Forest Encounters. THINKING WITH THE FOREST TOWARDS PRACTICES OF ATTENTIVENESS AND ECOLOGIGICAL JUSTICE

Master Thesis Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr Jeff Diamanti 9th _{of July 2019}

Forest Encounters.

THINKING WITH THE FOREST TOWARDS PRACTICES OF

ATTENTIVENESS AND ECOLOGIGICAL JUSTICE

Abstract

In this thesis I argue for the necessity of thinking with the forms of experience, communication, signification, and modes of relation made available by thinking with the forest. I do so by analyzing several case studies that foreground aesthetic mediations forest encounters. By introducing the concept of “forest encounters” I contribute to ecofeminist discourse of climate change inflected knowledge production processes that operate and act at the intersection of scientific and critical inquiry. I do this by showing how forest encounters provide access points based on empathy for renegotiating the relationship between human and nonhuman actors for practices of nonviolent communication and ecological redistributive justice.

Table of Content

1. Introduction

2. Translating the Forest

3. Storytelling with the Forest

4. Mourning the Forest

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

2018 was a positive year for environmental activism and climate justice. Emblematic of the resurgence in action is the victory at The Hambach Forest. For several years activists had occupied the ancient forest near Cologne which has become a symbol of resistance against coal energy and earth resource exploitation in Germany—an economy whose green reputation still remains heavily reliant on this dirty fossil fuel. The energy company RWE AG legally owns the land of the forest and had planned to cut it off in order to expand the space for coal mining arguing that due to the stop of nuclear energy in 2022 Germany’s energy supply heavily depends on the expansion. The police started to evict the activists leading to dramatic scenes and the death of a journalist who had been living, sympathizing and reporting about the activists and their cause. However, in an unexpected ruling the Higher Administrative Court of Münster decided that more investigation and environmental assessment is necessary and suspended RWE’s plans to cut off the forest and evict the activists. In celebration of this turn a mass activation took place and about 50.000 people celebrated the victory over the company in a public gathering nearby the forest.

The case study of the Hambach Forest signifies a turn towards the forest as a nonhuman agent and allows us to move with a contemporary and ongoing political fight into reconceptualizing and refiguring the forest itself. The focus on the forest can thus not only be pinned down to one event but can be situated in a bigger context of a renewed interest and attention in environmental, legal, and social discourse towards the forest as a communicating and social network. Central to this renewed attention has been Eduardo

Kohn’s approach in developing an Anthropology beyond Human. Kohn argues that nonhuman bodies, including trees, think through and with the semiotics beyond the practices of merely human symbolic interpretation. This challenges the foundation of the anthropological field by questioning the distinction of the human species as the only thinking life form. These thoughts that can also be found in recent literally mediations as with Richard Power’s epic novel The Overstory (2017). In over 500 pages the entangled stories of nine human protagonists unfold alongside the stories and protagonists of trees which play a big role in their individual lives and brings them finally together over the cause of saving trees. Starting with ancestry and migration stories of the human protagonist’s family history and their coming into the world, which is in deep and often mythical connection to the trees, the main plot revolves around those people becoming environmental activists and resisting corporate interests of murdering trees and eradication of forests. The literary mediations are accompanied by publications in the field of popular science and nonfiction: Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees. What they feel, How they Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. (2017) caught much attention in the world of literature and evoked controversies in the scientific world. The forester Wohlleben argues that the forest is a social network and he writes about the communication skills of the trees and their community, the forest. Biologist David George Haskell’s publications The Forest Unseen (2013) and The Songs of Trees (2018) were praised for their writing and engagement with the natural world. In exploring the connections of all - human and nonhuman - life he reveals its interdependence. These interventions bring together a disciplinary and aesthetic viewpoint of the forest, on the one hand as social network from a scientific perspective and on the other as a practice of thinking with the

forest as an entangled network whose entanglement goes beyond the specific forest site but rather proposes practices of care and attentiveness towards non-human and interspecies encounters which finds expression through th aesthetic mediations of the forest encounters.

These case studies of entangled and interspecies forest encounters show that ecological aesthetics have found their way in the public discourse and disturb the interpretative mechanism of world making by exploring forms of thinking with the forest. Novelists study biology; foresters become writers; and biologists investigate nature with categories of beauty and sound, stating unironically that The forest presses its mouth to every creature and exhales (Haskell, 2018). And a recent exhibition in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin asks: How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions? We can thus conclude that parallel to the urgency of political movements of ecological justice, new aesthetic theories and projects around the forest are emerging at the crossroads of environmental concern. In this project I contribute to the sylvan turn by claiming that thinking with the forms of experience, communication, signification, and modes available by thinking with the forest is necessary since it proffers the framework to read the forest as a nonhuman agent. Why should we draw our attention towards the forest and its cultural meaning and expression of the present?

Deforestation is one of the earliest practices to generate energy and space for humans, to monetize, commodify and own nature, eliminate biodiversity and animate creatures for humankind’s well being. Deforestation caused the first energy crisis in Europe which lead to the adoption of coal energy, changing the history of Britain, Europe and the

world forever by bringing forward the Industrial Revolution and thus setting in motion what we now call the Anthropocene by expanding the industry and leading into the exploitation of natural resources ( John U. Nef, 140). Forestry science is inherently based on the goal to commodify the resources of the forest and the timber industry has “managed” forests in order to harvest them. How can we discuss the forest when it is figured within the opaque interplay of romantic longings and capitalists’ interests and in what way might those hinder or enforce a process rethinking the forest and its agency? It was Raymond Williams who pointed out the tendency towards a reductionist contrast of urban and rural environments, as he writes:

“Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society. But when this is so, the temptation is to reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are loosely called symbols or archetypes: to abstract even these most evidently social forms and to give them a primarily psychological or metaphysical status. This reduction often happens when we find certain major forms and images persisting through periods of great change. Yet if we can see that persistence depends on forms and images being changed, though often subtly, internally and at times unconsciously, we can see also that the persistence indicates some permanent or effectively permanent need, to which the changing interpretation speak. I believe that there is indeed such a need, and that it is created by the processes, or seem the only incidentally, we fall back on modes of thought which seem able to create

the permanence without the history. We may find emotional or

intellectual satisfaction in this, but we have then dealt with only half the problem, for in all such major interpretations it is the co-existence or persistence and change which is really striking and interesting, and which we have to account for without reducing either fact to a form of the other. Or, to put it more theoretically, we have to be able to explain, in related terms both the persistence and the historicity of concepts.” (Raymond Williams, 289)

In insisting on both, the persistence in the present and the historicity, depending on the images and archetypes carried within the cultural memory of a community he provides valuable thoughts for this project and a guideline on how to think with the forests whilst resisting merely romanticized images and archetypes of the forest. Rather than reiterating those nostalgic archetypes of the forest any process of rethinking

knowledge and experience- as modes of relatability within moments of social change and crisis- faced with climate change poses the big challenge of the present within those and other terms. I aim for an analysis that makes sense of a different set of ideas that focus on accessibility approaches towards a practice of thinking with the forest. I argue that first we have to translate the forest into a form of linguistic representation by examining the notion of language from a vegetal perspective that reunites it with the anthropocentric notion of language into a mode of expression. In a second step I argue that the stories that are to be found and are being told within multispecies assemblages centered from and within the forest provide empathy carriers and a necessary expansion of human

perspectives towards forest encounters as not merely a projection surface for nostalgic longings but rather I insist that they contribute towards an ecological redistributive justice through their aesthetics. In a third step I investigate the interplay of mental health and climate politics on an individual and collective level through the forest. In doing so I propose that thinking with the forest evokes environmental grief on a collective level and propose that mourning nature is a powerful tool to process mentally the losses of the future in order to prevent for dystopian environmental narratives to become reality. This project thus insists that our forest encounters carry a momentum of destabilization and hope by bringing forward and insisting on practices of listening and attentiveness towards non-human actors and argue therefore that those forest encounters bring forward a re-redistribution of agencies and thus environmental justice.

Writer and visual artist Pedro Neves Marques points three related binaries in relating to the forest and writes “the histories of forest are a complex of cyclical, spatio-temporal, and material energetic flows that defy any linear trajectory (...) forests are presented as inherently ambivalent material settings, but also as abstract sites for extraction and production; as disappearing entities that keep reappearing; and as rationalized environments that become locii for irrational longings” (Pedro Neves Marques, 44). Marques is important to think with since he sketches the contractionary images created through forest economies and argues that nature had to be left behind in order to reposition the forest as a site of economic activity. Processes of dispossession and displacement foreground thus the next momentum of nostalgia and with Williams we can thus examine how the historicity of concepts become important anchor points for the reexamination of

our current forest encounters. Once this century-long process had set in another moment was to be observed and public emotions entered the discourses and practices around the forest. Due to the disappearance of the forests public sentiments were evoked within the growing popularity of environmental movements in Western societies. This was a moment of entering a crisis mode and bringing forward conservation strategies and movements, starting in the 1970s, which nevertheless lacked a global perspective and presupposed an antagonism and dichotomy between humans and the more-than-human world. By drawing on forestry cultures Marques identifies a “dual thrust of rationalization and mystification” (64) and thus the ongoing ambivalent relationship Western society has created with its forests and within colonial settler structures the forest of others. His thoughts provide insight in the historicity of forest imaginary within human paradigms and exemplify how the notion of ownership of nature and the forest lead to the problems of the present due to the exploitation of nature. With those thoughts that explain the romanticized connotation of the forest I thus ask how the current sylvan turn is marked by a renegotiation of ownership and agency asking how aesthetic interventions provide access to those thoughts and practices.

There is an undeniable urgency for new forms of representation that shift the debate around the forest from practices and modes of commodification into an awareness as well as practices of connectivity and the ability to think emphatically the relationality of all species in the public discourse and mind. The challenge hereby is to recognize and re-conceptualize the forest as an actor with agency, following Bruno Latour’s argument about redistributing agencies for environmental justice and politics to take place (Latour, 361).

This process is as much social, cultural, economic as well as material, physical and scientific. It is therefore inherently cross disciplinary and poses the challenge of planting and sculpting a public and political mindset beyond anthropocentrism in order to come closer to a mode of sustainable coexistence within multispecies assemblages.

In this project I thus propose that thinking with the forest means reading across forms of narrative, representations, and mental health issues in order to clarify the agency of forests amidst ongoing bio symbiotic entanglements. Those entanglements matter for how the ongoing struggle for environmental and social justice interweaves with critical biomes that are simultaneously of concern for climate change and capitalist accumulation. The forest encounter as I treat it here is a generative space of convergence where literary, scientific, and political orientations co-create with the forest.

2. Translating the Forest

Both science and art form in the course of centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language

(Werner Heisenberg, 109)

This thesis is about the necessity of thinking with the forms of experience, communication, signification, and modes of relation made available by thinking with the forest. In this chapter I claim that the current sylvan turn is marked by a new attentiveness

towards the forest as a communicating agent whose entanglement in the human and more-than-human world is prominently made available by translating the language of the forest towards the language of the human. But translation is an encounter, and the encounter goes both ways. I ask how these mediations might elude or enforce an anthropocentric understanding of language and thus in what sense the aesthetics of the case study, the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, provide a critical standpoint to re-channel the encounter: not just turning the forest into language, but letting the forest’s language inform the way we speak I am not offering a close reading of one novel but instead put The Overstory into conversation with a constellation of concerns about how to listen to the language of trees. I will do so by first providing theoretically ways of taking the language of tress seriously across science and critical theory in order to foreground the attempt of this project to rethink the notion of language and expand its concept towards nonhuman expressions. The aesthetic meditations operate at the intersection of science and art and cue an accessibility towards processes of reimagining, or rather reworlding, towards what Ursula Heise calls an “eco-cosmopolitanism” (Heise, 61) and defines as “an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kind” (ibid. 61). In referring to Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities Heise helps us to take a first step towards language as the starting point for rethinking our communal structures by taking Anderson’s argument for the community of the nation further towards a global community that equally grants agency to nonhuman and human actors. As Anderson proposed special attention can be drawn towards language as the carrier and performative practice of assembling and sustaining those communities. (Anderson, 44). With Anderson’s argument - in his case national but as I would rephrase

with Heise global— we can think about language as a performative community practice that includes in its global understanding and perspective equally the language of nonhuman and human actors.

