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

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

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

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

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 77

The lake of my mind

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Vintage Books, 2004) p. 21

Det mäktigaste av alla narkotika

Vilken lycka att arbeta från tidiga morgonen till sena kvällen för sig och sin familj, att ordna tak över huvudet, att odla upp jord för att sörja för födan, att likt Robinson bygga upp sin egen värld, imitera skaparen då han skapade universum, att i sin egen moders efterföljelse gång på gång återföds sig till världen!

Så många tankar som går genom medvetandet, så mycket nytt man kommer att fundera över när armmusklerna är upptagna av kroppsarbete, av grovarbete eller timmermansjobb, när man tar itu med förnuftiga uppgifter, som man kan lösa genom fysiskt arbete och som skänker belöning genom den glädje och den framgång deras lösande innebär, eller när man sex timmar i sträck håller på att yxa till någonting eller att gräva i jorden ute under en öppen himmel som genomtränger en med sin heta och välgörande andedräkt. Och just detta, att dessa tankar, dessa aningar och denna närhet inte låter sig överföra till papperet utan glöms bort där de hastigt fladdrar förbi är inte en förlust utan en vinning. Du stadens eremit, som med starkt svart kaffe eller tobak piskar på dina slappnade nerver och din försvagade inbillningskraft, du känner inte det mäktigaste av alla narkotika, det som ligger inneslutet i verklig nöd och en god hälsa.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 305

Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ

Men hela tiden är det ett och samma oändligt likartade liv som uppfyller universum och som varje timme förnyas i otaliga föreningar och omvandlingar. Ni är rädd att ni inte ska uppstå från de döda, men ni uppstod redan när ni föddes, utan att ni lade märke till det.

Kommer ni att plågas? Kommer vävnaderna att känna av sitt sönderfall? Det vill med andra ord säga: hur kommer det att gå med ert medvetande? Men vad är medvetandet? Låt oss undersöka den saken. Att medvetet vilja somna innebär verklig sömnlöshet, att medvetet försöka känna sina egna matsmältningsorgan arbeta, det innebär en verklig störning a deras innervation. Medvetandet är ett gift, ett medel till självförgiftning av det subjekt som inriktar det på sig själv. Medvetandet är ett ljus som går i dagen, medvetandet lyser upp vägen framför oss så att vi inte ska snubbla. Medvetandet är de tända lyktorna på ett lokomotiv i rörelse. Rikta dess ljus inåt så inträffar en katastrof.

Hur går det med ert medvetande? Ert. Ert. Vad är ni? Däri ligger knuten. Låt oss reda ut den saken. Hur uppfattar ni er själv, vad är det för del av er som ni är medveten om? Är det njurarna, levern, blodkärlen? Nej, så långt ni kan erinra er har ni alltid bestämt er själv genom era verksamhetsyttringar utom er själv, i familjen, bland främmande människor eller genom era händers verk. Låt oss se närmare på detta. Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ. Detta är vad ni är, det är i dettas ert medvetande har andats, det är därav det har närt sig, har berusat sig hela livet. Er själ, er odödlighet, ert liv finns hos andra. Än sen? Hos andra har ni varit, hos andra ska ni förbliva. Och vad gör det för skillnad för er, att detta sedan kommer att kallas minne. Detta är ni, sådan ni ingår i det varav framtiden skall bestå.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 75

It is by doing just acts that the just man is produced

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 28

The manifold phases of consciousness

Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing – a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness) – why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different form all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) pp. 198-199

Reasoning without desiring is not reasoning

Reason and cognition cannot develop or exercise their functions normally if they are not supported by affects. Reasoning without desiring is not reasoning. In order to think, to want, to know, things must have a consistency, a weight, a value, otherwise emotional indifference annuls the relief, erases differences in perspective, levels everything.

Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident (Polity Press, 2012) p. 22

Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes

The delusion of control—the conviction, apparently immune to correction by mere facts, that the world is a machine incapable of doing anything but the things we want it to do—pervades contemporary life in the world’s industrial societies. People in those societies spend so much more time dealing with machines than they do interacting with other people and other living things without a machine interface getting in the way, that it’s no wonder that this delusion is so widespread. As long as it retains its grip, though, we can expect the industrial world, and especially its privileged classes, to stumble onward from one preventable disaster to another. That’s the inner secret of the delusion of control, after all: those who insist on seeing the world in mechanical terms end up behaving mechanically themselves. Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes, and lurch robotically onward along a trajectory that leads straight to the scrapheap of the future.

John Michael Greer, 'The Delusion of Control' on The Archdruid Report (URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/06/the-delusion-of-control.html, 24/06/2015)

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 152

We think not the distant, but the close that measures it

We believe that we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 44

The mind is a thing that lasts

To Descartes' sentence: "the mind is a thing that thinks", Bergson retorted: "The mind is a thing that lasts..." The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: it's our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 22

The absence of any reason for my being

Even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. [...] For even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 56