Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy

The Mineralogy of Being

Fig. 01 Fraudulent fossils from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer’s Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726).

There has been a substantial interest for some time in interrogating the admittedly hard to define human/inhuman polarity, and this alongside the longstanding critique of the mind-body split. From earlier works such as Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman, as well as through a recent body of critical work devoted to the question of the animal, there has been a continuous call to decentre the species privilege accorded to the human and to suggest instead that the human, like the embodied mind, is necessarily infiltrated by, and coterminous with, the non-human, or, to use a term not exactly synonymous but more expressive of the very violence of designation, the inhuman.[1] While a certain, latent Cartesianism comes under fire in the attack on the mind-body opposition, a more implicit literary-philosophical humanism is the enemy of the interrogation of the human/inhuman divide. In the latter context, someone like the purportedly humanist Jean-Paul Sartre would be an enemy in no uncertain terms, and even a thinker of such ontological finesse as Martin Heidegger would be too mired in the division between a privileged human thought and what lies outside of it to be an exemplary thinker of the inhuman. To the contrary, I will claim that it is those very works that maintain the division or separation between the human and the inhuman that provide, somewhat in spite of themselves, the most detailed phenomenology of something like inhuman perception. If it is not possible for the living being to perceptively inhabit the realm of the non-living, it may still be possible to imagine an ontology of the non-living—what I will refer to, following Jean-Luc Nancy, as a “mineralogy of being”—in the very maintenance of the boundary between these two realms.

It is first necessary to highlight, through a brief reading of early interventions in the contemporary discourse of the “animal,” the peculiar dialectics of the friend/enemy distinction that animates the dialogue on the animal. In other words, insofar as a series of contemporary thinkers have tried to open the question of the animal to re-evaluation and insist on the permeable boundaries between the animal and the human, this insistence is bolstered by a drive to signal just where previous critics have failed by ultimately only exposing their latent anthropocentrism in spite of their claims to the contrary. Such an argument takes the following form: even though thinker X tries to reimagine the relation, or continuum, between the human and the animal, X nonetheless cannot escape a human-centred logic. To be sure, these are compelling and textually demonstrable arguments, all the more when they are directly or indirectly affirmed by the thinker in question, in the fashion of Heidegger who compares an animal “poor in world” with the “worldless” stone and the human who is “plentiful in world” (Giorgio Agamben’s extensive discussion of these Heideggerian demarcations will be taken up in what follows).

In another version of this critique, Cary Wolfe is critical of both Lyotard and Levinas, among others, for basing their respective theories of posthuman ethics on a rubric that would seem to exclude the animal. In Wolfe’s unassailable reading, it is Jacques Derrida who comes the closest to successfully suspending an explicitly human-centred perspective.[2] Indeed, and seemingly paradoxically, Derrida insists that one has to respect the discontinuity between the human and what the human labels, after his or her fashion, the animal; not to do so would be, for Derrida, beyond stupid, or bête. I quote at length:

Although Derrida suggests that what might be taken to be the limits of the animal—the lack of self-consciousness, the inability to tell a complex lie—are also the limits of the human, he takes pains to distinguish this questioning of limits from an idea of some kind of simple human-animal continuum. In other words, as emphasized in the passage quoted above, he is careful to assert, and in the strongest of terms, that the division or separation between human and animal must remain in place for any well-founded interrogation of these terms to take place. Indeed, he submits the very naming of the animal, the very calling of the animal in the singular, to critical scrutiny.

