conversation in the open

“You know, the treatment of animals in parts like the middle-east seems inhumane. I mean they kill them by chopping their heads off; they make dogs live outside in the cold and offer them left-over food.”

“Partially, but I would say that for quite different reasons. It is because if the dog in your backyard is poisoned by your neighbour, and you go to file a lawsuit against them, they will dismiss you with a shrug and say: we are too busy with people dying; what a dog to that? But relative to what… is it humane to trap poultry in cement warehouses where they have no space to move, no stimulus, nothing to engage with but the overwhelming noise of their clucking? Isn’t it more inhumane to deny an animal its purpose in life, engaging with its environment than to kill it in a manner that invokes “human” disgust of gore, for after all it is less painful for the animal to die executed than it is to die electrocuted? (The major nerve is severed almost instantly and the blood drains in a few minutes.) It might even be befitting to kill the animal a violent death, an awakening of a function and a portrayal of the kind of life it led, for a subdued death is simply a forgetting of “man” of the violent detachment the animal was subjected to. But if by humane you mean, most appealing the modern human notion of refinement then yeah.”

“Then why would you say that poisoning a dog is inhumane.”

“I think the word inhumane isn’t really befitting. It is an allowance for beings to engage in their world and accepting them as part of a major portion of our environment that create for us an avenue to view the world and understand it. To kill a dog because it activating its function (barking) is a denial of that principle.”

“Then why can we kill an animal to begin with? How can we eat?”

“Animals kill each other, animals die after mating and animals don’t fear death, or in other words the future of being attacked resulting in death; they respond to the function of fear in protection. In other words, they activate the “carriers of significance” to their function in protecting.”

“They fear nevertheless; they feel pain.”

“To recognize that which is animal is to recognize that death for nutrition is a fundamental aspect in all that defines a living being. It is Aristotle’s definition of bare life. We are bare life (not only) and in so we find nutrition in the same way.”

“If we agreed on the broadest parameters: to live is to recognize that living is in engaging and to kill for nutrition is bare life; wouldn’t that say: that human beings live through engaging; we engage through hunting animals as a sport; we engage through making and buying leather couches and fur coats; we engage with technology and live in overpopulation and a mode of our engagement is mass-production, mass-consumption. How can we mass-produce food if we don’t alter it, accelerate its rate of growth, prolong its lifespan, if we don’t trap chickens in caged spaces. Our engagement with animals alters them and their environment. It might seem like a defeatist statement in either saying: let’s engage and damn the environment since we alter it anyway or in saying: let’s not eat animals but I think it is more complicated than that. I would say that we have to err on the side of preserving the environment.”

“It is true that our engagement, even in observation, alters the world but I don’t think the solution is in looking at man and animal and leaning towards one or the other. In other words, I don’t think the problem is in our lack of looking at end results and encountered objects (or living beings), but in understanding engagement. We are not different than animals in distinct criteria but rather in our ability to conceive ourselves as the something other. See I don’t believe that this something other is that which is not-animal, but a possibility other than our current engagement, our present self. When we speak of shunning the animal in us, we forget the care animals give their new-borns, the unconditional loyalty that dogs display towards their owners (while they own them), and the complete captivation that drives them incessantly to engage with their “perception” of the environment as the only thing there is. Humans have the ability to condition, to define and remember, and to contemplate pure possibility. Pure possibility comes from profound boredom (the beings that refuse themselves and as such present themselves as “nothing to offer” but in a way in which we cannot escape because they show in their respective beings that which is boring, as an offering of no further possibility of acting or letting anything act). This profound boredom points to the possibilities of being-thrown-in-the-world (other ways of engaging, other ways of picking up and attuning to beings through different ways of activating our inhibitor in its disactivation). The pointing to pure possibilities is unequivocal and indifferent, present and perfectly inaccessible. The process of revelation begins with calling to possibility in profound boredom and unequivocal indifference. It seems to me that we have skipped that stage.”

“What’s the significance of such process in helping us?”

“To begin with that which is the closest to the animal in us as profound boredom is to captivation is not to side with the animal, but to be in closest proximity to it.”

“It seems to me that we are in the closest proximity to that which is animal in our captivation, our abandonment of consequences outside our current mode of living.”

“The danger lies in the fact that if we simply live in the mode of lending ourselves over to our animal captivity offers no possibilities but the present engaging. It is not that it offers no words, no experiences and no logic but it offers us nothing that not already given in captivation… the current mode of logic, the pattern of experience and the conventional stringing of words. It wouldn’t be a danger if in rendering to captivation, we abandon our acting on our capability for language, logic and social interaction, but we do not; we simply render those to captivation, animal captivation. (I would say Heidegger missed that end of proximity but only because he doesn’t show how we move from pure possibility to engaging but asserted that it is the historical-collective’s great task to unravel that.)”

“Would the cement cages and zoos be the new mode of our engaging with technology, a necessary by product of the age of over-population, mass-production, revolutionary technologies, and mass consumption?”

