Attunement in the Estuary
Stories spring from and fill the spaces we inhabit. The landscape holds infinite narratives in its rocks, trees, murmuring streams, buzzing bees. This year I have been exploring our means of coming into contact with such stories. Beginning in the fall, I have been experimenting with a wide range of ways of interfacing with narratives held in the environment. Emerging from early roots laid down in classes across a variety of disciplines, I established the foundational trunk of the project in explorations of rhetoric, metaphor, attunement, the digital, and dialogue with the landscape; from this body of ideas my writing continued to branch out and blossom over the course of the year, resulting in a multifaceted endeavor into Ecocriticism.
Roots
In the immortal words of Don Draper, when a man walks into a room he carries his whole life with him. Entering into this project, I carried with me influences from several classes in my career at Western. Honors courses like the Regenerative Design and Systems of Metaphors, Memes, and Myths seminars shaped my ideas on systems thinking and metaphor; my Fairhaven Applied Human Ecology courses, which I both took and facilitated in a later quarter, introduced me to a wealth of ways of thinking about human interaction with the environment. The class from this period of laying down my roots which is most overtly connected with Attunement in the Estuary would have to be the major author study of Thoreau though.
In my Thoreau class I embarked on a series of essays which were exercises in establishing a sense of place through writing. Over the course of five essays I explored a section of forest containing a stretch of Chuckanut Creek and a small pond. I began with an experimental essay, Stream of Consciousness, in which I first worked with notions of the digital and the role of immersion in the subject matter of environmental writing. I grappled with the task of translating the landscape into text, and I found a potential for objects to take on new identities; inert objects sprung to life as I imbued them with imaginative metaphors, particularly in Seeing the Forest for More Than the Trees: An Expedition into the Abstract.
Subsequent essays introduced me to the challenges in truly capturing a subject within the confines of a photograph or a piece of writing. I determined that such media isolate features of the landscape, reducing the overall effect experienced when immersed in the full environment. Still, I recognized this as a challenge in environmental writing, and sought ways to address this adversity. How could I use such isolation consciously and deliberately? How could I layer different ways of seeing and expressing my surroundings to closer appropriate my actual experiences? I wrestled with these issues and more as I developed as an environmental writer.
In Sounding the Depths to Establish a Sense of Place, through my interactions with the pond I garnered newfound understanding of immersion and its role in establishing a sense of place. Upon looking at the pond, one is first faced with a reflection. Trying to see through the reflection only yields a sort of affirmation of the illusion, as it only seems more real the more you look at it. This would be akin to only reading about nature, seeing a reflected surface of the environment rather than truly understanding it. To try to combat this, I started sounding the pond with a long stick, trying to establish how deep it was. Even with this way of experiencing the pond though, I was only making a limited appraisal of the pond with blind stabs into its depths. I recognized this as analogous to my sporadic and short visits to the pond. My presence there was not a true immersion; true immersion would require diving into the pond, enmeshing myself in the space for a long period of time.
With my final piece in the class, Where Still and Running Waters Meet, I introduced the importance of naming, and I named the place that I had been visiting Where Still and Running Waters Meet, a name clearly evocative of a narrative, and in fact multiple narratives layered over one another. I closed the piece with a final analysis of the writing:
“This type of writing, which combines objective observation with epistemological contemplation, is very much in the vein of Thoreau’s style of writing. I don’t think that it is just “outdoor writing”, but actually an exercise in coming closer to our roots and the fundamental qualities of our existence. Each visit peeled away new layers of preconceptions that come with being a “civilized” person, allowing that which is essentially me and essentially human to rise up from deep inside. At the place where still and running waters meet, not only did I find new facets of nature that I had never before witnessed, I also found a little bit more of myself.”
Each visit to the pond invoked a peeling away of conceptions I had about the space, writing, and myself, and it was as if layers were being stripped away to reveal what lay at my core.
In my Thoreau class I embarked on a series of essays which were exercises in establishing a sense of place through writing. Over the course of five essays I explored a section of forest containing a stretch of Chuckanut Creek and a small pond. I began with an experimental essay, Stream of Consciousness, in which I first worked with notions of the digital and the role of immersion in the subject matter of environmental writing. I grappled with the task of translating the landscape into text, and I found a potential for objects to take on new identities; inert objects sprung to life as I imbued them with imaginative metaphors, particularly in Seeing the Forest for More Than the Trees: An Expedition into the Abstract.
