NOT-ONE: A Convocation in a Field at Dusk

Against Non-Dualism, Monism, and No-Self (Sickman's First Stab)

“Guerrilla warfare against the metaphysics of presence goes by various names: one is deconstruction; object-oriented ontology is another.”

Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (2024)

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Note: There’s a philosophical knife fight at the end. Letting you know in case that’ll keep you going.

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PRE-FACE:

The face hasn’t yet emerged but it is emerging. It is not yet present enough to be called a face, but it is reconizable as prefiguring a face. The recognition of features that haven’t yet arrived is uncanny. Because unfinished. Yet begun. A work-in-progress is thus inherently unheimlich. In the present case, not only this Pre-Face but also the Face that follows are incomplete. Incomplete faces are uncanny.

They’re the only kind I’ve got. Meet our unarrived eyes if you dare.

And in our eyes you will see:

This is poor art by poor artists. Sickman and Co. can only stitch together what’s to hand, or at hand. (Dasein doesn’t always get to distinguish, much less pick and choose, between zuhanden and vorhanden.) But I’ve started to notice that “bricolage” gets a bad rap as a sort of hoity-toity term or idea or practice. I keep looking it up to make sure it’s what I’m after and it is. Sickman and Crew do philosophical bricolage (or unphilosophy). Turns out it converges with arte povera or “poor art”.

Yup. Or rather, hell yes. (And remember, We’re in hell.¹) This is what we are/do.

The following poor artistry started as a statement on its own a la the title of this entry (against monism). Then it wove in a quote from a podcast that tangentially intersected it (we-are-a-single-entity-ism). Then it back-wove a cut-up and reassembled (in original order) quote from Morton’s latest book, which I’ve finally been able to purchase and start to read.² I believe I’m on side with Morton (in his shimmering ontological inbetweenism for the sake of the All Things) over against what I’m against here. But Morton is ever more tricksy, which I salute and also dispute. Furthermore, scraps or nods from my own writings (from professional academic essays to phone notes) are stitched in here as well.

But I believe these varied strands relate, even if my stitching them together this way for now causes headaches or night terrors if viewed too closely. Please stand back a ways.

(The Creature looks rather dashing from a distance. Patchwork graveflesh is hot.)

Ok.

Here comes the face.

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NOT-ONE: A CONVOCATION IN A FIELD AT DUSK

“No,” says Sickman.

Sickman then gestures to Crow to proceed reciting the source as planned. Crow preens, revs his craw, and then Crow crows:

“I’m feeling very tired of regarding myself as an individual contributor to what seems so obviously a collective process, an evolving wisdom commons, dare I say a culture of sense making and embodied understanding unfolding (if we look at it from a wide enough perspective) as a single gesture and single entity.”

Crow pauses here and remarks out of the side of his beak: “Emphasis added.” Crow puffs his chest with a big breath and continues:

“This project has brought me into conversation with so many amazing and insightful people doing what is often lonely, challenging work in the margins of society or their parent institutions and has kindled in me a passion to discover how we graduate together into something more harmonized and coordinated and how we can all stop seeing cultural and economic activity as the work of the debunked Homo Economicus, a contest between rational self-serving actors, and start living as members of a single being again in which the presence of our shared destiny shines through in every decision.”³

Crow gasps to recover from that run, then repeats, a little breathless: “Emphasis added.”

“NO,” Sickman reiterates.

Sickman says, “I suspect the doctrine of no-self is borne of privilege.”

The Gargoyle’s dismembered arm crawls onto Sickman’s foot. Feeling those heavy fingers on his toes, Sickman looks over at Gargoyle’s head glowing in a clump of sunsoaked weeds, which remarks stonily but not stoically: “Folks with more than enough rice pudding, eh?”

“Yeah,” acknowledges Sickman. “Those having enough of both self and world find it too much and wish for relief in a peaceful annihilation, diffusion into a Total-One or All. But those not yet having enough of either self or world, we who are deprived—depraved through these under-the-floorboards conditions—find little comfort in giving up what we never really had. Perhaps if we could ever get enough of it, we too would flock the cushions and breathe ourselves into inexistence.”

Grasshopper-Moth hop-flitters across Sickman’s eyeline and remarks in his fluttering voice, “But you yourself meditate, Sickman.”

“Concentrated breathing helps everyone,” responds Sickman. “Temporary relief from self, especially a half-self at best, a fractured self such as we are—a self beleaguered and battered by a (pseudo)world that is against its scattershot entelechies—always feels good, is much needed. A body-environment-centered reprieve from the inner nattering and outer battering (and vice versa). But to go there permanently is not something such as we/I intuitively seek.”

“I thought you were seriously considering Buddhism?” says Grasshopper-Moth. “And I thought you were sympathetic to the Humans On The Loop project?”

“I am. Both,” says Sickman. “This denial, this refusal, it’s a sketch. An intuition laid bare for future examination.”

“‘Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!’,” recites Crow. “Blake wrote that.”

“Yeah,” says Sickman. “Morton’s bound to jump on it like a cloud and float away.”