“Again the problem isn’t in the by-products. It is not in what we allow and what we do not allow. It begins with holding possibilities in a state of profound boredom, in absolute indifference. Any question can be asked, any inquiry made. In so we find many questions that we are missing in our current debates and pondering. Moreover the media’s structure is de-contextualized, biased, framed and filtered with only enough time to state and reaffirm common conceived notions, because to speak of anything that is unconventional needs more air-time than is in the interest of such companies. The spectrum of discussion has parameters of proper and improper. The questioning of such parameters and speculating of what ifs is very minimal. We have to ask ourselves what are we enabling in the world (mass consumption, mass production, comfort, ready to hand, efficient, schedules, finance log books, junk food, individuality in a lack of non-virtual community, incredible technologies, possibilities of ultimate body functionality, any-time-any-place to state a few)”

“But wouldn’t you say we have a choice in all that in eating or not eating junk food, choosing mass consumption or not, and having or lacking a non-virtual community.”

“Enabled does not mean lack of choice, but means a choice that is not structurally offered by the hegemonic structure or system (in our case the play between governments and private corporations in creating common avenues to experience our world). To eat healthier is more expensive or more time consuming if not both, to have a community is to seek one or slowly create your own. It is because that which is disabled is not easily accessible in a world that runs on easily accessible that the difficulty arises.”

“In so we ask what are we disabling with our enabling (and vice versa)? We ask what do objects, people and the world reveal to us of its nature through different associations? Water and surfing is not water in the shower, or in puddles of rain, or a thundering storm. To engage in a debate to prove a point is not the same as to put your idea to the world to alter and modify. We ask of functions (the function of anger in pointing to a threat, the function of sadness in pointing to an emptiness or joy in displaying a fullness and energetic calm) Through functions we ask of benefits and drawbacks of different ways of engaging and we ask of what is effective. I don’t think Heidegger would point to any questions precisely because it is the asking of all questions, but rather a point that is crucial is that our world is made by the anthropological machine which is a historical production. In so history in its contextualization, in its sequence, in its discernable patterns is ultimately the vessel in which possibilities are placed within. It can be revealed as such: as patterns, as sequences, as benefits and setbacks, as potential risks and securities.”

“But Heidegger did not saw how pure possibility leads to concrete questions or patterns?

“Pure possibility does not ask; it only points to, but history can ask, the ontology of words can ask (preserve as pre-serve, belong as be-long) and observed functions (of emotions for example) can ask. If we can make asking more important than framing than maybe we move from defining to understanding. Understanding such as that contextualizes and gives a clearer picture that although it has less judgements of good and bad, it has more reasons to why, how come, what possibilities, what risks and solutions.”

“Do you know that when we acknowledge the pain, sadness or disappointment in certain situations, we feel the pain, sadness and disappointment but when we refuse to acknowledge such emotions, when we block them we experience that emotion heightened. See an emotional wave lasts only minutes but a predisposition of our thoughts to wallow in an emotion or block it only amplifies it. It is like what we were taught in self-defence classes: when you are held against the walk in a choke-lock, your initial reaction is to push back instantly; if you let yourself relax and melt into the wall, you loosen the grip of your capturer, but also gain a force much more powerful than resisting instantly. Our most heightened fears and pains are the ones that appear as unaddressed phantoms that have been rehashed or blocked over and over. See this is not to say that to acknowledge is to see as the only possibility, but rather to change, we must begin in acceptance. ”

“The main difference I think is that we think about things… stuff and their respective characteristics in what they are, but Heidegger would look at what the relationship is telling us and in its telling what is it is being concealed. We look at binaries in opposition, but what binaries lead to one another, are chasing one another and in so are a process. It not the acceptance or rejection of technology, but rather what it tells us about how we should relate to it; guide it and be led by it. It is not that I am, but that I am becoming and catching up with myself at the same time.”

“We think in the moment; we meditate through clearing thoughts; we think patterns and chronological chains of events; we think from memory and in retrospect; we think through analysing, through conceptualizing and speculating. How can we use those processes to work with our emotions and intuition and guide us?”

“The simplest and vaguest answer is openness to questioning, reorganizing, reformulating, and receiving those signals of our disinhibitors, a conceiving of something new. It is in drill, practice and repetition. To meditate, we practice meditating over and over again until it becomes second nature. In a way it is old material reformulated in new processes and new content processed through old processes. So long as we find the new in the old and the old in the new we are chasing the binaries towards each other.”

“If technology shows us our ultimate potential in unity and functionality; it also shows us the destruction and terrors that are ever-present in its possibilities. We are undertaking a reorganizing of our biology, our environment and more than ever yielding them to show us offerings that are most tailored to our conception of perfection. Do you think we are heading towards the ultimate perfection and infinite potentiality or are we heading like the Black Widow’s male in our exuberant excitement towards that which stimulates us, towards death and our ultimate destruction? A more important question is can we reach either?