#how forests think

[astranemus]

That other-than-human Sphinx whom, despite her inhumanity, we nevertheless regard and to whom we must respond, asks us to question what we think we know about the human. And her question reveals something about our answer. Asking what first goes on four, then on two, then on three legs simultaneously invokes the shared legacies of our four-pawed animality and our distinctively bipedal peripatetic humanity, as well the various kinds of canes we fashion and incorporate to feel our ways through our finite lives—lives whose ends, as Kaja Silverman (2009) observes, ultimately connect us to all the other beings with whom we share the fact of finitude.

Footing for the unsteady, a guide for the blind, a cane mediates between a fragile mortal self and the world that spans beyond. In doing so it represents something of that world, in some way or another, to that self. Insofar as they serve to represent something of the world to someone, many entities exist that can function as canes for many kinds of selves. Not all these entities are artifacts. Nor are all these kinds of selves human. In fact, along with finitude, what we share with jaguars and other living selves—whether bacterial, floral, fungal, or animal—is the fact that how we represent the world around us is in some way or another constitutive of our being.

A cane also prompts us to ask with Gregory Bateson, “where” exactly, along its sturdy length, “do I start?” (Bateson 2000a: 465). And in thus highlighting representation’s contradictory nature—Self or world? Thing or thought? Human or not?—it indicates how pondering the Sphinx’s question might help us arrive at a more capacious understanding of Oedipus’s answer.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human

[dustedmagazine]

Vilde & Inga — How Forests Think (SOFA)

When performers go by first names, it often implies familiarity. In the case of violinist Vilde Sandve Alnæs and double bass player Inga Margrete Aas, that familiarity has not been with the audience, but with each other. The Norwegian duo’s first two albums project a dynamic so intertwined that extra words, whether they be genre descriptors or surnames, just get in the way of the music. But on How Forests Think, the duo opens up their process up outside input.  

Inspired by musicians such as Jana Winderen and Alvin Curran, and writers including Sabine Feisst and Eduardo Kohn, the duo have determined to place their music within places in ways that affirm our existence within contexts. The acoustic qualities of each of the locations selected shapes the music, and sound artist Benjamin Maumus, whose microphone selections emphasize each location’s qualities, is also an essential contributor. Those locations include a forest outside of Oslo, a dock near the city center, the Emmanuel Vigeland Mausoleum and, as a sort of a sonic baseline, a recording studio.

The album is split into two CDs, one recorded indoors, the other outside. Disc one opens with a track recorded in the Vigeland Mausoleum, a windowless stone vault with highly resonant acoustics. The sustained tone of the double bass hits you like a wave; additional, shorter tones from the viola follow it, creating an effect like oceanic swells. When in the Mausoleum, the duo sensibly let the room do the heavy lifting. Their work lies in deciding how to draw out the room’s presence and then stay out of its way. The studio tracks, on the other hand, are ultra-close mic-ed. The players’ techniques, mostly scraping or tapping against various parts of their instruments, draw attention to a much smaller space — the distance between the microphone and a couple of wooden surfaces. 

The duo situate themselves within much larger and more diffuse spaces on the other disc. The Oslo location is quite liminal, with the musicians situated between the sound of water striking a tethered boat on the one hand, and that of distant traffic on the other, while gulls pepper squeaky commentary over the action. The musicians sound like they are poised on the border, playing to each other, constituting one stratum in a multilayered sound field. In the forest, different species of birds and the green noise of wind blowing through trees circle the players, who play up the woody qualities of their instruments. 

To their credit, Vilde and Inga’s music is already hard to situate within a genre. By adding spatial/environmental awareness to their classical technique and openness to sounds associated with improvised music, they’ve made it that much harder to know where to file their record, but even more rewarding to listen to what they’ve put on it.

Bill Meyer

[sodomyaspraxis]

“That is, we don’t usually notice the habits we in-habit. It is only when the world’s habits clash with our expectations that the world in its otherness, and its existent actuality as something other than what we currently are, is revealed. The challenge that follows this disruption is to grow. The challenge is to create a new habit that will encompass this foreign habit and, in the process, to remake ourselves, however momentarily, anew, as one with the world around us.”

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013)

[sodomyaspraxis]

“There is no inherent difference between the associations of living thoughts that constitute the living thinking knowing self and those by which different kinds of selves might relate and thereby form associations. Further, because selves are loci of living thoughts—emergent ephemeral waypoints in a dynamic process—there is no unitary self. There is no one thing that one could ‘be’: ‘A person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is “saying to himself,” that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time’ (Charles Peirce). Because all experiences and all thoughts, for all selves, are semiotically mediated, introspection, human-to-human intersubjectivity, and even trans-species sympathy and communication are not categorically different. They are all sign processes. For Peirce, the Cartesian cogito, the ‘I think,’ is not exclusively human, nor is it housed inside the mind, nor does it enjoy any exclusive or unmediated purchase on its most intimidate object: the self that we commonly think of as the one doing our thinking.”

-Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013)

[astranemus]

In Ávila, the literal refers to a customary interpretation of the world internal to a given domain. Metaphor, by constrast, is used to align the situated points of view of beings who inhabit different worlds.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward and Anthropology Beyond the Human

[sodomyaspraxis]

“But signs are more than things. They don’t squarely reside in sounds, events, or words. Nor are they exactly in bodies or even minds. They can’t be precisely located in this way because they are ongoing relational processes. Their sensuous qualities are only one part of the dynamic through which they come to be, to grow, and to have effects in the world.”

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013)

[wearesonar]

Who Is Civilized? Part two of "How Forests Think" - Sonar

This is the second part of Sharon’s article, How Forests Think Reveals The Need For Nonhuman Personhood, a compelling review of the ideas within the book How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn. Mediating Eating and Death For the Runa people, all animals are conscious selves and have souls just as humans do. Kohn says this is “because animals …

[magneticrealm]