Tie Me to a Tree: Notes on Chapter 4 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

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.

All Aboard the Good Ship Greta

I. 

I don't know who invented carbon fibre; nor do I know where and when it was developed into the light-weight, super-strong (though very expensive) wonder material that is increasingly used in the manufacture of all kinds of things today - including, as we shall see, multi-million dollar yachts. 

Some environmentalists embrace CF technology as it promises to make planes and cars ever-more fuel efficient and it also plays a significant role within the wind power revolution (turbine blades made from carbon fibre are longer, more rigid, and more resilient than traditional fibreglass models). 

Unfortunately, however, carbon fibre is wasteful to manufacture, difficult to recycle, and results in a toxic by-product. And whilst there's talk about being able to eventually mass produce it from plant material, at the moment it's made from oil and acrylonitrile - so it's really not as eco-friendly as some might like to pretend.


II. 

At first, when I read of Greta Thunberg's announcement on Twitter that she'll shortly be sailing across the Atlantic in a high-speed, carbon fibre, multi-million dollar racing yatch owned by a German property developer in order to attend a UN climate summit in New York, I thought her account must have been hacked by a prankster. But, apparently, that isn't the case; she is genuinely that detached from reality that she fails entirely to see the absurd comedy of the situation.

Wishing to make a point about the climate impact of aviation, Greta refuses to fly. But - as she helpfully reminds us - America is "on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean" and there are no trains to take you there. Thus, going by boat would seem to be the only other option - though maybe she could've taken a yellow submarine. 

However, Greta being Greta - an extremely privileged and over-indulged teenager who has apocalyptic visions of the future and the superhuman ability to see carbon dioxide - she's not going by raft made from recycled oildrums and driftwood; nor is she sailing across the sea singlehandedly.

The Malizia II is a hi-tech 60ft craft fitted with sails, solar panels and underwater turbines to generate zero-carbon power (note: it has a diesal engine for emergencies). Based in Brittany, the admittedly beautiful-looking boat is proudly sponsored by the Yatch Club de Monaco. Greta will be accompanied on the voyage by the skipper, her father, and the grandson of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly.

Oh, and the obligatory film crew ...    

One hesitates in describing this as a ship of fools, but the sheer vanity of the super-rich posing as environmental activists - and the contempt displayed for the rest of us - is as vomit-inducing as the enormous waves Thunberg is about to encounter.  

I would like to wish bon voyage to this happy crew of eco-warriors - but I also damn them all to hell.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

Pippa McManus: Crazy Daisy Dreams (2017)

Flower Child Group Exhibition (12 Aug - 2 Sept 2017)

Modern Eden Gallery (San Francisco)

I. Summers of Love and Hate

As a punk rocker, the symbolism of the zip and safety pin means more to me than that of the groovy floral designs so beloved of the hippie generation. However, as the Summer of Hate is now as much part of ancient cultural history as the Summer of Love, it's easier to view both events with critical perspective and concede that wearing flowers in one's hair is probably preferable to having to remove spittle.

And, of course, as a floraphile, I very much approve of intimate relationships between plants and people and can see how one might wish to develop a green neo-pagan politics upon a love of flora - although, personally, I've no desire for universal peace and love and refuse to accept that flowers can only symbolise such benevolent (and naive) idealism.    


II. If You're Going to San Francisco ...

Back in '67, San Francisco was the epicentre of the hippie counterculture, a movement mostly composed of privileged white youths who temporarily dropped out and experimented with drugs, sex, and alternative lifestyles, before moderating their views and dropping back in again as corporate yuppies in the 1980s à la Jerry Rubin.           

Thanks to a strong economy, the hippies were able to spend their time getting stoned, listening to psychedelic music, reading Allen Ginsberg,* protesting against the Man, dreaming of revolution and generally indulging their narcissism. Some formed communes and attempted to live as far outside mainstream society as possible. It's easy to mock and tempting to despise these idealists with flowers in their hair, but they have had (for better or for worse) a wide and lasting impact and many of their ideas and values are now part of the liberal orthodoxy.

Interestingly, the American author Robert Anton Wilson suggests that the hippies can be characterised as unearthly angels whose psychology manifests friendly weakness. Such people are kind, passive, generous and trusting. But they are also easily led and secretly in search of authority (which might explain the obsession with gurus and, indeed, why Charles Manson was able to wield such control over his extended Family of followers).  


