immanence

Here’s the “reader’s guide” I promised for Shadowing the Anthropocene. It begins with a quick summary of the book’s main contribution — a kind of “master key” to what it tries to do. It then lays out a set of paths one can take through the book, which would be useful for readers with an interest in one or two but not all of the book’s themes. Finally, I include the detailed table of contents (without pagination), as this somehow got dropped during the editing process, even while a detailed index and bibliography got added.

 

The master key

Shadowing the Anthropocene is premised on an acceptance of the “feverishness” of the world we are moving into (a feverishness that’s also the focus of the symposium and art festival I’ve been co-organizing here in Burlington, Vermont, taking place this coming weekend). Climate change and ecological destabilization are exacerbating political and economic challenges that will lead to a generally more anxious and more conflict-ridden world. The book hopes to contribute to the psychological and affective “coming to terms” with that world, so as to allow us to better address it.

It brings two bright ideas to the table. Neither of them is original; they are certainly not my own. I have simply tried to fuse them together in an original way, and this marriage has produced a couple of hundred pages of offspring. The first idea has served as the core of a two-and-a-half thousand year tradition of philosophical theory and practice (Buddhism), and was revived in a particularly coherent and clear way nearly a century ago in the writings of a certain mathematician-turned-philosopher (Alfred North Whitehead). The second idea has been at the core of a rather newer tradition of thought (semiotics) advanced and articulated by an equally original modern thinker (Charles Sanders Peirce).

The first of these ideas suggests that people tend to misperceive the nature of reality, which results in an overabundance of suffering, and that we can change that. The second idea suggests that part of that misperception is the role we ascribe to meaning and significance, and the ways in which meaning and significance are rooted in more primary forms of experience.

The book’s first part (of three) tries to articulate the ontology — the understanding of the world — that results from the marriage of these two ideas. Its second part applies that understanding to our direct experience of reality, and suggests some ways in which we can incorporate this understanding into our lives. And its third part applies that understanding to the cultural and spiritual clashes of our world.

 

Paths through the book

The book could simply be read as most such books are read, from start to finish. Or it could be read more intentionally with respect to its three main thematic contributions, which are as follows.

1) The ontological path: You could read it for its philosophy, which means for what this view of the world (this ontology or metaphysics) says about the world. I call this view “process-relational,” because its main premise is that our perception of things is inaccurate to the extent that we miss their inherently “processual” and “relational” nature. This view is laid out in the early sections of Part One, especially the four sub-sections from “Metaphysical entry point” to “No thing alone” (see below). This is followed, in the remainder of Part One, by some detailed explications and examples of what reality looks and feels like when seen through this lens. Some of the latter may get too detailed or esoteric for some readers, but “Where we find ourselves” and “Eventology 1” and “2” are a little more central and easier going. Finally, Appendix 1 provides a detailed bibliographic overview of process-relational theory today, for those who are interested in the philosophical background.

2) The experiential path: Alternatively, you could read the book for what it offers in understanding our immediate experience of the world. Because the process-relational view is not entirely original and has appeared in multiple forms over the centuries (especially in Buddhist and Daoist philosophies and their western interpretations), this view may sound vaguely familiar to some readers. My book intends to make this loosely defined terrain both more precise and applicable to every moment in one’s life — to the things that arise in the mind and the body, to the actions one takes, and to the results or “realizations” of those actions. It does this by grounding it in the two “bright ideas” mentioned above. To be understandable, the experiential path requires a basic familiarity with the ontological substrate of the book, which is introduced in the first half of Part One. The sections “Metaphysical entry point” through to “No thing alone” (pp. 30-52) are most essential for that. But Part Two is the heart of the book for this second path, especially from “Philosophy of the moment” (p. 101) and “Sensings” through to the end of the chapter. (For readers who follow this path: don’t let “Returning to immanence” throw you off; starting with “A time of suffering,” the reading gets easier.) Finally, Appendix 3 offers practical exercises to accompany the method and framework described in Part Two. It is these that might make the ideas much more tangible for followers of this second path.

