Metabolic Literacy Against The Machine
Reading Hospicing Modernity — part three
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The metaphor of metabolism is an invitation to seeing everyone and everything (human, nonhuman, seen, unseen, known, unknown, and unknowable) as nested in living entities engaged in nonlinear movement, in nonlinear time. — Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity, p. 215.
My mother is soon 86 years old. She does not have the internet, has never owned a computer nor a car, and her mobile phone is an old Nokia 3310 from the year 2000. She is not literate in technology, but thanks to her taking care of me and my sister at the summer cottage each summer while we were growing up, without electricity, running water, or a water closet, I think her generation knows a thing or two about metabolic literacy. With the help of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, allow me to share what I think that means. The story starts at the recycling centre.
Recently I went to the tip to dispose of various clutter, including a printer that worked just fine but was not supported by my computer’s operating system anymore, and an assortment of AV cables that had become obsolete thanks to the HDMIs that we today use to connect various devices to screens. The visit reminded me about Jennifer Gabrys’ 2011 book Digital Rubbish: a Natural History of Electronics which, perhaps fittingly, I found in a charity shop. While I appreciate the service for recycling electronics that the city council offers, the visit made the notion of digital rubbish and its disentanglement from natural processes — as a manifestation of the machine economy instead of the planetary metabolism — very concrete.
Furthermore, the visit gave me a perspective on how to bring my reading of Hospicing Modernity to a close. In the first post about the book, I tried to summarise the premise of the book in the context of technological solutionism. The second part was about my efforts in articulating how the hospicing mindset might manifest for individuals working with technology. This, the final part, consists of reflections on the last third of the book, on topics such as the neurophysiological foundations of modernity, staying in the eye of the storm with modernity’s troubles, and in particular what the tip visit brought to the surface: Vanessa’s notion of metabolic literacy.
Materiality and metabolism
Technologies do not have metabolisms, but they would not exist without metabolic activities and often end up violently impacting them. Technologies gain their meaning through their relations to various metabolisms, human and non-human. Like metabolic processes, technologies consume energy and create waste through their materiality, but as Gabrys writes in the context of digital technologies, it is “a materiality that is often only apparent once electronics become waste.” And such materiality goes beyond the ‘thingness’ of the electronics:
Waste and waste making include not just the actual garbage of discarded machines but also the remnant utopic discourses that describe the ascent of computing technologies — discourses that we still work with today. (Digital Rubbish, p. 4).
I find Gabrys’ focus on electronic waste, inspired by Walter Benjamin, fascinating. It goes beyond the study of technological lifecycles and sheds light on the less attractive aspects of technological development, beyond the perception of progress and human ingenuity and to “the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay” (Digital Rubbish, p. 6).
What if we would not see technology as a set of man-made inventions, separate from nature? How might we pay attention to the devices and techniques we use in ways that ‘see’ the natural resources they are made from, or emerge from, abiding to the laws of nature?
In finding ways to do this, I suggest we start by acknowledging that in our means of communication, we engage with the world through metaphors. As Lakoff and Johnson convincingly argue in the classic Metaphors We Live By, linguistic concepts and consequently, language, construct a metaphorical relationship to what we do and perceive. Our ancestors embraced such a world view steeped in metaphors explicitly, as Carolyn Merchant has observed:
A popular Renaissance belief held about mining was the metaphor of the golden tree. The earth deep within its bowels produced and gave form to the metals, which then rose as mist up through the trunk, branches, and twigs of a great tree whose roots originated at the earth’s center. The large branches contained the great veins of minerals, the smaller the metallic ores. — Carolyn Merchant (1980): The Death of Nature, p. 29.
If we attended to the world through the metaphor of metabolism that encloses us to nature, we would be on a brink of regeneration instead of collapse.
Yet, a major challenge is that the above demonstrates an image that modernity has deemed irrational and unscientific. Have a look where such a disposition has brought us: on the path to collapse. How might we recapture the essence of right hemisphere leaning world views that privilege metaphor? How might that manifest in our considerations of where technologies and their material basis come from? How might it help us to discern which technologies to let go of and which to keep?
Recalibrating our existence with metabolic literacy
When Machado de Oliveira calls for experiencing the world and ourselves as metabolism, she talks about “recalibrating our existence away from separability and toward entanglement” (HM, p. 224). Instead of imagining societies through individualism or collectivism, she argues for imagining them through metabolism. To return to the quote from the beginning of the post, “(m)etabolism evokes nested systems and entities that operate in rhythms and cycles and that are constantly exchanging and processing energy and matter. … The metaphor of metabolism is an invitation to seeing everyone and everything (human, nonhuman, seen, unseen, known, unknown, and unknowable) as nested in living entities engaged in nonlinear movement, in nonlinear time.” (P. 215.)
Metabolic literacy refers to developing our sensitivity to the entanglement with everything else — however, in today’s world, this comes with a trade-off: choosing to hold on to metabolic literacy damages the opportunities for social mobility within the confines of modernity. Therefore, in raising my children, personally I am wrestling with how to balance the conflicting demands for the literacies between what modernity wants — for children to be educated for the service of the global markets and to begin amassing individual wealth — and what the metabolic stance requires: volunteering to work in the ruins and rehoming oneself into relationality on a local scale.