III. On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

I say their values, but, as the sociologist Bennett Berger pointed out at the time, there's nothing very new or uniquely hippie about the morality of the flower children. Their movement was merely another expression of the 19th-century bohemianism that the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had reduced to a relatively formal doctrine with several key ideas, some of which we might (briefly) summarise as follows:

(i) Only a Child Can Save Us

This first point, found in Christianity and Romanticism as well as flower power philosophy, continues to resonate today; thus the astonishing rise to global fame of Greta Thunberg, for example. The idea is that the innocent child is born with special potentialities which are systematically repressed by society. If they could only be left to blossom naturally and develop their personalities, then the world might yet be saved and humanity redeemed. 

(ii) Express Yourself (Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey)

When hippies claim the right to do their own thing, they are, of course, simply reviving the idea that the moral duty of each person is to express themselves and realise their full potential as individuals via some form of creative activity. Or smoking weed. Madonna was still churning out such bullshit twenty years after the Summer of Love.       

(iii) Paganism Good / Christianity Bad

The idea that paganism is a happy, innocent worship of the natural world that regards the body as a temple in which there is nothing unclean, whilst Christianity, in contrast, is a morally repressive and anti-sexual religion is one that I used to subscribe to myself. But then I read Michel Foucault on power, pleasure, and Christian ascesis and realised that things aren't so simple; that the difference between Graeco-Roman (i.e. pagan) and early Christian forms of self-disciplining cannot be established in terms of a fundamental distinction or dialectic. Ultimately, even the Nietzschean binary of Dionysus versus the Crucified has to be deconstructed.    

(iv) Seize the Day, Man

The idea of living spontaneously and for the moment is crucial to hippie philosophy; the immediacy of the present or the nowness of the Now is where it's at; the past and future are just abstractions and what D. H. Lawrence calls the quick of time is contained only in the instant. We have the Roman poet Horace to thank for this: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ...  But whether it's ever very wise listening to a poet (or Robin Williams) is debatable; doesn't it all just end in the sanctioned hedonism of consumer society and a Nike slogan?

(v) Free Love

Ah, the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties ... Again, part of a long tradition carried on by individuals who objected to the state having any say over matters such as marriage, contraception, sexual orientation, etc. What an individual chose to do with his or her body was, they argued, entirely up to them. The great hope was that sexual liberation would lead to greater freedom in all spheres of life and bring about profound social, political, and cultural change. Again, I used to subscribe to this, but then I read Foucault and realised that the politics of desire involves a naive and mistaken understanding of sex, power, and subjectivity thanks to our unquestioning belief in what he terms the repressive hypothesis.   

(vi) Romantic Primitivism and Exotic Otherness 

Finally, the hippies were of course anti-Western and believed that spiritual enlightenment either lay in Asia (and involved transcendental meditation and taking lots of drugs), or with native Americans who combined tribal wisdom with noble savagery. Embarrassingly, I also used to buy into this in my Kings of the Wild Frontier/Nostalgia of Mud period. But now, I'm wise to the culture cult and refuse the tyranny of guilt identified by Pascal Buckner.

Indeed, now, not only would I never trust a hippie, I'd never trust a punk, pagan, or poet either (even though I used to self-identify as a combination of all three during the 1980s).

* Note: In an essay written in 1965, Ginsberg advocated that anti-war rallies should become non-violent spectacles and that hippie protesters should be provided with masses of flowers to be handed out to political opponents, police, press, and members of the public. Thanks to activists like Abbie Hoffman, this idea of flower power quickly spread and became an important expression of hippie ideology. It also led to some iconic images, as flower-wielding protesters were confronted by armed force.

See: 

Bennett M. Berger, 'Hippie morality - more old than new', Society, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (December, 1967), pp. 19-27. Note that Society was entitled Transaction at this time.

Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, (W. W. Norton, 1934). The Penguin edition (1994), ed. Donald W. Faulkner, is perhaps more readily available.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising, (Falcon Press, 1983), p. 55. 

Play: San Francisco, sung by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips, (Ode Records, May 1967), the unofficial anthem of the flower power generation: click here. It's a pleasant enough tune, but like Sid Vicious I was busy playing with my Action Man whilst all this was going on.

    

Greta Thunberg: Child Saviour or Witch?

We cannot help regarding the phenomenon of Greta with wonder, fear, 
amazement, and respect. For in her the spirit of modern childhood 
is profoundly, almost magically revealed.  

Following a recent post, someone who identifies as a practicing Christian and environmental activist writes quoting scripture in support of Greta Thunberg: And a little child shall lead them [Isaiah 11:6].    

I have to say, I'm always a little troubled by this idea of an infant saviour - even when it turns up in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. And with reference to the case of Miss Thunberg, it's a startling model of redemption she offers; one that denies people hope, deliberately spreads panic, and desires that the entire world suffers, as she herself has suffered, on a daily basis.