The current discourse of Ecocriticism, the Anthropocene and the material turn within the Humanities and Arts evokes the question about the representation of the materiality of nature and the production and construction of objects of knowledge. If representation has come to an end within the Humanities and Art and language thus becomes unsatisfying as a practice of formulating the semiotics of matter, I ask: how does natural science then translate into a material and scientific literacy that forms a profound understanding of nature’s entanglement with the human species and mind? Or as Karen Barad asks: “What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?” (Barad, 801) Even though I find Barad’s argument against the trustworthiness of language compelling I argue that thinking with the forest necessarily includes thinking about language, or rather, a process of translation from nonhuman language towards human language. I make this claim by analyzing the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers in regard to its literary mediations and linguistic

representation in refiguring the forest as an animate, speaking agent and thus ask: How does The Overstory translate the language of the forest into a language of human imagination within the form of a novel? Or rather, how is thinking with and through the forest made available here as an approach towards re-shaping future knowledge production processes?

In the broader framework of exploring new knowledge formations in the age of climate change, this question resonates with the bigger picture of knowledge production by exploring how we think and organize thinking in the Anthropocene, and make meaning of ourselves and the world. Through art we articulate our deepest concerns, beliefs and our most profound ideas of who we are. Art that intervenes into the climate crisis and proposes through its aesthetic a worldview that does not prioritize the voice of the human thus compels on a very profound level the exceptionalism of the human subject by challenging the very idea of essentialism. On a pragmatic level and in order to be taken serious within the hierarchy of knowledge formations it is obvious that every art that concerns itself with climate change has to rely on scientific knowledge and thus translates this knowledge into aesthetics. This forms a field of tension since science occupies a cultural position as the place of truth. In this process the current epistemological shifts, the turn of the Humanities and Art turn towards material science and experience, erodes the barriers between established fields of knowledge, or as Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky put it: “Climate change has not altered the planet but the order of knowledge itself” (14). I propose that the process of translation works on several levels in mediating climate change inflected aesthetic in order to “push against the numbness that is said to define us as a geological

force, insisting that our experience can and must be phenomalized, that we must search for the hidden movements and mutations our being-in-this-warming-world comprises” (17). Language serves hereby as an anchor and starting point in doing knowledge and establishing an eco-literacy.

Of course, other species always had a prominent space within the human cultural imagination and the forest provided within Western culture always a projection surface for nostalgic longings, maybe most beautifully expressed in the almost untranslatable German word Waldsehnsucht1_{. It would extend the capacity of this project to trace the historical} embeddedness of the forest in all its facets but the fascination for the forest is undeniably strong and deep. Nevertheless, recent efforts within posthumanism, animal studies, phytolinguistics and biosemiotics contest the semiotic exceptionalism of the speaking and thinking human subject. New questions emerge thus emerge: What could be a language in multispecies storytelling? How do we recognize and possibly translate such articulations, while acknowledging that they manifest in multisensory ways, in and through signs, visual shapes, sounds, and sensory cues, and that they may elude anthropocentric understandings of language?

With these questions as guiding anchor points in my mind I will reexamine the notion of human language as a merely anthropocentric and thus inherently national concept in regard to tree communication and thus ask what a language of the forest can be and how

1 _{An affective state of mainly longing for the forest as a place of recreation, wilderness, mysticism, nostalgia which} refigures the forest simultaneously as far away and unreachable as well as a place of home.

it can linguistically represent the material and relational existence of something that translates into the human centered concept of the language of the forest.

First, how valid is it to even assume that the forest has a language whilst the concept of a language is so undeniably anthropocentric and how can it then still proffer a frame for distributive justice? A possible entrance provides Walter Benjamin in his essay Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen where he develops the concept of a language of things, in which language becomes an expression for everything that informs it from within. Any language thus discloses itself from within and not through it and is as such independent of its level of consciousness. This independence of its level of consciousness allows us to understand language thus not as a merely human domain, defined by a human consciousness of language but rather as an inherent and expressive concept of all things, insisting on the materiality of linguistics communication. According to Benjamin, everything makes use of expression and thus constitutes each being’s particular language. Nonverbal language is a specific form of articulation and things communicate through their material community (stoffliche Gemeinschaft) and relationality. He then addresses the paradox of having to translate those material languages into verbal languages by prioritizing human language as completed, because it is a practice of naming and thus creative, expressive and performative. In doing so he provides a concept of translation that moves away from romantic notions of national languages and into a relational reconfiguring of articulation between human language and the language of matter, which is taking place within those languages and become the base for language itself as an expressive practice. It is then the practice of language that reveals through itself

how humans relate those things to the world. The power of language from within thus enhances the potentiality of change through translating the different modes of language.

