Re: <nettime> Swipe, a Smart Phone Movie by Mieke Gerritzen/Next Nature

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Michael Benson wrote:

"And how could it be Other, Nature I mean, when we are so utterly reliant on
the ecosystem that produced us? Isn't it just another peak in the mountain
range of our collective anthropocentric arrogance (I don't mean this
personally Brian) to continue with such an insistence?"

Michael, your post could not be called a screed because it has way too many
registers: playful, satirical, mocking, philosophical, dismayed and
wonderstruck - you composed a new genre!

I gather that you, too, must be a Lynn Margulis fan - I'm trying to find
Demodex folliculorum in Kingdoms & Domains, but it doesn't seem to be in
there. However, it may be clouding my vision...

Evolution is a beautiful drama, the reality behind it has a 3.8 billion
year run (puts any Broadway show to shame), and it sure is a pity to see
humans engaging in so much necrotrophy toward their endless millions of
ecto- and endo-symbiotic partners. Just like Demodex folliculorum, we could
be mellow (as in melodrama) and get along discreetly on the face of Gaia,
but instead we're ruining its complexion, as Margulis's friend Lovelock
pointed out some time ago. When I say we must compose with Nature, it just
means learn to get along like commensal symbionts do, happily eating each
other's byproducts. On this you and I would likely agree - but the question
of the Other is more vexing.

I reckon that not just language, but especially inscription has created the
big difference of humanity. Biosemiotics is going to find more and more
language in other species: it's idiotic and counter-intuitive to present
animals as deterministic machines bereft of thought, the way a whole range
of arrogant anthropocentrists has done. But when language starts to pile up
as writing, then the other thing that animals do - use tools - starts
accumulating and complexifying through comparison and analysis, something
called techno-logos emerges, and before you know it, you get scanning
electron microscopes and GIS-guided JDAM munitions, all together in the
weird cacophony that Peter Lamborn Wilson used to call "too late
capitalism." The means to admire evolution and the means to destroy it.

In short, my assertion that nature is an Other doesn't cancel out either
the reality of a microbiome with which we have already evolutionarily
composed, or the macro-perspective that John Hopkins takes on humanity as a
mote in deep time. Instead I'm just focusing on the meso-dramatic moment of
arrogance that's really ruining the holobiont these days. How not to be
parasitic to the point of necrotrophy? It's pretty certain that as a
technologically amplified species we can engage in a version of ecological
overshoot and wreck our planetary niche; but it's still uncertain whether
we can choose not to.

Recently I read an article in the Anthropocene Review that really blew my
mind. It takes off from Lovelock's notion that Gaia exists as a
superorganismic entity in which the teleconnection and effective
coordination of all the parts manifests as a living, self-regulating whole.
But the author asks: Is there any other such superorganismic entity? And he
finds another one right here on Earth:

"Humankind is differentiated not into numerous species and physical
processes (like Gaia) but into a myriad of cultures, languages, religions,
economic systems, technologies, and ways of living and interacting with
each other and the more-than-human world. These diverse modes can be said
to integrate with varying degrees of success into higher-level
“physiology”-like organizations—certainly on local scales such as
communities and cities as well as on the meso-level scale of nation-states
and religions, but also, arguably, on a planetary scale in an initial
dynamic coherence that approximates a global physiology, that is
globalization. This human global physiology could, at least theoretically,
be one that maintains its coherence through time. Just as Gaia possesses
differentiated cycles and systems (e.g. heat, chemical, gaseous,
ecosystemic, population-level biological) that interlock and maintain
global homeostasis in the face of changing conditions (e.g. the gradual
intensification of heat from the sun), globalized humanity develops
comparably global, differentiated, and interrelated feedback cycles and
systems of its own. Resource distribution through governmental and
intergovernmental bodies, circulation of goods and services through global
trade and finance, and knowledge gathering and exchange through
intercultural relationships (not to mention the waves of affect, narrative,
and metaphor traveling between cultures) could conceivably allow a
planetary humanity to develop its own versions of homeostasis in response
to global perturbations."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20530196221087789

All this culminates in the wonderful notion that humanity is or could be a
"child of Gaia," another superorganismic entity of planetary scale, now
reaching the age of adulthood and learning (or failing) to negotiate its
relation to its parent (learning or failing to "compose," in the word I
borrowed from Bruno Latour). Alas, a decent melodrama is looking ever less
likely at this chaotic moment. But the Nanocosmos is still worth exploring.
Because it's not all about language. Images matter.

