Ultimate reality is always experienced as wrongness and failure because human beings are restricted to partiality of perception by their finitude, or so says the stodgy book of theory I'm reading by Timothy Morton. It's called Hyperobjects and essentially it's about phenomena and their 'thingness' which are so vast in time and space that human beings can only glimpse them, and yet in their absolutism they've shaped the formation of our species and the way we grasp the world itself. They are inescapable and yet their existence is only ever smelled, sensed, gleaned as an ambience and never in their totality as an 'object' (thus the prefix Hyper). Does that make any sense?
As it's most obvious example Morton talks about climate change being a hyper object, but only as a knock on from global warming, because apparently confusing climate and weather itself as fixed objects is a mistake; weather is something we've only assumed as fixed because it's existed in a certain patterned way for as long as humans have existed (in this specific historical strain anyway), when in reality weather is a radically contingent process, like a scale on a dragon so huge it spans our entire galaxy with it's snout at the sun and it's tail at Pluto. And we are microbes on that scale assuming the absolutism of it's features as a reality, as a whole, and suddenly the dragon shrugs and it's scales ripple and behave in ways previously unseen which obviously rocks our whole world (or worlds) and forces us to overhaul everything we've taken as ontological givens.
Or something.
And as we already know, things like pandemics are ripples from the dragon shrugging, because industrialising our environment and pushing it to it's absolute limit has rebounded in a rapid increase of global temperatures and so an acceleration of certain negative (to us) geological potentials, or a natural entropic process of eventual renewal (one which humanity will probably not be around to see) that in our limited life-worlds can only be experienced as a conflagration, a cataclysm, a dismantling of a world that was premised on borrowed time anyway. Oh well.
It's like existing in a single petri dish, which we've made singular by globalising, and then maybe putting that dish in a microwave so that every wriggling bacterial presence is jolted with directives of virulent growth and starts vampirising the bodies around it. Oops.
Anyway as far as an anthropocene is concerned, I'd been thinking about it in exclusively dystopian terms, but that would be to think lowly and separately of humanity itself. The very word suggests an inherent separation between ourselves as a species and natural processes, when in reality no such division has ever occurred, we are still inside 'nature' (whatever that is) and the notion that we have somehow splintered off from and then attacked 'nature' is an aesthetic consideration. A false marketing rendition of our world, of our role in it.
But then how am I to think about global warming when I also think we definitely pushed the pedal on climate shift by industrialising so aggressively? Is it maybe that our actions have always been intimately enclosed within nature's script (as the anthropocene suggests) but in choosing to consciously alienate ourselves (a dream) inside nature we deliberately blinded ourselves to this intimate reality, and thus are only coming into collective knowledge of it because industry (an aggressor) has goaded some very immediate effects?
Why did we choose to alienate ourselves in this way? What comfort was taken and from what perceived threats? Was a short term sense of dominion really worth the apocalyptic price of admission?
I think modernism has a lot to answer for.
There's a consideration in Morton's book of the economy itself as a hyperobject, and as a sprawling diagnostic of value which is wildly speculative, acculturated, impossible to predict even with all the corruption and insider trading, then certainly the economy counts as a spatio-temporally massive 'thing' which can never be grasped in it's totality. Only sensed and gleaned, sometimes effectively and sometimes futilely. If it was anything else then a little bump or jolt (like a credit crunch, or a few months of isolation for the good of public health) wouldn't have such catastrophic results; knowing it's dimensions and directives with wholeness would not make it, or us, so vulnerable. But it is and we are.
Yes, we are fucked now.
But then maybe if hyper objects can only be registered as wrongness and as failure, and it's impossible to find a workable angle, grasping for coherence itself is a waste of energy. What then should our energies be directed towards? As the life-world we've built around ourselves deteriorates and reveals itself to have been a chimera all along, what becomes a worthy investment for the immediate future?
Firstly the aesthetic category of nature ('I love being in nature, getting back to nature etc') has to be abandoned, because it means absolutely nothing. Considering humanity and nature as separate, or even humanity and nature in themselves, is nonsensical and goes against reality. Whatever we are it's not as contained local entities but as viscously interconnected aggregates with other objects around us, their particularities and their management of our behaviours by vector of relationship. Our sense of ourselves as contained beings moving through 'stuff' is incorrect; the 'stuff' around us consists of objects like ourselves, which in turn are made of smaller objects, which in turn are made of smaller objects etc (microbes made of molecules made of atoms, that kind of fractal shit). Each of those objects has needs, demands, unique modes and registers, effecting the behaviours of objects and entities around itself in an interpersonal field, an ambience of exchange by which we're aware of ourselves only in debt to awareness of others. Literal debt, because the subsistence of life is transactional, exchanges of energy and order (not in an economical sense, but as Morton puts it, in directives). We are all symbiotes in a parasitic orgy, which the further back you step starts looking like an infinite machine with an unending number of modules interlocking with sound and fury. Perhaps galaxies themselves are the microbes on even larger bodies outside our spatio-temporal grasp.
Anyway, Beautiful Nature must be forgotten. It's an ideological weapon that makes us blind to complexity.
Maybe beauty itself should be forgotten. On a social level it directs our gaze and desire, conditions our behaviour to strive for certain outcomes, holds our thinking and feeling to tailor-made vectors which, more often than not, serve a complaisant ruling class. It's consumerism's whole motor, and as the world is making abundantly clear consumerism has kind of reached it's limit.
Fuck beauty. It's an affect of normative standardisation, removing freedom and criticality and substituting them with aesthetics. I'd rather identify with and behave inside the directives of this planet and it's myriad objects (wind, rain, city infrastructure, hormones, grindr, party etiquette) and let those shape me into whatever form they do so long as that form coincides with survival (and even if it doesn't), an anthropocenic sincerity rather than a guilt about how inescapably entrenched we are; the anthropocene is not an arrival point, is without beginning and end because since humanity has existed we have been in radically contingent relationship with environment. The idea is old, only the word is new.
The spontaneous solidarity expected of the working class in Marxist tracts is nonsense because it excludes the nonhuman and thinks around matter the same way the capitalist algorithm does, which is in exclusive terms of resourcefulness towards human requirements.
Fuck profit. Fuck beauty. Fuck anything that prescribes or imposes a mode of conduct outside the immediacy of situation, of context, of matter.
We should work against alienating ourselves any further, embrace the smouldering ash-pile our world will become, because it's as much a product of nature as your lifestyle block in Piha or the organic biodynamic produce you spend triple the standard amount on. The difference is aesthetic, are merely preferences inside the metric of consumerism. If it's beautiful then you should probably kill it.
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