Whilst Benjamin develops then his thoughts into a more teleological concept of divine language I propose to take his thoughts on the language of things and his model of translation as a starting point to think about the translation of the science, the biochemistry of tree communication into a language of the forest and make it thus available for the politics of climate change since it challenges us to rethink our own communicational concepts of language and the inherent problematic of representing climate change themes through language in its aesthetic form and content. With Benjamin’s concept of expressivity, we can also acknowledge that plants write us as much as we do write them and can thus claim the potential of the nonhuman, vegetal world to create the potential to make space, take over and infiltrate the human world in order for us to take actions accordingly, as discussed by Luce Irigiray and Michal Marder in their book Through Vegtal Being. Two Philosophical Perspectives. But let’s return to plant language first as it seems to be the base for activating those potentialities in both worlds in order to unite them.

A more hands on approach on plant language than with Benjamin is provided by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, Patricia Viera in their introduction to The Language of Plants. The editors identify two modes of plant language(s), namely extrinsic and intrinsic. In their account extrinsic language refers to the descriptive, responsive and discursive dimension of plant languages and “refers to the ways in which scientists, theorists, writers, artists and others express what is ‘peculiar’ (...) about plant being.” (xvii) They furthermore

point out that this mode of linguistic representation can be one the hand misused or even abused if it performs careless and unaware of the ethical entailments or on the other provide a capacity to understand the mysteries of the entangled and material processes of vegetal life and thus inspire human recognition processes in order to refigure the distinctive modes of plant forms of “thinking, being and acting.” (ibid). Intrinsic language then refers the modes of obtaining communication and articulation of the plant species in order to “negotiate ecologically with their biotic and abiotic environment” (xviii) which includes for example biochemistry, multisensory, olfactory and visual cues as well as multi-species interaction of plants and animals and soil microorganisms. In their account non vocal beings can thus not be excluded from the domain of language since “as semiosis (...) language is more than the audible communication carried out by humans; it encompasses the complexities of intersubjective and interspecies dialogue, involving nature (including plants) and humanity.” (xix)

I suggest that it is exactly the dynamic interplay between extrinsic and intrinsic language(s) of the forest that animates the current sylvan turn towards the dynamics of the process of recognition leading to potential new modes of attentiveness, care and humility. This process of recognition and its dynamic nature is described by Amitav Ghosh as “famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. (...) The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something

new: it arises from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.” (Ghosh, 4). Ghosh therefore emphasizes the processual nature of establishing eco-literacies that resist an epiphany mode of knowledge but rather pick up the subject from where she is at that moment. Recognition thus works by activating her own already inherent potentiality towards a renewed understanding of the crisis of this warming world and the ethical and political consequences this includes on a broader scale. Recognition is thus more than knowledge transportation but a transformative process of the subject herself on an intellectual and affective level that carries the potential to move from an individual towards and collective level of knowledge transformation..

The Overstory, then, poses a challenge to those conceptual ideas and dynamics between human and non-human languages and asks What’s crazier - plants speaking, or humans listening? (322). The character of Patricia Westerford provides the most obvious entrance to the interplay of the significance of a tree language within the field of tension provided by the novel, namely between science, ethics and environmental activism. “Little plant-girl Patty” (ibid. 113) has initially “no need of words” (112) and is even considered for mental illness until a deformation of her inner ear is discovered. Her speech will remain impacted and she has to rely on a hearing aid throughout the plot. Nevertheless she recognizes mutely, to speak with Ghosh, since she is able to see and experience emotionally and intellectually that life is talking to itself, and she has listened in (126). Her story seems to be one of failure, grief, disappointment and the constant feeling of being an outsider in the human and scientific world. But it is also a story of resilience, assertiveness and the value of following the intention of a girl who grew up playing in forests (122). When she

discovers as a young academic, right at the beginning of a promising scientific career in the discipline of botany, that trees are intelligent and social beings, leading to the conclusion that The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community (126) her paper gets torn apart and discredited by the mainly male scientific community. It is only years later that she gets the chance to rehabilitate her reputation. The set up and development of her character reveals the tension and chances between intrinsic and extrinsic plant communication depictions and displays the hierarchy, arrogance and lack of self-reflectivity within the scientific community she is no longer part of, manifesting her status as an outsider. Of course, her discoveries in the field of biochemistry are based on data. Despite this, her research is nevertheless rather motivated from an inner conviction for a tenderness and respect towards the trees and their community. In her final speech she explains,

“My whole life I’ve been an outsider. But many others have been out there with me. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks.

Here’s a little outsider information and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and

making decisions. Fungee synapse. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together and a forest grows aware.” Her words sound far away, cork-lined and underwater. Either both her hearing aids have died at once of her childhood deafness has chosen this moment to come back. “We scientist are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: Only man could know enough to want things. But believe me trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive - a thick, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete be eaten more than animals compete for berries. (...)

Planty-Patty raises her glass (...) The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means such opposite things. The reals one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.” (453).

This quote shows how translations of the forest as a communicating agent allows us to become the nonhuman other, or at least provides the accessibility towards a phenomenalization of feeling the experience with the forest. The form of her speech and the emotive force of her insistence drive at a redefinition of the “world” and her figurative language activates the recipient, the listener within the storyworld and the reader of the

novel, simultaneously towards a momentum of disturbing her own concept of the “world”. In doing so the experience of a forest encounter as an initial momentum for rethinking the concept of the world is not merely narrated but rather translated into experience, coinciding with the overall form of The Overstory. It is language, the language of the forest translated into the language of the human and then translated into aesthetics and form of the novel itself. Within the recognition processes taking place in the novel it is not merely the discovery of the forest language that activates the protagonists to become environmental activists, literally risking their lives to protect the trees against corporate interests. It is, even in Patricia’s case, rather an inner voice, prone to mysticism and a deeper longing for making sense of their own existence, evoked through the early encounters with the forest as a place of ideal co-existence with an acknowledgement for the ungraspability of the forest for the human mind. The research and the activism then follow the encounter and thus the forest experience and every action after the individual encounter is an aim to live up to the experience coming from a renewed understanding of what is truly valuable and worth to be protected, namely the forest, and is thus a coming to terms with a responsibility for the forest after encountering it. This mediation of experience towards a public mindset is marked by an imperturbable drive to provide access to the experience of the forest encounter towards the human collective and the hope and conviction that this recognition process towards responsibility and care for the forest can be set in motion by providing access towards the language of the forest. The protagonist Olivia also poses this question and her development allows to critically examine my argument for the mechanism of forest language as the prioritized entry point. Almost like Jeanne d’Arc her recruitment comes from a longing of satisfying her feeling of being truly needed and taking a stand for