Addressing a UN climate conference last year, she virtually placed a curse on all their houses, as if she were less salvator mundi and more some kind of witch. Indeed, seeing how she's enchanted an entire generation and left so many world leaders - including the Pope - spellbound, describing Greta Thunberg as a witch seems entirely justified: she's like a Swedish Joan of Arc.
   

I'm not saying this to denigrate her, or dismiss her message. But I do think we need to exercise caution when dealing with charismatic individuals who claim to possess (or be possessed by) special gifts and who speak with absolute conviction, seeing the world as they do in stark black and white terms.

When Greta presents her arguments within the bounds of science, I don't have a problem. But when she offers us an interpretation of the facts that veers towards apocalyptic vision, then I have my concerns - for her and for all those who share her vision. Their love - for the planet, for humanity - becomes questionable and subtly diabolic, to borrow a phrase from Lawrence, exerting as it does a destructive force. 

Women like Greta - and her mother - who campaign to save the world and save the future, may have kind hearts and the very best of intentions. But, underneath, there's something malevolent; an unconscious desire for revenge on those they blame for the crisis that afflicts them at a personal level. You can almost see it in their eyes. Still, this malevolence is just as necessary as superficial goodness - maybe more so, especially when it comes to exposing the world's own corruption and stupidity. 
  

Like that other witch-child, of whom Hawthorne writes, Greta is a being 'whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves'. We say she's neurologically diverse, or has Asperger's, a condition that manifests itself in all kinds of ways; depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, selective mutism, etc.

And again, it gives Greta a peculiar look in her eyes that is also Pearl-like: 'a look so intelligent, yet so inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious' that one almost questions whether she's a human child. Who knows what this brave but tormented sixteen-year-old will be like as a fully grown woman. I wish her well and hope she discovers a little peace and happiness; hope, above all, that she doesn't martyr herself to her own cause.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter' (Final Version, 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Quotes taken from Hawthorne's 1850 novel can be found on pp. 93-94.  

Note: The lines underneath the image of Greta Thunberg are paraphrased from Lawrence (writing of Pearl) in the First Version (1918-19) of the above essay, SCAL, p. 252. 

For a sister post to this one on Greta as Pippi Greenstocking, click here. 

Pippi Greenstocking: Notes on the Case of Greta Thunberg

Illustration: @artbyneva on Instagram

I.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl from Sweden called Greta. Greta had pigtails and was an unconventional child with special gifts who cared so much about climate change that she stopped going to school. Often, she would attempt to shame adults into listening to her, especially if they were more concerned with putting profit before the planet.

Many found Greta inspirational; others mockingly called her Pippi Greenstocking. And a few expressed their concern that her neurodiversity made her vulnerable and prone to fanaticism and fantasy ...

II.

Paulina Neuding, for example, is interested in the role Greta's parents have played in her meteoric rise to international fame. Her father, Svante Thunberg, is an actor and her mother, Malena Ernman, a successful opera singer, so both dream of transforming the world into a stage and seek the limelight.

A book, published last year and entitled Scener från Hjärtat, tells the story of Greta and her family - including her younger sister, Beata - in sometimes harrowing detail. Narrated by Malena, the work was written, apparently, with the collaboration of her husband and daughters.

As Neuding notes, this story is framed in terms of a family and a planet in crisis - and, rather oddly, these crises are inextricably linked. The personal is political, as they used to say in the sixties.

Thus it is, for example, that Scenes from the Heart claims that the "oppression of women, minorities, and people with disabilities stem from the same overarching root problem as climate change: an unsustainable way of life. The family's private crisis and the global climate crisis [...] are simply symptoms of the same systemic disorder."

Little wonder, therefore, that Greta seems to take everything so personally; insisting people wake up to the coming eco-apocalypse and feel the fear, pain and panic that she experiences daily. Greta Thunberg protests not merely because she believes the planet is dying, but because she feels as if she were dying inside too.

Her mother's hope seems to be that once the planet has been saved and there is environmental justice for all, then Greta and Beata can also be happy and healthy, overcoming their depression, anxiety, eating and obsessive-compulsive disorders, selective mutism, etc.

Without wishing to say anything negative about Greta, question her phenomenal impact, or deny the existential threat posed by climate change, Neuding wonders whether it's advisable to groom an anguished sixteen-year-old into a global icon ...?

Adults - including politicians and journalists such as herself - have a responsibility to not be carried away by messianic hysteria: "It is time we stopped to ask if we are using her, failing her, and even sacrificing her, for what we perceive to be a greater good." 

See: Paulina Neuding, 'Self-Harm Versus the Greater Good: Greta Thunberg and Child Activism', Quillete (23 April 2019): click here. 

For a sister post to this one on Greta as child saviour or witch, click here.