 You're welcome, Ms. afternoon, on the third of our days. Today we get to reconvene with our marvelous tenor panel, comprised of our lecturer, Philippe Dethgola, Adam Magata-Chou, Timothy McClain, Timothy McClain, and David Wengrow. Today is the time for a more informal conversation. First, this is the way it will go. I will ask each of the commentators to come up for about 10 to 15 minutes to speak. We'll then take a break either before or after Professor Dethgola gets to respond. And then we'll open it up to you, the human members of this tenor assemblage, with a certain attentiveness to the nonhumans in the room. And we will then have a more informal conversation. Professor Dethgola for the lectures and this opportunity. So in his lectures over the past two days, Professor Dethgola has traced the remarkable range of what he has called extra modern collectives, where collectives are understood as assemblages of nonhumans and humans. In my remarks for today, I'd like to consider the question of assembling, the assembling of humans and nonhumans from a different, very different direction. And it will seem for most of it that I'll be taking us very far from the lectures, but I hope that these departures will prove fruitful. So before I get into it, I just wanna start with maybe three initiating provocations that will frame the rest of my remarks. First, as I mentioned in my comments during the first lecture, the nature culture divide has always produced a differentiation of humans in which some humans were cast as closer to nature and thus the world of animals. The human nonhuman divide has always thus implicated the division of humanity itself. When this division of humanity maps on, while this division maps on in various ways to the division of the moderns and the extra modern communities who continue to resist and deflect the project of modernization, it is also a division that ensnares those David Scott following Talal Assad calls the conscripts of modernity. For Scott, non-Europeans were conscripted to Europe's modernity project, where that is coercively obligated to render themselves its objects and agents. It should be noted that from this perspective, even the difference of what has gone under the rubric of the extra modern over the last two days would have to be reconsidered. And so far as those at the margins of modernity project are to quote Scott again, increasingly obliged to respond to and be managed by the categories of thought brought into play by European modernity. We see this in yesterday's lectures, for instance, as threats of extraction and agricultural expansion, forced communities to adopt a modern vision of territory as exclusive and spatially delimited. So I'll just leave this question of whether something like conscription would be the terms we might employ more widely. My second starting point, though, is that whether or not we apply this conception of conscription to the extra modern collectives discussed in Professor de Skola's work, we can think with the figures of what Scott has called the conscripts of modernity to examine another meaning of the extra modern. That is, we might take the extra modern not only those that sit at the boundaries of the modern world, resisting its totalizing logics, but those we might consider extra modern because they are excessively modern. Conscripted, they are not outside the terms of modernity, but their relation to it, their positioning as liminal figures within the project of modernity provide a distinctive vantage point. The excessively modern, the hyper modern, reveal the logics and limits of modernity from within rather than from without. And it's in this way that I'd like to think about the aesthetic practices I'll discuss in a moment. Third and finally, I wanna think with Professor de Skola's phrase, body territory from the second lecture. You will recall from the example of Amazonian communities he described yesterday that the territory is viewed as, quote, a large living body that feeds, reproduces, and weaves links with other bodies. When territory is understood in these ways, the extractive logics that threaten the Amazon are not simply territorial incursions, but bodily violations and so far as the territory is a living organism composed of material and spiritual relationships of humans and nonhumans. In what follows, I'd like to think with this collapse of the body and territory by taking up the body itself as a kind of territory or at least a spatialized site of assemblage. So I draw on these three provocations to consider what I hope will be a kind of analog to the cosmopolitical collectives to which Professor de Skola has drawn our attention. I would like to suggest that perhaps the practices of the extra modern world understood as both those uncaptured by modernity and those that are overburdened by an excessive modernity might be closer than we think. So I'll dive in now and okay. So almost nine years ago, the Ferguson police, Missouri police officer, Darren Wilson shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown. Michael Brown's murder would ignite a wave of political unrest and mobilization to be repeated again in the summer of 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. After Brown's murder, a grand jury was called to investigate Wilson's use of force. In his testimony to the grand jury justifying his actions as a matter of self defense, Wilson described Brown as monstrous. When I grabbed quote, when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is that I felt like a five year old holding onto Hulk Hogan, Wilson noted. Brown, according to Wilson, was that so angry that he looked like a demon who grunted and was aggravated. As we know, Wilson was not indicted. For many of his depictions of, for many his depictions of Brown as both superhuman and non-human recalled an earlier moment of racialized police violence in the United States. In 1992, shortly after the police involved, police involved in the video recorded beating if Rodney King were acquitted, it was revealed that the Los Angeles police department used the unofficial term no humans involved to describe the murder and or bodily violation of people of color. In light of this revelation, the Jamaican literary theorist and philosopher Sylvia Winter penned an open letter denouncing how the distinction of the human, non-human had subjected racialized communities to the quote, genocidal effect of incarceration and elimination by ostensibly normal and everyday means. She indicted her colleagues in the human sciences for the ways their categories and frameworks had facilitated this very distinction. The bifurcation of the nature, culture, human, non-human, Winter argued had transformed some into the sign of the quote, lack of the human, the conceptual other to that of the properly human. The question of the ways in which a nature, culture divide was implicated in practices of dehumanization has, of course, a much longer history beyond the question of police violence. And in traditions of black political thought and practice, there have been various answers to this problem of dehumanization. What I'd like to highlight today is one strategy or response that refuses the reclamation of black humanity in ways that rely on the bifurcation of nature, culture, human, non-human, rather than decry and reject the association of blackness with animality, animality, this probes, it probes this connection to account for the permeability and plasticity of the human. And in doing so, it reconfigures the body as a terrain, maybe a territory on which articulations of the human, non-human are assembled. So I'd like to briefly illustrate this possibility through the work of the contemporary artist, Wangetchi Muthu. Wangetchi Muthu was born in, born in Kenya and studying and practicing in New York since the 1990s. Muthu's practice spans a range of media, from sculpture, painting, collage, to film and performance. Her wide body of work, currently the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York, has consistently and creatively scrambled the nature, culture, human, non-human divide. Central to her intervention is the ways that she positions the human figure as a kind of exploratory site. So consider this 2002 piece, Intertwined, which represents two conjoined figures with both anthropomorphic and animal features. The intertwining refers both to the duality, animal and human, but also the ways that these two figures are not entirely separated and they share a catch in their mouths. The hands-on hip positioning and lean of the figure to the right, which recalls the posture of a model, suggests a repose that invites us to see this intertwining as calm and collaborative. The second figure, however, whose hand rests on this figure and face leans away, suggests perhaps a more conflictual and antagonistic relation. Is this figure pushing against or propping up? There is always an instability to Muthu's assemblages that reveal the violences from which her figures are constructed. For instance, does