Text extracts from: e-flux journal - 'Subscendence' by Timothy Morton.
Issue #85
October 2017
[Accessed 20/10/21]
- Found some interesting topics in portions of this text, and made some notes within the text (my notes are in blue)
It is believed that one cannot be more than man. Rather, one cannot be less! —Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside. —Doctor Who
We should see things such as humankind as wholes that are less than the sum of their parts. Tim Morton is so many more things than just “human.” A street full of people is much more than just a part of a greater whole called “city.” It’s hard to locate contemporary megacities because we keep looking for something that totally incorporates its parts. Towns, villages, and other formations are strung together in Java in such a way that only the volcanoes on that massive island prevent them from spreading everywhere. The only limit is a perceived threat to life. The string of dwellings isn’t even a megacity, it’s a hypercity, a city that is hardly a city at all. But precisely because of this less-than-a-city quality, a hypercity is beyond even the colossal size we associate with megacities such as Mexico City. Java’s hypercity and Mexico City are less than the sum of their parts. Parts of them—houses, regions of houses—keep on pouring out of them like ice cubes bursting through the paper bag they made wet. The one and the many - the many within the one/ the many different parts and systems that a body/thing is made up of that blurry the ideas of what the singular body is, and expands it into something more that just the one thing. For example, I see this in the context of my art making, in particular the bike cluster formation I am currently working on. I have observed that the was I construct the bike is as something that holds multiple pieces and materials together, and thus becomes this one, clustered object. This cluster holds an array of different elements, but considers them in relation to each other and as equals. This can be considered as a cluster of ideas that can be picked apart be looked at individually as well as part of a whole eg. the bike.
Wholes subscend their parts, which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible. It is good to regard things such as capitalism as physical beings, not simply as fictions that would disappear if we just stopped believing in them.
These things are real. The ideas I am looking at touches on this topic, as I am trying to rediscover what has been pushed aside as 'unreal' and what we consider to be 'real.' Eg. Is landscape that shown in tourist brochures 'real'? Is land that is unappealing and therefore ignored 'unreal' because it has been pushed away where we can't see it?
But what kind of physical being are they? If they are subscendent, it means that we can change them, if we want. What if some things could be physically huge, yet ontologically tiny? What if neoliberalism, which envelopes earth in misery, were actually quite small in another way, and thus strangely easy to subvert? Too easy for intellectuals, who want to make everything seem difficult so they can keep themselves in a job by explaining it, or outdo each other in competition for whose picture of the world is more depressing. “I am more intelligent than you because my picture of neoliberalism is far more terrifying and encompassing than yours. We are truly enslaved in my vision, with no hope of escape—therefore I am superior to you!” Isn’t this a tragic consequence of what some call cynical reason, the dominant way of being right for the last two hundred years?
To prove subscendence is also childishly simple, which makes the resistance you will feel toward it all the more significant. To show that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, all you need to do is accept that a group of things can be a thing, which is a simple way of saying that if a thing exists, it exists in the same way as another thing. A sentence exists in the same way as a word-processing program. A tree exists in the same way as a forest. An idea exists in the same way as a quasar. This is very far from saying that things have the same right to exist. Claiming that the AIDS virus has as much right to exist as an AIDS patient is a conclusion you can draw within the logic of deep ecology, but it has nothing to do with actual ecological politics, and everything to do with a Gaia hypothesis or concept of a biosphere that is greater than the sum of its parts, in which every being is a replaceable component. This has to do with agricultural-age religion, the ideological support of the social, psychic, and philosophical machination that eventually generated mass extinction. Deep ecology is fighting fire with fire. So then is deep ecology something that is a response to a crisis/or ruling ideologies, rather than some fixed doctrine? Is it more of a fluctuating method of facing the influx of ecological dogmas that we all are subjected to on a daily basis in one way or another?
Very well, a tree exists in the same way as a forest. The forest is ontologically one. The trees are more than one. The parts of the forest (the trees—but there are so many more parts in fact) outnumber the whole. This doesn’t mean they “are more important than the whole.” This is the kind of anti-holist reductionism that neoliberalism promotes: “There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals.” We need holism, but a special, weak holism that isn’t theistic.