something higher and more valuable than her individual path in life could ever provide, thus filling out the emptiness of her own life that she was even unable to identify before. This process follows again her own forest encounter and then like Jeanne d’Arc “something comes over her, strange and beautiful courage” (172) that will lead to her death, of course for the cause, making her the beautiful young female martyr. I mention her character not to undermine my argument as the translation of the forest into new concepts of language as the access point for thinking and feeling with the forest. Rather, I read her character as an example of exceptionalism and fanaticism, which is not sustainable as a collective response towards climate change. Her fate, her death, seems heroic but remains an individual response. Her fate thus does not provide a sustainable practice of reconnection within the multispecies assemblages of the (forest)world. The late success story of Patricia nevertheless signifies the common ground of language as an anchor point for refiguring the relationship with the forest as much as her evolution is one that lays bare the failures and ambiguities of science as a cultural practice and hierarchical community. It nevertheless depicts how science can justify an inner need for forest encounters and create visibility and responsiveness the forest deserves within the broader framework of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. In doing so it questions the hierarchy and power formation within science but nevertheless acknowledges its reality and thus operates simultaneously from a critical and pragmatic standpoint. Finally, Patricia is being heard by a broader audience that has money and power (the quoted speech above takes place in Silicon Valley) and her publications are firstly being published, read and taken seriously. This process takes place by the other protagonists as well, evoking moments of epiphany and either an evolved understanding of why they are willing to do what they do and the radicality of their actions

as environmental activists, or serves as confirmation of their actions. Furthermore it is Patricia's book that connects all the human protagonists finally and the language of the forest thus becomes the common ground for their attention and care for the trees and their community, the forest and therefore activates the potential and even further towards a realization of this potential, whilst maintaining the otherness of the forest and resisting an epiphany mode of knowledge against a finite process and thus rather signifies the ongoingness of knowledge formations. The Overstory then creates the space for Patricia’s intervention by depicting her journey from a muted subject towards a scientific authority based on her expertise on forest language. The question of language and who gets the attention to be listened to develops through her unbroken commitment towards providing accessibility towards a space where the responsibility and care and thus the prioritizing of the forest in practices of attentiveness can be experienced. Her motivation is to express a mediation of the forest encounter by taking on language as the accessibility point and working thus within the realities of power and hierarchy formations. This approach can be read on a meta level through the novel with the form novel: In providing numerous forest encounters through the perspectives of the human protagonists the reader gets to experience her own forest encounters and is directed on a path of possibility of recognition by activating her own potential for first encountering and then caring for the forest.

My argument is thus not a mere prioritizing of language as the only possible entry point towards thinking and feeling with the forest, but rather as the most sustainable one in terms of bringing forward new concepts as well as practices, that serve the communities of human collectives as a base of common ground to enter a meaningful relationship with the

forest. Translation has it flaws and true connection stays often untranslatable. I am not able to say if translation will ever truly work and thus remain suspicious of the concept itself, but nevertheless claim that in order to move from a romantic, nostalgic forest concept as the other - a mere projection surface for a deep and undefined human longing of wilderness, out-of-world-ness and nostalgia - towards a redistributive justice that acknowledges the forest as an equal agent within the real world, the discovery of forest languages is crucial to enter those. The semiotic resonance of tree language within human collectives is thus more successful in it its effect and potentiality than nostalgia or any epiphany mode of knowledge production can ever be. This is, when we measure success by the sustainability and thus long-lasting effects within climate change knowledge formations and the establishing of eco literacies. In juxtaposing the sensuality of human language and communication with the material dimension of forest communication due to the flaws of the protagonists in their human bodies, may it be deafness in Patricia’s case, the incapability of having children of Ray and Dorothy, or Neelay’s sharp mind in his broken body, the novel depicts a process of unblinding and offers entrances towards practices of listening to the forests in a different way. Namely, in an attentive process that redefines and calls for the responsibility and accountability of their human actions.

In my next chapter I ask what stories are being told with those forest languages, intrinsic and extrinsic, in order to move further in a healthy reconciliation of nature and humans.

3. Storytelling with the Forest

“The consequence of a single story is that it robs people of their dignity” Chimamanda Adichie

How do stories about the forest make us think with the forest and what literary mediations can we draw upon those in order “to seep intellectual and artistic disciplines, to deepen the interconnection among the human, social and natural sciences, to create new vocabularies and languages, to instigate new modes of representation and dissemination.” (Baucom and Omelsky, 17)? Since the figure of the forest itself is one of interconnection and invisible networks it is clear that is one of multispecies encounters. This project focuses on the moment of translation from forest mediations towards the human imagination and asks how forms of experience, communication, signification, and modes of relation are made available by thinking with the forest. I thus propose that multispecies stories challenge anthropocentric narratives that tend to depict the bodies of other species as rhetorically passive resources for human appropriation, whether as consumptive commodities in global economies, or as metaphors and symbols in aesthetic media. But where and how do these insights get mediated and spread through aesthetics and strategies of linguistic representation? Undeniably new models of knowledge create new questions and those models of knowledge have to be provided within the recent epistemological shifts due to climate change. The turn towards material science and experience have contested disciplinary boundaries and assumptions in natural and social sciences as well as in the humanities and arts. The Anthropocene, as Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky have laid

out, is an epoch of feedback loops since it has not altered the planet but the order of knowledge itself (Baucom and Omelsky, 14). Within this changing framework and the consequential alteration of knowledge production and perception the turn towards trees as communicating creatures and their community the forest is to be situated. To talk about talking trees is not to be called ridiculous anymore. The forest, on the one hand once a place of longing and mystery as well as on the other a signifier of civilization and colonial settlements, is becoming something else in the current discourse situating itself against the nature human divide. Trees appear now as companions, communities, entities, providers, expert witnesses, data stories and as resourceful and even caring ancestors.