the spotting on the figure represent a form of self-adornment that recalls celestial bodies or is it a discoloration that suggests disease? As Michael Viel has noted, the beings that Muthu imagines are survivors of all the violence and material and psychic toxins dumped upon their bodies and environs. In these ways, her figures embody a anesthetics of fractured assembly. Figures such as these from the 2004 work Petition's Curse are decomposed and recomposed. Rather than intact and singular, they are constituted by other beings, both human and non-human. Wheels, heels, sculptural pedestals and claws are both forms of embellishment and serve as the prosthetic extensions and connections of these figures. These prostheses serve as the collective links of the figure's composite constitution. They form and they extend the body. We might see these figures as embodiments of the practices of operators that Professor Daskola has illuminated in his lectures. These figures are literally constituted by operators that can join and disjoint. Assembled from parts of human bodies, organic and inorganic matter, taking animal and human form, the body here is imagined as a collective that is composed out of ontological difference. Zakiya Iman Jackson has argued that Muthu's compositions draw on the natural sciences, especially marine biology, zoology and botany in ways that especially probe connections between the female body, femininity and nature. Her collaged figures are Jackson notes distinct in the ways that their conspicuous maidness and artificiality is both magnified and embraced. This is not simply a form of willed and willful self-making. That is these figures do not reinforce a Promethean story in which we are sovereign agents who can compose and decompose ourselves out of the materials of human, non-human and inorganic matter. Instead, Jackson's readings, these are figures produced through mutation, understood as that radical alteration in the interstitial of chance and design. A process that is not ours because it necessarily involves a degree of randomness or in other words, mutation exploits the unpredictable and the limits of human control. The language of mutation might offer one way of thinking through the confrontation between the cosmopoletics of the extra modern and the forces of modernization. In discussing the confrontation for instance between territory understood as a singular relationship between humans and non-humans, unfolding in a milieu and territory as a Westphalian exclaim of exclusive use, Professor Descola asked yesterday, at what point will the disappearance of some of the components of the body territory make it survival impossible? Perhaps we might think also about what kind of mutations are constituted in this unequal confrontation. What might emerge from the adoption, adaptation, a certain techniques of Westphalian boundary making? What new assemblages emerge and how might operators be reconfigured? This is neither to minimize the real violent destruction of the relations enacted through the living forest, nor to insist glibly on the resilience of life worlds. It is instead to probe how cosmopoletics mutate, reassemble and reconstitute themselves to ask about their transformation over time. Ultimately, my wider purpose in this is to ask if we might think the Cyborgian figures of Muthu's aesthetic practice as one instance of a practice of assemblage emanating from the extra as in excessively modern alongside the cosmopoletics of the extra modern as in those at the margins of the modern. Thank you. Professor McCain would you like to? Thanks for your patience on this. Again, thank you all for coming and for the very generous treatment we've received here at Berkeley. So for my comment today, I wanted to build a bit on what I said yesterday, but turn a little bit more squarely to Professor Descalaz's idea of moving beyond the modernist concept of a solely human-generated society and instead embrace what he is terming the collective. The idea that the essential traits of both humans and non-human groups emerge primarily from the ways in which these organisms interact with each other. And as he notes, one of the defining traits of modernist peoples, and I'm quoting here, is their inability to integrate non-humans into collectives or to see non-humans as political subjects acting in their own collectives. Given that it also seems reasonable to wonder if this inability might well be at the root of many of our contemporary problems. And if so, viable solutions to these problems must then begin with developing new ways of incorporating the non-human into our contemporary human collectives. So yesterday I was sort of arguing that we could draw on some of the recent work of ethologists, biologists, et cetera, who have found these very human-like traits among animals. I thought Adam's illustrations sort of point towards that kind of concept. And I think too, she reminded me of Donna Haraway's idea of the cyborg as being all in this kind of lineage. That these would be useful ideas that are certainly not identical to animus views, but that nonetheless would have the good effect of increasing our appreciation of and respect for non-human animals, as well as our shared evolutionary roots. So that was Ken Myreg made yesterday. Today I wanna consider how embracing that collective might also have the surprisingly salutary effect of decreasing our estimation of ourselves. So on the one hand, we're sort of raising other non-human animals and organisms up. Now let's consider how we might reduce our own status in our eyes. And somewhere in between, I wondered if we might find something that I'm calling a collective humanism. So to do this, I suspect we must expand beyond recognizing a manner of shared humanness with a small group of mammals and birds. Or I was just reading this on the airplane over here. Oh, whoops. And again, so as I was saying, I was reading this on the plane. They relatively recent edition of science where we're expanding that even to vertebrates like fish who apparently can show empathetic behaviors. But we would also need to explore how the human collective emerges from our engagement with a much wider biotic and abiotic world, including organisms like bacteria, viruses that are radically different than humans. And even things that we typically think as inanimate, which is to say water, rocks, minerals, but also tools, buildings, machines, technologies. How can we incorporate those into our collectivities is one of the things I wanted to interrogate here. Now, if we do so, would we to imagine a much more modest and obviously less anthropocentric humanism? One that emphasizes what Gibson called the material affordances that help to create and sustain the human? To be sure, there is a long, and there's long been a careful and more circumspect version, more modest version of humanism. One that emphasizes, emphasizes our weaknesses. Yet humanism and the humanities have also often assumed that there was something uniquely special about their subjects of study. As the historian Daniel Lord Smale demonstrates, the roots of this run very deep. Humanists, at least in their iteration as historians, have long labored in the shadow of what Smale calls sacred history, a religiously rooted faith that we are creatures of mind, spirit, and soul, destined to reshape and transcend this merely material earth. Ironically, this anthropocentric neglect of the non-human also pervaded the modern capitalist system and its closely related consumerist culture. It's a cliche today to condemn the modern world for being too materialistic. Yet from the perspective of Professor Descalas' collective, you can very well argue with it were the least genuinely materialist creatures to ever walk the planet. Indeed, our modernist capitalist system conspires to encourage an utter lack of care and respect for the things and organisms that we exploit, what we might think of as a bizarre new age of immaterialism. We throw things away almost as quickly as we buy them, showing little interest in where they have come from or where they will go, much less how they shape who we are as creatures. Likewise, with the notable exception of our domestic pets, few of us have any regular interactions with other intelligent social animals like horses and cows that have once been woven into the very fabric of everyday lives. In this new age of immaterialism, we largely ignore or tolerate the brutal mistreatment of billions of pigs, chicken, cattle that we consume, all in the name of saving a few dollars on our grocery bills. This is why I was so intrigued and heartened by Professor Descola's examples yesterday of what by contrast seemed to me to be far more deeply materialist peoples, these collectives, the Sasha Runa, people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, for example, in their attempts to grapple with the depredations of climate change by creating the Kauska Sasha, the living forest, the domain and here quoting Professor Descola, entirely