Yet there is a tension that resides at the heart of this discourse, between, on the one hand, the need to assert the distinction between the human and the animal (for it would be stupid [bête] not to) and, on the other hand, the simultaneous need to assert that other thinkers make too much of a distinction, that they are too forthright in creating demarcations between the human and the animal. In “And Say the Animal Responded,” another early formulation of Derrida’s work on the question of the animal, from the 1997 Cerisy conference on “The Autobiographical Animal,” the other thinker making too much of a distinction is none other than Jacques Lacan, whom Derrida accuses of falsely distinguishing the human from the animal. According to Derrida, Lacan makes such an overstrong distinction in the Écrits as well as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, where he affirms that the animal is incapable of the pretense of pretense (as opposed to simple pretense), something on the order of telling the truth to deceive the other, since the other is expecting a lie. This is a second-order lie, which requires an understanding specific to our purportedly human psychology.[4] Derrida contends, however, alluding to his own work on inscription, the trace, and the difficulty of making absolute distinctions, that “it is as difficult to assign a frontier between pretense and pretense of pretense, to have an indivisible line pass through the middle of a feigned feint, as it is to assign one between inscription and erasure of the trace.”[5] While attacking the notion of a continuity between the human and the animal by underscoring the line between the two—and noting that he has always been working against such homogenizing operations—Derrida simultaneously accuses Lacan of holding too firmly to an indivisible line, holding up the counterexample of his concepts of inscription and trace, concepts that challenge such an absolute division.

Derrida’s reading of the multivalence of pretense of pretense of follows directly from his citation of Lacan’s anecdote of the sardine can in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. This story is narrated as a recollection of Lacan’s experience as a young intellectual working a summer job with fishermen in Brittany. There is clearly a class awkwardness that pervades Lacan’s relations with the other fishermen, leading to one of them to remark, in a fashion both jovial and barbed: “You see that sardine can, well it doesn’t see you.” The mature Lacan gives this anecdote a famously enigmatic gloss: “To begin with, if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated—and I am not speaking metaphorically.”[6] Although Derrida expresses an implicit objection to the too human-centred and uni-directional focus of Lacan’s notion of the gaze, it is in no way clear where he situates this anecdote of the sardine can, which would seem to go well beyond even the realm of the animal, to that of the inanimate object and its eyeless gaze.[7] Staged here by Lacan in its full social and ontological complexity is the inanimate, non-human object, the detritus of the canning industry upon which the fishermen depend, staring back: not a metaphorical gaze coming from a conscious agent, but one situated at the level of the point of light, from a vantage point reminiscent of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, yet even less encumbered by the limiting perspective of the human observer.

Thus, on the one hand, Derrida’s criticism of Lacan highlights what I am signalling as the philosophical trap of accusing other thinkers of making too strong a distinction, which is an observation directed at the form of the argument—although in Derrida’s case, it also reflects an earlier moment in his career, one more intensely grounded in critical engagements with other thinkers such as Foucault, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, and Lacan (in the case of the latter, Derrida undermines in dramatic fashion Lacan’s equally dramatic reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” with Lacan emphasizing how a “letter always arrives at its destination,” and Derrida how it “never arrives at its destination”[8]). On the other hand, and this goes more to the heart of the matter, it is puzzling that Derrida both addresses and leaves aside the anecdote of the sardine can, given that it stages—if ever it was staged in French thought—the inanimate inhuman object looking back.

Fig. 02 Fraudulent fossils from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer’s Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726).

Before returning to this question of the inanimate object, I wish to consider very briefly Agamben’s concept of the animal in The Open. Far more than any text written by Derrida, Agamben’s reading lends itself quite readily to the criticism that it is merely a probing meditation of the animal that ultimately serves to underscore the singularity of the human. While I do not necessarily take issue with such a critique, I nonetheless want to highlight an attribute of the animal that is, for Agamben, a superior one and therefore one that makes the animal-human relation more complex. This attribute is none other than “the open” itself, or the idea of openness. Agamben broaches the concept of the open in the chapter on Heidegger’s seminar on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. He writes: “The ontological status of the animal environment can at this point be defined: it is offen (open) but not offenbar (disconcealed; lit. openable). For the animal, beings are open but not accessible; that is to say, they are open in an inaccessibility and an opacity—that is, in some way, a nonrelation. This openness without disconcealment distinguishes the animal’s poverty in world [Heidegger’s term] from the world-forming which characterizes man.”[9] Crucial for Agamben is the two-part, relational aspect of the open. He describes it several times as an “openness to a closedness,”[10] not unlike the double structure of Lacan’s pretense of pretense. What distinguishes the human is the movement of opening to what is stuck, whereas the animal is simply stuck. Or, as Agamben puts it, “This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a non-open, is the human.”[11] We might question, as Derrida does with Lacan, whether this double movement of recognition of closedness, and the subsequent opening to it—what for Agamben makes “something like a polis and a politics…possible”[12]—is even fully accessible to the human. If the animal cannot accede to the double structure, is it always the case that the human can?