best to all, Brian

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 10:31 AM Michael Benson via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Hi Brian, greetings everybody:
>
> With respect, what does this even mean:
>
> >Nature is somehow an Other with whom we must compose.
>
> ....?
>
> How could it be "Other," an Other with whom we must "compose," when we are
> the result of millions of years of complex, multifaceted, dice-throwing
> evolution on this planet? (For anybody tempted to say "no wait,
> anatomically modern Homo Sapiens have only existed for 300,000 years," it's
> not as though on a Thursday we had Homo Heidelbergensis -- handily named
> after a city that wouldn't exist for 298,000 years -- and then on Friday
> there emerged Homo Sapiens, AKA "Wise" Humans -- what a risibly
> self-regarding self-identification.... Rather a gradual, incremental,
> continuous evolutionary morphing transpired, across millennia and extending
> all the way back to the first cells.)
>
> And how could it be Other, Nature I mean, when we are so utterly reliant on
> the ecosystem that produced us? Isn't it just another peak in the mountain
> range of our collective anthropocentric arrogance (I don't mean this
> personally Brian) to continue with such an insistence? Or to maintain that
> Nature is "somehow" an Other, which amounts to the same thing?
>
> Item: a couple days ago, watching the latest cable news reporting about how
> dismally we're handling our exasperatingly destructive dominance of this
> planet, I was struck by how the projecting ears and feral wrinkling nose of
> the cable news host somehow made him seem irrefutably a representative
> Mammal of the order Rodentia, whereas the person he was interviewing -- a
> particularly duplicitous representative of a military force that has been
> doing a heck of a lot of killing lately -- while also an individual with
> fleshy, projective ears, looked somehow squarely centrally cast as a
> representative of a clade of Old World simians, albeit a particularly
> hairless and skinny ape of the family Hominidae? Sitting in a TV studio on
> a rump sans tail?
>
> Item: More than half, to about one half, of your body is non-human. Human
> cells make up about 43% of the body's total, with the rest being
> microscopic protists or bacterial colonizers. Yep, colonialism! One
> estimate has it that a typical Homo Sapiens consists of about 30 trillion
> human cells and about 38 trillion bacteria. So where do we draw the line,
> between Nature as Other and Human as... Other other?
>
> And that's just the bacterial and single-celled symbionts. Let's talk about
> the multicellular ones. You know how you just scratched your eyebrow? Why
> did you do that? Most likely, anyway as likely as not, due to human face
> mites. Demodex folliculorum or Demodex brevis, take your pick. They live in
> your hair follicles and/or sebaceous glands, the latter being those little
> oil producing glands connected to individual hair follicles. Domain
> Eukaryota, kingdom Animalia, phylum Arthropoda, class Arachnida, order
> Trombidiformes, family.... We like to name things, both to attempt
> understanding and classification, but also to persuade ourselves we
> control, we stand above and are.... Other.
>
> Demodex species live on most mammals, actually, usually without symptoms.
> The word derives from two Greek terms, the word for "fat" and the word for
> "woodworm." Just to really gross you out. BTW they're 0.3-0.4 mm long and
> they like to commute around on your face at night, moving at a speed of
> 8-16 mm per hour. Half of all adults have them, and 2/3rds of older people
> have them. This means you, Nettimers, ha ha.
>
> But don't let it bug you. They're essentially harmless. They merely belong
> to the more-than-50% of "you" that's not specifically "you."
>
> Though of course, where do "you" really live? What part of "you" is really
> "you," given that most of the "you" presumed to be human is actually the
> support system: organs and arteries and corpuscles and ductwork and nerve
> endings supporting -- what? Presumably supporting Wherever that Other is
> supposed to live. (Even as it also supports the above-mentioned
> "individual" ecosystem.)
>
> So where does that Other live? Presumably amongst the circa 86 billion
> neurons of the typical human brain?
>
> We are -- material.
>
> FYI a sperm whale has a brain five times heavier than a human brain. But it
> doesn't have more neurons. As far as we know, only short-finned pilot
> whales (a flat-nosed species of dolphin) and elephants have more neurons.
> Both of these species exhibit altruistic behavior, are highly social, take
> care of young not their own, and grieve visibly for their dead. Elephants,
> for example, shed tears.
>
> Do they belong to Nature as Other, while we do not -- we're exempt?
>
> Of course, none of them have iPhones designed by coddled elites on the
> American west coast, and built using semi-slave labor elsewhere, etcetera.
> The Smart Phone Movie that started this thread. But somehow sitting here at
> this SEM, or scanning electron microscope, looking at dinoflagellate
> designs, something I've been doing for the last three weeks almost
> continuously for a project called Nanocosmos -- somehow I don't think our
> design genius, however noteworthy, is enough to render us Other, and
> Nature, which produced us, Other Other.
>
> So here's a new question. Will artificial general intelligence, when it
> emerges in like, ten minutes, also be a part of nature? That's a good one:
>
> "When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest,
> he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been
> announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra
> spake thus unto the people: I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that
> is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto
> have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that
> great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is
> the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall
> man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Ye have made
> your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were
> ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. Even the
> wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But
> do I bid you become phantoms or plants? Lo, I teach you the Ubermensch!
> The Ubermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say:
> The Ubermensch SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!"
>
> Maybe AI is the Next Nature referred to in the subject line?
>
> Best from Ontario,
> Michael
> --
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
>
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org