composed of living beings and the communicative relationships that these beings maintain. Clearly, the Sasha Runa don't think that they invent themselves alone. Rather, their essential nature emerges from, quote, the material and spiritual relationship that they weave with other beings that inhabit the living forest. Given this, I wonder if it would ever have occurred to the Sasha Runa that they were in need of something akin to the humanities and humanism or to extend Professor Descola's earlier definition of modernist as society's incapable of incorporating the non-human. Might a corollary be that only such a modernist society would develop something so strange as the humanities. So to pause there for a second, I do recognize all too well that the humanities are already under siege from a variety of different quarters. I earn my living as a humanist. I'm not in the least trying to speed their demise. Rather, it seems to me that Professor Descola's concept of the collective might help us to imagine a new manner of humanism that is both more capable and useful and resilient and better able to resist the barbarians at the gate, as it were. You're not gonna be surprised that once again, I am going to point to both the sciences and the humanities as a possible bridge and adjunct to what we might learn from the animus peoples that we've been hearing about. But you're all familiar, of course, with the idea of the microbiome. But what I find quite fascinating about this is that some scientists have argued that considering the microbiome, humans are best understood not as discreet subjects, but rather as akin to symbiotic super organisms, something like a coral reef. More broadly, recent developments in the socio-ecological concept of human niche construction also challenge conventional modernist distinctions between the brain, the body, and the non-human environment. As the historian Edmund Russell argues, humans and non-humans alike build niches with other things and organisms, which then in turn serve to create, sustain, and define them, somewhat like the woven fabrics of animus life that Professor Descalade describes. The evolutionary biologist, Kevin LaLanne, argues for what he calls an extended evolutionary synthesis that better incorporates niche construction, culture, and learned behaviors under the umbrella of evolution. In this framing, human culture emerges as we engage not only with biotic plants and animals, but also with volcanoes and rivers and even cities and machines. And finally, I think, and most broadly, some philosophers of cognition, like Andy Clark, argue for what he calls an extended mind, suggesting that even our seemingly most abstracted ideas and thoughts are, and I'm quoting here, best understood as the activity of an essentially situated brain, a brain at home in its proper bodily, cultural, and environmental niche. Finally, these and other similar insights resonate with developments in a variety of different corners of the humanities. The one that I'm most familiar with that I'll briefly mention is the new materialism, which I think offers a set of theories and methods that are very different than the constructivist post-modernist views that dominated in the humanities over the last half century. While it is a somewhat ill-defined and contentious field, I would argue that at its core, the new materialism emphasizes the essential materiality of humans, not just in the well-understood sense that we are biological organisms embedded in complex ecologies, but also because our thoughts, ideas, and cultures emerge in significant part from our engagement with a vibrant material world to use Jane Bennett's evocative term. Importantly, the new materialism doesn't seek to negate the post-modern insights into the power of narrative, but rather to deepen that analysis by recognizing how these emerge from and are reproduced in the non-human material environment, what I and others have termed as sort of deep culture. Which is all to say, I think there's an intriguing and hopefully useful resonance between these novel scientific and humanistic ideas in Professor Descalade's concept of the collective. Indeed, that all these insights are emerging in our current historical moment might very well confirm the generative power of the non-human world that they seek to study. Consider that it's been three years since a virus, the smallest if perhaps not the most humble of organisms, nearly brought the planet to its knees, or that it's been several decades now since climate scientists demonstrated their addiction to a particular set of abiotic things, coal, oil, hydrocarbons, was leaning us towards disaster. Yet despite these warnings are sclerotic and self-obsessed ways of thinking seem to have left as ill-prepared to effectively grapple with them. But of course to diagnose the malady is not to suggest a cure. And with a few minutes left to me, I wanted to briefly engage the critical question Professor Descalade raised, what is to be done? What kind of cosmopolitics might emerge from more deeply embracing the collective nature of the human animal? I don't pretend to have the answers. I'm hoping that during our discussion day, Professor Descalade might tell us more about how we might draw on animus insights to reshape modernity. In terms of the more modest goal of developing a new humanism, I'm encouraged that there are opportunities to build on rather than abandon earlier humanistic methods of analysis and critique. As already suggested, the utility of post-modernist constructivism can be strengthened by a more materially rooted deep culture approach. Or we might consider a very different and powerful intellectual tradition, perhaps a sort of extended Marxist synthesis, a dialectical new materialism, now informed by the developing understanding of the creative power of the material world. Ideas which scholars like Jason Moore, among others, have already begun to explore. So to conclude, I think Professor Descalade's concept of the collective could indeed offer a powerful means of reimagining the nature of humanism and the humanities. Such a collective humanism would, I think, fully and gladly embrace the human removal from the ontological center of the cosmos. In favor of a deeper recognition of our essential evolutionary material and cognitive continuum with other organisms and things. For the many urban dwelling technological humans, this would especially require a much deeper appreciation for abiotic things, interrogating the role of the buildings we live in, the cars we drive, and the goods we purchase, how they shape our collective. And here I was hoping Professor Descalade might tell us more about the animus relation to artifacts like tools, weapons, and structures. What role did these non-living things play in their emergent collectivities? What role does the making and building of things play versus the modernist dependence on mass produced consumer goods? Does that make any difference? Finally, I wanted to briefly share that we had an interesting convergence of worlds at dinner last night when we were joined unexpectedly by a friend of David's, the prominent computer scientist, Jaren Lanier, who just had a new piece in the New Yorker if you happen to see it. And Jaren was a pioneer of virtual reality and computer technology digital advancement. I thought it was intriguing that on one side of the table set Professor Descalade, who has taught us about this collective formed of humans and non-humans. On the other was Dr. Lanier, whose work points us towards a new age of virtual reality that would, one might think, seem to be the height of immateriality. The table was very noisy. I don't think there was a chance for Professor Descalade and Dr. Lanier to talk, but in this aborning age of artificial intelligence, of chat GPTs, I did wonder what Professor Descalade thought about our chances of recapturing a more materially engaged collectivity in this very fraught moment. Thanks very much. Sorry about the problem with the slides. Professor Wake, the grotesque one. Thanks again for having me over and for including me in these discussions. Thanks for tolerating the gate crashing of dinner yesterday. And yeah, I thought I'd just pick up more or less where I left off yesterday. I asked a bit unfairly because it wasn't a direct focus of Philippe's talks. Whether perhaps we've been over hasty in welcoming the archeological discovery of ancient cosmopolites of magnificent scale below the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. And no doubt such findings should be welcomed as a kind of redemption, as Philippe put it, of this whole region from this state of nature and from the logic of naturalism that was imposed on it by settlers, thus denying its true historicity and reimagining it instead as a wild or uncultured landscape of resources without people or with very few people to be extracted or destroyed for profit. As it turns out, this also meant denying the co-agency of humans and non-humans in creating these very landscapes