Eto-tecture

The reality is stark. The world is cruel. Without sufficient reason, only non-contradiction as Meillassoux says in "After finitude" . But life always creates a sheath, a humour of its own that protects it and filters the chaotic excess of the world, its wildness (Richir's Wesen sauvage). Whether the membrane and cytoplasm of the cell, or the boundaries of the city and its infrastructure, the envelope and the humour are the world of self-centred life or Umwelt as von Uexküll called it. Before von Uexküll, Descartes identified then Kant described the Umwelt of thought. For Kant, knowledge of the world depends on the conditions of possibility of thought, absolutely correlating knowledge of external objects with the Umwelt of thought. But each life with its Umwelt, and the world with its wilderness. But what happens if you break through and go beyond the envelope, the umwelt of your own? Most likely you will perish. But before that happens, you will have a moment when you will feel, experience the cruelty of the world, its wildness - the thing itself. You will be passible (Maldiney), you will become molecular, invisible (Deleuze/Guattari and Bataille)... But can you happen to prolong that moment and try to know the world in its terms, the world of the thing itself? This is where the savage comes in, the shaman who is exemplary in his techniques of transgression. The shaman works at the extremities of the Umwelt. The shell, one's own humour are thus exposed, pierced and contaminated by the chaotic excess of the world. The shaman has the most opportunity to feel, to know the world on its terms. But the way the shaman communicates with the wildness of the world, with its chaotic excess is determined not only by the techniques of transgressing one's own Umwelt but also by object-oriented, expressive world-oriented communication.

If we try to understand the experience of the world in a quasi-shamanic way, then we have to give up the idea of abstract and isolated information. We have to give up measuring and quantifying, filtering. We need to replace information with expression. Expression is an aspect, a perspective of an object, it is external information unfiltered by its own Umwelt. It is the dirty, warm information. Expression cannot be abstracted, potentialized, virtualized, it is material, actual, immanent. Manifest expression is what Foucault called statement. The statement can be understood as a kind of unit of measurement of object-oriented communication, and the ways in which objects relate to the statement represent the structure-layer of the expressiveness of the world. The statement is the product of a network, it is the manifested expression of a being that thus makes its presence felt. So, to begin with, we have expression and being - the first layer. Being part of a network, obviously, this first statement is sensed by another being whose first reaction is the account, a type of compound statement based on recursivity, which contains the reproduction of the first statement, the identification of the being who expressed it and, very importantly, the event in which it occurred. So we have the statement and the being plus the event - this is the first enveloping layer of object-oriented communication and the second in the order of complexity. But recursion does not stop at just one level. That is why a third being can intervene in the network we have described so far, reacting both to the initial statement and to the account of it. And the new type of complex statement on which the expressiveness of the third being is based is the argument. The argument is a reaction to the account and in this way identifies and highlights the communication that has taken place between the being who expressed the initial statement and the being who expressed its account. This is the top layer of the expressiveness of the world, the second enveloping and third in the order of complexity. So we have the layer of the initial utterance, the layer of the account and now the layer of the argument that situates everything in a communication.

The argument contains the account and the account contains the statement and all are expressed by beings in different moments/events that can be taken up by other beings, expressed in other moments in relation to other beings creating communication, layers upon layers of expressivities. Being, event, communication. Statement, account, argument. Expressions, networks, layers upon layers - ethothectures.


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