Lee Marvin as Ben Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (1969)
I.
The ancient Greeks thought of planets as objects characterised by their irregular movement. Indeed, the modern English word planet derives from the term ἀστήρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), which, translated, means wandering star.
Emanuele Coccia reminds us of this fascinating fact in the fourth chapter of his book Metamorphoses (2021) [a], arguing that the earth, first and formost, is a kind of migrant (although it's not true to say that it's wandering aimlessly through space, obliged as it has been to maintain a relatively stable orbit about the sun for the last 4.5 billion years) [b].
For Coccia, wandering is a key word in his philosophical lexicon. Like Heraclitus, he insists that everything is constantly moving and everything is constantly changing: all is flux. Not because all is fire, but because of the planetary nature of existence:
"Look at everything around you, regardless of its texture, shape, age, or consistency. The birds, the wind, the rivers, but also the buildings, the smells, the colours: everything moves, everything changes. Everything changes places, even if we do not perceive it. Everything changes form even if this transformation remains invisible to our eyes. The world as a planetary reality is a wandering body and, inversely, wandering is the primary attribute of all bodies in this universe, terrestrial and celestial alike." [116]
It's important to note, however, that just as nomadism in the Deleuzean sense refers to a trip in intensity, rather than just moving from one place to another, so too does wandering, for Coccia, mean more than spatial movement: "It is a far more intimate, corporeal movement that is at work at all levels of the life of every earthly being." [116]
Eating, loving, and dying are all forms of metamorphosis and all expressions of this movement. Wandering is simply the cosmic name for metamorphosis; metamorphosis in its "most original, elementary, mineral form" [117].
I have to say, I do like this line of thought. It might be nonsense to some to construct a cosmology in terms of a metaphysics of wandering, but I find it seductive and like the idea that we are all drifters, hobos, nomads, or migrants; all born, like Ben Rumson, beneath a wand'rin' star [c].
Amusingly, even those who would stay put and cherish the notion of a home built upon fixed foundations - who find the thought of terra firma psychologically reassuring - are obliged to be constantly on the move, just as everything that surrounds them is transforming. In sum: there is no firm ground; even the continents are drifting, making a mockery of geographers and cartographers alike.
We're all at sea, drifting about on an endless voyage ...
II.
In a neo-Platonic section which develops a theory based on the ancient Greek notion of ochema [ὄχημα] - a term meaning vehicle, that is often used in esoteric circles concerned with the transportation of souls - Coccia suggests that because "everything is the planet for something else", it means that "everything is a vehicle for something else" [121].
Continuing with this line of thought, he explains:
"To be in the world is to bear something other than oneself and to be borne, transported, by others. So that the metaphysics of wandering is also a metaphysics of vehicularity." [121]
From this, Coccia then makes the astonishing claim that being-in-the-world can best be thought of not as the formal existential expression for the being of Dasein, but in terms of Noah's Ark: "Life has made each living being an ark for an infinite number of living and non-living beings." [126]
This, essentially, is how Coccia also understands evolution; one species is borne into the world by another species, for which it will in turn serve as an ark: "Thus, we humans were introduced to Gaia by way of the ark of the great apes: the primates were our ark, and we are now theirs." [126]
And this, essentially, is how Coccia also conceives the universe:
"These arks traverse the history of the planet and the cosmos, not just their geographies: they traverse the totality of apparent boundaries - those that seem to separate the living from the non-living, those that we suspect to exist between matter and spirit or between individuals, species, places, and times." [126-27]
III.
I have to admit, even as someone whose primary instinct is to torpedo the ark, Coccia makes me nostalgic for a time when I was equally keen to dissolve boundaries and distinctions. And, like Emanuele, I still remain suspicious of the notion of an ideal home; a neat, clean, orderly space of one's own.
In an important paragraph - which reminds me of something Ray Brassier says in Nihil Unbound [d] - Coccia writes:
"This obsession with home is much more profound than it seems. Not only does it structure our political experience [... and] our experience of things [...] It also, above all defines, the way in which we continue to think about the relationship between living beings, and between living beings and the space that surrounds them. Indeed, it is on this idea that all ecology is based [...] For not all reflections on the living, it seems, have managed to free themselves from a childish nostalgia for the idea of nature as an immense, natural, welcoming, benevolent home [...] Ecology as a whole testifies to a will to [...] reproduce everywhere the form of the house - the opposite of the vehicle. The very term 'ecology' already confesses this predilection for the domestic." [130]
Ultimately, home, green home is as objectionable as the fantasy of home, sweet home: it's a form of limitation that turns the chaotic splendour of that which lies outside the gate [e] into just another economy; i.e., "a system within which everything and everyone must have a meaning and a function" [132].
