jacques Rancière in his Le Partage du

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My own Socratic-style improvisation. The birth of shadow theatre or shadow puppetry is presumed to have taken place in Ancient China when the magician (sic) of Emperor Wu of Han (156 BC87 BC) tried to console him about the death of his favorite concubine with a lifelike shadow moving behind a curtain; clear records of Chinese shadow play date to a later period, however, namely the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). William Dolby, “The Origins of Chinese Puppetry,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41, no. 1 (1978): 97–120. “SOCRATES: Also imagine, then, that there are people alongside the wall carrying multifarious artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made of stone, wood, and every material.” Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave,” 515a.

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sensible,13 we discover a Plato who is not (only) a lover of ideas and ideals, but (also) a lover of authentic art. In Rancière’s interpretation, Plato opposes writing, which, as a “mute sign” (similar to painting), destroys “the legitimate basis of the circularity of speech, and the rapport between the effects of speech and bodies in communal space” and theater as “the movement of simulacra on the stage, offered to the identification of the public” to “the authentic movement, the genuine movement of communal bodies,” the only good form of art being the “choreographic form of the community that dances and chants its own unity.”14 But there is still the other Plato, the writer of at least 250 manuscripts, who considers the idea of the thing as much superior to the thing itself. There is a mystery here—could Plato be both an idealist and a materialist? In his text “De quoi parlons-nous” Bernard Suzanne proposes a third way between the two categories of thinkers, “the sons of the earth” (tous gègeneis, Soph. 248c1-2) and “the friends of the idea” (tous tôn eidôn philous, Soph. 248A4-5),15 as Plato names them in The Sophist, a text from his late period dated around 360 BC. Following Suzanne’s account of the text, the former (materialists) bring everything from the sky and the invisible to the earth, without discernment. They pretend that being is only related to contact and friction, and that without body 13

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Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du Sensible. Esthétique et Politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). English translation: The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible (London: Continuum, 2006). Rancière, Partage du sensible, 12 (my translation). The entire passage reads: “Au théâtre et à l’écriture, Platon oppose une troisième forme, une bonne forme de l’art, la forme chorégraphique de la communauté qui chante et danse sa propre unité. En somme Platon dégage trois manières dont des pratiques de la parole et du corps proposent des figures de communauté. Il y a la surface des signes muets : surface des signes qui sont, dit-il, comme des peintures. Et il y a l’espace du mouvement des corps qui se divise lui-même en deux modèles antagoniques. D’un côté, il y a le mouvement des simulacres de la scène, offert aux identifications du public. De l’autre, il y a le mouvement authentique, le mouvement propre des corps communautaires.” (11-12). Bernard Suzanne, “De quoi parlons nous,” https://www.plato-dialogues.org/fr/p df/De_quoi_parlons-nous_long.pdf.

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there is no existence. The second (idealists) are people who talk from an invisible and elevated place and strongly insist on the prevalence of the idea, considering the truth of the first as becoming (genesis), and movement as better than being (ousia). Then the figure of the Eleatic Stranger places himself above this muddle and proposes an approach which would reconcile the two parties. Most commentators consider Plato to be “a friend of the ideas” and do not take this third way as a serious proposition, and the fact that in The Sophist Socrates assists rather passively in the debate doesn’t help. For Suzanne, on the contrary, the stranger’s discourse is the crucial point of all the Socratic dialogues. He argues that what Plato proposes here is not a third answer to the question of being, but an escape from the secondary question of idea vs. matter (ontology) and a return to the “first” question—that of language (logos). First, we need to answer if, how, and to what extent language permits access to something else other than the words which compose it—be this the “modulated sounds or graphic signs drawn” that are supposed to replace it.16 In other words: the opposition between idea and matter is always-already a “between”; it is always-already grasped through language, which is thus not a simple mediator between idea and matter, but represents the cognitive ground that allows for their conceptual opposition. There is yet a different reading of Plato’s allegory: as a self-promotional manifesto which demonstrates that only education—climbing the steep path towards the sunlight, then looking directly into the sun—in the form of the rigorous training of the mind provided in an academy of philosophy enables “free” men (no women here either!) to “see” the idea of the “good” which is the cause of all that is “right” and “beautiful”—and thus to conduct themselves well and to govern those whose minds remain in the dark.17 Our problem is possibly that we took

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Suzanne, “De quoi parlons nous.” English translation of the passage provided by the author. “But anyway what appears to me appears in this way: in the knowable, the ultimate [thing to be known] is the [517c] idea of the good (hè tou agathou idea), and it is seen with great difficulty, but once seen, it must be apprehended by way

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Plato’s cave sophisms (whose meanings, as in any good sophism, is endlessly debatable) to be the real thing, so that we are having a hard time deconstructing this wobbly cathedral of abstract thought. For Plato’s “philosophistry” as Iʼd like to call it, represents one of the first systematic attempts to separate body and mind—a monstrous push towards what Franco “Bifo” Berardi has called life in a “bifurcated form,”18 which could be the name for what we have called “the human.”19 It is thus idealism and the division between body and mind (and not species characteristics) that lie at the root of this bifurcated form, the human; the consecutive delusion of being “separate” from the rest of our worldly co-dwellers has made us a species of “locked-in” persons unable to build and maintain relations with them. Will we be able to leave this cave in which education has chained us, and live under the sun, sharing the world with our fellow beings? Let us rewrite the cave allegory in that light! First, we remove the chains which represent the most morbid part of Plato’s thought. This way we can freely enter and leave the cave—a

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of reasoning (sullogistea einai) as [being] indeed in all things responsible for all that is right and beautiful, begetting in the visible light and its lord, and in the intelligible, lord itself providing truth and intelligence, and that whoever is to act sensibly either in private or public [affairs] must see it.” Bernard Suzanne, “Socrates’ comment on the allegory (Republic VII, 517a8-519d7),” in PLATO (the philosopher), version of December 6, 2016, 48, https://www.plato-dialogues.org/ pdf/Plato_user_s_guide.pdf. “Why are the cognitariat weak and disunited and unable to assert their rights as laborers, their knowledge as researchers? Because they live in a bifurcated form, because their brain is detached from their body, because their communication communicates less and less, while more and more freezing sensitivity to life. The new space of activism is here, in the connection of poetry, therapy, and the creation of new paradigms.” Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (Chico/CA: AK Press, 2011), Chapter 4, “Happy End.” Kindle. Humans suffering from animal rabies or “rage” used to be separated for fear they would turn into savage animals; later, “enraged” and thus animal-like behavior was to become a synonym for “revolutionary.” Guy Debord happily took up this fraternity with savage animals. See Frederic Saumade, “Guy Debord, la séparation et le vide. A propos de la réédition de l'oeuvre de Guy Debord,” in Le Midi du politique, special issue Pôle Sud no. 2 (1995): 203-211.

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very specific space indeed, not a symbol of the (visible) world (as both Plato and Pythagoras have it)20 but a space of sociality and creativity. The fire, then, is no longer a symbol of the sun but the material center around which community and art are made. It is in caves that we find the earliest human drawings and paintings. But did our distant ancestors take these images of the animals and plants of their time for real? Or, put differently, did they take them for what they are (paintings) or for what they represented? Did they represent (stand in for something else), or were they a different kind of sign; a sign that actuates a magical relation (and not a rational separation) between the co-constituent parties of the animate world including the elements (earth, water, fire, air)? Back in the cave around 30,000 or 40,000 years ago I may think in a way where matter (the animal body, for instance) is not opposed to sign or idea, where the idea of the animal is part of my relation to the animal, and this relation is also physical, as for instance in hunting or eating. This relation to the world is weaved on an ever-present shuttle (the weaver’s shuttle movement) between the idea and the experience. As Guy Debord wrote in The Society of Spectacle, “Dans l’amour, le séparé existe encore, mais non plus comme séparé : comme uni, et le vivant rencontre le vivant.” (In love, the separated still exists, but no longer as separated: as united, and the living meets the living.)21 Desire is certainly linked to the idea (of the Other), but to make love is also (primarily) a physical experience. When you make love you are tying a strong knot between the idea, the desire, the body, between self and other. And if we reach deeper into the body... into its molecular structure, and even deeper, into its electrical structure, we discover that what we thought

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Robert Baccou argues that Plato’s cave allegory (located at the end of Book Seven of the Republic) was in fact borrowed from Pythagoras, who is said to have followed the teachings of Pherecydes of Syros in a cave and to have lived and taught in a cave himself—the cave, for Pythagoras and his disciples, symbolizing the world. See Robert Baccou, “Introduction,” in Plato, La République. Traduction et notes par Robert Baccou (Paris: Flammarion, 1966). Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967), my translation.

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to be solid matter is mere energy, ions constantly shifting their electrical charge from positive to negative to positive... Through this constant change in the electrical charge of their cellular membranes, living beings exchange with their environment, gather food/fuel, discharge waste, feel and express feelings; in short: they live! But if all is energy, does matter still exist? Matter can only contrast with non-matter, but non-matter (or anti-matter) is nothing but an idea, a hypothesis of astrophysics. If we stay on the side of human sensorial experience, what we have is pretty well summarized in James Joyce’s words: “If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”22 Should we believe Plato when he posits that we have been chained in the cave from our childhood onward? Should we believe that humans are not only idolatrous (worshipping the wrong gods), but credulous, and in general mentally lazy, unwilling and unable to think reasonably? Do we really take the shadows for reality, as says Socrates, do we live deluded lives and are fine with this? It is not impossible to deceive our closest kin, Chimpanzees, for instance, for a short time, but they will never take a shadow for the thing itself.23 If humans can be deceived it may be for the very reason that they trust their reason and their leaders more than their senses; the delusion lies in the separation, in thought, not in experience. It is not necessary to be an adept of Buddhism or the neurosciences to know that vision (and intellect) is but a tiny fraction of a much more embracing sensory relation with the world: we intuit much more of a person than we perceive with our eyes. We have had about one million years (since, say, the invention of fire) to perfect this

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James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922), 23. Research has shown that chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins recognize their mirror image, and a recent study has produced evidence that chimpanzees recognize themselves in live and delayed video images, suggesting a “self-concept proper” extending across time and space. Satoshi Hirata, Kohki Fuwa, and Masako Myowa, “Chimpanzees recognize their own delayed self-image,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 8 (August 2017), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do i/10.1098/rsos.170370.

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extrasensory talent which runs way deeper than today’s deep neural networks used for face recognition.24 What if the foundational act of Socratic and post-Socratic philosophy was a deceit that consisted of putting the idea on top of a hierarchical construction of values? A deceit with fatal consequences! For what is an idea if not a poor summary of our cognitive capabilities? Thought, encompassing the illogical, the associative, the magical, the unconscious, the intuitive, as well as ideas and abstract-logical thinking, is intrinsically tied to sensorial experience. Was it Giacometti who said that his sculptures were the poor remnants of his experience? Are not ideas (the words we find to express our experience of being alive) only the poor remnants of thought? Let us go back to Platoʼs cave now: what do we see? We see shadows and these shadows are shadows. The inside is inside, the outside is outside. Perception is perception, a word is a word, and the idea of the good is perhaps not so good an idea (pace Godard).25 Tim Ingold, in the second chapter of his book Making,26 entitled “The materials of life,” challenges the definition of material culture as representing “at once ideas that have been made material, and natural substances that have been rendered cultural” and the concomitant

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DeepFace by Facebook, for instance, is a face verification algorithm based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques using a 9-layer deep neural net. Its accuracy is said to work with 97.47 percent accuracy just 0.20 percent off human eye accuracy. But such numbers are bracketing out the vast area of human perceptive intuition. See Yaniv Taigman, Ming Yang, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato (all from Facebook AI research) and Lior Wolf, “DeepFace: Closing the Gap to HumanLevel Performance in Face Verification,” in CVPR ‘14: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (June 2014), 1701–1708. French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard frequently uses such sense reversals in his films; one of which is “Pas une image juste, juste une image” (Not a just image, just an image). Tim Ingold, Making. Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013).

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notion that only the interplay of matter and form can account for the existence of everything, every being in this world.27 Ingold writes: On one side is the raw physicality of the world’s “material character”; on the other side is the socially and historically situated agency of human beings who, in appropriating this physicality for their purposes, are alleged to project upon it both design and meaning in the conversion of naturally given raw material into the finished form of artifacts.28 Ingold goes on to deconstruct the notion of material, showing with Chantal Conneller that a material is something quite different from the point of view of a chemist (what it is) and that of an alchemist (what it does) and showing (still with Conneller) that “there is no such a thing as ‘stone’; there are many different types of stones with different properties and these stones become different through particular modes of engagement.”29 In the third chapter, entitled “On making a hand axe,” Ingold writes: Ever since Aristotle this distinction between body and soul has been taken as a specific instance of the more general division between matter and form. Any substantial thing, Aristotle had reasoned, is a compound of matter and form which are brought together in the act of creation.30 Herein […] lies the foundation of the hylomorphic model 27

28 29 30

Ingold, “The materials of life,” in Making, 17-32, here 20. Ingold’s definition of material culture is taken from Julien Thomas, “The Trouble with Material Culture,” Journal of Iberian Archaeology 9/10 (2007): 15. Ingold, Making, 27. Ingold, Making, 30. He quotes Chantal Conneller, An Archeology of Materials: Substantial transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe (London: Routledge, 2011), 82. Ingold, 37. The note after this sentence reads: “As Aristotle explains, at the very start of Book 2 of De Anima (‘On the Soul’): ‘Now there is one class of things which we call substance, including under the term, firstly, matter, which in itself is not this or that; secondly shape or form, in virtue of which the term this or that is at once applied; thirdly the whole made up of matter and form. Matter is identical with potentiality, form with actuality (Hicks 1907: 49).’” Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1907).

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of making. In the subsequent history of western thought, hylomorphic thinking became ever more entrenched. But it also became increasingly unbalanced. Form came to be seen as imposed by an agent with a particular design in mind, answering to his or her purpose, while matter—thus rendered passive and inert—became that which was imposed upon.31 Ingold’s analysis implies that hylomorphism is actually a top-down triadic model of creation with matter being the lowest, idea being the highest element, and form the intermediary agent. In Western art theory, from the Renaissance onward, this meant that walls, stones, and canvases were considered the material ground on which the artist imposed a disegno, and thus a form. Is an ax, if we remove both handle and blade, still an ax? Put in hylomorphic terms: Does a form which no longer exists (or never existed) still exist as its idea?32 What is the relation of form and idea? In “On making a hand axe” Ingold questions the dual mystery of the Acheulean biface (or hand ax); the fact that we are incapable of imagining the kind of use for which it was conceived and fabricated, and the fact that the same form subsisted for more than one million years unchanged. For Ingold, if the form of the biface was the result of a preexisting idea, then it is beyond understanding that this shape did not vary (that the idea never changed) throughout one million years. He shows that we are trapped in a double bind: If, on the one hand, the form of the biface is tied to the body plan, then we can account for its constancy but not for the apparent intelligence of its design. If, on the other hand, we regard the biface as the product of a complex intelligence, then we can account for its design but not for the constancy of form.33

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Ingold, 37. Conceptual art would say yes, as disegno (concept) precedes form (execution). Lichtenberg’s famous aphorism of the knife without a blade on which the handle is missing: the first conceptual artwork? Ingold, 37.

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Finally, Ingold proposes the idea that the form of the biface is not necessarily the result of a plan, but is only a result. And that the specimens unearthed by archaeologists are only the remnants of “living” bifaces whose actual size and form changed in the same way that a pencil shortens as we use it. The bifaces in the museum are dead and congealed “things,” while the biface existed in a movement, as a becoming. Is the biface creation, then, the product of intelligence, or the product of instinct? After all, writes Ingold: [...] birds build nests and beavers dams in ways peculiar and more or less invariant to their particular species, though responsive to the specific properties and qualities of available raw materials and environmental affordances. Why should it have been different for Homo Erectus?34 Ingold goes on to cite André Leroi-Gourhan’s hypothesis in his 1964 treatise Le Geste et la parole when he calls the hand ax makers “archantropians” whose tools “were still, to a large extent, a direct emanation of species behavior,” each one “a ‘secretion’ of the anthropoid body and brain.”35 “As closely bound to the body plan as the architecture of the skeleton, the forms of artefacts could change no faster than the skeletal morphology of the creatures that made them: both ‘obeyed the rhythm of biological evolution.’”36 Leroi-Gourhan’s hypothesis and Ingold’s question bring us back to the contested distinction between species instinct and human intelligence. Is the passage from instinct to intelligence the threshold which marks the passage from animal to human, or have they both been operating in the same body/mind until our days? This question remains unanswered so far, probably because it is wrongly asked. After all, classifications of the kind “instinct versus intelligence” are specific

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Ingold, 36. Ingold, 36-37, quotes André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. A. Bostock Berger, ed. R. White. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 91 and 97. Originally published as Le geste et la parole, 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–65). Ingold, 37 quotes Leroi-Gourhan, 106.