“I dunno,” mumbles the Scarecrow-Clown. “You said they’re tricksier and tricksier.”

“Did I say that?” says Sickman. “It’s true.”

Scarecrow-Clown continues more formally from his sunblushed staves in that soft reedy drawl of his that nuzzles the back of the brain: “Sickman’s cock-block to monism is perhaps akin to anticolonial critiques of the Big Human energy of the Anthropocene.”

Crow adds: “And here we direct you to a footnote (it’s at your feet, yes, just there, between those bumpy blades of ragweed) where our Author speaks and then we gathered here continue our convocation for a moment down there in that grassy academic convention. Go on, have a look.” Crow points with a talon at a diminutive number and they all disappear from view:⁴

Back up to their former dimensions,⁵ they notice a bloody bubble the size and shape of a young boy come floating down among them from out of the purpling prairie sky. Each of them encounters the boy’s voice like a wet mouth near the ear.

“Is that why the sign at the head of the field is that quote from Morton’s latest book?” the bloodbubbleboy asks. “Are we Little War-iors then?”

“Guerrillas. Ah,” says Crow with amusement.

“Yeah, I think so,” says Sickman. “Morton lays the root of the problem at the feet of the West’s ‘metaphysics of presence’. That a thing has to always be there and always be identical with itself shortcircuits ecological thought and feeling, he argues. I’m not sure you’d know what he’s on about if you hadn’t read his earlier book, Dark Ecology, where he outlines a shimmering and shuddering ontology of things going in and out of presence and just feeling the frisson of the open future,⁶ an ontology pitching itself headlong into the ‘gap between what you are and how you appear’ (p. 70). In Hell he’s in open but tactical warfare against the metaphysics of presence by means of little armed onto-skirmishes.”

The stony fingers of Gargoyle’s arms are busy at Sickman’s feet again, making notes in the grass, carving various numbers in the dirt.

“Isn’t Morton some variety of Buddhist as well as, now, some sort of Christian?” says Gargoyle’s head.

“Yes,” says Sickman. “But they’re not a monist, if I understand them right. Morton speaks against ‘the formless goo of Spinoza’ somewhere.”⁷

Looking toward the sky, Scarecrow-Clown says, “There’s another sign up there.”

They all look and in the empurpled clouds they read:

Since a human is a heap of things that aren’t humans, just as a meadow is a set of things that aren’t meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don’t really exist or there’s a malfunction of the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle. (Dark Ecology: p. 75)

“Malfunction it is then,” says Sickman. “We’re certainly a Heap.”

“And we’re Gorillas?” the bloodbubbleboy asks stickily.

“Sort of,” Sickman chuckles. “Crow, can you recite that opening quote in context?”

“Certainly,” says Crow. The entirety of his body shudders. His glossy down shimmers with sudden refractions of the dregs of evening light. His feathers riffled and resmoothed, he remonstrates from memory:

“Ontotheology claims that some things are more real than others. The metaphysics of presence claims that how these ‘more real’ things are more real is that they last longer—they are more constantly present. This is the most dangerous idea a human being ever formulated, the philosophical equivalent of inventing the atomic bomb. Guerrilla warfare against the metaphysics of presence goes by various names: one is deconstruction; object-oriented ontology is another. I am a guerrilla; I am also related to gorillas; I always wanted to be Cheetah the Monkey. When I was a kid I got guerrillas and gorillas confused. I guess I still do. I fight for them, not very well: gorillas and coral and whales and stomach bacteria and humans and bunny rabbits and glaciers and the smell of dust after the rain.” (Hell: p. 33)

“We fight for all these, and for Gordy too?” asks Gargoyle. “I mean Cheetah?” At Sickman’s feet Gargoyle’s fist smashes into his open hand, the clack of stone on stone.

“Aye,” says Sickman. “As best we can.”

“By carving up monisms and giant-single-entity-isms every chance we get with the shards of multiplicitous selfhood,” says Scarecrow Clown.⁸

“Yup,” says Sickman. The sun is down.

Crow flops onto Scarecrow-Clown’s stuffed shoulder, just dark figures in outline now, and chimes: “We inflect the gorgeous grotesquery of Clive’s ‘In the Hills, the Cities’.”

“Mm,” says Gargoyle.

“Who fights for us?” flutters Grasshopper-Moth in the flameless dark.

“I don’t know,” says Sickman.

Gargoyle’s arms crawl over and cup his head in his hands. “It’s Easter today,” he says.

“No shit?” says Sickman. “Hum. Totally forgot.”

A clear night has settled in. The company lays down to sleep beneath the starfield, the night not so flameless after all, its bright pinpricks tracing the outlines of Galactic Peaks.

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Afterw(o)(a)rd: A (Sub-Kierkegaardian) Knife Fight

This is an “unrelated” (nothing really is) scene. It is appended rather than woven. It will suggest its place in time.

