haptic – Animate Assembly

Entry: Human Perception and The Animated World

Human perception in an animated world is explored in an essay. [©TT]

Human Perception and The Animated World

Animation carries a range of connotations in contemporary ocularcentric culture. The term is getting more difficult to define, as animation becomes more deeply interwoven into our ubiquitous computational information society. The accumulating number of moving images that pervade our screens impact on how we understand and experience the world, not just optically but multisensorially too. The question addressed here is how we perceive moving images in terms of “somatosensation”.[1] This topic has long been discussed in the fields of science (biology, psychology, and neuroscience) as well as the humanities (art, philosophy, anthropology and sociology). One of the prime focuses is on the information processing of digital computational images, relating it to technical and organic cognitive systems used in neuropsychological approaches, something I have discussed elsewhere.[2] In this paper, I have one additional consideration to make in this context, the question of how ‘our body’ perceives the animated world from the phenomenological approach. The aim of this paper is to unpack the complex production process of ‘visual fields’ of human perception and to consider its relationship with ‘the visual world’ we live in from both neuropsychological and phenomenological approaches. To help address this issue, I particularly try to shed light on the role of the producers of visual representations, such as draughtsman, painter, and animator’s production processes of the drawing objects.

It is, therefore, helpful to begin by revisiting one of the fundamental mechanisms of human perception: the relationship between retinal vision and the process of drawing objects. Heinrich Wolfflin articulated the characteristics of the linear and the painterly in drawings. For him, a draughtsman produces a form which is “essentially objective in outlook” in relation to the objects. Conversely, an artist creates a form which is “more subjective in attitude, bases the representation on the picture, in which the visual appearance of things looks real to the eye, and which has often retained so little resemblance to our conception of the real form of things”.[3] He, therefore, clearly categorises drawings in two ways: the draughtsman’s linear form and artist’s painterly form: the linear form lies in the pictorial form (the representation and object are identical) and the painterly form (the drawing no longer coincides to the geometric lines of objects) which is largely based on subjective sensitivities.

Wolfflin further considers that the “line has an element of physical grasping”, which implies that “the eye performs the operation of the hand which feels along the body, and the modelling which repeats reality in the gradation of light also appeals to sense of touch”.[4] Eventually, Wolfflin conceives that, as art developed, the appearance and tactility become less important and the shift from linear form to the painterly form led to “a triumph of seeming over being”.[5] Wolfflin’s distinction between the two types of drawing is admirable, but there might need to be further consideration. It is clear that the creation of drawings can be influenced by the drawer’s subjective knowledge and experience, but this does not mean that tactility through the hand (and so the body) will be diminished in painterly form. Rather, there might be a shift from the quality of tactility which evokes direct-physical touch (‘grasping’ in physiological state), to tactility which involves ‘mental’ touch. Furthermore, the mental touch in tactility can also be found in linear form.

As Pallasmaa argues

“When sketching an imagined space, or an object being designed, the hand is in a direct and delicate collaboration and interplay with mental imagery. The image arises simultaneously with an internal mental image and the sketch mediated by the hand. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the thought, or a consciousness of an intention. In a way the image seems to draw itself through the human hand”.[6]

Hence, the tactility (physical grasping and mental touch) plays in both linear and painterly forms and, as Pallasmaa remarks, the lines are not just representation of the object, but also representation of thought, imaginary and tactility, producing though the human hand. The lines can, therefore, be said to be an abstracted form of our mind.

Tim Ingold brings this into another observation of the lines – the abstract line. Drawing on Kandinsky’s claim on ‘the spiritual in art’, Ingold demonstrates that “the abstraction does not mean draining a work of content”.[7] Kandinsky considers the abstraction means taking away all the external elements of things (outer appearances) so as to unfold their ‘inner necessity’.[8] For Kandinsky, this process brings about a way in which “the life force that animates them and that, since it animates us too, allows us to join with them and experience their affects and pulsations from within”.[9]

This idea can be supported by an episode of Hayao Miyazaki’s drawing. Miyazaki is an internationally well-known animator. Studio Ghibli’s producer, Toshio Suzuki, demonstrates Miyazaki’s distinctive skill as an animator, of which we can find evidence in the drawings of Totoro.[10] The most important character of Totoro is its organic feeling. The feeling of Miyazaki wanted to create was expressed by drawing “Totoro’s tum” which should be “naturally” or “organically”[11] bent by pushing. The feeling of touch should be real in the full sense of the experience. He uses only simple lines and contour to create Totoro. Suzuki asserts that many complex lines and detailed information do not work, rather destroy Totoro’s “inner necessity”.[12]

https://twitter.com/i/status/1223507353569333248 [a short video clip]

