Natural Cultures and Dark Ontologies

ROSS: I’ve said this elsewhere, in various places, but I reject ontological thinking (especially in the vein inspired by Heidegger) as unhistorical. Its concept of “historicity” attempts to freeze the inherent fluidity of historical time by assimilating its to the existential structures of presentistic being, and thus dilutes the richer and more dynamic understanding of the world as historical and the qualitative changes brought upon by the forces of world-history.

MICHAEL: You must not have had too much exposure to Bergson or Whitehead or Deleuze for that matter. Those guys have very “fluid”, diachronistic visions of the world. It’s true that Heidegger drew some strange and abstract conclusions from his investigations, many of which I do not support, but his interrogation of ‘the meaning of being’ was groundbreaking – and I believe the only starting point for a properly reflexive theoretical deliberation of existence.

And I think you go too far in assuming you can simply “reject ontological thinking” Ross. All belief systems, including Marxist ideologies, have at their conceptual core ontological commitments. All schematic thought, worldviews and paradigms necessarily operationalize certain basic assumptions. If you are not interested in investigating those assumptions and beliefs by engaging in thinking about ontology, or more fundamental, doing ontography then those guiding assumptions about the structure of the world will remain unexamined and taint everything you think.

Regarding the “forces of world-history”, I have developed my own ecological realist orientation which holds process, transitions, events and assemblages as fundamental features of the real world, and rejects the primacy of the existential analytic (correlationism) in favor of an (re)evolutionary, participatory, communialistic focus.

ROSS: In terms of our connection to nature, no one will deny humanity’s origins in the natural world, out of a long evolutionary process of biology. Yet the reason why I say that the nature/culture split is real is that it has become real, through a process of historical alienation. The moment that humanity becomes self-conscious, achieves systematic thought, and instrumental rationality — as well as begins to repress its more natural instinctual drives — humanity begins to differentiate itself from nature. At first this alienation is minimal, as even in primitive agricultural societies one remains tied quite immediately to the natural rhythms and cycles of existence.

Once human society becomes increasingly denaturalized, once its interaction with the nature from whence it sprang becomes more and more mediated through social processes and the built environment of towns and cities (artifice), the alienation rises to the level of consciousness. I believe that historically this took place most noticeably after the Scientific Revolution and capitalist rationality/intellectualization began to disenchant nature of its mysterious properties, such that the early Romantics began to feel a profound sense of estrangement and distancing from nature. Since then, this consciousness has gone through a variety of ideological mutations, all the way into the present.

That is why I affirm the division between nature and culture, not as an absolute, insurmountable opposition, but as one which has arisen historically and might be historically overcome. Human beings themselves cannot be called wholly “unnatural.” Our bodies are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of natural biological evolution. But the world which we create for ourselves, and with which we are more immediately familiar than “original” nature, cannot be said to be entirely “natural.” There is something about a skyscraper that is profoundly unnatural, with its ferro-concrete frame and huge glass facades. The anthills and honeycombs of Levi’s example pale in comparison to these designed artifacts, being as they are the creations of the unconscious social instincts of ants and bees.

MICHAEL: That’s all well and, for the most part, historically accurate, but in the last instance not at all a defensible position in light of contemporary science. Nor does the promotion of such a binary follow from a thorough-going investigation of our being-in-the-world. There is no-thing in existence which is un-natural. Everything is composed of the known cosmological elements and forces. The ‘wilderness’ of being is an immanent matrix which generates the full range of potencies we call reality. Anthills, beaver dams, bird songs, chimpanzee tools are expressions of material assemblages and intensive properties no less than primate sweat lodges, kula rings, international banking systems, pornography and skyscrapers. Ants do “design” hills, beavers do “design” dams, birds do “design” songs, etc. Bower-bird culture, for example, is just as expressive, interpersonal and natural as any human culture. The full litany of existing flows, objects and assemblages in existence are ‘Natural’ occurrences. The differences between humans and non-humans are the result of differences in composite substantiality - the relational organization of their extensive and intensive properties.

That said, we can also step back and appreciate the truth of your statements. Humans have fundamentally changed the ecological composition of the planet. And we have indeed alienated ourselves in disastrous ways. But we have not alienated ourselves from “Nature” in any ontological sense. What we have done, however, is organized our realities in ways that not only disrupt the functionality inherent in non-human ecological systems (as if that wasn’t dangerous and insane enough), but also distance us mentally and aesthetically from being able to sense and experience those systems in an adaptive manner. Alienation is a problem of intimation not metaphysical rupture. And it remains a problem whether or not we subscribe to any particular proto-modernist, romantic, theistic, or normative variations of the subject/object, culture/nature binary.

And to continue to perpetuate such binaries is to reproduce and reinforce the kind of alienated modes of being, consciousness and, yes, ontologies we seek to overcome. It is the kinds of ideations which posit a split between “nature” and “culture” that facilitate both our maladaptive domination (“sovereignty”) of ecosystems and our maddening fantasies of separation.

