From A Secular Age to Mind Jazz
Our next book club on June 14th is taking a look at the work of William Irwin Thompson. Meanwhile, join the Weird Studies duo for "The Twin Peaks Mythos" June 8th.
First, I just wanted to thank everyone who participated in last week’s book club. If you missed it, you can join us asynchronously. The recording is posted below for paid subscribers. Read on for some philosophical commentary on the direction of the Mutations project and some updates on what we’re up to this summer.
During last week’s book club, a few of the participants were making connections between Charles Taylor’s work and other important philosophical texts, such as Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin (1949) and more recently Emanuele Coccia's gorgeously poetic Metamorphoses (2021).
Both Gebser and Coccia help us to think further afield with respect to Taylor's conclusions. With Gebser, the “barred door” that is the imminent frame of the secular age becomes a generative and creative tension that allows us to start imagining the shape of the aperspectival world. Meanwhile, Coccia's ecological thought helps us to explore emergent modes of transparent identity that are possible beyond both the "buffered" ego of the present and the "porous" self of the unperspectival past.
And how might Taylor’s rough sketch of a post-secular world align—or not—with contemporary experiments in “metamodern” spirituality? With Gebser’s writing on what he calls “praeligio” (i.e., an integrative spiritual mutation)? I find this to be one of the more interesting inquiries to arise out of recent Mutations calls and I’m keen to host a few metamodern spirituality panels on the show this summer.
Meanwhile, we have two events coming up.
The Twin Peaks Mythos
First, a new course. The Weird Studies duo Phil Ford and J.F. Martel return for The Twin Peaks Mythos on June 8th.
As they write,
“Think of those great director’s commentaries of the DVD era, but in the style of a Weird Studies episode…. The goal is to start thinking of the world of Twin Peaks as a “mythos” that transcends its source, much like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos—or even the Star Wars universe—long ago transcended its original fictional milieu to become hermeneutic devices for interacting with reality.”
I’m thinking MST3K meets weirding 101, or a David Lynchian Let’s-Play. To get an idea of what the class might be like, you can go all the way back to episode 2 of Weird Studies:
As Dale Cooper says to Sheriff Truman, “give yourself a present.” Hope to see some of you in The Red Room this week.
Next up is June’s book club: we’re going back to one of the philosophical inspirations for the Mutations project.
Mind Jazz with William Irwin Thompson
The next book we’ll be reading is William Irwin Thompson’s Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.
We’ll be meeting for a 90 minute discussion on Coming into Being (1996) on June 14th at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.
Thompson has been a formative thinker and literary inspiration for me. His “mind jazz” literary style had a significant influence on me while writing Seeing Through the World, and some of his texts, like At the Edge of History (1971), Passages About Earth (1974) and Imaginary Landscape (1990) remain some of my absolute favorite texts. Let’s just say that his books, like my writing playlists, remain in heavy rotation.
When I was just a kid, really, I had the opportunity to interview Bill about his work.1 He remained a mentor for me during my graduate program at Goddard, and we kept in touch, although not as much as I would have liked, until he passed away in 2020.
A little more recently my friend and colleague, Michael Garfield, interviewed Bill for his podcast Future Fossils.
Bruce Clarke, in his important book Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, introduces Thompson’s work this way:
“Cultural historian, essayist, and poet are some of the ways to indicate the intellectual and creative personae of Lindisfarne’s founder, but planetary visionary does more justice to the spirit of his efforts. Thompson brought literary and anthropological depth as well as cybernetic acumen to the mythic resonances of the Gaia hypothesis.”
“Planetary visionary” is apt. If you’re looking for a written introduction and interview with Bill’s work, check out Clarke’s discussion with him over on the Gaian Systems project.
Central to Bill’s thinking was an integrative weaving of intellectual and poetic endeavors. He called it wissenkunst, or “knowledge-art,” similar to the continuity between rigorous thought and poetry in Gebser’s own kulturphilosophie. Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association2, first as an intentional community in the 1970s and then as an intellectual fellowship in the 1980s, curating scientists like Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and Gregory Bateson with poets like Wendell Berry and philosophers like Francisco Varela.3
Lindisfarne’s anthologies, Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology and Gaia 2 — Emergence: The New Science of Becoming formalized these transdisciplinary riffs on planetary culture into essays, and books like Imaginary Landscape and Coming into Being creatively drew from the Lindisfarne fellowship, crystallizing into Thompson’s own schema on the evolution of consciousness.
Clarke writes this on Lindisfarne:
Focused on Gaia hypothesis and the concept of autopoiesis through a philosophy fostering planetary cultural dynamics, these intellectual events culminated an era of thought I treat as the time of the systems counterculture.4
More than ever, I believe, this investigation into planetary futures needs to continue. I’d like to imagine that my own work, and the Mutations project as an experimental work of “anti disciplinary” public philosophy, is dedicated to—and ever aspiring towards—the spirit of Gaian discourse initially pioneered at Lindisfarne.5 That discourse is intergenerational. If you’re reading this, you’re part of it too.
I’ve always been drawn to historical networks of thinkers, artists, and creators whose constellation signified a big “zap” of kaironic time: from the American Transcendental Club to the Oxford Inklings, Switzerland’s Eranos circle, California’s Esalen and the Lindisfarne Association itself. What was so important about each of them wasn’t the atomized genius of their members. It was their networked brilliance.
That’s the paradox that makes up the self: we, each and all, are a fecund plurality. Nothing we do or make is done sui generis. What appears on the surface as solitary genius obscures the mycorrhizal web beneath. This is the notion that I believe Coccia’s Metamorphoses is on about: the self is irreducibly Other, and the other, the self. We come face to face with the “aperspectival” self: all at once singular and porous.
When we turn from biology back to cultural phenomenology, we can start appreciating the notion of “combinatorial creativity,” and recognize that each individual is something closer to philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the “transindividual.” Historical fellowships like Lindisfarne demonstrate combinatorial creativity par excellence.
The aperspectival world is relational, and aperspectival thought emphasizes the interrelationships of organisms and agencies in between. Ecological thinking is meta-, not in terms of higher order thinking but thinking with the middle.
The prefix meta- is often used to reference metamodernism, or meta-thinking, which is often associated with higher order thinking (systems of systems). I’m not going to discount this definition, but I do contend that its hierarchical, abstract emphasis needs to be de-privileged.
Meta-, in my work, denotes ecological thinking and relational cognition, and not merely higher order abstractions.
Meta denotes thinking that has gotten its hand-mind in wet soil.
Meta denotes senseful embodiment and cognition.
In however small a way it might be, I’m grateful to be exploring these subjects with my readers, and furthering inquiries into how to realize planetary thinking and cognition in ourselves and our communities. I understand this project to be an experiment in mycorrhizal creativity and distributed fellowship.
Please stay tuned for more updates from this space as Mutations initiates a new season of initiatives, projects, and publications.
That’s it for now, mutants. See you on the call.
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