Agrilogistics and the arche-lithic. Timothy Morton’s weird essentialism.| Hasso Krull

Written by Hasso Krull
First published in Müürileht, June 2021 (in Estonian)
Translated by Kristi Lahne

Is Earth a blank sheet onto which we may project human desires? Is it always worth fighting natural self-existence — fighting the earth (both in town and country)? We’ll try to get to the core of the issue with help from Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

1

Essentialism is an ominous term. Everyone can get angry during a fight, and once we run out of reasonable arguments, we yell at our opponent, ‘You are stupid!’ This affect passes soon, friends make up, even a domestic might get resolved, but if we pay heed to the words, we might still wonder whether the outburst was justified. And if it transpires that we were right in some respects, we just couldn’t find the right words at the time, then we’re standing at the crossroads of essentialism: whether ‘stupid’ was just an accidental outburst, a thoughtless off-the-cuff remark that crossed the lips at the right moment, or does it have something to do with the other person’s essence, because we had been essentially right? Can stupidity be the other person’s substance, their essence? If I’m now reckless enough and answer this in the affirmative (‘of course, he’s a stupid git’), I become an essentialist for a moment. Jean-Paul Sartre spits at me, because I have abandoned the maxim ‘existence precedes essence’ (l’existence precede l’essence)[1]; Karl Raimund Popper clubs me with his bludgeon of fallibilism, because I am an enemy of the open society; even some feminists look askew at me, because even though my exclamation is related to the sentence ‘men are pigs’, I could soon be spewing out phrases along the line of ‘fucking bird-brain’, ‘bloody whore’ etc.

Therefore we could claim that essentialism begins at everyday interactions. It is also clear that the most fervent defenders of essentialism are those who believe that hate speech is the height of freedom of speech, and by no means should anyone disparage words like ‘nigger’, ‘faggot’ or ‘babe’, as they supposedly express the deeper essence of something. All right. Nonetheless, essentialism does have a philosophical dimension — the word stems from philosophy and signifies an old and respected tradition whose conventional starting point is Plato’s theory of Ideas. To put it simply: even if I think I know who I am and where I belong, I also have an innate substance, a deeper essence, which actually determines my identity, whether I like it or not. I cannot change this substance, this essence, no matter how hard I try, because that substance is simultaneously inside me and somewhere else, in an ideal beyond which is unchangeable, and inaccessible to me. Thus, my identity does not depend on my own will. This is true also of all other things, a cat, a chair, a rock and an ocean — they simply remain what they are because that is their essence, which they do embody, but which does not depend on them but is something else.

This way of thinking gives rise to many questions, because since essences cannot be observed directly, there is a lot of room left over for speculation. Where does essence end and appearance begin? What is still considered substance and what is already an accident? Definitions depend greatly on the thinker’s other biases, which are often left unsaid, or else they are embellished or diminished. Therefore, here too the anti-essentialist mentality is not unfounded at all. However, it also becomes clear how difficult it is to escape essentialism, because how do you surmount the childish belief that things are indeed the things they truly are, even if they sometimes behave strangely. This requires a few crafty manoeuvres. For example, essentialism may be countered by nominalism (names are just names, not universals), and then one might equate essentialism with idealism and call oneself still paradoxically a ‘realist’ (like Popper did)[2]. But that is clearly a slippery slope, as it requires a clear-cut agreement on what exactly is ‘reality’. If this agreement does not exist or it is faltering, we are back to where we started. But is it still the same? What is the initial point like now?

