Semiotic but not languagelike

But representation, as I have been arguing, is something both broader than and different from what we expect given how our thinking about it has been linguistically colonized. Extending linguistic relationality to nonhumans narcissistically projects the human onto that which lies beyond it. And along with language comes a host of assumptions about systematicity, context, and difference, which stem from some of the distinctive properties of human symbolic reference and are not necessarily relevant to how living thoughts might more generally relate. In the process, other properties that might permit a more capacious view of relationality are obscured. My claim, in short, is that an anthropology beyond the human can rethink relationality by seeing it as semiotic but not always and necessarily languagelike.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 83-84

A self is the locus of agency

A self, then, is the outcome of a process, unique to life, of maintaining and perpetuating an individual form, a form that, as it is iterated over the generations, grows to fit the world around it at the same time that it comes to exhibit a certain circular closure that allows it to maintain its selfsame identity, which is forged with respect to that which it is not; anteaters re-present previous representations of ant tunnels in their lineage, but they are not themselves ant tunnels. Insofar as it strives to maintain its form, such a self acts for itself. A self, then, whether "skin-bound" or more distributed, is the locus of what we can call agency.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p.76

unexpected events

Unexpected events, such as the sudden appearance of a stump across our path – when we manage to notice it – or Maxi's peccary sudddenly reviving can disrupt our assumptions of how the world is. And it is this very disruption, the breakdown of old habits and the rebuilding of new ones, that constitutes our feeling of being alive and in the world. The world is revealed to us, not by the fact that we come to have habits, but in the moments when, forced to abandon our old habits, we come to take up new ones. This is where we can catch glimpses – however mediated – of the emergent real to which we also contribute. 

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 65-66

Museums and libraries are heterotopias

Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias' in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwimo4-YlaHkAhVQblAKHWf9DZoQFjAFegQIBRAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2Fallanmc%2Fwww%2Ffoucault1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw333VKyhg9HhLuy9An6eJNQ ) p.7

The garden is a rug

We must not forget that in the Orient the garden an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias' in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwimo4-YlaHkAhVQblAKHWf9DZoQFjAFegQIBRAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2Fallanmc%2Fwww%2Ffoucault1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw333VKyhg9HhLuy9An6eJNQ ) p. 6

Wholes precede parts

In semiosis, as in biology, wholes precede parts; similarity precedes difference. Thoughts and lives both begin as wholes – albeit ones that can be extremely vague and underspecified. A single-celled embryo, however simple and undifferentiated, is just as whole as the multicellular organism into which it will develop. An icon, however rudimentary its likeness, insofar as it is taken as a likeness, imperfectly captures the object of its similarity as a whole. It is only in the realm of the machine that the differentiated part comes first and the assembled whole second. Semiosis and life, by contrast, begin whole.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p.64

Our bodies are the products of semiosis

Symbolic thought run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are the products of semiosis. Our sensory experiences, even our most basic cellular and metabolic processes, are mediated by representational – though not necessarily symbolic – relations. But symbolic thought run wild can make us experience "ourselves" as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground this special kind of symbolic thinking in "our" bodies, bodies that are themselves indexically grounded in the worlds beyond them: I think therefore I doubt that I am.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p. 49

The book of events

Every beginning
is only a sequel after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Love at First Sight' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 198

So much Everything

There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Reality Demands' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 184

What's important

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own.

When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'No Title Required' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) pp. 176-177

When you take to the woods

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Children of Our Age' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 149

Life will always be short

Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Our Ancestors' Short Lives' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 144

We call it a grain of sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is inverted, his hasts is make believe,
his news inhuman.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'View with a Grain of Sand' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) pp. 135-136

Only what is human can truly be foreign

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Psalm' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 100

We are permeable

How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons pressed into service by gangsterish genes? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable – physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially – to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004) pp. 126-127

I write for my own contentment

Besides, I would have thought that the same thing applied to singing as has been said about poetry here in Iceland: 'I write for my own contentment and not my own aggrandizement'.