Ecology betrays the natural world; even the most ferocious of beasts and alien of creatures are tamed and made familiar; even the most exotic plants growing in the most remote areas are, as it were, placed in a pot:
"In its attempt to question the relationship between living beings, ecology ended up projecting out of the cities - into the spaces of the so-called 'wild' - a very bourgeois, very nineteenth-century order of life. [...] In trying to safeguard the non-human, ecology has ended up as one of the world's greatest agencies for the anthropomorphizing and humanization of the non-human. Thanks to ecology, the world is like an immense allotment garden where all life forms [are expected to] politely respect the boundaries." [132-33]
Take that, Ernst Haeckel! Well, I say that, but it's a little unfair to blame the great German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist.
For although Haeckel coined the term ecology (in a work of 1866), it was, as Coccia points out, just a variation on the older term natural economics
and it was not modern ecology that "first imposed upon living beings
the metaphor of a strictly indoors relationship to life forms and the
territory they occupy" [134].
Another discipline, of which ecology is a
descendant (or unconscious reincarnation if you prefer), is responsible for this: the economy of nature, which can be traced back to Linnaeus. The economy of nature is basically a form of Christian theology, investigating the relationship between God and His Creation: "Or rather, the relationship that all living beings entertain with one another and with the material world on the basis of a sovereign decision made by the Creator." [134-35]
According to this proto-ecological doctrine, "every being has its own place in the great household of the world, a place granted to it by the head of the family, God" [134].
One of the great ironies of this is that although many of today's environmental activists pride themselves on being anti-capitalist, their thinking of nature in terms of oikos is not only rooted in Christian moral culture, but shares a "common epistemological framework and language" [137] with capitalism - take that Greta Thunberg!
What's more - and perhaps worse - it perpetuates ideas of native and alien species (with the latter often thought to threaten the former):
"Whenever ecology persists in talking about 'invasive' species [...] it obliges us to impose upon the plant world the mores and conventions of a geographically and historically minute part of human culture (namely, nineteenth-century British legal culture)." [143]
What Coccia is attempting to do, then, via his philosophy of metamorphosis, is liberate living beings from their captivity within old ideas and norms which attempt "in various ways, to force onto non-humans social forms typical of [...] states with closed borders" [143].
In other words, Coccia wants all things to wander like stars ...
Notes
[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphosis, trans, Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021). All page references to this work will be given directly in the main text.
[b] It should be noted, however, that the possibility exists for this to be thrown into chaos and that the earth, like all other planets
in the solar system, is actually drifting away from the sun (due to the decreasing mass and thus weakened gravitational pull of the latter), at an
annual rate of 1.5 cm.
[c] Wand'rin' Star is a song written by Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, for the stage musical Paint Your Wagon (1951). Click here to see it beautifully performed by Lee Marvin, as Ben Rumson, in the 1969 film adaptation, dir. Joshua Logan.
[d] In the preface to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Brassier writes:
"Nature is not our or anyone's 'home', nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do
well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to
re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life,
or mend the shattered concord between man and nature." [xi]
[e] I'm aware of the fact that Coccia would find this phrase outside the gate problematic. In chapter 5 of his book - which I will discuss in more detail in a separate post - he argues that the opposition between what is within and without of city walls is a political myth that is both illusory and dangerous. See pp. 148-49.
Coccia has largely been influenced in his thinking on this question by William Cronon's important essay 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, (W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69-90.
In my defence, I'm not simply referring to the natural world when I use the concept of the Outside, as the first section of this post published in June 2020 on Torpedo the Ark hopefully makes clear. Readers who wish to know more about my thinking on this might also like to see a post I wrote for James Walker's blog, The Digital Pilgrimage: click here.
To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here.
To read notes on chapter two ... click here.
To read notes on chapter three ... click here.
To read notes on chapter five ... click here.
