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not quite a science,

not quite a fiction

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movement that has been and the foreseen traject

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movement that has been and the foreseen traject

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Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old-a number that is hard for humans to grasp. "For someone whose life expectancy is usually less than 100 years, it's nearly impossible to imagine something so vast as geological or deep time," says J.D. Talasek, director of cultural programs at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

To help us wrap our heads around this time scale, Talasek and his team identified 18 works by 15 artists across the country that provide some perspective. A light installation that evokes the infinite scope of time, a traditional oil painting that looks like rock strata and a sound sculpture that reads seismic waves like a musical score are among the pieces on display in " Imagining Deep Time," an exhibition now at the National Academy of Sciences headquarters through January 2015.

The concept of "deep time" dates back to 18th-century geologist James Hutton, who proposed that Earth was a lot older than 6,000 years, as most people thought at the time. However, writer John McPhee officially coined the term in his 1981 book Basin and Range, saying:

"Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years-fifty thousand, fifty million-will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination."

McPhee went on to describe our place on the geological time scale with this metaphor:

"Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."

As Talasek argues, the best way to imagine deep time is through metaphor and that's where art can lend a hand. "That's what artists do. They deal in visual metaphors. So this seemed like the perfect sort of area to explore," he says.

In the exhibition, certain visual motifs-lines, arrows and circular patterns-are used to capture the abstract concept of time. Photographer Sharon Harper, for instance, depicts the cycles of the sun and moon as seen through a telescope.

Other artists convey time through portraits of geological strata. A composite image by geologist-turned-photographer Jonathon Wells depicts the city of Boston sitting atop massive rock formations, as it might be viewed from the bottom of the Boston Harbor. Meanwhile, Rosalie Lang paints rock faces from photographs that she takes of formations along the California coast.

"The idea is that art is a cognitive tool, a way of understanding," says Talasek.

Some work in the exhibition harks back to the influence of museums, textbooks and movies, which have in essence provided a way for viewers to travel back in time and imagine dinosaurs and other organisms that once inhabited Earth. Clay aquarium scenes constructed and photographed by Alison Carey are based on 21st-century data but evoke 18th-century dioramas of geological eras.

But, unlike the frozen image of a diorama or a photograph, time doesn't stop, and some works in the exhibition play off the idea that we're on a continuum. For instance, a light installation by South Korean artist Chul Hyun Ahn entitled "Void" conveys time's depth using a simple trick of mirrors and LED lights.

The exhibition doesn't directly reference the Anthropocene, the proposed geological era of human influence that some scientists think we're currently experiencing. Yet it's clear from David Maisel's aerial photographs, which depict mining sites in Utah, that we're altering our landscape, and that humans have to make decisions with regard to energy and climate that will impact the future. "We're a species that has trouble planning for our retirement, never mind what's going to happen thousands of years down the road," says Talasek.

"Considering our brief amount of time on Earth, no other species has had such an impact on the way the Earth is moving forward," he adds.
"Imagining Deep Time" is on view at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Ave., N.W.) through January 2015. On September 18, 2014, the NAS will also host a DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous on the exhibition, featuring artists Rachel Sussman and Byron Wolfe, as well as other speakers.

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Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old-a number that is hard for humans to grasp. "For someone whose life expectancy is usually less than 100 years, it's nearly impossible to imagine something so vast as geological or deep time," says J.D. Talasek, director of cultural programs at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

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Deep Time History 1/3: The Rise of Civilization

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The Woman in the Shaman’s Body by Barbara Tedlock

#TheWomanInTheShaman’sBody by #BarbaraTedlock

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The Woman in the Shaman’s Body by Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D.: 9780553379716 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A distinguished anthropologist–who is also an initiated shaman–reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world’s oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition…

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Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of The Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook

#PaulaAllen #GrandmothersOfTheLight

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Grandmothers of The Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourceboo...

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Read 11 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. This extraordinary collection of goddess stories from Native American civilizations across ...

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HOLIDAY SHIPPING: To receive your records before Christmas, place your orders before November 28. If you order after this date, select priority shipping for estimated arrival before Christmas.
No purchases shipping from December 15, 2022 to January 3, 2023.

In her new essay, Myths + Models of Time & Timelessness, LD Deutsch investigates the human relationship to Time. Placing the leading scientific and Western philosophical models of Time in conversation with ancient Greek and Chinese mythological models of Time, Deutsch traces the correspondence between them, revealing the ways our intuitions about Time have shaped our interpretation of its phenomena across disciplines. Deutsch then turns the conversation to the phenomenon of synchronicity, attempting to chart how the connections between scientific and mythological views of Time might speak to instances of meaningful chance.

Questions explored in this essay include: Do the past and the future exist in the same *real* way that the present moment does? Why is the leading scientific model of Time one in which the future has already happened and all of Time exists in a spatialized block, especially if we experience Time as something that flows and changes with our free will? Does Time exist at all? How do we make meaning with regards to the passage of Time? And how does the way we think of and experience Time reflect our own human nature back to us? Through asking these questions, Deutsch presents a portrait of Time that is truthfully textured and ever-evolving.

(This essay is an expansion and reimagining of Deutsch's first essay with us, Mythologies of Time and Timelessness, and serves as a further evolution of those ideas). Featuring 40 new illustrations by Sam Klickner.

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In her new essay, Myths + Models of Time & Timelessness, LD Deutsch investigates the human relationship to Time. Placing the leading scientific and Western philosophical models of Time in conversation with ancient Greek and Chinese mythological models of Time, Deutsch traces the correspondence between them, reveali

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Listen to TTBOOK Presents: Deep Time on Spotify. Time rules our lives. We wake, eat, work, and sleep on the clock. Our days unfold in a standardized symphony of alarm clocks, school buzzers, and meeting timers. Meanwhile, global positioning satellites measure time in millionths of seconds, and financial trades circle the planet at the speed of light.

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We talked about to make an audio-visual essay, maybe combined with writings. This audio-visual essay combined with writings will be an kaleidoscope of fragments that invite the listener to make connections. You could experiment with sounds in which your voice merges with that of yours. You could play with the sound of ice, alternated with small poems and reflections. You could also read out quotes without really explaining them, but that it somehow fits with the rest. You could also share speculations, what if a thought could be immaterialized in a cloudy shape and fly softly through the skull of someone else. You could also raise questions about art and immateriality. You could question things about the unseen. I also placed some posts in your Padlet. Maybe you’ll find here some interesting info. Post 1 is about Pallasmaa; criticizing the dominance of the sense of sight, how we tend to forget the other senses (post 1). I also putted in the article of Isabelle Stenger who says some interesting things what it is to be in-between (between science and imagination/speculation), she believes Magnetism (energy exchange) is an interesting field where art and science can come together (post 2).

Also quotes of Haraway might be interesting in relation to speculation (see post 3). And don’t forgot Ingold, especially his concept of correspondences (post 4):

You also talked about pain and trauma, the relation with the body, maybe this also can be involved? See post concerning Bessel van der Kolk (post 5). We also talked about antenna and being a seismograph maybe you like these books (Baldini, shamanism and woman body  Look at the padlet Estellle, post 6).

You also wanted to know about the concept of the Liguid Society (see post 7) and Thomas Saraceno (post 8)

Best regards,

Hille

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Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers-weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling.

But bridge-making is a situated practice. As a philosopher, I am situated: a daughter to a practice responsible for many divisions, but which may also be understood as a rather particular means of bridge-making. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all Western philosophy can be understood as footnotes to Plato's texts. Perhaps I became a philosopher because writing such footnotes implies feeling the text as an animating power-inviting participation, beckoning to me and suggesting the writing of another footnote that will make a bridge to the past, that will give ideas from the past the power to affect the present.

In spite of this, I will not take advantage of the possibility that philosophy is a form of textual animism, using this to delocalize myself, to feel authorized to speak about animism. Indeed, where what we call animism is concerned, the past to be considered is primordially the one in which philosophical concepts served to justify colonization and the divide across which some felt free to study and categorize others-a divide that still exists today.

Thus, in contrast to David Abram, whose experience enables him to turn the animist modes of experience, awareness, and knowledge into an intensely powerful bridge-making tool, as a generative constraint I must accept to not feel free to speak and speculate in a way that would situate others. Rather, I must acknowledge the fact that my own practice and tradition situate me on one side of the divide, the side that characterized "others" as animists. "We," on our side, presume to be the ones who have accepted the hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world-one that is our task to appropriate.