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but somewhat primitive products of intelligence itself. What we have begun to learn in the last decades is that in our fabricated dualities (matter vs. form, matter vs. idea, body vs. mind/soul, but also day vs. night, humid vs. dry, male vs. female, etc.) the interesting point is when the “against” becomes an “and.” Let us take as an example instinct versus intelligence… Birds build nests in invariant ways, but what if one day they lack the specific material they use? Will they adapt? Or disappear? Most probably some will adapt and some will disappear. Instinct vs. intelligence? No such opposition under the sun! And what if the only way to solve the enigma of human intelligence is to consider the specificity of the human species as an accident of evolution which prompted the over-development of the human mind, and with it, the calamitous course of technical progress? There is yet another alternative to the hylomorphic theory of creation. This is to consider intelligence as a collective capability. We marvel at the fact that a discovery could be made at the same time in two or three different points on the planet and without direct communication. But if we consider human intelligence as a collective development, and not, as we have done so far, as an individual capability, we come much closer to the answer. In the following chapter of Making, entitled “On building a house,” Ingold attacks the definition of architecture, and of the architect. Is the carpenter an architect, contrary to Alberti’s claim? Did architecture exist in the Middle-Ages? What about, for instance, the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Chartres? Was there an architect? Was there a plan? All we know for sure is that nine master masons directed thirty separate, short building campaigns during a span of three decades. But what we can check directly is the result: “a patchwork of irregularly disposed and imperfectly matched architectural elements.”37 The irregularity and asymmetry of the towers of the cathedral reinforce the idea that there was no preexisting and general plan, and that the form was the result not of an idea, but of the bringing together of multiple feats of workmanship: “the ad-hoc accumulation of the work of 37

Ingold, 57, paraphrases John James, Chartres: The Masons Who Built a Legend (London: Routledge & Regan Paul), 1985.

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many men,” as John James puts it.38 Can we then argue that the idea of the cathedral exists only through its making: as a technical, temporal, social process? Viewed in this light, the idea/making of the cathedral—or any other artifact—is a common process in which idea, form, and matter are tightly woven together and where form is not the result of an idea but of a gathering, a coming together of makers engaging in common activity.

38

Ingold, 57 quotes James, 123.

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Chapter 4 / Ocean

Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.   Pauline Oliveros, “Native,” Sonic Meditation V (1974)1 Fast forward to contemporary art… By way of immersing myself in the images and sounds of a recent piece of video work that lingered in my mind, I want to explore, with “sounding” and “resonating,” a particular form of common activity across species borders, and from there sketch the common image as an “oceanic feeling.” The poetic work, entitled Acoustic Ocean (2018), is by Ursula Biemann, who as an artist and writer has been engaged in environmental issues for many years.2 Commissioned by The Atlantic Project, Acoustic Ocean pays homage to the complexity of sonic relations within the Arctic sea and is a plea to halt maritime pollution, species extinction, and climate change.3 Shot at

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Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1974). Available at: https://blogthehum.com/2016/09/13/pauline-oliveros-sonic-meditations -1974-the-complete-text-and-scores/. For a good overview of Biemann’s body of work, see the artist’s own website, https://geobodies.org/. See also her recent online monograph, Becoming Earth, launched March 1, 2021, http://www.becomingearth.unal.edu.co/home. Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean, 2018. Video installation, color, sound, 18 min. Commissioned by The Atlantic Project. Introduction on http://geobodies.org/ar t-and-videos/acoustic-ocean.

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dawn in a bay on the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, the video portrays a fictional ocean scientist, an “Aquanaut” laying out her instruments4 —gigantic hydrophones and a parabolic microphone—and listening on her headphones to the sound she captures and amplifies. Biemann augments these enigmatic, mute images with a complex, low-frequency droning soundscape interspersed with higher pitched sounds (the closing credits list different sea creatures, mostly whales), rendering audible what the scientist might be hearing through her headphones.

Figure 4: “Laying out hydrophones.” Still from Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (2018). Video installation, color, sound, 18 min.

Courtesy Ursula Biemann.

Sparse written lines of text are superimposed from time to time on the moving image. In this poetic overlay, Biemann relates that given the poor visibility in the ocean, “the sonic dimension is the primary means

4

A term invented by Biemann and derived from its space equivalent, “astronaut.”

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of communication, navigation and survival.”5 While for a long time scientists believed the depths of the oceans to be silent, military research of the 1940s revealed a deep sound channel where low frequencies travel great distances—enemy submarine signals, but also blue and fin whale vocalizations. The ocean, according to Biemann, is “a sonic and semantic ecosphere.”6 Sound is the image of the sea; in these pitch-black deepsea quarters visual sensing systems are eclipsed by auditory ones. Yet, what captures us first in Acoustic Ocean is not the sound but the image, the narrative taking place in a perfectly photogenic environment: a bay at dawn surrounded by steep rocks, the grey-blue-white of the natural environment contrasting with the light orange of the Aquanaut’s overalls. The image sets the tone; it colors the way we listen to the soundscape that at the same time “sonifies” the image, infusing it with an invisible depth, so that we do not know what comes first, and whether we are looking at the sound or hearing the image. A subtle, synesthetic, feedback loop! The Aquanaut, performed by Sami singer, musician, and climate activist Sofia Jannok, according to the overlaid text, “tunes into the transmissions of marine species.” […] But “the microscopic shell-forming lives of the sea butterfly—tiny chemical recorders of rising acid levels— show disruption here. Their absence will silence the submarine springs.”7 On the ground, life is disrupted, too: In the only live-sound passage of the entire video, the performer, directly addressing the spectator, tells the local story of climate change: of reindeer dying because “the rain becomes ice on the snow” and they can no longer reach the lichen beneath:8 “The reindeer that makes it through the winter is our 5

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Quoted from the script of Acoustic Ocean provided to the public for its 2018 installation at Helmhaus Zurich as part of the group exhibition Propositions: Refaire le Monde. Courtesy Ursula Biemann. Ibid. Ibid. Warm winters bring heavy wet snows and temperature swings that ice the land, making it impossible for the reindeer to reach the lichen they feed on. They can smell it up to one meter beneath the snow, but they starve if they cannot reach it.

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guardian. And we are its guardian.”9 Acoustic Ocean ends with the evocation of whales: “That night, a few whales gathered near the surface. Their enlarged memory-chambers contained images of near-extermination. They sent a canto of impermanence before diving back down into the deep.”10 On the one hand the superimposed narrative builds on science (and the scientific language of distancing) and on the other on poetry (and a quest for immediacy).11 The Aquanaut’s approach is described as “going from attention to immersion,” “her sensing disclosing a sea full of intentions,” but her actions are described using the language of communication.12 Her acoustic instruments “intercept the vocal signals marine beings are sending through,” her hydrophones “function as external organs” that “capture the dense sonic signature” of the ocean, and “spreading her sensors out into the deep, she is tuning into the transmissions of marine species.”13 The poetic text evokes “the ocean as an acoustic and semiotic ecosphere” while the actual relations between this ecosphere and the Aquanaut are named with words such as “intercept,” “capture,”

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Quoted from the script Acoustic Ocean. Ibid. In the closing credits, Biemann mentions Astrida Neimadis’ Bodies of Water (2017) and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016) as her main references, and we could add to this list Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010) and Exposed (2016). All these works are part of a strong current of feministmaterialist-environmentalist thought that stresses the interdependency of elements within the planetary ecosystem: of humans, animals, plants, machines, algorithms, the oceans, the land, the atmosphere. (Full references see bibliography.) On the artist’s website we can read that Acoustic Ocean “draws on a range of recent scientific insights in its foray into modes of marine biological expressions, proposing an immersed image for the complex and fragile interactions and responses between humans and non-human, knowledge and instruments in these multimedia landscapes.” https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/ac oustic-ocean. Quoted from the script Acoustic Ocean. Ibid.

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“send,” and “transmit,” firmly grounding them in a sender/transmitter/receiver type of communication theory.14

Figure 5: “Aquanaut speaking.” Still from Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (2018).

Courtesy Ursula Biemann.

It is as if human language itself resisted immersion! For instance, the term “sensing” connotes sensitivity and thus an emphatic, delicate, immersive relation with the world. But it is mostly understood in the scientific approach to perception as the human/animal and machinic capturing of sense data (waves of different kinds: light, heat, sound, etc.). Rather than a passive reception, “sensing” is always also an active “making sense” of the world through the specific sensorial and cognitive apparatus at one’s disposal: hydrophones, for example, increase our capability to hear, but not our capability to see… In short: sensing is a highly selective meaning-making process, a focused reaching out into the phenomenal world; attention rather than immersion!

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Quoted from the script Acoustic Ocean.

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Now, if we extend “sensing” to other than human and machinic species, the word acquires a non-intentional, immersive dimension: trees, for instance, increase their sensorium in symbiosis with fungi that cover their roots, creating what is called a “wood wide web,” with trees providing the fungi with sugar, and fungi helping the tree to gather water and nutrients.15 Trees sense through a distributed sensorium which is one part (roots) immersed in the ground and the other (trunk, branches, leaves, and flowers) immersed in the air: Immersion is not the privilege of submarine beings and liquid environments; all that exists on land and underground, at sea and in the sea, and in the air, including land, water, air, and the Earth’s core itself, is part of an all-encompassing ecosystem or self-regulatory organism that Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock called Gaia.16 It is, seems to say the film, high tide—metaphorically, and, with rising ocean levels, literally—that we humans start seeing with our ears, relying, like the killer whale or the dolphin on echolocation, or, like the humpback and blue whale, on sounding (the groans, moans, roars, sighs and squeals that are called “whale songs” are emitted by beings without vocal cords!). It is high tide that we humans learn how to swim among other creatures in deep waters where language and sight are of no rescue. Only then will we rediscover that eyes are not the only and most efficient way to see, and that, instead of exhausting our energies in the

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The Hidden Life of Trees (2016) by forest ranger and popular science author Peter Wohlleben opens with the author’s discovery that a seemingly dead tree trunk is kept alive by its younger offspring, something that does not even fall into the category of “biological altruism.” Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016). See Sébastien Dutreuil, “James Lovelock’s Gaia thesis: ‘A New Look at Life on Earth’... for the Life and the Earth sciences,” in Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, ed. Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 272-287. Dutreuil traces the evolution of the concept and Lynn Margulis’ crucial influence in shaping and popularizing the Gaia hypothesis.

Chapter 4 / Ocean

colossal work of reification we need to open up again to the life-sustaining animal/vegetal/mineral exchanges—the Earthly “pulse” that we are tuned to but that we have, over millennia, learned to ignore.17 What will we see then? A sound image reverberating from all sides, belonging to every being immersed in it, be they sea creature, seaweed, plankton, the water and its movement, the tide, the waves breaking on the sand, on rock, fishermen, ramblers, or submarines... But this state of oceanic resonance, we humans know it well, since we pass the nine first month of life immersed in the vibrations of the motherly womb18 —mother and sea (“la mère” and “la mer”) sounding alike in French. Did we create images in the womb? Are the manifold relations within ecosystem Earth—at and in the sea, on and under the ground, and in the air—processes of sonic and affective resonance partaking in a mode of being that infants still can access, but lose as they enter the world of language, as Hartmut Rosa relates?19 Resonance, according to Rosa, manifests as a “vibrating wire to the world” prior to any actual (bodily, emotional, cognitive) connection. Resonance emblematizes the state of unconditional connectedness with the world at the core of my search for an image that is not a “being apart” from (its object) but a “being part of” or “being with” ecosystem Earth, an image that we can approach through what is known as “oceanic feeling,” a feeling of oneness, of boundlessness and connectedness with the entire world occurring in mystical experience.

17

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Deborah Bird Rose, based on her account of the Yolngu term bir’yun translating as “brilliant” or “shimmering,” links the musical pulse of ritual drumming with the seasonal, environmental pulse. Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), G53/54. See also Peter Sloterdijk’s analysis of the uterus as the first “bubble,” in Bubbles. Spheres I: Microspherology (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998). See Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung, 2nd edition (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2016). English translation: Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World, trans. James Wagner (Hoboken/NJ: Wiley, 2019).

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Challenged by Romain Rolland to distinguish between a universal “religious experience” and religion, Freud discusses the notion in the beginning of his 1930 essay “Civilization and its Discontents.” While Rolland testifies to the “oceanic feeling” experienced by Ramakrishna and other mystics and that he himself encountered in states of spiritual ecstasy,20 Freud writes that he “cannot discover this oceanic feeling in himself” and dismisses it as a simple psychological residue of infancy, when the child has no concept of self and other yet.21 For Freud, distinguishing between an inner I and an outer world (objects upon which the infant has no control over such as the mother’s breast and which may cause feelings of displeasure and pain) is the first step towards the “principle of reality.” Hence, the frequent persistence of the “oceanic feeling” and other “primitive” drives are nothing but the result of a “cleavage” in psychic development. Is it not a very restricted, if reasonable, view of the human mind? According to French psychoanalyst Martine Revel, what Freud couldn’t find in his experience was a feeling of “total harmony” with the world.22 This brings us back to Rosa’s “resonance” and Heidegger’s “attunement.”23 20

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French original: “Mais j'aurais aimé à vous voir faire l'analyse du sentiment religieux spontané ou, plus exactement, de la sensation religieuse qui est...le fait simple et direct de la sensation de l'Eternel (qui peut très bien n'être pas éternel, mais simplement sans bornes perceptibles, et comme océanique).” Quoted after: Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, “The Oceanic Feeling: Origin of the Term,” Chapter II, The Oceanic Feeling. The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India (Springer Netherlands, 1980), 33-50. See also Chapter IV, “The Oceanic Feeling: Image of the Sea,” in The Oceanic Feeling, 68-79. Freud attributes the term “oceanic feeling” to a “revered friend.” Freud, Sigmund, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Und andere kulturtheoretische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 1-3. (Originally published 1930 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag Wien.) See also Ostow, Mortimer. Spirit, Mind, and Brain. A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Martine Revel, personal communication, October 2020. In his elaboration of “resonant” and “mute” world relations, Rosa draws heavily on phenomenology and critical theory, as well as on the sociology of Gabriel Tarde.

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We will move on now to Amazonian, medieval, mystical, and Aboriginal thought, while keeping in mind what, in the etymology of the word religion—religio stemming from relegere (to gather, to bring together) and/or religare (to link, to join, to connect)24 —could be a common thread linking myth and mystical experience. What follows is a journey towards a common (image), wherein relations between species-bound perspectives are not yet (or no longer) fixed and where transspecies commerce occurs.25

24 25

Jacques Derrida, Foi et Savoir, suivi de Le Siècle et le Pardon (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 2000), 54. I understand commerce here in its etymological sense of interaction, transformation, and communion; and communion in the sense of community as common activity. Concerning the initial meaning of the word “commerce” as social interaction, see Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?”.

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These are lessons that I learned in part walking with my dogs and wondering how the world looks without a fovea and very few retinal cells for color vision but with a huge neural processing and sensory area for smells. It is a lesson available from photographs of how the world looks to the compound eyes of an insect or even from the camera eye of a spy satellite or the digitally transmitted signals of space probeperceived differences “near” Jupiter that have been transformed into coffee table color photographs. The “eyes” made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”1 The quest that drives this book: identifying what comes after the image, is grounded on the assumption that what we know as image, the perspectival image, has suffered a severe loss of meaning in recent decades with the collapse of the humanist episteme, both supporting one another like two staggering drunks. At this point, my first idea was that

1

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 583.

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a “postimage” needed a posthumanist project.2 But, since project (and projection) stands at the core of the humanist episteme, don’t we rather need the opposite of a project, the reverse of projecting one’s will on the world, of projecting a form on (inert) matter, of projecting a world (of ideas, of forms) on the world (of living matter)? Perhaps the way to a new image would be the acceptance and the comprehension of the world as idea, intention, form; a way which places me in good company, since the common thread of environmental humanism, feminist materialism, and posthumanism understood here in the sense of that which comes after the humanism is the intuition of the world as full of intention, agency, and expressive matter.3 This intuition (both aesthetic and ethic) will be my beacon in my search for the image after the image—a search that needs to abandon the old posture of will or mastery and welcome a posture of receptiveness; a posture, or simply a “capacity to respond.”4

2

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Ingrid Hoelzl, “Postimage,” in The Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London/New Delhi/Singapore: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 360-362. Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, “The Future Evolution of the Image,” in The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, ed. Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska (London: Routledge, 2018), 131-143. See also Hoelzl and Marie, “The Martian Image (on Earth),” Chapter 14, The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). In both feminist and critical posthumanist thinking, “post,” rather than announcing the end of the human, is the marker for a different understanding of what it means to be human in a world shared with non-humans, both biological and technical. For feminist posthumanism see, among others, Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) and Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-831; for critical posthumanism see, among others, Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter, and Manuela Rossini, eds., European Posthumanism (London: Routledge, 2016). Donna Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, M25-M50.

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Now, receptiveness/responsiveness not being one of the strong points of Western culture we need to find elsewhere the tools which will bring about the “permanent decolonization of thought” that Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro considers to be “the new mission” of anthropology.5 What I propose therefore is a (rather long) detour through the space (of crisis) that has opened up between philosophy and anthropology, between what was the first attempt to rationally organize the world into concepts (philosophy) and the later investigation of cultural difference (anthropology), between the rationalism of Socratic philosophy and its defeat expressed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1955 memoir Tristes tropiques.6 There, in the “Forgotten Works” (as Richard Brautigan would say)7 between past and future could be hiding the secret entrance to a sealed-off present. There, I hope to find the glasses which will allow me to see what I call the common image. Or perhaps, instead of applying a Levi-Straussian pessimism onto a Brazilian canvas, we may find in the Rio school spearheaded by Castro, a former student of Lévi-Strauss, a possible answer. In his introduction to the English version of Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics editor and translator Peter Skafish writes: Can anthropology be philosophy? Can it not just contribute to but do, and even aid in reinventing philosophy, in the sense of constructive, speculative metaphysics? And what, in that event, would philosophy

5

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Full quotation: “Anthropology is ready to fully assume its new mission of being the theory/practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press/Univocal Books, 2014), 40. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). English translation: A World on the Wane, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961). The Forgotten Works, in Richard Brautigan’s novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968), are a forbidden zone containing remnants of a fallen civilizations, in particular books. Only a few inhabitants of the commune organized around the central gathering house called iDEATH dare to go there. Most of the things in the commune are made of watermelon sugar.