Subsequent essays introduced me to the challenges in truly capturing a subject within the confines of a photograph or a piece of writing. I determined that such media isolate features of the landscape, reducing the overall effect experienced when immersed in the full environment. Still, I recognized this as a challenge in environmental writing, and sought ways to address this adversity. How could I use such isolation consciously and deliberately? How could I layer different ways of seeing and expressing my surroundings to closer appropriate my actual experiences? I wrestled with these issues and more as I developed as an environmental writer.
In Sounding the Depths to Establish a Sense of Place, through my interactions with the pond I garnered newfound understanding of immersion and its role in establishing a sense of place. Upon looking at the pond, one is first faced with a reflection. Trying to see through the reflection only yields a sort of affirmation of the illusion, as it only seems more real the more you look at it. This would be akin to only reading about nature, seeing a reflected surface of the environment rather than truly understanding it. To try to combat this, I started sounding the pond with a long stick, trying to establish how deep it was. Even with this way of experiencing the pond though, I was only making a limited appraisal of the pond with blind stabs into its depths. I recognized this as analogous to my sporadic and short visits to the pond. My presence there was not a true immersion; true immersion would require diving into the pond, enmeshing myself in the space for a long period of time.
With my final piece in the class, Where Still and Running Waters Meet, I introduced the importance of naming, and I named the place that I had been visiting Where Still and Running Waters Meet, a name clearly evocative of a narrative, and in fact multiple narratives layered over one another. I closed the piece with a final analysis of the writing:
“This type of writing, which combines objective observation with epistemological contemplation, is very much in the vein of Thoreau’s style of writing. I don’t think that it is just “outdoor writing”, but actually an exercise in coming closer to our roots and the fundamental qualities of our existence. Each visit peeled away new layers of preconceptions that come with being a “civilized” person, allowing that which is essentially me and essentially human to rise up from deep inside. At the place where still and running waters meet, not only did I find new facets of nature that I had never before witnessed, I also found a little bit more of myself.”
Each visit to the pond invoked a peeling away of conceptions I had about the space, writing, and myself, and it was as if layers were being stripped away to reveal what lay at my core.
Trunk
It was in the fall that I really started exploring the ideas that would be the foundational concepts in the project. Drawing up from my roots in previous classes, I set forth on this project in tandem with my first Writing Studies course. Within the scope of Ecocriticism I applied concepts of metaphor, ecology, rhetoric, and the digital through a series of multimodal essays, weaving text and digital image together.
Like many good stories, this one began with a conflict. An argument, in fact, with some trees. The Madronas and I argued and danced as our narratives entered into a dialogue. The fall essays are in the original spirit of the essay in its French roots – essay: to try – and I tried the somewhat unorthodox in arguing with a plant. I found narratives arising out of every surface, tales of the tide in the ebb and flow of sea against land; songs of observation and conversation in the twittering of birds. The significance of names became apparent in recognizing a name as a carrier of a particular narrative, and I was able to see the world as a network of names and narratives. All of the components of my environment, which I began to regard as ‘cohabitants’ to acknowledge agency and equal-footing, were rhetorical spheres in constant and dynamic contact with other spheres. Each point of contact within the network of narratives constitutes a point at which narratives of different worlds come into contact with one another – something rhetorician Jim Corder would identify as argument.
In drawing and studying the trees we impacted each other’s narratives, and thus in a Corderian sense this interfacing of our narratives was an argument. This dialogic interaction took two forms within Arguing With the Madronas: drawing and researching, one of the many contrasts between these two modes being the analog vs. the digital. Drawing the trees brought about an intimate closeness, and researching through the digital gave me a breadth of knowledge about the species. Combining these threads of inquiry to explore the narratives within the trees, I was even able to attempt giving the trees a voice within my writing.