In particular, I shall not forget that my side of the divide is still marked today not only by this epic story, but also, and perhaps more crucially, by its moral correlate: "thou shalt not regress." Such a moral imperative confers another meaning on my decision to stand on the side I belong to. Indeed, there is some work to be done on this side. We can by addressing the moral imperative that mobilizes us, as it produces an obscure fear of being accused of regression as soon as we give any sign of betraying hard truth by indulging soft, illusory beliefs.

As for this hard truth itself, philosophers are anyhow no longer on the frontlines where it is expounded. When scientists' contradictory arguments resound, we are only bystanders. Neuroscientists may freely characterize what we were proud of-freedom and rationality-as mere beliefs. Anthropologists like Philippe Descola may freely affirm that our "naturalism" is just one of four human schemes organizing the human and nonhuman world (with animism being another of these schemes). As philosophers, we may certainly wonder whether the neuronal explanation is a case of "naturalism," or whether our organizing schemes can themselves be explained in terms of some neuronal attractors. But what we know is that those who are not authorized scientists cannot intervene in these questions, any more than a mere mortal could intervene in the Olympian gods' quarrels. Neither philosophers nor theologians have a voice in such matters, although the former are descendants of Greek reason and the latter are the inheritors of the monotheistic creed. Let us not even speak of the old lady with a cat who claims that her cat understands her.

Scientists may disagree on how we are wrong, but they agree that we are wrong. The epic is no longer about the "ascent of Man," but rather about the ascent of the Scientist. How, then, to keep the question of animism, if it is taken seriously at all, from being framed in terms that verify Science's right to define it as an object of knowledge?

The work that I feel needs to be done on my side of the divide may be characterized in terms of what the ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called a "decolonization of thought"-the attempt to resist a colonizing power that begins already with the old lady with the cat, defining her in terms of a belief that may be tolerated but never taken seriously. However, I would not identify this colonizing power with the living work of scientists. The feeling that it is possible and necessary to resist also stems from my interest in what I would call scientific achievements, and my correlative disgust at the way such achievements have been translated into the great epic story about "Science disenchanting the world."

Science, when taken in the singular and with a big S, may indeed be described as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge. In the name of Science, a judgment has been passed on the heads of other peoples, and this judgment has also devastated our relations to ourselves-whether we are philosophers, theologians, or old ladies with cats.

Scientific achievements, on the other hand, require thinking in terms of an "adventure of sciences" (in the plural and with a small s). The distinction between such an adventure and Science as a general conquest is certainly hard to make if you consider what is done in the name of science today. However, it is important to do so because it allows for a new perspective: what is called Science, or the idea of a hegemonic scientific rationality, can be understood as itself the product of a colonization process.

On this side of the divide, it would then be possible to remain true to a very particular adventure, while also betraying the hard demands of an epic. In order to think sciences as an adventure, it is crucial to emphasize the radical difference between a scientific conquering "view of the world" and the very special and demanding character of what I would call scientific "achievements." In experimental sciences, such achievements are the very condition of what is then, after they have been verified, celebrated as an objective definition. An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones.

What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a "partner" in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.

We can only imagine the adventure of sciences that would have accepted such claims as obvious, which would have accepted the very specific challenge of addressing whatever they address only if the situation ensures that the addressee is enabled to "take a position" about the way it is addressed. What we should not imagine, however, is that science would then have verified animism.

We may well think instead that the term itself would not exist. Only a "belief" can receive such a global name. If the adventurous specificity of scientific practices has been acknowledged, no one would dream of addressing others in terms of the "beliefs" they would entertain about a "reality" to which scientists enjoy privileged access. Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.

One might object by calling this a figure of anarchy. Yes-but an ecological anarchy, because while connections may be produced between any parts of a rhizome, they also must be produced. They are events, linkages-like symbiosis. They are what is and will remain heterogeneous.

In order to resist the powerful image of a treelike progress, with Science as its trunk, I will now address another idea of Gilles Deleuze, that of our need to "think by the milieu," meaning both without reference to a ground or ideal aim, and never separating something from the milieu that it requires in order to exist. To think then in terms of scientific milieus and what they demand, it is clear that not everything will agree to some of these demands. In particular, not everything may accept the role associated with scientific creation, the role of putting to the test the way it is represented.

I once offered the example of the Virgin Mary-not the theological figure but the intercessor whom pilgrims address. It's wrong to think that the Virgin Mary could make her existence known independently of the faith and trust of pilgrims; for her to do so in a situation committed to the question of how to represent her would be in bad taste. Rather, tif we accept that that aim of a pilgrimage is the transformative experience of the pilgrim, we must not require the Virgin Mary to "demonstrate" her existence to prove she is not merely a "fiction." We must not, in other words, mobilize the categories of superstition, belief, or symbolic efficacy in an attempt to explain away what pilgrims claim to experience. Instead, we must conclude that the Virgin Mary requires a milieu that does not answer to scientific demands.

However, pilgrims and the Virgin are weak examples of rhizomatic phenomena because they have been captured by the dichotomy of "natural" and "supernatural" causations. Within such a dichotomy, one would ask: What is responsible for the healings that occur at Lourdes and other miracle sites-a miraculous intervention or some sort of "enhanced placebo effect"?

This question authorizes the ugly scene, where, before announcing a miracle, the church hierarchy awaits the verdict of physicians empowered to decide whether a healing can be explained away in terms of "natural causes," such as a placebo effect. This relies on a disastrous definition the "natural," namely: that which Science will eventually explain. "Supernatural" is then-just as disastrously-whatever challenges such explanations. In other words, the milieu here opposes any rhizomatic connections, pigeonholing the case in terms of belief-those who believe that "nature," as the domain where Science rules, explains effects that kindle superstition, and those who accept this belief but add another one: a belief in a power that transcends nature.

The half-forgotten case of magnetism offers an interesting contrast here. In the nineteenth century, magnetism provoked a passionate interest that blurred the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Nature was made mysterious, and supernature was populated by messengers bringing news from elsewhere to mediums in a magnetic trance-a very disordered situation that understandably invited the hostility of both scientific and church institutions.

It has even been proposed that psychoanalysis was not the subversive "plague" that Freud boasted of, but rather a restoration of order, since it helped explain away mysterious cures, magnetic "lucidity," and other demonic manifestations pigeonholed as purely human. In the name of Science it deciphered a new universal cause. The Freudian unconscious was indeed "scientific" in the sense that it authorized the denigrating of those who marveled and fantisized, and it extolled the sad, hard truth behind specious appearances. It verified the great epic Freud himself popularized: he was following Copernicus and Darwin, inflicting a final wound on what he called our narcissistic "beliefs."

A distinct operation was attempted by the surrealist poet André Breton, who claimed that the magnetism should be taken out of the hands of scientists and physicians, who mutilate them through polemical verifications dominated by the suspicion of quackery, self-delusion, or deliberate cheating. For Breton, the point was not to verify what magnetized clairvoyants see, or to understand enigmatic healings, but to cultivate lucid trances (automatism) in the milieu of art, with the ultimate aim of escaping the shackles of normal, representational perception. The milieu of art would explore the means to "recuperate our psychical force."

Breton's proposition is interesting, as the milieu of art could indeed have supported and sustained the unsettling effects associated with magnetism. Such a milieu would perhaps have been able to produce its own practical knowledge of trances-a knowledge concerned only with effects of trances, indifferent to whether the causes were "natural" or "supernatural." Yet Breton's proposition was less a practical one than an appropriative one, marked by a typically modernist triumphalism. To him, art was supreme, not a craft among other crafts but instead the final manifestation of the "surreal," purified of superstitious beliefs-such as animism.

He would thus not envisage making rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than a representational) relation to the world. He would not break with the perspective that still dominates so many "interdisciplinary" encounters, where the "subjectivity" of the artist's standpoint is contrasted with the "objectivity" of Science. It is as if a contrast could be produced between two banners in a devastated landscape, each bearing one of these subjugating, commanding words-and therefore each empty. The seemingly opposite banners agree on one crucial thing: we should not betray the moral imperative that commands us to trample on what appears as a cradle we are able to leave, and have the imperious duty to leave.