But how can ‘the inner necessity’ animate the drawing and us? How can our affective feelings be evoked by the abstract lines? To address this question, it could be useful to explore further the selectivity of information processing in human perception. A Japanese neuroscientist, Kenji Tanaka, discovers that there is, what he calls an “image simplification process” in our brain’s neuron activities.[13] This is an activity where neurons produce an initial rough categorisation of the image of the objects and then single out its details later.[14] A French cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, also conceives that when we perceive objects, our neurons detect their characteristic configurations first and then an identity what the object is.[15] What is common to both scientists is that in our cognitive process, there is a selective process, which is a process of abstracting core information from the whole sensory data sources in order to produce a completed perception of the objects. The core information in this context can be also relevant to Kandinsky’s ‘inner necessity’. The abstract line can, therefore, contain ‘inner necessity’ which animates the objects and evokes affective feelings.

It is, however, clear that we perceive not just with optics, but with multiple senses in the whole body. Our perception, the body and the environment continuously influence each other. We often imagine, as Ingold remarks, that it is assumed that “things are perceived from a stationary platform…[B]ut in real life, for the most part, we do not perceive things from a single vantage point, but rather by walking around them”.[16] For him, ‘locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity’.[17] How we perceive an object, therefore, depends on from where we see it (for example, perspective). The body is never static and fixed as a living organism as it is in continuous interaction with the environment. Hence it can be said that the living body is in constant animation.

The question here is, then, how can we as the ‘living’ body, apprehend our spatial perception?[18] To further this inquiry, I would like to address the relationship between the living body and the ocular process. There is a biological mechanism of human retinal perception which lies in the oculomotor system. When we see an object, it is hugely significant to ‘maintain a steady gaze’. Suzan R. Barry explains that we tend to believe that we sense the world first, and then we react, it is not true, since “we cannot perceive the world in any detail without moving at the same time — Perception and movement are intimately linked in a continuous two-way conversation”.[19]

Hence, to see an object clearly, as Barry argues, we need to develop a stable gaze not just while we are still, but also while we are in motion. How can we keep a stable gaze? Imagine when you keep looking straight ahead, then move your head left and right. Your eyes move in an opposite direction from your head movement. In this situation, the oculomotor system plays a central role. This is a mechanism, a compensatory eye movement, called the vestibular organs (the otolith organs and semicircular canals) that sense the head movement and then send the information to neurons to stimulate the brain in order to move the eyes in a direction the opposite to that of the head. “This is the vestibulo-ocular reflex”.[20] Thanks to this system, we can keep a stable gaze in motion, therefore we can keep body balance and spatial perception. Another vital function to see an object is ‘saccades’ which is a rapid movement of both eyes in the same direction. Saccades are executed by the fastest movement of six extraocular muscles in the human body, occurring in as little as one-fiftieth of a second. Owing to saccades, we can perceive our spatial surroundings by ‘rapidly and continually glimpse, recompose, remake visual data, piecing it together in order to constitute a continually experienced “visual field”’.[21] The visual fields here include both ‘still image’ as well as ‘moving image’. What is striking to know about our capacity to see is that “if the image of an object on your retina does not move at all, it fades away”.[22] Our eyes need to be continuously moving to retain a stable gaze in order to perceive the world. This suggests that we/our perception already always live in/with the animated/animating world. Furthermore, as Barry suggests, “we perceive an object by combining information from the eyes and other senses into a perceptual whole and directing your movement according to what you sense”.[23] Hence, we can integrate a range of information though the multisensory capacities of the body in order to perceive an object in the environment.