In subsequent endeavors into the estuary, both physical and rhetorical, I further explored the idea of cohabitants. In Revisiting Metaphor: A Walk in the Woods I found that there is a dialogic relationship between our means of sensing and being with cohabitants and the metaphors which we hold for them. Within the spaces we inhabit, other objects (trees, people, the weather, Capitalism) simultaneously and equilaterally exist, constituting an ever-present and dynamic network. Through the varying connections we pass through as we move through environments, we imagine narratives for our cohabitants. We can never bring something that is outside of the self fully within, and thus we inherently cast an anthropocentric light on an object and bring it into our human experience through metaphor. I can never truly know what it is to be a tree, but I can see a tree as a dancer, a conversationalist, a teacher, and using such anthropomorphic metaphors I can bring an unhuman thing into my realm of understanding.
The metaphors we use inherently shape our interactions with cohabitants. If trees are viewed as a natural resource they hold narratives of potential, of exploitation; if they are viewed otherwise they can hold narratives of wisdom, of spirituality. And when trees are used as a natural resource exploitatively, the action only perpetuates acceptance of the metaphor. A positive feedback loop ensues, until somehow the metaphors are shifted. Through conscious choice to alter our metaphors, as well as through new modes of attunement which inherently shape the metaphors we use, this positive feedback can produce greater harmony with the environment as well though.
I sought after a new relationship with my environment by shifting my metaphors to see my surroundings as an amalgam of cohabitants, all participants in what Marilyn Cooper would consider an ecology of writing. Cooper views writing not as an isolated, individual process but rather as a phenomenon which emerges out of our connections with others in our environment. The cohabitants of the estuary contributed strongly to my writing, shaping my thinking and production in ways that I could never have conceived of on my own. Because I was not communicating through speech with my cohabitants, I focused on other senses in addition to just hearing in our dialogue, experimenting with various ways of sensing. I observed from a distance and up close; I listened, I touched, I smelled, I tasted. Each sense elicited different narratives and metaphors, and I found that no particular metaphor can be regarded as absolute.
In my explorations of the estuary I experienced a feeling which I would imagine is common to most, that “being in Nature” can be a respite from the stresses and overstimulation of the modern world. While I certainly recognize the legitimacy of this feeling, one cannot forget that the digital is still very present in the natural places, in this world cast awash in digital networks. In Ecocriticism in the Digital Age I found that the digital made my experience fundamentally different from that of the likes of someone such as Thoreau. And in fact, I had already begun to consider this notion in Stream of Consciousness. Now I can take pictures with my smartphone and even have them instantly geotagged, I can record myself speaking and the ambient sounds, I can find information gathered by countless others through the internet. Thus, in terms of attunement, the digital is profoundly impactful upon our relationships with Nature.
Fall culminated for me with a series of three interviews based on Robert Weiss’ qualitative interview methodology in Learning from Strangers. First, in Interview With the Naturalist, I sought out new ways of sensing and being in the wilderness by speaking with a fellow student. He had gone through various schools like the Wilderness Awareness School and Kamana Naturalist Training Program, where he learned about ways to develop “Nature Awareness,” that being a constant awareness and deep understanding of one’s surroundings. In our conversation I learned about orienting – how one situates themselves in the world – and explored new ways of reading the landscape.
In the second and third interview installments, My First Interview With the Trees and On Learning How to Interview a Tree, I adapted Weiss’ methods to further explore dialogue with the environment. I began by asking trees questions like “What do you see? What is this place you call home?” and allowing a response to spring forth from my cohabitants. Different facets of the scene – the intermixing of tall brown and green grasses, the grey clouds on the horizon –were stitched together into a cohesive narrative. The tree did not just provide an immediate and clear response like you might expect from a human; rather, I had to open my attunement in different ways to find my answers. I realized that, though I was attempting to interview a tree, I was really entering into a dialogue with several of my surrounding cohabitants. Recognizing this, I wanted to enhance my attunement further: I wanted to understand what the bird calls meant; I wanted to know how forest succession unfolds. I began to see that attuning to and conversing with the landscape is a life-long journey of development. I could never run out of ways to read the stories held within the landscape. There is no isolated moment of connection between the self and a cohabitant; the conversation with the landscape is constant. To develop the dialogue, one just needs to learn to attune to their environment in new ways.