Here it becomes crucial to finally ask, as an active, transformative, and not a reflexive question: Who is this we? It is a question whose efficacy I will associate with yet another operation, that of "reclaiming." Again it will be a question of thinking by the milieu, but this time a milieu that is dangerous and insalubrious, one that entices us to feel that we bear the high responsibility to determine what is entitled to "really" exist and what is not. It is a milieu that is, as a consequence, ruled by the power of judgmental critique.

Scientists are infected, of course, as are all those who accept their authority to decide what objectively exists. But also infected might be those who would claim to be animists, if they affirm that rocks "really" have souls or intentions, like humans. It is the "really" that matters here, an emphasis that marks the polemical power associated with truth. Coming back for a moment to the anthropologist Philippe Descola's classification, I would guess that those who are categorized as animists have no word for "really," for insisting that they are right and others are victims of illusions.

Reclaiming begins with recognizing the infective power of this milieu, a power that is not defeated in the slightest when the sad relativity of all truth is affirmed. Quite the contrary, in fact, since the sad-because monotonous-refrain of the relativist is that our truths do not "really" have the authority they claim.

Reclaiming means recovering what we have been separated from, but not in the sense that we can just get it back. Recovering means recovering from the very separation itself, regenerating what this separation has poisoned. The need to struggle and the need to heal, in order to avoid resembling those we have to struggle against, are thus irreducibly allied. A poisoned milieu must be reclaimed, and so must many of our words, those that-like "animism" and "magic"-carry with them the power to take us hostage: do you "really" believe in...?

I received this word "reclaiming" as a gift from neo-pagan contemporary witches and other US activists. I also received the shocking cry of neo-pagan Starhawk: "The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils." Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no longer take seriously the accusation of devil worshipping that was once levelled at witches. Rather, our milieu is defined by the modern pride in being able to interpret both witchery and witch hunting in terms of social, linguistic, cultural, or political constructs and beliefs. What this pride ignores, however, is that we are the heirs of an operation of cultural and social eradication-the forerunner of what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason. Anything that classifies the memory of such operations as unimportant or irrelevant only furthers the success of those operations.

In this sense, our pride in our critical power to "know better" than both the witches and the witch hunters makes us the heirs of witch hunting. The point is obviously not to feel guilty. It is rather to open up what William James, in his "The Will to Believe," called a genuine, effective option, complicating the "us" question, demanding that we situate ourselves. And here the true efficacy of Starhawk's cry enters. Reclaiming the past is not a matter of resurrecting it as it was, of dreaming to make some "true," "authentic" tradition come alive. It is rather a matter of reactivating it, and first of all, of smelling the smoke in our nostrils-the smoke that I smelled, for instance, when I hurriedly emphasized that, no, I did not "believe" that one could resurrect the past.

Learning to smell the smoke is to acknowledge that we have learned the codes of our respective milieus: derisive remarks, knowing smiles, offhand judgments, often about somebody else, but gifted with the power to pervade and infect-to shape us as those who sneer and not among those who are sneered at.

However, we can try to understand everything about how the past has shape us, but understanding is not reclaiming because it is not recovering. Indeed, this is the anguished question of David Abram, a question that we cannot avoid just by invoking capitalism or human greed: How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth? Abram writes that an answer to this question hit him when he was in a bookshop where all the sacred traditions and resources of moral wisdom of the present and the past were gathered:

No wonder! No wonder that our sophisticated civilizations, brimming with the accumulated knowledge of so many traditions, continue to flatten and dismember every part of the breathing earth ... For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings. Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance. Illumination-once offered by the moon's dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of the sunlight on the wind-rippled surface of mountain tarn-was now set down in an unchanging form.

Yet David Abram still writes, and passionately so. As a first step towards recovery, I propose that the experience of writing (not writing down) is marked by the same kind of crucial indeterminacy as the dancing moon. Writing resists the "either/or" dismembering of experience. It resists the choice between either the moon that "really" offers us illumination, as an intentional subject would do, or the moon of the critique, just triggering what would "really" be of human provenance.

Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author's, that they demand some kind of cerebral-that is, bodily-contortion that defeats any preformed intention. (This contortion makes us larvae, as Deleuze wrote). It could even be said that writing is what gave transformative forces a particular mode of existence-that of "ideas." Alfred North Whitehead suggested that Plato's ideas are those things that first of all erotically lure the human soul-or, we could say, "animate" humans. For Whitehead, what defines the (Greek) human soul is "the enjoyment of its creative function, arising from its entertaining of ideas."

However, when the text is written, taking an "unchanging form," it may well impose itself as being of human provenance-even giving the impression that it can be the vehicle for accessing the intentions of the writer, for grasping what he "meant to communicate" and for what is ours to "understand." Correlatively, the Platonic soul may become a definition divorced from experience, something that we have and that "nature" does not have.

Whitehead wrote that, after The Symposium, where Plato discusses the erotic power of ideas, Plato should have written another dialogue called The Furies, which would have dealt with the horror lurking "within imperfect realization." The possibility of an imperfect realization is certainly present whenever transformative, metamorphic forces make themselves felt, but this is especially true where ideas are concerned, if, as I claim, the realization of ideas implies writing.

Indeed, once "written down," ideas tempt us to associate them with a definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing. This is all the more so in a world that is now saturated with texts and signs that are addressed to "anyone"-separating us from the "more than human" world to which ideas nevertheless belong. In order to reclaim animism, however, it is not sufficient to entertain an "idea" that would allow us to claim that we know about it-even if for people like myself it is crucial to realize that my experience of writing is an animist experience, attesting to a "more than human" world.

Reclaiming means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as "not ours" but rather as "animating" us, making us witness to what is not us. While such a recovery cannot be reduced to the entertaining of an idea, certain ideas can further the process-and can protect it from being "demystified" as some fetishistic illusion. Such an idea is the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "assemblage" (the often-discussed translation for the French " agencement ").

An assemblage, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming together of heterogeneous components, and such a coming together is the first and last word of existence. I do not first exist and then enter into assemblages. Rather, my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write and as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down. I am not gifted with agency or intention. Instead, agency-or what Deleuze and Guattari call "desire"-belongs to the assemblage as such, including those very particular assemblages, called "reflexive assemblages," which produce an experience of detachment, the enjoyment of critically testing previous experience in order to determine what is "really" responsible for what. Another word for this kind of agency that doesn't belong to us is animation.

Relating animism to the efficacy of "assemblages" is a dangerous move, however, because it may well reassure us a bit too easily. It is part of our fabrication as readers, to feel free to ponder without experiencing the existential consequences of our questions. For instance, we may be tempted to understand assemblages as an interesting concept among others, pondering its connections with other concepts-that is, without feeling our intentional stance threatened by its demand. And also without fearing the suspicious gaze of the inquisitors, without feeling the smoke in our nostrils. We are protected by the references we quote.

This is why it may be better to revive more compromised words, which have been restricted to metaphoric use only. "Magic" is such a word, as we freely speak of the magic of an event, of a landscape, of a musical moment. Protected by the metaphor, we may then express the experience of an agency that does not belong to us even if it includes us, but an "us" as it is lured into feeling.

I would propose that we need to forfeit this protection in order to relieve ourselves of the sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified, a voice that relays that of the inquisitors. This voice may tell us about the frightening possibilities that would follow if we gave up critique, the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions. But it is first of all the voice of the epic story that still inhabits us. "Thou shall not regress!"

We would admit many daring propositions as long as-like Breton's-they reflect a version of the epic, as long as they warrant that only selected types (artists, philosophers, and so forth) are authorized to explore what mystifies others.

Magic undercuts any such version of the epic. And this is precisely why neo-pagan witches call their own craft "magic": naming it so, they say, is itself an act of magic, since the discomfort it creates helps us notice the smoke in our nostrils. Worse, they have learned to cast circles and invoke the Goddess-She who, the witches say, "returns," She to whom thanks will be given for the event that makes them capable of doing what they call "the work of the Goddess."

In so doing, they put us to the test! How can we accept regression, or conversion to supernatural beliefs? The point, however, is not to wonder whether we have to "accept" the Goddess that contemporary witches invoke in their rituals. If we said to them, "But your Goddess is only a fiction," they would doubtless smile and ask us whether we are among those who believe that fiction is powerless.