As I have shown in my first chapter the notion of language itself is changing and not merely a human domain anymore but a solid provider for an access point for thinking and feeling with the forest and language appears to be not merely anthropocentric concept anymore. Within the efforts to represent and mediate ideas of collaborative existence of species new stories of trees and the forest are being told. This phenomalization of experience consequently does not only rely upon the potential of a linguistic understanding of each other but also on mediating and possibly transforming experiences through environmental narratives and the stories that they tell. In this sense I am talking about stories that move away from mere mysticism and metaphor but anchor themselves within the science of biochemistry and botany and state that the forest itself, this fascinating multi species assemblage of life and decay has a language, a voice to be listened to and an agency to acknowledge and respect. Recent literary publications move smoothly in an interplay between natural science, popular science and literary fiction and thus create new modes

and narrative of interspecies storytelling, strongly based on the concept of language as an anchor moment of empathy and identification for the human species.

Amitav Ghosh called the climate crisis a crisis of imagination due to the lack of climate fiction (Ghosh, 9). According to him “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction” (ibid. 7) and there is thus a lack of stories that initiate a different understanding of more-than-human-world. Therefore, storytelling seems to be a key term here and it was Donna Haraway who famously coined the notion of multispecies storytelling:

My multispecies storytelling is about recuperation in complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings. (...)Call that staying with the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and awed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation. (Haraway, 10)

For Haraway staying with the trouble means moving away from a merely teleological narrative structure in order to propose to live imminently with what is before us, instead of merely asking where we came from and where we are going. Haraway’s multispecies storytelling thus demands a mindfulness and attentiveness towards the

ongoingness of the process and becomes a thinking practice. In this sense Haraway writes that “effective multispecies environmental justice must be as much about play, storytelling, and joy as about work, critique, and pain. Storytelling is a thinking practice, not an embellishment to thinking” and thus proposes that effectiveness through storytelling can only be reached when it becomes a wholesome practice that is taken seriously and not merely a decorative element on top of a story that ultimately reproduces the interspecies divide.

The realness of the stories gets emphasized but how does a story get real? I ask in what way stories of the forest and the multispecies encounter between human and nonhuman species move between scientific inquiry, aesthetic sensibility and political governance and thus map out a space of conflict as well as a proposition for a potentiality that coordinates - in the broader framework of knowledge formation – an attentiveness towards our forest encounters and ultimately a consciousness of climate. How do these stories become a tool for suspicion, connection and hope? Who and what may be able to represent itself or an environment within multispecies assemblages? How are we to articulate and narrate multispecies encounters? Who and what may also speak, when the human is not privileged as the only possible author?

In this chapter I will draw upon two case studies and investigate the stories that are being told. Again, I return to Powers The Overstory as a work of fiction as well as to David Haskell’s The Song of Trees. (Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors) as a work of nonfiction but nevertheless setting up its own storyworld. In this sense the trees give form

to the storyworld and the way to track that is the expressivity of the setting itself and thus the forest worlds we become enabled to encounter. In doing so I aim for an analysis that investigates stories not on a merely fictional basis but explore the inbetweenness of those stories within science communication and knowledge formation as well as the potential for empathy and vision and thus the affective state necessary to activate and realize this potential.

What can stories actually do? Can a story about and in the forest truly proffer the change of a mindset that enforces social change? What role can stories play in overcoming the mind-body-problem? According to Alexa Weik von Mossner” embodied cognition is of particular relevance for our theoretical and practical investigations of environmental narratives and the emotional responses they cue in readers and viewers. Environmental narrative, broadly defined, includes any type of narrative in any media that foregrounds ecological issues and human-nature relationships, often but not always with the openly stated intention of bringing about social change” (Affective Ecologies, 3). She argues for the importance for storytelling since it “plays a central role in memory formation and counterfactual thinking, it is what allows us to communicate events we have experienced or imagined to others, who can then in turn imaginatively simulate those events and therefore share our experiences to some degree” ( 6). The embodied stimulation of the story is thus also a mental performance of the recipient by activating her mirror neurons and receiving environmental narratives is not merely the consumption of a story but “a perception of movement” since “this plays out on the imaginary level, with our brains reacting much in the same ways they would respond to directly perceived or personally

performed movement” (23). She shows how the move from sympathy, feeling for, towards the capacity for empathy, feeling with, relies highly on intersubjectivity and furthermore provides a physiological explanation in order to ground the psychological experience of the protagonists and thus makes narrative text an instruction manual. (23) Intersubjectivity in multispecies story assemblage is not restricted to the human protagonists and my suggestion is that the forest becomes the protagonist itself and thus relies on the activation of empathy, feeling with, the forest.

