Lingis' 'Bestiality' and 'Religion of Animals' Notes - Jolie, Jesse, Natalie, Sabrina

*Bestiality*

**

*-symbiosis - boundary of our bodies/other species*

*“The number of microbes that colonize our bodies exceeds the number ofcells in our bodies by up to a hundred fold.”(p 27) *

*“Let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted bythe form that makes it an object of observation and manipulation for anoutside observer.” (p 28)*

**

*- goal oriented movement, teleological movement*

*-return to this with grosz, deleuzing notions of becoming*

**

define goal (not-goal oriented page 28)

plane of intensity/virtual

*”most movements are not goal oriented”*

**

*“How little of the movements of the bodies of octopods frolicking over thereef, of guppies fluttering in the slow currents of the Amazon, of cockatoosflaunting their acrobatics in the vines of New Guinea, of terns of thespecies Sterna paradisaea scrolling up all the latitudes of the planet fromAntartica to the Arctics, of humans is telelogical! How little of thesemovements is programmed by an advance representation of a goal, a result tobe acquired or produce a final state! Most movements do not get theirmeaning from an outside referent envisioned from the start and do not gettheir direction from an end-point, a goal or a result. Without theme, climaxor denouement, they extend from the middle, they are durations.” (p 30)*

**

*-animal behavior as eroticism - domestication?*

page 36

*”If an infant brought up in a highrise apartment, where all the paths hewalks outside are paved and even dogs and cats are forbidden, still acquiresfeelings other than those which purring, growling, or roaring machinestransmit to him, it is because he has contact with humans who have madecontact with the living forces of nature.”*

domestication

hypothetical world where there are no animals - what are purely humanmovements

**

*-does it all have to point to erotic, learning from animals for otherpurposes*

*Without theme, climax, or denoument, they extend from the middle, they aredurations.*

pg. 31 - *”The movements and intensities of our bodies take up the movementsand intensities of our bodies take up the movements and intensities oftoucans and wolves, jellyfish and whales. Psychoanalysis censures asinfantile every intercourse with the other animals, which it so obsessivelyinterprets as representatives of the father and mother figures of itsOedipal triangle.”*

grizzly man

feral children - wild child

*”Today in our Internet world where everything is reduced to digitally codedmessages, images, and simulacra instantaneously transmitted from one humanto another, it is in our passions for the other animals that we learn allthe rites and sorceries, the torrid and teasing presence, and theceremonious delays, of eroticism.”*

-embodiment of animals or symbols (power?)

pelts - tradition of killing/wearing/power

page 39 - *”Humans have from earliest times made themselves eroticallyalluring by grafting upon themselves the splendors of the other animals, thefilmy plumes of ostriches, the secret luster of mother-of-pearl oysters, thespringtime gleam of fox fur.”*

-frame/chaos bodies/boundaries - art as object art as tied to environmentnot separate

-art about the duration/process rather then the final state

-desire to understand process of creation, emphasis on process beingimportant - breaking down boundary of artist/viewer symbiosis - importanceof interpreter?

*Religion of Animals:*

page 56 - *”The noble impulses are nowise contrived to serve human needs andwants, human whinings.”*

define noble

our eyes are drawn to exemplary individuals… saunter on.

“yet we are also drawn to people who are not exemplary”

doing something beyond its practical reason -

page 60 - *”For courage as the word indicates, is the force of theheart(cor, cuer, coeur) and sociological studies show that the same numberof people die bravely and die cowardly among those who think that theirdeath is the gateway to eternal bliss among those who think their death isonly annihilation.”*

