Terra‐&‐Terror Ecology: Secrets from the Arrakeen Underground
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Western University, Canada
It is […] vital to an understanding of Muad'Dib’s religious impact that you never lose sight of one fact: the Fremen were a desert people whose entire ancestry was accustomed to hostile landscapes. Mysticism isn’t difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility […]. With such a tradition, suffering is accepted […]. And it is well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost complete freedom from guilt‐feelings. This isn’t necessarily because their law and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It is likely closer to the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal (often deadly) judgments which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt. Dune I (576‐77)
This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always is, was, and will be an ever‐living Fire, igniting and extinguishing in equal measure. Heraclitus Fragments (DK B30)
[F]orm is nothing but holes and cracks […] with a nature that has no hardness or solidity. Ancient Buddhist saying.
Frank Herbert’s science‐fiction classic Dune1 is a literary work about political, religious, military and ecological design: a design in which Dune’s desert‐planet is, like fire, a perpetually self‐consuming political, religious, military and ecological topos and in which human beings— among other things like water, sand‐worms and religious doctrines—are the fodder that fuels what could be called the ‘Great Ecology’ of planetary regeneration and desertification. The project of “planetary ecology” is established in the first book as the imperially‐sanctioned
1 Frank Herbert’s Dune, a thematically rich and varied work of science‐fiction, is the first novel in a trilogy about the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, and the rise to power of Paul Atreides, its messianic leader […]. Ultimately, Herbert produced six novels about Dune prior to his death in 1986 […]. These six novels comprise what has become known as The Dune Chronicles […]. The intricate ecology of the planet—encompassing the Fremen natives’ desire to turn Dune into a ‘green and fertile world’, and the need of the Empire for the indigenous spice mélange to facilitate space travel—forms the backdrop for Paul’s struggle to overcome his enemies, control the planet, and fulfill his personal destiny. Throughout the novel, Paul must meet and overcome challenges that serve to confirm him in the minds of the Fremen as being their messiah. Paul does not seek this position, but is instead caught up in the events that lead to his deposing of the emperor and control of the throne” (Parkerson 2010).
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ecological redesign of the planet Arrakis from a desert environment to one that is, on the one hand, hospitable to terra‐form life (via the creation of grassland ecosystems, surface bodies of water, etc.) and that will, on the other hand, “achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon” (Dune I: 310‐11). “A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric. Vegetative and animal changes will be determined at first by the raw physical forces we manipulate. As they establish themselves however, our changes will become controlling influences in their own right, and we
will have to deal with them too […]. [W]e need control only 3% of the energy surface—only 3%— to tip the entire structure into our self‐sustaining system” (ibid.).
This Gaian2 eco‐vision, aimed at physically transforming the living surface of the landscape, is upheld by an imperial politico‐economic apparatus entirely driven by the hegemony of ‘spice’ (a byproduct of the biological workings of an indigenous life‐form on Arrakis, the sand‐worm), which, when ingested, has hyper‐cognitive effects that allow its consumers a kind of ‘prescience’ or ‘second sight’ of the flux of time (or “time nexus”; Dune I: 332). Manipulation of this temporal structure is what makes time travel and interplanetary navigation possible in the empire (the latter being extensions—or more precisely, techno‐ pharmacological transductions—of Arrakeen worm‐holes3). The first book of Dune explains how the mystical religion of the Fremen—the autochthonous desert nomads of Arrakis—centers on the figure and function of the sand‐worm (Shai‐Hulud), and how, by way of imperial imperatives to control spice‐production, the acquisition and transfer of Fremen knowledge regarding sand‐worm ecology becomes a key concern for the political future of planet Arrakis.
Although such a Gaian ecological vision dominates the first book of Dune, it is not this ecology that dominates the subsequent volumes. Indeed, one of the most important overarching lessons of the Dune series is the failure of the Gaian political ecological vision once it has been realized, and its role in directly bringing about the extinction of Arrakeen life‐ forms—namely the sand‐worm and, by extension, the entire Fremen civilization. From the second book onward, the project of planetary ecology literally goes underground, becoming by definition chthonic (i.e. “in, under, or beneath the earth”),4 no longer focused on manipulating
2 From the Greek Gaia, mother of the Titans, personification of ‘earth’ as opposed to heaven, ‘land’ as opposed to sea, ‘land, country, soil’ as collateral form of ge (or the Dorian ga), meaning ‘earth’, of unknown origin, perhaps pre‐Indo‐European. The Roman equivalent earth‐goddess was Tellus (see tellurian), sometimes used in English, poetically or rhetorically, to designate ‘Earth personified’ or ‘the Earth as a planet’ (cf. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gaia). 3 As the Princess Irulan announces in the opening scene of David Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune (1984): The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4,000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of universe without moving” (cf. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune_%28film%29) 4 From Greek chthonios, ‘in, under, or beneath the earth’, from chthon, ‘earth’; pertaining to the Earth; earthy; subterranean) designates, or pertains to, deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek
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the planetary surface and no longer developed as a widespread political, ecological and cultural project involving the colonized—Fremen—in cooperation with the colonizer or imperial system. Instead, Arrakis is returned to the Fremen, who, in keeping with their mystic autochthonous theocracy, submit themselves to the rule of their prophesized messiah qua God‐Emperor (who, over the course of the chronicle, metamorphosizes into a human/worm chimera) whose only goal is to return Arrakis to the desert and to return the Fremen to their chthonic, hence underground, ecology.