3) The ‘world today’ (cultural/religious studies) path: Finally, you could read the book for what it suggests about the world are living in today, with its many cultural and religious conflicts, and the future of those conflicts as we try to collectively resolve the profound challenges facing humanity in the century ahead. Many books have been written about these challenges and about their cultural dimensions, and mine is far from exhaustive in its purview. Rather, I try to suggest a few conceptual tools for thinking through this terrain. I presents these tools by contrasting them with the ideas of a handful of other prominent contemporary philosophers and cultural theorists (Charles Taylor, Slavoj Zizek, William Connolly, Bruno Latour, and others). The more general and programmatic sections here include the book’s very beginning (especially “Space junk”), Part Two’s “A time of suffering” (p. 92-98), and the bulk of Part Three, especially its first three sections (pp. 151-164) and “Ontological politics” (pp. 180-185). The sections in between may get too specific, for some readers, in their interrogation of other thinkers or specific phenomena (such as digital images).

The last three sections (“Of gods…”, “Skin of the living,” and “Sacrifice zones…”) and the short “Postlude” try to bring the ideas home for all readers.

In the end, my hope is that I have offered here a hopeful perspective on a prospect many find relatively hopeless: that of human survival and flourishing in conditions of severe ecological crisis. It’s not necessary to agree with the more dire prognostications of this crisis — with global climate change triggering or contributing to massive ecological disruption, further toxification, “plastification,” and all the human consequences of all of this — in order to accept that there are deep challenges facing humanity today. And I argue that it isn’t even necessary to accept that there are such challenges at all. (Though of course there are.)

All one has to do is to view things from a process-relational perspective. Seen through that lens, the question that is most worth asking oneself is: what should I do now, here in the present moment? And the answer is always some variation of the following: determine what is happening around me now, how it impinges on my capacity to affect what will follow, and how I can best take it up in order to render and realize the beauty of what there is and of what can be.

If it’s true that a process-relational ontology, when internalized and made a vital core of our experience, forces these questions upon us — that’s the leap of faith the book is premised on — then such an ontology may in fact be helpful in making sense of today’s very real worldly challenges.

This doesn’t mean that changing our idea of the world is sufficient in changing that world. (Asserting that would be a form of philosophical idealism, a position that process-relationalism critiques.) It just means that our perception and our experience are vital mediators between the ideas we bring to the world and the world that shapes those ideas. They are the point of connection that we can affect, and this capacity of ours has aesthetic, ethical, and ecological dimensions. (See “Toward a logo-ethico-aesthetics of existence” for the upshot of the experiential chapter, Part Two.) In its 250 or so (pocket book style) pages, the book tries to identify and trace those dimensions and how we can directly get at them.

I will assume that the book will take time digesting, for those readers willing to undertake that journey. Comments and suggestions will be welcome at any point, here on this blog or sent to me at aivakhiv@uvm.edu. Enjoy.

 

Table of contents

• Prelude: The spectre

1     Engaging Objects: A Treatise on Events

• Space junk
• An object flies out the window
• Things (scribbled on a restaurant napkin)
• Metaphysical entry point
• Matters of concern
• Projects in the making
• No thing alone
• Topographies of morphogenesis
• The soul(s) of things
• Earth jazz
• Where we find ourselves
• Slice of time
• Eventology 1
• Eventology 2

2     Engaging the Act: What a Bodymind Can Do

• Returning to immanence
• A time of suffering
• Situating ourselves
• Philosophy of the moment
• Sensings
• Relatings
• How to make a bodymind flow, or, deconstructing experience with Reality
• The bodymind Rubik’s Cube
• Dark flow, or the great sucking sound at the heart of things
• The apophatic, inside-out twist
• Returning to the things themselves, differently
• Toward a logo-ethico-aesthetics of existence

3   Engaging Images: Building Common Worlds

• Mundus imaginalis
• Iconoclash
• A pagan world
• The immanent frame
• More than one way to be porous
• Jamesian maneuvers
• Ontological politics
• The subject and the subjectless
• Totality, or original hybridity?
• Image, archive, cloud: on the ecology of images
• Time of the image
• Of gods and the eyes of the world
• Skin of the living
• Sacrifice zones, Chernobyl, and the post-human

Postlude

• The long revolution
• Of times and beyond time

Appendix 1 Contemporary process-relational thought: a primer

Appendix 2 What a bodymind can do: Full Rubik’s Cube version

Appendix 3 Practices: 7 exercises

Acknowledgments, Bibliography, Index

 

Image credit: Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee (1942), from the book’s frontispiece, used by permission of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018