Elemental Dances: Crossing Environs w/Thomas Coryate

“Queer does not have a relation of exteriority to that with which it comes into contact … becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body 
saturating the space with bodily matter.”

Sara Ahmed

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The Following is a Transcript of Paper Delivered at

the Graduate Conference on Medieval Studies 

at the Catholic University of America

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"Are we human, or are we dancer?"
The Killers

I see people around me suffocating. We have circulating around and through us the concept of identity as an acrophobia, as a set of monkeys which sit on our back telling us to “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.” By asking us to place our hands over our eyes, our ears and out mouths, what it encourages us to do it to seal our orifices off, so as to let nothing in or out. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call this a failed body without organs, a narcissistic sewing shut of the self, which attempts to produce an individual as an autonomous and contained thing, separate from its environment. What happens to us as a result is exactly what should expect: we suffocate, we become unable to see others or ourselves, and we also well up with all the shit stuck inside.

Conservative and Liberal identity politics both play this game. On one side we see the imperial, monotonous, colonial sublimation of all things into the self and on the other we see the minoritization and alienation of all things into separate, claustrophobia inducing boxes. The prior passes through the dance floor without becoming a part of it, looking annoyed at those around him who keeping knocking him about. The latter sits off in the corner, by herself, observing others on the other side of the room; watching but letting them be. Both go home without having too much fun, but also not changing very much.

This paper is a call into the mosh-pit that exists all around these two cloistered off figures. It dances in the middle of things, as Deleuze and Guattari imagine it, where bodies throw themselves against one another, fall in disorienting directions, exchange sweat and air with those around it. As Judith Butler writes, identity is a way of being disposed; we exist as things for other people and as the other which is ourselves. We become ourselves because of the physical, intellectual, & spiritual gifts of others. To become anything, even human, means to constantly become more than human; we dance and become our environment; we perform the dance of air, water, earth and fire; we dance and become Muslim as we become Christian. Let’s grind; open up our motions, bodies, lungs & learn to breathe again.

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Queer Movements of Christianity

For now, I will address movements of Christian education, that dance of sacraments that is traditionally and more accurately called, the formation process of becoming Christian. Christians conceive of God is as an active Trinitarian community and the Eucharist, or communion, as an active ecological body in which is shared, consumed, and ultimately expelled into the environment.

Likewise, the Christian articulation of the Law and the Prophets is to “Love God, and Love the neighbor as the self”, which requires the simultaneous process of acknowledging a contingent existence of neighboring bodies as interpenetrating and forming one another, but also a contingently separate things. This requires a sense of wonder about each other, and self, but also a sense of adventurous, joyful, dangerous contact with a queer world.

GK Chesterton believed in faeries, which exist alongside but also intermeshed with our world. CS Lewis believed in Greek gods, which play in the spheres, but also intervene in our affairs. Tolkien believed in angels, demons, and other non-binary spirits; and angels that are messengers; an office Michel Serres prescribes to all things which act on us as mediators for other mediators, which transform us too into messengers in lines of actor-networks. These thinkers, like Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentile, prompt us to imagine a Christianity which moves not to a singular eternal purity; for that is nothing; nothing is purity and monotony par excellence.

Instead, Christians can dance like Thomas Coryate, who walked from Jerusalem to India in 1614, embodying difference all the way. His Christian formation consists in shaking things up and enacting an ecological, communal body; which anyone who has lived in community knows, means productively conflicting, exchanging, & inter-identifying with diverse, queer, “odde” bodily motions of ontology. We can treat his letters home as dance lessons, as airy, watery, earthy, and fiery embodied debates between Christian, English bodies and Muslim environments, on the cross-roads of identity

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Air

Words reshape the body, and not only by language itself but the air on which it rides. “Your prayers doe stink” slurs Coryate in what becomes a failed assertion of closed identity, to a host of Muslims he meets while traveling through the Middle East on way to India. Registering the olfactory qualities of their prayers reveals an adoption of their words through the nose, as well by sound. Conversley, he adds that Christian prayers are “like a sweete smelling sacrifice.” We can imagine Coryate sniffing around various places of worship, opening up his orifices to allow tiny particles of air, words, and smells to stick in his body.

