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Mind and Land I: Cognitive ecology: sketch of a project This first session of Mind and land will lay out an open question about whether environmental care and concern are necessarily in tension with human aspirations to be technically hip and culturally sophisticated.
What I see in this painting is cause for pagan post-post-modern hope. It is hope of intelligence that is grounded in contact with the natural world and at the same time the very opposite of primitive. 1. Preliminary bits
Driving with someone, a woman friend, past the edge of the city on a side I haven't seen. I'm looking at the farmland which at first I think is unusual, interesting. I begin to see it is desolate. A farmyard set on a little hill so steep the ruined sheds look as if they will slide down. A church tower, the towers of an oil refinery in the distance. We are driving east. It's a grey country. I don't see trees. I see the road will end just ahead. I have heard of what is happening here. The land is sinking into the water. There is a flat treeless shabby sort of village, just a few streets. And there is the airport, one cornerless smooth-skinned building rising above the road. I see it is like an airplane, spreading back in a triangle from a rounded prow. My friend and I are on the ground level of the building. It is like an auto repair shop, grease, cars on hoists, mechanics in coveralls. My friend is asking directions. She is taking me to lunch. Upstairs, we are standing in a partitioned steel and glass space that is the restaurant. I open a door and see three young Asian men in a cubicle that seems to have windows on all sides though it is in the center of the building. My friend wants to take me somewhere else. I just want to see what it's like, I say. I wake and say it is a dream about technology. The land has died and is sinking. It has been ruined for the sake of this sleek seamless structure more airplane than airport, a sort of office building for Asian men.
We can no longer tolerate seeing ourselves everywhere, for we are ugly & dirty & tasteless . We are the same as this ugly outer world we've made . Alice Notley in The scarlet cabinet The highway south of Tijuana passes through chaparral country that s thick-strewn with paper, bottles and cans, plastic bags caught in the bushes. Scattered all over this trashed land are unfinished cinderblock shacks standing roofless, without windows or doors. North of the border in San Diego County there is beautiful mountainous country, also chaparral, not many roads yet, but from the freeway shooting through you will often see single house placed on hilltops. There's been no effort to fit them into the landscape: on the contrary, they are designed to be visible like billboards. Hilltops are sliced off like the tops of eggs, and on this flat pad is placed a three storey stucco mansion in a style that could be called Disneyland Spanish. This house will have five bedrooms and eight bathrooms, cathedral ceilings, a four-car garage, a 'great room' and a stone fireplace in it large enough to roast oxen. There will be a tv in almost every room of this house and most of them are on. Chaparral in summer shows a subtle palette of silvers and olive greens, toned to the reddish boulders strewn among them agave, Cleveland sage, buckwheat. These hillsides after a wet winter spring into color - fifty kinds of wild flowers, California poppies and goldfields, lupins all of their blues and golds and pinks and purples and maroons exquisitely drifted among the silvers and greens, always in a way that tells us something about the terrain there's a seep here, there's a shaded slope here, there's wind shelter here. But around the mansion, a hundred feet deep on all sides, whether it rains or not, planted in the dumped earth carved off the hilltop, is a solid-colored sheet of fire-retardant groundcover blooming so violently mauve it can be seen five miles away: a lurid patch. This hillside house is in effect a billboard, and what it is saying all day long is We're rich. What is the Tijuana landscape saying? Is it saying We don't care? Is it saying We don't see this anymore, we've given up? In both instances one thing we can see right away that there is something wrong with the people who live in these houses - the minds that live in these houses.