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be, since most of its best instances begin, end with, and never abandon Western categories?8 Castro himself mentions as a point of reference (alongside Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Deleuze) Alfred North Whitehead, whose speculative metaphysics probe the very limits of Western categories. His is a philosophy of relation, of transformation, and of becoming; a philosophy whose notions do not pretend to be “adequately defined in respect to the complexity of relationship required for their illustration in the real world” since “even our more familiar ideas, seemingly obvious, are infected with [this] incurable vagueness.”9 (emphasis mine) In particular, Castro draws on Deleuze and Guattariʼs anti-analytic philosophy infused by anthropology and their program of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation developed in the two-volume work capitalism and schizophrenia. In “Geophilosophy,” the fourth chapter of their last joint book, What Is Philosophy? they write:

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Peter Skafish, introduction to Cannibal Metaphysics, 9. The translation was published by the independent publishing house Univocal Press, which, in 2017, became the Univocal Books series of the University of Minnesota Press. The title of the press/series is ironic, for Castro’s aim is precisely to replace univocality with equivocality: the univocal structuralist semiotics of one word/one meaning/one referent with equivocal constellations of words/meanings/referents. The scope of the press/series, however, is rather plurivocal, covering the fields of cultural theory, media archaeology, continental philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, etc. “The history of European thought, even to the present day, has been tainted by a fatal misunderstanding. It may be termed The Dogmatic Fallacy. The error consists in the persuasion that we are capable of producing notions which are adequately defined in respect to the complexity of relationship required for their illustration in the real world. [...] Except perhaps for the simpler notions of arithmetic, even our more familiar ideas, seemingly obvious, are infected with this incurable vagueness.” Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas [1933] (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 144f. Cited by Arran Gare, “Speculative Metaphysics and the Future of Philosophy: The Contemporary Relevance of Whitehead’s Defence of Speculative Metaphysics,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 2 (June 1999): 127-145.

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Artaud said: to write for the illiterate—to speak for the aphasic, to think for the acephalous. But what does “for” mean? It is not “for their benefit,” or yet “in their place.” It is “before.” It is a question of becoming. The thinker is not acephalic, aphasic, or illiterate, but becomes so. He becomes Indian, and never stops becoming so—perhaps “so that” the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else and tears himself away from his own agony.10 It is in Whitehead’s philosophy of becoming,11 and in Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming other” that Castro wants to find his northwest passage towards a counter-anthropology, an anthropology where the anthropologists themselves become Other. When Castro calls for the opening up of the virtualities of “becoming Other” through the experience of another thought, what he has in mind is Amerindian thought.12 Could Amerindian notions of “image” hold the same promise? In The Falling Sky, the collected and translated conversations of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert, the word “image” and “spirit” appears synonymously. (The Yanomami are a group of indigenous people living in the Amazonian forest on the border between Venezuela and Brasil; Castro has worked in the area as well and has photographed them before becoming an anthropologist.)13 At the same time, Kopenawa is conscious of the impossibility of translating Yanomami concepts: 10

11 12 13

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Verso, 1994), 109. Originally published as Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1929) Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 93. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Variations of the Wild Body. Photographs by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Exhibition catalogue (Frankfurt am Main: Weltkulturen Museum, 2017). Presented at Weltkulturen Museum as part of Tropical Underground. Revolutions of Anthropology and Cinema curated by Vinzenz Hediger and Paula Macedo (November 2017 to March 2018), https://www.tropical-undergro und.de/en/variationen-des-wilden-koerpers-fotografien-eduardo-viveiros-de-c astro/index.html.

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The Xapiri are the images of the yarori ancestors who turned into animals in the beginning of time. This is their real name. You call them ‘spirits,’ but they are other.14

Figure 6: Barbara Crane Navarro. Yanomami men working in the forest, Alto Orinoco, Amazonas, Venezuela. Color photograph.

© 2006. Courtesy Barbara Crane Navarro.

In a footnote, Albert explains that yarori is the word for both the ancestors themselves (“yaro” meaning game) and their images (the suffix “-ri” 14

Kopenawa, Davi, The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman, ed. Bruce Albert, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy (Harvard: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2013), 55. Kindle.

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standing for “image”)—one word for both the being and its “image” or “spirit”! But there is another Yanomami word for image, utupë: Every being of the forest has an utupë image. These are the images the shamans call and bring down. These are the images that become xapiri and do their presentation dance for us. They are like photographs. But only the shamans can see them. Ordinary people cannot. They are the real center, the real heart of the animals we hunt. These images are the real game!15 In the “clarification” of the written account of a native Cuna (an Amerindian people mainly inhabiting the San Blas Archipelago along the Gulf of Darien from Panama to the Colombian border)16 the word “image” was replaced by the word “spirit.” For Michael Taussig, this “clarification” is a kind of “magical mimesis: from the (mere) image of a thing comes its soul and spirit.”17 As Taussig relates further, the Cuna word purpa, for example, which Norman Chapin defines as “spiritual copies of the physical body,”18 can have a range of other meanings, such as menstrual blood (red purpa), semen (white purpa), shadow, photograph (face purpa) and speech (mouth purpa).19 This points not to conceptual sloppiness (on the part of Amerindians) or “false” interpretation/translation (on the part of Westerners) but to the fact that while there seems to be a clear distinction between “bodies” and their “inner images,” the categories of body, soul/mind/image, image/spirit

15 16 17 18 19

Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 60. The Cuna call themselves Tule (real people) in opposition to Waga designating Whites and any other Indian people. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1992), 103. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, chapter 8, note 2. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 101-102.

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stand in constant mimetic relation.20 As Kopenawa puts it,21 “there are so many wasps in the forest and just as many wasp images.”22 If in Amerindian thought the notions of body, image, and spirit tightly intertwine, they actually intertwine at a level that precedes these

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Drawing on Castroʼs and Taussig’s work, Pedro Neves Marques, in his article, “Mimetic Traps: Forests, Images, Worlds,” interprets the relation between body and spirit in Amerindian thought as mutually mimetic, the body being the image of the spirit and the spirit being the image-double of the body. In Footnote 18, Marques also refers to Brazilian anthropologist Pedro Niemeyer Cesarino, who “notes that ütupe is comparable to ‘yochin of Panoan, the karon of Jê and the ang of Tupi speaking peoples,’ indicating a certain generalization of such uses.” Pedro Neves Marques, “Mimetic Traps: Forests, Images, Worlds,” in Intercalations 04: The Word for World Is Still Forest, ed. Etienne Turpin and Anna-Sophie Springer (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and K. Verlag, 2017), 21-38. Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 20. Apropos body and image: In his seminal An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (2011), originally published in German in 2001, art historian Hans Belting links human “imaging” no longer with material “pictures” embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography but with our mental images and therefore our bodies; he understands the body as a “living medium” that produces, perceives, and remembers images that are different from handmade or technical pictures. This constitutes an important move emerging from the then-blossoming field of Bildwissenschaft (image studies), certainly, but one that still ties the image to human bodies and human perception/imagination/memory only. Learning the lesson from anthropology, new materialism, and posthumanism, Common Image goes one step further: it is not the human body which is a “living medium” but the encounters of (human and non-human) bodies which are living relations. Belting retains William J. Mitchell’s widely accepted distinction between pictures (images with material support) and images (mental images), a distinction that Mitchell himself does not always follow. For me, “image” designates, in its humanist acceptation, the convergence of vision and representation (no distinction between image and picture here) and, in a posthumanist and postanthropic acceptation (developed in this book) the eco-relations that constitute ecosystem Earth. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2011). Originally published as Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2001). William J. Mitchell, Chapter 6, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 190-223.

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notions; Castro acknowledges this when he writes that the Western concepts of body and of soul/mind when applied to Amerindian thought are mere approximations (or “equivocations,” to use his term) with floating referentiality. He argues that their application infuses these concepts with new meaning, thus transforming our thinking in return. It is why the projection of these concepts is not a cognitive colonization of Amerindian but a decolonization of Western thought which, in the process, has to adapt to new cultural ground, thereby transforming itself. This idea implies that the infusion of our thought with Amerindian concepts can happen through their reconfiguration in Western terms and this raises the questions of translation and equivocation discussed below. For Castro, who initiated (alongside his antagonist and fellow student of Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Descola) what has been called the “ontological turn,”23 there are no cultural differences, but ontological differences. Thus his “philo-anthropology” does not need to deal with different cultures and the problem of cultural appropriation since there is no such thing as different cultures but only different possible worlds, and hence different perspectives or points of view. As Castro puts it, “[i]n Amerindian cosmologies, the real world of different species depends on their points of view, for the ‘world in generalʼ consists only of different species, being the abstract space of divergence between them as points of view.”24 This is the core of what Castro calls “perspectivism,” a term that can be used to account for the fact that “virtually all peoples of the New Worlds share a conception of the world as composed of a multiplicity of points of view.”25 According to Castro, perspectivist thinking can be found with the Arawaté in Northeastern Amazonia, the people that Castro studied himself, but also with a variety of other indigenous groups in Amazonia and other regions of South America, North America, and Malaysia. He relates that when developing the concept in the 1990s he drew on his own field research and on

23 24 25

Major proponents of the “ontological turn” in anthropology are Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 90. (emphasis in original) Ibid., 55.

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other ethnographic records—in particular, Tania S. Lima’s thesis on the Yudja (“Juruna of Eastern Amazonia”) which he refers to (with Aparecida Vilaca’s study on the Wari’ of Rondonia of Brazil) as “one of his major inspirations for his extrapolations.”26 The term perspectivism pairs with the term “multinaturalism,” which means a “unity of mind and a diversity of bodies,”27 an idea which is, according to Castro, the exact opposite of multiculturalist Western thought that presupposes one nature and a variety of cultures. Perspectivism is a form of multinaturalism, since a perspective is not a representation (property of the mind) but a point of view anchored in the body.28 Animals perceive different things, because their bodies are different—body accepted in the sense of an “ensemble of ways or modes of being”29 in between soul and organism, a bundle (pace Deleuze) of affects and capacities. And yet, Castro firmly inscribes perspectivism into a Western line of philosophy: This double, materialist-speculative twist, applied to the usual psychological and positivist representation of animism, is what we called “perspectivism,” by virtue of the analogies, as much constructed as observed, with the philosophical thesis associated with this term found in Leibniz, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze.30 In his Monadologie, Leibniz argues that each monadic entity has his or her perspective on the world; what appears as a multitude of universes is but the different perspectives about it.31 As an epistemology, Leib26

27 28 29 30 31

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Part III of The Relative Native. Essays of Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015), 197-203. Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 56. Ibid., 72. Ibid. Ibid. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Lehr-Sätze über die Monadologie, ingleichen von Gott und seiner Existentz, seinen Eigenschafften und von der Seele des Menschen etc. wie auch Dessen letzte Vertheidigung seines Systematis Harmoniae praestabilitae wider

Chapter 5 / Points of View

niz’s objective perspectivism (positing one world viewed differently) holds that all knowledge of the world is necessarily situated, thus it bears some similarity to relativism and constructivism, but also to phenomenology. Even more radical approaches such as Alfred North Whitehead’s process ontology posit that the different perspectives are as objective as reality itself, while subjective perspectivism such as that advocated by Nietzsche (in Jenseits von Gut und Böse) posits a multitude of realities.32 But it is mainly on Deleuze and Guattari’s a thousand plateaus (1987) that Castro builds here; the declared aim of Cannibal Metaphysics is to bring together Amerindian ethnology influenced by Deleuze with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought influenced by Amerindian cosmologies.33 Castro writes: “For as Deleuze would say, there are not points of view on things, since things and beings are themselves points of view.”34 But rather than the world in general being the abstract space

32

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die Einwürffe des Herrn Bayle. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Heinrich Köhler (Jena/Frankfurt/Leipzig: Meyer, 1720). Wild, Markus, “Nietzscheʼs Perspektivismus,” in Perspektivismus. Neue Beiträge aus der Erkenntnistheorie, Hermeneutik und Ethik. ed. Hartmut von Sass (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2019), 37-59. See also Hartmut von Sass, “Perspektiven auf die Perspektive. Eine Einleitung,” ibid., 9-33. In the opening chapter of Cannibal Metaphysics Castro speculates about the book that he would have written, entitled Anti-Narcissus, and to which the actual book is but a “beginner’s guide” (39). Here, Castro is quoting “certain anthropologists who are responsible for a profound renewal of the discipline”, such as Roy Wagner with his notion of “reverse anthropology,” Marilyn Strathern with her feminist take on anthropology, and Bruno Latour with his actor-network theory (45). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 : Mille plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 203. See also the transcription of Deleuzeʼs recapitulation of the notion of the “fold” in Leibniz in a lecture held at the University Vincennes-Saint Denis on December 16, 1986: “Second caractère du point de vue: surtout il ne signifie pas que tout est relatif, ou du moins il signifie que tout est relatif à condition que le relatif devienne absolu. Qu’est-ce que je veux dire. Je veux dire que le point de vue n’indique pas une relativité de ce qui est vu ça découle du précédent caractère: si le point de vue est vraiment puissance d’ordonner les cas, puissance de mettre en séries les phénomènes,—le

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between species/points of view, as Castro has it, Deleuze, in his book The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1992), reads Leibniz in the sense that each and every point in space can be treated as a point of view. 35 Following Deleuze following Leibniz means entering a Baroque world where there is no more singular center (the eye of God? the eye of the beholder of a central perspectivist painting?) but a multitude of centers in the form of points of view. With his reconception of points of space as possible points of view, could Leibniz have invented a new kind of image? Could he guide me in my search? Could the Leibnizian world, still geometrical, still three-dimensional, but already brimming with manifold perspectives, give us a preview of a postgeometric, n-dimensional world where every being, every thing is its own point of view, generating its own image and its own dimension? Does the Baroque world of Leibniz, the Baroque philosophy of Leibniz, if catapulted into the Amazonian forest like the steamship in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo,36 still float? Cannibal Metaphysics is organized in four parts: The first one, AntiNarcissus, exposes the concepts of multinaturalism and perspectivism (influenced by Deleuze) and concludes with the chapter “Images of Savage Thought,”37 in which Castro calls for the reconceptualization of the

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point du vue est, du coup, condition de surgissement ou de manifestation d’une vérité dans les choses.” The lecture is available online: https://www.webdeleuz e.com/textes/47. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (Minnesota University Press, 1992). Fitzcarraldo (1982), feature film by Werner Herzog starring Klaus Kinski as Peruvian rubber baron Fitzcarrald. Refusing special effects, Herzog forced his cast to haul a 320-ton steamship over a hill. The historical steamship, however, weighed much less and was carried over the hill in pieces. A nod to Lévi-Strauss’ La Pensee Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962) translated as The Savage Mind (Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Throughout the book, Castro makes reference to Lévi-Strauss whose books and theories he revisits, positing that Lévi-Strauss himself had already grasped the essence of “perspectivism.”

Chapter 5 / Points of View

anthropological procedures of comparison and translation as equivocation.38 He writes: Amerindian perspectivism is a doctrine of equivocation, of referential alterity between homonymous concepts. Equivocation is the mode of communication between its different perspectival positions and is thus at once the condition of possibility of the anthropological enterprise and its limit.39 In Amerindian perspectivism, the “general world,” as Castro writes, is “the abstract space of divergence between species as points of view.”40 There is no formal correspondence between points of view that would allow a truthful rendering of one point of view in or as another; there are only equivocations of different points of view. There is no base (or objective) world that shimmers through its “speciate” aspects; there is only a multitude of “speciate” world views.41 Equivocation, for Castro, is “neither error nor illusion nor lie” but the “relational positivity of difference.”42 It “is not what prevents the relation, but what founds and impels it.”43 As such, it does not stand opposed to truth but to “univocation,” to the idea of a “unique, transcendent meaning.”44 In Castroʼs words: To translate is to presume that an equivocation always exists; it is to communicate through differences, in lieu of keeping the Other under gag by presuming an original univocality and an ultimate redundancy—an essential similarity—between what the Other and we are saying.45

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 85. Ibid. (underlining in original) Ibid., 90. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 89.

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In this sense, there is no “problem of translation” of concepts such as “soul,” “mind,” “body”, or “image.” Let us recall Ortega y Gassetʼs insistence on the need to drag the reader into the language of the writer: According to Schleiermacher, translation can be attempted in two opposite directions: either the author is presented in the language of the reader, or the reader is confronted with the language of the author. In the first case we translate in an improper sense of the word: at best we produce an imitation or a paraphrase of the original text. Only when we drag the reader away from his linguistic habits and oblige him to move inside those of the writer, can we properly speak of translation. (Ortega y Gasset, 1937)46 The second part of Cannibal Metaphysics, entitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia from an Anthropological Point of View, ends with the chapter “Everything is Production: Intensive Filiation” in which Castro looks at how Deleuze and Guattari reinterpret the two classical concepts of kinship theory, namely alliance and filiation, and how this opens up the possibility of aligning anthropological theory with current “nonhumanist (sic) developments.”47 The point is to rethink alliance and kinship: from categories of humanization per se to “modalities opening onto the extrahuman.”48 “If human is no longer an essence, what is the implication for an anthropology of kinship?” Castro asks.49 While Castro does not pursue this path of reflection, the possibility of “being kin” beyond the bonds of blood and marriage among humans has been taken up by other anthropologists.50 Among them are Anna 46

47 48 49 50

Ortega y Gasset, 1937, quoted in The Translator’s Dialogue: Giovanni Pontiero, ed. Pilar Orero and Juan C. Sager (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1997), 27. Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 123. Ibid. Ibid. It may be argued that when Castro’s book was first published in 2009, feminist materialist anthropology was just on the rise. However, it is surprising that Castro does not mention Donna Haraway, whose seminal book, When Species Meet was published with the University of Minnesota Press in 2007.