Throughout the course of the entire Dune chronicle, we come to see that what begins as a Gaian (terra‐surface) imperial ecology turns into a covert hence “larval”5 terror‐ecology that operates underneath the [terra]surface of planetological perceptions and sociocultural consciousness, and that uses war, fear, and ideological obedience as tools of ecological transformation. The terrible secret of Dune—one that only the human/worm chimera i.e. God‐Emperor knows—is that the survival of autochthonous Fremen culture requires returning Arrakis to the desert. “At their roots the Fremen remained special‐application animals, desert survivors, governance experts, under conditions of stress” (Dune III: 33). Dune’s chthonic/ autochthonous eco‐vision is that of a desertification in which the human is submitted to the desert, overrun by it, and ultimately transformed by it into something other than human (this is “the amor fati which I bring to humankind: the act of ultimate self‐examination. In this universe, I choose to ally myself against any force which brings humiliation upon humankind”; Dune III: 270). This necessitates pulling an ecological conceptualization of earth or of earthliness down from a ‘surface’‐ or ‘ground’‐level perspective to an ‘subsurface’ or ‘underground’ one. The politico‐ecological vision in which the human is submitted to and retranslated by the desert, and consumed in its ongoing conflagration, is one that is by necessity terrible and terrifying: the human becomes, not just an ‘agent’ or merely a ‘tool’, but the ‘material’ to be consumed, transformed, or transduced in the conflagrational battle‐space created by chthonic interaction between human and sand‐worm; the effects of ecological transduction ripple and extend not only throughout the desert‐planet that produces the ‘spice’, but also across the empire’s entire trans‐planetary political‐economic network which is dependent on (indeed addicted to) spice.
My aim in this short discussion is to think ‘ecology’ transductively, taking an ec(h)o‐ formative perspective on this intensive and constitutive activity of interaction between various materials/material environments, for example sand/water, worms, and human beings: “The concept of eco‐formation (formation by things) transforms itself into oïko‐formation (the Greek
religion. The Greek word chthon is one of several for ‘earth’; it typically refers to the interior of the soil rather than to the living surface of the land (as gaia or ge does) or to the land as territory (chora) does. 5 From Latin larva (plural larvæ), earlier larua ‘ghost’, also ‘mask’ (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=larva).
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oïkos designating [habit/habituation/]habitat), and finally the notion […] of ec(h)o‐formation attempts to account for the interactions between these different poles” (Denoyel, trans. Mellamphy 2013: 14). This “interaction” “articulates interrelations that are both mater- ial (i.e. eco-logical: having to do with the material environment) and sociocultural (i.e. oïko-logical: having to do with the habitual environment)”; “Ec(h)o-formation”, as we shall see, interweaves “the interaction of self and sociocultural environment” with “the interaction of self and material environment,” “generating an interactional intelligence” (Mellamphy 2013: 14).
The generic or more precisely ‘generalist’ project of planetary ecology is articulated by Arrakis’s first official planetologist, Pardot Kynes: “The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, […] [and] [t]he highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences, […] [since] one cannot draw neat lines around planet‐wide problems. Planetology is a cut‐and‐fit science” (Dune I: 305, 306, 307). The goal of planetary ecology—one that is sanctioned and funded by state and imperial power—is to control and transform the landscape from desert to grassland: that is to say, to change the living surface of the land so that sedentary terrasurface settlement —especially of the autochthonous nomadic underground‐dwelling Fremen—can be established and propagated. “Arrakis is a one‐crop planet […]. One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times, while beneath them a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on their leavings. It is the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected” (ibid. 310).
The basic method of planetary ecology is to track movement across landscapes, hence it is not to be conceived as an essentially logical and juridical science (one that is a product of symbolic or grammatical inputs alone) but rather as a fundamentally diagrammatical science of “ecological notation” the primary aim of which is to chart human and non‐human movements through the landscape.