in the first place, which as we've known now for some decades turn out to be based quite often upon anthropogenic soils, the famous Terapeuta de Indio, dark earths with carrying capacities well in excess of ordinary tropical soils. These are humanly produced soils which owe their fertility to the absorption of organic byproducts from everyday village life extending back over centuries or even millennia. It would surely be a tragic irony if the result of all these findings was simply to gain Amazonia a few extra rungs on the ladder of progress that leads to cities, state formation and civilization in the Western sense, thereby placing them back in the logic of naturalism and the transition from nature to culture. I was wondering if one way around this dilemma might be to historicize and problematize the origins of naturalism itself as an ontological lens which gained focus precisely through the encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans including Native Americans from the 15th century onwards. And this point I should add was already made at least 70 years ago by the French historian Paul Hazard in his seminal work which in English is called The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680 to 1715. One of Philippe's very reasonable justifications for focusing his Tana lectures on the topic of animism is that he knows it best. Following the same wonderfully instrumental logic I will now shift ground at this point to a case study in the kind of historical exercise I'm talking about which I explored in my book with David Greba The Dawn of Everything. And then I'll come back to more questions about Amazonia. Towards the end of that book we talked about the ancient Native American city of Cahokia which lies on the outskirts of the modern city of East St. Louis. About a year ago I visited the site of Cahokia with a small group of friends and archeologists and noticed something that I found striking. If you walk up to the top of Monk's Mound which is a huge pyramid constructed of intricate layers of earth now covered in grass and you look over towards East St. Louis you feel like you're sort of looking in a mirror. You see something that looks very much like a mirror image of what you're standing on. But actually what you're looking at is the landfill from East St. Louis where all the toxic crap and refuse gets dumped and accumulates forming a sort of pyramid similar dimensions to the ancient one that you're standing on. And it occurred to me that the two mounds could be regarded in some ways as the sort of physical culmination of two different, I don't know if they're ontological frameworks but at least two different styles of life which I don't know why but the word terraforming popped into my head and of course it's completely inappropriate because it's meant to refer to what goes on in a foreign body like another planet or a moon what has to be done to a foreign planet in order to make it habitable for humans to live on. But actually there are interpretations of Cahokia which suggests that the indigenous builders who raised up a city from the swamp lands of the American bottom from roughly a thousand AD to the year 1350 thought about what they were doing in exactly those kinds of terms. The creation of a highly structured and celestially ordered cosmopolity out of black mud and water. Substances connected to a chaotic underworld unfit for humans to dwell in. As for the modern landfill of East St. Louis I guess that could also be thought of as a kind of internal terraforming or maybe terraforming in reverse rendering large parts of the landscape permanently uninhabitable for human life or indeed for almost any form of life in order to sustain a city made up of human beings who have effectively in practice renounced the earth they live on as a long-term partner in the business of making a living. I'm not having a go particularly at the people of East St. Louis be talking about any city you like more or less. We might be tempted then to idealize Cahokia somewhat as a sustainable alternative to the naturalist and extractive logic of the modern city. But in truth the monks mound was not just a cosmological pivot of the four quarters but also a kind of surveillance platform from which it is thought that ancient Mississippian elites achieved a remarkable degree of control over their subjects who probably numbered in the tens of thousands. According to archeological reconstructions or at least some of them a calculated effort was made to resettle foreign populations in newly designed thatch houses arranged in neighborhoods around smaller plazas and earthen pyramids. From the summit of monks mound the city's ruling elite enjoyed powers of surveillance over these planned residential zones. And at the same time existing villages and hamlets in Cahokia's hinterland were disbanded and the rural population dispersed scattered in homesteads of just one or two families. What's so striking about this pattern is its suggestion of an almost complete dismantling of any self-governing communities outside the city. For those who fell within its orbit it seems there was nothing much left between domestic life lived under constant surveillance from above and the awesome spectacle of the city itself which included the performance of human sacrifices, mass executions often of young women and their burials carried out in public. Moreover, the influence of the Cahokian cosmopoliti extended far beyond that part of the Mississippi base and called the American bottom arguably almost as far north as the Great Lakes region. During the 11th and 12th centuries Mississippian sites with links of various kinds to Cahokia appear everywhere from Virginia to Minnesota often in aggressive conflict it seems with their neighbors. Now whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway it seems to have ended up being overwhelmingly rejected by the vast majority of its people. For hundreds of years after its demise in the late 14th century the site where the city once stood and hundreds of miles of river valleys around it lay entirely devoid of human habitation of vacant quarter a bit like the Forbidden Zone of Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes place of ruins, bitter memories. Charles Dickens actually visited the place and described it, I quote, as an unbroken sloth of black mud and water. In the dawn of everything David Graeber and I argued that it was precisely the rejection of the Cahokian cosmopoliti including the forms of esoteric knowledge expressed in its calendrical monuments that laid foundations for the kinds of societies eventually encountered by European invaders a couple of centuries later in the territories that anthropologists refer to as the Eastern Woodlands. These were indigenous societies that long before the arrival of Europeans have moved away, disobeyed and reorganized themselves into political orders of an entirely different kind. Small towns about the size of a typical Greek polis a few hundred people with egalitarian clan structures communal council houses, women's freedoms as well as highly sophisticated cultures of consensus decision-making and participatory democracy that were obviously a complete anathema to the Jesuit missionaries who sought their conversion. How are you gonna explain the 10 commandments to people who don't give each other commands or don't obey them anyway? I'm not gonna go into it here but a key argument of our book is that the very notion of human politics as originating in a state of nature whether it's a Hobbesian one or a Russoian type was established in European thought at least partly through the shock of such encounters and to quote Paul Hazard the crisis of the European mind a mind long wedded to hierarchy, patriarchy and revealed religion that were precipitated by such encounters and by the indigenous critiques of European civilization that they generated. What we refer to in the book as indigenous critique like those frequently reported in the Jesuit relations are obviously not world views but neither I think are the expressions of rival ontological frameworks of the kind explored by Philippe in these lectures. I suggest they may be better regarded as intellectual weapons of choice. Weapons of choice selected by indigenous thinkers and commentators to repel a very specific ideological threat which at that time I think was really not naturalism but rather a sort of imperialistic form of Christian analogism. In Europe the result was among many other things obviously the creation of a huge intellectual apparatus which we've now come to know as the age of enlightenment having largely purified it of all the cultural cross currents and indigenous critiques and mestizo logics as Jean-Luc Pamcelle calls them that undoubtedly were a key part of its making. This is getting complicated. So I wanna finish with a question or two to Philippe. Do you think we might one day maybe quite soon be able to begin reconstructing a similar kind of deep history for Amazonia which brings together