Teorie della rappresentazione - III modulo

Animism and the Movement of the Parasol

Since he had not observed so large a thing as a parasol does moved, he writes. The dog knows that a parasol cannot move autonomously. Therefore, its movement must be provoked by another living being, whose mysterious presence elicits the dog's reaction. So, for Spencer, the parasol incident was simply a momentary error and even humans can temporarily err. In this perspective:

So, if for Darwin animism is an instantaneous lapse into the animal, for Spencer it depends on a momentaneous suspension of rational faculties. 58 Darwin's animal example becomes further embellished in the interpretation offered by Tito Vignoli, the animal psychologist author of the book Myth and Science.

The movement of pain, produced by an object to which habit had rendered him indifferent That Vignoli interprets as the first stage of myth deeply embedded in the organic memory of the living being. In fact, if we follow the interpretation of Spyros Papapetros in his study On the Animation of the Inorganic (2012), we

One could argue that:

Besides, we can also notice that the example at issue here, revolving around the movement of a parasol hit by the breeze, reminds us of the etymological route of animation, in Latin, anima, or soul, based on the Greek animòs, meaning precisely the wind, the breeze or simply air, indicating the breath that animates the living beings. It is the animals that tend to attribute life in connection with the presence of movement, but one thing is to attribute life to a moving thing, while to grant animation to inert entities is a totally different thing.

In this sense, Tylor draws a distinction between animism and fetishism. Unlike fetishism, animism does not refer to a singular object, instead:

And the soul traverses both the physical and the metaphysical world. However, within the animist conception, the anima is a mobile energy that is independent from the bodies it infuses. Ethnographers like Wund, Durkheim and Moss describe the belief in such a mobile force as the

Intrinsic principle of the pre-animistic stage or animatism, also mentioned by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). Animatism describes the animation of all objects by a universal force. It is a diffuse state of force, equally spread into all objects and, therefore, it precedes the individual souls. Indeed, animistic thought can be identified in the practices of everyday life, and we could invoke a number of familiar incidents involving, as Taylor suggests, fully grown Europeans who, in the face of an accident, regress into infantile behaviour. For example, after bumping their head into furniture or a wall, otherwise sensible adults would instinctively blame the object, curse it and even hit it back. Pain is often the primary catalyst for the vivification of objects and the reflexive regression into animist mentality.

However, as Papapetros remarks:

"But, if we, that are educated in and acquainted with the values of the Western culture, are not to accept animistic beliefs as such, we still can"

For Ingold, recover the sense of astonishment, vanished from official science. There are a bunch of sciences of the Western propensity to an animist conception, for example, from time to time, the media of the Western world register a surge of excitement about the imminent prospect of discovering life on the planet Mars. This is indeed a fascinating perspective, but what it is exactly that scientists hope or expect to find on the surface on the planet? And, if there were life on a planet other than the Earth, how would we recognise it when we see it? In fact, what we know from ethnography is that people do not always agree about what is a life and what is not and that, even when they do agree, it might be for entirely different reasons. Animism is commonly defined as a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert, but this convention is misleading because, first of all:

It is the dynamic transformative potential of the entire field of relation within which:

In a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the lifeworld. The texture helps us to figure how organisms can be understood as being constituted within a relational field, not a field of interconnected points but of interwoven lines, not a network, but a meshwork.

The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously linked this web to a rhizome, but Ingold prefers to refer to the image of the fungal mycelium, or we could take on the image we analyzed speaking of Bredekamp's account of images of science, the image of the coral, developed by Darwin. In this conception, what we have been accustomed to calling the environment might then be better conceived as a domain of entanglement, that is an intertwining between organisms and the matter that surrounds them.

Relational ontology is a tangle of interlaced trails, continually ravelling here and ravelling there. We must cease regarding the world as an inert substratum over which living things propel themselves about.

Like counters on a board or actors on a stage, where artifacts and the landscape take the place respectively of properties and scenery.

So, the first step to undo the Western conception of animism, would be to stop to think of life as an inner principle and think of it as a "continuous birth". Life, in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not preordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual.

In his essay Eye and Mind, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty attributed precisely the same kind of sensibility, the same openness to a world in formation, to the painter. The painter's relation to the world, Merleau-Ponty writes, is not a simple physical optical one. He does not gaze upon a world that is finite and complete, and proceeds to fashion every presentation of it, in its depiction of the world. Rather, the relationship between the painter and the visible is one of continued birth, as though at every moment.

thepainter opened his eyes to the world for the first time. The vision of the painter is not of things in aworld, but of things becoming things and of the world becoming a world. The painter Paul Klee mademuch the same point in his Creative Credo (1920), when he declared that art does not reproduce the visiblebut makes visible. In their painting, painters aim to recover, behind a mundane ordinariness of the abilityto see things, the sheer astonishment of that experience of being able to see. That is what Merleau-Pontycalls the magic or the delirium of vision, and it is precisely such attitude of astonishment that Ingold wantsto bring into light.

This is the other side of the coin to the very openness to the world that is fundamental to the animic wayof being. not as a simple background or astage for events to comeNow, when Western mentality, unfamiliar with this way of being, looks at this openness, it reads it as aprimitive belief and practice. In fact, Wester’s attitude is