CONNECTEDNESS

Civilization and Its Discontents, a book Sigmund

Freud wrote nearly a hundred years ago, begins with
a consideration of “the oceanic feeling,” “a feeling as
of something limitless, unbounded,” “a feeling of an
indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world
as a whole.” Freud, who confessed that he was unable
to discover this affect in himself, did not, to be sure,
coin the term, which first appeared in a 1927 letter
from his friend, French writer and Nobel laureate
Romain Rolland. What the psychoanalyst proposes is
an original interpretation, according to which the sense
of “being one with the external world as a whole” is a
symptom of ego boundaries melting away, recalling the
state of an infant at the maternal breast, still unable
“to distinguish his ego from the external world as the
source of the sensations flowing in upon him.”

In primary and secondary fusion with the world,

though, there is no longer or not yet a relation to
that world: melting into the other is as detrimental
to the logic of relationality as absolute separation and
detachment. Could it be, as a result, that relations
of any kind depend on careful acts of calibrating the
distance (physical and otherwise) between the relating
and the related to? Perhaps, but this intuition misses
something crucial about relations and connections
that are neither posterior to the interrelated terms nor
limited to their positive approximations. It is necessary
to delve a little deeper in order to start getting a hang
of the way they operate.

The elemental texture of the feeling, which Rolland

puts into words and about which Freud expresses
his doubts, matters. The oceanic feeling dissolves, by
liquefying, the boundaries between the ego and the
world. Today, another sort of feeling is on the rise,
“the terrene feeling,” which is the analogue of the
oceanic feeling, this time around directed toward the
earth. Both the critics of the Anthropocene and the
advocates of deep ecology or Gaia theory have this
feeling, tinged with a mix of disgust and fascination,
repulsion and attraction. Unlike water, the earth is a
hard substratum for physical existence, but it is also
manifold in its unity, combining, accommodating all
the other elements on its surface and in its depths. We
cannot fuse with it by melting, but we can decay into it,
by Michael Marder becoming a part of it as a result, which is what happens
Ikerbasque: Basque Foundation for Science in death, at least according to some funerary rites. And
& University of the Basque Country we can also clog it with nondecomposable materials.

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 Whatever our position, the twenty-first century forces socio-political, economic, and ecological levels. On
us to form a relation to the earth, and to clarify the very this view, to be outside the web is to be no longer.
logic of relationality in the process. Connections are everything. What we fear most is
being disconnected, off the grid. But it is also what
we sometimes secretly and sometimes openly desire,
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO ATTUNE a little like the partisans of the terrene feeling with
their attraction to and repulsion from the earth. More
OUR RELATION TO THE EARTH pervasive than the interconnectedness of the web is
the idea or the ideal of connectivity, the possibility of
IN A SITUATION WHERE WE ARE establishing and maintaining connections. One should
be able to be connected to anything and anyone at any
SIMULTANEOUSLY TOO FAR time. Connectivity thus tends toward totalization; its
imaginary institution tends to be total.
FROM AND TOO CLOSE TO IT?
What does total connectivity do to actual and possible
The difficulty of the task at hand is that the immanent relations? The answer is: in the name of freedom, it
inclusion in the earthly fold of the being called seals off the breathing spaces, the pores or the gaps, the
“human” (the Greek anthropos) is simultaneously blanks or the disjunctions, that make relations what
disturbed and exacerbated today. The age of space they are. It effects a fusion detrimental to the vitality
travel, presaged by the intellectual movement known of relations. The dream is to be in more than one place
as Russian cosmism, puts us at a distance from the at the same time and, ultimately, to be anywhere and
planet, even if we have never left its surface. The everywhere. To be, in other words, godlike after the
technological advancement that allowed us to see the death of God.
earth as it looks from outer space assigns to us the
role of outside observers, unmoored from the planet. Something similar happens in the case of entanglement,
In Kelly Oliver’s sharp formulation, “the photographs a concept derived from quantum physics and introduced
of earth from space provoke the ‘love it or leave it’ by another Nobel Prize winner, Edwin Schrödinger:
reaction that feeds the illusion of control and mastery
by suggesting that we must, or can, choose one or When two systems, of which we know the states by
the other, but not both.” No one can stay unaffected their respective representatives, enter into temporary
by this provocation; even Prince William weighs in physical interaction due to known forces between
on the issue. On the other hand, the Anthropocene, them, and when after a time of mutual influence the
with industrial waste encrusted in the earth’s strata systems separate again, then they can no longer be
and present in every ecosystem on the planet, signals described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing
the inextricable involvement of our transgenerational each of them with a representative of its own. I would
“techno-bodies” in the planet’s geophysicality. How is not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of
it possible to calibrate our relation to the earth in a quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire
situation where we are simultaneously too far from and departure from classical lines of thought. By the
too close to it? Isn’t the earth’s relation to us ultimately interaction the two representatives [the quantum
unregulated and unregulatable, despite all the daring states] have become entangled.
of geoengineering?
Not by chance, already at the time of the concept’s
*** coinage, one of the main applications of entanglement,
which is the maximal sense of connection, is
One doesn’t need to be an adherent of the Actor- teleportation. The Anthropocene is human
Network Theory (ATN) or Object Oriented Ontology entanglement with the earth, assuming that, as a result
(OOO) to realize that the web furnishes the of their interaction, “two systems,” the geologic and the
contemporary image of ontology, of being itself as anthropic, can no longer be described separately from
a scattered but interconnected whole at the digital, one another. In fact, there were not two independent

