Erik Davis - Secret Earths

Human experience is being taken over by technological processes, but at the same time it is also being re-defined through a process of re-animism.

Re-animism can be defined by moving experience away from human-centrism to a relational experience with non-organic actors and processes.

Nascent populist movements are representative of this re-animism, including indigenous nationalism, the nature of existence of objects etc...

The study of the phenomenon of smart objects feeds into this new definition of existence.

Looking at re-animist technological factors from a human society perspective is different from a robot resembling a human or a rock having a spirit, but revealing the relationships between these can help define the new study of existence.

Animism is the act of attributing spirit to non-human objects, what can be after science has defined the existence of something – adding spirit to objects and fantastical delusions to other humans.

"Modern" society are the naive faithful as they deem others having silly beliefs.

Descartes states that our observation of reality comes from our senses, which ultimately is a projection based on our subjectivism – not unlike animist beliefs.

When you strip away the human sensory perception of an object, what remains are alleged primary qualities - mass, location, (existence in spacetime) - however these essential qualities can be broken down as well -- locations equals maps which are subjective, matter itself is tricky as it ultimately leads to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

Re-animism today is beyond attributing a special power to objects in that existence consists of relationships of mutual benefit between persons, only some of whom are actually humans. The definition of persons goes beyond what is typically referred to as humans, in that the human perspective of intelligence must be considered. The area between humans and non-humans is a social relationship from this perspective. Culture within the animal realm is the same as ours, Instinct is not a factor. Communication between shamans and the animal world are gestures of society that don't occur on some fantastic spiritual plane.

This idea goes against the status quo of western thinking that naturalises relations around the space of what we call life. By removing life from the environment it we no longer need to have a mutual relationship with it, which allows the commodification of this alleged infinite resource, as opposed to an agent whom we would have dialogue with. However, these non-human persons don't fit neatly into the philosophical concept of "the Other" (mainly due to the necessity in defining The Other with terms used generally with human-centred experience, specifically human language). Again with the philosophical, Martin Buber defined relationships through I-It and I-You. I-You being a mutual experience between any 2 things and not necessarily quantifiable but experience, whereas I-It is a singular experience, a monologue where the singular treats the other thing to be used and experienced. So, the space where this new relationship of re-animism can be found in this interstitial area where the I-It phenomena changes into an I-You encounter.

A certain author wrote about religion where every aspect of existence is defined by your relationship to a deity – which is a bit much though the writer acknowledges that everything eventually returns to an It relationship. Though, this framing allows non-humans to enter into the phenomenon relationship through religion as political route, where previously only humans could be. An example of this can be found in the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution that acknowledged the Rights of Nature. Hilariously, this uses the same language of the enlightenment-era Social Contract where the initial human v. nature split was codified. A clear example of a perspective change to indigenous modes of perception.

The constitution in fact named the rights of Pachamama, the Andean earth mother and goddess of time. The contemporary western view would cynically see this as an analogy literalised only through activist struggle, but in the re-animist view a true dialogue exists between the user and Pachamama through the world she creates. As a value comparison of the ridiculousness of the current state of things, many people would scoff at Pachamama having legal rights while in the legal system an entity known as a "corporation" has a panoply of rights and serves to limit the liability of shareholders should the corporation "die". Corporate personhood is not the same as re-animism, in that the construction maintains modernity by denying the relationship within the ecology of person-hood.

Guattari states that human emotions are embedded in the structure of technology. The non-human person has the potential to embody space and subject. A model of the unconscious follows, where all things are embodied with spirits that coagulate and split and re-assemble into different groups which give an objective reality in the structure of these groups.

Within the Ojibwa language, there exists specific tenses like genders in western language, that differentiate between animate and in-animate objects. thunder, stones, kettles, and pipes are examples of objects that have the potential for being animate, not specifically continuous life or identity. The life of objects flickers from the surface into the thought processes.

With D & G, metals are the most brilliant examples of inorganic life. To create metals the user implies the specific unique aspects of the material. The art and science of metal ore, mining, extraction, alloys and forges follow the drift of the specificity of the act, ultimately leading to the crystalline structures that dictate the aspects of the metal, distinct from molecular purity. Ultimately the process is what is important here, which leads from early metal forging all the way to the integrated circuit. The industrialization of metals into circuitry represents the non-organic lifespan of geological materials. The alchemical metallurgist enlivened the temporality of the metals, once locked in the womb of the earth (geologic time) and changed to life time. In mythology around the world blacksmiths are thought of as mercurial, violent, rife with sexual taboo, chaotic up to where mcluhan states in a "proto-cyborg argument" where technology extends the nervous system at the same time amputates the flesh it replaces.

Tonnes of religions have lore regarding metalsmiths as an esoteric cast, i.e. The Other.

Rare earth metals are essential to technology, and therefore are a type of higher metallurgy. Deleuze states that "metal brings matter to consciousness" – matter is continually variable, in flux -- a feedback system -- constant change realised in electronics. This represents a dialogue between these structures and us - re-animism.

critical thought should expand beyond cynical reason to embrace a methodological naiveté that is open to the modulation of perceptions.