And no doubt this exchange of odors and hot air, heated by the sun and by their respective egos, are flowing between the bodies of Coryate and his interlocutors as they exchange insults. Thus smells travel via mouth as well through the nose. This “empty space,” in the face, where the two bodies meet and combine, writes Butler, is “literalized by the empty mouth which becomes the condition of speech and signification.” Coryate seems ironically unaware of serving as odorous and excrementry cross-roads for the airs of two faiths to mix and leave their mark on his body.

The diatribes continue: he adds that the Muslim afterlife is “A filthy quagmire so full of stinking dung-hills that a man cannot walke two spaces there but he shall fumble at a dung hill and defile himself… as the reward for superstitious mumbling in your praiers, and the often ducking of your heads when you kiss the ground;” while the Christian paradise as “a proper and perculiar inheritance purchased unto us by the precious blood of our Christ.” Whether it’s through the sloshing, muddy feces of the Muslim world which they reach by repeatedly touching the ground or the intake of human flesh and blood, real or represented in the imbibing of Christ, both heavens are described as being filled with the odorous airs of bodies which stick to the nose as the description might stick in our ears. Certainly Coryate’s abjection of Muslim airs is a fervent rejection from the body, but there appears to be a delight in taking it in nonetheless, even if he prefers exhaling to inhaling.

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Water

An argument, like making out, or grinding, could be called swapping spit with someone; and in the days of humoral theory, becoming liquid is considered more than a metaphor, but a real way in which bodies were recorded to transform gender, races, and disposition. Coryate argues, grinds up against, and flows with Muslim waterscapes throughout his travels. “Thou… drink of the liquor of the running river” writes an anonymous poet in the Introduction to Coryate’s letters, In Praise of the Author. Unlike the practice of settled everyday life, that of drawing water from a well, the very water Coryate drinks in the river remains in motion from the time it enters the mouth (as one of many options) and ultimately runs through the veins and other currents of the digestive track, and as it exists through a multitude of outlets, being it through the skin, the urethra, the anus, etc.

Let it also be said that standing water provides more opportunities for disease to enter the body than moving water, suggesting that if Coryate did not want to be infected by Muslim fluids as he traveled through their lands, drinking from the river may be healthier in the end; except that rivers were also the dumping place for sewage during this time. Hence, we also see an instance of the medical practice of bleeding in Coryate’s text in order to flush out these fluids. “In Constantinople,” Coryate records “I had an Ague, which with a little letting blood was clean banished.” Again, while attempting to assert the molar identity of his body against a foreign life-form, Coryate only serves to bring attention to the queer cohabitation that occurred as the disease entered, altered and mingled with the body.

The forign world literally floated in his blood, one of the most vital bodily fluids in humor theory, and more than hot air, capable of transforming the identity of a person or a lineage if exchanged. Modern mico-biology also attests that diseases stay in the memory of the immune system for a life-time, changing the body to remain in some ways a perpetually, parasitically occupied, diseased thing.  While pushing Arab fluids out of him, Coryate needs to drink & remember them to survive.

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Earth

Living on and eating on Muslim lands, likewise transforms Coryate on his travels. As Sara Ahmed writes, “Queer does not have a relation of exteriority to that with which it comes into contact… becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body saturating the space with bodily matter.” These lands have been saturated by Muslim bodies, and he now joins with them.

Food which Coryate indiscriminately imbibes as he travels, are not only made from foreign materials and in foreign ways, but since, as Coryate says the “victuals being cheape in some Countries where I traveled, that I oftentimes lived competenlie for a pennie sterling a day” it should be inferred that he was eating the inexpensive peasants cuisine. Food would likely be simple and the be drawn from that which was most available. What came into Coryate’s body reflects the landscape of where he was travelling, through digestion, marking his perspiration and smells, etc., before he in turn used it to mark the landscape through defecation.  We are what we eat, and in the days of humoral theory where heat and wetness defined gender, race, and countenance, imbibing environments literally act on and change identities we now largely view as culturally produced.

The movement in and out of each others holes, challenges the sealed, ontological status of the molar being, the normative idea that if nothing else, a person has the individuality at the level of flesh. We are open networks of differentiation, where “the boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages,” writes Butler, “in which the inner effectively becomes outer and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which others become shit.” While shit is often not owned up to once it leaves the body, it evidences environmental transformation that puts pressures on the clean oneness of the body. It is what happens when various outsides meet and spend time together inside. The smell of shit, as we have seen, while associated with the Other, is more the byproduct of the Other becoming self.

