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.