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