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Fire

Having gone through Coryate’s airy, watery, and earthy transformations with the Muslim environment as he debates, I finish with fire. I can feel his body change in the heat of Arab lands, which as noted, according to humoral theory, has the power to materially change a person’s identity as they dry out and warm up. Furthermore, fire is likewise in the Christian imagination, specifically the scripture passage on the gift of the holy spirit as tongues of flame. Fire changes bodies through the gift of gab.

Coryate’s fiery language transforms his body as he argues with Muslims on his travels, revealing many spiritual ironies in his assertion of Christian identity. He delivers the speech in Arabic, which he learned, and wrote down both in Arabic and in English in a letter back home. Literally, his body is affected and trained in Muslim linguistic motions of the mind and mouth, which have been infused in practice of Arabic.

Coryate claims that the best manner of Christian education is to learn other languages, for which he suggests repeating the same words until they become rote/wrote in the body. He claims to have done with both as motions of the mouth in speaking the language and in hand while writing it. This harkens back to his critique of Islamic prayer as repetition. His repetition of Arabic, Muslim inflected motions are then clear signs that to become identified as Christian to the Muslim who he argues with, he must become Muslim by repeating their language.

An Arabic scholar and colleague of mine noted that the Arabic script which Coryate records is not “proper” Arabic, even for the time period. It has, she claims, an English accent. This tells us that Coryate has not mastered or become solidly either Arab or English in his performance of translation, but bumps up against the language communities of both. He is a queer polyglot. Likewise, in order to contend with Islam, Coryate has had to study the faith. Even if he demonizes it, he at least partially learned it. He let fiery spirits of Arab culture and Islam into his body, in order to them expel it. This fire however remains in him and travels traveling along with his letters, down to us as we share them.

2000 Hamlets: Haunted Technology in Hamlet 2000

"I am thy father's spirit,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night"

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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Specters of Technology

Hamlet is a haunted text. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes ghosts as intellect without bodies just as zombies are bodies without intellects, as part of his meditations on "Undead" for his talk of that name at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. In a sense, the very sighting of a ghost is problematic. How do we see something without a body? Even if it is a glimmering light, a partially transparent image, or a white bed-sheet, there is still a kind of body that is being imagined or performed. While the ghost in Hamlet appears in Act 1 of the play, setting the dramatic events into motion and being a key motivator for Hamlet, the ghost disappears for the rest of the play.

The revenge which Hamlet supposes, plans, and then executes for the sake of the ghost, is left to stand by itself, because we never discover whether the ghost approves of its conclusion, after the act is carried out. The simultaneous absence of the ghost and its active force, observation, and haunting becomes the real spectrality in the play; which, in Michael Almereyda’s movie adaption of Hamlet, is presented as the liminal station of all voyeurs, including the filmmakers, audiences, and their technology.

A Lacanian Psychoanalytic or a Derridian reading of Hamlet is well known, gesturing to the lack or the defferal of meaning or desire. But can we think of texts as more than subjects or language bound experience, but also as bodies? Are not the various specters with their limits on presence, action, and speech not crip figures that haunt not only Hamlet, but film-making, and our own experiences of them? Ghost's form networks, they need mediums, mediators, and us to act on their behalf, and that is why they haunt us. Haunting becomes, in fact, the indirect act of agency on us by mediated and oblique members of the community. Through haunting, we become ghostly bodies by which the dead can en-able presence, action, and speech in the world.

Ghosts in the Machine are not new concepts and with the rise of computer technologies, the idea of "intellects without bodies" has been on the rise again. The dream of a digital body free from the crippness of flesh seems to be offered in a variety of digital sci-fi/fantasies such as the Matrix, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell (to name a few). But in many ways this idea is not new, as we see in the technology of books, including Shakespeare's sonnets, the dream that through poetry (or film) an artist may live on after death. The technology of prosthetics in general may be said to be a part of the long tradition of connecting to objects to enable our lives to extend beyond the spatial and temporal limits of our bodies through networks. Thus, it may be well worth returning to the concept of techno-spectrality in Hamlet, which is present in certain literary forms in the text and which can be re-imagined on film with the host of technologies which now fill our bodies and lives.

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Specters of Desire

Cohen, in his talk on the undead at the 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, shared a story, in which a ghost's primary act was the communication of a desire: it wanted to be told what it wanted. Hamlet is haunted by desire. It's ghost and those bodies it infects, are left groping for action, knowledge, and presence.

