Skip to main content

Gaia, Chippel and the double articulation

Elizabeth Povinelli invokes the issue of what makes Chippel, a rock formation at Karrabing, a form of life. It seems like in our naturalist constitution where Nature and Humanity are the guiding entities (very different from each other), life has a special status of something that is natural but with deserving some special normative attention ("it is really guided by a mechanism, even though it it is a complex one..."). The Karrabing community, however, involves Chippel - she cannot be counted out by a mining company. Povinelli argues that we should get out of what she calls the carbon imaginary that drives a line between the geotic and the biotic. Deleuze and Guattari's third plateau (The geology of morals) describes the interesting double articulation where at the same time substances make form (through sedimentation) and form makes substances (through orogenesis, folding). They are at the same time a double articulation of the molecular and the molar and a description of what makes up the floor. Floor is something common to whatever is sublunar: a floor is made by our lives on it (sedimentation) and it produces itself new things (through folding it produces strata but also roots, sprouting seeds etc). The floor is like a skin (pele and floor have apparently similar etymologies) but it is not the limit of an organism (or a planet) for the involving environment, as Deleuze and Guattari stress, is properly part of what is inside for they are fully dependent on what is at the other side of the membrane (as it is in the other way round, i.e. what is inside relies on what is outside the membrane). This is the case for living organisms but also for the Earth's atmosphere (as Lovelock has shown). The issue of whether Gaia is geotic and biotic - and therefore whether Chippel is geotic or biotic - gets metaphyisically dissolved. They are both creatures of the floor.

This is what I explored under the name of speculative dermatology. Dermatological structures should be looked at as the basis for a future animism: wherever there is skin, there is some form of animation even though it can take different forms and very different speeds. This is why professor Challenger - in Deleuze and Guattari's piece - is somehow an alter-ego of Geoffoy St-Hilaire: recapitulation is at the order of the day for skin structures are common animated structures present in the planet as a whole as much as in the interaction between the genetic and the environmental in each organism. Skin is a general scheme for animation - maybe better than life and encompassing the strictures of what is properly human. The animism to come will be dermatological.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more