At the Crossing-Place of Gods and Animals, The Sky-Earth System as Generic Cosmology
By Adam Louis-Klein[1]
Animism and polytheism are neither doctrines, nor mere philosophical positions: they ask us to think from the Center of the Universe. I here describe the Center as an articulated system, what I call a generic cosmology, in so far as it incorporates both its own variation and the concrete development of positive content. A pluralist system requires being open enough not to be dogmatic, but diacritical enough not to be vacuous.
To think from the Center involves thinking the Center in-itself, and as such, with Others. When I say 'the' Center, I speak in the same way as polytheists do when they say 'the' God (cf. Hornung 1981). For the definite article 'the' has deictic properties; it indicates via context and presence, and does not imply absoluteness. Compare then what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has noted for the term ‘person’ in Amazonian worlds, which extends horizontally to the animal, any finite Other, who also sees themselves as Human (Viveiros de Castro 1998, see Butler 2014).
We thus already have an indication that this Center – where we are – is at the intersection of two Others, the vertical, immortal God, and the finite, horizontal Other, the animal in the generalized, perspectival sense of Amazonian worlds. We already have a minimal triad, articulated with a basic duality – the Sky and Earth – which brackets the space of variation that I propose as generic.
Rather than a dissemination, or the universalization of the periphery, of which we are familiar due to what François Laruelle has called “the philosophies of difference” (Derrida, Deleuze, etc.), a thinking from the Center follows a logic of intersection (Laruelle 1986). As in the widespread three-fold model of the cosmos – Sky, Earth, Underworld – or in the notion that the Human lives between Sky and Earth, the Human is a Center because at the point of intersecting relations. It is a chiasmus structure – as in Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula of myth – in which differences are neither reduced to indifferent identities, nor endlessly diverging (cf. Pierre Maranda 2001). They are ever crossing in the relativistic center, like a Great Snake curling around the World Tree up and down and around. It is like the cosmogram of the cardinal directions and the World Mountains, familiar to us from Central Asia to Mesoamerica, in the image of an ‘X.’[2][3]
It is through this intersection and periodic return that the ‘identity’ of these terms are thought – God, Human, and animal – and thus the superposition of worlds I propose. François Laruelle describes the principle of superposition as follows: “Superposition is not a total or partial identification, but a special addition that qualitatively produces a result of the same nature as its terms, or what is idempotent” (Laruelle 2009). No term is alienated from the Center, which prior to the division of the Sky and Earth, and its crossing in the Human, would be but the God itself, the non-space that I call the Original Sky.
A person is something divine. It cannot be defined by anything outside itself and holds itself in itself. The integrity of a person cannot be explained by who or what it is not. If a person is only a person due to others, then those others themselves are only so, due to others. Either there is an infinite regress, in which the person is not explained, or the chain circles around itself, in which case the person would be explained by a formal whole of relations, such that it would be a mere component, a thing rather than a person.[4]
The Sky-Earth system inhabits the realm of what Edward Butler has called positive individuation, without exclusive differentiation (Butler 2015). A universe identical to the divine person at its center, Sky-Earth systems science is a kind of theurgy and worship. We rejoin the Egyptian and Greek notion of the cosmos as an image, statue, agalma, of the Gods themselves. Amazonians might speak instead of the patterned skin of a great anaconda.
Sky-Earth systems science proposes a new method to study cosmology. Cosmology is neither the study of merely human beliefs and practices – in either a biologically reductive or culturalist sense – nor is it simply the proliferation of worlds within a differential meta-ontology, a quasi-Nature or Whole that would dominate the parts. The Sky-Earth system only “makes explicit” this axiom or hypothesis of the Center. It starts with a minimal duality, which, if it is not factually universal, is open enough to encompass animisms, polytheisms,[5] and to trace the real theological roots of the Modern extractivist cosmology, which as Davi Kopenawa has warned, threatens to make the Sky fall (Kopenawa & Albert 2013). In its content, it is a science – which is allied with today’s scientific cosmology, without demanding a mathematical approach, or the specific epistemologies that may be prized by Moderns as a condition of legitimacy. It is a study of and reverence for the Universe itself.
The first question generic cosmology asks is: why did the Sky and Earth distinguish themselves from each other? I propose that the Center of the Universe – since it is without extension – as such appears spatially as infinitely far away, on the Other side of the Sky.[6] This may be a certain response to the question of why there is space, derived from something non-spatial. It is consistent with contemporary physics’ use of the holographic principle, which generalizes the information-structure of a black hole to that of the universe itself: the universe would be but the extended surface of a non-extended existent. But more importantly, the identity of the Center of the Universe and the Other side of the Sky, shows that the Sky-Earth system can be understood as simply the “non-dual” dimensionality of the Center.
