I always hated that "half a loaf" saying. I mean, sure: if you're starving, half a loaf is better than none. But half a friend? Half a computer? Half a cat? Half an ecosystem?
It comes down to this problem we have of seeing everything as divisible and made up of parts, rather than holistic and entangled. It's really hard to think in a different way, and that's what I have been trying to do.
For the third time, I am attempting to read Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. First time I managed 4%, second time 9% and am now at 13% - I had to start from the beginning again. It's hard to say what it's about... but what I am taking so far from it is this: beings arise from their intra-actions. The intra-actions are already and always there and the "agents" emerge from them and exist only through them. Consider this: something in a vacuum with nothing else there is essentially devoid of meaning. Nothing has meaning except by its arising out of connections.
What this suggests to me is that you can't separate things out or cut them apart. The meaningfulness of the world is not reducible to a sum of units all with their own essential values. The meaningfulness of the world, and all things or beings or concepts in it, is entangled into the entanglement of matter and ideas. Nothing can stand alone. Nor is it meaningful to talk of halves. That seems to emerge from this but I can't explain it.
I think about animal cultures in this way. The mattering of an elephant emerges from the relationships and connections with other living and non-living things, which also possess meaning through their connections. It is connections that make things matter. A thing cannot matter on its own. You can't do what utilitarianism does and add up how many lives of sentient creatures you save and claim that a bigger number is better. That's to abstract mattering to meaningless mathematics. The sentient beings matter through their entanglements - and in the same way the trees and the grass and the rivers matter. Relationships and entanglements are not just between sentient beings or sentient beings and living or non-living things. Earth and moon are meaningful in their gravitational relationship. Glacier and ground. Sea and shore.
What matters is not the number of things but the number of mattering-making intra-actions. The emergent thirds are wrongly named: the two becoming-beings arise from the connection. The third, as it were, gives rise to the other two (or six or million).
Right. Glad that's sorted. [???!!!!!???? - Ed.]
More pictures.
And a long video.
I enjoyed the garden visitors video and the photos! Thanks for descriptions of "relationships and entanglements". In some ways it reminds me of alchemical processes where two whatevers come together to produce a third something. Good luck with the rest of Karen's book and maybe you'll be posting more about it!