[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]

Wed Jun 20 20:24:22 AEST 2018

Dear John Jordan,

Your post leads me to two questions (some questions I have these days
vis-à-vis the ecological perspective in general):

1/ One of our goals should be, I think, to go beyond the opposition
between "becom[ing]
the territory" vs "floating over it with our virtual networks and
airplanes" because the risk of this opposition is to produce the
fetishization of the territory - but what's about migrants, nomads, those
who'd prefer not coming back to the land? What's about the vital aspect of
existential deterritorializations? Let's think about Debord's
psycho-geography, using ecology in order to sustain an existential
"dérive"...

2/ Is it necessary to personify Earth, forests, etc.? Fighting against the
denial of the non-human is one thing, but symmetrizing humans and
non-humans is something else (the "lesson" of nature, forests "teaching"
us, etc.). Actually, it seems very difficult to leave the non-human being
other than us!

My best,

Frederic Neyrat

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 11:24 AM, John Jordan <artactivism at gn.apc.org>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>  “The new picture of reality that the arts and sciences promise is one of a
> deeply sentient and meaningful universe. It is *poetic *– productive of
> new life forms and ever-new embodied experiences. It is expressive of all
> the subjective experiences that individuals make. It is a universe where
> human subjects are no longer separated from other organisms but rather form
> a meshwork of existential relationships – a quite real ‘web of life’. “Andreas
> Weber , *Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of
> nature,*
> <https://www.boell.de/en/2013/02/01/enlivenment-towards-fundamental-shift-concepts-nature-culture-and-politics>* culture
> and politics, *2013 Heinrich Böll Foundation*. *
>
> The key is that we begin to think like a forest which means become
> sensitive to its sensitivity, to the sense of  every being in it, from the
> mycelial hyphe that spread through the ground building soil and feeding the
> forest, to the ants that farm and  harvest mushrooms, the woodpecker that
> profits from the fungi that rot wood to build her nest. The forest is a a
> wave of life, ever moving, ever adapting, ever weaving spaces that enable
> forms of life to flower, ever changing and diversifying. But the key lesson
> it gives us 21st century humans is inhabiting,  how do we  really inhabit
> worlds, which means giving up the hyper mobility of the cultural class and
> learning to become the territory rather than floating over it with our
> virtual networks and airplanes.
>
> We must see the forest and its life as our teachers, sometimes teaching us
> things that are totally counterintuitive to our cultural frames, such as
> the fact that the spores of Arbuscural Mycorrhizae (non mushroom forming
> mycelium that connects 95 % of the plant roots on the planet) have more
> than one nuclei, in fact many of them have between 800 and 35, 000
> DIFFERENT nuclei and not all the same DNA but the Genetic material of other
> fungi AND other species !! These warehouses of genetic information defy the
> biological species concept !!!!
>
> Like lovers carve their names on trees, the earliest books were engraved
> on beech bark, hence the origins of the word “book” - “boc” meaning “beech
> tree”.
>
> Under the canopy of an ancient Athenian olive grove, home to Plato’s
> academy, Phaedrus asked Socrates why he never ventured beyond the city
> walls into the countryside. “I'm a lover of learning” Socrates answered
> “trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town
> will.” The grove was later chopped down to make siege machines.
>
> The soundtrack of western “civilisation” is the noise of the book of
> ‘nature' being slammed shut and the rumble of war machines approaching. We
> are told that Nature is mute, it has nothing to teach us, except that it is
> a battlefield of all against all. But as the war against our climate and
> ecosystems tips the physiology of the planet into chaos, the myth that
> Nature is just ‘red in tooth and claw’, is unravelling.
>
> The more we study the living world the more we come to realise that the
> tendency is actually to associate, build relationships, and cooperate. From
> trees that work with fungi to share sugars and information between
> themselves to bees pollinating flowers, nature abounds with reciprocity.
> The fittest are in fact those that relate the best. Perhaps it’s no
> surprise that a culture that rewards greed and domination would rather we
> forget the true lessons of the natural world. Perhaps its no surprise that
> capitalism wants us to be mobile and rootless, because then we cannot fall
> in love with a place and if your not in love with a place then you can
> never defend it from being destroyed and turned into another machine of
> profit and growth for the gods of the economy.
>
> Susan simards work on the relationships between trees in forests is
> gorgeous….she calls it the WOOD WIDE WEB.
>
> https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
>
> PETER MACOY’s BOOK - RADICAL MYCOLOGY is a gem of art, activism and
> science merging together in  practice and philosophy -
> https://chthaeus.com/collections/books-1/products/
> radical-mycology-a-treatise-on-seeing-working-with-fungi
>
> THE RADICAL MYCOLOGY WEB SITE HAS SOME GREAT WEBINARS and resources for
> those of us who want to become fungi and forests...
>
> https://radicalmycology.com/
>
> here is to the mysteries of mycelium, the bridges between life and death...
> yours JJ
> AKA my new drag performance MISS CELIUM
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 20 Jun 2018, at 03:58, Aviva Rahmani <ghostnets at ghostnets.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Just a quick comment on trees and hierarchies, vertical space doesn’t
> necessarily imply hierarchy. A tree’s canopy, for example is at least as
> important to its survival as its roots and all the interconnected mycellae
> of its underground networks. I would suggest a more realistic
> conceptualization of these spatial relationships would be to consider
> permaculture- in which each spatial layer is equally important and all are
> interconnected. Further more, it might be considered that any trees’ role
> is grounded in watershed dynamics, the atmosphere, soil, food webs, etc.
> Even a sentinel tree is only an artifact of these much larger
> relationships. Re: rehearsals for a network and other systems, it might be
> interesting to consider about the sentinel tree, that what is obvious may
> not be what’s important to pay attention to. The corollary in present
> politics is that the strong man may not be the real danger. It is the
> followers of the strong man and why they follow.
>
> Aviva Rahmani, PhD
> www.ghostnets at ghostnets.com
> Watch ³Blued Trees²:  https://vimeo.com/135290635
> www.gulftogulf.org
>
>
>
> *From: *<empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of
> "Vanouse, Paul" <vanouse at buffalo.edu>
> *Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> *Date: *Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at 3:18 PM
> *To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> *Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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