2

Some time ago, Timothy Morton proposed a form that could establish the initial point differently. He calls it weird essentialism. Weird essentialism contrasts with the thinking which presupposes that since the inner essence of things is unattainable to us, we must only concern ourselves with how our world view corresponds to reality. Lately, this thinking is referred to as correlationism and Immanuel Kant is considered its starting point. ‘The correlationist often assumes that because a thing is real insofar as I have to open its refrigerator door to see if it exists, that means it doesn’t really exist.’ [3] This explanation stems from a simple metaphor. When I close the refrigerator door, I can never be sure whether the light in there is on or off; we could further speculate that I also cannot be sure whether the things in the refrigerator are still there. Indeed, the things could just appear as I open the door, thus simply meeting the expectations of my perception. Morton now states that if I still believe in the reality of things, regardless of their being invisible to me, it is a certain kind of essentialism — but this essentialism is weird, because it does not follow one logical rule, the Law of Noncontradiction. If I imagine that there’s cheese in the fridge, I can easily test that notion by opening the refrigerator door; whether reality reflects my expectations of not, the question has been answered and there is no contradiction, because the answer is either yes or no. I don’t need to wonder whether there is something else in the fridge, even if I truly don’t know if the light is still on behind the closed door or not. However, if I presume that there is something in the fridge even if I can never open its door, I have sneaked past noncontradiction — I have accepted a certain essentialism, a belief in the refrigerator’s hidden essence.

Why does Morton need weird essentialism? A certain attunement, which Morton calls ecognosis, demands it. Ecognosis is based on the view that the being and appearance of things are tightly entwined: forming a strange loop, a constant circulation of feedback, where the human interacts with the nonhuman, infatuated by something alien and different, bringing about a kind of ‘heteroaffection’ [4]. We desperately need the ecognostic approach to understand what’s happening on our planet without hiding behind speculations. ‘Earth isn’t just a blank sheet for the projection of human desire… We are going to have to rethink what a thing is.’[5] When we state that humans exist and that they have created the Anthropocene, by drilling holes in the ground, then, according to Morton, the statement is essentialist and demands a new kind of ecological awareness which does not simplify the being of things, but rather makes thinking about them complicated. ‘What best explains ecological awareness is a sense of intimacy, not a sense of belonging to something bigger: a sense of being close, even too close, to other life forms, of having them under one’s skin.’[6] Thus, ecognosis begins at the realisation that there are things around and inside us that we cannot simply offload or renounce — there are other beings to whom we must passively attune, so that we could coexist with them into the future.

Perhaps the clearest example of such coexistence is symbiosis. ‘Lifeforms do not simply live alongside us: they are within us. We are strangers to ourselves. That is how close the other is. Ecology is about intimacy.’[7] Symbiosis means cohabitation with something unknown that we cannot even completely sense, but which is our inner essence, nonetheless. This unknown is just as alive as we are, it’s even more alive, because our life cannot continue without it, but it can live on without us. Recognition of this level of intimacy makes us nauseous at first, then anxious and restless. But it is even stranger to think about humans on the planetary scale. ‘It is as if I realize that I’m a zombie — or, better, that I’m a component of a zombie despite my will. Again, every time I start my car I’m not meaning personally to destroy lifeforms — which is what “destroying Earth” actually means. Nor does my action have any statistical meaning whatsoever. And yet, mysteriously and disturbingly, scaled up to Earth magnitude so that there are billions of hands that are turning billions of ignitions in billions of starting engines every few minutes, the Sixth Mass Extinction Event is precisely what is being caused. And some members of the zombie have been aware that there is a problem with human carbon emissions for at least sixty years.’[8] The sixth wave of extinction is so near to us, so present for us, that a justified question arises, how do we not sense it at all. Even though it might mean the beginning of our own extinction. Until now it has been customary to think that in contrast to other life forms, humans have been blessed with consciousness which supposedly even allows us to make conscious choices. But is that actually true? Or is consciousness but an assumption which cannot be proven?

3

But maybe it isn’t so after all. Maybe humans are conscious, maybe many of them have goodwill and some even an intellect. However, the human collective — as opposed to that of bees, for example — apparently does not know what it is doing any more, or else that knowledge has gone missing somewhere during modernity. People thrash around aimlessly, unable to free themselves from institutions they themselves have established, like being unable to get out of a house you built.

Timothy Morton does not associate this current situation with modernity alone, though. The change happened a long time ago, in the Neolithic era, and it is directly linked to the advent of agriculture and cattle farming. With it a new way of thinking appeared which, according to Morton, is also the source of the Anthropocene. This thinking he calls agrilogistics, the logistics of arable and grazing land, whose principles we should now acknowledge contrastively, as we start contemplating how to get along with other living creatures and our surrounding ecosystems in the future. That’s how we can form ‘the substructure of a logic of future coexistence’.[9]

Agrilogistics is based on three philosophical axioms.

