Distributed Perception

Resonances and Axiologies

Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions, and axiologies of animal, human, and machinic perception/s? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word 'visibilities' to indicate that visual perception isn't just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio-temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events.

In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to vibrate with increasing amplitudes at certain frequencies of excitation. In cybernetics and in theories of technology, it refers to systems' feedback. In Native science, resonance denotes the axiology of positions and events. It's a form of multi-species perception that emphasises emergent directionality and protean mnemonics.

This transdisciplinary volume brings together key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art his- tory, and design informatics to examine: a) the becoming-technique of animal– human–machinic perceptibilities; and b) micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. The volume shows distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and peristence of plant, animal, human, and machine relations.

Part I

Entanglement

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157021-2

1 Relational philosophy

The stars are our relatives

Gregory A. Cajete

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157021-3

Introduction

The resonances Indigenous peoples developed with the cosmos – the constellations, the sun, the moon, and the planets in the night sky – reflect a relational philosophy and a belief that ‘the stars are our relatives’. In their cosmology – the creation of the earth and the evolution of human beings – Indigenous astronomies rely on myths about animals and human relationships with animals. The second largest group of Native myths are myths about the stars. They reflect the deeply felt sense that humans have both an ancient and a direct relationship with the stars. In a Pueblo myth related by the famed Santa Clara Pueblo artist Pabilita Velarde in Old Father, the Storyteller, Long Sash, the Pueblo cultural hero, leads his people on a journey to find the Pueblo homelands. Before the journey begins, Long Sash instructs his people in hunting, making clothes, and building shelters. The journey is arduous and the people must overcome many obstacles, the most difficult of which is their own intolerance. They stop in many places; in each they must overcome duress, doubt, and decide whether to go on. Finally, they complete the difficult journey and arrive at their present homelands. Their journey is written in the stars: Long Sash is Orion; the never-ending trail is the Milky Way; the stops on the journey are Castor and Pollux and the constellations of Cancer and Leo. In Indigenous traditions, stars visit the earth, too, and beings from the stars are incorporated in evolution myths (Miller 1997, pp. 176–177).

Because of their fascination with the heavens, and a strong sense of relatedness rooted in a pan-species epistemology, which cultivates axiological relationships of humans to the natural world through an inclusive taxonomy of ‘being alive’ where everything (every plant, rock, mineral, lake, or desert) has its own intelligence and creative process (Cajete 2000, p. 21), astronomical systems evolved by Native Americans were extensive. Western archaeologists have only recently begun to investigate star mythologies in a relatively new branch of science called archaeoastronomy. For example, in the last two and a half decades, several explorations have yielded a recognition that the great pyramids of Egypt may have been star aligned and utilised to communicate with the stars in the Pleiades. Evidence based on the calculation of star positions 3000 years ago indicates that three main pyramids were aligned to afford a view of the three central stars of the Orion constellation and were spaced in a geometric ratio to the stars in Orion’s Belt. Holes previously believed to be for ventilation purposes have been reinterpreted as viewing ports (Bauval and Gilbert 1994; Magli 2009). Much of the revitalised interest in the astronomy of ancient peoples commenced with the 1977 discovery of the Sun Dagger at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, where three inconspicuously placed slabs of sandstone form a dagger shape in the contrast of sunlight and shadow for a two-hour period around the summer solstice on 21 June. At the very centre of the dagger there is a spiral petroglyph carved in an indentation behind the stones, speculated to mark the 19-year cycle of the moon.

The Anasazi, careful and creative twelfth-century pre-Columbian builders, most likely used natural site alignments such as the Sun Dagger to determine the date of the winter solstice; alignments of windows, doorways, and niches in the walls of the circular ceremonial structures, Casa Rinconada and the Great Kiva at Pueblo Bonito, also in Chaco Canyon, suggest such use. They are not the only ones. In the ninth-century Toltec-Mayan structure at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán called the Caracol, the upper floor is speculated to have served the purpose of observing the settings and risings of Venus – the celestial embodiment of the god Quetzalcoatl – which shaped the Mayan calendars (Aveni 1993). Formations of stones and circles – called medicine wheels – were likewise constructed in Peru, in the US states of Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, and in the Canadian northwestern corner of the Great Plains. One of the oldest known, near Majorville in Alberta, dates to 2500 BCE – the time of the early Egyptian pyramids. Similarly, the Big Horn Medicine Wheel near Sheridan, Wyoming, and Moose Mountain Medicine Wheel in Saskatchewan, among others, are evidence of early Plains Indian observatory use. Cairns of stone on radial lines here mark key points which, when used as points on a sight line, give an accurate determination of the summer solstice (Landon 1993, pp. 27–34).