Chapter 5 / Points of View

Tsing and Donna Haraway. Tsing’s feminist materialist and decolonial take on the Anthropocene in terms of the “replication machinery” of the “plantation” has been groundbreaking for posthumanist, feminist, and environmental humanist thought.51 And Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), building on her earlier notions of “interspecies communication” and “multispecies world,”52 argues for a “making kin” that is no longer bound by practices of filiation and species-bound procreation but traverses species. In particular, Haraway advocates a “making kin” between humans and endangered animals (such as the Monarch butterfly) whereby both partners gain sensory-cognitive capacities.53 Castro’s counter-anthropology attempts to build its aerial constructions somewhere between the thinking of the Arawaté, the people he studied, and Western thinking. He explains that the point is not to faithfully render another’s point of view—that of the Arawaté, for instance—within one’s own point of view, but to explore the abstract space between points of view: between different points of view that exist within Amerindian cosmology, and between the points of view of Amerindian cosmology and Western philosophy. In this in-between space lies what anthropology has called “myths.” The following two chapters will examine what myth has to do with the image. Concluding this chapter, let me suggest that in this space of counter-anthropology, in this space between worlds, between self and other, in this space of hesitation and doubt, a counter-image may emerge. What perspectivism opens up for the image is the possibility to replace our abstract and univocal perspective (point of view) on the world with the living relation between beings as points of view.

51 52 53

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Donna Haraway, When Species Meet. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Chapter 4, “Making Kin” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

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Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

In my dream I was in a room where there was a bull; the bull lifted one of his front legs and put his hoof around my neck, as if to strangle me. He nibbled at me with his jaws open, lips pursed, like a horse, and was about to devour me. I managed to disengage myself from his stranglehold, and then suddenly I was with my mother in another room. She was washing clothes. I told her about the bull; she replied she could understand it. I followed her to another room, and suddenly had a revelation: she was the bull! When I told her, she simply said, “yes.” But it was as if I were incapable of uttering a word, a mere indistinct grumbling came out of my mouth. I heard it and woke up…1 Since the Ionian Enlightenment beginning in the sixth century BC, Greek philosophy (and in its wake Western philosophy) has posited itself apart from theology and myth, seeking rational explanations of the world. It is thus not a surprise if, in his Republic, Socrates/Plato projects himself and his disciples as the founders of an ideal city-state (379a) where it is the task of the philosopher-censors to replace the “false stories” by right ones. This task starts with the education of the children (377b-c): SOCRATES: Shall we carelessly allow our children to hear any old stories made up by just anyone, then, and to take beliefs into their souls that are, for the most part, the opposite of the ones we think they should hold when they are grown up? 1

Transcription of a dream, dreamed in Zurich sometime in Spring 2019.

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ADEIMANTUS: We certainly won’t allow that at all. SOCRATES: So our first task, it seems, is to supervise the storytellers: if they make up a good story, we must accept it; if not, we must reject it. We will persuade nurses and mothers to tell the acceptable ones to their children, and to spend far more time shaping their souls with these stories than they do shaping their bodies by handling them. Many of the stories they tell now, however, must be thrown out.2 The Republic discredits traditional storytelling in poetry and myth (μυθοποιοις)—such as the stories told by Homer or Hesiod about warring or fighting gods—as “false stories” (377d). In order to forge ideal, virtuous citizens only those stories are to be told that display the gods as they are: good and not harmful (379b). The philosopher-founders of the ideal city-state are to decide the appropriate patterns on which the poets are to base their stories (379a).3 Today, our relation to myth remains deeply infused with this dismissal of myth as “false stories”; and when we interest ourselves in “indigenous” mythology we are permanently facing the risk of locking it up in the same cabinet of curiosities in which we also lock up the artifacts of pre-modern cultures. Bruce Albert tried to avoid this risk when he edited the conversations he had with shaman Davi Kopenawa over the course of several decades. In his introduction to the ensuing book The Falling Sky, Albert writes that it is “an attempt to make nonYanomami familiar with Yanomami myths from within”:4 that is, not from the standpoint of Western anthropology but from the standpoint of a practicing shaman. In the first part of The Falling Sky dedicated to his shamanic training and experience, Kopenawa relates the origin myth of the demiurge Omama who created the forest world in which his people live:

2 3 4

Plato, Republic, Book II, translated from the New Standard Greek Text, with Introduction by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 377b-c. Plato, Republic, 377d, 379a,b: paraphrases of Reeve’s translation, 2004. Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 22.

Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

Omama and his brother Yoasi first came to existence alone. They did not have a father or a mother. Before them, in the beginning of time, only the people we call yarori existed. These ancestors were human beings with animal names. They constantly metamorphosed. Gradually, they became the game we arrow (sic) and eat today. Then it was Omama’s turn to come into being and to recreate the forest, for the one that existed before was fragile. It constantly became other until the sky fell on it. Its inhabitants were pushed underground and became the meat-hungry ancestors we call the aõpatari.5 Following Kopenawa, Yanomami origin myths are the very ground of their life in the forest and are also the basis of shamanic practice; they create the link between pre-cosmological and cosmological time. Precosmological time subsists in cosmological time in the form of human ancestors, the yarori that now exist in the bodily form of game, but that are originally, and in their self-understanding, human. According to Castro, this “virtual” humanity shared by all beings, a common myth across Amazonian peoples, is remembered by each species in their understanding of themselves, not in the understanding of others. As Castro puts it: […] if every mode of existent is human for itself, none of them are human to each other such that humanity is reciprocally reflexive (jaguars are humans to other jaguars, peccaries see each other as humans, etc.) even when it can never be mutual (as soon as the jaguar is human the peccary ceases to be one and vice versa).6 This seriously challenges not only our solidified notion of humanity as human form but as any kind of form: If everything and everyone can be human, then nothing and no one is human in a clear and distinct fashion. This “background cosmic

5 6

Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 27-28. Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 69-70.

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humanity” renders the humanity of form or figure problematic. The “ground” constantly threatens to swallow the “figure.”7 The humanity of all beings offers some clues to a new relation to the world that is no longer humanist but general. Accepting the idea of such a general humanity means accepting that the notion of human and humanity is not bound to the human form or imago (in the sense of the final or mature form in insect metamorphosis). 8 Only then can we enter a new episteme that is not merely postanthropocentric (humans making space for other species) but postanthropic in the sense that the human species as a distinctive form is no longer relevant or existing.9 But where is the entrance? Could it be in our own mythologies, the myths that lie buried beneath layers and layers of philosophical education? Over the centuries, so-called rational thought (and the canonical lore, Christian religion) has steadily pushed myth into the ditch of knowledge, letting it thrive only in minor genres: popular culture, fantasy, and entertainment—minor genres, but with major impact as in the Harry Potter series. In ancient myths and contemporary tales, animals are not just metaphors for unworthy human behavior and character traits;10 they don’t simply speak like humans or act like humans; they are humans.11

7 8 9

10 11

Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 70. See General Humanity, “Manifesto,” https://generalhumanity.org/manifesto/. Octavia E. Butler, in her trilogy Lilith’s Brood, tries such a disentangling: After a global nuclear war the surviving humans are forced to hybridize with the Oankali, an alien species that need “trading” with “partner” DNA to survive. The resulting children or “constructs” are born sexless and change into male, female, and ooloi (gene “mixers” and healers) during metamorphosis. Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood – Dawn; Adulthood Rites; IMAGO (New York/Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 1989). Mathias Gredig, Tiermusik: Zur Geschichte der skeptischen Zoomusikologie (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2018). A well-known example is the Roman de Renart, a series of animal stories written in verse by different authors in Old French from the twelfth century and in which animals speak and behave as humans.

Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

Figure 7: Detail of a miniature of a leucrote, a creature with the body of a stag and the legs of a lion, supposedly capable of imitating the human voice. Second quarter of the thirteenth century, England, S. E. (possibly Rochester), Latin and French, parchment codex. British Library (Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 23r.). Public domain.

Retrieved from: wikimediacommons.

In the Breton legends of Celtic origin that Marie de France put into verse in her Lais (a series of short narrative poems dealing with courtly love composed around 1170), we encounter a particularly salient crossing point of pagan mythology and Christian religion, of courtly (pagan) love and Christian ethics and faith. There are frequent metamorphoses between different species (man/animal/man being the most frequent one, followed by fairy/woman/fairy). Bisclavret, for instance, tells the story of a werewolf (called garwolf in Norman) and his fainthearted and treacherous wife. In the opening of the poem, Marie de France writes: Long ago you heard the tale told And it used to happen, in days of old

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Quite a few men became garwolves, And set up housekeeping in the woods.12 Bisclavret, who “was, and acted like, a noble man,” disappeared every week for a couple of days. Pressed hard by his loving wife he reveals to her that he changes into a wolf during these days in a hidden place after stripping from his human clothes. She urges him to reveal that place to her out of love, but in her terror of sharing her bed with a beast she then betrays him by hiding his clothes so that he cannot change back into human form. He is forced to stay in the forest until one day the king’s huntsmen almost kill him. When he runs up to the king to beg for mercy, the king exclaims: Behold this marvel, see this wonder. How this beast bows down to me! Its sense is human. It begs for mercy. Drive me those dogs away again, See that no-one strikes a blow! This beast understands, feels like a man.13 Thereafter, the beast stays with his beloved king, following him everywhere. It is “gentle, well-bred, polite” with everybody, until, one day, when the king is holding court, he bites the knight who had helped hide his clothes and married his wife.14 A while later, he also bites off the nose of his ex-wife, and a wise fellow muses that he must hold a grudge against those two. Torturing the lady, they find out what happened, and the lady is forced to return the clothes to Bisclavret, who finally can change back into his human form. In the German Children’s and Household Tales collected by the Brothers Grimm much later (the first edition was published in 1812) we still read

12 13 14

Marie de France, BISCLAVRET, in Lais, trans. Judith P. Shoaf, 1996, https://people .clas.ufl.edu/jshoaf/files/bisclavret.pdf. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

of the frequent metamorphosis of humans and animals.15 One of the lesser known fables is that of Hans mein Igel (Hans my Hedgehog), the story of a boy who—following his mother’s curse, who despaired of ever giving birth—is born half hedgehog, half human and who is delivered of his “hedgehog skin” only after a princess agrees to marry him. In another story, called Die drei Federn, an old toad helps one of the three sons of a king to obtain the impossible: the most beautiful carpet, the most beautiful ring, the most beautiful woman. The toad gives him a carrot with six mice and puts a young toad on top of the carrot. The carrot turns into a state coach,16 the mice into horses and the young toad into a beautiful girl. And what is more, in a contest with the sturdy farmer’s daughters brought in by the other two sons, the frog-girl wins because she retains her frog-like capacity to jump through a ring “as light footed as a deer,” while the other two break their arms and legs.17 And who does not remember the tale of the Froschkönig where the angry princess who, forced to sleep in one bed with the frog who had helped her, throws it against the wall—thus breaking the wicked fairy’s spell and transforming it back into a prince?18 In Grimms’ Fairy Tales (and many myths across the world), humans are often changed into animals as the result of a curse, a punishment, or a betrayal. If loved in their animal form they are delivered and changed 15

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Brüder Grimm, Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Ausgewählt von Lore Egal und Maurice Sendak (Zürich: Diogenes Verlag, 1974). Originally published as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Marburg: Wilhelm Grimm, 1812). The Brothers Grimm’s friendship with the Encyclopedists testifies to a curious alliance between their romantic involvement with German fables and legends (both synonymous with myth) and a materialist/scientific inventory of the world, its objects, cultures, languages, and stories… This wordplay in German is difficult to render into English: for the metamorphosis is from the German Karotte (carrot) into Karosse (state coach): one consonant change from “rr” to “ss” and voilà, an entirely different object! German original: “so leicht wie ein Reh.” In English, the tale is known as The Frog Prince. In modern versions, the princess needs to kiss the frog for the transformation to happen, while in other, early versions the frog simply spends the night on the princess’ pillow. See Stith Thompson, The Folktale (University of California Press, 1977), 102.

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back into human form. But most importantly, humans and animals (metamorphosed or not) speak a common language (rendered as human language, for the tales are told to humans); and if humans are helpful towards animals, these later help them overcome obstacles that would otherwise result in their death. But human-animal conviviality is not reduced to speaking with each other and living with each other: it also extends to sexual congress. In the German myths collected by the Brothers Grimm, sexual congress happens only after a metamorphosed human (usually a man) has disposed of his (sic) animal skin, temporarily or for good.19 In Greek myths as well as in Amerindian myths, immortals copulate with animals: Pasiphaë, daughter of the sun-god Helios and wife of Cretan king Minos, with the King’s bull, and Omama, the Yanomami demiurge, with Paonakare, a “fish being that let itself be captured in the appearance of a woman.”20 For the Yanomani, the game they hunt are actually their ancestors turned into game, but in Western evolutionary biology, the situation is not much different: primates are considered our ancestors, with the only distinction that they are generally considered “too close” to be eaten or to have sexual commerce with. In Yanomami language, having sex means “eating the vulva,” but sex is actually a reunion of humans and animal spirits. As Kopenawa relates in The Falling Sky, “[t]he shaman did eat his wife’s vulva but it was the xapiri who made her pregnant through him.”21 An interspecies version of immaculate conception! We can safely say that what myths across the world reiterate is not the distance between humans, animals, and spirits, but their proximity and mutual metamorphosis. What has been the very base of mythical thinking is now resurfacing in contemporary thought. In his talk at the Narratives of a Near Future / Inhabiting the Anthropocene symposium

19

20 21

The humans changed into animals (as punishment or disguise) are mostly men; female characters tend to be fairies: spiritual beings that can change into human form and back again. Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 29. Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 46.

Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

at HEAD, Geneva, in 2017,22 Baptiste Morizot addresses the “profound confusion” with regard to our current time of crisis, a “time of the myth” where “beings of metamorphosis” abound.23 In so doing, he draws on the work of an anthropologist friend of his, Nastassja Martin, specialist in the animist worlds of the American North, and in particular on the Gwich’in, a people who inhabit the subarctic forests. (Martin and Morizot spent time there together studying the coywolf).24 Relating that biologists are baffled by the new hybrid forms such as the coywolf (coyote and wolf) or the pizzly (polar bear and grizzly) that emerge with a changing climate (and changing natural resources) and that are, contrary to established belief, fecund and able to procreate, Martin and Morizot propose the hypothesis that animist cultures have better mental tools to deal with this kind of phenomenal instability and incertitude.

22

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Baptiste Morizot, talk at the Narratives of a Near Future symposium, HEAD, Geneva, December 14-15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8_tjuOq-N s. A slightly different version, co-authored with Nastassja Martin, has been published as “Retour du temps du mythe,” Narratives of a Near Future, Issue no. 1 (December 2017), https://issue-journal.ch/focus-posts/baptiste-morizot-et-nastassj a-martin-retour-du-temps-du-mythe/. I understand the word “crisis” in the sense of “turning point” at which change must come, for better or worse. Nastassja Martin, Les âmes sauvages. Face à l'Occident, la résistance d'un peuple d’Alaska (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2016).

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Figure 8: Detail of a miniature of a manticore, a creature with the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a scorpion. Second quarter of the thirteenth century, England, S. E. (possibly Rochester), Latin and French, parchment codex. British Library (Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 24v.). Public domain.

Retrieved from: wikimediacommons.

According to Morizot (again drawing on Martin),25 for animist cultures the world is entirely social, meaning that one entertains social (and stable) relationships with all beings that share one’s world. But there are places and beings that do not have a stabilized status and with whom one cannot enter into relations. These beings can appear

25

This quotation and the following ones are taken from my transcription of Morizot’s talk at the Narratives of a Near Future symposium.

Chapter 6 / The Time of the Myth

as humans, animals, or spirits. An animist mind is capable of including among those “beings of metamorphosis” not only the mythological creatures of the “time of origin” but also the new creatures that are emerging with the current environmental changes. In normal times, these metamorphic beings are rare, but when the world enters a state of anomaly, these beings become normal and proliferate. As a result, we are no longer in the “time of the world” where relations with our fellow creatures are stable (we know who we are confronting, and how: a caribou, a river, etc.) but in the “time of the myth” where the distinction between humans and animals, between male and female, are not drawn—a time which existed in the origin of the world and which subsists to this day. Shamans, heroes, and artists are capable of striking a pact with these beings, establishing alliances with them, and stabilizing relations with them, thus bringing about the “time of the world.” Morizot then proposes to think of our current times of crisis as a return to the time of myth, where beings of metamorphosis become the norm and proliferate, and where we have to abandon our fixed and limited ideas about other species (animals as well as plants) and the earth as a whole (no longer a resource, but an auto-regulative system). The “beings of metamorphosis” (bees that are much more complex than we thought, trees that communicate and think, humans that are multispecies alliances with bacteria, etc.) challenge the status that we have reserved for them and demand that we invent new relations, a demand which holds “the potential of theoretical and practical liberation.” Whereas in animist cultures these new relations are invented in myths, in our culture they need to be invented by art and what Morizot calls “subversive science.” As he puts it—and this is important for us here—this invention of new relations exacts “new figures, new images,” and new metaphors. He ends his talk by proposing two such figures: “diplomacy” (a figure he developed in his book Les Diplomates with regard to our relationship with wolves)26 and “interspecific resistance,” where two different species (human and plant, for instance) ally 26

Baptiste Morizot, Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une nouvelle carte du vivant (Marseille: Wildproject, Collection Domaine Sauvage, 2016); “Nouvelles

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to (make) common cause27 —such as when farmers in Latin America fight against Monsanto’s corporate seeds with the help of wild-growing amaranth.28

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alliances avec la terre. Une cohabitation diplomatique avec le vivant,” Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines 33 (2017). The correct English translation would be “ally for a common cause,” but the French “faire cause commune” renders better the fact that common engagement is a making and not simply a reacting to some pre-existing situation. On the Monsanto website we can read: “High-quality seeds are at the center of the modern agriculture systems we deliver to farmers to help achieve better harvests while also more efficiently using natural resources. We provide farmers seeds in eight row crops: alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, sugarbeets, and wheat. We also produce more than 2,000 vegetable seed varieties covering 22 crops.” https://monsanto.com/products/seeds/. In 2018, Bayer became the sole owner of Monsanto. Under the banner “advancing together” the website announces the successful acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer in these terms: “By strengthening our agricultural division and reinforcing our life sciences portfolio, the acquisition represents a significant step for Bayer, our employees, our customers and our shareholders.” For the farmers (not mentioned at all in the announcement) this represents rather a step backwards! The International Monsanto Tribunal which took place 2016-2017 in The Hague found that “Monsanto has engaged in practices which have negatively impacted the right to a healthy environment.” http://www.monsanto-tribunal.org/upload/ass et_cache/1016160509.pdf.

Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry

In his call for art to invent new figures, new images, and new metaphors, Morizot does not expressly mention poetry. Yet poetry has been—in conjunction with myth—the privileged ground for this invention. There was no clear distinction between myth and poetry in Ancient Greece; Homer’s epic poems (or rather, the Homeric tradition, which is most probably a cumulative multi-authored process)1 are infused with myth and based on an oral tradition of storytelling.2 Repudiated and discredited in philosophy, myth has survived in its poetic and written form. It survived also in the form of the novel that emerged in the thirteenth century with Chrétien de Troyes (whose works were still rhymed poems) and that continued with Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, Hoffmann, author of The Sandman, and Franz Kafka, to name but a few.3 In ancient myths and poetry, as well as in contemporary poetry and fiction, humans, animals, plants and rocks can “talk” to each other, as we have seen in the chapter “Stones” as well as in the previous chapter; they share a language that permits the personification of animals in the sense of a becoming (or rather, being) persons in their own right, with intentions and the power to 1 2 3

Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer, 15. Frederick Ahl and Hanna Roisman, The Odyssey Re-formed (Ithaka/NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung (1915); Bericht an eine Akademie (1917), Schakale und Araber (1917); E.T.A. Hoffmann: Nachricht von einem jungen gebildeten Mann (1819); Miguel de Cervantès: El coloquio de los perros (The Dialogue of the Dogs) (1613). References see bibliography.

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act; they share a language that permits transspecies commerce such as when animals help a hero to circumvent looming danger or to achieve a humanly impossible task. Today, mythical thinking and poetry are brought back to the forefront of theory. The conference Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet 4 which took place in 2014 at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), for instance, was opened with a talk by Ursula Le Guin, an “American novelist” as she chose to be called, and a poet.5 The conference was organized by Anna Tsing,6 whose feminist materialist anthropology gravitates around a critique of the “plantation” as a catchphrase for the modern alliance of capitalism and colonialism marked by an exploitative relation to “nature” and humans alike.7 Le Guin (deceased in 4

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In her book review of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet Edith Dove writes: “With essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway as the more obvious highlights, those by the other, possibly lesser known authors are certainly of equal interest. Arts of Living is an explicitly trans- or cross-disciplinary book, confirming that we need the intertwining of disciplines to find solutions for the rut we got ourselves into. As stated in the introduction of the Ghosts part ‘to survive, we need to relearn multiple forms of curiosity. Curiosity is an attunement to multispecies entanglement, complexity, and the shimmer all around us.’” (emphasis mine) Edith Dove, “Review of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene,” Leonardo, March 2018, quote from Arts of Living, G11, https://www.leonardo.info/review/2018/03/review-of-arts-of-living -on-a-damaged-planet-ghosts-and-monsters-of-the-anthropocene. Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) wrote poetry, novels, short stories, literary criticism, translations and children’s books. Le Guin is best known for her speculative fiction such as the Earthsea fantasy series. In an interview she said that she’d prefer to be known as an “American novelist.” Julie Phillips, “The Real and Unreal: Ursula K. Le Guin, American Novelist,” Bookslut.com, December 2012, http://www. bookslut.com/features/2012_12_019664.php. Tsing is professor of Anthropology at UCSC and author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. From 2013-2018 she was also Niels Bohr Professor and leader of AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene); the 2014 conference was a part of her research activities there. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. See also “Man(n) stalkt Erde. Für einen feministischen Umgang mit dem Anthropozän,” in Verschwindende

Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry

2018) turned feminist in her later works and rose to fame in the field of feminist materialist theory. According to Donna Haraway, what makes Le Guin so special is her combination of indigenous American thought, Taoism, and Anarchism.8 Besides her poetic and fictional work, Le Guin also published a theory of narrative entitled “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and which, as Haraway relates, was taken up by feminists in the early 1980s.9 In her keynote speech entitled “Deep in Admiration” Le Guin proposes to take poetry out of the dump of history and reconsider it (once dusted off) as a precious tool that allows us humans to “subjectify the world” in a “great reach outward of the mind and the imagination.”10 For Le Guin, admiration means “reverence for the infinite connectedness, the naturally sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight in it. So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.”11 Her short talk ends with a reading of her own poems, the first one of which is titled The Marrow. Like Szymborskaʼs Conversation with a Stone, Le Guin’s poem narrates at first the “closedness” of the stone, but unlike Szymborskaʼs stone, which ends the conversation with “I donʼt have a door,” this stone finally opens up:

8 9

10 11

Vermächtnisse. Die Welt als Wald, ed. Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, exhibition catalogue (Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2018), 12-21. In this article, which is based on an earlier, not explicitly feminist article published in English, Tsing also stresses the notion of the “Anthropocene” to be a conceptual and geographic “patchwork,” not a universal condition. Donna Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, M25-M50. Ibid. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (originally published in 1986) is part of Le Guin’s non-fiction collection Dancing at the Edge of the World (Grove Press, 1989). The book contains talks and essays, book and movie reviews, each of them marked with one or two of four main themes: feminism, social responsibility, literature, and travel. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is marked with feminism and literature. Ursula Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, M15M22. Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” M16/17.

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The Marrow There was a word inside a stone. I tried to pry it clear, mallet and chisel, pick and gad, until the stone was dripping blood, but still I could not hear the word the stone had said. I threw it down beside the road among a thousand stones and as I turned away it cried the word aloud within my ear and the marrow of my bones heard and replied.12 But the most intriguing part of her keynote was the opening, a reading from the fictive editorial by the President of the fictive Feral Linguistics Association from the year 1974, a text which moves from a persiflage of dry scientific jargon and logical argumentation to wild speculation and emphatic language. Curiously, this opening was left out in the written version of her talk. I quote here from my own transcript of the video documentation available on Vimeo: […] What is language? This question essential to the science of feral linguistics has been answered heuristically by the very existence of the science: language is communication! […] But to the related question but not identical question, “What is art?” we have not yet given a satisfactory answer. Tolstoy, in the book whose title is that question, answered it firmly and clearly: art is communication. This answer has, I believe, been accepted without examination or criticism by feral linguistics. For example: why do feral linguists only study animals? Because plants do not communicate. Plants do not communicate, that is a fact. […] Therefore plants have no language. […] Therefore, also, plants have no art. But stay, that does not follow from the basic axiom, only from the unexamined Tolstoïan corollary! What if art 12

Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” M17.

Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry

is not communicative? What if some art is communicative and some art is not? Ourselves animals, predators, we look naturally for an active, predatory, communicative art, and when we find it we recognize it. The development of this power of recognition and the skills of appreciation is a recent and glorious achievement. But I submit that for all the tremendous advances made by feral linguistics during the last decades we are only at the beginning of our age of discovery. […] We have not yet lifted our eyes to the vaster horizons before us. We have not faced the almost terrifying challenge of the plant. […]13 After pointing out the “noble failure” of an early plant linguist to produce a lexicon of sunflower through time-lapse photography, because his method (based on the hypothesis that the problem was merely the slow kinesis of the plant) was wrong, the fictive president increases the emotional charge of his speech and ventures into drawing the foundations of a future discipline of “plant linguistics”: […] the art of the plant, if it exists, is a non-communicative, probably a non-kinetic one. It is possible that time […] doesn’t enter into vegetable art at all […]; all we can guess is that the putative art of the plant is entirely different from the art of the animal […] Yet I predict that it exists, and that when it is found it will proved to be a not an action, but a reaction, not a communication, but a reception; it will be exactly the opposite of the art we know and recognise; it will be the first passive art known to us… Can we in fact know it, can we ever understand it? […]14 From there, the president (the historical context given by Le Guin being the early 1970s, I assume it is a “he”) pushes even further, into the domain of geo-linguistics:

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Ursula Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” keynote speech at the Anthropocene: Living on A Damaged Planet conference, May 8, 2014, University of California Santa Cruz, https://vimeo.com/97364872. My transcription. Ibid.

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The first geolinguists, who, ignoring the delicate transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath at the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal cold volcanic poetry of the rocks, each one a word spoken how long ago by the earth itself in the immense solitude, in the immenser community of space.15 Le Guin makes an important move: Instead of dragging every “thing” into the realm of the human, making every non-human manifestation a “language” and a “communication” by spreading out the concepts of “language” and “communication” like the dough of an Apfelstrudel so that they include any kind of relation, Le Guin goes the other way round. She boldly defines an art of the plant, an art of the rock that defies our human-bound definition of “art” as active communication. To presume that “visualizing” kinesis in a human “way of seeing” renders the plant’s particular “way of being” is what Le Guin refuses. The opening and closing of flowers in fast-forward—the rendering of a particular “art of living” in a human-bound sensory mode, that of cinematography—is not what the art of the flower is about.16 The art of the plant, according to Le Guin, “will be the first passive art known to us,” if we can ever know it. But does this insistence on an art created by and for plants solve the problem of anthropocentrism, or merely displace it? Aren’t we once more trapped in the circular functioning of language and its impossibility of grasping what is absolutely foreign to it except through appropriation? Is not the notion of the “art of the plant” once more activating the “linguistic machine,” our apparatus of appropriation and flattening of the world—a digestive system intended to assimilate and transform alterity according to our human cognitive metabolism? Is not speaking “humanly for [a tree, a rock, a

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Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” keynote speech, Vimeo. Even though, I must add, fast-forward and slow motion have been perceived, in early cinema, as profoundly alienating, non-human modes of vision. A century of training later, it has become part of the cinematic language.

Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry

river], in both senses of the word “for,”17 as Le Guin puts it, yet another example of this linguistic machine? Rather than about an art I prefer to talk about an aesthetics of the plant. At first sight, this leads us straight into the garden, to the arrangement of plants fostered and ordered for the visual, ambulatory, and olfactory pleasure of humans. It leads us to Monet’s garden in Givenchy, where the painter fabricated his paintings dʼaprès la nature—of a garden that is already “after nature.” At second sight we see the untilled, the unfarmed, the unploughed land; we see the fallow, the savage, the uncivilized land; we see the desert, the swamp; we see the land that has been abandoned, the wilds that have never been reclaimed, the wasteland… The French word for wasteland, friche, has a slightly different signification probably derived from the Dutch virsch/versch which means “new”, and when coupled with lant, points to a newly conquered territory by means of embankment. We have thus two possible significations: abandoned/unclaimed land vs. newly conquered land. Both ideas are related to the agricultural practice of letting a part of the land lay fallow so that it can regenerate, a practice that dates back to the Roman two-field system and to the Medieval three-field system practiced until the twentieth century. The friche, then, is both abandoned land and a new conquest for future cultivation. Even if the term, in referring to an agri-cultural practice, is tied to human ways of living, it brings me closer to Le Guin’s categories of reaction and reception. It also resonates with my earlier idea that the “reverse image” of the modernist/humanist project/projection of our will onto the world might be the acceptance of the world as a will,18 the comprehension of the world as a form. It is in the friche 17

18

“Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.” Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration,” M16. (emphasis in original) This is not an unintended bow to Schopenhauer’s “world as will and representation,” rather a nod to Deleuze’s “a life.” Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life…,” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (May 1997): 3-7.

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and even more so in the wilds where grows the aesthetics of the plant as a way of living. The original sense of the Greek term aisthēsis designates sense (and intellectual) perception as well as that which is perceived and the ability to perceive. From this we can infer that the aesthetics of the plant is the activity and the ability to perceive, as well as what is perceived: the scent of another plant, the electromagnetic field announcing a thunderstorm, the pressure of human touch, the warmth of a summer day, etc. But plants exist as a multispecies community. Many of them develop from a common root, a rhizome, let alone the numerous plants that host symbiotic epiphytes (air plants) or parasites. The aesthetics of the plant, then, is a common aesthetics, embodying “the contradictions that compose life” as Olga Goriunova and Matthew Fuller put it.19 Let us take the example of a lichen: Is the multispecies community here the alliance of algae, yeast, and fungus that a lichen is composed of, or the alliance with the rock it grows on and which is host to small plants and animals?20 Is it the alliance of the rock community with the sun and the shadow cast by the rock (and in which humans may gather), or is it the entire “breathing biosphere,” as David Abram would put it?21 Instead of searching for an aesthetics of the plant we

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“Plants scintillate in the contemplative mode of the aesthetic because they dramatize and embody so many of the contradictions that compose life.” After enumerating the various aspects of plants as “aesthetic objects” emblematizing “variation and unfolding, vigor and decay,” longevity and transience, Goriunova and Fuller turn to the “aesthetic activity” of the plants and posit (with reference to Marder and Tsing, among others) an “expanded sense of the aesthetic that would take the vegetal into account.” Plants are “foodstuffs and co-respirants, indifferent and intimate, activists of putrefaction and regeneration, both our darlings and what will digest us.” Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 93. Kindle. Jennifer Gabrys, “Sensing Lichen: From Ecological Microcosms to Environmental Subjects,” in The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, ed. Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, Third Text 32, no. 2-3 (2018): 350-367. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. See also his Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (London: Vintage/Penguin Random House, 2011).

Chapter 7 / From Myth to Poetry

should perhaps redefine aisthēsis as the common activity of sensing and exchanging through multispecies alliances.22

Figure 9: Rémi Marie. Stone covered with lichen in Antronapiana valley, Italy. Color photograph.

© 2019 Rémi Marie.

Pushing this line of thought further I want to think of the image from the point of view (or sense) of the plant: no longer the humanbound view of the world but the eco-relations that constitute ecosystem Earth. Following Harawayʼs notion of “chemosensual awareness of each other” and her notion of the “capacity to respond” which is not the same as “responsibility,”23 and following Michael Marderʼs notion

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I develop this topic (common, common activity) in the next chapter. Haraway, “Symbiogenesis,” Art of Living, M25-M50.

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of “plant-thinking,”24 I propose that the image of the plant is the ensemble of the sensorial, electrochemical relations that plants create and maintain within their ecosystem at every scale: their own metabolic system, other plants that can be symbiotic or antagonistic or even toxic to them, animals including humans that feed on them or that pollinate them, the air, the rain, the soil, the moon, the sun, the planets, the stars... I call this “ensemble” which includes growth and decline, reproduction and death, the way of living of the plant. Now, what if we enlarge the point of view to include not only plants but all beings? What if we overcome the modern Western self-image of the individual as part of yet at the same time apart from the community? What if we accept that we are all “sharing the world,” as Luce Irigaray would put it;25 that we humans—with all our knowledge, our science, our machines, our calamities, our waste—are partaking in the ensemble of Earthly relations? What if “image” were the ensemble of these ecorelations?

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“Plant” usually means a living being that can digest, metabolize, grow, absorb, secrete, circulate, respire, and procreate but cannot sense or fly like animals. Recent research has revealed this to be a strikingly limited view of plants. Drawing on the work of Michael Marder, among others, I understand plants as thinking and feeling beings. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). See also his later, joint publication with Luce Irigaray: Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Michael Marder, “To Share without Dividing,” in Sharing the Planet (La planète en partage), Caliban, French Journal of English Studies 55 (2016): 69-86. See Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (London: Continuuum, 2008).

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

In the beginning there were only Karrabing movies. And… …there were mermaids… …and… … mud.1 Reading Geontologies (2016) by Elizabeth Povinelli, I learned about the Karrabing Film Collective (KFC) of which she is a founding member and which involves friends and family members based in a rural indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia, near Darwin. Intrigued by its politically incorrect title, Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$, I watched an excerpt available online; then, even more intrigued, I asked Povinelli for the password to access the full video. Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015, 30 min.) relates the story of a group of young adults who, after having found two cartons of beer in the bush, settle down in the shade to drink. They throw the empty cans over a crag where two older men from their community are doing illegal prospecting work for a mining company and, enraged, call the police. Chased by the police, the group finds refuge in a contaminated area 1

Text appearing in the closing credits of Mermaids (2018) by the Karrabing Film Collective.

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where the officers do not dare to enter. They stay there for the night, assailed by visions and ghosts, since the area is a sacred ancestral site. At dawn they give themselves up and are driven to the Darwin tribunal.

Figure 10: “Taking a shortcut through the bush, four young men find two cartons of beer.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015) by the Karrabing Film Collective (KFC). Feature film, color, 30 min.

Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective.

