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

[Chris Fremantle via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

This is so useful and interesting - Newton Harrison used to talk about
humanity occupying a mega-niche and I now know what he was meaning...
Chris

Chris Fremantle
chris@fremantle.org
+44 (0)7714203016
http://chris.fremantle.org
http://ecoartscotland.net

Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classroom
and Community
Geffen, A., Rosenthal, A., Fremantle, C., and Rahmani, A. (eds)

https://nyupress.org/9781613321461/ecoart-in-action/

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024, 16:28 Brian Holmes via nettime-l, <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> 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
> > --
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> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
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