Our perception is, however, not only constructed by the bodily sensory system, but also by our memory, experience and tacit knowledge as mentioned earlier. Although there is as yet no scientific, neuropsychological or neurophysical evidence of the precise mechanism of the interconnectivity (for example, in a complex neuron network) between the biological sensory system and our memory, knowledge and experience, “it is almost a truism that we perceive not with the eyes, the ears or the surface of the skin, but with the whole body”.[24] Nevertheless, the debates of how our perception can be constituted and be influenced by memory, experience and tacit knowledge have been developed by many thinkers and critics. For example, Deleuze’s theory of time-image cinema[25] which is largely influenced by Bergson’s exploration of Matter and Memory.[26] The memory is also particularly important for Bernard Stiegler, especially its constitutive relation to technics. He argues that with the development of computational technical memory aids, human memory today is more and more exteriorised and expanded. Technical devices and systems systematically order human memories. Stiegler writes, “This is particularly apparent in the transition from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies[27] – from individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large-scale technological systems or networks that organize memories”.[28] Computationally organised memories consequently become “the new technological forms of knowledge”,[29] which provides a new way of seeing and perceiving the world. This process, conversely, “engender[s] a loss of knowledge”.[30] This is what Stiegler calls, pharmakon, which refers to the paradoxical double meaning: cure and poison. Thanks to technology, we expand our memories and knowledge, but at the same time, the dependence on the externalisation of memories reduces our immanent capacity to organise memories and knowledge, then we eventually become isolated from them. We forget techniques and tacit knowledge in an automated society. We lose our ‘own’ perception of the animated world.

A similar fear of the dangers of the computational technical systems can be found in Pallasmaa’s claims about “the computerized hand” in architecture design process.[31] He emphasises that “the computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent multi-sensory and synchronic capacity of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal survey”.[32] Both Stiegler and Pallasmaa sound the alarm on losing our immanent human capacity of perception. Pallasmaa further stresses the importance of directness in hand-drawing to create a haptic connection between the object (its representation) and the designer’s mind (her/his perception). For him, “the computer drawing is a mediated construction”.[33]

This diminishing capacity of human perception is perfectly captured by his description of how the craftsmanship should be.

“The craftsman needs practices to develop specific relationships between thought and making, idea and execution and action and matter, learning and performance, self-identity and work, pride and humility”.[34]

Although he applied this suggestion to the craftsman, we could also include animators, draughtsmen, even artists, in effect all of us who live in a hypomnesic computational society. What is crucial in this message is the importance of avoiding unintended integration of human conscious and perception with algorithmic reasoning and thinking: it is, therefore, essential to improve our ‘craftsman’s’ techniques and their spirits – craftsmanship. Hence it could be ventured if we could remain like a ‘craftsman’ who is not totally contaminated by the huge networked computational system (the ‘attention economy’), it would enable us to live a dignified human life and to continue to ‘perceive’ the ever-changing animated world.

Tomoko Tamari

[1] Paterson 2017: 25. Paterson, Mark. “Architecture of Sensation: Affect, Motility and the Oculomotor”. Body & Society 23 (1) (2017): 3–35.

[2] Tamari, 2021, forthcoming.

[3] Wolfflin, 2003: 53, emphasis in original. Wolfflin, Heinrich. “Linear and Painterly”. In The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History. Edited by Angela Dalle Vacche, 51–5. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

[4] Wolfflin, ibid. 56.

[5] Wolfflin, ibid. 54.

[6] Pallasmaa, 2009: 91–2. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Thinking Hand, Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009.

[7] Ingold, 2013: 135. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

[8] Kandinsky, 1982: 160, cited in Ingold, 2013: 135. Kandinsky, Wassily. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol. 1 (1901-1921) and 2 (1922-1943). Edited by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo. London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

[9] Ingold, 2013: 135.

[10] My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) is a Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli in 1988. Totoro is the main character and a seemingly forest spirit.

[11] Suzuki, 2010. ‘The producer, Toshio Suzuki talks about Studio Ghibli’s Production’, IT Media Business Online, 25 Nov 2010. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/makoto/articles/1011/25/news024_5.html (accessed 20 August 2020)

[12] Suzuki, ibid.

[13] See Dehaene 2009: 133–4. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in The Brain, The New Science of How We Read. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

[14] Dehaene, 2009: 133.

[15] Dehaene, ibid.

[16] Ingold, 2011: 45.

[17] Ingold, 2000a: 166, cited in Ingold 2011: 46.