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systems to begin with: since its evolutionary origins, One explanation for the inflation of the notion of
Homo sapiens is a species of earthlings, embedded entanglement is disregard for its origin in quantum
in the earth’s elemental realities and ecosystems. physics. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
The oceanic feeling is the affective evidence of this Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
lopsided, unequal or asymmetrical, relation. Yet, as (2007), Karen Barad forged a crucial link between the
a consequence of species activity, the earth becomes sciences and the humanities. However, her endeavour
immanent to humanity, just as humans are immanent is all too often reduced to a single keyword, loosely
to the earth. The terrene feeling testifies to this taken to signify mutual imbrication or inextricability.
entanglement, but the point of balance (or of identity In “new materialism,” matter taken in its relational
in difference) is not sustained for long, as lopsidedness character as entanglement is unwittingly idealized. In
makes its comeback: whereas, previously, the earth turn, oblivious to elemental density, to the un- or non-
was independent of human earthlings, now humanity transmittable, and to whatever may still be outside a
is on the verge of proclaiming itself an interplanetary global network, the minimal sense of connection in the
species, wishing to part with the perversely humanized image of the web is avowedly idealist. What is missing
earth. All the same, if the Anthropocene designates between entanglement and alienation is a space and a
human entanglement with the earth, then we have no time for relations, for connections, and, therefore, for
good philosophical reasons to criticize it while praising the disconnects, punctuations, intermittencies, and
“entangled lives,” the maximal sense of connection, far tears in the fabric of existence.
in excess of symbiosis.
***

IN METAPHYSICS, THE HUMAN It is prudent, as always, to listen carefully to what the

word itself tells us, to what, not limited to the field of
IS CONCEIVED AS A CREATURE etymology, the word as a unit of language among many
other units and many other languages (not only of the
WHO LIVES ON BUT IS NOT OF human variety) contributes to the making of being.
The Latin heritage preserved in connection does what
THE EARTH it says, connecting two words into one at the juncture
n, which, redoubled, marks simultaneously their
The minimal sense of connection returns to the image sameness and difference, repetition and disruption by a
of the web, presenting all of us, human or not, as nodes space or a spacing, attachment and detachment. It adds
in a vast network. What are the lines intersecting at to con-, with, a form of the verb nectere, to bind or to tie.
nodal points? What lies between them, between us? Taken together, the two units convey: “with a bond,”
Obviously, the elements, such as the atmosphere, “with what guarantees the being-with.” Connection
in which we are enveloped and which infiltrates our says, literally, with with-ness and betrays an underlying
bronchial tubes and the lungs, or the earth sustaining anxiety that the without is lurking nearby.
us, as well as the cables buried underground or
under the sea and the air through which radio waves In the twentieth century and in the beginning of the
and satellite or wireless signals travel. The material twenty-first, with (mit, avec, com/cum/con) drew the
infrastructure of connectivity is largely inconspicuous, attention of numerous philosophers, including Martin
receding to the background unless it malfunctions: the Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce
earth gives way under our feet or spews fire into the air Irigaray, Roberto Esposito, and Marcia Sá Cavalcante
as a volcano; satellite communications are interrupted Schuback. From Heidegger’s suggestion in Being and
or an internet cable is accidentally cut by a construction Time that human existence (Dasein) is always a being-
crew. In “business as usual,” the in-between evanesces. with (Mitsein) or a being-there-with (Mitdasein) to
To sum up, in the minimal sense of connection, we the deconstructive insight into the dispersal of the
face the relata (i.e., parties to a relation) without the origin and a disseminated multiplicity that supplants
relating; in its maximal sense, we deal with the relating it, thinking with the with, or – as I formulated above
without the relata. – with with-ness, allowed for a fresh articulation of