the evidence of archeology, anthropology and colonial encounters and contemporary forms of critique into something like a unified framework which also allows us to better understand the intellectual roots both of naturalism and perhaps even of animism in its modern forms. And then another question just occurred to me and I'm sorry, Philippe, if you've answered this a thousand times in other places and it's just my ignorance or forgetfulness but is there a basic difference or inconsistency among the four modes of identification, animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism? In so far as only the latter has a traceable history and point of origin as implied I guess by the overarching binary distinction that we're all using between moderns and extra-moderns. And if so, then why is that? In other words, why isn't there more naturalism in human history? That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's the okay to respond afterwards. It's the okay to respond afterwards. It's all right. We'll take a break. Okay, fine. Let's take a brief break, five to 10 minutes and then gather again first for a response and then for a conversation. Okay, let's resume. So the procedure from here is, Filipe D'Escola will respond for about 15 to 20 minutes and then we will open that up to you and then the doors will open and there'll be a feast of sorts and we invite you to participate. Well, thanks again to the Tanner Committee, to all those who made this series of meeting possible, Jane Fick in particular and the members of the Tanner Committee, the commentators and the University of Berkeley. Thank you in particular for your very thoughtful comments. I won't be able to answer either the straightforward question that some of you have asked or even the hidden questions, but I'll try to say a few things about your comments. And I'll follow the order of the presentations. I want to thank Adam for bringing into the audience into the topic the work of Wangeshi Mutu, which has in fact interested me for a while and I will try to explain why. She, in a book I published in 2021 called The Form Divisible, The Forms of the Visible, which is being translated now into English. I developed, among other ideas, the hypothesis that image makers, and this term is broad enough to cover any form of making images that is artist, but also cave painters or whatever, not to use precisely and naturalist definition of what image making is. That image makers, in a way, prefigure transformations into the forms of worlding. And this has appeared to me very clearly when looking at the images of the beginning of the 15th century in Europe, where long before naturalism was expressed in words, in texts, in the 17th century by Descartes, by Galileo, by Bacon, et cetera, image makers, two centuries before, already presented in a very distinct form the basics of what is naturalism, that is the centrality of human interiority, subjectivity, by the painting of the soul, which already in the work of people like Robert Campin at the beginning of the 15th century attains a mastery which is very impressive and the description of nature, or the invention of nature as a figurative representation based on the emulation of human vision, which is a very specific way of figuring beings and things and scenes, because it's based as Panofsky has shown quite well on the imposition of a subjective point of view in order to reach an objective definition on what is an organization of the world structured by mathematical laws, but even beyond the invention of perspective, which is what was the objective, I mean the topic of Panofsky's analysis of this objectification of a subjective point of view in the northern paintings in Flanders, in northern France, et cetera, painters precisely like again Robert Campin and of course later on Van Eyck organized the world in such a way as to prefigure what is a natural system. So in that respect, we can see in the images the future accomplishment of naturalism which will be again thematized in text, in discourse, only two centuries after that. But in the same way that the image makers prefigured naturalism in images, they prefigured something that we can't really completely grasp now, which is an overcome of naturalism in a direction which is still very difficult to figure and this is why I became interested in a number of painters or image makers among them Wangeshi Mutu precisely because as you very well explained, what she produces are forms of hybrids that are very difficult to pinpoint. They do not belong to a specific figurative regime that could be called naturalist and there are a number of image makers of that kind. I'm thinking of a French artist by the name of Pierre Huig, who is also extremely interesting because he realizes installations that are a combination of nature and culture in many respects. There are artifacts, there are users, sculpture, bees, a very peculiar mechanism which selects images out of the development of a sequence of cancer cells, for instance. So it cannot be pinpointed either to nature, to culture, to any academic canon and these attempts by image makers precisely allow us to grope in the dark towards new forms of worlding that are taking place now and Wangeshi Mutu is one of these image makers and I'm very glad that you mentioned it. Also, I want to come back to your initial point that is the fact that naturalism is also a means to scale people on the nature, culture, access. This is a point that was well made by someone I mentioned yesterday, Jacques Ranciere, when he very clearly shows that there's a squirrel pursuing a magpie. So it's interesting. We have a further audience now here. When Ranciere shows that in fact nature, culture is not on its dichotomy but it's also a scale that people occupy different places on this scale and of course non-modern or indigenous people, women, workers are near nature while thought of as near nature while white Europeans, landowners, et cetera, et cetera are on the cultural side of the hierarchy. So this is indeed a thing which has been going on for quite a while and the dissolution or the transformation of naturalism appears as an important objective to go beyond these forms of discrimination and value judgments that are a part of naturalism. There's a moral dimension to naturalism and political dimension to naturalism which as you mentioned in the specific case you brought which causes much, which has been terribly violent. So yes, looking towards images for finding new operators I think is an interesting project. Now I turn to the idea of becoming more materialists which I find interesting. I completely agree that in the sciences the natural sciences in particular geology, ecology, ethology have completely transformed the way that we see this set of affordances that were thought for a long time to be a limited set and opening up the picture towards things that are more complex like human niche construction. I'll go back to human niche construction about the Amazon precisely because that's a very good case of human niche construction in the sense that all living organisms construct their niche which they transfer to their descendants in a way and humans are not different in that respect which means, and it's an important point for me because when I started, when I went to Amazonia for my fieldwork, my idea was to try to understand the forms of adaptation and socialization by a society of its own environment and what I figured out after fieldwork that it was a completely mis-conceptualized objective to begin with because it implied the idea that society is a closed form that is as perished into an environment while it became obvious and I'll come back to that later that this environment had been patiently constructed although not necessarily in an intentional form but over the millennia so the question of adaptation is one of the... there's a paradox here because I'm wary of this concept of adaptation because of its automatism but at the same time we are facing with climate change and with the broad ecological destruction and devastation of the earth a situation where we have to adapt precisely so at the same time that I understand that adaptation is not an ideal concept and has to be criticized at the same time we have to bring in or to activate it in a different way because it implies our survival as a species in dark circumstances but it's true that emphasizing human niche construction or emphasizing the part of the microbiotis microbiote in humans is a very interesting way of dissolving the dichotomy of human and non-human what part of us is really human when we think of the kind of assemblage of which we are made and what part of us in fact fosters the ideas that we use in order to understand the world are the trillions of bacteria that we shelter part of this process and part of our subjectivity probably in ways that we still don't know very well so I think this materialism this form of materialism is extremely important what is to be done of knowledge, knowledge, knowledge