When one watches the film for the first time, without any background knowledge, it is hard to grasp the plot, and even harder to grasp the meaning. What is immediately understandable is that—in place of the cultural self-promotion one would expect of a people on the verge of extinction—the film’s stance is that of self-denigration. Instead of showcasing ancestral customs, a way of living unchanged from time immemorial, or the breathtaking beauty and vast expanse of the arid territories they live in, the film takes one on a bizarre journey where the comical, the absurd, the derisory, and the ridiculous compete for the lead. Instead of empathy or sympathy it is a feeling of sadness and/or pity—faintly tinted with contempt for such a laisser aller—that these images convey at first sight.

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

Yet, when watching it again more closely, one realizes that the film stages the quasi-totality of what constitutes the daily life of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia: unemployment, alcoholism, and petty crime on the one hand, confrontation with the administration, the police, and the mining trusts which vandalize their sacred sites on the other except that, as it turns out, the lines between both sides are blurred. When the “stealing cunts” run away from the police, they crawl under a barbed wire fence, stepping over a broken board on the ground which reads “Danger, Poison.” Later, on the edge of a swamp, where the police are waiting for them, another board reads “DANGER. ASBESTOS, CANCER, AND LUNG DISEASE HAZARD.” For the audience, these signs imply that the film takes place almost entirely in a forbidden zone—but whether the danger is real or whether the boards were placed there to drive nosy people away from an undeclared mining prospecting zone is unclear. Reading in the fifty-sixth Venice Biennial edition of the art journal eflux—KFC films are frequently screened and discussed at international art museums, festivals, and biennials—a detailed commentary by Elizabeth Povinelli about the film, I learn more: Like their previous film, the Karrabing Film Collective’s second work, Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$), is a piece of improvisational realism. The basic plot is set in the scrub near Darwin, Australia and is easy enough to summarize. A group of four indigenous young men, played by members of the collective, are holed up in a chemically compromised mangrove swamp having been falsely accused of stealing two cartons of beer, while at the edge of the standoff miners are ransacking the country. Kelvin Bigfoot and Gavin Bianamu proposed the basic idea—they wanted to tell a story about finding two cartons of beer in the bush and running away from cops who were trying to arrest them. Other Karrabing members added layers of characters: two corrupt miners and two local men illicitly sampling a possible iron ore deposit located dangerously close to a sacred site; a community land-ranger group secretly tracking their furtive activities; community kids who,

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arriving at the scene of the standoff, immediately pocket a police siren for fun; community parents worried that if their sons don’t emerge from the swamp they’ll be harmed by the chemical spill, and if they do emerge they will be locked away in a Darwin jail; nyudj (ancestral spirits) inhabiting the same landscape and playing tricks on the young men; and a well-intentioned but befuddled white woman from aboriginal legal aid trying to understand what the possible theft of two cartons of beer might have to do with potential illegal mining in the area. As she puts it, “Why would miners leave beer in the middle of the bush to trap local young men?” How could beer be part of an elaborate plan to erode indigenous sovereignty of place—is the beer a scheme to create a swamp of a different type: a cesspool of substance abuse in which indigenous people are trapped? Even those of us making the film do not have a definitive answer; everyone answers slightly differently when asked, “Aba windjarrameru?” (Who are the stealing cunts?) […] The need to think through how corupciouns kulled ful manye (corruption kills many) centers the narrative of Windjarrameru.2 While at the first viewing of the film I considered it a weird piece of DIY community filmmaking, during the second viewing I approached it as a piece of ethnofiction which projects a crude light on various aspects of the internal and external relationships of the community. Or, to be more precise: an ethnofiction which unfolds the ways in which external entities (the state, the mining companies) are internalized within the community, and how intermediaries such as the police and the community land rangers are trapped in a conflict between two loyalties, the first to the laws and ancient customs of their community, and the second to Western law and money. I also felt receptive to the poetics of the

2

Elizabeth Povinelli, “WINDJARRAMERU, THE STEALING C*NTS,” e-flux journal, 56th Venice Biennial, May 21, 2015 – Day 12. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com /authors/elizabeth-a-povinelli/.

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

film and here I do not mean the “lyrical” superimposition effects used to evoke visions of ancestors, but formal aspects: condensation, shortcuts, litotes, etc.

Figure 11: “Two men are bribed to help with an illegal mining project.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015).

Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective.

Windjarrameru can be seen as a strange mirror game where the KFC protagonists—the “mob,” as they call themselves”3 —hide behind the image that Western culture has projected onto them. By all accounts, the systematic undermining (no pun intended) of the culture, ways of life, and beliefs of the Aboriginal population had the general effect acted out by the characters in the film. Spoiled, robbed, and humiliated, displaced, educated, and assisted, their cultural and personal integrity has crumbled. (This ethnocide never named as such weighs heavily on the shoulders of the younger generations: Almost non-existent in the 1980s, 3

The Karrabing Film Collective, “Growing up Karrabing: a conversation with Gavin Bianamu, Sheree Bianamu, Natasha Lewis Bigfoot, Ethan Jorrock, and Elizabeth Povinelli,” Un Magazine 11, no. 2 (2017), http://unprojects.org.au/maga zine/issues/issue-11-2/growing-up-karrabing.

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the rate of suicide among Aboriginals has since risen exponentially. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Aboriginals aged between fifteen and thirty-five, and the second leading cause of death of children of up to fourteen years old.)4 But, one wonders, if this mirror game is actually an image-act of cultural resistance and reclaim, how is it possible for this act to be accomplished through conventional Western image-making? A closer look at the self-image of the KFC may yield the answer. In a conversation with its members, published in 2017 in Un Magazine, a Melbourne-based journal, I read: The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots arts and film cooperative consisting of friends and family members whose lives interconnect along the coastal waters west of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. Begun in 2008 when members of the extended family found themselves homeless in the wake of deteriorating conditions on their natal Indigenous Community and a neoliberal assault on Indigenous funding, most Karrabing now live on a rural Indigenous community in the Northern Territory and have no formal training in film or art production. The Collective uses artworks and films to analyze contemporary settler colonialism and, through these depictions, challenge its grip. Their films operate at many levels: from insider jokes and hints of a sentient world beyond the edge of visibility, to probes on what is causing everyday corrosion within Indigenous life. KAC’s films and artworks represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity. They develop local artistic languages and forms, while allowing audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. The collective’s medium is a form of survivance—a refusal to relinquish their country and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality.5

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Jens Korff, “Aboriginal suicide rates,” Creative Spirits.info, 25 March 2019, https:/ /www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/aboriginal-suicide-rates#ixz z5Y5CvACXX. The Karrabing Film Collective, “Growing up Karrabing.”

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

While in this presentation the members of the KFC—note the alternative spelling KAC, which stands for its “alter ego,” the Karrabing Art Collective—insist on collective authorship, the film we are talking about, as well as the five other KFC films, are “directed and edited by Elizabeth Povinelli” as the closing credits put it. Povinelli, who has dedicated a great part of her life to the defense of the Aboriginals in the Northern Territory of Australia, while at the same time pursuing a career in Western academia, is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. This dual role of academic and activist necessarily raises eyebrows, for it abandons the politically correct (and safe!) position of the Western observer and dares to embrace cultural and economic asymmetry in a collective endeavor. Povinelli’s keynote at the thirteenth EASA Biennial Conference organized by the European Association of Social Anthropologists, a conference whose overarching theme was “Collaboration, Intimacy & Revolution – innovation and continuity in an interconnected world,” is particularly revealing in this regard. Her presentation of the first KFC film, When the Dogs Talked (2014), sparked heated controversy. In a critical commentary entitled “Why Povinelli’s talk at ESEA2014 was a failure,” medieval historian Sylvain Piron notes: I can only say that I was uneasy with many of the concepts she developed—for instance, the notion that her interactions with the aborigines she studies could be described as a “collaboration,” while she admittedly “wrote the script” of a movie that she was proud to be the “director” of, When the Dogs Talked. These two positions are not easily reconcilable. This might be what she attempted to do by using the notion of an “alteration,” that (sic) could be symmetrically applied to her own self, and to the community she observed.6 An animated debate followed this commentary, covering many aspects of the so-called anthropology crisis. A central focus of the debate was 6

Sylvain Piron, “Why Povinelli’s talk at ESEA2014 was a failure,” Allegra Lab Blog, August 19, 2014, http://allegralaboratory.net/why-povinellis-talk-at-easa2014-w as-a-failure/.

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the issue of exoticism and proximity. The editors of the Allegra Lab Blog who published Piron’s commentary and moderated the debate, resumed the controversy: What was the fundamental problem [with the talk]? To us, quite bluntly, instead of helping our beloved discipline to break free from a European/North-American legacy that has tended to exoticize the “other” and make him/her become the silent object of the anthropological gaze and Western knowledge consumption, it resonated, even strengthened this troubling legacy. First there were Povinelli’s persistent reminders of her close intimacy with the natives—the use of the pronoun “we” as if wanting to secure her legitimate position for representing the world of the indigenous groups she studied. “We eat together. We raise kids together. We make films together.” Was she emphasizing that it is extraordinary for an anthropologist to share the everyday activities of her informants? Etc. […] To us, it is as much on (sic) the discovery of radical sameness as it is in difference where the truly ‘exotic’ lies.7 Povinelli’s first words in Tallinn were that she would prefer not to be there;8 this seems to have shocked many of her colleagues. That sound was lacking in her presentation due to technical failure and that, as a result, When The Dogs Talked was showcased mute, may have increased the negative response. The debate about exoticism and proximity is one internal to anthropology. Am I concerned, too, when leveraging Aboriginal filmmaking and Aboriginal culture to create a model for what I call

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Julie Billaud and Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, “Persistent point of first contact – Povinelli & EASA2014,” Allegra Lab Blog, August 22, 2014, http://allegralaborat ory.net/persistent-point-of-first-contact/. The blog is an experimental platform that publishes field notes, conference reports, and essays in the field of anthropology. “Even if intended as humorous or ironic, the audience never seemed to forgive her for her opening comment of ‘not really wanting to be there’. And yes, we wonder too: if she didn’t want to come, why did she – or why did she share her hesitation?” Ibid.

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

the common image? Am I facing the same pitfalls of exoticism, illusionary proximity, and cultural cooptation? I prefer to think (with Castro) that the answer I am looking for lies in the space between Aboriginal cosmogonies and Western philosophy. The film and its technical form, totally foreign to Aboriginal culture, are everything except neutral. The externality of the anthropologist’s point of view—even if Povinelli joins in the daily life of the Karrabing community and has passed a great part of her life there—reinforces this bias and a feeling of malaise: Even if the young members of the group are familiar with the medium of film and use smartphones for shooting, and even if, as Povinelli stresses in her e-flux commentary on the film,9 the scenario and the shooting were discussed by the entire group, it is difficult to look at the film as an Aboriginal production. The very presence of the anthropologist doubled with the technical dispositif of the film makes me wonder if—although somehow off-beat—KFC films are not still part of the history of ethnographic film: a history that has always been the result of collaboration and negotiation between the ethnographer-filmmaker and the filmed “natives” staging themselves and their lives. Even when this collaboration and negotiation is taken as the basis for novel, hybrid genres—think of Robert Flaherty’s docudrama Nanook of the North (1922), or Jean Rouch’s ethnofictional body of work starting with his seminal Moi, un Noir (1958)—and pushed to its limit as in the collaborative film-making of the KFC, is it possible to go beyond the fundamental imbalance between Western ethnographer/director and “indigenous” actors/scriptwriters? KFC films are in fact described by Povinelli as improvisational realism, a term forged during the South by Southwest film festival in 2005 by Eric Masunaga, a sound engineer working with filmmaker Andrew Bujalski. Mumblecore refers to a sub-genre of independent film characterized by naturalistic acting and dialogue (often improvised), lowbudget film production, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of people in their twenties and thirties. Its influences are both French New Wave, Reality TV, and (technically) 9

Povinelli, “WINDJARRAMERU.”

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the availability of cheap cameras and post-production software. It is in this vein that Povinelli decided to position KFC films, with the difference that, while mumblecore films (as a mainly American phenomenon of the 2000s) are addressed to the very same public they portray, KFC films seem to be targeted to a Western public. What do other Aboriginal communities think when watching these films? Do they identify with them? When asked via email, Povinelli replied: They are pitched to Indigenous people everywhere and have been shown via thumb drive and screenings—we have a show scheduled for the Yarra Land Council, This Place,10 Alice Springs, and Kunanarra, for example. Indeed, we notice Indigenous people get the films and videos most deeply. I should also add that we also show in the Nonwest—in Asia and Southeast Asia (Times Museum, Guangzhou; Vargas Museum, Philippines; Jakarta Biennal, etc.).11 It is difficult to say what kind of film Windjarrameru is; it does not fit into a genre, but seems to hover above an ontological faultline. Let us tentatively posit that the film stands somewhere in between Povinelli’s claim of improvisational realism, the tradition of ethnographic film and art (as mentioned before, the KFC frequently calls itself KAC, standing for Karrabing Art Collective). It is difficult to say what kind of film it is, but it surely remains a filmic film with regard to the dispositif of production and display. If it is possible to transform the dispositif of production to a certain degree—the French New Wave filmmakers at the beginning of the 1960s, for instance, using the much lighter and more mobile Aaton camera, were able to leave the studio and shoot on location; the Dogma 95 movement in Denmark started in the mid-1990s turned towards handheld consumer cameras and against special effects or technology to create “authentic” films, and mumblecore films from

10

11

This Place is an Australian TV series produced by ABC TV telling the story behind the place names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. https://iview. abc.net.au/show/this-place. Elizabeth Povinelli, email message to author, May 2019.

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

the mid-2000s prioritize improvisation over scripted acting—the dispositif of display remains in place: director/actors on one side of the screen, audience on the other. How Aboriginal communities experienced the first filmic images of themselves and their rituals I do not know; what I do know is that these images that the colonial settlers made and shared about them deeply influenced Aboriginal politics. These images are malleable for those who know how to use them to convey a certain message, a certain emotion, a certain ideology; they are crushing for those who don’t and who passively receive them. To reclaim ownership of one’s image one needs to master the politics and the technics of film, and this is the reason why the KFC, in order to create their films, needed an influential Westerner (Povinelli), and (for the first films) a professional filmmaking team. Put differently, the KFC, in order to create their films, needed the presence of an insider familiar with the arms of the enemy... It seems to me that the intention of the KFC was not to create a new art or a new language—as a matter of fact, they never had the ambition of creating a cinematographic revolution—but to create a “counter-image” of themselves destined for a Western audience. And for that, ironically, they shot a film that no Westerner would have dared to shoot for fear of being accused of devaluing Aboriginal culture. Windjarrameru is a counter-image in the sense that in using the weapons of its adversary (Western filmmaking) it manages to turn the enemy’s force (the depreciative image of Aboriginal culture) into a positive force—like in martial arts when leveraging the force of the adversary to counter a blow. The film does so in using the strategy of self-derision, of reclaiming the negative image projected on oneself, thus canceling out its negativity. But can the image created by the colonizers be inflected or even reversed by the colonized? Kopenawa’s Words of a Yanomami Shaman, for instance, can be seen as a positive counter-image of Yanomami culture from the standpoint of the Yanomami. But because the relation of Western and Yanomami culture is asymmetrical, the words spoken by Kopenawa are not only transcribed and edited by Albert, a Western anthropologist, but also translated into English. Do we still have here what Isabelle Stengers calls “reciprocal capture”? Stengers, who is quoted by

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Castro in this sense, coined the notion in a different context—that of the philosophy of science. In Science Wars, the first book in her sevenbook volume Cosmopolitics, she defines “reciprocal capture” as a “symbiotic agreement” or a “dual process of identity construction” wherein conflicting practices develop a mutually beneficial relationship.12 Reciprocal capture, as Deborah Bird Rose summarizes the concept, is “an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence” in which “neither entity transcends the other or forces the other to bow down.”13 It is a relationship of encounter and transformation similar to “equivocation,” a term used by Castro for the “relational positivity of difference.”14 Can there be a mutually beneficial relationship, can there be encounter and transformation when the Western capitalist practices of mining, logging, and herding render the daily Yanomami practices of living with the forest ever more difficult? As Kopenawa puts it: “I think that we will only be able to become white people the day white people transform themselves into Yanomami.”15 I want to believe Kopenawa, Stengers/Rose, and Castro that it is indeed possible to “become Other,” but we must not forget that the KFC’s guerrilla of the image is a guerrilla precisely because of the monstrous asymmetry between the warring parties, the desperate fight of the (de)colonized against a relentless cultural assimilation. From this perspective, can the anthropologist be the “friend of the natives” she desires to be if the knowledge accumulated and disseminated by her (despite best intentions to the contrary) inevitably serves the Western strategy of cultural usurpation? Does not this dilemma rather than that of exoticism and proximity lie at the core of the current crisis of anthropology? Is the hope that those “indigenous cultures” that Western

12 13 14

15

Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. R. Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 36. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 35, quoted after: Rose, “Shimmer,” Arts of Living, G51. Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 91. Castro is acknowledging Stenger’s notion of “reciprocal capture” and in particular her term “cosmopolitics” which he relates to Amazonian perspectivism. Kopenawa, The Falling Sky, 22.

Chapter 8 / Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$

imperialism has almost eradicated may salvage Western civilization in the end nothing but a kind of reverse cultural cannibalism?16 After scrutinizing the film again and again I had the intuition that beneath its manifest image layers transpires a latent image of an entirely different order. So, after having addressed the question of the genre of the film and its position within the anthropological and postcolonial discussion, I want to follow my intuition that there is something more in KFC films than meets the eye—something more than a guerrilla of the image, something like a real negotiation, inside as well as outside the Karrabing group. My hypothesis is that, beyond the conscious repositioning of Aboriginal culture in the social/political/economic context of settler colonialism, the film is about the (re)invention of a multilateral relation to the world, to the Other, and to the self; it is about what I call a common image, an image which, beyond the selfmocking mirroring of the colonial gaze, has something to do with Rancière/Plato’s “dance of the community.”17 A common image which is the composite (rather than a composition) of all the relations between humans, animals, plants, spirits, the dead, the lithic, the elements, etc. A common image of which the film is an ambiguous clue, showing us what we already knew (the impact of settler colonialism) and, at the same time, what we did not know: namely, how they—the so-called natives—appropriate Western culture for their cultural reconstruction, and adumbrating what we can only intuit: namely, how this implies the possibility of a communion transcending the human realm.

