New Years's resolution - Be more organism

 Be more Organismed

 

Whilst walking with my two sons to ward off depression, anxiety and in my case fibromyalgia, the eldest turned to me and asked, do you think you could build a nest with your mouth? I thought for a bit and was understandably taken aback. How do they know how to make the structure in triangles he went on? I’m not sure they know how we consider knowing to be. They don’t have an instruction manual to follow. It’s more a case of the knowledge being part of their body. My son started to say something about them being programmed. But who is controlling them he asked? At this point I felt that this idea of control is perhaps the greatest stumbling block to expanded empathetic thought that there is. God used to be the controller so who or what is in control now that he is dead? 

 

After being thrown in at the deep end with affect theory during my doctorate in fine art I have become more and more interested in the idea of embodied understanding and the analogy of birds being pre-programmed is not a particularly helpful one. It dates back at least as far as the Victorian fascination with automata and the sense of the uncanny closeness to real life. Its uncanny yes but not necessarily accurate in terms of a model for being. Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message and less famously that we shape our tools and our tools shape us. This is clear in the way that our thinking and reflex to regard processing data as an almost essential part of our identity and the way that the computer processor works. This powerful kind of cognitive thinking is a specifically human quality and shapes the communication systems that connects us. I watched a Ted talk correctly saying that language is the very thing that binds civilisation together and without it no inventions are possible. It strikes me that birds’ nests came into being without language and our own ability to feel understanding is connected to our ability to innovate through a sense of material vitality. Unlike birds we can write down the instructions or the recipe or the shopping list it’s just that lately the shopping list has become what we try to live off. 

 

Back in the mid twentieth century, Stanislav Lem noted that soon cybernetic systems would be too autonomous for us to be able to control them. I’m not here to discuss the perils of our over reliance on digital technology but to speculate about how powerful it could be to add this to our inbuilt ability to feel meaning and understanding like an organism instead of seeing this part of our selves i.e. sensation and felt understanding as shameful, suspect, superstitious or infantile. As humans we are very good at examining other organisms. Organisms such as the mollusc that can find its way back over a rock to where it felt at home even when scientists move it and place obstacles in its path. This ability presumably is not proof of their direct connection to alien life forces beaming geo location information but the ability of every organism to feel the landscape through its body. As far as I know no one has added anything to the universe since the big bang so why is it so surprising that the contents have an ability to feel their place within it.

 

The problem goes back to control and the idea that a god is controlling things even though he’s a he and a dead one at that. I was talking to a grown-up friend – one far harder to coerce into my flights of fancy around the human as organism. I started to tell him about Libet’s delay. Is this like a science thig or just an idea he asked. Luckily for me it’s a science thing. Libet’s experiments seem to prove that we feel a decision before we use cognitive processes to prove we decided to with our cognitivised identity. A mollusc has no concept of itself but does very well for itself. If I were a cat in the world of animals says Camus. Interestingly he says we cannot cross this separation out with a pen. It’s that thing again - cognition and language they are tools but somehow, they have come to shape how we think of ourselves. I don’t agree that you can’t uneat the apple. That’s my speculation having grown up partially deaf so language was something I felt could be turned on and off. Sometimes I had to feel things. This is what I would call felt intensities rather than emotions per say. Emotions are more sophisticated and organisms are more touchy-feely types. So, going back to the bird who builds the nest she knows because she comes out of the egg with the information all in there around her. Bird song by the way is essential to neuro-genesis and birds in the wild who sing grow new brain cells more effectively than those examined under laboratory conditions. Systemised Language and laboratories are distinctly human they somehow set us apart as Camus rightly points out. We talk of having to learn that we are guests of the planet rather than masters and I would venture to say that this still casts us as separate. You see we can’t help inserting and reverting to hierarchies because they after all built civilisation. Instead of hardening the categories we could find our super-natural selves by feeling our place in the universe which is still made of exactly the same stuff it always was. A bunch of stuff, that we as organisms are part of. Aldous Huxley suggests that it’s not supernatural but natural to seek the total human organism. If it helps to see this as spiritual then that’s fine but only if this doesn’t become another excuse to create a hierarchy of separation of human from the ubiquitous consciousness of stuff. Be more organism.