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 © Blane De St. Croix

singularity and universality, unity and multiplicity, part philosophical metaphysics, the human is conceived as
and whole connected by means other than dialectical, a creature who lives on but is not of the earth (despite
mereological, or logical. This showed how being-with the derivation of the biblical Adam, all the way down
disrupts the very connection or community it forms. to his name from the earth, adamah). While the feeling
In the oceanic feeling, “an indissoluble bond, of being of being one with the earth affirms the immanence of
one with the external world as a whole” is persistently human life to planetary existence, it also differentiates
dissolved on its own terms of “being one with” that the human from that existence. That is why, whether in
world. Being one with something or someone indicates response to the magnificence of Gaia or the deplorability
fusion and, at the same time, implies a separation, the of the Anthropocene, the crypto-metaphysical response
distance of the with, where there is already more than is uniform: we need to become posthuman biologically,
one in or outside the one. technologically, or bio-technologically.

Assuming that the oceanic feeling cedes the affective What if, instead of either adhering to or protesting
stage to the terrene feeling, the question is: how against the injunction to be one with the earth, we
to interpret being one with the earth, rather than tried to be with the earth? What would this being-with
with the world? The connective with, which denotes or being-there-with (Heidegger’s Mitsein or Mitdasein)
a disconnection between the parties it conjoins, entail? What could this broken planetary bond or this
tacitly continues the metaphysical paradigm that the articulated break look and feel like? Would it not skirt
terrene feeling claims to repudiate. In theological and the pitfalls of the maximal and the minimal senses

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of connection without striking a fictitious balance Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the
between them, the golden middle that is inconceivable Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque
there where the doubling of the with coincides with its Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings
silent negation? span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and
political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific
articles and eighteen monographs, including Plant-
HUMANITY IS AN ERRANT Thinking (2013); Dust (2016), Dump Philosophy (2020),
Green Mass (2021); and, most recently, Senses of
SPECIES; PERHAPS THIS Upheaval (2021). For more information, consult his
website: michaelmarder.org.
IS WHY IT IS A PLANETARY
SPECIES, DREAMING OF
BECOMING INTERPLANETARY
Being with the earth does not mean that we can
travel with it, as on a gigantic spaceship, or treat it as
portable thanks to a preconceived set of ideas projected
onto other planets. Nor does it mean that we should
transpose the structures of sociality onto our relation
to the planet, as in Michel Serres’ idea of a “natural
contract” with the earth, mimicking the old social
contract of the European Enlightenment. What it does
bring into play is the temporal dimension of being-with
in the diachronies and asynchronies of deep planetary
or geological time, flattened at the surface by a history
of industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the
existential time of living beings and ecosystems, on
the other. Not only do such diachronies respect the
multiple disconnects lodged in every connection, but
they also flesh out the meaning of being-with as a
shared destiny, shared, once again, asymmetrically,
asynchronously, with the without: the earth itself will
persist long after the human species becomes extinct
along with the untold numbers of other species that are
now dragged along into non-being.

***

P.S. Planets are errant stars; they fascinated the

ancients because unlike other stars they did not stay
put in the night sky. Humanity is an errant species;
perhaps this is why it is a planetary species, dreaming
of becoming interplanetary. In their wanderings,
planets are nevertheless bound to stars they orbit,
not to mention the gravitational fields organizing the
spacetime around them. Does our errant, nearly lost,
kind have any analogous bonds left?

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