What the witches challenge us to accept is the possibility of giving up criteria that claim to transcend assemblages, and that reinforce, again and again, the epic of critical reason. What they cultivate, as part of their craft (it is a part of any craft), is an art of immanent attention, an empirical art about what is good or toxic-an art which our addiction to the truth has too often despised as superstition. They are pragmatic, radically pragmatic, experimenting with effects and consequences of what, as they know, is never innocuous and involves care, protections, and experience.

The witches' ritual chant-"She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes"-could surely be commented on in terms of assemblages, since it resists the dismembering attribution of agency. Does change belong to the Goddess as "agent" or to the one who changes when touched?

But the first efficacy of the refrain is in the "She touches." The indeterminacy proper to assemblages is no longer conceptual. It is part of an experience that affirms the power of changing to be NOT attributed to our own selves nor reduced to something "natural." It is an experience that honors change as a creation.

Moreover, the point is not to comment. The refrain must be chanted; it is part and parcel of the practice of worship. Can the proposition that magic designates both a craft of assemblages and their particular transformative efficacy help us to reclaim it from both the safety of the metaphoric and the stigma of the supernatural? Can it help us to feel instead that nothing in nature is "natural"? Can it induce us to consider new transversal connections, resisting all reduction, unlike this sad term "natural," which in fact means "no trespassing: available for scientific explanation only," and also unlike "the symbolic," which covers about everything else?

Reclaiming always implies a compromising step. I would claim that we, who are not witches, do not have to mimic them but instead discover how to be compromised by magic.

We might, for instance, experiment with the (nonmetaphoric) use of the term "magic," which designates the craft of illusionists who make us perceive and accept what we know to be impossible. Magic, the witches say, is a craft. They would not be shocked by a transversal connection with the craft of performing magicians if this connection was a reclaiming one-that is, if the craft of performing magicians was addressed as what survived when magic became a matter of illusion and manipulative deception in the hands of quacks, or left to the mercenary hands of those who know the many ways we can be lured into desiring, trusting, buying.

And this is precisely what David Abram, himself a slight-of-hand magician, proposes when he relates his craft with what makes it possible, that is, "the way the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible." What "illusionists" artfully exploit would then be the very creativity of the senses as they respond to what Abram characterizes as "suggestions offered by the sensible itself." If there is an exploitation, the magician himself is exploited as the suggestions are offered not only by his explicit words and intentional gestures, but also by subtle bodily shifts that express that he himself participates in, and is lured by, the very magic he is performing.

Our senses, Abram concludes, are not for detached cognition but for participation, for sharing the metamorphic capacity of things that lure us or that recede into inert availability as our manner of participation shifts-but, he insists, never vanishes: we never step outside the "flux of participation." When magic is reclaimed as an art of participation, or of luring assemblages, assemblages inversely become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not of general consideration or textual dissertation.

Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing-all our words express the ambivalence of lure. Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted. Scientific experimental crafts, which dramatically exemplify the metamorphic efficacy of assemblage conferring on things the power of "animating" the scientist into feeling, thinking, imagining, are also a dramatic example of this enslaving power. What I would call with Whitehead an "imperfect realization" of what they achieve has unleashed a furious conquest in the name of which scientists downgrade their achievements, presenting them as mere manifestation of objective rationality.

But the question of how to honor the metamorphic efficacy of assemblages-neither taking it for granted nor endowing it with supernatural grandiosity-is a matter of concern for all "magic" crafts, and more especially so in our insalubrious, infectious milieu. And it is because that concern may be common, but can receive no general answer, that reclaiming magic can only be a rhizomatic operation.

A rhizome rejects any generality. Connections do not manifest some truth about what is common beyond the rhizomatic heterogeneous multiplicity-beyond the multiplicity of distinct pragmatic significations associated with "magic" as related to what we call politics, healing, education, arts, philosophy, sciences, agriculture, or to any craft requiring or depending upon a capacity to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention.

The only generality here is about our milieu and its compulsion to categorize and judge-and spiritualism is here a probable judgment-or to negate whatever would point to the metamorphic dimension of what is to be achieved. Rhizomatic connections may be a non-general answer to this generality. Each "magic" craft needs connections with others in order to resist infection by the milieu, the divisive power of social judgment, to smell the smoke that demands we decide whether we are heirs to the witches or the witch hunters.

But connections may also be needed to heal and to learn. Where the dangerous art of animating in order to be animated is concerned, what connects may be practical learning about the needed immanent (critical) attention. Not about what is good or bad in itself, but about what Whitehead called realization. Again, no mode of realization may be taken as a model, only as calling for pragmatic reinvention. In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art.

Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist "in general," only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected-and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.

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Making kin beyond babies - after Donna Haraway

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Tim Ingold: On Human Correspondence – Huxley Memorial Lecture 2014

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How the body keeps the score on trauma | Bessel van der Kolk for Big Think+

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ReviseSociology - A level sociology revision - education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

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Last Updated on August 24, 2016 by

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world's leading sociologists. He is particularly interested in how the west's increasing obsession with 'individualism' actually prevents the individual from being free in any meaningful sense of the word.

In 'Liquid Times (2007), Bauman argues that there are a number of negative consequences of globalisation such as the generation of surplus people who have no where to go in a world that is full; of increasingly visible inequalities as the rich and the poor come to live closer together; and of a world in which it is increasingly difficult for communities and nations to provide collective security.

According to Bauman, the ultimate cause of negative globalisation is due to the fact that the owners of Capital are invisible and shifting, having the power to invest locally without making commitments, and even to ignore international law if they deem it in their interests. The global elite are globally mobile, they are not stuck in one place, and they are free to move on if there are better investment opportunities elsewhere. The elite are seen as creating an unstable world as they move from place to place, seeking to maximise their profits. Meanwhile, the experience of 'negative globabalisation' for the rest of us who are 'doomed to be local' is one of increasing anxiety, fear, and suspicion, which derive from living in an unstable and unpredictable world over which we have no control, and we are compelled to develop strategies to counter the unstable, unjust, unequal and 'risky' and 'dangerous' world that the forever shifting elite leave in their wake.

The strategies adopted depend on the specific experience of negative globalisation, but they nearly always involve putting up barriers to protect us from 'dangerous others', or they involve escaping from a world that is perceived as no longer worth living in.

Those that 'run away' include everyone from refugees fleeing a war torn country to the millions of people in the West who continually reinvent themselves selves through seeking out new life experiences rather than rooting their identities in involvement in local and national institutions.

'Barrier strategies' include the emergence of fortress Europe to keep refugees out; the development of gated communities and the move towards zero tolerance policing policies in many cities.

For Bauman, these strategies are always ineffective, because they do no address the root cause of our anxiety, which is the fact that our national and local institutions can no longer provide us with security in the wake of instabilities brought on by advanced global capitalism. Instead, these strategies end up increasing the amount of anxiety and fear and segregation and eventually serve to justify our paranoia.

The remainder of this article looks at three elements of 'negative globalisation': The generation of surplus people; Increasingly visible inequalities; and the undermining of national and local institutions.
Surplus people
Bauman argues that 'When the elite purse their goals, the poor pay the price', seeing the instabilities and inequalities caused by global capitalism as creating the conditions that can lead to ethnic nationalisms, religious fanaticisms, increased civil wars, violence, organised crime and terrorism, all of which do not respect national boundaries. As a result, there is a new 'global frontier land' occupied by refugees, guerrilla armies, bandit gangs and drug traffickers.

Focussing on refuges, Bauman points out that they are outside law altogether because they have no state of their own, but neither are they part of the state to which they have fled. He points out that many Palestinians, for example, have lived in 'temporary' refugee camps for more than a decade, but these camps have no formal existence and don't even appear on any maps of the regions in which they are situated. To make matters worse, refugees often have no idea of when their refugee status will end, and hence Bauman argues that they exist in a 'permanent temporary state' which he calls the 'nowhere land of non humanity'.