In Act 1, Hamlet encounter’s the ghost and speaks with it, thus propelling his actions towards the multiple deaths at the plays end. The guards are the first to notice the anomaly and report it to Hamlet; he initially receives contact with the ghost obliquely, through an intermediary. Here, Hamlet is shocked but also intrigued. His normal course of actions is halted and diverted towards the ghost without direct experience. Then when he sees the ghost, there is much confusion over what and who it is. The ghost must repeat, in very plain terms, that he is Hamlet’s father and he comes from and lives in an existence after death.

Hamlet’s initial inability to understand the identity and state of the ghost is then repeated in his act of forgetting, apparent in later scenes (particularly the famous “To be or not to be” speech) where he claims that no one returns from death and that death may mean that a personal existence simply ends. Having met a ghost, Hamlet has empirical evidence both of a life after death and of the ability to come back into the world. Finally, when the ghost is most direct, giving clear instructions to Hamlet to kill his uncle, which the code of honor already compels him to seek out to avenge his father’s death, Hamlet does so but only after a long period of uncertainty about his course. Thus we see, that although the ghost continually acts on Hamlet, he does so obliquely; his actions, like his presence, is always somehow difficult to comprehend.

In addition to participating in the events of the play, the ghost is evidently also perpetually watching them unfold, like an audience member. In his speech to Hamlet, the ghost reveals that he is aware of many of the details of his own death, which occurred while he was sleeping, as well as his wife’s marriage to his brother and his ascension to the throne, which all occurred after his death. The ghost then clearly has some form of perception that not only allows him to see into our world, but also to events across different spaces. It may even be appropriate to say he has a kind of super-natural power of observation. After his instruction to Hamlet, he disappears, but there is a sense that the ghost will know if his son is successful in carrying out the command. In that way, the ghost continues to watch the play, along with us, across time and space, and in that way have a haunting presence over it. We may feel, in fact, that as audience members or readers, we become like ghosts ourselves, invisible and non-present presences in the world of the play.

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Specters of Need

Hamlet is haunted by needs. As a meditation on the limits of knowledge, the body, and death, the play and its principle characters, including the ghost, are traumatized victims which are attempting to fulfill their needs for livable lives (or after-lives). Technologies and persons become prosthetics, or proxies, for each other in order to enable them to enact their will. The ghost may have a body it seems, and it is a crip body, which needs to enlist the help of young Hamlet to accomplish its task of revenge. It is often said that it "infects" Hamlet or that Hamlet becomes "traumatized" or goes "mad" as a result of this contact. This may be true, but it may be more than a pathologizing of a character, but a cripping of our very bonds of kinship. We need one another. From Kings and their servants, to ghost's and their hauntings, to Princes and their movie cameras, we all need things and need to find out things. Our skeptic or post-modern epistemologies may be yet more signs of our bodily limits and spectral networks of action.

The spectrality of the ghost and the audience is accentuated in Michael Almereyda’s film adaption of Hamlet. In this movie, personal video cameras, security cameras, and still cameras, as  well as audio recording devices, are principle actors in the drama, recording for the audience and for the other characters, the other actors in the film. The technology becomes like Fortinbras and  Guildenstern, intermediaries that report the events back to us in oblique and possibly deceptive (or deceived) ways; such as Hamlet’s interception of the letter which commands his own death, which he alters to complete the death of his friends turned spies. In this production, Hamlet and Ophelia are filmmakers and photographers respectively, and thus underline the performative, personalized technologies of observation and transmission. While the King watches Hamlet’s play, turned movie for this film, he may be wondering if he can trust what he sees just as Hamlet watches for the King’s reaction and enlists help to confirm his uncertain reading of it.

The King too uses cameras, spies, and audio devices to keep watch over Hamlet. As yet another meta-film-making moment, the primary subjects of Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s art is themselves. As we watch a film about Hamlet, we also see the King filming Hamlet, and Hamlet filming himself. And yet the play remains plagued by uncertainty about what it sees. If we could trust what we observe as truth, then we could confidently act based on that information. Hamlet does not trust what he sees in the ghost, the King, his mother, Ophelia, Denmark, his friends, and perhaps even himself. He sees death and life after death and questions both. Thus while the play enacts a kind of spectral panopticon, it also emphasizes its mediated and oblique qualities, leaving all that we see as  epistemological uncertainties; the whole world and ourselves becomes ghostly.