There is a war going on and a transformation taking place. That war is not simply the contest between the socialist camp and capitalist camp over which political/economic/social arrangement will enjoy hegemony in the world, nor is it simply the battle over turf and resources. Truth is one of the issues in this war. The truth for example, about inherent human nature, about our potential, our agenda as earth people, our destiny. I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus ) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as whole. There are no career labels for that work, no facile terms to describe the tasks of it. Suffice it to say that I do not take lightly the fact that I am on earth at this particular time in human history . Toni Cade Bambara What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow
There's a fight going on about what humans are and should be. So far it's kind of inchoate. In a way it's about prestige. In a way it's about culture for the next 20 centuries. Envisioning a project - action toward a culture of organic high intelligence - "something practical, something honest, some kind of design"
support people who are already doing it, in art, epistemology, scholarship, activism
2. Introduction to the series
ecology "division of biology that treats of the relation of organisms and their environment" - eco from Gk oikos, home. Gary Snyder 'earth householding.' cognition fr L co-(g)noscere, together to know 'mind' - aboutness - perceiving, feeling, imagining, thinking, doing - includes what is usually meant by 'consciousness' but is larger 'natural world' 'land' - what makes and maintains itself - includes human bodies compared to the artifactual (though artificing is itself natural) culture what each generation has to learn from previous generations 'nature cultures' nature and culture are not different spheres, we live as nature cultures, natures with particular kinds of culture, cultures with particular attitudes to nature cognitive ecology mind and land relation of cognition and environment
This minicourse is built around a tension and an open question - Image: kids anywhere in the world walking home from school wanting to be marvelous wanting to belong to the front edge of human possibility. Human flair, human freedom, human gorgeousness. What is the culture that would hold their interest, give scope to their idealism and brightness and newness what cultural attitude is hard enough and alive enough and yet achievable enough? What ways of being would be so compelling everyone would want to be them when they see them?
I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus ) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as whole. Tying in with last residency's session on new humanism, cosmic humanism, monist humanism whatever it should be called. New paganism, re-Renaissance. Summary from Body and cosmos I: Western dualist philosophies imagine humans in terms of a hierarchized duality of body and mind (or soul or spirit or whatever). Body is imagined as a machine and mind as something non-physical. The non-physical is considered more valuable than the physical. Dualisms can never solve the problem of how to understand an interaction between the two essentially different kinds of things. Subsequent attempts at monism picked one term of this prior dualism: idealisms pick the non-physical term and say there are really no such things as physical bodies. Mechanist monisms have said everything is physical, and as such is a machine. We have the option, though, of refusing the original dualism and saying that humans are one thing rather than two. They are bodies which are not machines but are inherently capable, as bodies, of all we have considered to be mind/spirit/soul. If humans are one thing, which is a structured physical body, then all the ways we study human life will ultimately be grounded in an understanding of how this structured physical organism works.
Bodies in the age of simulation, mechanization and abstraction. Organic high intelligence. Make sure it isn't left out of what's making. Body as machine, cosmos as machine, economy as machine, empire as machine - it has been a flame-through of a kind of masculinity finding its power - and it's not over. It's mechanist not modernist, mechanist-dualist, a division of everything into machine and whatever is left over. Not anti-technology, not sacrificing what shouldn't be sacrificed - Post-mechanist organicism is what's going to grow, but it will grow out of mechanism brought to a finer grain.
3. Good minds The question is, what is it inherently excellent and pleasurable to be? Make your own lists may not all be compatible in the same moment. 'intelligent', adventurous, affectionate, alert, astute, blissful, ecstatic, brave, centered, charming, clear, comprehensive, confident, secure, contemporary, creative, curious, investigative, deep, dreamy, imagistic, effective, employed, energized, finely perceptive, flowing, free, unhindered, funny, surprising, generous, hip, honest, independent, informed, integrated, integral, mobile, original, organized, playful, present, relaxed, responsive, feeling, secure, self-enjoying, sensitive, splendid, spontaneous, venturesome, wide, wise, with flair
These are not just 'cultural attitudes' they are styles of body. They are often visible as such. The point about these for my purposes here is not that these attitudes are bad for world but that they're bad for mind, and signs of wrecked intelligence of one kind and another.
ie qualities that minds need to be because they are prevented from being these primarily pleasurable things anxious, egotistical, self-absorbed, guilty, ideological, imperceptive, insistent, martyred, narrowly identified, pious, brutal, punitive, righteous, transgressive, evasive
Proposed remedies ask if they are so compelling everyone would want to be them when they see them, and if not, what is missing.