in a place like here it's obvious now at the same time although as I said I'm politically involved in movements that try to claim a new use of the land social scientists as such are actually prepared to prescribe solutions what they can do is point out solutions like David did point out solutions that people have invented at some time to, like in Cahokia for instance to do away with forms of political organization that were considered as inegalitarian and from these experiences as you do in the book with David Greber try to imagine alternative ways of being in the world and so the question I don't think the question can be transposed as Timothy has asked how can we learn how to deal with artifacts from an animist point of view I think we are all able to make animist inferences and in certain circumstances when we speak to a cat or to a rose tree or to when we are furious against our computer as I am right now because it doesn't work we tend to impute an intentionality in the case of artifacts very often a malevolent intentionality to artifacts it doesn't mean that we are animist it means that the basic kind of inference that is the staple type of inference for animism is present in every one of us but we don't stabilize it in an animist system in a certain way so to answer the question ethnographically artifacts are imbued with life more or less in animist systems no, a blogger a sledge for instance cases like that they go against their owner in some circumstances when they feel they have been mistreated and of course it's part of the idea that the artifacts have a very close relationship with the person, the human who uses them and so that's one of the reasons why people are buried with their artifacts precisely because no one else could use them no one else could use the spear or the shotgun or whatever or the knife or the machete that one uses because they would not accept to be manipulated by anyone else than the person who was their owner or tamer perhaps since they are imbued with life and it's among the Atua for instance if you lend someone an artifact and you can't refuse someone asking for something among many collectives especially those that are governed by the gift, by sharing and so if an Atua asks you will you lend me your axe and that you do it but internally grumbling because you need it also the result will be that the person using the axe will experience an ache for instance no it will suffer from using this because the axe transmits the lack of the mixed attitude of the person who lended it so it's and all this has disappeared with the mercantilization of things and the fetishism of commodity is there a way to get back to this that would be interesting we don't know if we have to eliminate commodity fetishism first to do that or whether this will eliminate commodity fetishism that's an interesting I am interested in what people do in places like the Zad because there is an attitude towards artifacts precisely which is very different from the one we are used to in the sense that they circulate among people and in that respect they have certain kind of autonomy finally I'm glad you brought the question of Amazonia it's not only a terra preta as you mentioned that is the fact that the the soils there are mostly in many places anthropogenic for the so that the the ecosystem has been profoundly transformed but also there is a process which I observed among the atua which is the fact that slash and bone cultivation means not only planting in gardens crops that have been domesticated over the millennia and there are many of them in the atua garden there is about 50 different species of plants with many varieties but that people also transplant plants from the forest which is a thing which they have done initially in the process of domestication that is of maintaining certain plants under forest cover and this is why these plants progressively became domesticated so what they do is they transplant plants from the forest palm trees and fruit trees and of course when the when the garden is abandoned after a few years of cultivation perhaps five or six years the transplanted plants from the forest survive the encroaching forest that regain the space while the domesticated plants disappear and when you think of this process in the long term it means that the floristic composition of the forest is completely transformed because there is a higher rate of plants that are useful to humans in the forest because of this process of transplantation and so the Amazonian forest is not a virgin forest it's a cultivated forest in many respects or it's a process it's a result of a process of cultivation and when we take this phenomena into account then we have the first steps as you said with which to try and reconstruct a historical ecological evolution of the region which is a co-evolution of humans and their environments over the millennia although the forms of the actual forms of collectives that we observe may be very different from those that were that can be reconstructed I mentioned that yesterday from the tracers like these great earth mounds and pyramids or urban settlements that are being found now in Amazonia one has to take into account also that 90% of the native Amazonians disappeared in one century so it's mind boggling imagine any country modern country being reduced to 10% of its population in a very short period of time in fact the information the collectives we see now are remnants of a of a Rome which is hypothesized indeed it's a middle age of which we do not know the Rome as David Storz very aptly said Reconstructing the Rome process because again the forms of collectives that have survived have adopted very different ways of surviving the encounter with the Europeans in particular it's well known that what are called now in the press for instance uncontacted tribes are not uncontacted tribes they were people who had been subjected to the most atrocious violence during the rubber boom they were enslaved and of course they are people who have fled and never to see a white person again to use a bold image like survivors of concentration camps that fled in the forest in order never to see the killers and the people who subjected them to the kind of forced labor and violence they experienced this is well known for the recent past that is for the rubber boom but it must have been like that for a long time and so many of the institutions that we observe now have been transformed by this situation since we have very little historical record that would allow to reconstruct this past so finally you ask a difficult question why is naturalism the only way of worlding with a history I think it's the invention of history by the naturalist was a great thing it allowed the durability and the ability to expand that all the ways of worlding perhaps do not have and why did it did it happen once I think it could have happened several times but it didn't it didn't work it could have happened in medieval Islam in the Near East it could have happened in China it could have happened even earlier in Europe in Greece there were elements there that were identical but for a variety of reasons it didn't work out so it is an exception indeed but an exception that could have and also it's an exception that required something to appear it required an analogist system before naturalism is a transformation of analogism and not only because it is so historically but also because of some logical reasons for it contrary to Bachelard for instance I don't think that modern physics is a complete break up with physics of the senses or physics of qualities in the sense that the physics of qualities is based on the idea on the analogist idea that the world can be decomposed into elementary elements and that these elements can be combined in certain ways that there is a regularity in this combination and in the outcome of the process that this combination produce and this is I think a basis for modern physics or for mathematical physics in that sense and you can't go from an analogist physics if you wish one based on metamorphosis to mathematical physics but you can go from physics of sensible qualities to mathematical physics because the basis especially this idea of the elementary components of the world that can be organized and reorganized and understood as having a regular behavior I think I'll end up with this and continue the discussion with the audience Please do continue the discussion in the course of the questions and answers Jay, please wait until the roving microphone gets to you before speaking Okay, I guess I just want to go back to the question of rethinking our relations or to physical aspects of the milieu that we inhabit and just try to understand better what some of the alternative conceptions would really come to and I'm just picking up on some themes that came up in the second lecture in the discussion afterwards I think Philippe made a very to my mind apt comment about the cartoonish way moral philosophers and I belong to