Fig. 03 Fraudulent fossils from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer’s Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726).

Such a dynamic is also reminiscent of Sartre’s distinction in Being and Nothingness between the “in-itself” and the “for-itself.”[13] Whereas the for-itself is characterized by its dialectic of relationality with the inert in-itself, the in-itself is more purely non-relational. It seems that the merit of the for-itself for Sartre, and the human for Agamben, is the complexity of being-in-relation, the dynamic of recognition enjoyed by the for-itself and the human. But what if we were to follow the letter of Sartre’s texts, and not their spirit? In doing so, we could begin to articulate a phenomenology of the in-itself, or something like thing-being, that is not accorded relationality from the perspective of the human observer. For this is what Sartre does, eminently and in spite of himself, not with the animal but more radically with the inanimate thing—represented by the stone—that Heidegger characterizes as “worldless.”[14] Sartre, avant la lettre, explores the worldless world, the inorganic inanimate world of the stone, something that more contemporary thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler, challenge in Heidegger’s hierarchy of human, animal, and stone. But it is toward an exploration of the thingness of the thing in all its worldless, closed, stuck, and inert glory that both Sartre and Heidegger lead us, for it seems that they—above and beyond those who follow with arguably more sophisticated meditations on the human and the animal—are actually stuck, stopped, at the level of the thing.

Like Sartre, who takes care to affirm a logic of separation between the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, Heidegger, in his maintenance of the division between human, animal, and stone, actually imagines a phenomenology within which human perception might asymptotically approach something like stone-perception. In his minutely detailed example of a lizard on a rock—where the way the lizard perceives its world differs from both that of the human or the rock—Heidegger envisions a mode not only of lizard-perception but beyond that, and clearly in spite of himself, of mineral-perception and being:

Fig. 04 Fraudulent fossils from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer’s Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726).

This passage reveals a thought of the being of the rock in the very act of distinguishing its “worldless” quality from the animal, which is merely “poor in world.” While it is easy to critique Heidegger for his penchant for hierarchy and separation, and to assert by contrast the human-animal-thing continuum (to put it in contemporary parlance), what is less obvious is that Heidegger, much in the fashion of Aristotle, poses the problem of non-human ontology with a richness unparalleled by subsequent readings that insist on the human/non-human continuum.[16]

To develop this claim, I will attend to Heidgger’s lizard-rock example in a very particular fashion. Heidegger first asserts that it is “doubtful” that “the lizard is capable of experiencing the rock as rock.” Yet, when there is doubt, there is the concomitant possibility that the lizard might be capable of experiencing the rock as rock, or perhaps the possibility that the rock could experience itself as rock. Heidegger continues that, although it is doubtful that the lizard could experience the rock as rock, still its “relation to the sun and to warmth is different from that of the warm stone simply lying present at hand in the sun.” The lizard then is distinct from the stone lying “present at hand,” but what does it mean to be so? Could there be a lizard or rock consciousness of being “present at hand”? Might this in fact be the point of light, here the sun-warmed stone, that gazes back in the fashion of Lacan’s sardine can? Moreover, if we avoid the anthropocentric fallacy of empathetic projection onto the lizard or rock—if it is even possible to avoid this, stuck as we are in a state of humanness, just as it may be impossible for the lizard to experience the “rock as rock”—we still need to acknowledge a “specific manner of being” pertaining to animals and material things. But, even if we can acknowledge it, can we perceive its specificity in the way that the animal or the rock inhabits this specificity? Although the lizard cannot inquire into the “mineralogical constitution” of the rock, it nonetheless “has it own relation to the rock.” What is its “own relation” from the perspective of the human who has a different relation to the rock?