Response to 'Dangerous Emotions' -- Robin Sacolick

“How even less do most movements represent initatives by which an agent posits and extends its identity!…A campesina in Guatemala occupies her hands with the rhythms and periodicity of her knitting as she sits on the stoop gossiping with her friends…every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its telos and continues as a periodicity with a force that is not the force of the will launching it and launching it once again and then again…when (the carpenter) pauses he, alone in the neighborhood, registers the nearby tapping of a nutnatch on a tree trunk…The movements and intensities of our bodies take up the movements and intensities of toucans and wolves, jellyfish and whales…[through] These movements extend neither toward a result nor a development. They are figures of the repetition compulsion…” I am trying to understand this whole passage from the “Bestiality” chapter. Musically, Lingis notes the periodicities of life and whereas some of them, such as the knitting and hammering, are done for an articulatable reason, others, such as fiddling with ones hair repeatedly, have less well understood motives.  Lingis wrties of “the” repetition compulsion; whereas I have experienced it, I am not sure what he represents when writing of it: psychology? anthropology? his own opinion? biology? etc.  Is it a well-accepted phenomenon, or is it something he believes in? The same goes without saying of “the movements and intensities of our bodies take up (those) of toucans and wolves…”.  When he writes of intensities, is this in the same sense as planes of intensity?  Oh what a tangled web we weave when we wax eloquent.  Or maybe I’m just exercising my spider genomes. Repetition, whether or not it is compulsive, has value in human existence. That which springs to mind is the way in which it lulls us and makes us feel safe. On the other hand “Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its telos and continues as a periodicity” is a VERY interesting thought relevant to my work.  I am planning to do dissertation work on music and ritual, and repetition is almost always involved.  Last quarter I did a term paper on alternate teleologies and their therapeutic psychological benefits.  This fits right in. Another passage that will assist my own research interests is the one about Le Clezio’s observations on the music of the Lacandon Maya in Chiapas: “how their songs, leaving words and meaning behind, pick up and join the basso continuo of the frogs the dogs, the spider-monkeys, the agoutis, the wild boars, and the sloths in the tropical night.”  The immense spiritual depth and strength of surviving Mayan peoples is a topic too large for here, but suffice it to say that the implied recognition of the value of identity with ones environment and ecology has both material and psycho-spiritual utility.

Response to 'Dangerous Emotions' -- Beth Ratay

“…the high point of diving is not to distinguish some rare fish but to be observed by them.”

So far, a theme that seems to pervade Lingis’ book is the theme of humans separation from the physical, natural world. In our current society, people have separated themselves from the natural world through many means. Society’s imposed taboos against taking pleasure in the touch and feel of an animal is one instance where we separate ourselves from nature. Our Freudian Ego causes us to feel guilt when we seek or derive pleasure from a socially unacceptable source; or there is a limit to the amount of pleasure we may derive. These emotions and desires are “dangerous”; they allow the Id too much control.

“It is when we see the parent bird attacking the cat, the mother elephant carrying her dead calf in grief for three days, that we believe in the reality of maternal love.”

Lingis is pointing out here that we are animals, and that we learn from animals. Our urban society of brick and stone produces too many individuals who do not know how to be animal in caring for one another as opposed to animal in defense of a territory. Many children grow up without ever knowing the devoted love of a pet, and as a result they are unable to connect with others on a deep emotional level.

Art is one way that we are able to express and experience this sort of animal pleasure and fulfillment in a socially acceptable, but maybe not always, way. As artists, we can bring this joy of the moment, this joy of sensation to the public, and I feel that this is part of the purpose of art for me: to share and express these dangerous emotions.

Post-Speciesism: We are all in the mush pot -- Sabrina Habel

Post-Speciesism: We are all in the mush pot

Hurray, a look at systems thinking! So we as humans have finally spentenough time breaking down ideas, objects, and life forms into compartmentswith labels and drawers, trying to master the natural world. Its finallytime to destroy the compartments and build everything back up into a wholesystem, complex, difficult to command, unpredictable, and deserving of ourunyielding respect. The world doesn’t revolve around you, me or us, none ofus are the winners or losers. We are all swimming around in the mush pot,with our dependencies, equilibriums, predators, cooperations and so forth.

The return to the system is apparent in all of the readings. In Lingis’s TheReligion of Animals, we look to the entire animal kingdom to find theattractions and repulsions within human response to other humans. InBestiality, a search to find more parallels in human and animal emotionalresponse. As if we need to be reminded that we are animals too, our bodiesmust survive the earth’s gauntlet every single minute of the day. We arevulnerable. Donna Haraway’s article goes further to look at our position as“partial connections” and the great amount of interspecies mingling thatoccurs without our conscious knowledge. And It all comes full circle (as itoften does when looking at systems thinking) with John Dewey’s The LiveCreature. Even in 1934 he stresses a need to de-compartmentalize, to lookinto oneself before projecting outward, in creating more questions thananswers.

Like Lingis says, the Brazil nut is a hard one to crack and so is systemsthinking. We have to retrain ourselves to undo how we have been conditionedto think since entering the world. It is especially hard because we don’tlike uncertainty, unfinished stories, loose ends. Well TOO BAD. I agreewith the authors. Humans are not superior to the entire earth (universe)system; there is no value judgement to be made because we can’t even graspwhat we are, where we live or who we live with.