Like many good stories, this one began with a conflict. An argument, in fact, with some trees. The Madronas and I argued and danced as our narratives entered into a dialogue. The fall essays are in the original spirit of the essay in its French roots – essay: to try – and I tried the somewhat unorthodox in arguing with a plant. I found narratives arising out of every surface, tales of the tide in the ebb and flow of sea against land; songs of observation and conversation in the twittering of birds. The significance of names became apparent in recognizing a name as a carrier of a particular narrative, and I was able to see the world as a network of names and narratives. All of the components of my environment, which I began to regard as ‘cohabitants’ to acknowledge agency and equal-footing, were rhetorical spheres in constant and dynamic contact with other spheres. Each point of contact within the network of narratives constitutes a point at which narratives of different worlds come into contact with one another – something rhetorician Jim Corder would identify as argument.
In drawing and studying the trees we impacted each other’s narratives, and thus in a Corderian sense this interfacing of our narratives was an argument. This dialogic interaction took two forms within Arguing With the Madronas: drawing and researching, one of the many contrasts between these two modes being the analog vs. the digital. Drawing the trees brought about an intimate closeness, and researching through the digital gave me a breadth of knowledge about the species. Combining these threads of inquiry to explore the narratives within the trees, I was even able to attempt giving the trees a voice within my writing.
In subsequent endeavors into the estuary, both physical and rhetorical, I further explored the idea of cohabitants. In Revisiting Metaphor: A Walk in the Woods I found that there is a dialogic relationship between our means of sensing and being with cohabitants and the metaphors which we hold for them. Within the spaces we inhabit, other objects (trees, people, the weather, Capitalism) simultaneously and equilaterally exist, constituting an ever-present and dynamic network. Through the varying connections we pass through as we move through environments, we imagine narratives for our cohabitants. We can never bring something that is outside of the self fully within, and thus we inherently cast an anthropocentric light on an object and bring it into our human experience through metaphor. I can never truly know what it is to be a tree, but I can see a tree as a dancer, a conversationalist, a teacher, and using such anthropomorphic metaphors I can bring an unhuman thing into my realm of understanding.
The metaphors we use inherently shape our interactions with cohabitants. If trees are viewed as a natural resource they hold narratives of potential, of exploitation; if they are viewed otherwise they can hold narratives of wisdom, of spirituality. And when trees are used as a natural resource exploitatively, the action only perpetuates acceptance of the metaphor. A positive feedback loop ensues, until somehow the metaphors are shifted. Through conscious choice to alter our metaphors, as well as through new modes of attunement which inherently shape the metaphors we use, this positive feedback can produce greater harmony with the environment as well though.
I sought after a new relationship with my environment by shifting my metaphors to see my surroundings as an amalgam of cohabitants, all participants in what Marilyn Cooper would consider an ecology of writing. Cooper views writing not as an isolated, individual process but rather as a phenomenon which emerges out of our connections with others in our environment. The cohabitants of the estuary contributed strongly to my writing, shaping my thinking and production in ways that I could never have conceived of on my own. Because I was not communicating through speech with my cohabitants, I focused on other senses in addition to just hearing in our dialogue, experimenting with various ways of sensing. I observed from a distance and up close; I listened, I touched, I smelled, I tasted. Each sense elicited different narratives and metaphors, and I found that no particular metaphor can be regarded as absolute.
In my explorations of the estuary I experienced a feeling which I would imagine is common to most, that “being in Nature” can be a respite from the stresses and overstimulation of the modern world. While I certainly recognize the legitimacy of this feeling, one cannot forget that the digital is still very present in the natural places, in this world cast awash in digital networks. In Ecocriticism in the Digital Age I found that the digital made my experience fundamentally different from that of the likes of someone such as Thoreau. And in fact, I had already begun to consider this notion in Stream of Consciousness. Now I can take pictures with my smartphone and even have them instantly geotagged, I can record myself speaking and the ambient sounds, I can find information gathered by countless others through the internet. Thus, in terms of attunement, the digital is profoundly impactful upon our relationships with Nature.