(1) The Law of Noncontradiction must not be violated.

(2) Existence means constant presence.

(3) Existence is always better than any quality of existing.

Morton calls noncontradiction a ‘law’, because that axiom does not stem from an everyday experience, but requires specific prescriptions which would make it a rule. In reality, most things are simultaneously both one and another, so contradiction must be illustrated by carefully chosen examples along the lines of ‘black is not white’, ‘you can walk on land, you can’t walk on water’, etc. But the axiom has an obviously agricultural background: land must be divided into farmland and uncultivated land, plants into cultivated plants and weeds. Cultivatable soil means substance, everything that grows in it is an attribute or accident of the substance. ‘The agrilogistic algorithm consists of numerous subroutines: eliminate contradiction and anomaly, establish boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, maximise existence over and above any quality of existing.’[10] The agrilogistic space is a constant war against everything accidental, against weeds, uncultivated land — in other words, against natural self-existence. This is the incessant battle with land of Andres of the Robber’s Rise, a frenzied attempt at ploughing up everything, cultivating everything, so that only forcibly sown crops would grow there. Today’s frantic desire to turn all natural resources as quickly as possible into money is similar to that — it brings to mind an advertising slogan from years back, ‘an idle forest is like a lazy husband, get rid of it immediately’. If there is a free site in the middle of a town somewhere, covered with dandelions, it must be asphalted and turned into a car park — because that site either is a part of the townscape or not, there is no in-between.

The second and third axiom of agrilogistics are clearly connected. Defining existence as constant presence is caused by the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which is closely connected to the history of global warming. The metaphysics of presence is the ineluctable enemy of future coexistence, as the deconstruction already explained. ‘Here is the field: I can plough it, sow it with this or that or nothing, farm cattle, yet it remains constantly the same. The entire system is construed as constantly present, rigidly bounded, separated from nonhuman systems.’[11] This metaphysics of presence causes valuing existence for itself, regardless of the quality of that existence. ‘Agrilogistic existing means just being there in a totally uncomplicated sense. No matter what the appearances might be, essence lives on. Ontologically as much as socially, agrilogistics is immiseration.’[12] This is a way of thinking that basically prefers flat and monotonous to everything multicoloured, complex, lush and varied. Everything simple, clear and uniform is useful, the rest is dangerous, because it is enigmatic and mysterious, ambiguous and full of contradictions.

Therefore Morton insists that a prerequisite to future coexistence is axiom awareness. As long as they function unconsciously, they cannot be banished, because they are utilized automatically like divine preordination. ‘Future coexistence […] accepts contradiction and ambiguity.’[13] This also means that there is no single recipe that would suit everyone identically and that could be exported as a ready-made package, like ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ have been exported. The export of a package in itself would be agrilogistical. There is no need to go forward or backward from agrilogistics. Instead, we need different structures, different temporalities. Those structures and temporalities do exist right now, sometimes quite visibly, sometimes still invisibly. But to find and amplify them, we need another possibility space that is simultaneously both astonishingly more ancient and excitingly more innovative than agrilogistic space.

4

The arche-lithic — who has heard of such an era? Is it historical or prehistorical? When did it begin? Has it ever ended? Did the Neolithic cancel the arche-lithic? Or has the arche-lithic come to replace the Neolithic?

A cluster of questions bursts out of just one word which is similar to a couple of others. The Neolithic, Mesolithic, Palaeolithic — these are different stages of the Stone Age, because the Greek λίθος means stone. All those lithics are the brainchildren of archaeologists, because rummages in the layers of ancient times don’t unearth items made of wood or leather, which is why we are under the impression that the artefacts of the time were always made of stone. In any case, that lithic is a lost time, the job of the archaeologists is to search for the lost time, from much farther afield than the lost time of Marcel Proust’s — from beyond ancient memory. Now and again it may evoke mystical experiences in them, an uncanny feeling that the immemorable antiquity is right here, within our reach; and touching a fractured artefact might bring you in contact with it. But that feeling is fleeting and passes soon. The excavated stone age will not return. In truth, it has never left, it is hidden underground and won’t give itself up that easily, simple shovelling is not enough.