Refugees in camps can be forgotten, whereas if they were amongst us, we would have to take notice of them. In these camps, they come to be seen as one homogenous mass, the nuances between the thousands of individuals living therein becoming irrelevant to the outsider. Refugees, in fact, go through a process much like Goffman's mortification of the self, as many of them are stripped of all the usual things they need to construct an identity such as a homeland, possessions and a daily routine. Unlike the mentally ill who Goffman studied, however, refugees have no formal rights, because their self- mortification takes place in a land that doesn't formerly exist. Bauman's point is that one of the worst consequences of globalisation is the absolute denial of human self expression as experienced by refugees.

While Bauman's work provides us with an insight into why refugees may want to escape their permanent temporary camps, there is little chance of this happening. For a start, Europe is increasingly developing a 'fortress mentality' in which we try our best to keep refugees out the European Union through offering aid to countries that boarder international crisis zones in order to help them, rather than us having to deal with the 'refugee problem' ourselves.

Those refugees that do make it to the United Kingdom and other European countries have an ever slimmer chance of being awarded Asylum, and are increasingly likely to be locked up in detention centres. In the United Kingdom, Asylum seekers are not allowed to work or to claim benefits, which in turn makes it incredibly difficult for such individuals to ever integrate into what is to them a new and strange country. Thus even for those who escape, their reward is further experience of marginalisation.

Bauman also deals with why the general populace of the West are so scared of Refugees. Firstly, and very importantly, he reminds us that the real underlying cause of our fears, anxieties and suspicions is that we have lost control over the collective, social dimensions of our life. Our communities, our work places, even our governments, are in constant flux, and this condition creates uncertainty about who we are and where we are going, which is experienced at the level of the individual as fear and anxiety.

This experience of fear and anxiety means that we are unnaturally afraid of a whole range of things, but a further reason that we might be especially scared of Asylum seekers in particular is that they have the stench of war on them, and they unconsciously remind us of global instabilities that most of us would rather forget about. Asylum seekers remind us, ultimately, that the world is an unjust place full of tens of millions of people who, through no fault of their own, bear the consequences of negative globalisation. Asylum seekers remind us of the frailties of a global system that we don't control and don't understand.

Rather than looking at the complex underlying causes of our irrational sense of fear, the Media and Politicians see people such as Asylum seekers as an easy target: They are confined to camps, and hence stuck in one place, and they will obviously look different and hence are more visible. Keeping Asylum seekers out, or sending them back in droves, becomes a political tool, with politicians winning points for adopting ever greater levels of intolerance towards the desperate.

The consequence of this for refugees is bleak. A major theme of Bauman's work is that once fear of a group in society has been generated it is self perpetuating, whether or not that fear is justified. The very fact that we are afraid of Asylum seekers means we are less likely to approach them, it means that were are less likely to give them a chance, which in turn leads to a situation of mutual suspicion in which both parties seek to keep as much distance between themselves as possible.
The experience of Global Inequality
The radical inequality between citizens in the United Kingdom and refugees living in the no where land of non humanity is stark, but, for most of us, easily ignored. Much more visible are the inequalities that exist within International cities such as London, New York, and, even more obviously Mexico City and Rio Di Janeiro.

Bauman points out that cities used to be built to keep people out, but today they have become unsafe places, where strangers are an ever looming presence. The underlying reason why the modern city is a place that breeds fear and suspicion is because they are sites of some of the most profound and visible inequalities on earth, where the poor and rich live side by side. As a result, those who can afford it take advantage of a number of security mechanisms, such as living in gated communities, installing surveillance cameras, or hiring private security. The architecture of the modern city has become one of segregating the haves from the have nots.

For the poor, this 'fortification mentality' is experienced as 'keeping us excluded from what we can never have' and they effectively become ghettoised in areas which will always seam undesirable compared to the places they are prevented from being. Thus the poor are permanent exiles from much of their city. Lacking economic capital, sub cultural capital becomes the only thing the excluded can draw on in order to carve out some status for themselves. This, argues Bauman, is the reason why there are so many distinct and segregated ethnic identities. These are the strategies adopted by the poor to carve out some freedom for themselves, the strategies of those who are doomed to be local.

This strategy, however, breeds a culture of difference, and separatism. It breeds a city in which we are surrounded by strange others whose territory will always seam unfamiliar, which in turn breeds yet more suspicion, fear and insecurity. Islands of difference rather than an integrated city are the result, a city populated by unfamiliar people who we do not know.

Bauman points out that, once visited on the world, fear takes little to keep it going. Social life changes when people live behind walls, wear handguns, carry mace and hire security guards. The very presence of these things makes us think the world is more dangerous, leading to increased fear and anxiety. It doesn't actually matter if the 'others' are actually, or ever were, dangerous, the fact that we put up defences against them is proof enough of the fact that they must be a threat.
Insecurity, anxiety, and the inadequacy of identity...
While Globalisation creates instabilities which creates surplus people and stark inequalities, Bauman also argues that Globalisation erodes the ability of the state and local communities to provide genuine stability and security for individuals. Social institutions such as the family, education and work dissipate faster than the span of one's life, and it becomes difficult for individuals to construct a coherent life-project.

This situation results in what Bauman calls 'existential tremors,' where individuals do not have a stable sense of who they are, or what they belong to, resulting, as we have already come across, in increased feelings of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. As evidence of this, Bauman points out that most of us do not generally perceive the future as a bright place of hope and of 'better things to come', instead we see the future as a series of challenges to be overcome, of risks to be managed, and of threats to our security. In short, the future is a bleak, dark, and uncertain place.

In the absence of collective security, individuals and families are left to try and develop strategies to find security and stability themselves, and our goals become limited to the managing risks, and our horizons limited to the every narrowing sphere over which we still have some measure of control! Thus we invest in pensions, become very protective of our children, and become increasingly suspicious of strangers. We are obliged to spend our time doing things to minimise the perceived threats to our safety: checking for cancers, investing in home security, and monitoring our children. Our life-project becomes not one of developing ourselves, not one of striving for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, but, instead, our life goals become limited to avoiding bad things happening to ourselves.

Bauman also has a pessimistic take on the common practice of the continual reinvention of the self. Bauman argues that the process of constructing an identity is sold to us as something that is fun, as something that should be pleasurable, and as something that is indicative of individual freedom. One only needs look at the various networking and profiling sites to see that the expression of self identity is something associated with pleasure and leisure. It has become a normal part of daily life to spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and money on constructing, maintaining and continually transforming one's self.

Bauman, however, reminds us that although we may think we are free, we are actually obliged to engage in this process of continual reinvention because our social lives are in continual flux. Furthermore, many identities are not rooted in the local, the social or the political, they are much more floating and transient, based on fashion, music, and interests, and Bauman interprets many of these strategies as an attempt by individuals to try and escape from a world over which they have no control.

Following Joseph Brodsky, Bauman is rather scathing of the range of shallow strategies many of us adopt to escape from the world, and ultimately argues that they are all pointless....

"you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate, you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.... In fact you may lump all these together and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window." (105)

Bauman seams to be arguing that individuals will never find peace of mind, never find 'who they really are' unless they have stability and security, and in order to have that, people need to root themselves in local and national institutions, otherwise, our attempts to find ourselves through the reinvention of the self will always be less than satisfactory.
Conclusion and Evaluation
Bauman's work is important as it reminds us that there is inequality in the way we experience risk and instability. On the one hand, the global elites who cause our global society to be unstable benefit from this instability and are able to avoid the worst effects of it, through, for example, moving away from war zones, or retreating into gated communities. Meanwhile, the poorest are the ones who suffer, having lost, in the extreme example of refugees, the very right to be regarded as human beings.

As a final perverse twist, the elites that created this situation in the first place end up either retreating to expensive enclaves that are well secured, or they profit from our fears politically and financially.

One cannot help but feel incredibly pessimistic after reading Bauman's work. It is as if hegemonic control has penetrated so far into the hearts and minds of the populace that the huge effort required for people to reassert localised, communitarian politics against global capitalist hegemonic power is simply too much to ever hope for.

