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.

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 1: Notes on a Preface)

Photo of Ian Bogost by Gregory Miller

Preface: Life Is Not a Game

Ian Bogost describes himself as a philosopher who also happens to be a game designer. But I've heard it said that he's more of a game designer with pretensions of being a philosopher. Either way, he's not stupid. But he is badly in need of a haircut.  

His Alien Phenomenology (2012) was a book that I enjoyed, so I've been looking forward to reading his most recent work, Play Anything, since its publication in the autumn of 2016 (apologies to readers who expect this blog to always be bang up to date).

From what one gathers from the Preface, Play Anything promises to be a work of object-oriented ethics; one that offers a perspective on "how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams, and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude" [x].

Bogost doesn't think life is a game. But he does think that games teach us an important life lesson. And it's a lesson concerning the pleasure of limits. To play, he says, is to accept things on their own terms. And to generalise this notion of play is to see structures constrained by their own limitations at work everywhere.

This doesn't sound all that much fun. But Bogost assures us that if we learn how to play anything, our lives will be "better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish" [x] - a line that could have been lifted straight from an overly-optimistic self-help book. Or off a bottle of snake oil.   

Our mad obsession with the ideal of freedom, argues Bogost, has made us "miserable and bored" [xi]. We need to understand that real freedom is the chance to find fulfilment by operating within and exploring the implications of "a constrained system" [xi] - i.e., the actual world as is.    

Further, according to Bogost - never one to shy away from the chance to project his own anxieties onto his readers - we are marked by a profound fear; not just of ourselves (our desires and dark fantasies) or our mortal fate (that great shipwreck into the nauseous), but also of the world and its contents - objects and events alike.

Whether confronted by a pickle jar with a tight lid, or the prospect of an illicit love affair, "we worry that it might harm or disappoint us" [xi] - or that we might fail to live up to the challenge that all things present. What we need to do, says Bogost, is "slough off all these false fears that keep us from truly living" [xii].

What he doesn't say is why these fears are false; I have to admit they seem pretty genuine and perfectly legitimate to me. Nor - in the Preface at any rate - does he instruct us how to "replace them with a new sense of gratitude" [xii] towards all the miraculous opportunities the world affords us.  

Well, that's not quite fair - he does suggest that play is the key. Though it's not play in the ordinary sense of the word; Bogost wants to convince us of the need for a radical form of play that is profound and deliberate and "bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things" [xii].

One suspects that Bogost has the Heraclitean line about man only becoming himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play in the back of his mind. Or maybe he's thinking of Nietzsche's playful vision of philosophy conceived as a gay science. But if he is, he's not going to give the game away as there's no mention of either philosopher in the index - something I regard as a bad sign ...

Still, let us read on and see where Bogost takes us ... Click here for Part 2 of this post on Chapters 1-4 and here for Part 3 on Chapters 5-7.

See: Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, (Basic Books, 2016). All lines quoted are from the Preface, pp. ix-xii. 

Object-Oriented Ontology and the Joy of Washing Up (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Einai gar kei entautha theous

One of the reasons that D. H. Lawrence continues to fascinate is because his work is an attempt to construct a queer form of philosophical realism that is very much object-oriented. Even when, as a novelist, he writes of human subjects, he clearly cares more about their impersonal and, indeed, inhuman elements and how they interact within an ontological network made up of all kinds of other things; be they dead or alive, actual or virtual. For Lawrence, art is primarily an attempt to help us understand how all things – including ourselves – exist within this dynamic network of relations.

Human being, we might say, has its belonging in this network and although Lawrence often suggests that the most important of all relations is that between man and woman, there is of course no such hierarchy in reality. All things may not be equal, but they are all equally things and all relations are established, developed and dissolved on a flat ontological playing field. For a man to be rich in world requires more than the love of a good woman. He has to have also a quick relationship to "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper" [SoTH 183].

Thus it is that so many of Lawrence’s characters only really blossom when they enter into strange and startling new relationships with nonhuman objects; objects which, for Lawrence, even if composed of inert matter as opposed to living tissue, nevertheless exist "in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects" [SCAL 77].

This is true irrespective of actual physical contact, although Lawrence encourages his readers to establish joyful small contacts with objects, even offering a philosophical justification for doing the washing up:

"If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts ... the primal consciousness is alert in me ... which is a pure satisfaction." [RDP 151]

When Lawrence advocates climbing down Pisgah, this is an important aspect of what he means; discovering the sacred in daily life. It's not a new idea, obviously. Even Heraclitus standing before his kitchen stove was keen to impress upon visitors that the gods were present everywhere and in all activities. But it remains an important idea that counters all forms of ascetic idealism that advocate separation from the world of things and devotion to a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.   