Heidegger answers in a mode that is strikingly poetic, so I will parse the last sentence from the above citation accordingly:

We have in this sentence-poem, this paean to the lizard, all the complexities of voice and character to be found, as for instance, in a dramatic monologue. There is the potentially unreliable narrator (“one” [man]) who may not really be suggesting what he is “tempted to suggest,” or may not believe it. Yet he distances himself from “we” (wir), presumably here the human in general, as if to indicate that he has access to something beyond the realm of the dull sublunary “we,” the “we” that simply identifies rock and sun as “the rock” and “the sun.” But the second stanza reveals, with its enjambment of nature and being (“sun/are”), the break between the human “we” (as narrated by the superior narrator/“one”) and the lizard-thing realm, that place between the lizard and the thing as it were, the being “just” a lizard-thing (not the rock or sun of the “we”) for the lizard. What does it mean to imagine lizard perception of lizard-thinghood? Is lizard-thinghood separate, and separate because impossible, from the realm of our narrator, who in his failure to narrate it nonetheless gives it a startling approximation, one signalled only in the English translation by the concluding line “so to speak” (and marked in the German more by neologism, italicization, and so forth.) For in this addendum (in translation, no less) we see staged the ambiguity and difficulty of speaking, the fact that the haughty narrator, even in his superiority over the “we” of the people, acknowledges that, with respect to the lizard and its lizard-thinghood, he can only speak approximately in his language, “so to speak.” It seems that in asserting the separation of human from lizard from rock, Heidegger imagines poetically a lizard-thinghood, and in the theatrical play of its imaginative presence and structural distance comes as close as might be had—indeed closer than those who might simply propose a continuum—to an ontology of the inhuman from its own perspective.

What would it mean, then, to characterize this world-less world of the thing? Of course, this is impossible from a human-mediated framework, something thinkers after Sartre and Heidegger are all too anxious to concede. But it seems nonetheless that this thing beyond mediation still lies at the outer limit of their thought, and is perhaps none other than thought itself.

I would like to conclude by turning my attention to a quality of the thing that would seem to set it decidedly apart from the human, as well as the animal: its stuckness, its state of inanimation. To be sure, all things and all parts of things are not literally immobile; if we were to examine them closely enough there would be all sorts of movements and forces beneath our perception. But if we take the thing phenomenologically, at the level of perception, then what we confront most unsettlingly (or most delightfully, depending on one’s perspective) is the thing’s extreme immobility. This confrontation may be nowhere better captured than in Nancy’s chapter “The Heart of Things” in The Birth To Presence. There, he evokes the “heart of things,” where “one must not seek the living beat of a universal animation.”[18] It seems impossibly difficult to deflect a will to animation, to the perception of animation, which might be equated with a perception of movement or becoming. Yet it also seems that the “being-there” of the thing is beyond such animation. Nancy writes that “this thing is nothing other than the immanent immobility of the fact that there are things.”[19] Indeed, for Nancy this very thinking of the thing, which is thought itself, also participates in the immobility of the thing: “It is in the thought of the thing that thought finds its true gravity, it is there that it recognizes itself, and there that it collapses under its own weight. Thought finds itself at the heart of things. But this heart is immobile, and thought, although it finds itself there and attunes itself to that immobility, can still think itself only as mobility or mobilization. There, the heart of things creates an obstacle; there, it remains unmoved.”[20] In these passages, Nancy touches on the obstacle that is inertia, the fact that for the human it is hard to confront inertia, that almost all of human thinking about thought is modeled on a logic of movement, on a thought that goes somewhere, travels elsewhere, becomes something other. The stone, however, does not need to become more inert. It just is inert; it has being and ontology on its side.

