Lyric Culture: Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities (pt 1)
Lyric Culture: Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities (pt 1)
Introduction to 2024 Course (Jan- July)
We are not in Kansas anymore
The ecologists Buzz Holling and Lance Gundersen created the concept of the panarchy cycle to explain non-linear dynamics in living systems. Holling’s original research told him that living systems are not abject to chaos, but actually seek out the edges of choas where they thrive. In those early days of ecological thinking, this came as a surprise. Previous notions of ecological health were based on metaphors of homeostasis and balance, not chaos and resilience. People today talk about the search for a 5th attractor. Jim Rutt defines attractors in complexity science as “basins” in which different strategies can get caught in, and achieve a more stable (meta-stable is the best we should hope for) state. He argues that currently, both as a society and a planetary ecology, we operate in dangerous, unstable spaces, and the obvious attractor basins, such as AI-governed authoritarianism, or neo-liberal accelerationism, lead to extinction events. Rutt identifies 4 attractors that are unacceptable: neo-feudalism, neo-fascism, neo-dark ages, endogenous social collapse with environmental collapse. Hence, he is “in search for a 5th attractor.”
Holling’s panarachy, however, suggests that it is in the places that are far from equilibirum that we want to be, close to chaos are the places where we should be. There, at the edges of chaos, there is movement, a phase-like beat, rhythms of constant change through phase transitions, decompositions, and recompositions. The panarchy cylce was meant to illustrate this:
Hollings has recently called the Anthropocene “the Back Loop.” The back loop of the panarcy cycle is the Ω (omega, release) phase of living systems, where relations are severed, and the energy stored in conserved systems is released. Hollings argued that the entire era of the Holocene, which began about 10,000 years ago with the retreat of the ice ages until now, was a prolonged period that favored “front loop dynamics,” where new forms discover new niches (a- reorgnization) and begin to flourish there (r- growth), eventually developing bonds and relationships with each other such that the entire system complexifies into larger and larger systems that scale (K - conservation.) Everyone alive today is comfortable with thinking of reality in terms of front-loop, Holocene advantages. We like familiar systems that grow, reproduce themselves over time, offer predictable pay-offs.
We are not in Kansas anymore.
Holling’s point is that we are not in the Holocene anymore. And though we like to talk about resilience and resilience thinking, this is merely a way to fool ourselves into thinking that the Holocene might outlast its period. Because, you see, once people had the idea of the panarchy in their minds, they believed they could strategize themselves out of the back-loop phase. But that is not what the panarchy is meant to illustrate. The back loop is, by definition, a place where all strategies break down, and we should not be surprised to be surprised, because it is a phase of unprecedented events and novel occassions. I don’t want to say much more about this, but please read (or re-read) this post before you continue on.
What kind of culture do we need in back-loop realities?
Back-loop realities have been described by Nate Hargens as The Great Simplification, and in his book Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton is implicitly addressing back-loop realities by exploring “Our Place in the Sixth Extinction.” Hinton adopts a a Daoist view of reality wherein “death is a return home, a return to the generative tissue of Tao to … the “nurturing mother,” the “mother of all beneath heaven.” When we cultivate a sense of belonging at this deeper level, as belonging to the unborn, undying ”living existence- tissue” we never leave home. From this view,
we are each a fleeting form conjured in Tao’s generative process of perpetual transformation: not just born out of wild earth/Cosmos/Tao and returned to it in death … but never out of it, totally unborn through and through, wild mind integral to wild earth.
We are in the midst of the earth’s 6th mass extinction event. Through our grief over the vast destruction and suffering and death all around us, so close now that they are part of the ordinary everyday news cycle, this event reveals to us our deep love for this earth. We are saying farewell to the era of the Holocene which was our evolutionary womb for 10,000 years.
Through the Holocene
Lyric Culture can be seen as a final station along our evolutionary journey through the Holocene. Here is where we must get off, since we are at the end of the line. We can journey on, but we need first to wander out into the landscape on foot and ask the land to speak to us. And we must listen, because the question of the land is recursive to the question of us. We walk the land and discover the needs of the residents there — this particular paw-paw, this misunderstood witches broom, this struggling turtle, this lost songbird, this mushroom with no name, and this moss, hiding under a water wheel. We look. We partake in the sensing of what we need through them. This is the beginning of lyric culture. It is wordless particularliness. A respectful participation. Eventually we find, we discover, we land, as the residents lean into us, toward our wordlessness. Here they encounter this particular body, this particular silence, this particular need, this particular gesture toward mutual recognition.
