Compostings
Braidotti on Holding the Tensions of our Planetary Present
I’m introducing a new series here on Mutations. As a writer, reader, and academic, I often don’t know what materials will end up where. Will this citation make it into the new manuscript? Perhaps my (eventual) thesis? Podcast conversation? Blog post? What do I do with all my own literary fragments, scattered across analog books and note apps? For myself, and for my readers, perhaps a good composting practice is in order. Some will inevitably become good, healthy dirt for other projects. Others will sprout in surprising places. The life of the writer welcomes it all.
Holding the Tensions of our Planetary Present
“There are… complex process ontologies coming in to give us the transversal subject… but that transversality being able to sustain the effort to think [about] posthuman convergence.” - Rosi Braidotti
Recently I’ve been appreciating the insights of posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti. In this lecture, Braidotti speaks about the challenge of holding the enormous tensions and complexities of our planetary present. There are “zig-zagging patterns,” and “resonating causes and issues,” two of them being the fourth industrial revolution, or ‘cognitive capitalism,’ and the Sixth Great Extinction. Civilization is exploding and imploding, seemingly at the same time. Scientific and technological innovations intermix with sure-fire signs of imminent collapse. “These two events,” Braidotti says in the lecture, “are happening simultaneously… [this] is the posthuman challenge.” When Braidotti comments that we live, “really [in] the best of times and worst of times,” I am reminded of the philosopher Jean Gebser’s resonant insight that our moment of cultural mutation oscillates between states of “anxiety and delight.” To that end, Gebser suggests the analogy of the arrow on a string: to open the future, we must find a way to live in the middle of these tensions. “How to think such dissonance,” Braidotti asks, “such incredibly opposite events?” What seems to be needed is an ecological way of thinking and being friendlier to the tangle of paradox. In my forthcoming book (Fragments of an Integral Future), I call this “thinking [and being] with the root.” Such a way of thinking must be able to appreciate difference without imploding into atomizing relativism. It must be able to intuit a sense of the common, the whole, and perhaps even planetary, without falling into the Enlightenment trap of reductive universalism. This, for Braidotti, is the role of “posthuman knowledge,” and the emerging “transversal” subjectivity that it makes possible:
“[Such complexity and dissonance] demands skills of endurance, of imagination, and of transversal connectivity… Transversality is really the key here… You need to draw lines across events that are not similar at all, really. We need to look at these phenomena… the chain of socio-political effects… and try to steer a course, to have something productive, affirmative, to offer.”
The term ‘transversal’ comes from Felix Guattari, but it is very much present in the collaborative works between Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. There is something about this term that conveys a striking resonance with Gebser’s notion of “diaphaneity,” or transparency, which Gebser emphasized again and again as an ‘integrative’ mode of perception, a way of seeing through the interrelationships between things, and events, in what today we might call a process-oriented way. It is a perceiving, or shining through of the whole through the irreducible uniqueness of the multiple, and the singular. The tangle of interrelationships.
Transversality, Braidotti says, “draws lines across events that are not similar.” Like the rhizome, transversality undergrows neat, categorical distinctions. It grows towards the life of relation. Transversality is a way of seeing the multiple that coheres, rather than reduces, and finds relation rather than forcing synthesis. It has to do with ecological life, which is to say, the life of the middle.
How do we live the tensions and complexities of the present? Thinking of Jonathan Rowson’s recent article on the ambiguities of embracing meta-theory, one vital point of interjection, in my mind, is that we cannot ‘go meta’ without the transversal. Transversality helps us to avoid over-rationalizing the ‘meta-crisis,’ because it orients us towards a life of relation [in philosophical language, I would say, it offers a ‘relational ontology’]. Transversality does not require us to be academics, or, shudder to think, ‘galaxy brains,’ nor does it ask us to ‘resolve’ the meta-crisis in the manner of an intellectual problem. What it does seem to be asking us is to start living these tensions, and like the poet Rilke or the psychologist C.G. Jung understood, it is through bearing the opposites that new possibilities take root in our soul, and the future ripens in us.
Perhaps the immense complexity and paradox of our times is meant to spur on a mutation (a term Braidotti uses in the lecture), where we recognize that the only way to overcome the civilizational crisis of our present is to bring forward new forms of perception and subjectivity — call them ‘transversal,’ ‘integrative,’ ‘diaphanous,’ ‘nomadic’ — that encourage us to move towards what is embodied, what is in [actual, concrete] relation. It is a way of being that invites us, as Braidotti states, “to become in and with the world.”
Join me for ‘Integral Futuring: Reclaiming Time in the Radical Present’ - A New Online Course
“It is a question of what is future in us, that is, what is present to the same degree that all past in us is present... Our sole concern must be with making manifest the future which is immanent in ourselves.” - Jean Gebser
If you found the subject of this ‘compost’ meaningful or engaging, then consider joining me on the weekend of December 5th for a new online seminar: “Integral Futuring: Reclaiming Time in the Radical Present.” This three-day course offers an opportunity for an in-depth exploration of ‘integral futuring,’ a concept as well as a praxis developed in my forthcoming manuscript. Join a community of avid seekers, explorers, and practitioners who aspire to live the future in the present.
In this 3-part weekend seminar, participants will move between sense and story, theory and practice, as they begin to cultivate a way of seeing through the manifestations of the future—the ways in which the future is already living us, often as unintegrated and unconscious crisis—as they begin to cohere their own ‘medicine bundles,’ experimental practices of ‘integral futuring’ that link personal transformation with social and ecological.