The reference to Black Holes, which provide a kind of litmus test for the very concept of stars, is felicitous, in so far as Black Holes are only found in the Sky,[7] reaffirming the duality of Sky and Earth, rather than the flattening that Galileo and other Moderns have claimed, and against the actuality of which Kopenawa warns. The Black Hole’s recession into itself – its event horizon and absorption of information – speaks to the very nature of the Other side of the Sky, as the inverse of the living star, which shines forth from what I call the Visible Sky. By thinking with the holographic principle – in which information would just as much be preserved on the surface – it is as if the Universe would be the very e-volution of the Black Hole center, a surface stretched and expanded between the Center of the Universe (where the Big Bang took place) and the Other side of the Sky. In future talks and publications, I hope to show that the Penrose Diagram, which poses the Universe, the Parallel Universe, Black Hole, and White Hole, around each other in a self-intersecting and two by two grid, is in a tight analogy with the chiasmus structure that I have suggested characterizes the Sky-Earth system and nicely exemplified by certain icons in Mesoamerican cosmology.
It is no wonder that stars have so often been seen as the images of Gods or of the dead, for they simply articulate the returning to the Center that so many non-Moderns prized as fundamental. They showed the Center as something outside them – shining forth like little eyes piercing through the darkness – the image of something that was in them. It’s a simple argument for the immortality of the soul.
What may appear transcendent, and what appears as immanent, the Sky-Earth system sees in a “non-dual” way. It is important not to fall into a variety of confusions about an ascetic, absolutist, and transcendent Sky, versus a less authoritarian and more immanent earth. In his four volume Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss described a fundamental polarity in Amerindian mythology, between “the Burnt World” and the “Rotten World,” or the “Long Day” and the “Long Night,” in either case, where the sun and the sky is either too close – and stifling – or too far – alienated and disconnected – from the earth. We need the breathing space, where what Kopenawa calls the breath of the forest and the value-of-growth can circulate (Kopenawa & Albert 2013). We have to let the lungs of the Universe expand before they contract again to the Black Hole, and death trades places with life. That’s what it means to say that Humans – at the middle place – play a role in holding up the Sky.
The Sky-Earth system then is a science of living well, precisely because it is a science of the Universe, at the place where Human, animal, and God meet. It is about tracking what Earth-Systems scientists call relationships of negative feedback – the balancing mechanisms through which a fragile “equilibrium,” fit for the beings for whom it is an equilibrium – can be maintained. The Moderns have overwhelmingly privileged positive feedback – exponential growth[8], asymmetric thinking, neurosis – and negative individuation, whereas the Sky-Earth system emphasizes negative feedback and positive individuation. The Sky-Earth system here approaches a kind of transcendental generalization of Earth-Systems science ([[From Earth-Systems Science to the Sky-Earth System | Louis-Klein 2021]]).
In conclusion, it is now being said more and more often that the climate crisis and the Anthropocene requires new cosmological proposals, and those who have developed the tendency known as cosmopolitics, have emphasized the need for cosmologies that themselves are plural and distributed. I propose the Sky-Earth system as a minimal cosmology, one that I hope I have at least begun to show – by developing a few of its core concepts – is not only an accommodating frame but a variable one open to positive invention. The Visible Sky, the Other side of the Sky, the World Tree, Black Holes, the Crossing-Place: these are only some of the concepts that can emerge from it, or can be put to new usages. The goal of this thinking is to reach the status of myth, as a thought that simply “riffs” on itself, in unending conceptual invention and freedom.
References
Butler, Edward. 2014. “Animal and Paradigm in Plato.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 18, Issue 2.
Butler, Edward. 2015. “The Nature of the Gods.” Accessible at: http://polytheist.com/noeseis/.
Hornung, Eric. 1981. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kopenawa, Davi & Albert, Bruce. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Laruelle, François, trans. Gangle, Rocco. 1986. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Laruelle, François, trans. R. Smith, Jeremy. 2021. “The Tsunami and the Myth of the Water-Fish: A Short Essay on Fantastic Zoology, to Add to Borges and Schrödinger.” Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology.
Louis-Klein, Adam. 2021. “From Earth-Systems Science to the Sky-Earth System.” Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology.
Maranda, Pierre (ed.) 2001. The Double Twist: From Ethnography to Morphodynamics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Odum, E.P. 1953. Fundamentals of Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4, No. 3: 469-488.
Notes
- Transcript of a talk given at the Conference on “Polytheisms Today & Tomorrow” at Indic Academy, Oct. 29th, 2021. ↩︎
- I am not trying to conflate the idea of ‘x’ as an open, algebraic variable, with the icon or image of ‘X,’ though here both do suggest a genericity to the system I am describing. The icon or image of ‘X’ would add a punning quality, a sense in which a mere variable is imaged, yet also folded back into the variable. ↩︎
- The two dualities God/Human, Human/Animal, in fact creates a four-term system, where the Human appears twice, as a ‘mediating center,’ similar to the term ‘b’ in Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula. ↩︎
- If the formal whole is a person, then it would in turn be explained by others, creating a new whole, and so on ad infinitum. ↩︎
- Monotheisms too, as long as their axiom of exclusion can be suspended. ↩︎
- Here the unextended appears not only as infinitely small, as in Leibniz’s monad, but infinitely large. In fact, the Center can be understood as the underlying identity of the two moments. ↩︎
- And when the earth is seen from outer space, it takes on the image of a star. ↩︎
- “J-form” rather than “S-form,” in the language of ecology (Odum 1953). ↩︎
© 2021 Adam Louis-Klein
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