But for those that are inclined to join Social Movements, at least Bauman's work identifies an elite to position oneself against, and reminds us this elite continually flout the principles of genuine freedom, equality, in the pursuit of their self interest. Bauman's work also offers a useful counterpoint against what some would regard as the pointless relativism of post-modernism and the mediocre third way quiescence of Anthony Giddens.
You might also like... A summary of Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman A Summary of Runaway World by Anthony Giddens Bibliography
Zygmunt Bauman (2007) Liquid Times
This summary was published in the Sociology Review in February 2009

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Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Times - A Summary - ReviseSociology

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Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world's leading sociologists. He is particularly interested in how the west's increasing obsession with 'individualism' actually prevents the individual from being free in any meaningful sense of the word.

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Art surveys the biological and

unconscious realms of our body and mind.

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Maybe an argument can be a sort of gestalt that emerges from a series of interconnected bits

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What would it even mean to write a nonlinear essay?

The philosopher in me kind of shudders at the very question. In my world, essays are either narratives or they are arguments (or possibly both). But narratives and arguments have an order. You can't just start out with Q; you have to establish that P and that If P, then Q before you're allowed to go around proclaiming that Q. That's just how nonfiction works.

Only, it's not. Or at least, it's not necessarily.

Maybe an argument can be more than just a series of carefully-sequenced claims that build to a conclusion. Maybe an argument can be a sort of gestalt that emerges from a series of interconnected bits. My brother Josh likens the nonlinear essay to the experience of visiting an art exhibit- there are many possible paths through an exhibit, and the story you will take away turns heavily on which path you choose.

Burroughs' Dadaist experiments with cut-in writing pushed the boundaries of text. Imagine what he could have done with access to HTML and a database.

And, let's face it, there really is more than one way that any given set of ideas can be organized. There's a mind-boggling set of links between concepts. Don't believe me? Go surf around Wikipedia for a bit.

For a long time, though, we've been pretty limited in how nonlinear we could be with our writing. The media available to us just didn't lend themselves to anything else. It's only in the last 50 years or so that we've had machines capable of creating the kinds of links we need for nonlinear writing, and only in the last 20 that said tools have been widely available.

The combination of the hyperlink and the relational database open up some pretty amazing possibilities for fundamentally rethinking nonfiction. But most of our writing continues to look just like it always has.

Which brings us to this little experiment. You won't find an instruction manual for writing a nonlinear essay in any of the pieces in this collection. And you won't find a full argument for writing differently in any single piece, either. But my hope is that both of those things will arise out of the whole collection.

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The philosopher in me kind of shudders at the very question. In my world, essays are either narratives or they are arguments (or possibly both). But narratives and arguments have an order. You can't...

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Long-term thinking benefits from diversity and discussion. Each month our Talks series invite a domain expert to explore their work in the context of the next and last 10,000 years. We share this media with our global audience via our social channels and member newsletter.

Our local community gathers in San Francisco, California - where the administrative offices of The Long Now Foundation double as an award-winning public space called The Interval. This lively 'third space' features craft cocktails, artisan coffee and tea, a library that stretches from floor to ceiling, and large-scale prototypes from the 10,000-year Clock project.

Everyone everywhere is invited to join us on this journey. Our global membership program connects over 11,000 individuals across more than 65 countries to a whole world of long-term thinking.

Join our newsletter Subscribe

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The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit encouraging imagination at the timescale of civilization- the next and last 10,000 years- what we call the long now.

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Jenny Odell- Discovering Life Beyond The Clock

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Jenny Odell- Discovering Life Beyond The Clock

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Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

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Listen to this episode from Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking on Spotify. "What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose."

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1. Shell 111 : noise performance exploring different temporalities

2. Futuristic fossil: creating a fossil to be found in the future of a transformed version of myself

4. Monster Archief with Michiel Teeuw

5. Soundpiece for Het Resort

5. Peeking into the marrow - non-human-language exploration with Nina Lila Veloo

6. Time Sketches

7. Card Bored Kids @ Simplon Up and Podium Explore Leeuwarden

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#sound #noise #soundsculpture #timetraveller #erosion #geologicaltime

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@logofafutureself - futuristic fossil project

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@logofafutureself - futuristic fossil project

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https://www.instagram.com/logofafutureself?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

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The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Te...

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Read 107 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. From the first seeds sown thousands of years ago, to the construction of the cities we sti...

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Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

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Read 603 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnect...

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In Light-Years There's No Hurry: Cosmic Perspectives on...

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Read 190 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. How seeing Earth through the eyes of an astronaut brings new wonder and meaning to life on...

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Project Emmen -futuristic (trace) fossils (working name)

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Project Emmen -futuristic (trace) fossils (working name)

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For my project in Emmen I want to work towards creating a series of fossils together with people from Emmen that could be found by future generations.

In order to start this project and conduct it in a way that feels integral, rooted and sustainable I first want to explore slowly get to know Emmen and it’s people and create the first fossils as an personal log of my findings there.

I am most fascinated by trace fossils.

For this, I want to go on walks and make casts and molds of things, placed and maybe even people that catch my eye.

For my final presentation I want to show the fossils and a expedition log.

At the same time I hope that this process will bring new ideas and insights about for example where I want to host the collective fossil making, which people I want to invite and how to do this in a way that elevates voices that need to be heard.

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Read 7 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves toget...

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Goals:

Ease into or feel more at ease with my creative process.

Integrate the concept of Deep Time, cyclic time and anti-capitalism into my creative practice. Research what that means for me.

Work on projects outside of Minerva.

Finish a book or two that have to do with my research.

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Monster Archief on Instagram: "Sofía Murillo Lommers ( @babyplantbaby ), they/she, 26, Costa Rican-Dutch
Earthscumkisser/Aardsschuimkusser

 [EN] nasty girls,
who love so well
their hands a mount of mud 

cast it out, the fog of hate
join, 
and kiss 
this filthy foaming spell!

During our readings of the Helsche Boosheit text by van Byler, what stood out to me was the association being made between the sin of sodomy, filth and impurity, evoking images of Dirt, Mud, Soil and Scum. 

Dirt has been historically associated with the undesirable: queer and BIPOC bodies. I had internalized this queerphobia and racism, to the point of feeling dirty myself. However, the last few years I have gone through the purifying process of recognizing the colonial and patriarchal roots of the judgment of undesirability. 

By learning about the Indigenous peoples’ relationship with Earth, alongside being a queer herbalist with many queer friends working with the Earth, Soil has reclaimed its place as a space of nourishment, mutual care, and safety. It has become a grounded expression of life, God, and spirit.

With my performance i want to invite Dirt, Filth and Queerness into the church, a place that has been hostile for both Queer and Indigenous Peoples for centuries. 

I want to assert their sacredness. A gesture of reverence to the men killed in Groningen, 1731 in the name of “cleansing the earth”, to my Indigenous Ancestors and their ways of relating to Dirt, to (my) Queerness and the Soil. 

A Rose and Sage covered middle finger to the god of murder, a service to the god of life, laughter and love. 

Sofía Murillo Lommers, a 26-year-old Costarican-Dutch artist studying at Minerva Academy, grew up in Costa Rica among the rainforest, Caribbean Sea, volcanoes, and rivers, valuing nature and the human-more-than-human relationship. Their work, influenced by hydrofeminism, decoloniality, and speculative fiction, uses intuitive, embodied practices to evoke connectedness, empathy, and awe for nature.

Sat 22 June | 19:00-20:30 | Donation-based
Pelstergasthuiskerk, Pelsterstraat 39, Groningen
Helsche Boosheit is made possible by: Diaconie in de Stad, Haella Stichting & Stichting Roze Zaterdag Groningen."

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monsterarchief on June 5, 2024: "Sofía Murillo Lommers ( @babyplantbaby ), they/she, 26, Costa Rican-Dutch
Earthscumkisser/Aardsschuimkusser

 [EN] nasty girls,
who love so...". 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Monster Archief (@monsterarchief)

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Before you begin taking steps to develop a longer-term view, it can help to get a sense of your current time perspective. Some people are more inclined to be present-minded while others are more past- or future-minded; and these perspectives also come in positive or negative varieties.