Lingis on Bestiality -- Jolie Ruelle

Response to Reading Week 2Jolie Ruelle

There were two themes that stood out while reading Lingis on Besteality. The first was the beautiful way in which he described the symbiotic relationship one has with their environment. Even calling it a “relationship” might assume to much of the imagined boundary that as Lingis points out does not exist.“The number of microbes that colonize our bodies exceeds the number of cells in our bodies by up to a hundred fold.”(p 27) This is a liberating thought. By imaging ones body as in continuous process with the world around it, a certain weight, caused by striving towards a perfection in the way we present ourselves to others, is lifted. “Let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted by the form that makes it an object of observation and manipulation for an outside observer.” (p 28)

The second theme that could also lead to a free or “liberated” way of thinking, is Lingis’s take on goal oriented movement. It is easy to picture oneself on a linear path in which all actions are adding up to some cumulative goal. As Lingis points out this is not the case in nature, and this perception may only limit one from seeing how movements function. “How little of the movements of the bodies of octopods frolicking over the reef, of guppies fluttering in the slow currents of the Amazon, of cockatoos flaunting their acrobatics in the vines of New Guinea, of terns of the species Sterna paradisaea scrolling up all the latitudes of the planet from Antartica to the Arctics, of humans is telelogical! How little of these movements is programmed by an advance representation of a goal, a result to be acquired or produce a final state! Most movements do not get their meaning from an outside referent envisioned from the start and do not get their direction from an end-point, a goal or a result. Without theme, climax or denouement, they extend from the middle, they are durations.” It strikes me that by assigning “special importance” to teleological movement we might not only limit our perception of the movements themselves but may also have limited understanding of their outcomes.

Experiencing the External/Internal - Natalie McKeever

My strongest reaction was to Lingis’ description of his personal experiencevisiting Easter Island and his idea that the art/statues were inherentlyconnected to the landscape they were developed in (“It was inconceivablethat this kind of work, these giant stone statues, could been erected in therain forests, or in the temperature latitudes in the middle ofcontinents.”). I related to Lingis’ idea of art primarily as experience -when he describes the wall of Buddha statues as not having arepresentational function, but as a direct channel for experience. Thatyes, analyses, deciphering, and the history of the island and the statuesare interesting and important, and he spends the majority of the chapterdiscussing just that - but that is looking at the task at hand from afar, itis examining the statues as art *objects, *and not works intrinsicallyconnected to the environment/place they were created in. I am interested inthe folding of boundaries between external and internal that Lingis is getting at here. The external place stirs emotions and creates a particularexperience within the inner state of the artist who then externalizes thisthrough the creation of the statues (and accompanying ceremony/tradition ofthe birdmen). External>Internal>External that hopefully heightens theexperience of the location for the next person that experiences it.

I had a similar experience when I visited the ancient site of Newgrange inIreland a few years ago. The site is a mound/tomb, covered in rocksarranged in patterns . The top is covered in grass and the entrance isframed by giant stones covered in megalithic etchings of swirls. When I wasfirst approaching, and viewing it from the outside I found myself in themindset of trying to figure it out. How did they make this, how did theyhave the ability to plan the intricate rock patterns, to carry all thesupplies up this hill? Why make this structure, what was it functionally?I was analyzing and not experiencing. There is a thin passageway which youare allowed to enter by crouching and maneuvering your way through. When Iwent inside I stopped actively pursuing answers to my questions and insteadnoticed my psychological and biological reaction to the environment. It wascold inside the rocks. I was very aware of myself and my body as I tried tosafely navigate the passage. When you reach the center of the tomb there isa small circular area. The tour guides explain to you that the opening youjust climbed through aligns with the sun on the Winter Solstice. Theancient people who created the tomb would climb inside it on the Solsticeand sit and wait in the pitch darkness until the sun crossed over theentryway at the end of the passage and briefly illuminated the circle inwhich we were standing. The sound inside this area was very insulated andit was a strange kind of quietness I had not heard before. The tour guidesthen recreated the experience for the group by switching off the small lampsthat are there for safety. You wait in the cold, quiet, darkness until anartificial light mimics the movement of the sun. I felt like my mind wastransported to a primal state, similar to Lingus’ description, “what thesevanished people had felt was clear, palpable, as though i were walking amongtheir very ghosts.” I understood the need for such a monument as the tombin this particular place. Going through the ritual (even in its touristyform) that the ghosts of this place had also experienced, I felt that I wasconnected to their emotions - that there was something almost magical aboutexperiencing the same inner state in the same place that had beenexperienced by people for thousands of years.

Response to Alphonso Lingis' 'Faces' and 'Navel of the World' -- Sabrina Habel

Granted I have a limited scope of philosophical texts however the style Lingis uses in his works on philosophy is unlike anything I’ve read in theacademic field. Faces and The Navel of the World read more like novels tome than philosophical discourse, especially in contrast to the ElizabethGrosz piece. After doing a little background research on Lingis I found thathis descriptive and almost narrative style is somewhat fitting with hisfocus on phenomenology. He draws his conclusions based on observablepatterns found in experiencing the world and in a similar way describes hisobservations to set the scene so that a reader is poised notice those samepatterns. I find in reading his works that, instead of a central argumentbeing drilled into my head through scholarly evidence, I come away withgeneralized feelings. The feelings are nondescript cynicism towards humanhistory and social construction, awe of the natural world and its processes,and discomfort for future social and nature/human interactions.