Climate is ontologically smaller than weather. Weather is a symptom of climate, but there is so much more to weather other than simply being a symptom of climate. A shower of rain is a bath for this bird. It’s a spawning pond for these toads. It’s this soft delicate pattering on my arm. It’s this thing I wrote some sentences about. I like this paragraph a lot as it is trying to find a middle ground or resolution between a whole or its parts. "We need holism, but a special, weak holism that isn’t theistic." Morton is in the middle of hinting the kind of philosophy he thinks we need to reconsider how things are situated. This holism he is talking about - is it still holism if its something that needs to be semi- detached from it? Or has holism taken on this "theistic" approach and needs to be removed from it? "...there is so much more to weather other than simply being a symptom of climate" This opens up the possibility of so many other different perspectives the "weather" could be, as Morton continues to describe. Then maybe Morton's holism is more open, it is holistic to the extent of consideration of other beings and challenging the 'holism' that runs as a hierarchy rather than an egalitarian idea.
Humankind is ontologically smaller than the humans who make it up! There is so much more that humans do other than be parts of humankind. Humans modify their bodies to change their gender and add electronic and decorative prostheses. Humans form relationships with nonhumans. Humans contain nonhumans such as the bacterial microbiome in such a way that if the nonhumans left, the humans would die.
This means that the correct left concept of the human is of a partial object in a set of partial objects, such that it comprises an implosive whole that is less than the sum of its parts. This partiality extends in every dimension, including time. An event is a temporal partial object. An event is part of some set of events that comprises a whole, but this whole is always less than the sum of its parts. A battle in feudal Japan was not simply a matter of two lords fighting. Flies settled on the corpses. Five years later, delicate flowers bloomed. Evolution shuffled the decks in its eons-long game of cards.
To be a thing is to be a perforated bag full of water, in which are swimming countless little perforated bags full of water, in which are floating … When you cut open a bag, so many more bags spill out than you probably bargained for. This is how an emotional label such as “anger” is not (quite evidently) a whole that intuitively contains gradations and subtleties all comprehensively summed up by that one term. We may find within it hesitation, a sense of humor, sexual passion, grief. This is equivalent to discovering that a physical line has a fractal dimensionality when you examine it more closely. A fractal is a partial number that goes wiggling around being just itself for a potential infinity of iterations. Beauty is slightly disgusting or weird or fascinating because the human-scaled bag full of water that is inducing the beauty experience inevitably contains and is part of bags full of water at all kinds of nonhuman scales. What I understand from this: Beauty exists beyond the human experience and extends to other beings' feelings and perceptions? Beauty is not human-centric. The "disgusting or weird" is cast upon beauty through a human-centric perspective.
Kitsch is subscendent beauty.
What Bataille calls “general economy” is a subscendent twelve-inch remix of restricted economy. And what this means is that all the nonhuman economic modes are in the mix too. Economics is really just about how you organize enjoyment. And ecological politics just means allowing and enhancing all kinds of enjoyment that aren’t obviously to do with you. Well, not that they’re nothing to do with you—that’s too tight. It’s just that you let yourself be perforated.
Spectrality means that a being is a symbiotic community consisting of itself and its spectral halo. A being is less than the sum of its parts. Kitsch is other people’s enjoyment. In an ecological age, where there is no one true and proper scale, beauty will be appreciated along with its halo of weirdness or disgust. This makes beauty into something much more than just an anthropocentric idea. It is holistic and unbiased, and speaks to a much more democratic view of ecology and beings on earth. This is the ecological age, as Morton says. However, unlike a massive geologic Anthropocene, I wonder if Morton holds that the ecological age is something that can be more intimate with humans and society in the sense that one can initiate a structure in their home and personal life that acknowledges basic ideas of 'deep ecology' ...or a more holistic view of the surrounding environment. This kind of beauty is X-beauty, just like a lifeform is always an X-lifeform. Marxism that includes nonhumans is a subscendent X-Marxism, less than the sum of Marxism and anarchism (and so on). Political space that includes nonhumans is X-space that subscends its parts.
A record of a positive discharge of electricity, also known as a Lichtenberg figure, in the text Walter E. Woobury,‟Photographing Electrical Discharges” in Popular Science Monthly, Volume 49, (July 1896). Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Of Invisible Gods
Not everything can be empirically observed. There are some things that are thinkable and computable, yet we find it impossible to see them: the hyperobjects. Many are ecological phenomena such as global warming, evolution, and extinction, not to mention the human species and the biosphere.
We tend to think of these things as wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, but let’s see how they subscend their parts. The political task we face is to see physically gigantic and intellectually complex (hence invisible) things as ontologically tiny. Neoliberalism is physically vast, but ontologically small. We are able to dismantle it, by crawling out from underneath in solidarity with the other lifeforms it now threatens.