ROSS: I agree that the world is composed of a variety of distributed forces, entities, networks, energies, and existential spontaneity. There are, of course, regularities and rhythms to this distributions that can be understood, whether as the “natural laws” of physics or as biospheric tendencies. Within this sublime order of calm predictability, there are of course also countervailing forces that are extremely chaotic, disruptive, and destructive, abiding by their own sets of laws, which can radically reshape the distribution of natural entities. It is not, of course, this fragile equilibrium hanging delicately in the balance. If that were the case, species extinction and environmental transformations would be impossible.

MICHAEL: Agreed Ross. The cosmos is a dark and relentless (and ‘wild’?) place with chaos and order swirling inside us and around every galactic fold. Adapting to both the “regularity” and the “spontaneity” of the affective forces of reality is the core imperative of sentient beings.

ROSS: [H]uman society has displayed an increasingly marked ability to affect the total environment of the Earth. While every biological organism seeks to exploit its environment in order to survive and perpetuate itself, humanity is able to do so on an unparalleled level.

MICHAEL: Yes, we certainly are talented primates. We’re especially good at hording and killing.

ROSS: Particularly following the advent of capitalism, the rate of revolutionary technological innovations has accelerated at an astonishing pace. Our ability to extract natural resources, whether from the bottom of the ocean or buried beneath layers of Siberian permafrost, is astounding. We can shear off the sides of mountains with dynamite, drill tunnels and subterranean underpasses, redirect the course of rivers, and create artificial lakes. And while this happens in a hyperexploitative, individual, and anarchistic fashion under capitalism, such monumental forces of production and environmental transformation could be directed to literally reshape the globe according to human need and taste. Humanity would have to attain a more complete mastery over its own form of social organization, such that it could self-consciously exert its energies in the most sustainable, and yet efficient, ways. I dare say that we could even enhance nature, not only for our own sake, but for nature’s sake as well.

MICHAEL: Without wanting to be interpreted as being a complete jerk-off, let me say that I find your assessment of humanity’s “progress” sad. In an age where over 50 industrial toxins can be detected in the breast milk of every new mother in North America, where much of the world’s fresh water sources are being either depleted or irreparably polluted, where childhood obesity is on average 300% more prevalent, where global warming is rapidly accelerating beyond any kind of control, etc., etc., I find it hard to believe anyone as smart as you can still support the under-critical Marxist article of faith in (post)modern technology. The myth of unrelenting progress is alive and well with you then?

Sure, we could direct all our technological innovations towards building more just and efficient subsistence systems, systems where societies are organized to maximize the allocation of resources and social solidarity, but not without first brutalizing the historically evolved and entrenched life-ways of so many people all over the planet. What you are implying is a total reorganization of human life around a technocratic machination of existing ecologies and territories based on a culturally specific instrumental rationality. This sort of undertaking would forcibly penetrate all aspects of other people’s mental and material lives, presumably without their consent. I couldn’t possibly think of a more monstrous, degrading and life-destroying endeavor.

Again, humans are only one kind of entity within a vast parliament of things, flows and forces. We would do well to set aside our violent interrogations and understand deeper the wilderness of being with all its beings and learn to adapt to it in more mutually supportive ways. Notions such as “mastery” and “enhancement” are the buzzwords and keystones of mentalities that seek to dominate, control and impose not liberate, reconcile and co-create.

ROSS: I agree that Heidegger’s thought has many facets and that one cannot uniformly label them all as fascist. I believe that much of his romantic emphasis on the “poetry” of being, “pathways” through the forest searching for “the clearing” in which beings unconceal themselves, these concepts have dangerously völkisch undertones. The simplicity of wisdom, Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism, setting itself apart from the “idle talk” of the “they” (those alien, overly-verbose Jewish cosmopolitan types), all this is extremely problematic. The problem is that many of his successors, even if they espoused different political ideologies, carried over these mute fascisms from Heidegger’s unique spin on phenomenological thought.

MICHAEL: To some extent I can see your point Ross, but, again, Heidegger’s thought can be worked several different ways, and not all of them are fascistic. I think you only read him through the Nazi lens, whereas I choose to read him through the ecological lens. There is nothing inherent in talking about ‘the clearing’ and ‘pathways’ that makes it dangerous. It is all a matter of how you deploy such thought and, more importantly, for what ends.

I’m not going to defend Heidegger the person Ross. He is indefensible. I only disagree with you about what his thinking can possibly do.

ROSS: The concept of a “wilderness” in which all beings are entangled, bound up, and which through struggle manifest themselves, this bears too much similarity to the kinds of speeches he delivered to young Nazi volunteers during his (brief) career as the rector of Freiburg.

MICHAEL: I sympathize with why you would rail against this then. But let us not give in to the Nazis. Let us not allow those monsters of history and flesh foreclose thought and the possibility of meaning because we are disgusted or afraid. Let us reclaim and eradicate their power over us. Let us chose exactitude in the face of the Real instead: because if being is fundamentally ecological, and ontology is simply an abstracted formalism of empirical investigations of ontic reality, then the notion of ‘the wilderness of being’ is entirely appropriate to the practical task of exploring, adapting and getting along in a world such as ours. The cosmos is quite literally a wild matrix of forces, flows, beings, possibility-spaces and becomings. And understanding just how this is so is indispensable.