The starting point for fiction is the possibility and a mediation of a sense of what is possible. The Overstory reflects on that, by constantly drawing upon questions that reflect upon on the core of itself as an attempt to mediate the story above all the stories, the Overstory as its title already implies. In playing with the double meaning of the overstory, as on the one hand the highest layer of vegetation in the forest and the crowns of the trees who constitute the overstory of the forest and on the other hand the overlying story of humanity it states right at the beginning, through the act of naming the novel, an approach that moves away from the singularity of narratives and embedded itself rather in a plurality of narratives that renders the human protagonists as only one part of the story. Storytelling works in this case on several levels, recurring to the wish of drawing attention and granting agency to the forest as well as reflecting upon the human capacity for inflicting change and acting upon redistributive justice. The protagonist Adam, is introduced as a curious boy with a big fascination for insects and nature, for the pleasure of looking until you see

something. (56) Later as a young academic in the field of psychology his main interest

truly understand and initiate change. He calls this unblinding (236) and starts to study the transformative potential of humans adjusting themselves to a nonhuman moral order and questions the motivation behind the environmental activist by mapping out their sentiment and questioning their authenticity as a genuine moral interest. Within his process of recognition he also moves from an outsider towards an insider, becoming fully involved in the environmental activists movement and taking part on their last action, leading to Olivia’s death. His involvement then goes even so far that he takes, years after the incident, the full blame for this and is sentenced to go and remain in jail. Whilst he was questioning - before his involvement with the activists and before becoming one of them - the morals behind the actions his story leads after this initial skepticism to a complete fulfilment as the second martyr of the group and his journey includes the repetition of the same argument in different words: “The best argument in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story” (Powers, 488)

How does the overstory of The Overstory exemplify a multispecies encounter that resists an epiphany mode of knowledge then and what role does perspective play? The layering of multiple perspectives the novel is inherent in its structure, where the human protagonists provide possible entry points and examples for thinking with the forest. In providing a plurality of narratives that nevertheless come together in one story, the Overstory, the novel provides a critical standpoint as well as an example for thinking with the forest from an undeniable human perspective and is more than a mere fabrication of a fantasy world. Due to the acknowledgement of the limitations of the human perspective, the several ruptures of the human plots and the breaks within those storylines the novel can

be read as a literary mediation that maps out a space of conflict on many levels within human and nonhuman worlds whilst exemplifying their entanglement on the protagonists individual and collective level. Situated within an assemblage of flawed humans the performance of reliable and unreliable knowledge and thus contributes toward eco-literacies that start with not knowing and thus curiosity, preventing a monocultural reading of the forest. Does The Overstory stay with the trouble, to speak with Haraway? It does by interweaving every human individual story with the stories of the trees and thereby restructures the human scale and temporality, for which the following passage can serve exemplary in order to prove this point: “He tells her. How his great-great-great-grandfather started planted the tree. How his great-great-grandfather started photographing, at the century’s start. How blight crossed the map in a few years and wiped out the best tree in eastern America. How this rogue and loner specimen, so far from any contaminant, survived.” (Powers, 176). The trees themselves carry thus the novel’s narrative and feature in the novel’s core the relationship of the protagonists: humans and trees. The humans become thus merely the understory which corresponds and adds to The Overstory but does not overwrite or privileges an anthropocentric perspective. Take for example the untold human stories, especially in the beginning of the novel, in which characters die abruptly and a process of identification with them is not even set in motion due to the abrupt change of scenery and personages. The novel thus breaks with those expectations and disrupts a storytelling that stays with the human in order to draw out the ongoing interspecies ties of living creatures, including plants. It even emphasizes the kinship of humans and trees by stressing the shared genes and thus, to speak with the trees, their shared roots. This restructures the scale of possibility human experience, a point I will later return to when

addressing the metalevel of the novel in relation to conceptual work and fiction as a world making practice. It furthermore evokes notions of myth and historicity.

Historicity is a crucial point for understanding the challenges of the Anthropocene and global warming. Historicity itself maintains an air of ungraspability as does climate change which becomes - to speak with Timothy Morton - a hyperobject and thus beyond human comprehension formed on the base of experience. Or as Dipesh Chakrabarty formulates in his “Climate of History: Four Theses” how the notion of history and the challenge of global warming are entangled and lay bare the limitations of anthropocentric thinking. Especially the third and fourth thesis address the tension between scientific account of species and constructionists and merges thinking of species with a critique of the Capitalocene. It asks how narratives of capitalism obstruct humans to think of themselves as a species among many others and how the industrial way of life got us into the crisis of global warming. In conclusion it is thus, for Chakrabarty, this inability to think ourselves as coexisting equally, that disables the humanist discourse of suspicion due to the limited possibility of reconceptualizing the world based on experiencing the world as one of multispecies. (Chakrabarty 212 and 220).

These limitations are clearly addressed and aimed to be reshaped in The Overstory. It is especially the process of unblinding juxtaposed with violent actions of purposefully blinding that can be seen metaphorically here as well as other motives of experiencing the world more sensually. When the environmental activists are confronted with violent police force, it is pepper spray that they use in order to make them obey and release themselves

from the trees they are protecting with their bodies (see especially Powers, 301-305). In taking away the protesters senses they are supposed to be made obedient to the capitalist system that profits from deforestation and is unable to think about the forest like they do, which is entangled, purposeful, animate, threatened and worthy to be protected with their own human life:

She tells him: everything depends on everything else. There’s a kind of vole that need old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs, no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading fungus; no spreading fungus, no new trees. “Do you believe we can save these species by keeping fragments of older forest intact?” She thinks before answering- “No. Not fragments. Large forest live and breathe. They develop complex behaviors. Small fragments aren’t as resilient or as rich. The pieces must be large, for large creatures to live in them. (Powers, 282).

In raising awareness of this entanglement and evoking a tenderness in regard to the threatened creature of the forest The Overstory thus attempts to represent the vulnerability inherent in the complexity of the ecosystem of the forest through its narrative and recurring motives that align themselves with alternative perceptions of the concept world. Or as Latour puts it: “Every thought, every concept, every project that fails to take into account the necessity of the fragile envelopes that make existence possible amounts to a contradiction in terms” (Latour, 322.)