Movement across the landscape is a necessity for animal life […]. Nomad peoples follow the same necessity. Lines of movement adjust to physical needs for water, food, minerals. We must control this movement now, align it for our purposes […]. We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet […]. We must use man as a constructive ecological force—inserting adapted terra‐form life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place—to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape […]. It was lines of movement that gave us the first clue to the relationship between worms and spice (Dune I: 308).
Humans have an extremely specific role to play in this planetological eco‐vision: the human—in this case especially those who are Fremen—is a life‐form that can scientifically track not only its own movement along with that of other elements within a milieu, but that can also
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 4 uncover and manipulate the mechanisms6 underlying such movement. “To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings […]. [Hence] one must cultivate ecological literacy among the people; this is why I have created an entirely new form of ecological notation” (Dune I: 307).7 Ecological design becomes the general or rather the generic activity of localizing, translating and transcribing movement across a landscape; and all symbolic, logical and normative considerations are considered to be effects of this primarily generic gestural mechanism of movement. “The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious” (ibid. 309). It is the diagrammatic quality of ecological notation that allows this Gaia/Terra ecology on the one hand to take on a “generalist” or “non‐local” perspective within the local context of a given field/landscape/milieu, and on the other hand to be a “cut‐and‐fit science.”
In this sense, there are resonances between Dune’s Gaian ecology qua Terran science of planetary ecology and François Laruelle’s recent articulation of “generic ecology” which is to be understood neither as a general ecology nor an ecological philosophy, nor even a philosophy of ecology. Generic ecology, like planetary ecology, is not primarily concerned with philosophy as the movement of growth and overgrowth, i.e. with what Laruelle describes as the “nostalgic agrarian trope” in which “philosophy thinks only [in order] to grow like the Cartesian tree, or to root itself in the soil, as in Heidegger” or to ultimately “project itself into a great living being” (Laruelle 2012: 33). Generic ecology is instead concerned with what Laruelle calls the “generic
6 Neuroscientist Carl Craver highlights the specificity and significance of the specifically human capacity for mechanistic or “causal” inference: “Indirect empirical evidence for the utility of moving beyond the phenomena to posit underlying explanations comes from Daniel Povinelli’s (2000) contrast between causal reasoning in chimpanzees and human infants. Chimpanzees, Povinelli argues, are like Humeans. They do not posit hidden causal powers or mechanisms, and so they confine their understanding to regularities among the manifest events in their world. On relatively simple tasks, this strategy is highly effective. Chimpanzees are active manipulators of their environments, they mimic each other’s behavior, and they quickly pick up on regularities between actions and consequences. Nonetheless,their understanding of even relatively simple systems never goes beyond the manifest sequence of events […]. Chimpanzees can be fooled, and can remain fooled for a very long time, by changes to a system that would never fool even a three‐year‐old […]. If Povinelli is right that Chimpanzees fail to form causal inferences, and if he is right about the impact of this failure on their ability to manipulate even simple devices, then his research displays poignantly the importance of moving beyond phenomenal models to models that describe underlying mechanisms. The chimpanzee’s failure to reason about mechanisms leaves them unable to manipulate the system after even relatively minor changes. The chimpanzees thus point to a central contrast between merely phenomenal models and models that characterize the mechanisms responsible for the phenomenon” (Craver 2006: 359). 7 “Fremen were the first humans to develop a conscious/unconscious symbology through which to experience the movements and relationships of their planetary system. They were the first people anywhere to express climate in terms of a semi‐mathematic language whose written symbols embody (and internalize) the external relationships. The language itself was part of the system it described. Its written form carried the shape of what it described. The intimate local knowledge of what was available to support life was implicit in this development. One can measure the extent of this language/system interaction by the fact that Fremen accepted themselves as foraging and browsing animals” (Dune III: 351).
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degrowth” in which philosophy is not only reduced to being one “productive force” among others such as science, art and religion (ibid. 331), but in which this movement of degrowth or receding becomes constitutive of philosophy—the loving pursuit of wisdom—itself. “We cannot transfer ecological problems and means‐of‐thought directly and continuously into philosophy; we need new definitions of vicinities and risks, new ways of marking out knowledges, and we must set our goals according to them” he suggests (ibid. 333). Generic ecology, like its Arrakeen counterpart, is a ‘science’ of ecology in which ‘philosophy’ itself becomes “an ecological object or preoccupation”; the perspective of such a generic ecology is that of a theoretical “installation” and “sub‐science” (ibid. 333, 335), not that of a “meta‐ science or a meta‐conjugation of knowledges” (ibid. 334); not a science “that draws neat lines around planet‐wide problems” but a “cut‐and‐fit science” (Dune 1: 307). The viewpoint or model of generic ecology is a “generic matrix” which Laruelle calls a “device for the conjugation of the two disciplines —philosophy and science— which preserves their […] specificity, while depriving them of their will to domination” (op.cit. 332).