[18] A moving image has to be understood as a phenomenon of movement not only in space, but also in time. Considering time in relation to cognitive process is particularly important to understand the interdependent relationship between consciousness and non-consciousness (see Hayles, 2017: 41 onward and 2021, forthcoming). The debate on time (timing) in affect has also been discussed in a great deal in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, film theory and media theory, such as Brian Massumi’s “the missing half second” (Massumi, 2002). A number of books, such as Timing of Affect, Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics (2014) and A Tenth of A Second, A History (2009), are also important. For the purpose of this paper, I only focus on space and will consider issues related to time in another paper in the future.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002; Angerer, Marie-Luise, Bernd Bosel and Michaela Ott (eds). Timing of Affect, Epistemologies of Affection. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014; Canales, Jimena. A Tenth of A Second, A History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

[19] Barry, 2009: 70. Barry, Susan R. Fixing My Gaze, A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[20] Barry, ibid. 77.

[21] See, for example, Burr and Morrone, 2004 on saccades, cited in Paterson, 2017: 7.

[22] Barry, 2009: 71.

[23] Barry, ibid. 75.

[24] Ingold, 2011: 45. According to the experimental psychologist, Makoto Ichikawa, we know that we have many types of illusions and their elements and characteristics, but we do not exactly know why human perception creates illusions and the mechanism in human perceptual system. https://yumenavi.info/lecture.aspx?GNKCD=g000191 (accessed 23 August 2020)

[25] For Deleuze, an image is infused with time. The time is an important axis to articulate memories. See his book, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2, The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

[26] Bergson writes, “there is no perception which is not full of memories” (Bergson, 1986 [1911]: 11). Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986 [1911]: ix. https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/matter-and-memory.pdf (accessed 28 August 2020)

[27] Mark Hansen elaborates on Stiegler’s terms: mnemotechniques refers “the artificial storage of individual memories that characterises hypomnesis from ideogrammatic writing to the print revolution”; mnemotechnologies means “the embedding of memories within technological systems that systematically order memories according to their own logics” (Hansen, 2010: 65). Hansen, Mark. “Introduction in Memory (Stiegler)”. In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, 66–87. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory”. In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

[28] Stiegler, 2010: 67.

[29] Stiegler, ibid. 67.

[30] Stiegler, ibid. 67.

[31] Pallasmaa, 2009: 95.

[32] Pallasmaa, ibid. 97.

[33] Pallasmaa, ibid. 97. It is, however, almost inevitable for us to take for granted ‘being-with-the machines’ in contemporary life of digital information society. Therefore, Pallasmaa insists, “The craftsman needs to embody the tool or instrument, internalize the nature of the material, and eventually turn him/herself into his/her own product, either material or immaterial”. (ibid. 53).

[34] Pallasmaa, ibid. 5.

Entry: Fell

Video and essay encompass each other. [©RM]

Meet-cute with a tree

Birch, Scots pine, bog myrtle, bracken, creeping ladies’ tresses, glittering wood moss and clumps of yolky chanterelles people this forest. There is no back or foreground. The forest is continuous, alive. Trees communicate with each other, share food and drink, send warnings, protect the young and old and weak.

That day, the forest was a stage. It was still, any slight breeze broken by the tree canopy; the birdsong and distant noise of people walking their dogs happened off stage. The ground in the forest was not flat, nor were the trees all upright. I steadied my camera on a monopod, watching, listening. Listing too, balanced on the edge of a deep rectangular pit, all that remained of a long abandoned house. The pit was full of wood moss and bracken, but still, I might have sprained an ankle had I tripped on a root and over-balanced. I wanted to catch hold of the dead tree standing by me on a shard but it wouldn’t hold my weight. It was rotting, giving life to other trees, ants, mycelium, bugs and birds.

Fell opens with a meet-cute between a man and a large branch of a tree. A meet-cute is a technical term in cinema for the first meeting between two protagonists who will form a romantic bond later on in the film. A man enters the frame, pushes and is pushed, easing the tree over without breaking it. Each body moves and is moved by the other. The tree branch seems to come to life in the human caring for it, in the gentle handling of its human-life-like limbs and scale. The man’s clothes, gloves and shoes form a protective barrier but also suggest a dignity and respect—this isn’t about the man trying to be subsumed into the forest, into wild nature, or the tree becoming an extension of the man.

The bough swinging between limbs and hands, the whistle of air and wind, the rhythm of breathing, the cracking bark muffled by soft, spongy undergrowth, is a dance of life and death. For a while, the dead wood becomes animated for the camera. The tree comes alive, but of course it is already, even though it is dead. No longer recognizably oak, ash, birch or pine, the skeleton will soon be covered in borrowed foliage, home to insects, birds and mammals. Matter is animate, vibrant even. Sapped of its own life, the tree lives on in others, imbibed through soil, fungi, lichen, worms, water and air, in the entangled forest biome.