16

17

The Antropofagia movement is a Brazilian avant-garde cultural theory about consumption and counter-colonial discourse. Developed in the late 1920s by Oswald de Andrade and others, it has become the basis of contemporary academic debates on postcolonialism. Ironically, it is currently being devoured in turn and used as a trope for the artistic strategy of re-appropriation in an intercultural/cosmopolitan context. Carlos A. Jauregui, “Antropofagia (Cultural cannibalism),” in Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2012), 22-28. See my discussion of Rancière’s interpretation of Plato in the Chapter “Matter.”

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I have to be careful at this point not to mix image and image: the mirror-image game and the cultural reconstruction on the one hand, and the (re)invention of a shared world as a common image on the other. Returning the Western gaze for investigating inequality is certainly an artful judo move; it can help restore cultural self-esteem, but it will not lead much further; trapped in the old relation it will not create a new one. Yet inventing a new relation to the world is vital; it is urgently needed if we want to survive, and survive together. Have the KFC or the Karrabing community succeeded in this reinvention? Is this common image already (or still) existent among them? Can this common image be shared by others? I do not know for sure, but what the KFC films have taught me is that there exists a possibility of something coming, or coming back, like the ocean flooding back after low tide (low tide being the literal meaning of karrabing)—a possibility which appears only (but for how long?) at the meeting point of two cultures.

Chapter 9 / Travelling to the Warlpiri Country

What notion of the image existed in traditional Aboriginal culture before the arrival and imposition of the Western image? Trying to answer this question I leave the region of Darwin, hit the road and follow Highway One for a bit more than 300 km until Katherine, make a right on Road 96 and continue straight on for 460 km more, trying hard not to fall asleep. Just before I reach Kalkarindji, I turn left onto the dirt road that leads, 115 km further and four hours later, if I believe Google Maps, to Lajamanu. After about thirteen hours on the road, if everything goes well, I shall be at the Warlpiri outstation in the heart of the Tanami desert. Here is the place of Milpirri, a community arts project bringing together Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri people to “enliven tradition for an intercultural twenty-first-century future,” as creative director Steve Jampijinpa Patrick puts it.1 The project is a collaboration between Tracks Dance Company and the community of Lajamanu that dates back to 1988 and gathers the Lajamanu community every two years in a theatrical performance. The 2018 edition of Milpirri drew on “the Warlpiri ceremony (the Jurntu Purlapa) which teaches about law (kuruwarri) and justice.”2 The commentary for the documentary about the 2018 Milpirri performance posted on Vimeo defines kuruwarri in the following terms:

1 2

Tracks, presentation of the 2018 milpirri, http://tracksdance.com.au/2018-milpi rri-jurntu. Ibid.

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Kuruwarri explains the proper functioning of the world, including how humans should relate to each other and the world around them, as given to Warlpiri people through the Jukurrpa, rather than a set of rules designed and constantly modified by humans to regulate society.3 In her attempt to elucidate concepts that are difficult—if not impossible—for an occidental mind to grasp, Christine Judith Nicholls quotes Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi, formerly a Warlpiri teacher at the Lajamanu School in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory: To get an insight into us [the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert]—it is necessary to understand something about our major religious belief, the Jukurrpa. The Jukurrpa is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment. The philosophy behind it is holistic—the Jukurrpa provides for a total, integrated way of life. It is important to understand that, for Warlpiri and other Aboriginal people living in remote Aboriginal settlements, The Dreaming isn’t something that has been consigned to the past but is a lived daily reality. We, the Warlpiri people, believe in the Jukurrpa to this day.4 (emphasis mine) The religious beliefs of the Warlpiri and other Aboriginal peoples are thus complex constellations in which a holistic, ancient law is the basis 3 4

Tracks, presentation of the full 2018 milpirri performance on Vimeo, https://vi meo.com/305387298. Christine Judith Nicholls, “‘Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming’: who dreamed up these terms?”, The Conversation, January 28, 2014, https://theconversation.com/d reamtime-and-the-dreaming-an-introduction-20833. According to Nicholls, the Dreaming is a term “supposed to summarize the fundamental principle of the Warlpiri people, Jukurrpa, a concept mostly known in grossly inadequate English translation as ‘The Dreamtime’ or ‘The Dreaming.’” It was invented in the late nineteenth century by Francis Gillen, a post-and telegraph stationmaster in Alice Springs, a speaker of the Arrernte language and a keen anthropologist. The term was made popular by his collaborator Walter Baldwin Spencer, a biologist and anthropologist who “studied” the Arrernte.

Chapter 9 / Travelling to the Warlpiri Country

for a lived reality, providing rules for interaction with humans and the non-human environment. Ancestors and spiritual forces are present in the landscape where they have left their traces; they are manifest in present time. Nicholls writes: The Warlpiri religion, the Jukurrpa, has a host of word-concepts that are important adjuncts to the core concept. Included among these is kuruwarri, defined in the Warlpiri dictionary as: visible pattern, mark or design associated with creative Dreamtime (Jukurrpa) spiritual forces: the mark may be attributed to these forces, or it may symbolise and represent them and events associated with them; mark, design, artwork, drawing, painting, pattern.5 Jukurrpa manifests itself through kuruwarri: the cartography of sacred sites and mythical itineraries as well as paintings, drawings, dances, and ritual songs. Among these marks, only the sacred rocks and the engravings are permanent material marks; all other marks, such as sand drawing, body-painting, dances or songs, are ephemeral; and the mythical routes are invisible. Anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski, who has spent her long career living with and researching the Warlpiri, puts it this way: The Warlpiri word kuruwarri translates literally as “image,” “mark,” “track” or “trace.” To suggest its cosmological meaning, I have proposed translating it as the “image-forces” and “vital forces” of Dreamings (Jukurrpa). In 1980, a young Warlpiri man named Martin Johnson Japanangka said to me “We have no beliefs! We have kuruwarri!” I later came to understand that as “traces,” Warlpiri kuruwarri are the evidence that an event happened or an action took place. In that sense, traces are always true—only their interpretation is subjective. This is why kuruwarri is also translated as the Law.6

5 6

Nicholls, “Dreamtime”. (emphasis in original) Barbara Glowczewski, TOTEMIC BECOMINGS – COSMOPOLITICS OF THE DREAMING / DEVIRES TOTÊMICOS – COSMOPOLÍTICA DO SONHO (São Paulo: n-1 publications, 2015), 23. See also Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze

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In a recent email conversation Glowczewski precises that “it is the Warlpiri who use the term [kuruwarri] for their images (body paintings, paintings on ritual objects and on canvas for sale) as well as their mythical stories,”7 and that she in fact proposed the term “image-force” (in French) or “force-image” (in English), rather than the “slightly essentialist notion of ‘vital force’ used by other colleagues.”8 For sure, what is meant by the Warlpiri word “kuruwarri” cannot be adequately translated into Western languages, only equivocated, to speak with Castro, without final closure, to speak with Derrida. But does the notion exist in other Aboriginal languages? When asked about an equivalent used by the Karrabing community, Elizabeth Povinelli answers: We use the term “Durlg” *Batjemalh language and equivalent “Therrawin” *Emmiyangel language for Kuruwarri. What Karrabing members and their parents and grandparents say is that Durlg is the material imprint that their ancestors made on and in the land as they traveled and encountered each other. These material imprints are often, typically, iconic of the action or being itself. So you can literally see an image of the being in the shape and material of the site. You can also see an indexical icon of these Durlg actions on living beings—say, the shape of a pelican’s beak or the affects of a person. In this way the Durlg image is not a frozen remain of a past action but an ongoing indexical iconic (sic) image imprint on the ongoing present.9 (emphasis mine) In the third of the KFC films, Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016), the ancestors appear, protesting “We are alive!” This implies that Durlg (to paraphrase Povinelli’s definition) is not a frozen past or immutable present

7 8

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(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) in which she revisits her work of the last thirty years. Barbara Glowczewski, email message to author, April 2021 (my translation). Ibid. For my purposes, “image-force” makes more sense: it sounds better in English than “force image,” in addition to avoiding connotations to “power object,” which is the name for African magical objects formerly called fetishes. Elizabeth Povinelli, email message to author, May 2019.

Chapter 9 / Travelling to the Warlpiri Country

but an ongoing imprint on the ongoing present—life printed upon life, in the same way that a child’s name engraved on the bark of a tree grows with the tree, in parallel with the child. If we compare this material, animate imprint of the ancestors on the world to the Latin imago, the wax or golden imprint of the face of the dead, what we have on the one hand is a living image (the world in its present process of transformation is shaped by the ancestors) while on the other hand all we have is the dead image of a dead person. While the Western notion of life sees death as life’s annihilation and negation, the Aboriginal inclusive relation to the ancestors and to death is also an inclusive relation to life and to the living.

Figure 12: “Ancestors spirits talk in an apocalyptic future.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015).

Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective.

Coming from an entirely different direction, namely neovitalist materialism in the wake of Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti, in her book The Posthuman (2013), develops a similarly holistic definition of life that encompasses non-life and death. The term she uses is zoe, redefined by her—in opposition to bios—as “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life it-

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self [that] stands for generative vitality.”10 Zoe-centered egalitarianism, for Braidotti, is “a materialist response to the trans-species commodification of Life in advanced capitalism.”11 According to Braidotti, “Life/zoe undoes any clear-cut distinctions between living and dying.”12 Death for the posthuman “marks the generative force of zoe [...] beyond personal individual death […]; the posthuman subject is the expression of successive waves of becoming, fueled by zoe as the ontological motor.”13 With this double grounding, one foot set in Aboriginal religion, the other in posthuman theory, let me try one last time to outline what I mean by the common image: not a representation of the invisible or the visible world but an ongoing relation between the invisible and the visible, the living and the non-living; not a sign that stands in for something else but an aesthetics, an ethical practice, a way of living.

10

11 12 13

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity 2013), 60. Braidotti uses the term zoe to deconstruct human superiority and centrality, a deconstruction which, for her, stands at the core of posthuman theory. Canceling the distinction between anthropos and bios as tied to the human on the one hand and zoe as the life of animals and non-humans on the other hand, she designates zoe as a “productive and immanent force,” as “life in its nonhuman aspects.” Ibid., 65 and 66. But Braidotti herself acknowledges that bio-genetic capitalism shares the same de-centering of the human, not merely welcoming the hybridization of species as does posthuman theory but practicing the commodification of all life. This is why her “materialist” and techno-positivist response to techno-capitalism, despite its deconstructive stance, holds the risk of being coopted by it in turn. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 136.

Coda / Common Image

As the heirs of so-called rational thought, we tend to assume that theoretical concepts are developed in a steady progression, step by step, in a laborious, machinic process, but of course this is seldom the case. Most of the time we grope our way through unknown terrain, trying different paths, different perspectives, different points of view, intuiting solutions rather than finding them by logical procedures. This is particularly the case with my search for the common image, which is an open-ended search in unknown and uncertain fields outside the solid (if obsolete) constructions of the humanist episteme and crosswise to the logical chains it has implemented. Where has this search led me? The first chapters explore our human relation to stone, a thread which runs through the entire text: magical stone, in the case of the Sami stones, habitable stone, with Plato’s cave, built stone, with the cathedral of Chartres, and finally, living stone, with the Aboriginal sacred rocks. All these stones are corner stones in my attempt (Chapter One and Two) to stake out common ground that potentially allows for the non-living and the living to enter into relation and for the building of a general humanity. The image is not explicitly referred to in these first two chapters, as they are dedicated to preparing the soil for a new and larger concept based on eco-relation. It resurfaces in the third chapter, with a discussion of the Greek origin myth of the image (the loved one’s contours traced), challenged by current archeological discoveries, and Chinese shadow theater as a possible model for Plato’s cave allegory. Chapter Four discusses the sonic image as the ensemble of life-sustaining animal, vegetal, and mineral exchanges.

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Chapter Five opens up with the (counter)anthropological notion of perspectivism (which again refers only implicitly, if strongly, to the image) and with our equivocal relation to Amerindian ontologies characterized by a fluid community of humans, spirits, animals, and forests rather than immutable species-bound forms and perspectives. Chapter Six develops the notion of a general humanity heralding a postanthropic episteme where the human species as a distinctive form is no longer relevant. Chapter Seven enlarges, with the aid of Ursula le Guin, the concept of aesthetics to plants and to ecosystem Earth in general. Chapters Eight introduces, with the Karrabing Film Collective, the notion of the common image as the community of the living, the non-living, and the dead. In Chapter Nine, the Aboriginal concept of kuruwarri (marks left by our ancestors on the land and their continuous manifestation) offers an outline of the common image: not a common sign that stands, by convention, for something else but a common sense: an aesthetics and ethics shared between the living and non-living. Having arrived at this point, we need to start the tortuous journey once more da capo al coda and recapitulate the possibilities, difficulties, and questions that have arisen. The notion of the common in the sense of something shared by everybody, something that is felt or done together, something that is general, accessible to all, like the air, the soil, the water, through which Earthly beings exchange their respective lifesustaining elements—or rather, not a “thing” but the very activity of sharing and therefore relating and the different modes of this relating—appears in many contexts of meaning throughout the chapters: common ground, common air, common activity, common sense, common ethics and aesthetics, and ultimately, common image. Common may also take the plural noun form of the “commons,” generally understood as the obverse of individual property, which—coupled with individual labor and identity—sustains late modern capitalism. In the current of ecofeminist critique of capitalist patriarchy, authors such as Starhawk have argued the elimination of the commons to be a rather recent phenomenon, starting with “enclo-

Coda

sure” of aristocrats’ land in seventeenth-century England.1 But have the commons as a state where natural and social resources belonged to all, that is, nobody in particular, ever existed? Are not “common” and “community” enacting the same (modern) principle of identity and exclusion, only at the level of the group? By way of interrogating three texts that treat the notion of the common—Commun, Essai sur la révolution au 21ème siècle (2014) by philosopher Pierre Dardot and sociologist Christian Laval, Communauté, Immunité, Biopolitique (2018) by philosopher Roberto Esposito, and A World of Many Worlds (2018), an anthology edited by anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and geographer/archeologist Mario Blaser—I hope to sharpen the contours of what I have named the common image. Dardot and Laval quote Marie-Alice Chardeaux’s Les choses communes (2014), a piece of research about the commons from the point of view of civil law history. Between 29 and 19 BC, the idea that the air or the water belongs to everybody appears at different times in Virgil’s Aeneid. Led by Aeneas, and after many adventures at sea, the Trojans arrive in Italy and ask old king Latinus for “a humble home for our country’s gods, and a harmless stretch of shore, and air and water accessible [patentem: literally, open] to all.”2 In Roman law, following Marie-Alice Chardeaux,3 exist the two notions of res communes and res nullius, with res nullius (including wild animals) potentially belonging to the first claimant, and res communis (the air, running water, the sea) being by nature nonappropriable. Chardeaux explains that this is so due to a (temporary) flaw in Roman law, and that—except for a short period of time—things which were part of juridical categories and which were not appropriable 1 2

3

Starhawk, “Appendix A,” in Dreaming the Dark. Quoted from: Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. A. S. Kline, 164, https://www.aoifesn otes.com/docs/third-year-latin/VirgilAeneidpdf.pdf. Latin original: “dis sedem exiguam patriis litusque rogamus/innocuum et cunctis undamque auramque patentem.” Patentem (nominative patens) is the present participle of patere (“to lie open, to be open”) in Latin. Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes (Paris: LGDJ, 2006), 1-17, quoted in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2014), Chapter 1, “La Réification du Commun.”

