Thea Potter
From the biopolitics of lithic liminalities to the fungal symbiocene and the metaphysics of wholeness
‘Fidus in silvis silentibus’ (faith in the silent forest) -Schauberger family motto
The Lost Continent of the Biological Mind
Contents
Green Fuse Burning
In Mind of the Fungal Nexus
Threading our way through the forest – Appraisal of Wilderness – A Rose by Any Other Name – Tree of Life – (Un)Earthing Linguistic Roots – Radicle mind, Disseminated Brain – The Precocious Mushie – Like Unto Many – Rhizomatics of Domination
Monoculture of the Soul
Naturalising Misanthropy or, Don’t Kiss the Frog! – Free as a Bird – Technocracy’s Taxonomy of the Future – Devil in the Detail – Hiding the Light, Dimming the Sun – One Earth™ – Nature his Coy Mistress
The Lost Continent of the Biological Mind
After Atlantis – Conflicted Cosmogonies – Getting a Buzz out of Wholeness – Subtleties of the Gaian Mind – Memory Karst in Stone – A Noble End – Hylozoism
Surfing the Waves of the World Soul
The Lost Continent of the Biological Mind
An Ethnobiological Journey Through Tasmania’s Tarkine Wilderness
Reclaiming the environmental movement from the global technocracy
Excerpt From Chapter One: In Mind of the Fungal Nexus
Takanya is the name of the area given by the aboriginal people who inhabited the northwest area of the island of Tasmania located 240km south of the southeast coast of the Australian mainland. The name ‘Tarkine’, the Anglicised version of the name, was adopted by the environmental movement in the 1960’s to refer to the large area of wilderness, whose boundaries are today given as enclosing about 490,000 hectares, consisting of Australia’s largest area of cool-temperate rainforest, extensive button-grass plains, and coastal areas with some of the country’s most significant Aboriginal archaeological remains. Since the 1960’s to the present there has been constant and increasing interest amongst inhabitants of the island, spreading to the mainland of Australia, in conserving and protecting this region of wilderness as a world heritage site. Despite numerous efforts, business interests in mining and forestry have always held the upper hand and the government of Tasmania has ruled time and again against the overall protection of this gradually dwindling wilderness. As I write, the Tarkine is a region of recognised World Heritage significance, but is not yet nominated for World Heritage listing by the Australian government. In order to be inscribed on the World Heritage list, the Australian Government must formally propose the Tarkine to Unesco (the United Nations Body).
That said, inclusion within Unesco also means the inclusion within or acceptance of a dubious intellectual tradition of evolutionary biology and a theory of ‘scientific world humanism’ in which, as Julian Huxley clarifies in his manifesto ‘Unesco: it’s Purpose and Philosophy’ , the European belief in the value of cultural and technological progress outweighs any and all indigenous values, such as belonging or connectedness.
In Horos, Thea Potter explores the complex relationship between classical philosophy and the ‘horos’, a stone that Athenians erected to mark the boundaries of their marketplace, their gravestones, their roads and their private property.Potter weaves this history into a meditation on the ancient philosophical concept of horos, the foundational project of determination and definition, arguing that it is central to the development of classical philosophy and the marketplace.
Horos challenges many significant interpretations of ancient thought. With nuance and insight, Potter combines the works of Aristotle, Plato, Homer and archaic Greek inscriptions with the twentieth-century continental philosophy of Heidegger, Derrida and Walter Benjamin. The result is a powerful study of the theme of boundaries in classical Athenian society as evidenced by boundary stones, law and exchange, ontology, insurgency and occupation.
The innovative book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of ancient Greek social history, philosophy, and literature, as well as to the general reader who is curious to know more about classical life and philosophy.
Horos
Ancient Boundaries and the Ecology of Stone
Excerpt from the Prologue
When Edward Said visited Lebanon, he picked up and threw a stone across the border to Israel. For this act he was barred from attending certain institutions. During the French Revolution stones, frequently the humble cobble, were thrown against the troops and added to the piles of refuse forming the barricades. Again, in England, during the suffragette movement, women wrapped stones in paper, tied a string and threw them at public offices, drawing the string to retrieve them and throw them again. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine it was an iconic image of a young boy throwing stones, later killed by the Israeli army, that attracted the attention of the international media. In a simple protest in Athens against education cuts in 2008, a youth throwing stones was killed by police, causing a general revolt. In Egypt during the latest uprising, stones littered the streets even as the military was sending in tanks.
Must we be satisfied in agreeing with Blanqui that the stone is the principal article in urban battles because it is most ready to hand? Or has the stone gathered this reputation for insurgency on account of history’s momentum, resurfacing every time because of its presence in a former revolt? As Lacan said, perhaps the stone has become an objet petit a for the revolutionaries.
But what if the symbolism of the stone is not limited to these recent acts of historical insurrection? What if the stone itself already marks our responsibility to struggle for what we know to be right? What if the stone actually stands as a testament to what we cannot see in the immediate world around us but presents a most substantial challenge to the status quo exactly because something has been missed, overlooked, or simply lost?
Contents
1. A New Ancient Petrography
2. Does the Letter Matter?
3. Breaking the Law
4. Terminological Horizons
5. The Presence of the Lithic
6. Geophilia Entombed or the Boundary of a Woman’s Mind
7. Solon’s Petromorphic Biopolitics
8. I Am the Boundary of the Market