Ways all of them are inadequate: Ecological environmentalism a puritan streak of self abnegation - that question is how can humans be good for the natural world. Deep ecology taken as advocating well-being of the nonhuman at the expense of humans. Egotistical feel of deep ecology people. Sunday school do-gooderism, identification, shadow projection. Prophylactic environmentalism "Studies indicate that restorative natural environments have the ability to relieve stress, induce relaxation, increase awareness and perception, and promote positive physical and emotional states." These things may be true but as a cultural attitude this is a form of horizontal concern in which the natural world is valued not in itself but purely (one could say) as a good mother. Exoticism - learning about pre- and non-mechanist cultures. We can recover important abilities from pre-technological cultures but we can't readily want to give up technology to be like them. Culture-critical attitudes and activism. Forms of horizontal concern. Getting stuck in opposition, which is a way of staying in love with the oppressor. Postmodernism refusal of 'master narratives' and grand syntheses disable our ability to do synthetic thinking postmodernism discourse often feels quite theological in tone abstract and fabulating disconnected from concrete experience of body and world. New Age alternative metaphysics often devalues physical world and body or even denies their existence unchecked wish-fulfillment fantasies. Refuses science without understanding it. Pop culture cashes in on developmental anxieties about love and sex without showing how to resolve them creates a culture of disabled wallowing. Compare CIA introducing heroin into the anti-Vietnam-war community.
Cognitive excellence excellence of minds immersed in land is not often discussed in terms of humane sophistication, culturedness, virtuosity, flare, skill, style. If intelligence evolves in contact with the physical world, is the integrity of the natural world necessary to the integrity of intelligent function? Could the most humanly pressing argument for environmental preservation and restoration be that the preservation of mind or intelligence depends on it? When we lose world, do we necessarily lose mind? The forming of persons is the specifically human part of environmental value. What specifically do natural environments have that we seem to innately need but cannot find in built environments? The elaborate scientific explanation can be succinctly summed up as a very unique relationship between complexity and order." Julie Stewart-Pollack the destruction of beauty, of complexity, of physical coherence, all of these being forms of destruction of mind, that is, of practices of intelligence that depend on the flourishing of the natural world. Notion of good contact (Gestalt psychology). Notion of semantic depth. - More about this in Mind and land II and III
4. This era
A cultural transition. Trying to keep this discussion specific to intelligence, cognitive excellence. the post-medieval Enlightenment period taking us into the mid-twentieth century. This is the apex of what we have referred to as the final phases of the Late Cenozoic period. What is characteristic of this period is the major cultural revisioning of thought systems that are now identified as the technical scientific-industrial world-view. The movement into this post-medieval period represents a very profound change in cultural consciousness. Lewis Mumford characterizes this change from the medieval into the modern temper as one of the most far reaching cultural changes in human history. Mumford notes that, as with other great historical junctures, the movement from the medieval world into the modern world, was a movement that involved a new metaphysical and ideological change involving all major cultural institutions and, in essence, forms a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human. What style of mind was promoted by the machine age? The sense of the world that views nature as a mechanism that is enmeshed in mechanical forces has led to a profound disenchantment with the natural world. There is within these forces of modernism a loss of the sense of a wider cosmology in which human actions are embedded. O'Sullivan Could we in subtle ways be coming to the end of the mechanical age?
What is new about this historical moment? The natural world is less perilous. Maybe there's a moment of balance. Large groups of people with some leisure, not tied to physical survival worries - basic physical health and comfort showers, food supply, political stability. Information globalization - not as parochial - relative freedom at least in some places from cultural coercion. Possibilities of cultural synthesis. A lot of work already done. Changes in science and in how science understands itself. For an important instance, see the next point.
Network metaphor ascendant complexity theory, chaotic dynamics supports more subtle comprehension.
Simulation cultures: virtuality, shallow artifact, ideology Lostness because evolved drives and skills aren't called upon - triviality, drift soullessness - artificial interests (media) Ungrounded communities, oppositional identities, ideological identities, narrow safeties.
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