Andreas Weber - Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene

Untimely Meditations

1.THE AGONY OF EROS

Byung-Chul Han

2.ON HITLERSMEIN KAMPF: THE POETICS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Albrecht Koschorke

3.IN THE SWARM: DIGITAL PROSPECTS

Byung-Chul Han

4.THE TERROR OF EVIDENCE

Marcus Steinweg

5.ALL AND NOTHING: A DIGITAL APOCALYPSE

Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Hfer

6.POSITIVE NIHILISM: MY CONFRONTATION WITH HEIDEGGER

Hartmut Lange

7.INCONSISTENCIES

Marcus Steinweg

8.SHANZHAI: DECONSTRUCTION IN CHINESE

Byung-Chul Han

9.TOPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE

Byung-Chul Han

10.THE RADICAL FOOL OF CAPITALISM: ON JEREMY BENTHAM, THE PANOPTICON, AND THE AUTO-ICON

Christian Welzbacher

11.GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: A DIALOGUE

Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy

12.PORTRAIT OF THE MANAGER AS A YOUNG AUTHOR: ON STORYTELLING, BUSINESS, AND LITERATURE

Philipp Schnthaler

13.WASTE: A NEW MEDIA PRIMER

Roberto Simanowski

14.THE DEATH ALGORITHM AND OTHER DIGITAL DILEMMAS

Roberto Simanowski

15.LAW AS REFUGE OF ANARCHY: SOCIETIES WITHOUT HEGEMONY OR STATE

Hermann Amborn

16.ENLIVENMENT: TOWARD A POETICS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

Andreas Weber

Andreas Weber

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Enlivenment: Eine Kultur des Lebens: Versuch einer Poetik fr das Anthropozn in the series Frhliche Wissenschaft by Matthes & Seitz Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weber, Andreas, 1967 author.

Title: Enlivenment : toward a poetics for the anthropocene / Andreas Weber.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2019. | Series: Untimely meditations; 16 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018030684 | ISBN 9780262536660 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of nature. | Human ecology.

Classification: LCC BD581 .W3585 2019 | DDC 113dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030684

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Love is everywhere distinguished from its false semblances by the way in which one respects the independent reality of what one loves.

Raimond Gaita, The Philosophers Dog

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy

Many ideas in this book have their origin in fruitful meetings of my own research into biology as a story of unfolding relations and existential issues with a group of highly innovative commons activists and philosophers, at a time that in the future might be recalled as the heyday of Berlin commons thinking between 2010 and 2018. I am particularly grateful to Heike Lschmann (who coined the term enlivenment) and to David Bollier, who encouraged me to pursue my thoughts in English and opened some vital doors allowing me to do so, and hence, makes me experience commoning in a real sense. I am happy that Hildegard Kurt has been a companion on that track ever since, in various settings and projectsin a common search for new cultures of aliveness and for an ontology where self comes about through the blossoming of the other, and the other through the full realization of self. This is the ontology we already know through our bodies, and as commoners in a vast circle of giving, that of the ecosystem. It is with Alessandra Weber that I explore how it feels being the ecology. I am grateful for sharing on a daily basis how the leaves unfold and the opening buds crackle, and that commoning ultimately is a process of love.

This essay proposes a new perspective on humans relation with the sphere we commonly call nature. Throughout this book, I will approach both humans and nature in a way that dissolves the separation between the two categories. I will explore how we can begin to view all beings as participants in a common household of matter, desire, and imaginationan economy of metabolic and poetic transformations. I call this perspective enlivenment.

Every living beings identity unfolds as a transformation of the other through ones own self. This self emerges through perceptions and through being touched, through sensual exchanges, through symbols and metaphors, and through the impact of molecules and light, all of which somehow transfer their relevance to the ongoing self-creation of the body. All life, from its very beginning, is made up of such mutual transformations. Our existence in an ecosphere pervaded with life takes part in a vast commons even before we perceive our individuality. All subjectivity is already intersubjectivity. Self is self-through-other.

Each individual belongs to the world and is at the same time an owner of this worldan owner of this rough stone flecked by the waves, ruffled by the wind, caressed by gleams of light. All perception is a commons: a dance of interdependency with the world. The world belongs to us entirely, and at the same time, we are fully entrusted to it. It is only through this give-and-take that we become conscious of it and of ourselves. It is only through honoring this give-and-take in a manner that provides life that we can build our place in the world. This is the principle of embodied identity and of householding.

In what follows, I will develop a set of alternatives to some of the basic assumptions underlying our current worldview. In doing so, I will engage with the Anthropocene debate, and try to recalibrate its basic tendency to view our epoch as the beginning of a human-dominated Earth, in which our species de facto controls everything and humankind and nature are separated in principle but stand on the same level.

The idea of the Anthropocene is that we are living in a new geological era in which human culture has largely overtaken the biogeochemical realities of the earthly household; humans now dominate and control matter, energy streams, and the distribution and existence of biological species. The difference between humans and nature has been claimed to be resolvednot by recognizing that all living beings and living systems are subject to the same natural dynamics and creative principles, but by declaring that humans can assert mastery over all inanimate and animate nature on earth. In this way, the idea of the Anthropocene has overcome the dualism that has defined our culture at least for five hundred if not two thousand years. This is an epochal move, but it is one that could very well go in the wrong direction.

This essay is an attempt to imagine the end of dualism in a different way. It tries to dissolve the opposition between humankind and nature not by understanding all nature as something to be controlled, as something that lends itself to cultural practices because it has the same deep setup as human technology: a purpose-free process of emerging efficiency and optimization. Rather, I propose we understand the identity of humans and nature through a commons of creative transformation that underlies all reality and finds a particularly forceful expression in life. I argue that there can be no dualism, because the fundamental dimension of existence is already shared: it is