this tribe myself but have accommodated animals in their moral conceptions which is a process of letting them into the club in some ways by attributing to them qualities that we see in ourselves that we take to be the basis of moral standing in some sense that's Peter Singer's expanded circle and so on and I think there is something odd about that way of conceiving things we just presume a sort of status to ourselves and we bestow it on these other individuals by seeing them as like us in some ways and that may be very well be I'm open to the idea that there are radical alternative ways of seeing things that don't start from this questionable framework and so on but I was struck when it came to we were talking about milieus yesterday and rivers and we were talking about our relations to those things kind of the alternative frameworks that were offered seemed to me sort of very similar to the processes of letting into the club that you were criticizing when it came to the animals if to reconceive our relationship to the river is to bestow on it legal personhood that really just seems like an example of taking a juridical concept that we apply to ourselves and allowing it application to new things that it didn't apply to before and that was the way we ended up reconceptualizing our relation to the river, to the milieu another thing that was mentioned in this context was that we might think of the milieu as owning itself and maybe standing there by an ownership relationship to us and I was also troubled by this because it was a historic early modern Lockean conception of property which is a matter of appropriation through mixing one's labor and it's the most absurd theory in the history of philosophy to be honest but it assumes that we stand in natural ownership relationships to ourselves and then we extend this to the natural world through doing things with it and I think we should just give it up even an application to our own relationship but if our transformed conception of milieu involves imputing to itself ownership it seems like that's the wrong category I would hope that the encounter with animism would open up something more interesting as a way of reconceptualizing the kind of relationship that we stand in here and I'm sure that it does have such resources so maybe I could invite you to say a little bit more about that It's an interesting question because it poses the question of what are the more efficient tools in order to change If I mention this trend of giving legal personality to milieus it's because precisely it's based on something which is familiar to us in particular the Lockean conception because we own ourselves we are in a position to exchange between human subjects etc etc and at the same time using the strength of something which is basic in our moral and political philosophy in order to transform it by completely perverting the notion of ownership precisely and attributing ownership to something which on the face of it is not predisposed to being an owner of itself although there are cases I mean the legal historians know that the fact that things can own themselves and own other things is something that was common in the ancient world for instance temples being owners of land etc etc or dating in fact so I think it's not an end in itself but it's a means that is useful in the sense that people can gather around an objective of this kind in a local struggle for instance no instead of saying we want to protect this river against pollution etc uniting around the idea of the goal of transforming this river into a political subject it's only a small step further but the consequences in terms of the conceptualization of property ownership are much wider so I see that as a step not as a general objective for transforming our ways of dealing with the world around us it's a critical step that is accessible and has already been achieved in some places but I understand yes the idea I've been discussing this with the last book I wrote with a friend called it's called Ethnographies of Worlds to Come and we have had and it's precisely a book that is based on the idea that anthropology and archeology provide stimulation for imagining different worlds and and the ways that indigenous people right now are fighting against the land grab to which they are submitted provides in the very that's why I tried to show yesterday in the lecture in the way they conceptualize their struggle and in the way they try to adapt to the circumstances interesting stimulating ways of transforming our own political institutions Aidan or Timothy or David did you want to add anything? Just a question more for you Philippe does the person or to you Jay as well does the concept of person I understand that it's primarily the motivation here is sort of a legal device that's being used but then of course does it go farther than that a person obviously has agency a person affects other people and other actors and might have a personality and a person could be good or bad or evil even does that was that ever in the cards there at all and thinking about it legal scholars I'll tell you there is a huge difference between personhood and legal personality and it's true but at the same time this does already exist in law and since the law is the common language of our institutions if we want to change them it's important to subvert these legal concepts in order to transform our institutions and this is why I'm quite interested in the process of legal personality being conferred to meteors it doesn't mean the fact that I mentioned yesterday that in Amazonia territories are sort of bodies that relate to other bodies neighboring territories I don't know if there is any notion of personal in that respect in the sense that I don't think these bodies are thought of as intentional agents no there are more like processes vital processes that any organism will develop in order to sustain itself and in that respect I don't think there is any personhood implied but I may be mistaken I don't know sorry Adrala is a sense of personality for a region where I'm a you Philip I'm glad you brought up the Zod Notre Dame de Land I was there for the first anniversary of the defeat of the airport construction project it was an amazing 3D party with a lot of evidence of commodity fascism thrown under the bus and it makes me wonder I like how you seem to be saying that there is a mutual exclusion or antithesis between animism and commodity fetishism I've wondered about that and it seems like there is a possible mutual potentiation between the two if you have struggles against commodity fetishism to protect land animism could help those struggles along and they do have a whole cult of this like Newt at the Zod they have this enormous puppet that took 100 people to dance through the fields and there is a kind of myth that makes Newt there yeah anyway I'd love to hear if you have more thoughts on any of that I think that new narratives are very important worlding is based in our education and socialization on narratives that we hear and that channel us in certain directions is the case in any form of worlding in particular in animism so when you hear, I was mentioning that this morning in a seminar with graduate students in anthropology, when you hear stories of hunters in your childhood that describe very precisely what happened during the hunt the animals they've seen the indexes that allowed them to infer that in some place it wasn't an animal but perhaps a spirit etc it renders an animist form of worlding obvious and when you grow old you will see all these indexes as forms of interpretation of events in your life the question is how do you do this purposefully there are people in the ZAD who are trying to invent new rituals precisely in order to create new narratives that would accompany the institutional shift that the ZAD represents in terms of sharing property sharing work etc I think it's difficult but it may be feasible and this is why images, rituals narratives are an important part of this political process and should not be discarded and I think that it's not only image makers that make us feel that something different is emerging but also narratives that I'm thinking of the great success of writers like Richard Powers for instance and I think that it's a consequence of the fact that so many people are discontent with the present situation and they find in narratives like that a form of possible identification with the characters in a novel and even if it doesn't mean mobilizing oneself in a specific struggle at least sharing an empathy with the characters in a narrative so I think this is very important yes thank you so I kind of have a very specific question but I wanted to ask everyone but especially Philippe can race as like today be understood only through naturalism as an effect of naturalism and how conceptions of man becomes a means or a benchmark to measure other modes of being whether it be being human and yeah that's my question I think so I think that race is a product