In Faces, Lingis paints a timeline of human communication using the face aas the center point, vital to non-verbal communication. He states, “A faceis a field that accepts some expressions and connections and neutralizesothers. It is a screen and a framework.” Lingis points to the face as aprojector and receptor of complex emotional communication that the rest ofthe body cannot convey with the same specificity. I also find that he isshowing how as human bodies become more restricted in their actives andappearance by societal rules/norms and language, the face remains the onepoint of powerful self expression and emotional response. Lingis drawsspecial attention to the mystery of the “black holes of the face”, thepupils of the eyes. However he offers no analysis other than selectivedescription to make sense of the information (story) he provides us with.

The Navel of the World I found to be more rich in that Lingis himself ispresent in his discussion. In Faces he was more of an onlooker from above,but in The Navel of the World he is a member of his environment completewith faults, emotions and unanswered questions. Though amidst his personalanecdotes and unfounded historical interludes, Lingis has bursts of criticalthought (on Western dominance, completion, competition, the writing ofhistory, emotion and the sublime) which he skates right through. He statessome view points on a topic and moves right along to the next description. This left me a bit disappointed because as interesting as Easter Island is,what is more interesting in the critical thought on human behaviorengendered by visiting such a place and I would have appreciated more depthin exploring his conclusions.

Emotions focus the mind, but they also limit it -- Jesse Fulton

Lingis seems to be in dialogue with some of Grozs’s ideas associatingartistic production with the “passion” and “emotions” created as aresult of “excess energies” encountered in our environment. He alsotouches on Grosz’s explorations of architecture being the “mostelementary containment of forces” (Grosz, 16), although Lingis seemsto be much more direct and unsupportive of his statements when he saysthings like “We do feel that … people who live in cubicles in publichousing developments tend to have narrow, constricted feelings” (Lingis, 18) without developing the thought further or supporting itin any manner.

In doing this, Lingis is attempting to take on the role which he hadpreviously set up for us in this chapter: that of the passionate,modern historian – one who can “make his reader feel again thetorrential emotions of men and women” (Lingis, 14). However, byattempting to elicit an emotional response, Lingis’ discussion quicklydissolves into a thinly veiled attack of corporate influence andWestern cultures in general. He assumes the role of the corporateslave, the adventurous explorer, the victimized native, and even us,the reader, projecting his own beliefs and value systems onto each. The well-to-do scientist is vilified by the influence of the urbanarchitecture has upon him, while the adventurous sailor, freed fromthe confining walls of urban architecture allows the forces of natureto fuel his passions. Lingis expects us to come to the reading withshared ideals, and when that expectation is unfulfilled, thefoundation of his argument reveals itself as nonexistent. While I don’t necessarily disagree with everything he’s saying, the amount of energy Lingis spends setting us up for this attempted emotional exploitation only undermines his argument.

Response to Lingis -- Beth Ratay

I found that Lingis’ thoughts on and critiques of typical modern human interaction was something that I have also been grappling with lately. How is it that we in our super modern society are so afraid to just be ourselves and let ourselves shine through our faces and body language?

Lingis roots the problem in the lack of physical closeness with each other and nature, and he anthropomorphizes this by describing the impassive, emotionless face of the despot, judging us. We are afraid to be ourselves since we cannot emotionally connect with the immoveable features of that judge.

This problem has been present in Western society for some time, but it is exacerbated to a degree by technology. We can have whole interactions and conversations without ever meeting a person and seeing their face, and this lack of person to person sharing turns both parties into the impassive, immoveable judge. It has become easy to hide behind our masks, and to never really let ourselves out. Which is what Lingis points out; as a society, we have been taught that emotions are something which always happen on the inside, and are never truly shared. But anyone who has ever been to or been involved in a truly moving concert has felt that communal energy and emotion as we all sing together and make music together in the moment. In today’s world, it is one of the few ways that we feel okay to let down our guard and truly open ourselves again.

Beth Ratay

Lingis' (2000) Dangerous Emotions

Post responses here (about 250 words, not counting quoted texts…but don’t limit yourself strictly…) related to readings from Alphonso Lingis’ (2000) Dangerous Emotions. The response should include some precise quotes from the reading, and a reflect on its relevance to your work, or to something else of interest to you; it can also just be your abstract interpretation of the reading.

To make your post, simply send an email to post.bencarson.dangerousemotions at “squarespace dot com.” It will appear in this blog within a few minutes, as a post similar to this one.