Even if such an approximation of inertia falls short, it strikes me that such a non-vitalist ontology—including Heidegger’s “lizard-thinghood” and Nancy’s “mineralogy of being”—offers human thought a more decisive confrontation with inertia than the hoped-for continuities of contemporary vitalism. “The heart of the stone,” Nancy writes, “consists in exposing the stone to the elements: pebble on the road, in a torrent, underground, in the fusion of magma. ‘Pure essence’—or ‘simple existence’—involves a mineralogy and a meteorology of being.”[21] What is a mineralogy of being if not the seemingly impossible event of pure being? It is the “it is” above and beyond the “there is” (es gibt, il y a) of being. Nancy links the concept of event to that of thinghood just after he evokes the mineralogy of being: “This is how a thing takes place. That is how something comes to pass. The event itself, the coming into presence of the thing, participates in this elementary essence.”[22]

While it is beyond the scope of this essay to map out the various ways in which “being” and “event” are linked and dissociated in twentieth-century French thought, particularly in thinkers such as Nancy, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Badiou, it is useful here to turn briefly to Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Here, Deleuze situates the event within the temporal logic of Aion, the past-future conjunction, as opposed to Chronos, the time of the present. Deleuze writes of Aion, also considered as the time of the event, that “the event in turn, in its impassibility and impenetrability, has no present. It rather retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.”[23] In mapping the conjunction of past and future that eclipses any permanence of the present, Deleuze openly favours the movement of becoming over the inertia of being. Yet in other works, he also gestures to a becoming of being, or a movement toward being. In Cinema 1, for instance, Deleuze locates the small as opposed to the large as the site of being, or more precisely, of “beginning to be”:

Even in this somewhat rare paean to being, Deleuze situates it in the temporality of becoming: “that which has ceased to be useful simply begins to be”; or, “the walker is defenceless because he is he who is beginning to be.” It seems that to be human, or even simply to be alive, requires the need for beginning. But to not need to begin, to not need to move, to live entirely affirmatively in inanimation, is a quite extraordinary quality; this quality requires the shift of perception that the Stoics, and Deleuze following them, attributed to the mode of the incorporeal, the modality opened by the corporeal event yet also entirely separate from it.

Fig. 05 Fraudulent fossils from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer’s Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726).

I would like to suggest that the oxymoronic quality of inanimate being is none other than Sartre’s in-itself and Heidegger’s rock, pointing as they do toward a mineralogy of being. This is a realm not fully delineable, but it is one that at the least poses a challenge and a provocation to suspend the doubled register of human thought thinking its difference from the animal or thing, and to perceive instead the singular realm of the inhuman. This realm might also be considered a form of being as such; as Nancy writes, “We can define it: a thing is a concretion, any one whatever, of being.”[25] The challenge is to perceive this concretion of being not so much as something distinct from the human but as simply what it is. I am who I am, God says; Sartre says, “if [man] could encounter pure matter in experience, he would have to be either a god or a stone.”[26] This realm is, after all, a persistent literary refrain. It is the haunting and inflappable stuckness of Melville’s Bartleby, who eats ginger nuts from his immobile perch in his boss’ office, Kafka’s hunger artist who, having found nothing he likes to eat, stays in his circus cage beyond the designated forty days, and nearly all of the characters in the fiction of Maurice Blanchot, which reliably restages scenarios where the protagonists are stuck in vexing houses, apartments, infernal institutions, and hotel rooms.[27] Why is the inert, thing-like quality of these humans so fascinating? It is time to take the directives of Heidegger, Sartre, and Nancy in their most literal sense and shift this fascination to things themselves. Perhaps this might provoke a philosophy adequate to the event of our geological epoch.