How can seeing a “confederation of human and nonhuman elements” alter our notions of self?
Shared by SHELLEY O’BRIEN
How can seeing a “confederation of human and nonhuman elements” alter our notions of self? Bennett says that “thing-power” is a good place to start when thinking beyond a life-matter binary. Zen practice, or paying attention (to a confederation of human and nonhuman elements), disrupts and thins once-sovereign notions of self (the “thinking-mind”). The powerful “thingness” of an incense stick, a temple bell or a tea cup can penetrate through a thinking-mind. They are so who they are, so “thingful”. Their presence resonates with the presence that everything including humans are, in being-mind/time, not thinking-mind/time. Thich Nhat Hahn calls this “interbeing”. The tea cup (and the tea plant, and the river from which the water was drawn, and the fire to heat the water) and the human inter-are. To see things this way reveals an out-of-stepness of dominant human thinking. In fact, everyone and everything is intimately implicated, entangled. This is Bennett’s “Agency of Assemblages”, in which an actant never acts alone.
References
Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.