Fall culminated for me with a series of three interviews based on Robert Weiss’ qualitative interview methodology in Learning from Strangers. First, in Interview With the Naturalist, I sought out new ways of sensing and being in the wilderness by speaking with a fellow student. He had gone through various schools like the Wilderness Awareness School and Kamana Naturalist Training Program, where he learned about ways to develop “Nature Awareness,” that being a constant awareness and deep understanding of one’s surroundings. In our conversation I learned about orienting – how one situates themselves in the world – and explored new ways of reading the landscape.
In the second and third interview installments, My First Interview With the Trees and On Learning How to Interview a Tree, I adapted Weiss’ methods to further explore dialogue with the environment. I began by asking trees questions like “What do you see? What is this place you call home?” and allowing a response to spring forth from my cohabitants. Different facets of the scene – the intermixing of tall brown and green grasses, the grey clouds on the horizon –were stitched together into a cohesive narrative. The tree did not just provide an immediate and clear response like you might expect from a human; rather, I had to open my attunement in different ways to find my answers. I realized that, though I was attempting to interview a tree, I was really entering into a dialogue with several of my surrounding cohabitants. Recognizing this, I wanted to enhance my attunement further: I wanted to understand what the bird calls meant; I wanted to know how forest succession unfolds. I began to see that attuning to and conversing with the landscape is a life-long journey of development. I could never run out of ways to read the stories held within the landscape. There is no isolated moment of connection between the self and a cohabitant; the conversation with the landscape is constant. To develop the dialogue, one just needs to learn to attune to their environment in new ways.
Foliage
Through winter and spring, I carried my Ecocritical exploration forward through new styles of rhetoric, branching out from my initial foundations. Much of my winter writing was conducted in tandem with my Writing Studies courses Wanderings in Style and Art of the Essay: Writing the Body. Through these classes I experimented with Ecocritical writing in various styles ranging from low to classic to grand style. I also put into practice a cultural shift through metaphorical revision, which I describe in Ode to Om.
In the spring I further developed my repertoire in environmental rhetoric, exploring the medium of podcasts in the writing seminar Rhetoric, Attention, & Podcasting: Framing Our Means Of Making. Through podcasting I delved deeper into the relationship between the digital and an environmental dialogue. In my first podcast, a revised version of my Arguing With the Madronas essay, I was able to bring my text to life and convey meaning through rich layers. Word, music, and ambient sound, all invoking visual imagery, gave me greater license with the work and I was able to create a more immersive experience through digital means. In my second podcast installment I further explored how the digital enables and augments a dialogue with the environment, examining several examples of people using technology to listen to and communicate with plants.
The digital and its absence in the analog are juxtaposed in the exhibition of Attunement in the Estuary. An analogue portfolio of photography and text, albeit pulled from digital production, sits alongside ambient sound recorded from the estuary, podcast listening stations, and a projection of a digital, interactive portfolio of the project. This juxtaposition of digital and analog is intended to further emphasize the role of the digital in attunement and environmental dialogue. Through digital media and new styles of rhetoric, over the course of the winter and spring I began branching out into several ways of engaging with attunement and on a larger scale Ecocriticism.
Perched among these branches, I was able to look back at the work which had sprung up from the fertile soil of the estuary in new light. Considering rhetoric, cohabitants, and the timescales involved in conversing with the landscape, it becomes appropriate to consider Kairos. The concept of Kairos has been in discussion since Greek times; it is commonly understood as timeliness, or the seizing of the most opportune moment. Thomas Rickert brings a new voice into the conversation in Ambient Rhetoric, modernizing the notion and making it relevant to rhetoric in the digital age. Rickert aims to embed Kairos in a sense of spatiality as well as temporality, which harkens back to its original usage that became warped over time. Rickert’s views on Kairos are of utmost importance to Ecocriticism in the digital age, as they redefine the way in which environments engage in the construction of meaning.
The environment has to be understood in new ways in light of Rickert’s definition of Kairos. “Place is not a neutral, material stage… but is itself a complex of relations” (90), those being a highly nuanced set of relations among language, environments, and people (91). It is from our existence within these webs of relations that meaning springs forth: “the world takes part in human activity not as mundane backdrop but as shifting relations of essential, contributing elements, discourses, and forces, all determinately placed” (92).