For a flavour of your own time perspective, reflect on the following statements, and for each one ask yourself: 'How characteristic or true is this of me?'Make a note of whether it is very untrue, untrue, neutral, true, or very true:

1. I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past.

2. Painful past experiences keep being replayed in my mind.

3. It's hard for me to forget unpleasant images of my youth.

4. Familiar childhood sights, sounds, smells often bring back a flood of wonderful memories.

5. Happy memories of good times spring readily to mind.

6. I enjoy stories about how things used to be in the 'good old times'.

7. Life today is too complicated; I would prefer the simpler life of the past.

8. Since whatever will be will be, it doesn't really matter what I do.

9. Often, luck pays off better than hard work.

10. I make decisions on the spur of the moment.

11. Taking risks keeps my life from becoming boring.

12. It is important to put excitement in my life.

13. When I want to achieve something, I set goals and consider specific means for reaching those goals.

14. Meeting tomorrow's deadlines and doing other necessary work comes before tonight's play.

15. I complete projects on time by making steady progress.

This is a short version of a test called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (if you prefer, you can complete the full version online) that was developed by the tech researcher John Boyd and the psychologist Philip Zimbardo (who you may know for staging the Stanford prison experiment). People's answers reveal how they view time through five different psychological lenses.

Most people's answers indicate a mix of all five, but some perspectives can be more dominant than others - and each has upsides and downsides. To get a sense of your dominant perspective(s), look to see which statements you agreed with most strongly:

Past-negative (if you agreed most strongly with 1, 2, 3):your worldview is coloured by the trauma, difficulties and regret you've experienced.
Past-positive (if you agreed most strongly with 4, 5, 6): you are grounded in your history and traditions, warmly and nostalgically.
Present-fatalistic (if you agreed most strongly with 7, 8, 9): you're pessimistic, perhaps even doomist, about current events.
Present-hedonistic (if you agreed most strongly with 10, 11, 12):the time is now, and you're going to enjoy it.
Future (if you agreed most strongly with 13, 14, 15):you're a forward-planner and gratification-delayer.

Your score can reveal your own personal starting point as you seek to cultivate a longer-term view. For example, if you scored high on present-hedonistic, you're currently more likely to focus on the moment, taking risks and seeking adventure. People high on this category are pleasure-seeking, intense and playful. The downside is that they are poor forward-planners, and their 'devil may care' attitude makes them more likely to fall prey to addictions. Delaying gratification is difficult when there are salient pleasures to be won and immediate pains to be avoided.

The people who score high on present-fatalistic, by contrast, are the Eeyores of the world, defined by feelings of helplessness towards the future, which they see as predestined. On the positive side, they are more likely to believe that luck or fate can change circumstances, but their doomist inclinations lead to lower mental wellbeing.

The ideal mix, according to Zimbardo and Boyd, is to score low on the measures with negative rumination, and moderate-to-high on the others. Or more specifically, you want to avoid being too past-negative and present-fatalistic, and embrace a healthy mix of past-positive, present-hedonistic and future. This allows an individual to learn from their roots, live in the moment and plan for tomorrow.

The good news is that people are not fixed in their categories. One group of psychologists who gave people mindfulness training, for instance, found that it fostered a more balanced time perspective with less rumination. Others found that certain interventions can boost the future perspective: for example, asking people to write down what they would want said about themselves in their funeral eulogy, or to imagine being 90 years old, sitting in a rocking chair and remembering their life. As you'll discover, the rest of this section is about using these types of interventions to boost your own long-term perspective - fostering a clearer, healthier view of both the past and future.
Have a conversation with your future self
The psychologist Hal Hershfield - author of Your Future Self (2023) - argues that we tend to think of our future selves as different people, with the same kind of psychological distance as if we were considering the needs of a stranger.

That makes it hard to set ourselves long-term goals - from eating healthier to reducing smartphone time - even when we know they could bring benefits. It helps explain why I've broken too many new year's resolutions to remember.

However, Hershfield has found that it's possible to bring the future self closer, and make better choices in the present. For example, in one study, he found that showing people their faces edited to look older encouraged them to set aside more money for retirement.

Recently, I asked Hershfield to translate his findings into a simple exercise for people to try: an imagined conversation with their future self. In a BBC article we worked on together, he explored the question If you could meet 'future you', what would you ask them?

You might be tempted to pose a simple, closed question, such as 'Are you happy?' However, Hershfield suggests it's more fruitful to imagine open questions, such as these:

What have you been most proud of and why?

In what ways - both positive and negative - have you changed over time?

What's something that you miss most from earlier in your life?

What actions have you regretted?

What actions did you not take that you regret?

What's a time period you'd most want to repeat?

What things should I be paying more attention to now?

Which things should I stress about a little less?

'Imagine if you were to put these eight questions to your future self,' he wrote. 'What might you find out that would modify how you live now? It'd probably be the most important conversation of your life.'

Another way to bridge the gap between your present self and your future self could be to add events to a long-term diary:personal milestones that you hope to experience one day. For example, I'll be celebrating my daughter's 21st birthday in February 2034, retiring in 2046 and, if I'm lucky, marking my 50th wedding anniversary in 2058. This exercise risks being a little morbid; it can make you realise how little time you actually have left on Earth, but I find that the act of marking an actual date for the milestones in my life makes them feel more tangible. And crucially, I find myself more inclined to make changes today that will ensure they happen, such as eating more healthily or exercising regularly. (For even more ways to connect with your future self, check out this previous Psyche Guide.)
Take the perspectives of people in the past and future
If 'future you' is a stranger, then that's even more so when you consider 'future others'. Many of the world's biggest problems, such as the climate crisis, might be tackled more easily if we could collectively extend greater empathy towards future generations.

Sometimes, the case for passing on a better world to our descendants is made using statistics: statements such as 'By 2100, the world faces 1-2°C warming above pre-industrial levels,' and so on. These claims are well intentioned, but the trouble is, if you don't expect to live that long, it's difficult to feel as much concern as if it were today or tomorrow. There's a different approach that's more effective. Research suggests that empathy for the people of 2100 comes more easily if you can step into their shoes.

In one study, researchers asked people to consider the impacts of future climate change in different ways. They gave one group data about climate impacts, on a global scale. They handed a second group the same information, but also showed them the story of one woman living in a degraded environment in 2105, burnt by the sun, with an itchy rash caused by swimming in a polluted sea. Afterwards, the researchers observed that, on leaving the experiment, this second group were more likely to pick up brochures about environmental harms. In other words, a single future person's perspective seemed to trigger the participants' concern more than a barrage of statistics.

You could try using this approach to cultivate your own long-term perspective. Rather than imagining the distant future in vague or statistical terms, picture vividly what it might be for a specific young person you know (or their children).

A related, but more positive, technique in this vein is known as 'backcasting', which involves imagining a hoped-for future. Similar to Hershfield's 'future self' conversation, this involves picturing a future person looking backward to you in the present.

One example is a set of exercises from the Long Time Project, founded by Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke. They suggest picturing a child you know and care about today as an old man or woman, looking back at the legacy you left for them:

There's a framed picture of you on the table. That person you care about who is celebrating their 90th birthday taps their glass and asks for everyone's attention. They raise their glass and toast you. They thank you for something you did that helped shape their world for the better. What are they toasting you for?

Other groups have encouraged people to time-travel in the opposite direction: to step into the shoes of their ancestors, and consider the sacrifices they made, such as fighting in wars, or achievements such as making medical discoveries. Ask yourself: What did your grandparents' generation do that enables your current way of life? Doing this, the researchers suggest, can encourage people to feel greater benevolence towards their own descendants.

In sum, past and future people become less like strangers if you make the effort to mentally time-travel to imagine the specific details of their lives.
Seek 'temporal windows' to deep time
If you want to take your mental time-travel abilities to the extreme, then why not take a step into deep time? Projecting the mind thousands or millions of years away from the present might seem like taking things too far. You might wonder how it could possibly be relevant to your needs today. But I find that when I reflect on how my life fits into the longer story of our planet, I feel more in touch with nature and the wider world.

There's no doubt it can be discombobulating to consider that, from Earth's perspective, your own lifespan is equivalent to a flash of sunlight on the surface of a lake. However, I find that knowing I am one link within a vast chain of people and organisms, living within a Universe that traces back to the Big Bang, evokes a feeling of sublime awe. And awe, psychologists have found, brings myriad benefits: it decreases the likelihood of rumination, for instance, as well as promoting altruism, and making us feel more connected with one another.

When possible, I try to seek out deep time through what I call temporal windows. This involves spending just a short while every week transporting your mind into the very long term, by mindfully observing your surroundings. If you look around, these windows are often accessible - whether it's the rocks beneath your feet or the ancient light from the stars above you.

