Practices of Eco-sensation: Opening Doors of Perception to the Nonhuman

Landscapes must be painted with the eyes and not with the prejudices that are in our heads.

– Pablo Picasso¹

Whether through words, colors, sounds, or stone art is the language of sensations.

– Deleuze and Guattari²

Take a lump of sugar: It has a spatial configuration. But if we approach it from that angle, all we will ever grasp are differences in degree between that sugar and any other thing. But it also has a duration, a rhythm of duration, a way of being in time that is at least partially revealed in the process of its dissolving, and that shows how this sugar differs in kind not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself. In this respect, Bergson's famous formulation, "I must wait until the sugar dissolves" has a still broader meaning than is given to it by its context. It signifies that my own duration, such as I live it in the impatience of waiting, for example, serves to reveal other durations that beat to other rhythms that differ in kind from mine. Duration is always the location and the environment of differences in kind; it is even their totality and multiplicity.

– Gilles Deleuze³

Introduction

How can art help us to think ecologically? Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, this essay argues that art produces new sets of relations that enable us to map the world beyond human space and to glimpse an image of time, inhabited by multiple nonhuman worlds, sensations and durations.⁴ Humanity is constantly transformed through the machines it creates and the human body becomes a different machine every time it encounters the work of art.⁵ As perceivers of art we partake in the unlivable forces of the cosmos and become earth bodies by virtue of the new affects and temporal relations that form. Art enframes chaos in order to constitute new planes and extract new affects, which then gain autonomy from its creators and take a life of their own; ecophilosophy responds to these sensory becomings by opening up new spaces for thinking and the creation of concepts.

Perhaps, this passage to the nonhuman can be best conceived in terms of the ways in which philosophy, art and science work together to activate the potential of thinking to transform itself. According to Deleuze and Guattari, thinking is an activity of life, which commences only once thought confronts something other than itself. Here life may be best understood as a power to differ and create, not reducible to what has been actually produced; it is also a play of intensive processes and differential relations between forces that form various beings, assemblages and planes of perceptions and images. None of these relations is determined entirely in advance and what is actualized refers only to a specific expression of that power's potential.⁶ Life is a flow of differences and becoming that includes the inorganic world and ceaselessly proliferates new lines of flight and ever more complex forms. As a part of the flux of life thinking becomes one mode of maximization of the virtual within life, which harbors the potential to grasp prehuman forces and differences that precede it and produce it. Whereas science seeks to isolate the properties and functions of actual bodies and states of affairs, philosophy is more interested in what a body can do or become but has not yet done or become. To enter into philosophy, then, means to participate in the invention of a vocabulary-sensorium that maps a virtual realm of relations that a body is capable of. Ecophilosophy, in turn, may be conceived as a set of practices of thinking and sensing by way of concepts that "open lines of flight from an actual order of human bodies" and their habitual modes of perception. Ecophilosophy is an aggregate of concepts that maps the virtual possibilities of another system of "forces, energies and flows that congeal into the more tangible materiality of animals, vegetables, minerals, wind, gravity, tides, sunlight."⁷

One key task of ecophilosophy today is to confront anthropocentrism or all too human-centered ethical thinking...