True spectrality may be beyond us who have bodies to experience or imagine, but we may witness its performance in our oblique relationships with actors, observers, and haunting presences. Such specters can be seen in the mediators of Hamlet, particularly in Almereyda’s film adaption, including the ghost, the filmmaker, the audience, and their technologies. The payoff of meditating on ghosts may then be less the discovery of intellects without bodies, but the highly mediated and quasi-subjective qualities of all things.

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GK Chesterton in Defense of an Ethic for Change

"Every act of will is an act of self limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else."

GK Chesterton, 

"The Suicide of Thought"

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In response to an argument I made for transformation, a colleague rightly criticized that this may be unjustly condemning of compulsive behavior to describe it as “demanding, repetitive, and consumptive.”

The argument I was proposing was in part (a large part) an analysis and an imperative of Queer Christianity in CS Lewis; a description of a form of queerness in his philosophy as well as an inviting experiment in applying queer theory to his thinking. As such, my initial response is to pull a quote from the second primary text I am considering in this study, the Great Divorce:

"The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble.... the whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing.... It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it... And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine" (CS Lewis, the Great Divorce).

As we see, the distinction between transformation and repetition, and the ethical imperative which I am reading in Lewis’s work strongly in favor of the prior, comes down to the basis of ethics: the power of choice. To explain this, I will explicate the relationship and the priority of life, creation, transformation, and choice.

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Telos

I am in favor of creation as a part of trans-formation, and choice but wish to be so for reasons more than a simply preference for that which is familiar to me and the powers over those things which are afforded to me because of my various privileges. In response to my colleague’s critique, I would say then that there is a logical reason to favor these things in regards to ethics in a metaphysical study.

In will explain this by using Heidegger’s phrase “being toward death” although I may be using it differently than he intended it. I say may, because I do not believe that this was necessarily the best phrase to explain or translate what he meant when he wrote it, but also because I don’t claim to fully understand what he meant; also because I generally don’t agree with it, which may cloud my judgment.

When I use the phrase, being-towards-X, I mean to say acting in a way which is oriented towards this as the priority over its alternatives, but which may include the alternatives (as I will show) as subordinate goods. In acting in such a way, then, we not only enact and affirm this direction but also maintain the power to choose that direction again.

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Changing Lives

"Being-Towards Life" or "Being-Towards Death?" What's the difference?

This starts us generally, with all that Life and Death connote. Taken literally, which I believe Heidegger was less interested in doing, I favor Life because it maintains and affirms the joys and goods of the world and myself; as well as their relationship. GK Chesterton calls this loyalty, and I affirm loyalty as a virtue. I however admit that in this respect, I cannot answer my colleague's response without going further. Loyalty to “the system” we call Life is all well and good for those whom Life has been kind and given privileges to. Life may be and very well is seen as an oppressor by many.

Thus, I further define Being-Towards Life or Death as: Being-Towards Creation over Being-Towards Nothingness.

In this way, I define Life in terms beyond those of the biologist, and say that all things that create are alive. I further propose that since there is no creation of new essences (as far as I know) but rather the same matter-energy constantly changing form, creation means trans-formation (for us, not in a metaphysical, what I would describe as “divine” or “essential” office of creation; “essential literally meaning here “of essences”). Because we cannot be-towards being or be-towards nothingness absolutely, we cannot essentially create or annihilate, we can only be-towards in the sense of seeking either the diversification of forms or the reduction of the diversity of forms.

Thus this statement becomes, Being-Towards Transformation over Being Towards Repetition.

Nothingness is the par-excellence of singularity and repetition, because as Shakespeare writes “Nothing comes from Nothing.” Here I defiantly disagree with Slavoj Zizek who proposes in a metaphysical reading of the Un (the Un-Conscious, Un-Being, Un-Life, and Un-God) expressed in the Monstrosity of Christ. I stand with many of the classical (Greek/Roman) thinkers as well with Christian Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas to eschew Nothingness as a real possibility either as an origin, a possible end, or a fully imaginable idea to us. Yet, Being-Towards Nothingness can still manifest in what I called “demanding, repetitive, and consumptive” behavior and orientations. But, Chesterton, who I invoked earlier, reprimands transformation, or change, for similar problems:

"It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote -

“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into. The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible."