It has become popular to label the different cultural epochs. There are a few different versions of this, but they all map fairly loosely together. Zoom out and we have the four-part cultural schema pre-modern, modern, post-modern, and now meta-modern. Gebser gives us the structures of consciousness archaic, magical, mythic, mental, integral. Merlin Donald maps the origins of the modern mind as episodic, mimetic, oral, theoretic, digital. McLuhan emphasizes the different stages of media technologies: speech, print, photograph, telephone, radio, movies, television, digital web … and now, I suppose he would pencil in AI. If we ask the question: Where is meaning stored and shared? we can create a different map:
Soma - I touch
Mimetic - I gesture
Oral - I sing
Oral - I say
Narrative - I tell
Axial - I name
Lyric - I disclose
Each one of these is a kind of reflexivity. To touch means to self-other. We feel the other and we feel ourselves touching. We begin by feeling forward. The worm crawling, the amoeba stretching, the flagellate flagellating, the neuron feeling foward to connect. The basis of life is touch.
Gesture is touch at a distance. I point to the stick, rather than touch it. I give you a hug sign because you are not near. I blow you a kiss because I am leaving, unless you come back this way
To sing means to gesture with sound. I sing my pleasure, I sing my anger, I sing my loneliness, I sing my wonder, I sing myself towards you … I touch you with my song. You gesture with your dance. Culture begins here.
Unlike singing which is expansive and open, saying begins to be much more directional. I want to say something — this thing, not that thing. Saying has a direction it’s going in, it has something it is going for … Singing surrounds us and takes flight. Saying points us to a destination. When the song is ended, the experience dissipates. We need to experience it again, and again. Saying is never-ending. It lands on a point, but it’s the point that disappears. Even when it is not encoded in written form, saying persists even when it’s done with its saying — it lingesr there, awaiting response. The words hang in the imbalance.
Narrative forms of saying begin with story (tell) ing and swell to the great epics: Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Le Morte D’Arthur, The Illiad, The Odyssey. The epics go to great lengths to tell us more than what they say— they withdraw the invitation to respond, but as a result, open themselves up to questions of interpretation. Unlike saying which is an invitation to participate with, telling creates a thing that can be commented on. Even before text was invented, meaning becomes more fixed— more thing-like.
Cue the axial age “naming game”, and we begin to think with thing-thoughts.
*for the difference between saying and naming, see
Along with the axial age consciousness, most specifically with the Socratic philosophers, people started isolating the terms that pointed to things or properties of things (box, red) and relating to the terms as if they were themselves real things. These were called “Ideas” by Plato. In contrast to the particulars of the world, which were like shadows on the wall or a cave, the Ideas were more real, more clear and distinct. The Ideas represented the language of the gods — how the gods stored and shared meaning. I am not going into all of this here, because the Before Socrates series last year was basically an exegesis about axial age minds. You can read the entire “Gadfly” series here (if you are a paid subscriber)
Lyric Culture
It is said by those who study such things, that Lyric Philosophy begins in wordlessness. There is a joke in here, similar to the Daoist joke that begins with “the Dao that can be spoken of is not the true Dao” — which is the opening of one of the most profound texts of the ages. Jan Zwickey — the major figure in Lyric Philosophy, is a big fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is basically a collection of aphorisms, whose own statement of aim for the work was:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
I think the problem here is not one of orality, or even of written text, but, as I wrote in this post there are ways in which we can say without naming. It is this possibility that brings us to Lyric Culture which goes beyond what has been possible before. The aim of Lyric culture is not to remain speechless, or just to return to song and dance (although that is a part of it).
Lyric culture does not say, tell or name reality.
It discloses reality.
In the first half of 2024, we will be exploring just this possibility — of storing and sharing meaning through the disclosure of reality. Whereas saying, telling and naming represent reality, disclosure is a direct experience of touching reality. Disclosure removes all the intermediaries. It is raw, naked expression. Lyric vernacular is a direct mouthpiece for reality. By attending in such a way that reality reveals itself clearly, we are able to disclose that reality directly.
We find ourselves here, in the midst of the 6th great extinction event. Here, something that is revealing itself is wanting to be disclosed. We, among the sayers, tellers, namers— the proclaimers and explainers — suspect that something is wanting to be understood, not named or explained away.
Something is wanting to be seen perfectly, and so to be loved.
Thank you, Ms. Roy. I especially appreciated this notion: "Lyric culture does not say, tell or name reality. It discloses reality"...As we attempt to disclose, let us not confuse self-promotion (the production, promotion, and marketing of authenticity) for authenticity, itself because once we promote our authenticity, it ceases to be authentic. Rather, disclosure is unselfconsciously real.
Simply amazing rendition Bonnie. The more times I listen the more I understand.
You have put it in such a way the that your saying begins an understanding which turns into a narrative worthy of comment.
And more, maybe it’s worthy of a life worth living as we shoulder the burdens of the Anthropocene.
Yes, listen to the earth and sing and gesture the future awake.