These elaborate forms of building and spatial technologies were, in Native science, as in Native astronomy, entwined with storied participation and the metaphoric mind. ‘Native science’ is a broad term which includes observation techniques, metaphysics, art, and practical technologies as well as ritual and ceremony. It has both a rational and a metaphoric aspect, rooted in direct, lived experience, and storied participation with natural landscape and reality (Cajete 2004, pp. 48–50). The metaphoric, pre-cultural mind – also called the ‘nature mind’ – is used to convey the world through symbols, creative, ecological, and integrative thinking, and ‘storying’ since, in Native science, causality reflects the belief that cause and effect go beyond the physical principles such as synchronicity and the action of natural energies and entities to include the transformation of energy to other forms and resonance with the order of the universe (49–52). The state of flux and its multidimensional, constantly re-forming cycles of interaction are quintessentially creative. Creativity, in all its forms, flows from what physicist David Bohm termed the “implicate order” – the inherent potential of the universe – into the ‘explicate order’ of “material and energetic expressions” ranging from “entire galaxies to the quarks and leptons of the subatomic world” (quoted in Cajete 2000, p. 15). Bohm initially developed the notion of the implicate order to explain the behaviour of subatomic particles. He suggested that subatomic particles that have once interacted can “respond to each other’s motions thousands of years later” when they are, literally, “light-years apart” (Bohm 1973, p. 140). This ability of an individual existent to interact with and reveal information about an(y) other existent is caused by unobserved sub-quantum forces that form a cross-material interconnectedness through enfoldment. For Bohm (1980), everything is enfolded into everything else; connections are non-local and cross-temporal. But what Bohm hailed as a “major breakthrough in human thought” had actually been “part of everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, MicMaq, Cree and Ojibwaj” and other Indigenous traditions for centuries (Peat 2005, p. 238). In Native science, which is a holistic process, the task of humans is to find an epistemic-experiential entrance into enfoldment and the flux of the world.

The French anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl termed such active perceptual and experiential engagement “participation mystique”. He used this expression to describe

the animist illogic of indigenous oral peoples for whom ostensibly “inanimate” objects like stones or mountains are often thought to be alive … and for whom particular plants, particular animals, particular places, persons and powers may all be felt to “participate” in one another’s existence, influencing each other and being influenced in return.

(Levy-Bruhl quoted in Abram 1996, p. 57)

The word ‘animism’ could be seen to perpetuate a modern prejudice, a disdain, and a projection of inferiority toward the worldview of Indigenous peoples. But if, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty contends, perception, at its most elemental expression, in the human body, is based on human participation in the world, both humans and the world are, for Merleau-Ponty, made of the same “flesh”, seen not as matter, mind, or substance but as “the concrete emblem of a general manner of being”, an element akin to earth, water, air, or fire (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 100), then it can be said that ‘animism’ is a basic human trait common to both Indigenous and modern sensibilities and that “all humans are animists” (Cajete 2004, p. 50). Given nature’s fundamental flux, Native science does not attempt to categorise firmly within the domains of ideas, concepts, or laws formed through an analysis bent on a specific discovery, as is the case with Western scientific analysis. Rather, all things, events, and forms of energy unfold and enfold themselves in the contextual field of the micro- and macro-universe. As conscious thinkers and tool-makers, capable of rational as well as metaphoric thought, human beings play a key role in finding, sensing, and conveying the resonance of multi-species perceptions and knowledges, necessary for the practice of deep ecology. These multi-species knowledges form an axiology based on four interdependent axes: storied participation, astronomical structures, place, and ceremony; community with the celestial beings; the relationship of plants to pan-species epistemology; and the relationship of animals to Indigenous cosmologies. In what follows, I offer a brief discussion of each of these four axes in order to delineate the basis of what, in broad terms, is Indigenous relational philosophy.

Storied participation, astronomical structures, place, and ceremony

Stories are an important social technology for explaining the interdependence of humans, nature, and the universe. The limits of popular Western thought often disallow the “deeper significance of story which correlates with scientific thought, such as quantum physics, chaos theory and systems theory” (Begay and Maryboy 1988, p. 277) and their pertaining ideas of cross-temporal, non-local interconnectedness. Stories often involve a journey to the stars; a meeting and a compact made with the star beings and the resulting gift of new knowledge the hero/heroine shares with the tribe. Compacts are important in a world of non-linearly causal events where every existent can exercise an influence on other existents through relationality. For example, in a Blackfoot legend, a young warrior hears beautiful music and women singing while he is hunting. He is entranced, follows the sound, and sees seven women and a large basket. He finds one of the women particularly attractive. As he begins to walk toward them, the girls jump into the basket and shoot up into the sky. The hunter reasons that he saw them near the day of the solstice, and makes a calculation of when they will return. The young women do indeed return. This time the hunter manages to catch his love’s arm before the basket ascends. After spending some time with him, the young woman falls in love with the hunter and takes him, in the star basket, to meet her father, the sun (Malville and Putnam 1993). Such stories complement the rational and practical dimension of Indigenous astronomy, such as the 365 markings etched deeply into stone in a hunters’ camping area in the Chihuahuan Desert in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, believed to be at least 15,000 years old, where the 365 markings are speculated to signify the number of days between the winter and summer solstices as well as indicating the equinoxes.

Both practical and social technologies are entwined with ceremony. In the Mound Builder cultures (or Mississippian traditions) where the star priest set the calendars, vestiges of solstice ceremonies continue to the present day. They are performed by the descendants of the Mound Builder cultures: the Choctaw, Cherokee, Cree, and other Southeastern Indigenous groups (Aveni 1993, pp. 125–126). Likewise, among the Plains peoples, a social and political leader was given the task of depicting the key events from one solstice to the next, using pictographs. Drawings and pictographs on animal hides and markings on canes were also used by the Cree to represent events in the night sky in order to know when to arrange ceremonies. These markings might show the time between one full moon and another and positions of stars or the sun in relation to other celestial bodies. The canes were also emblems of authority given to political leaders. Many of the petroglyphs on rock faces in the Southwest depict a sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Entanglement
• PART II: Plasticity
• PART III: Organology
• Index