GK Chesterton, "the Suicide of Thought"

What this brings me to, is the necessary understanding of an Ethic (for Transformation) which affirms all of the virtues I extolled in the other formulations, which is,

Being-Towards Choice over Being-Towards Determinism.

Thinking back to the dialog from the Great Divorce, Lewis’s metaphysical ethic seems to affirm that for us, who can chose, we must chose and continue to chose in order to remain ourselves. The problem is that to give ourselves completely over to a single choice, to become completely and eternally the result of that action/being, is to end our ability to chose. This is good for four related reasons:

(1) the notion that in order to “be good” or “love” we must be perpetually free to chose to do otherwise;

(2) our experiences as persons constantly invite us to make choices and to lose this ability (however limited, contingent or a fantasy of perceived powers) would be to lose a vital aspect of how we define what we are;

(3) Ethics requires choice; without the ability to chose or without free-will, we are no longer capable of discussing ethics (as far as I know);

and (4) Choosing choice allows us to chose mechanism, determinism, enslavement (Christians have long described “sin” or “bad behavior” as a kind of enslavement, and Hell as the ultimate form of bondage; which again, in Lewis and Aquinas, Hell is defined as nothingness or as close to nothingness which we as we can get, and may chose to embrace over being; rather than Hell as other forms of divinely sadistic punishment). The reverse is not true. If we are machines or slaves, we by definition cannot choose. Choosing to choose allows us the power to choose to become a slave, to enjoy the power to imagine it as alternative, or to live in a limited form of slavery while maintaining the principle power of choice. This is what I meant by subordination, we may become slaves in a limited way, while maintaining choice as a principle power, and thus enjoy the benefits of both.

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Self-Forming

Fredrick Nietzsche and others have often described those bound to moral or ethics as slaves, and in a way they are right; but they are slaves that maintain the power to chose and refuse that choice generally and that slavish action specifically. The only unthinkable thought, the only real taboo and sin which we must not choose, writes GK Chesterton, is to give up the power of thought or choice. And yet, he admits, if our world is just, it is that we can even choose to abdicate choice; and all too often exist-towards determinism by our choices. This is what we must guard against, that is our ethical imperative, because it is the basis for all ethics.

Now, to go back and to summarize, we have found that because choice permits us to engage in its alternative in a subordinated way and to at any moment give ourselves wholly to that alternative, we may say that:

Being-Towards Choice can mean, Being-Towards Determinism IN Choice;

Or, Being-Towards Repetition in Transformation;

Or, Being-Towards Nothingness in Creation;

Or, Being-Towards Death in Life.

The reverse, you will find, is logically impossible. Nothing comes from nothing and the determined machine cannot choose. Unless, of course, the machine exists, lives, transforms and can in a sense choose (as we may say we are, and do) in which case we are back affirming to my thesis; because then the machine is not determined after all. Thus the most logical (I do not say “only” logical out of skepticism of my own position) we must generally ethically affirm a preference for choice, transformation, creation, and life as I have offered them.

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The Crip Contingency

Considering the crip example which my colleague offered specifically, we may say that they are less able to make an “ethical choice” or that their powers are more contingent. It is our imperative, I would argue for different but related reasons, to see that all persons and that person be given the utmost powers to choose.

In the end though, the ethical imperative for choice, and thereby transformation, remains; it’s simply a matter of degree of execution, as it always is. The person with the power to rule nations, or create worlds, or cast magic spells that can turn humans into fish, or to cure diseases, or to help the poor, all have different abilities and thus different ways in which their ethical choices may manifest. Each person has different abilities and thus different abilities and forms of choice. It is a fact that many things are not a choice for me that are choices for others. It is also a fact that I have choices that others do not.

We can of course expand this in as many permutations as I like, considering the difference and contingency of each thing and its relationship to free will. We may ask if a dog has choice and therefore ethics. Does a rock make choices? They are clearly not the kind of choices which we experience, but this is a fundamental question in what I have (now) been calling, queer, vital, or speculative realism.

There is also the interesting and possibly impossible question of in what and who is to judge our choices; or the choices of a dog or a rock for that matter. THAT is a challenge I do not in any way intend to grapple with here.

Now, you may say that ethics don’t matter, because we all die or it all turns to shit anyway, but again, that doesn’t defy the imperative of ethics, merely their importance in the grand scheme of our lives or this cosmos; and that is a very different, but related, question.

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