of naturalism and it's I mean we evoked this and Adam evoked this in a presentation in particular this obsession with scaling and marking hierarchical differences on the nature society scale conceptions of humanity this is an interesting thing it's an interesting and puzzling and difficult thing because we are all aware of the benefits that were the result of the philosophy of the enlightenment and of the idea that there is humanity and there is human nature and this human nature which has been defined in very specific naturalist terms is endowed with rights and so we are not prepared to go to turn our back to that but at the same time as I mentioned yesterday about animism humanity as a general concept is something very specific to naturalism for in an animist regime there is no such notion as humanity as such there are different tribe species again each with a specific habitat and dispositions etc and so the very difficult and tricky question is how do we retain the benefits of the idea that humans has specific rights because of a specific human nature that has been defined in a specific let's say cultural form of world how do we combine that with a more pluralistic approach of what humans and non-humans are and this is an intellectual challenge and that is one that we need all people who are interested in these things during this century will need to think out in order not to lose what was obtained but go beyond based on different conceptions of humanity precisely so the notion of race there are transpositions there are multiple transpositions I'm in animism there are different races of spirits for instance there are tribes species, there are not humans but they are defined as races with specific physical dispositions and the forms of organization etc and even totemism is in fact the idea that your identity is derived from a prototype that left seeds of identity on the surface of the earth and which means that you belong to a specific guide of being that is derived from these seeds of identity that includes humans and non-humans alike is different of course from the notion of race as we know it because it's hybrid, it implies humans and non-humans but I think the general pattern is there are different races but the extraordinary thing about totemism is that in Australia at least what is implied in totemism is that these different races collaborate and in fact exchange spouses in order to produce new races in a way so it's exactly the contrary of racism as we know it there are ontological differences that need and these ontological differences are complementary and not exclusively of each other Does anyone else want to respond to that? Yeah Go on to partially disagree I'm quite convinced personally by the arguments of Cedric Robinson for example that race actually emerges out of feudalism in the sense of aristocratic bloodlines and is then transformed under capitalist labour regimes into something more like its modern biological form but I certainly partially disagree because you just said earlier that naturalism must be a transformation of analogism which would be compatible with that if I understand you correctly I was very struck by it's an article I can't remember the author now about a black person in Venezuela during the colonial period and there was an incident and so they described the detail of the incident but at no time in the judgement about this incident it's mentioned that he is black so it's only by circumstantial evidence discovered that this person was black and at no in spite of this the obsession that the Spaniards had with the castas that is with the distinction between racial distinctions with how they were the product of mixed marriage etc. I don't know 54 castas or something like this so there was a classificatory obsession at the time but the classificatory obsession did not mean in particular that it had social or political consequences wait it had of course because the slaves were black engaging into an interaction I think it was at church could be described under many guises but not on the basis of his race but you're probably right I mean there's a history of constitution yes but it was amplified of course immensely by the classificatory obsession of well the colonial Spain in Venezuela was very much still an analogist formation they were not much naturalist in that respect I mean maybe just to add one other name I've invoked over the two responses would be Sylvia Winter who maybe tells a slightly different story than Cedric Robinson one I think you know for her this exactly the point you're making Philip which is about the simultaneous revolution and birth of something called humanity which she does think is something to be celebrated in the ways that came entangled with this hierarchization is the central problematic for her about trying to recuperate something called the human but she thinks the first version of it in 1492 was about the difference wasn't biological race not naturalism but religion right and we talked about this those who were not Christian so for her there's these various stages or transformations of the humanist project that I think corresponds to the story you're telling about the gradual triumph of naturalism and one in which race over the course of that gradual triumph does become a biologized conception by the 19th century so there's this I don't know important I think historicization or transformation of race that for her does always signal something like non-human but what the terms of that non-humanity are are shifting across this period of time what are your questions just wanted it is somewhat related to this but it is not directly related to this question of race I was also thinking of Silvia Winter when we were talking about this who was also influenced by Bateson as you both are right but my question is on Islam because you said in passing when you were like half an hour ago like 20 minutes ago that naturalism could have happened on the other side of the Mediterranean it could have happened in the world of Islam it could have happened in China it didn't and it happened in Europe and I because the argument that naturalism transforms but transforms is a complex word for you so it's not mechanical at all the transformation there is a radical alteration in the transformation so maybe that is the answer but from analogism and this is an argument that even someone like Agamben makes an infancy in history for instance when he talks about neoplatonism and the relationship on neoplatonism and the development of modern science and so the question of abstraction abstraction and the relationship of that to monotheism and so I was wondering because for instance, Levi-Strauss says in race and history that Islam is actually a different case because in the context of Islam the place of nature was very different it was much more inclusive of a different relationship to nature and that the opposition nature culture was not organized in the same way as us and I thought maybe you were thinking along those lines but also at the same time Islam is a monotheistic religion I work in a Muslim collective and to me these things are much are kind of very complex and I would not be able to simply say that because it is a monotheistic religion then we have analogism and therefore we don't have something like that could you say more about Islam the way you were placing it within your arguments I think it's analogist in the sense that of any analogist system that is the world is composed of many differences that need to be organized with systems of correspondence hierarchy, totalization and monotheism of course is the great invention which allows this process of totalization in a very efficient way but why did I say that in medieval Islam in places like Damascus for instance Damascus naturalism could have emerged because there were a series of factors like differences in philosophical schools that were competing for gaining the attention not only of the learned but also of the powerful much like in China also experiment or experimental science in particular in optics there were elements like that that it seems to me could have reorganized the specific configuration of relation between nature and culture and Islam towards something that is closer to what we know in Europe I'm not a specialist of Islam but it's a conjecture the and of course well of course the fact that there was a prohibition at least in this part of the Near Eastern images is an interesting I don't see the equivalent in Islamic images of this kind of prefiguration of something different of a new form of worlding as we observe in 15th century painting in Europe I suppose what I was trying to say is that maybe that conflict and that there are elements that comes to world but I don't know this is something you can talk about but I would need to be a specialist of medieval Islam to answer so it's a pure hypothesis I'm not prepared to defend it to death let's continue discussion over food but first let's thank our four wonderful speakers