These determinately placed elements and forces are what Bruno Latour identifies as actants and alliances. Latour offers that every actant is not only a physical manifestation of matter in space, but is an event as well. He places the actant in the context of time and space. In every moment, I, a tree, my smart phone, are all new actants. We are constantly in a dynamic and fluid state. This notion is of particular importance in its relation to Kairos.
Thinking of Kairos as a matter of both time and space as Rickert suggests, to be Kairotic is to be attuned to the fluctuations of cohabitants in the environment. It is because every actant is an event, and thus what we perceive as a substance is a series of events, that Kairos requires a constant awareness of surrounding actants. Kairos and attunement emerge from alliances formed between an ambiently aware actant and their cohabitants.
Rickert’s assessment of Kairos in its bearing on attunement is perhaps best summed up in this statement: “Kairos is not about mastery but instead concerns attunement to a situation, with attunement understood not as a subjective state of mind or willed comportment but as an ambient catalysis within what is most material and concrete, a gathering that springs forward” (98). It is attunement that is key in seizing the kairotic space/moment, and this enables the dialogue with the environment which I am after, a “gathering that springs forward” of meaning in the surrounding world.
Rickert makes a distinction between two ideas of attunement. The first he lists is “a subjective state of mind or willed comportment,” but this is not the type of attunement which he finds necessary to Kairos. Rather than this purely internal (ie mental) perspective of attunement, Rickert claims that attunement lies in the external world, identifying it as “an ambient catalysis within what is most material and concrete, a gathering that springs forward.”
This notion of gathering is akin to the foraging we do with texts. In the same way that we navigate through a text and selectively gather information, attunement to the environment involves interaction with the material world that begets a gathering of information, and as such ‘reading the landscape’ can be an apt metaphor for attunement. It is the foraged pieces of information which the brain stitches together to create narratives for cohabitants of an environment through metaphor. Attunement is an “ambient catalysis” in that the reach of perception has to spread through the space like a cloud, coming into contact with many points in the material world at all instances. Such ambient attunement can take many forms. The attention used to draw or write about a piece of the environment, or the passive absorption of ambient qualities through sit-spot exercises, for example, contribute to the seizing of Kairos.
Through attunement we form alliances with the cohabitants in our environment, or actants as Bruno Latour refers to them. Oscillating between varying modes of attunement creates strings of alliance between the self and other actants. These alliances can be strengthened through discourse, and reshaping our current frames of metaphor and dialogue can further augment the relationship between ourselves and the environment. I still have a great amount to learn and do in regard to developing my own modes of attunement, and am incredibly excited about the prospects of expanding my environmental awareness. I plan to engage in the Kamana naturalist training program which I learned about in one of my interviews in the fall to increase my proficiency in orienting myself within a landscape. And I also plan to continue pursuing studies into these issues in graduate coursework. These and other future endeavors will surely contribute to my constant and ever-evolving dialogue with the environment. As I said in Ecocriticism in the Digital Age, mine is not a new path. I walk along the shady groves long travelled by writers before me. But I carry with me the digital networks in which I am intrinsically bound, exploring new avenues of attunement and Ecocriticism.
In the spring I further developed my repertoire in environmental rhetoric, exploring the medium of podcasts in the writing seminar Rhetoric, Attention, & Podcasting: Framing Our Means Of Making. Through podcasting I delved deeper into the relationship between the digital and an environmental dialogue. In my first podcast, a revised version of my Arguing With the Madronas essay, I was able to bring my text to life and convey meaning through rich layers. Word, music, and ambient sound, all invoking visual imagery, gave me greater license with the work and I was able to create a more immersive experience through digital means. In my second podcast installment I further explored how the digital enables and augments a dialogue with the environment, examining several examples of people using technology to listen to and communicate with plants.
The digital and its absence in the analog are juxtaposed in the exhibition of Attunement in the Estuary. An analogue portfolio of photography and text, albeit pulled from digital production, sits alongside ambient sound recorded from the estuary, podcast listening stations, and a projection of a digital, interactive portfolio of the project. This juxtaposition of digital and analog is intended to further emphasize the role of the digital in attunement and environmental dialogue. Through digital media and new styles of rhetoric, over the course of the winter and spring I began branching out into several ways of engaging with attunement and on a larger scale Ecocriticism.