It has not always been this way. We find the divorce from metabolic literacy in Carolyn Merchant’s interpretation of how our perception of nature has changed:
The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradually to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea, that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which female principles played an important role was undermined and replaced by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. — The Death of Nature (p. 2)
Notice the juxtaposition of organic (metabolic) and mechanic (machine). In Eric Fromm’s terms, we have become to have a (manipulative) relationship with nature instead of being in concert with it.
The walls that modernity built
For the centuries since what Merchant identified as the moment of divorce from the metabolic metaphors, we have learnt to live within “the house of modernity” as Machado de Oliveira puts it. In chapter 3 of _Hospicing Modernity_, she introduces a “creative social map” that depicts an oversized house on Earth. It is a house that exceeds the limits of the planet and that is held up by the four denials. The author presents various versions of the map — while one version of the map symbolises how modernity exceeds the limits of the planet, another one models the house in terms of the ‘false promise of universal middle class’, and still another illustrates how the house is maintained by the violence caused by unsustainable growth and over-consumption.
The ‘promises’ of the house are worth quoting at length:
Each structural tenet of the House of Modernity issues a promise based on violence and unsustainability, that also naturalizes and normalizes colonial expectations for the inhabitants of the house. The foundation of separability issues the promise of unrestricted autonomy (for certain people) — which makes responsibility optional, dependent on individual choice — and protects people from seeing the costs and consequences of their choices. The promise of autonomy is premised on racialized hierarchies of existence and on the negation of responsibilities to one another and the metabolism of the planet we are part of. This promise creates expectations of unlimited freedom to extract value and exploit what is considered a "resource" —including other humans. The wall of universal reason promises seamless progress achieved through certainty, mastery, and predictability expressed primarily in science and technology. (P. 112.)
The choice of a house as the focal point is not accidental — a house with a concrete foundation separates us from the rest of nature, and in doing so, reinforces the notions of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism. For example, through our advanced sanitary technologies, such as the water closet, we conveniently lose sight of how our shit goes back to the planetary metabolism, whereas anyone who has lived with a compost outhouse can appreciate the literal relationship between our faeces and the earth and the knowledge of how to deal with a full compost (like my mother). While the more advanced water closet improves hygiene, it removes its metabolic dependencies conveniently out of sight.
In the house metaphor, the walls promise security and order through the borders of a nation state, and the roof is global capitalism, promising happiness and comfort through wealth accumulation, often supported with various technologies. Inside the house are stairs that provide social mobility via “affluence meritocracy”. The politics of those (us!) living in the house tend to focus on “internal redecorations rather than structural changes” (p. 113). Due to the colonial desires in play, other perspectives become impossible within modernity’s walls, and as a consequence, “we cannot simply think our way out of modernity” (p. 121.)
Better life through serotonin
Machado de Oliveira attributes such separation to neurophysiological, metabolic processes. She posits a hypothesis about how modernity reorients the production, release, and absorption of serotonin and, as a consequence, we become separated from the planetary metabolism. Moreover:
Because of this reorientation, we feel compelled to seek connection and the external validation for our sense of worth through participation in modern affective, intellectual, relational, and material economies. If we fail to participate in these economies, our serotonin pathways are not activated and we feel isolated and worthless, which makes us feel insecure, alone, and unable to relate to others. (P. 116.)
Modernity’s economies, clamouring for our attention, create “a neurofeedback loop where we become metabolically dependent on this cocktail for feeling good temporarily” (p. 117). Machado de Oliveira sees motivations to produce knowledge or engage in politics within modernity also driven by dopamine:
“[F]orms of politics and knowledge production based on dopamine are intelligible and relatable, while politics and knowledge production based on serotonin, for example, could be mostly unintelligible in modern societies.” (P. 118.)
Such disposition leads to valorising individual achievements and positions, the “affluence meritocracy”, instead of producing knowledge for collective wisdom that can be applied locally.
Letting the old die with dignity
While taking advantage of modernity’s gifts, we are walking the tightrope between the machine that wants to cover the planet with its mechanistic tentacles and the metabolism that supports natural life and permits consciousness. Staying with the trouble in the eye of the storm, as Machado de Oliveira describes it, is of utmost essence. How does one do that?
Earlier in the book (p. 94–102), she illustrates the different layers of imagining and acting otherwise through the image of a dying olive tree, an image that “evokes the structure of modernity as an ancient elder facing the prospect of death” but willing to admit their mistakes and share wisdom about how to live differently.
The dying olive tree might give us a metaphor through which to think about what needs to be trimmed and replanted. The roots are the ontological-metaphysical layer; the ground of being from where the ways of being, desiring, hoping, relating, and existing in the world stems. The branches are the epistemological layer where the ways of knowing, imagining, and evaluating legitimacy need to be reconsidered. The leaves and flowers are the methodological layer where the ways of doing need to be reevaluated and the story of the singular forward must be questioned to arrive at regenerative outputs.
Addressing each layer is an overwhelming task, but I suggest we start from the roots, one step, one day, at a time, to reorient our internal metabolism to align with the planetary one. But again, the point is not to resuscitate the dying civilisation but let it perish in a dignified way. When we look at the mounds of electronic waste, the very material rubbish that stems from our seemingly immaterial digital interaction; the waste that The Machine is producing, where is the dignity in that? Becoming more literate and mindful about the metabolisms — or lack thereof — around us is a start. To return to the question from the beginning: how might we pay attention to the devices and techniques we use in ways that ‘see’ the natural resources they are made from, or emerge from, abiding to the laws of nature?
Thank you for reading.
With love and kindness,
Aki