Halldor Laxness, The Fish Can Sing (Vintage Books, 2014) p. 238

We require toy political forms

Intellect is indeed an organ of extinction and that is not great. You can't snicker triumphantly about that. Like all autoimmune systems, intellectuality-depression reinforces itself. How does one sub-vert a self-reinforcing loop? To cast intellect away would be the absurd anti-intellectualism that is part of the problem, trying to return to some state of Nature defined by stripping "civilization" of its symbionts: intellect, plastic, cancer; and, beyond this, stripping the very loop form that provides the structure for beings. This is absurd because "civilization" is already agrilogistic scorched earth and retreat with the nonhumans airbrushed out. Stripping the human realm of its symbionts is... agrilogistics.

[...]

An ecological politics based on guilt underlies "return to Nature" tactics. Basing politics on horror necessitates some kind of resignation tinged with Schadenfreude, wide-eyed and screaming while Rome burns. What mainly impedes ecognosis is the deadly seriousness; we require toy political forms that don't take themselves quite as seriously. A lifeform, an engineering solution, a social policy, another lifeform – they join together and become another type of toy, in a sort of ecological Lego. Not as models for some future serious form. Why? Because of interdependence, there's always a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There can never be The Toy, one toy to rule them all. Attempts to impose one system top down ahve consistently failed to feed as many people as a variety of smaller scale approaches.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 140-141

Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter

A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: all three axioms of agrilogistics are in play. Life is the ultimate noncontradictory Easy Think Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future society in which being ecological became a mode of violence still more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories such as health.  It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls it) look like an anarchist picnic. If that is what future coexistnce means, beam me up Scotty. The widescreen view of dark ecology sees lifeforms as specters in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 137-138

Reason reveals itself a little bit nonhuman

The basic mode of ecological awareness is anxiety, the feeling that things have lost their seemingly original significance, the feeling that something creepy is happening, close to home. Through anxiety reason itself begins to glimpse what indigenous – that is, preagricultural – societies have known all along: that humans coexist with a host of nonhumans. For reason itself reveals itself to be at least a little bit nonhuman. In turn, reason discovers global warming, the miasma for which humans are responsible. Through reason we find ourselves not floating blissfully in outer space, but caught like Jonah in the whale of a gigantic object, the biosphere. Such an object is not reducible to its members, not its members to it; it is a set whose members are not strictly coterminous with itself.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.130

To exist is to coexist

Depression is the inner footprint of coexistence, a highly sensitive attunement to other beings, a feeling of being sensitized to a plenitude of things. De-pressed by them. So we don't want to reject the logical structure of consumerism. Enjoy a thing just for the taste of it. By listening to it rather than sadistically treating it as silent plastic. Ecognosis means: letting become more susceptible.

Melancholy is irreducible because it's ecological; there is no way out of abjection because of symbiosis and interdependence. To exist is to coexist. Yet this coexistence is suffused with pleasure, pleasure that appears perverse from the standpoint of the subject under the illusion that it has stripped the abjection from itself. Down below abjection, ecological awareness is deeply about pleasure.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.129

To be a thing is to be nonsensical

Awareness of ourselves as another "nonhuman" entity has to do with our knowledge, now including logical proofs, that even our thoughts and logical systems evade us. Despite our intentions, they have a life of their own, which means, despite our fantasies that they are totally coherent, they are in fact fragile, like lifeforms. To be a logical system is to be able to speak nonsense because to be a thing is to be nonsensical. Ecognosis has to do with allowing for this nonsensical, pestiferous dimension of things. A thought, a lizard, a spoon veer from themselves. To be a thing is to be a deviation. A thing, a thought, a sentence are per-ver-se. An en-vir-onment is not a closed circle but a veering loop. A thing is in a loop with itself: a thing and a thing-pattern, asymmetrical, which is why there can be patterns at all – which is why there can be replication. Which is why there can be organic chemicals, lifeforms, and sentences about patterns.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.96

Sense must coexist with nonsense

Sense must coexist with nonsense, its shadow. A thing is shadowed by another thing because it's shadowed by itself. Recursion points to coexistence in a nonholistic, not-all (which is to say ecological) possibility space. Metalanguages try to escape this possibility space, to reduce the paradox of coexisting: we entail one another and are not one another. Plants, specters, and hallucinations return more vividly when you try to prune them. To distinguish thought from nonsense is like taking a lifeform out of its habitat.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.91

A human is a heap of things that aren't humans

Since a human is a heap of things that aren't humans, just as a meadow is a heap of things that aren't meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don't really exist or there's a malfunction in the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle. A malfunction, moreover, that is beginning to distort political decisions at scales appropriate for thinking global warming. If we relax our grip, we can allow for sets of things that don't sum to a whole, and this just is what we have when we think geological temporality as a series of nested sets of catastrophes.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.75

Nature as such is a twleve-thousand-year-old human product

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn't just a term – it's something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-year-old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one's brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a sipping point.

