April 25: Andreas Weber
On an Excerpt from Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
Andreas Weber, in conversation with Kamea Chayne elaborating on the following excerpt from his book Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
“There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life-form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one in night. Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.”
The idea of the self or individual is important for me. It is, on one hand, something real in our experience, and not only ours, but also the experience of all these innumerable other biological selves, which are not humans.
On the other hand, self is only a transitory and fleeting state, and it's only possible because there is a continuous transformation of selves into others, which is actually a way to describe the ecosphere: as this giving rise to selves which then transform into other selves.
We are part of this.
So we have, on the one hand, the reality of our selves to a much higher degree in the biosphere than we thought. Before, we thought it's only the human rational self which is real, and the rest is something we don't know, and it's somehow material and neutral and it has no interest. But the world is full of these selves.
On the other hand, all these selves can only exist because they exist together and they exist through one another.
So you see, the self is broken, but it's broken in a way that it needs the other. It is always in the process of co-creation and co-construction, which is visible in the ecosphere. You can see that the ecosystem is a distributed self made of a multitude of individual subjects, continuously building up themselves and then melting into one another again.
So the self is real in the sense of the locus of experience, of emotions, of meaning, of the understanding of being alive. And on the other hand, it is not something absolute, autonomous, or sovereign which could be put into a polar opposition to the rest of the world because it is only an expression of the ongoing breathing relationships within this world.
It's very important to see these two aspects, and that they need one another. You can't pull out one of them or bank on one of them as our culture has done. So one idea was that the individual is absolute and it's only human and it stands against the world. And the other idea is that the self is an illusion, the self is a process, it's completely distributed. And though it is, it has both of these aspects which makes the experience of life not only possible but also interesting.
We know that we cannot exist in solitude, in isolation. We know that individuals are actually dividuals, which is a lovely language trick by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern.
We are always dividing and divided and sharing and shared. We are dividuals; we cannot be just an individual.
Edited for brevity and clarity