The camera imposes a frame and time that brings into focus this movement, this anima of the forest. The anima happens somewhere between the man, the dead tree, the forest, and the observer. The anima at work in the interdependent lives of the forest is revealed to the observer in the intimate dance of man and tree. The observer, through the presence of the camera, becomes a part of the ecology of the wood, at the very least its psychic ecology. Fell suggests a kind of animation at work in the wood, in and around and outside the image. It is reassuring somehow, to watch and be part of this play, a play with image capture and carbon capture, a play with words. Is it erotic? Is this dead or alive, play or serious? I can be enamoured with instead of enarmoured against the world.

Within the frame, the objects—human, trees, branch, floor—are in motion. The film is not exactly animation or live action—maybe a kind of resuscitation. In stop frame animation objects are moved or manipulated between shots to produce an illusion of movement. Here the manipulation happens in front of the camera. The life of the branch takes a new turn in the hands of the performer and the eyes of the beholder. Filming anything is a move to animate, to activate, to put something in motion, twice or even thrice over: in the act of filming, in the anticipated future watching, feeling and reflecting. But then, you might say, everything is animation. So what is the opposite of animation? Inanimate is not the same as no longer animate—stopped, halted, poised or paused. The still image is obviously not the opposite, but a part of the picture, the frozen image of the not-yet animated, not yet activated.

Animation and ecology

Would the ivy on my wall grow over my hand if I sat still long enough? I’ll never see the tree grow but only grown, except in natural history documentaries using time-lapse video. Life and death in the forest is bound up with the movements of microscopic mycelium, sap rising, worms, squirrels, mice, insects, humans and everything else. Digital animation (of all kinds) is often used to help describe current knowledge of the various movements of the natural world which are at scales too small or large, slow or fast for humans perceive. This isn’t what I mean though. The anima of the forest is more than the sum of its movements. To know something of the living forest you have to spend time in it, to move about in it, to breath it, to smell and feed from it, to be a creature of the respiring, unobserved life of the forest. And then, to imagine the movements of the infinitely small and infinitely large is a poetic leap of animation that our minds are quite capable of.

The artifice of animating still objects to make them look like they are moving sometimes feels like a way of repairing a lost capacity to connect with things in the world, to imagine and feel movements that we cannot or can no longer, perceive or understand. Humans are not outside or separate from the worlds we live in. “Nature” is a fraught category, often opposed to “culture”; some say nature is no longer, but others (and I concur) say it is everything, whatever word you decide to use. When we keep ourselves to ourselves, apart from the natural world, ignore it, stop caring, lose our feel for it, try to control, contain, bound nature, we lose track of ourselves. We lose, we are lost and a lot else besides.

So, what can animation do or mean in relation to ecology, or ecosophy? Ecosophie is a term coined by Félix Guattari, bringing ecology and philosophy together in one concept. In his book Les Trois Ecologies[1], Guattari argues for an ecosophy that attends to and seeks to repair the “three ecologies”: environmental, social and mental or psychic ecology. A collection of Guattari’s ecological writings is gathered in Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?[2].

Is animation only representation of movement? Or is it making something move that doesn’t move? Or wasn’t moving? It needn’t be only about representation or visual representation. You might animate someone or yourself with something, make it necessary for them or you to move. Push someone, edge them towards something, towards a feeling, a response, an appreciation, a love; make them and you care. And if you care, then well, you can do lots of things. This is a kind of animation, one aspect of activism. Activism implies the need for and possibility of transformation. Even when the odds are stacked against it, activism implies that by putting your body on the line to act in the service of a reimagined world you just might change other people’s minds and actions.

If animation is moving things that are still or dead, but nothing is dead, just altering from one state to another or dispersing like spores, cells, gases or atoms—then is everything already animated? Animation might be useful for appreciating the dead as living on, the still as about to move, artifice as lively, transformation as a possibility.

Animation for activism

“The extraction of toxic heavy metals for use in digital devices has [also] fuelled genocidal conflict around the world, and will likely render many environments uninhabitable.”[3]

I claim animation for purposes other than mining, electronics, Artificial Intelligence or warfare. I claim the real intelligence of animation, of the feelings and bodies that animate. I claim animation for making leaps of the imagination, for appreciating the in-between moments and the feel of things and for repairing broken worlds. Instead of touching the keyboard or screen, touch bark, touch a branch of a tree or stroke the surface of a leaf. Is it shiny or furry? Rough or smooth? Do the veins of the leaf spread off an axis, or gather to a point at the base of the leaf? Other things you can’t do with a screen: enjoy the dark—when edges are lost or blurred; be cold and shiver to warm up; tickle, wriggle or wrestle; sniff, taste, sting, rub, soothe, scrape, scratch or bite.