Even in a busy city, such windows can be found. Near where I live in London, for example, there are ancient barrows in Richmond Park, some of which are more than 4,000 years old. Until a friend pointed them out, I had often walked past them without realising they were there. Even holes in the street can offer a temporal window: roadworks can reveal layers of tarmac and rock layers that speak of historical and geological timescales.

With a bit of imagination, you can also conjure up temporal windows to the future. There's an elderly care home around the corner from my house, with a small sign outside: it explains that a time capsule for future generations was buried there when the structure was built. I don't know what's inside, but I like that someone thought to leave a message for the future in such an everyday place. (If you want to find one near you, the International Time Capsule Society keeps a registry of such capsules placed around the world.)

The academic David Farrier - author of the book Footprints (2020),about humanity's legacies - once told me about another exercise in mental time-travel he practised when he visited Shanghai. As he gazed up at the buildings, he spent a moment imagining how all the skyscrapers there might change, evolve and decay over millions of years: what would survive and what would not? Which materials are truly long lasting, and which are transient on geological timescales?

So, when possible, try moving your mind into deep time, and asking yourself: what came before all this, and what could it become in the long term? I find that doing so often reminds me just how fortunate I am to be alive, right now, reflecting on my vantage point within a grander temporal arc.
Think of time in generations, not years or centuries
Look at your family tree, and you'll see you are only a handful of generations from the time of Jane Austen or George Washington. If you were born in the 1980s like me, you are around seven generations from Charles Dickens, and approximately 17 from William Shakespeare. If your tree traces to the UK, it's possible that one of your ancestors even watched an original performance of Hamlet: after all, you potentially have more than 100,000 great-grandparents who lived in the 1600s (without any overlaps in your family tree, such as from cousins marrying, your number of grandparents doubles every generation).

Framed this way, the future is also closer than you think. One of the ways I find it easier to step outside the present is to think about my daughter's life in the coming decades. Born in 2013, she could potentially live to see the 22nd century. On New Year's Eve 2099, as the fireworks explode and people sing 'Auld Lang Syne', she'll be in her late 80s.
Give a gift to the future
You might make a similar calculation for the young people in your own life: sons, daughters, nieces, nephews. In 2024, it's estimated that 135 million people will be born worldwide - many of whom will become citizens of the next century. And, looking ahead, almost 11 billion more children will begin their lives before 2100. If they are lucky, some of the people born this century - including my daughter's potential grandchildren - will live through to the 2200s.

Previous generations are only a branch or two away on your family tree, and the people of the next century and beyond are already here - or will be very soon.

A few years ago, James Janson Young - who founded a YouTube channel about long-term thinking called Ours for the Making - was recovering from major surgery. During this time, he writes, his 'sense of the future collapsed'. So, he decided to cultivate a practice called future-gifting.

'In its simplest form,' Young writes, 'future-gifting is the straightforward, instinctive act of doing something in the present to support yourself (or those around you) in the future. It's a practice of being generous to your future self in order to help them out a little and shape your future in the process.' For example, you might write yourself a letter that you won't open until 2030, or a scheduled email that won't arrive for a year or even a decade.

While it starts with the self, what makes it powerful, Janson Young argues, is that it helps to build a habit that can spill over to acts of generosity and empathy for other people in the future too.
Seek alternative time perspectives and long-term communities
So, what would be your gift to future people? All of us leave behind both wanted and unwanted heirlooms. What will your legacy look like? It does not need to be a grand statue or presidential library but can be far more everyday. It could also be a personal possession, or a positive idea, tradition or norm: something you taught someone, or a way you inspired them.

I believe the greatest legacy I can aspire to leave behind is simply choice. Much of what we are collectively doing in the present threatens to close down the range of possibilities available to our descendants: whether it's worsening climate change or causing species extinctions. It needn't be so. I know I cannot solve the grand challenges of our time by myself, nor can I claim to know what the people of tomorrow will want or need. However, if I'm ever uncertain about my daily decisions or beliefs, I return to a core principle: I wish to pass on a world where tomorrow's people have the ability to choose their own destinies. That, to me, is what it means to take the long view and be a good ancestor - and through that, I derive meaning and purpose in the present.

As we saw with the time perspective questionnaire, everyone has their own horizon of time. For some, it's days or weeks, while for others it's years or decades. It's worth asking: who around you is pulling you towards the moment, and who is encouraging a longer horizon?

Throughout my life, I have come across many people whose targets, priorities and desires were heavily rooted in the present - I'm sure you have too. But I have also met many people who have a far longer perspective than my own: artists, philosophers, scientists and historians who spend their days extending their minds across thousands or even millions of years. Every conversation with them has opened my perspective to be a little closer to their lens on time. The more I immerse myself in their work, art or ideas, the easier I find it to escape the present.

Similarly, I've also come across other cultures around the world who think about time differently to my own Western-centric, scientifically trained, geological world view. For example, for the Yupno people who live in steep valleys in Papua New Guinea, time flows uphill. Yesterday is downslope and tomorrow is higher up the mountain. Other cultures see the past, present and future differently: the past is visible in front of them, and the future is unseen behind their heads (which is actually more accurate, if you think about it). Finally, Indigenous Australians have described time more like a body of water that surrounds you. When I realise time is a cultural construct, not an absolute object, I find it easier to think about how we might reframe our role and position within it.

In my research, I have also encountered various communities of people - some of which you can join - who come together to cultivate a longer view. They allow people to connect, listen to talks, share insights, and even go on field trips. Each long-minded group has a different flavour, but they are united in the belief that the long term matters.

Perhaps the most well-known community is the Long Now Foundation. Headquartered in San Francisco, it has become increasingly international, with offshoots in Boston, London and Europe that organise meetups and talks, run by volunteers. Each local group has developed its own approach: the Boston chapter is shaped by the culture of its nearby universities, Harvard and MIT, as well as the region's biotechnology sector. London has a more British approach, meeting monthly in a pub and going on an annual field trip to maintain the White Horse of Uffington, a 3,000-year-old chalk geoglyph in Oxfordshire. If you're nearby, why not tag along this summer?

Another example of a long-term community would be the effective altruists. This community is concerned with many areas, such as poverty reduction in the developing world or the threat of AI, but it's also a hub for those interested in exploring the principles of 'longtermism': the ethical belief that ensuring the future goes well is a key moral priority of our time. It has attracted controversy in recent years, but one place to discover if their approach is for you or not is the podcast and website 80,000 Hours, or the book What We Owe the Future (2022) by the philosopher William MacAskill.

Finally, there are communities and places you can visit centred on long-term art, especially in Europe. Every year, you can attend a ceremony in a forest north of Oslo in Norway for the Future Library, a project where novelists like Margaret Atwood submit a manuscript that won't be published until 2114 - it's the literary version of 'future-gifting'. Visit the Dutch city of Utrecht, and you will find a poem embedded in the cobblestones of the street that is intended to run for centuries. Every Saturday, a stonemason adds a new letter, sponsored by the public. And in Germany, a trip to the small town of Wemding will bring you to the Time Pyramid - a project that the local citizens are planning over 12 centuries. Once every decade, they meet for a ceremony to place a new block: so put September 2033 in your long-term diary because that's the next one.

A longer view is out there to be found - and, if you can seek it out, your perspective on time and the world can begin to feel a little richer, more grounded and perhaps even more hopeful. You have an incredible mind: capable of taking you to the ancient past or the deep future; to meet your ancestors or to picture your descendants. A unique form of time-travel is within your grasp.

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How to do mental time travel | Psyche Guides

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Feeling overwhelmed by the present moment? Find a connection to the longer view and a wiser perspective on what matters

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The Metabolic Rift - Kohei Saito offers a unique and groundbreaking interpretation of Marx’s Capital as “a book about metabolism between humans and nature”. As Saito explains, Capital’s logic of infinite accumulation creates an irreparable rift with nature's metabolism, ultimately culminating in catastrophic climate change. In Marx, Saito finds a thinker deeply concerned with the ecological crisis, and one who (despite conventional takes on Marx), no longer believes that the overthrow of capitalism is inevitable. Ultimately, Saito calls for degrowth communism, a mode of production that will hopefully be the subject of part two of this series.