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did not exist in Ancient Rome. In short, there are no commons since every thing falls under the juridical regime, and this juridical regime has been the regime of property ever since. Starhawk points to the fact that the elimination of the commons in seventeenth-century England through the splitting up of aristocrats’ forests coincided with the repression of traditional (female) medical knowledge and status.4 But what was common to these commons was nothing more than a complex construction of strictly delineated usages or traditional rights of so-called commoners (the right to graze livestock, to fish, to collect firewood, or to dig turf for fuel). Thus when Dardot and Laval write that the principle of the common is that of a common activity, what they are saying is that there is no such thing as the commons (in the sense of common property): only activity is a common thing.5 The common (koinôn)—a perpetual process of putting in common (koinônein)—is not linked to property (individual or communal) but to activity. Roberto Esposito tries to untangle the equivocal notion of community in a collection of essays entitled Communauté, Immunité, Biopolitique (2019), which draws on his Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community (2009).6 He opposes communitas and immunitas, two notions built from the same root, the Latin “munus” which means “gift,” “duty,” “obligation,” but with contrary significations. While community is a regime instituted by (common) duties and obligations, immunity is a regime

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Starhawk, “Appendix A,” in Dreaming the Dark. French original: “Au sens strict, le principe politique du commun s’énoncera donc en ces termes: “Il n’y a d’obligation qu’entre ceux qui participent à une même activité ou à une même tâche.” Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2014), 23. English translation: Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, trans. Matthew MacLellan (London/New Delhi/Singapore: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Roberto Esposito, Communauté, Immunité, Biopolitique. Repenser les termes de la politique (Paris: Éditions Mimesis, 2019); the following quotes are taken from this body of work, translated by me. See also Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy C. Campbell (Redwood City/CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Coda

of exemption from such obligations considered as onus: a burden, not a bond. As Esposito writes: “Is immunized the one who is shielded from obligations and dangers that concern the others; who interrupts the circuit of social exchange in placing him/herself outside of it.”7 If American neo-communitarianism (as opposed to liberalism) and German organicist sociology link community and belonging, 8 identity and property, defining “the community as that which identifies somebody with his or her ethnical group, land, or language,” the original meaning of community is entirely different.9 “Common” is the contrary to “proper.” The members of the community are linked by a duty of reciprocal gift, they are obliged to step out of themselves and turn towards the other. In order to counter this intrinsic exteriority of community, considered a menace to individual freedom, modernity has put in place a process of immunization where the other is first kept at bay and then suppressed through incorporation: Where communitas opens, exposes, turns the individual towards its exterior, renders it free with regard to which is exterior to itself, immunitas closes it up in itself, in its skin, and draws the outside into the inside, in suppressing it as an outside.10 Esposito dismantles the modern opposition between (individual) liberty and community in going back to the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin etymology of the word liberty. The Indo-European root leuth or leudh, from which stem the Greek eleutheria and the Latin libertas, and the Sanskrit radical frya, from which derive the English freedom and the German Freiheit, are both at the base of a semantic chain (*lieben, leif, love, friend, Freund) that attest to a communautarian connotation, a power

7 8

9 10

Esposito, “Immunisation et violence,” in Communauté, Immunité, Biopolitique, 132. In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), Ferdinand Tönnies distinguishes groups characterized by a feeling of togetherness and communal goals (Gemeinschaft/community) from groups characterized by instrumental, individual goals (Gesellschaft/society). Esposito, “Liberté et immunité,” in Communauté, Immunité, Biopolitique, 115. Ibid., 116.

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of connection, of aggregation, of communization. Liberty is “the exact contrary of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency, to which one has long tried to assimilate it”; it exists only in relation, only as relation.11 Modern political philosophy has operated an inversion of the notions of liberty and community, epitomized in Hobbes’ assumption of a primitive state of war where “every man is enemy to every man” and which can be overcome only by a social contract whereby citizens cede all individual power to an omnipotent sovereign (state) in charge of enforcing the law.12 Modern society and its civil laws place the individual beyond reach of the other and free of the hold of the other (including, in principle, the State). A liberty, then, through which we lose everything: the other, the relation to the other, the common (as alterity) and the community (as the composing of alterities). Community, on the contrary, is not something given, but something that is always deficient, but which we must nevertheless aim for. It is both impossible and necessary.13 While Dardot/Laval and Esposito highlight the complex of meaning of the word “common” with regard to the human, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser reach out towards a larger than human commonality in bringing together philosophy of science and indigenous thought in an anthology named A World of Many Worlds. In their introduction entitled “PLURIVERSE, Proposals for a World of Many Worlds” the editors stress (referring to Helen Verran’s chapter) the importance of resisting the temptation “to propose one’s common sense to think difference.”14 11

12

13 14

Esposito, “Liberté et Immunité,” 121. “Rapport” in French means any kind of relation, while in English it connotes a close, intimate relation; the choice was therefore to use “relation” rather than “rapport.” Thomas Hobbes, Chapter XIII, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery,” in Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2010). Esposito, “La loi de la communauté,” 35. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, “PLURIVERSE, Proposals for a World of Many Worlds,” introduction to A World of Many Worlds, ed. de la Cadena and Blaser (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 11. See also Chapter

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They oppose the “one-world world” (John Law) to a pluriverse—a heterogeneous world, “a world that fits many worlds,” as write the Zapatistas quoted in the epigraph. Cadena and Blaser argue that the notion of the common good is usually evoked to dissimulate corporate interests (as with extractive industries) but their critique goes deeper than that. “Common good” and “commons,” even when used in a progressive sense, share a form of relating based on exclusion, separating humans from the rest of the world, thereby canceling out other forms of relating in which humans are part of an Earthly community. In contrast, the “making of an uncommons” means “the negotiated coming together of heterogeneous worlds (and their practices).”15 The uncommons seems to be another way of framing “divergence,” a notion used by feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in conversation with philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and paraphrased by Cadena and Blaser as that which “constitutes the entities (or practices) as they emerge both in their specificity and with other entities or practices.”16 Divergence (or cosmopolitics) is about accepting having “interests in common which are not the same interests,” as Stengers puts it elsewhere,17 a phenomenon that is frequently observed in activist groups gathering a heterogeneous mix of people and points of view. The uncommons, Cadena and Blaser conclude, is “the heterogeneous grounds where negotiations take place toward a commons that would be a continuous achievement, an event whose vocation is not to be final because it remembers that the uncommons is its constant starting point.”18

15 16

17

18

Four by Helen Verran: “The Politics of Working Cosmologies Together While Keeping Them Separate,” 112-130. De la Cadena/Blaser, “PLURIVERSE,” 4. De la Cadena/Blaser, “PLURIVERSE,” 9. See also: Marilyn Strathern, “Opening Up Relations,” in A World of Many Worlds, 23-52; Isabelle Stengers, “The Challenge of Ontological Politics,” ibid., 83-111. Isabelle Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices,” Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2005): 183-196; and “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (2011): 48-63, here 60. De la Cadena/Blaser, “PLURIVERSE,” 19.

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How does this inflect my thesis of the common image? What kind of common does it imply, and how does it differ from the common restricted to the human species? As a matter of fact, the image we inherited (and that I refute here)—the perspectival image—is/was our common image. It took a century-long process of perceptual and technological adjustments culminating in the invention of photography and film for the perspectival image to be fully implemented as the modern means of representation and vision. This is what I argued in SOFTIMAGE some years ago.19 In light of the insights gathered in the course of writing this book, the argument needs to be revised: With the invention of photography and film, the perspectival image became common, in both senses of the word: ordinary, and shared belief. This common image, we could say, is/was a visual regime whose artificial construction has become invisible, since it has become naturalized among Westernized people (which, by now, includes the majority of the human population). This construction gradually forged a shared belief about how to think, perceive, and relate to the world. Every image is potentially common in this sense; the question, then, is what kind of community it institutes and what beings this community includes/excludes. Are we humans capable of enlarging our notion and practice of the common to include the entire Earthly community or would that inevitably mean to impose our all-too-human “common sense”? Are we ready to embrace again and again the irrevocable divergence of being and acknowledge the common image as a process of perpetual re-negotiation? My initial hypothesis was that the perspectival image, erected along firm borders between humans and the rest of the living and non-living world, is disintegrating. We may think that this division was a delusion from the start, or we may think that it has had its day, depending on our point of view on the history of so-called civilization. But we are forced to acknowledge the dead end this artificial border reiterated in Western myth, science, and philosophy, from Aristotle to Heidegger, has 19

Hoelzl and Marie, “The Photographic Paradigm of the Image,” in SOFTIMAGE, 94-96.

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led us to.20 As the borders between humans and “nature” are being torn down by the very disciplines that contributed to building them (biology, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology), transversal, non-hierarchical appreciations of ecosystem Earth reemerge. Playing now the last notes of my coda, let me suggest (with Josep Rafanell i Orra) that, as a matter of fact, “practices of communization” partaking in a larger than human communism are always-already at work in the world.21 I understand larger than human communism in the etymological sense of koinônein or putting in common and in the sense of overcoming the period of what Alain Badiou has called “deanimalisation.”22 Likewise, the common image (and its larger than human

20

21

22

In a course given in 1929/30, and in accordance with Jewish-Christian theology, Martin Heidegger posited that humans define themselves in opposition to animals, and that both Rilke and Nietzsche’s nihilism are at the base of the nineteenth-century biologism and psychoanalysis that lead to a “monstrous anthropomorphisation of the animal […] and a corresponding animalisation of the human.” Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (Wintersemester 1929/30), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 226. Josep Rafanell i Orra, “Le monde revient. Ebauche d’une antipolitique” (The World is Coming Back. Sketch of an Antipolitics), lundimatin no. 252, August 31, 2020 (my translation), https://lundi.am/Le-monde-revient-Ebauche-d-une-anti politique. For Badiou, this period starting with private property and sedentary agriculture and culminating in capitalism has produced a “monstrous humanity.” Alain Badiou, “Trump, le capitalisme et le communisme,” interview by Frederic Taddeï, RT France, January 29, 2020 (my translation), https://www.les-crises.fr/interditd-interdire-trump-le-capitalisme-et-le-communisme-avec-alain-badiou/.

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community) is always-already there, all around us—we only need to reclaim our general humanity to recognize and embrace it. In the meantime, all we can do is “open all our eyes” and look ahead into the open, at our common (ancestral) ground.23

23

This is a reference to the chapter “L’Ouvert” in Giorgio Agamben’s treatise,L’Ouvert. De l’homme et de l’animal (The Open: Man and Animal), where he relates that, according to the poet Rilke, only the animal sees the open “with all its eyes” while the eyes of humans have been “inverted” and placed “like traps” in the interior, an inversion that Martin Heidegger, in his notion of “the open” (das Offene), refutes. While twentieth-century biologism calls this hierarchical separation into question, notably with Uexküll’s notion of “Umwelt” proper to each being, Heidegger upholds human superiority in arguing that the “unveiling of being” is only possible through language, which neither animal nor plant possesses (Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 237, see note 20). Giorgio Agamben, L’Ouvert. De l’homme et de l’animal. Traduit de l’italien par Joël Gayraud (Paris: Editions Payot, 2006), 91-101, quotes 91-92; see also Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926).

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Mihail Siergiejevicz. Saami seid in the mountains of Nyavka Tundra in Russian Lapland. Color photograph, 2019. Creative commons license. Source/retrieved from: wikimediacommons. Figure 2: John William Waterhouse. Circe offering the Cup to Ulysses. Pencil on wove paper, 1891. Public domain. Source/retrieved from: Victoria  and Albert Museum, London. Figure 3: Bernard Suzanne. Graph illustrating “The Allegory of the Cave.” © 2015. Courtesy Bernard Suzanne. Figure 4: “Laying out hydrophones.” Still from Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (2018). Video installation, color, sound, 18 min. Courtesy Ursula Biemann. Figure 5: “Aquanaut speaking.” Still from Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (2018). Video installation, color, sound, 18 min. Courtesy Ursula Biemann. Figure 6: Barbara Crane Navarro. Yanomami men working in the forest, Alto Orinoco, Amazonas, Venezuela. Color photograph. © 2006. Courtesy Barbara Crane Navarro. Figure 7: Detail of a miniature of a leucrote, a creature with the body of a stag and the legs of a lion, supposedly capable of imitating the human voice. Second quarter of the thirteenth century, England, S. E. (possibly Rochester), Latin and French, parchment codex. Bestiary with 55 framed miniatures in colors and gold, at the end of each passage of text describing the animal. Held and digitized by the British Library (Royal MS 12 F XI II, f. 23r.). Public domain. Retrieved from: wikimediacommons.

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Figure 8: Detail of a miniature of a manticore, a creature with the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a scorpion. Second quarter of the thirteenth century, England, S. E. (possibly Rochester), Latin and French, parchment codex. Bestiary with 55 framed miniatures in colors and gold, at the end of each passage of text describing the animal. Held and digitized by the British Library (Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 24v.). Public domain. Retrieved from: wikimediacommons. Figure 9: Rémi Marie. Stone covered with lichen in Antronapiana valley, Italy. Color photograph. © 2019. Figure 10: “Taking a shortcut through the bush, four young men find two cartons of beer.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015) by the Karrabing Film Collective (KFC). Feature film, color, 30 min. Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective. Figure 11: “Two men are bribed to help with an illegal mining project.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015) by the Karrabing Film Collective (KFC). Feature film, color, 30 min. Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective. Figure 12: “Ancestors spirits talk in an apocalyptic future.” Screenshot from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015) by the Karrabing Film Collective (KFC). Feature film, color, 30 min. Courtesy Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective.

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Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaka/CA: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. Sharing the World. London: Continuuum, 2008. Irigaray, Luce. In the Beginning, She Was. London/New Delhi/Singapore: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Irigaray, Luce. To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. James, John. Chartres: The Masons Who Built a Legend. London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1985. Jauregui, Carlos A. “Antropofagia (Cultural cannibalism).” In Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk, 22-28. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2012. Jewish Publication Society. Genesis. In Complete Jewish Bible. Revised translation of public domain 1917 Jewish Publication Society version of the Old Testament (Tanakh) by Dr. David H. Stern. Jerusalem: Jewish New Testament Publications Inc., 1998. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Kindle edition published by Public Domain Books, 2006. Kafka, Franz. Bericht an eine Akademie. In Der Jude. Eine Monatsschrift 2, no. 8 (May-June 1917). Contemporary edition: In Franz Kafka: Drucke zu Lebzeiten, edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, 219-313. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1996. Kafka, Franz. Die Verwandlung. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1915. Kafka, Franz. Schakale und Araber. In Der Jude. Eine Monatsschrift 2, no. 7 (January-February 1917). Kirby, Vicky. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Kopenawa, Davi. The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman, edited by Bruce Albert, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Harvard: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2013. Kindle.

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Artworks Karrabing Film Collective (KFC). Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015). Feature film, color, 30 min.

Bibliography

Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean (2018). Video installation, color, sound, 18 min. Commissioned by The Atlantic Project. Introduction on htt p://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/acoustic-ocean.

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Detailed Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION    

CHAPTER 1 — STONE Conversation with a Stone by Wisława Szymborska: do humans and stones share common ground? * “About a Stone” by Hugo Reinert: resource capitalism versus magical practices around stones * “Can Rocks Die?” by Elizabeth Povinelli: can rock hear and smell people passing by? * Stone by Jeffrey Cohen: enter the magicians! * Vertical time of history, horizontal time of magic

CHAPTER 2 — MAGIC Homer, The Odyssey: Circe, skilled in remedies and poisons, a magician? * The slow invention of the term μαγοσ (magus) as a negation—or how to refute a foreign religion * Excluding magic from the field of thought in Ancient Greece (and Modern Europe) * A new caste of priests emerges, the philosophers * Magic as the space of undivided, uncensored thought

CHAPTER 3 — MATTER The Greek myth of the invention of drawing: Kora of Sicyon * Archaeologists’ origin stories, from the Blombos caves to Lascaux * Plato’s cave allegory: a dispositif of deception? * Plato/Rancière: art as the genuine movement of communal bodies * Plato/Suzanne: a third way beyond materialism and idealism * A cave is a cave; a wall is a wall—or how to live beyond the prison of separation * Making by Tim Ingold: mat-

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ter, form, and idea—and what is wrong with hylomorphic theory * The enigma of the Acheulean biface: intelligence as a collective capability? * Making as a common process, a common activity

CHAPTER 4 — OCEAN Acoustic Ocean (2018) by Ursula Biemann: sound, the image of the sea * Humans, animals, plants, and rocks: all immersed in the earth and its atmosphere * The sound image: processes of sonic and affective resonance within ecosystem Earth * Oceanic feeling as connectedness with the world, as common image * Religio as the common thread linking myth and mystical experience

CHAPTER 5 — POINTS OF VIEW Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: philosophy and counter-anthropology * Whitehead’s philosophy of becoming, Deleuze/Guattari’s becoming Other * Castro and the permanent decolonization of thought—is it possible? * Following Castro following Deleuze following Leibniz: a way for the image? * Perspectivism and multinaturalism: unity of mind and diversity of bodies * Equivocation, or the “relational positivity of difference” (Castro) * Extending filiation and kinship, from Deleuze to Castro to Donna Haraway * The space between (anthropology and philosophy)

CHAPTER 6 — THE TIME OF THE MYTH Understanding the Other from within? (On Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky) * A general humanity: from postanthropocentrism to postanthropism * Western mythologies, or the ditch of knowledge * The animal/human divide: a humanist invention? * Human/wolf metamorphoses in Marie de France’s Bisclavret * Human/animal metamorphoses in the Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm * Baptiste Morizot and Nastassja Martin: the emergence of hybrid species * Morizot’s “time of the myth” with its “beings of metamorphosis” * The need to invent new relations and create multispecies alliances

Detailed Table of Contents

CHAPTER 7 — FROM MYTH TO POETRY Ursula Le Guin, “Deep in Admiration”—or how can poetry reach out to our fellow beings? * Le Guin’s notion of the art of the plant as passive and receptive * The image of the plant: the ensemble of the sensorial, chemical, and electrical relations that plants create and maintain within their ecosystem * The image as a sharing of the world; as the eco-relations that constitute ecosystem Earth

CHAPTER 8 — WINDJARRAMERU, THE STEALING C*NT$ Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective * Windjarrameru: DIY community filmmaking or ethnofiction? A strange mirror game! * The anthropologist and her natives: on the crisis of anthropology * A film is a film is a film: the medium and the message * Filmmaking as cultural image reclaim: fighting with the arms of the enemy * The common image as the community of the living, the non-living, and the dead

CHAPTER 9 — WARLPIRI COUNTRY The law as an integrated way of living (jukurrpa) * A mediation between the visible and the invisible (kuruwarri) * An ongoing imprint on the ongoing present (durlg) * A different relation to death, to memory—and to the image * Life/zoe as a generative vitality encompassing life and death (Rosi Braidotti) * Common image: an aesthetics of the common, an ethical practice

CODA — COMMON IMAGE Recapitulation * The commons; immunity and community; the uncommons * Practices of communization: always-already at work in the world * The common image: always-already there, around and between us    

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BIBLIOGRAPHY       

APPENDIX (List of Illustrations)