Perched among these branches, I was able to look back at the work which had sprung up from the fertile soil of the estuary in new light. Considering rhetoric, cohabitants, and the timescales involved in conversing with the landscape, it becomes appropriate to consider Kairos. The concept of Kairos has been in discussion since Greek times; it is commonly understood as timeliness, or the seizing of the most opportune moment. Thomas Rickert brings a new voice into the conversation in Ambient Rhetoric, modernizing the notion and making it relevant to rhetoric in the digital age. Rickert aims to embed Kairos in a sense of spatiality as well as temporality, which harkens back to its original usage that became warped over time. Rickert’s views on Kairos are of utmost importance to Ecocriticism in the digital age, as they redefine the way in which environments engage in the construction of meaning.
The environment has to be understood in new ways in light of Rickert’s definition of Kairos. “Place is not a neutral, material stage… but is itself a complex of relations” (90), those being a highly nuanced set of relations among language, environments, and people (91). It is from our existence within these webs of relations that meaning springs forth: “the world takes part in human activity not as mundane backdrop but as shifting relations of essential, contributing elements, discourses, and forces, all determinately placed” (92).
These determinately placed elements and forces are what Bruno Latour identifies as actants and alliances. Latour offers that every actant is not only a physical manifestation of matter in space, but is an event as well. He places the actant in the context of time and space. In every moment, I, a tree, my smart phone, are all new actants. We are constantly in a dynamic and fluid state. This notion is of particular importance in its relation to Kairos.
Thinking of Kairos as a matter of both time and space as Rickert suggests, to be Kairotic is to be attuned to the fluctuations of cohabitants in the environment. It is because every actant is an event, and thus what we perceive as a substance is a series of events, that Kairos requires a constant awareness of surrounding actants. Kairos and attunement emerge from alliances formed between an ambiently aware actant and their cohabitants.
Rickert’s assessment of Kairos in its bearing on attunement is perhaps best summed up in this statement: “Kairos is not about mastery but instead concerns attunement to a situation, with attunement understood not as a subjective state of mind or willed comportment but as an ambient catalysis within what is most material and concrete, a gathering that springs forward” (98). It is attunement that is key in seizing the kairotic space/moment, and this enables the dialogue with the environment which I am after, a “gathering that springs forward” of meaning in the surrounding world.
Rickert makes a distinction between two ideas of attunement. The first he lists is “a subjective state of mind or willed comportment,” but this is not the type of attunement which he finds necessary to Kairos. Rather than this purely internal (ie mental) perspective of attunement, Rickert claims that attunement lies in the external world, identifying it as “an ambient catalysis within what is most material and concrete, a gathering that springs forward.”
This notion of gathering is akin to the foraging we do with texts. In the same way that we navigate through a text and selectively gather information, attunement to the environment involves interaction with the material world that begets a gathering of information, and as such ‘reading the landscape’ can be an apt metaphor for attunement. It is the foraged pieces of information which the brain stitches together to create narratives for cohabitants of an environment through metaphor. Attunement is an “ambient catalysis” in that the reach of perception has to spread through the space like a cloud, coming into contact with many points in the material world at all instances. Such ambient attunement can take many forms. The attention used to draw or write about a piece of the environment, or the passive absorption of ambient qualities through sit-spot exercises, for example, contribute to the seizing of Kairos.
Through attunement we form alliances with the cohabitants in our environment, or actants as Bruno Latour refers to them. Oscillating between varying modes of attunement creates strings of alliance between the self and other actants. These alliances can be strengthened through discourse, and reshaping our current frames of metaphor and dialogue can further augment the relationship between ourselves and the environment. I still have a great amount to learn and do in regard to developing my own modes of attunement, and am incredibly excited about the prospects of expanding my environmental awareness. I plan to engage in the Kamana naturalist training program which I learned about in one of my interviews in the fall to increase my proficiency in orienting myself within a landscape. And I also plan to continue pursuing studies into these issues in graduate coursework. These and other future endeavors will surely contribute to my constant and ever-evolving dialogue with the environment. As I said in Ecocriticism in the Digital Age, mine is not a new path. I walk along the shady groves long travelled by writers before me. But I carry with me the digital networks in which I am intrinsically bound, exploring new avenues of attunement and Ecocriticism.