Critical Reflection - A Path Through My Econcept
Critical Reflection - Sonderweaving and The Sonderweb
As Clare Colebrook says in ‘Framing the End of the Species’, humans are often rendered blind to their environment because of their very attachment to and reliance upon it (Colebrook, 58). They are too often blind to the intra-connected web of relations from which their subjectivity co-emerges along with all the other human and non-human life with which they share space. If only we could all see the world all the time the way David Abram does in ‘The Ecology of Magic’, when he is mesmerised by the intricate intra-weavings of a multiplicity of spiders and intuits that somehow he is witness to ‘the universe being born, galaxy upon galaxy’ (Abram, 1111).
This is why I created the concept of the sonderweb. The word ‘sonder’ is taken from ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’ and it means ‘the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.’ The term sonderweb then takes this word in a more transcorporeal direction to mean the actual intra-connected web of all life, in which both humans and non-humans are all living lives as vivid and complex as your own. Thus the sonderweb exists whether we are aware of it or not.
This is why the term sonderweaving has also been created to describe actions and/or thoughts that move in such a way that show awareness of and respect for this intra-connected web of life; actions and/or thoughts that show kindness and tenderness towards the beings with which we cohabitate on this earth.
These sonderweaving thoughts and actions rely upon the notion of thoughtsilk, which stresses the materiality of thought and action as they leave permanent traces everywhere they go; just as snails leave traces of themselves and just as we can gain an impression of a spider’s mental space through the way that it navigates space with its web weaving.
Thoughtsilk also introduces and explains the concept of kin-cocoons. The concept of kin-cocoons embodies the way that thoughts can never actually permeate any substance, living, non-living or somewhere in between, because thoughts themselves are material. We can wrap our thoughtsilk around the beings that we encounter every day as intricately, as closely and as carefully as we are able, but these cocoons of thought will always remain empty of the actual being – void of the actual reality of their lived existence, which we can never really know.
This idea builds upon the concept of the ‘strange-stranger’, as Timothy Morton in 'Deconstruction and/as Ecology' translates from the Derridean idea of the ‘arrivant’ (Morton, 12) emphasising the active nature of thought as a weaving-perceiving device that navigates space around the beings it encounters in order to gain what are essentially only impressions of them and never a complete understanding of them as they exist in their own right. This is a quality of thought that I have termed ‘empathreadic’, as it encourages empathy but also acknowledges that to presume to know a being in its entirety is inherently a violent gesture - a gesture often made by science through its claim to ‘facts’ and obliviousness to the fact that these ‘facts’ are swayed by ‘unconscious “opinions”’, as Timothy Morton observes in ‘The Ecological Thought’ (Morton, 12).
Together, these concepts pursue a way of being in the world that embody Morton’s idea that ‘intimacy might make a better beginning for an ecological ethics than holism’ (Morton, 11), as they emphasise the importance of forming intimate and empathetic relationships with all life through conscious sonderweaving intra-action that embodies a kindness towards other beings in their ultimately unknowable potential for suffering.
These ideas thus function as a counterweight to the overwhelming weight of what Jason W. Moore calls in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism the ‘Capitalocene’; the apparatus that destroys the sonderweb. They exist as a way for people to understand how violence begins with a thought; how violent thoughts produce violent actions, and thus helps enable people to see how we can start to critique the Capitalocene in ways that spread more empathreadic thoughts and actions that will lead to a kinder future – one in which humans will likely become extinct due to the level of damage already done, but one in which they will nonetheless focus on how we can make life more comfortable for all the other beings with whom we share space now.
Reference List
Abram, David. The Ecology of Magic. 1957.
Colebrook, Claire. “Framing the End of the Species.” Symplokē, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2013, p. 51., doi:10.5250/symploke.21.1-2.0051.
Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press/Kairos, 2016.
Morton, Timothy. “Deconstruction and/as Ecology.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.013.005.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3300977.
“The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” Tumblr, www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/search/sonder.
By Claire - z3393668.