Mutations 0: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene

From the editor:

Mutants of Issue Zero

Brandt Stickley initiates our volume with a meditation on embodiment through a remedial consideration of integral consciousness and the body-as-time. "Contained within this three-dimensional embodiment," Stickley writes, "we may also uncover the seeds of time-freedom as fourth-dimensionality."

In "Climate Crisis, Karma, Compassion," Sam Mickey challenges our propensity to reinvent anthropocentric thinking. Rather than accruing more "karma" through our dualistic fixations, which continue to frame humanity-against-biosphere narratives, Mickey suggests a more compassionate and even mutational response to the climate crisis involves resting in "coexistentialism" with our planetary kin. This coexistential turn recognizes that "it is only through the inhuman that humankind can grow forth."

AnaLouise Keating articulates the central role and ontological status, that imagination itself holds for social transformation in the new mutation: "The Ontological Imagination: An Anzaldúan Manifesto for Social Change." Drawing from the posthumously published work of queer feminist and visionary scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality), Keating proposes that the "ontological imagination," the realm of dream and soul, maintains an independent level of reality, a "pre or beyond-human world soul." This realm often conveys "wisdom and insights that exceed ours," Keating writes, and therefore provides us with tools to realize "new forms of resistance," and alternative "visions of potential futures." This micro-manifesto for social change continues to draw from Anzaldúa's work, proposing that as a foundation for accessing and effectuating the ontological imagination for social change, we need a sufficient metaphysics of "radical interconnectedness" and practices of spiritual-imaginal alignment.

Matthew Segall's "Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus" considers how the modern, metaphysical divide between humans and nature needs to be upturned if postcapitalist futures are to be realized. Bringing Marx into critical dialogue with contemporary ecological thought, Segall turns to Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. What Whitehead offers our Gaian futures is a departure from teleological determinism, a cosmological move into "relational creativity" and Gaian agency.

In "10 Years After Coming Home," Sean Kelly concludes this issue of Mutations with an appropriate temporal exercise in this updated epilogue to his 2010 book (Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era). While many developments, as Kelly writes, have proven to detract from a substantive hopefulness that civilization will avoid the "Great Unraveling," as Joanna Macy describes it, the loss of hope can deepen into faith. Without any expectations of salvation or success, the mutational leap into what Kelly calls a "planetary wisdom culture" ceases to be prefigurative. It becomes lived, an affirmation in the present-a faith in the highest good, and a coming home to a living cosmos.

Whatever else the integral mutation might be-and it is the hope of the editors that in the following pages we will be that much closer to finding out-at the very least it involves the realization, thunderclap sudden or slow-blooming spring assured, that we are already entangled in that radiant body of time, and so our tomorrow is always shaped in mutuality. In the sympoiesis, the "making-with" of the spiritual present, the world asks for our participation.