The Anthropocene doesn't destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as catastrophe.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 58-59

The anture-culture split is the result of a nature-agriculture split

The humanistic analytical tools we currently possess are not capable of functioning at a scale appropriate to agrilogistics because they are themselves compromised products of agrilogistics. The nature-culture split we persist in using is the result of a nature-agriculture split (colo, cultum pertains to growing crops). This split is a product of agrilogistic subroutines, establishing the necessarily violent and arbitrary difference between itself and what it "conquers" or delimits. Differences aside, the confusions and endlessly granular distinctions arising therefrom remain well within agrilogistic conceptual space.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 43

You are already living on more than one timescale

You are already living on more than one timescale. Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. We sense that there are monsters even if we can't see them directly.

There's a monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone in one of its eyes. When you are sufficiently creeped out by the human species, you see something even bigger than the Anthropocene looming in the background, hiding in plain sight in the prose of Thomas Hardy, the piles of fruit in the supermarket, the gigantic parking lots, the suicide rate.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 41-42

Prove that I have imagination

Prove that I have imagination as a human being. Prove that I'm not executing an algorithm. more to the point, prove that my idea that I'm not executing an algorithm isn't just the variety of algorithm that I've been programmed to execute.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 31

Place is a twist you can't iron out of the fabric of things

Place has a strange loop form because place deeply involves time. Place doesn't stay still, but bends and twists: place is a twist you can't iron out of the fabric of things. When you are near your destination you can sometimes feel quite disoriented. You may enhance the magnification on Google Maps to make sure you are really there. The local is far from the totally known or knowable. It is familiar, which also mean that it is uncanny (German heimisch, "familiar" and "unfamiliar", "intimate" and "monstrous" at the same time).

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 11

Space has collapsed and placed has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension

We have been telling ourselves that homogenous empty "space" has conquered localized, particular "place". We are either the kind of person who thinks that the category of place is a quaint antique or we are the kind of person who thinks that the category is worth preserving because it is antique. In a certain way, we are the same kind of person.

Many have pronounced the death of place since the 1970s. In literary studies the announcement has gone hand in hand with the language of textuality versus speech. Our habitual talk pits speech (presence, villages, the organic, slow time, traditions) against textuality (dissolution, speed, modern, and postmodern technocultures). Yet the coordinates are terribly out of date. In a twist no one saw coming (because we weren't looking outside the human), space has by no means conquered place. That postmodern meme was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one's material conditions.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era, what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. "Space" has revealed itself as the convenient fiction of white Western imperialist humans, just as relativity theory revealed Euclidean geometry to be a small human-flavored region of a much more liquid Gaussian spacetime. The Euclidean concept that space is a container with straight lines is good enough to be getting on with if you want to voyage around the coast of Africa to reach the Spice Islands. Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly moonstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension. How? Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It's not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird's nest, beaver's dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. And these places, as in the concept of spacetime, are inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate (human) "world history", DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology; and again the time of wolves, the time of whales, the time of bacteria.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 9-10

Travellers who find themselves astray in some forest must not wander now this way now that

My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could, and to follow no less constantly the most doubtful opinions, once I had determined on them, than I would if they were very assured, imitating in this travellers, who, finding themselves astray in some forest, must not wander, turning now this way now that, and even less stop in one place, but must walk always as straight as they can in a given direction, and not change direction for weak reasons, even though it was perhaps only chance in the first place which made them choose it; for, by this means, if they do not go exactly where they wish to go they will arrive at least somewhere in the end where they will very likely be better off than in the middle of a forest.