Environmental activism plays an important role in The Overstory. I propose that in focusing on radical actions that disobey and call themselves the Stop the Humans movement (Powers, 430), the novel correspondents to Bruno Latour’s attempts to re-politicize our concept of ecology and challenge the binary division of nature and culture. In his emphasis and vocabulary evolving around war Latour makes a strong case for redistributing agencies toward nonhuman actors. He thus wants to move away from a concept of the world that assigns agency merely to human beings and thus only favors an anthropocentric perspective (Latour, 361). He furthermore argues for a dialectical reconciliation (Latour, 313) that holds account with the potentiality for politicizing questions about global warming and thus criticizing structures that rigidly prioritize human and capitalistic interest over everything. Or as he puts it: “Finally, thanks to the disputes over the climate and how to govern it, we are asking the political question again in terms of life and death” (Latour, 584) This aim can be clearly found in the case study that discusses and reflects on radical activism as an approach to matter in the world as an individual and forming a resisting collective as the last possibility to find meaning. On a later point, 20 years after the environmental actions took place, the human protagonists themselves renegotiate the moral authority and boundaries of activism: Adam says, “We set buildings on fire.” “We did.” “We believed that humans were committing mass murder. “Yes.” “No one else could see what was happening. Nothing was going to stop unless people like us forced the issue.” The beak of Douglas’s ball cap swings back and forth. “We weren’t wrong, you know. Look around! Anyone paying attention knows the party’s over. Gaia’s taking her revenge.” “Gaia?” Adam smiles, but pained. “Life. The planet. We’re already paying. But even now

a guy is still a lunatic for saying as much.” (....) “I ask myself at nights whether anything we did - anything we could have done - would ever make up for that woman’s death.” (Powers, 431). This quote demonstrates, by entering a mode of reflection on radical activism and uncompromising positions and the consequences they initiated, that a solution that merely states and demands but does not negotiate, hesitates or listens but rather acts in a war like manner is not a sustainable change making process. Instead of initiating a sustainable change and letting the dynamics and interactions of intraspecies experience and understanding unfold into a reconceptualization of world, the activist’s solution killed one of themselves. They are defeated in their particular cause and the company who cuts down the trees they want to protect wins. This reflectiveness on creating visibility and audibility of and for trees and forests can also be found for the academic discourse within the novel. As Patricia writes her book about the phytolinguistics of the forest and promotes the compassion inherent in the animate creatures that trees are, reflects years later after being asked to hold a keynote with the significant title Home Repair: Countering a Warming World. It says further:

We would be thrilled if you could talk about any role trees might play in helping mankind to a sustainable future. The conference organizers want a keynote from a woman who once wrote a book on the power of woody plants to restore the failing planet. But she wrote that book decades ago, when she was still young enough for courage and the planet still well enough to rally. These people dream of technological breakthrough. Some new way to pulp poplar into paper while burning slightly fewer hydrocarbons. Some genetically altered cash crop that will build better

houses and lift the world’s poor from misery. The home repair they want is just slightly less wasteful demolition. She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forest were patentable, she’d get an ovation. (Powers, 436).

I propose to read this passage as one that renegotiates the limitations of academia and lays bare the spectacularization of global warming, leading into another stupefying process of still imagining the possibility to find a solution through human intervention as well as invention. In opposition to that, we see with and through the novel that is rather appropriate to step back as humans and reconsider their right and possibilities to act. The Overstory does not offer a solution but rather voices the inconvenient points of the Anthropocene. Instead of proposing action, and therefore resisting Latour’s war rhetoric, the novel asks the reader to listen and learn first and endure human’s illiteracy towards the forest, symptomatically and allegorically the world, by acknowledging that a humble approach towards the scale of the world is necessary. In depicting life’s dynamism, tenacity and unpredictability it depicts the errors of thinking within anthropocentric thinking and therefore argues against human exceptionalism, even in the fields of activism and academia and natural science, and depicts thus the errors of thinking within distinct entities. It says for example: We scientist are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure that nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let

chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive - a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives depend on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forest for longer than we’ve been Homo Sapiens. (Powers, 454).

Biologist David Haskell’s The Songs of Trees. Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors does not operate in the mode of fiction but provides nevertheless another accessibility point for transmitting a sense of the possible and the necessity of thinking with the forest, by developing an ecological aesthetic that provides the access to listen to the stories the trees all over the world tell. I claim that even though it does not operate on the level of fiction it does set up it owns storyworld that by phenomanilizing the experience of and with the forest on a sensory and emotional level and thus engages with the forest on eco-cosmopolitan level, drawing attention to the practices of listening, observing and connecting with an outspoken agenda for “an ethic of belonging” (Haskell, viii).

The chapters depart from 12 individual trees all over the world he enters each story with the sonification of the forest and the effect it has on him, focalizing from an I narrator

perspective where author and narrator can be read as one person. Haskell’s expertise as a biologist allows him to bring together scientific insights with a political agenda and to translate his forest observations and affectual tree encounters towards an assemblage of tree stories that align themselves with the broader framework of climate change inflected aesthetics. This aesthetics then aim to move forward and work with what is already there, what is real to speak with Haraway, but has to be listened to and thus recognized as a voice.

In his preface Haskell states already: “I turned my ear to trees, seeking ecological kleos. I found no heroes, no individual around whom history pivots. Instead living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members. To listen is therefore to hear our voices and those of our family. Each chapter of this book attends to the song of a particular tree: the physicality of sound, the stories that brought sound into being, and our own bodily, emotional and intellectual responses. Much of this song dwells under the acoustic surface. To listen is therefore to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, to hear what stirs below.” (vii) In labelling the sonification of the forest as songs, thus an aesthetic composition with a beginning, an ending and a meaning to be read accordingly and therefore not a mere acoustic experience, a story gets assigned to the trees, unfolding or rather branching into an ecological aesthetic that critically reflects on the storytelling nature of biology since it does not aim to deny its storyworld but rather aims to work with this, or as he writes: “Biology like music and the visual arts, is a story of improvisation and elaboration on germinal themes” (Haskell, 43). In doing so he refuses oppositional thinking of the natural sciences and aesthetic productions in his work and thus