We shouldn’t reduce the physical living world to materiality. Ecology as animation imagines—elegantly, simply, correctly—matter as vibrant, tracing movement and feeling between things, living, dead or neither. It recognises that nothing is still or in one place or isolated, foreground or background.

I haven’t eaten this tree, but I have taken it into my body through love and touch and play. I haven’t turned it into wood by making a chair or a table, or a sheet of laminate to spread across the floor. The wood has its own story, or rather it doesn’t and nor do I. Story is how I make sense of it but actually it doesn’t need a story. We shared a place and moment, and then went our separate ways, forever tied together with gossamer threads of memory and dust and sweat.

Activists suspended high up, nesting in trees in ancient woodlands to prevent their destruction, draw on animism. They recognise a metaphysical challenge to opening a new coal mine, building an airport or railway line. Activists tying themselves to trees is a popular form of environmental activism in England since the activist Swampy in the 1980s climbed trees to protest against highway building. It is more widespread today, in France for example and in England against the building of the so-called HS2 High Speed Railway line (2020, http://stophs2.org/). These tree-dwellers are animated by a feeling, an understanding, that their lives are connected to the living, dying woods, that infrastructure is not man-made, but made together with and in the environment, with lives, matter, weather. And they care.

What is left for culture after ecology?

What and where are we as humans in this understanding of ecology? Are we just in the way, interrupting, destroying the animation, the regeneration or recovery of environments, the evolution and thriving of species? Do we think of culture as separate in order to believe we have made it by ourselves, as self-sufficient humans? Is this really where value comes from? Right now using our natural abilities, affordances, desires and learned skills to create food, medicines, artefacts, tools, buildings, shelters, social structures, rituals, is fraught with danger and risk. How can we appreciate contemporary culture at a time when humanity (by no means all humans) through capitalism is causing such destruction of the natural world and suffering?

I find it very hard sometimes to feel part of nature, even though I know intellectually and through many of my experiences that I am of course. It is often easier to recognise or identify with or through culture (that we often separate out from nature to pat ourselves on the back that we made such things). But we are similar to other life, and need to respond to and listen and be cared for by the lives around us, by the living environment. We are part of nature whether we feel it or not. But I love the pleasure of feeling it, experiencing it, seeking knowledge of it in whatever ways I can. Like other living beings—mammals and birds especially but also trees it turns out too—humans are very good at caring when we want to be. Sometimes we almost can’t help it.

We cannot afford to despair, otherwise who will care? Care don’t despair.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with anthropomorphism. It is not so good when it is about controlling or patronising or infantilising the other. But it can be a step towards caring, towards recognising the reality and subjectivity of the other and one’s own connection to things in the world that seem utterly strange and different and not-human. Isn’t it worse to make everything into a machine or a resource? That’s the dead-end of utilitarianism. If objects and other beings are given life (or rather their role in multiple livings is appreciated and recognised) then they can be loved sometimes or hated sometimes, but not ignored. It is a step on the way to appreciating and accepting the otherness and unknowability of another’s experience. A forest is a good place to start.

Perhaps in the beginning we made a clearing in the forest, a space to be human in and now the clearing has cleared away the forest.

We need the rustling of forests again, the long lives of trees, the air, food and weather they make. We can be part of the anima of the forest again with our swinging legs and arms and trunks, stumbling, mumbling, tumbling, falling; slipping, sliding, clambering, striding or resting. Our skin and bark, our voices and echoes, our breathing and the depths of the soil, the leaf litter, moss and lichen, let us lose and find ourselves among the trees.

Ruth Maclennan

[1] Félix Guattari, Les Trois Ecologies, (Paris: Galilée, 1989).

[2] Félix Guattari, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie? (Paris: Editions Lignes, 2018).

[3] Tim Ingold, Correspondences: Knowing from the Inside (University of Aberdeen, 2017), 21.

Glossary

Index

Animate Assembly

Entry: Human Perception and The Animated World

Glossary

Index

Animate Assembly

Entry: Fell