But if “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is true, it doesn’t really matter if those parts get replaced. We will still have our lovable old whole intact. Say the whole is the biosphere and say the part, which we very much imagine as a component because of the holism, is a polar bear. Never mind. They will go extinct and another lifeform will simply have to evolve to take their place. This kind of thought might not be so good for ecological ethics and politics.
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The fragility of hyperobjects is political good news. Cynical reason has been lamenting neoliberalism as the inescapable psychopath Cthulhu—it loves this kind of doom-speak. But ontologically, neoliberalism is quite small compared to a polar bear. Maybe this kind of thinking is what distinguishes an anarchist from a Marxist, or at any rate a certain kind of successful academic Marxist. That kind of ideology theorist is really just a believer in Ra, someone mindlessly retweeting an agrilogistic meme that has been wildly successful in transforming earth into a narrow temporality-diameter extinction pipe.
Subscendence affects things like nation-states, as huge and powerful as they appear. Subscendence is why you need a passport. It’s not to guarantee your identity, but to guarantee and prop up the identity of the state. Islamophobia sees Muslim terrorists as inevitably part of some larger, shadowy organization, while in the United States, white terrorists are always described as “lone wolves.” No matter how many of them shoot people in churches and outside abortion clinics and blow up government buildings, having trained in the Christian equivalent of an al-Qaeda training camp; no matter how many wolves there are, they are always seen as lone wolves, not as members of a pack.4 The concept that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts comes in ideologically handy because then Islamophobia can claim that Islamic terrorists are part of some emergent, shadowy whole, while white terrorists are individuals without a whole in sight.Humankind Is a Subscendent Whole
Subscendent wholes are fuzzy and ragged. They involve an uncountable number of parts. The effect of this is to cause the whole to be weirdly shrunken.
Contextual criticism in the humanities has become sclerotic. Rather than the dangerous frisson of noticing a historical unconscious, what has become routine is to explain a cultural document away by “situating” it in a context that usually takes the shape of a decade within a particular century and pertains to the country and the specific region in which the document was produced. Needless to say, all these contextual features are thought in an anthropocentric way. We are talking about what it was like for humans when the painting was made, not what it was like for mice.
But contextualization is potentially highly explosive: a cultural document subscends its contexts. There is no good reason to stop. Ironically most contextual criticism is trying to contain what is most interesting about context. And we can test this by thinking about ecology.
The thing about ecological contexts is that you can’t draw a line around them in advance, because ecology is profoundly about interdependence. The biosphere depends on earth’s magnetic shield to protect lifeforms from solar rays, and this depends on the way earth’s iron core is spinning, and that depends on how the earth formed in the early stages of the solar system, and so on. We are dealing with a potential infinity of entities on a potential infinity of scales—there is no way to ascertain whether the pleroma of beings has an end point, at least not in advance. Ecological awareness just is this context explosion. Is then ecology something that we need to keep discovering/rediscovering through a non-human-centric enquiry? What are the methods of conducting such enquiries? Does this now extend beyond science and into a much more experimental and avant guide methods? Or does this mean that we need to draw from the philosophies of indigenous and ancient communities and literature to gain a wider sense of an ecological interconnectedness?
Very large entities such as mountains and oceans sometimes move in such a way that the vibrations of their movement create sound, far too deep for humans to hear. The sound waves travel across earth, sweeping up all kinds of entities in their waveforms. You can record and broadcast this infrasound, but you have to build a special, very long speaker to push the wave through efficiently, and you have to speed it up about eighty times, so that humans can hear it—an incredibly deep, loud roar. It’s like the soft roar that is part of the signature of an explosion: not the shattering, but the pervasive rumble.
Infrasound is literally the sound of context, exploding. And the way it explodes undermines the idea of nicely bounded wholes that poof out big enough to contain their parts in a nice unified group. The longer the description of all the elements of such a thing goes on, the more it threatens to open up an abyss. Wholes might be boreholes that go so deep down that we can’t fathom their depth.
