My Magic Life

 Be more Organism

My screams will articulate a feeling of infinite longing for the “expression” model to re-emerge in a culture of feeling adorned with a filigree of ornate concepts.

 

 

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? This dialectical mode of thinking of choice as forks in a branch is literally something god given. It just feels off to me. I mean the way we tend to think a belief in a god is absurd but believing in freedom as choices is natural. Good or bad? Mine or yours? Heads or tails? Its what Brian Massumi discusses as the communication model of thought in Parables for the Virtual. As humans we tell ourselves that we communicate messages. Communication is our finest achievement and we decorate this with our beautiful handiwork. How often do we down grade nature’s achievements by insisting on framing them in the “human” communication model? Art communicates, I hear so often I want to scream. My screams will articulate a feeling of infinite longing for the “expression” model to re-emerge in a culture of feeling adorned with a filigree of ornate concepts.

 

After being throw in at the deep end with affect theory during my doctorate in fine art (I literally had no idea what I was letting myself in for) 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. It's uncanny yes but not necessarily accurate in terms of a model for being. It's an ersatz lure like a trompe d'oeil of life. 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 bind 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. 

 

In his reflection on an emerging digital culture, Summa technologiae, Stanislav Lem noted that soon cybernetic systems would become too autonomous for us to be able to control them. I’m not here to discuss the peril 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 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 thing 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 identity as self. 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, I would belong. 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. 

 

Like the bird’s nest is within the bird’s body, our systems of hierarchical separation are now built into our very being.

 

So, going back to the bird who build 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. It is a science thing. 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 guest 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 build civilisation. Like the bird’s nest is within the bird’s body, these systems of hierarchical separation are built into our very being. 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 in material vitality.