Sickman, having (j)aped a hugger-muggery of Nietzsche’s Madman, beats a retreat to Kierkegaard’s multiplicity of pseudonyms and characters. But here too it’s a knife fight, for these personas reek of privilege to Sickman (not to mention more glaring problematics). And Sickman’s stank is ranker still, not to be tolerated by polite society. But polite society packs a blade and all (anaw). In this case not a swordcane but a swaggerdagger. A little affected baton twists and a blade is pulled forth from its secret sheath. It’s hungry for blood. It strikes from the hand of some Johnny Climacus or Anti-Climacus. What’s the difference? Sickman leaps back just as the blade kisses his cheek and scarcely avoids a Glasgow Smile.

Thus:

Here comes Sickman up from under, cheek bloodied but not entirely laid open, his sudden switchblade thrusting up for the chin not the throat, to skewer tongue on through palate and into brain, not slit or slash, but K (let’s call him K) is already leaning back so far he falls and flails his dagger back and forth warding Sickman off and regains his footing and both circle to catch their breath.

(“It’s just survival instinct,” Crow editorializes. “He doesn’t want to kill.”)

Sicky hacks at an ear, the anti-Semitic one, nicks a sizeable chunk that falls on the ground without a noise and Boneyard Jones (let’s call him Boneyard Jones) shrieks even as he plunges his swaggerdagger into what would’ve been the Stomach of Love if Sicky hadn’t spun away in the nick of time and gotten only a blade into the Arm of Workable Faith instead, which poured forth blood the moment BJ retracted the blade as fast as he’d stuck it in. Sicky, stuck piggy, makes a woozy counter slash that clips BJ’s patriarchal nose and Sicky knows it’s not enough, throws the knife into the hand of the unharmed arm and fights ambidextrous perforce.

Then it’s a melee. K’s other aliases join the fray as do Sickman’s scattered selves. There is a pummelling and bloodletting of various kinds of flesh. Exhaustion sets in and no clear winners emerge. It may be they will continue their fight in due course or join forces. But only, insists a breathless and bloody-mouthed Sickman, if K’s cohort renounces its misogynies and bigotries. No doubt Sickman’s crew will realize a thing or two to renounce too. We leave them huffing and puffing, bleeding, reaching for crumpled cigarettes, asking if anyone sees a lighter on the ground.

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More reports to follow.

1. “Hell isn’t really evil and punishment—that’s a demonic angel’s idea of Hell. Hell is the physical world” (Morton, Hell: p. 41). Also: “How do we get the demonic angels off our backs? How do we start to live in a Hell of angelic demons? Of good people whose goodness is exactly a feel of demonic, of incomplete, of sin?” (p. 42). And furthermore: “How to smile in Hell, rather than scream: not a sardonic grin, but a real smile… that is the question” (p. 52).

2. Thanks to getting PAID to do some writing! My writing. Creative, weird, (un)philosophical writing.

3. Michael Garfield, March 14, 2025:

Ep. 12 - Matt Segall on Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy

4. See Zoe Todd’s essay on colonialist “geontologies”. I drew on this essay in my own recent academic chapter "Turtle Island of the (Un)Dead: Indigenous American Kinscapes in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Richard Van Camp" for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie. (At my request, Zoe kindly sent me the essay as I don’t have an institutional affiliation by which to access articles behind exorbitant academic paywalls.) Non-European thinkers critique the Group Man geontologies implied in concepts like the Anthropocene (i.e. “humanity’s” global carbon footprint, which is actually largely the footprint of Eurocentric societies/economies and/or the wealthier cohorts of humans; cf. Morton’s Hell: p. 40). Here Sickman is suggesting an analogous resistance to Group Metaphysics more generally. See Morton’s Dark Ecology (2016) for one of the most interesting and viable ecological One-and-Many geontologies I’ve seen so far. A fractal nesting-doll metaphysics of objects-within-objects all the way up and all the way down (that is, to riff also on other prominent object-oriented ontologists such as Ian Bogost and Graham Harman, aliens-within-aliens, monsters-within-monsters, blackholes-within-blackholes). Subscendence is Morton’s term for how you can’t just add up the sum and reach a whole greater than its parts. To do so is even to misunderstand the singular nature of Gaia according to Lynn Margulis and others. (And this is where you have to torque Morton with Haraway. Monsters don’t just swallow each other, they snake and writhe and luxuriate in all the Earth: tentacularity meets hyperobjectivity.)

Crow warbles: “Tentacularity meet Hyperobjects. Hyperobjects meet…”

“We get it, Crow,” Sickman interjects.

The Scarecrow Clown hops down from his staves and raves: “And now the two are flying at each other! They wind furiously around each other like a hell of a helical tornado!”

Grasshopper-Moth sings from his legs and wings: “We’re not off to Oz! We’re here and now in the Tornado Alley of the Great Plains, transported up high and dashed down again, right here on this Earth!”

Then they all disappear from that capacious footnote into bigness again.

5. In which we “experience the kind of disorienting scale jump that is part of ecological awareness” (Morton, Hell: p. 39).

6. Dark Ecology: pp. 82-83, 142. Morton borrows the shudder from Adorno.

7. That somewhere can be found here.

8. Cf. Zurn, Pitts, Bettcher, DiPietro, Trans Philosophy (2024), pp. xi-xii, xviii and passim.