Infrasound is a Tolstoy novel about mountains, oceans, and deserts. It is a perfect example of our current Age of Asymmetry: an ecological age in which we have so much more scientific data about things, which makes the things appear so much huger and more mysterious so that increasing knowledge doesn’t master objects. There is, instead, a Cold War–like explosion of knowledge and withdrawnness at the same time, and for the same reason. This is a sharp difference from Hegel’s picture of art history, in which knowledge gradually outstrips art materials, resulting, from the late eighteenth century on, in irony and the art of successful failures to embody spirit.5 That picture is just a symptom of the hubris that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, which we have been calling modernity. But the impetus to transcend one’s material conditions in every respect has resulted in drilling down, literally, ever deeper into them, to the extent that now we have realized that this very movement has created far larger and more immersive material conditions than ever before. Global warming lasts for a hundred thousand years. This Age of Asymmetry turns out not even to be neatly asymmetrical. It’s not really about humans full of inner space versus nonhumans also full of inner space. Because it’s at this very moment that humans discover that they are one of those objects, precisely insofar as we are now allowing them all to be Pandora’s jars like us, to contain multitudes.
Subscendence guarantees that objects encounter us as if they were the flu, getting inside our own fuzzy, ragged boundaries and executing their operations from an intimate place. Subscendence means, therefore, that we humans really aren’t nihilistic negation monsters, but chameleon-like entities that are susceptible to colors, surfaces, sound waves—the way the flesh at the back of my eye is palpated by electromagnetic waves spraying out of an excited yttrium-oxide coating on the inside of an LCD display or cathode-ray tube. I see red because yttrium waves are splashing onto me. Because I’m not a rigidly bounded whole but a ragged, subscendent one, I can wave along with this redness for a moment.
Susceptibility is very good news for ecological ethics and politics. I can be touched. Thinking itself is touching and being touched, not a guarantee of full metaphysical presence, but a disorienting flicker that haunts me or pleasures me or hurts me, and so on. A visual artist knows that visuality is badly misrepresented by philosophies that use the language of sight to establish constantly present things-to-be-seen, and the too-easy linkage of seeing and knowing.
Perhaps ecological philosophy needs to generate a whole new language that inclines more toward touch, toward the haptic. This is really because seeing is subscended by touching. It’s not that seeing is reducible to touching, as if touching were more constantly present, the equivalent of a doubting Thomas thrusting his hand into the wound and feeling it for himself; it’s that seeing, like hearing, is a part of touching, a whole that is not greater than the sum of its parts. The touch is lowly, susceptible, risky, humble—it subscends being able to see around and above and beyond a thing. It subscends because it is nearer, more intimate, quite the opposite of “more encompassing and less intimate.”
Now we can think humankind without having to think “Mankind,” and without having to imagine that there is no such thing as the human species or that differences between humans are superficial or irrelevant. We can talk about the human species while acknowledging difference because humankind forms a subscendent whole. There is an irreducible gap between little me and the human, but not because the human is ontologically greater than the sum of its parts. Humankind is not a negation of a human being, but rather an implosive whole that is susceptible to all kinds of phenomena. - an idea or way of thinking about humankind that subverts/re-constructs the ideologies of 'how things are or should be'... in the bible and/or such other orthodox doctrines that promote hierarchies within biological organisms and beings . The Anthropocene is one of the first truly anti-anthropocentric concepts because via thinking the Anthropocene, we get to see the concept of “species” as it really is—species as a subscendent hyperobject, brittle and inconsistent. The Anthropocene is the moment at which humans come to recognize humankind, insofar as it subscends its parts (such as plastics and concretes in earth’s strata). The Anthropocene is the moment at which species as such becomes thinkable in a non-metaphysical way, such that humankind cannot rigidly exclude nonhumans. The human becomes visible as a species, that is to say, as a whole weirdly smaller than the sum of its (human, bacterial microbiome, prosthetic) parts. Humankind is, as I said before, intrinsically disabled without hope of a “healthy” (explosive) wholeness.
Spot the Hypocrite is the favorite game of the left, a product of the monotheistic holism we’ve inherited from Mesopotamia. In a world in which wholes are always bursting like spider’s eggs into many, many parts, cynical distance cannot be achieved, because there is no place from which to grasp the totality without losing something. So, when it comes to a choice between Spot the Hypocrite or Burst the Spider Egg, we should be playing the latter game. A Google employee is capable of having critical, anti-Google thoughts. A bureaucrat in Soviet Lithuania is capable of having more-than-mixed feelings about what she’s doing.
A record of a negative discharge of electricity, also known as a Lichtenberg figure, in the text Walter E. Woobury,‟Photographing Electrical Discharges” in Popular Science Monthly, Volume 49, (July 1896). Photo: Wikimedia Commons
This text is an excerpt from Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton, recently published by Verso. Author Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature.
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