May 10, 2017
Participatory Inquiry, episode 85: Werewithall
“In a network, in transition, we gathered our wits and
with — our wherewithal and werewithall.”
@johnkellden
Where Am I? What’s The Time?
“If we are ourselves in question in the very unfolding of our life, it is not because a central non-being threatens to revoke our consent to being at each instant; it is because we ourselves are one sole continued question, a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What things could you happen, what new becomings would you be able to see, if your ongoing questions and lines of inquiry, would include a rekindling of a lived body seamlessly related to a living world?
“The recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded.”
— David Abram
Traversing Adjacent Possible Landscapes
“…if there is a relation of the visible with itself that traverses me and constitutes me as a seer, this circle which I do not form, which forms me, this coiling over of the visible upon the visible, can traverse, animate other bodies as well as my own. And if I was able to understand how this wave arises within me, how the visible which is yonder is simultaneously my landscape, I can understand a fortiori that elsewhere it also closes over upon itself and that there are other landscapes besides my own.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What relations can I enact and re-enact,
between my circles of concern,
influence and confluence?
“As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies — supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind.”
— David Abram
To The Virtuous and the Pathfinding
- We made it.
- What happened?
- We happened.
“It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor — where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Is there an english language with a healthy and wholesome understanding moving beyond empire?
Combinations making for both virtue and path?
Virtuous Embeds, Biosphere Paths
“It is, indeed, nothing other than the biosphere — the matrix of earthly
life in which we ourselves are embedded.”
— David Abram
Naming Ourselves Sonorous
“How are we to name, to describe, such as I see it from my place, that lived by another which yet for me is not nothing, since I believe in the other — and that which furthermore concerns me myself, since it is there as another’s view upon me?”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Is there words, poetry, renga, that will return us to our
senses and by so doing, conceive us as ourselves?
“Yet this is not the biosphere as it is conceived by an abstract and objectifying science, not that complex assemblage of planetary mechanisms presumably being mapped and measured by our remote-sensing satellites;…”
— David Abram
planetary mechanisms
remote-sensing
"…conversely an even absolutely unexpected and unforeseeable noise is from the first perceived as real, however weak be its links with the context.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“…it is, rather, the biosphere as it is experienced
and lived from within by the intelligent body…”
— David Abram
"… it is clear that in the case of perception the conclusion comes before the reasons, which are there only to take its place or to back it up when it is shaken.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Where is our being
taking place?
“…by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of
the world that he, or she, experiences.”
— David Abram
"In a philosophy that takes into consideration the operative world, functioning, present and coherent, as it is, the essence is not at all a stumbling block: it has its place there as an operative, functioning, essence.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Essential Character Co-Evolving With Evolutionary Purpose?
“We are unable even to imagine a sensible landscape that would not at the same time be sensed (since in imagining any landscape we inevitably envisage it from a particular perspective, and thus implicate our own senses, and indeed our own sentience, in that landscape), and are similarly unable to fully imagine a sensing self, or sentience, that would not be situated in some field of sensed phenomena.”
— David Abram
Worlds weaving words, living words, words made flesh — and such embodied poetry, words weaving worlds in return. Biosemiosis?
To The Virtuous and the Pathfinding
- We made it.
- What happened?
- We happened.
Werewithall
Similar to wherewithal, where both world and word, both resources and thrivability co-evolve in convivial spells of eco-normalisation.
Eco-normalisation
Relating a particular aspect of (business) activity
to an underlying level of ecosystemics.
Participatory Inquiry, episode 85: Werewithall
