New Course: World Without Opposite

"Ecology, Becoming, and the Makings of a New 'Self'" begins Oct. 27

Dear readers,

I am pleased to announce the launch of my new autumn course: “WORLD WITHOUT OPPOSITE: Ecology, Becoming, & the Makings of a New ‘Self’” begins on Sunday, October 27 and will run for five consecutive weeks.

Like many thinkers who I greatly value and appreciate, I am of the conviction that we are in the midst of a world view transition. What this new world view seems to entail is a dramatic re-ordering of the boundaries between self and world, human and more-than-human, space and time. Established orders are getting melted down into quicksilver with kairotic intensity. Times, as they say, are “weird.” It seems that everything is up for re-negotiation.

There are, however, certain themes that many thinkers suggest are coming to the fore. I am of the ‘camp’ that these themes have to do with a move back towards ecological thinking. Tyson Yunkaporta calls it “kinship mind.” Jean Gebser described it as an “integral” or “aperspectival” attitude. Gloria Anzaldua suggests we see these times as nepantla — a time between world views and realities — and proposes that we embrace an identity as creative “shapeshifters,” la naguala. The shapeshifter inhabits a state of radical relationality with the world. It is only from this state—of moving and becoming with things in radical relation— that the possibility of healing and regeneration can take place.

How do we learn to live in a “world without opposite,” let alone perceive our world as such? In this course, I propose we embark on an odyssey of ecological homecoming. Gebser suggests that the “new” world view, if it exists at all, is already present. How, then, can we draw on these latent themes? Find them already taking to seed and root in our souls? Perhaps they are like so many threads—they compose our chrysalis.

As I see it, the new world view has something to do with an interrelated triptych:

I. spiritual transparency (“diaphaneity”)
II. ecology, and
III. time

These themes, like the traces of a wider and wilder sense, help to orient us in a time of deep confusion and sheer world view vertigo. They gift us with the sense that things are coalescing, that present in us individually and collectively is a certain movement: the Cartesian ego is cracking open into the cosmos, but underneath that husk something we are surprised to find something rootish and tentacular. Something in us is enlivened by this chance to follow the waterways, to find its way towards new life. The abstract world of the moderns, who divided the Earth into neat maps of latitude and longitude, has bottomed out into a far more dynamic Gaian realism. It is dawning on many of us in the so-called ‘modern’ world that what we imagined to be the “self” is far more distributed than we previously imagined. In the words of Kim Stanley Robinson,

“We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view.” (New Yorker)

The new world view has had many proponents. Arguably it is not even ‘new.’ From the proto-process thought and poetry of the German Romantics to the Bergson’s “thinking with time,” to the experimental techniques of the cubists to the rhizome of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a new world view has long been in the making. This course draws from many of the aforementioned sources to help us find our place ‘in time’ and bring many of these themes towards their immanent fruition.

We will familiarize ourselves with how time has become the predominant concern—and anxiety—of the modern world.

We will come to make connections between the new philosophies of becoming and modernist art, connecting those in turn with the ecological thought of Gaia theory—all in an effort to catalyze our own perceptual shift.

What comes to the fore, I suggest, is a way of perceiving nature in such a way that both self, and world, subject and object, become transparent. Humanity and nature form an unthinkable continuity, an irreducible and open relation. It is from here, in the middle of things, that we begin to find the footfalls and traces that lead us on to more habitable futures.

Join me for this five week exploration. It starts Sunday, October 27 at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.

If you need a student discount, please reach out. No one will be turned away.

See our class schedule below.

Paid subscribers: stay tuned! I will be following up with you all this week with an update, an excerpt from the Fragments manuscript, and the schedule for our Mutations salon calls.

Thank you, all, for your tremendous support. I am excited to be back ‘in the mix’ with you. Back in the middle.

You can continue to support this project by becoming a paid subscriber, offering a one-time donation, or simply subscribing, liking, and sharing these articles in your networks. Thank you for making this all possible.

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Schedule

Origins

I - Philosophies of Becoming: Ways of Thinking and Being in an Ecological Worldview

II - We Have Always Been in the Middle of Things

Transformations of Consciousness

III - The World Without Opposite: An Ecological Triptych

IV - Becoming Human, Becoming Animal: Metamorphosis, Spinoza, and Nature’s Nature

Coming to the Roots of the World

V - Holding the Flowers of Transparency

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Summer of Solitude Comes to a Close

This past week I’ve been transitioning out of an unusually hermetic summer season. New England summers are mild things, with fair weather and comfortable evenings. If you leave your windows open at night, you’ll hear troops of barred owls taking turns with their calls, passing by in the midnight hours with song.

I am glad to say that, with much thanks to your ongoing support, the Fragments manuscript is inching nearer to completion.