The arche-lithic however is something completely different. ‘First peoples don’t live in a smoothly functioning holistic harmony without anxiety,’ writes Timothy Morton. ‘They coexist anxiously in fragile, flawed clusters among other beings such as axes and horses, rain and spectres, without a father sky god or god-king. They coexist elementally. Yet because anxiety is still readily available — because agrilogistics has far from eliminated it — the divergence is an unstable, impermanent construct. We glimpse the space of the arche-lithic, not some tragically lost Palaeolithic.’[14] The arche-lithic is not a lost stone age, but persistence of stone age, not exactly as a massive presence, but, on the contrary, as an ambiguous sense that the present day is also spectral, just an overgrown, powerful opinion. ‘The arche-lithic is a possibility space that flickers continually within, around, beneath and to the side of the periods we have artificially demarcated as Neolithic and Palaeolithic. The distinction of Neo versus the Paleo is evidence of a whole social and ecological programme. … [The arche-lithic] is not a proper name insofar as it doesn’t designate something that has proper boundaries with distinct and rigidly definable properties, let alone propriety. The arche-lithic is not the past.’[15]

Morton derives the arche-lithic from Jacques Derrida’s arche-writing, which the philosopher developed in his masterpiece Of Grammatology (1967). ‘Derrida’s book is a magnificent, strange, and profound exploration of the way the shimmering quality of what he calls writing has been blocked and demonized. “Writing” isn’t just scratching marks on surfaces. It’s the way a differential play, the tricksy play of nothingness, is in operation everywhere, producing and dissolving distinctions. Such distinctions aren’t only epistemological, having to do with language and thought, but also ontological, having to do with what Derrida forcefully calls “flesh and blood”.’[16] Arche-writing predates the strict differentiations between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, ‘a haunting ecological vibration already hums within the notion of arche-writing, despite many readers’ attempts to put Derrida in a box called idealism or scepticism or antirealism. The term arche-lithic only makes this hum a little louder, causing what is already the case to become explicit.’[17]

We could say that the arche-lithic is our own stone age — it’s the stone age in which we too live, because it isn’t subject to linear time. ‘The arche-lithic is the space of the trickster,’ Morton says elsewhere[18], i.e. it is rather a mythical space, which is there even without existing. If the agrilogistic space means war against everything accidental, the tireless weeding, the drying of bogs and marshes, the killing of creepy-crawlies, the electrification and asphalting of the whole land, the arche-lithic space is never that unambiguous. Here you could have this and that, black and white, clarity and dimness, and nothing has to stay incontrovertibly one and the same. Our garden can also be our forest, our town can also be our park, our shopping centre can be our greenhouse. Nothing has been definitively decided yet. If the hangars of modernity are crumbling, it means the end of only one world, which wasn’t worth persisting. To find the arche-lithic, we don’t have to go anywhere. The arche-lithic is already here, without being present. Timothy Morton’s weird essentialism and his dark ecology invigorate that realisation.

Footnotes

[1] See Sartre, J.-P. 2007. Eksistentsialism on humanism (Existentialism is a humanism), p. 24. Sartre explains his maxim, ‘We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature.’

[2] To be precise, Popper speaks about ‘methodological essentialism’, which he contrasts with methodological nominalism, ‘Instead of aiming to find out what a thing really is, its true nature, methodological nominalism aims at describing how a thing behaves, and especially, whether there are any regularities in its behaviour.’ Popper, K. 1945. The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. 1. The Spell of Plato, p. 26.

[3] Morton, T. 2016. Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence, p. 64.

[4] Ibid. p. 98.

[5] Ibid. p. 65.

[6] Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, p. 139.

[7] Ibid. p. 139.

[8] Morton, T. 2016. Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence, p. 35.

[9] Ibid. p. 46.

[10] Ibid. p. 46.

[11] Ibid. p. 48.

[12] Ibid. p. 51.

[13] Ibid. p. 143.

[14] Ibid. p. 80.

[15] Ibid. p.80.

[16] Ibid. p.80.

[17] Ibid. p.81.

[18] Ibid. p.87.