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Penguin Classics, 1968) pp. 46-47

Beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge

Having learnt from the time I was at school that there is nothiing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that has not been said by one or other of the philosophers; and since then, while travelling, having recognized that all those who hold opinions quite opposed to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many exercise as much reason as we do, or more; and having considered how a given man, with his given mind, being brought up from childhood among the French or Germans, becomes different from what he would be if he had always lived among the Chinese or among cannibals; and how, down to our very fashions in dress, what pleased us ten years ago and will perhaps please us again before another ten years are out, now seems to us extravagant and laughable, I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge, and, nevertheless that the assent of many voices is not a valid proof for truths which are rather difficult to discover, because they are much more likely to be found by one single man than by a whole people. Thus I could not choose anyone whose opinions it seemed to me I ought to prefer to those of others, and I found myself constrained, as it were, to undertake my own guidance.

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Penguin Classics, 1968) p. 39

Language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed

By means of poetic language, waves of newness flow over the surface of being. And language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 222

Forests reign in the past

Who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests. [...] In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 188

The sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams

A nest-house is never young. Indeed, speaking as a pedant, we might say that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting. For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence. An intimate component of faithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest and house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 99

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space

Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not only one of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently, of counter-energy.

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 46-47

Through permanent childhood we maintain the poetry of the past

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.

[...]

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.

[...]

It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 15-16

In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time

At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability – a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to "suspend" its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.8

The house shelters daydreaming

If I were asked to name the main benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.6

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.5

Only those who have learned to curl up can inhabit with intensity

After having followed teh day-dreams of inhabiting these uninhabitable places, I returned to images that, in order for us to live them, require us to become very small, as in nests and shells. Indeed in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxxiv

Poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom

The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.

Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, as it appears in the evolution of language across the centuries, the poetic image, assa a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speec. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship of freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes in making game of censors! Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced fredom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxiii

Work should not be glorified

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epiteths thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid 'job experience' imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalisation of those who are seen as getting something for free – all reveal the truth that for our societites, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis – where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognise that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 125

The history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence

While work is common to every society, under capitalism it takes on historically unique qualities. In pre-capitalist societies, work was necessary, but people had shared access to land, subsistence farming and the necessary means of survival. Peasants were poor but self-sufficient, and survival was not dependent on working for someone else. Capitalism changed all this. Through the process called primitive accumulation, pre-capitalist workers were uprooted from their land and dispossessed of their means of subsistence. Peasants struggled against this and continued to survive on the margins of the emerging capitalist world, and it eventually took violent force and harsh new legal systems to impose wage labour on the population. Peasants, in other words, had to be made into a proletariat. This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive. This means that the 'proletariat' is not just the 'working class' nor is it defined by an income level, profession of culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.. And the history of capitalism is the history of the world's population being transformed into proletarian existence through the advancing dispossession of the peasantry.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 86-87

Alienation is a mode of enablement

The overall aim must therefore be picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this world and transform them into materials for the further construction of freedom. Such an image of emancipation can never be satisfied with or condensed into a static society, but will instead continually strain beyond any limitations. Freedom is a synthetic enterprise, not a natural gift.

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis: one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration. There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 82

Emancipation is not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, 'synthetic freedom' recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer. In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, 'it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means'. Understood in this way freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons. Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 79-80

I shall love

But in everyone’s life major crises occur, in which the utmost patience and self-control are required. We then realise how silly we are to complain of trivial, daily annoyances, petty aches and pains. I shall love, and I shall do my best, and I shall do my duty by others cheerfully – if we follow this principle, we can cope with anything. Life does not last long, and its pleasures and travails are also constantly changing. Wounds, setbacks, deceptions – it’s hard to bear them lightly; but if we don’t, the burden of life gradually becomes insufferable, and it becomes impossible to fix one’s mind on any goal or ideal. If we fail, if we live in dissatisfaction and tension day after day, in constant conflict with our circumstances, then our lives become completely futile. Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress. […] Most of our troubles are self-imposed. […] Forgiveness in love and sharing of troubles are true happiness; the satisfaction of personal ambition is not happiness.

Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories (Penguin Books, 1994) pp. 286-287