Critics have often accused Lawrence of contemptuously dismissing modern life as inauthentic. However, in order to make this charge stick they have to glide over passages such as the above which demonstrate that he was eager to relate his ontological vision to everyday existence and those things that lie closest to hand (such as a bowl of soapy water). 

For Lawrence, no chore was too humble that it didn't warrant being done well and he happily absorbed himself in cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and milking the cow, whilst his wife lay in bed smoking cigarettes. Indeed, far from washing the dishes, Frieda was prone to breaking them over Lawrence's head - though I suppose this too is a way of demonstrating that matter actually exists and that violence can also give pleasure ...      

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

In the first version of ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence offers a different – no less surprising – list of things with which it is crucial to have relations. This includes "children, creatures, cities, skies, trees, flowers, mud, microbes, motor-cars, guns, [and] sewers". See Appendix III of the above text, p. 242.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allen Poe' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Nietzschean Notes on the Question of Power

The question of power is, for Nietzsche and those who write within his shadow, one of primary importance and the attempt to formulate and advance a critical conception of power beyond the reactive representations of moral idealism remains a real concern. That is to say, a conception free from what Lawrence describes as the superficial contempt for power which most of us experience due to the fact that we moderns only know dead power. Live or active power is worthy of esteem. It is not brute force, which is base and tied to bullying authority or what Deleuze identifies as emaciated forms of prohibition.

This is the key: to rethink power outside of currently accepted values and as more than that which restricts, prohibits, and denies. For power, as Foucault pointed out, has somewhat ironically been made subject to a repressive hypothesis and conceived as poor in resources, sparing in its methods, and incapable of invention. Only when we liberate our thinking on power will we see that what makes power so intoxicating is the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no; rather, "it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms of knowledge, produces discourse". 

In other words, power keeps us alive and in touch with one another acting as it does as the great productive network running throughout the social and political body. This is why Lawrence insists that power is not only prior to love, but that the latter is ultimately called into being by the former; "the first and greatest of all mysteries". 

Jesus failed because he didn't understand this; didn't experience the joy of an erection on a sunny day. Indeed, rather than thinking of power as a form of eternal delight, he taught that goodness is a form of impotence and passivity and evil is the active springing from energy which violates all human attempts to stabilize the free movement of life. 

Nietzsche was having none of this. Like Blake (and like any other poet worth his salt), he recognised that man needs what is most evil in him if he is to develop what is also best and most beautiful in him. Be happy, he says, and you will be good (once more reversing Christian teaching). But one is only happy when one feels oneself powerful and a little bit demonic via an expenditure (not an accumulation) of energy - shining like a tiny star with brilliant intensity, but to no end. 

Power is thus not something one can consciously seek out or seize and possess; power, rather, is that which can only be accepted as a gift flowing into us from behind and below - and flowing just as vitally away from us forever beyond our control. And humanism is everything that would limit this and accustom us to see the figure of Man behind every event and phenomenon.

Nietzsche's anti-humanist philosophy doesn't consider goodness or pleasure as its primary aim. Nevertheless, as indicated, his notion of joy connected to his concept of power allows for a new ethic to emerge. Or perhaps not so new: ethos anthropoi daimon, as Heraclitus would say ...

Note: this post is an extract taken from my study of Nietzsche's project of revaluation entitled Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) and those who are interested in reading more on the subject of power and the politics of evil - as well as tracking down references - might like to consult part II, chapter 5 of this text. 

I Love Everything That Flows

 Sarah Maple: Menstruate With Pride (2010-11)

Vaginal lubrication and menstrual blood; saliva, semen, and tears ... these bodily fluids all belong to love, even though such secretions are often subject to severe prohibition and taboo. It is feared that they possess magical properties which threaten to dissolve the solidity and rigidity upon which Man prides himself and bases his integrity. 

For the bone-dry moralists of patriarchal society, that which is soft, formless, and liquid is intrinsically evil: to be male is to be hard and firm of body and misogynists everywhere repeat after Heraclitus that, above all things, a dry soul is best. 

But for those of us fascinated by decadence and the corruption of the flesh, the moist cunt that waits like a carnivorous plant in the boggy marsh where insects and philosophers lose their way, is both a site of strange truths and the dissolution of all Truth with a phallic-capital T.

Feminism begins when one decides to reject the petrified and well-organized bodies produced by molecular fascism (bodies that daren't leak, or sweat, or even cry) and when one finds the courage to declare like Henry Miller: 'Yes, I too love everything that flows.'