Within the framework of generic ecology, human beings operate first and foremost as designers and implementers of ecological theoretical installations (Laruelle 2012: 333), tracking movements across landscapes that produce degrowth. Although generic ecology is supposed to be explanatory, not just descriptive—since it is “not content to describe fluctuations or oscillations without explaining them, receiving them as affects, contenting itself with undergoing and living them” (ibid. 332)—Laruelle does not shed much light on the mechanics of this explanatory power (i.e. he does not provide how‐actually explanations, only how‐possibly or how‐plausibly8 explanations). Generic ecology “proposes to change the ultimate reference‐ environment for ecology” by adopting a “quantum model” the epistemological object of which is the “universe” rather than the “world”:
The universe is not the great mystical All evoked by certain physicists, but an
epistemological correlate of physico‐mathematical knowledge […]. Thus we suggest an extension of the ecological domain: man must be prepared to transgress the
8 As Craver (2006) notes: “In order to explain a phenomenon, it is insufficient merely to characterize the
phenomenon and to describe the behavior of some underlying mechanism […]. Models vary considerably in their
mechanistic plausibility […]. How‐possibly models (unlike merely phenomenal models) are purported to explain, but they are only loosely constrained conjectures about the mechanism that produces the explanandum phenomenon. They describe how a set of parts and activities might be organized such that they exhibit the explanandum phenomenon. One can have no idea if the conjectured parts exist and, if they do, whether they can engage in the
activities attributed to them in the model […]. How‐actually models describe real components, activities, and organizational features of the mechanism that in fact produces the phenomenon. They show how a mechanism works, not merely how it might work. Between how‐possibly and ideal explanations lies a range of how‐plausibly models that are more or less consistent with the known constraints on the components, their activities, and their organization” (361). I am, however, careful not to claim that Herbert’s account is completely explanatory in the neuroscientific sense evoked here by Craver.
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natural world and to enter into the universe as theoretical object, not only into the world as biological milieu (Laruelle 2012: 338) […]. Knowledge, including the most ambitious thought, must be treated as a natural ecumenon, an inhabited surface of the terrestrial crust, but more extended, more universal, with dimensions supplementary to those of its relations to physis—it is universe‐oriented rather than world‐oriented (ibid. 339‐40).
As Laruelle clearly reveals in this passage, the “universe” is a theoretical (not material) object of generic ecology’s exclusively ‘terrasurface’ viewpoint. Generic ecology is ultimately a matter of theoretical objects and the production of theoretical knowledge, and it is in this commitment that its resonances with Dune’s ‘Great Ecology’ end. Even though Laruelle’s generic ecology seeks to replace “the language‐based model which favours the logocentric auto‐effacement of dualities” (Laruelle 2012: 335), its topological perspective is confined to the Gaian, terrasurface (“terrestrial crust”) model of universality. In refusing the phenomenal‐ /‘world‐oriented’‐ viewpoints of philosophically‐driven ecologies (Platonic, Cartesian, Heideggerian, what‐have‐you), generic ecology offers an ecological vision that sets off, not from a biological view of ‘nature’, but from a theoretical (i.e. quantum physico‐mathematical) naturalized ecumenical view of universe‐orientation. Yet, if we are to be attentive to the underground secrets of Dune, we must wonder what would be the chthonic mechanism underlying, contaminating, and thus modifying both ‘world‐’ and ‘universe‐’ oriented ecologies. Generic ecology gives us little opportunity to track “desert‐orientation”: the gestural (rather than theoretical), autochthonous (rather than ecumenical), ungrounding chthonos that ‘worms’ itself into every act of decay and degrowth. Every ecology, whether it is world‐ or universe‐ oriented, is submitted to and engineered by the Desert‐Worm‐Water nexus:
The only way that the solid can initialize its architectonic and compositional activities (processes for survival, development, etc.) is by letting‐in the void. The dynamic traits of solid can only be actuated when the solid is eaten, convoluted and messed‐up by the void. There is no other option for the solid. In a ( )hole complex, on a superficial level (bound to surface dynamics), every activity of the solid appears as a tactic to conceal and appropriate the void, as a program for inhibiting the void, accommodating the void by sucking it into the economy of surfaces […] or filling it. But on a deep compositional level (the machinery of the real), all activities of the solid are oriented toward engineering new voiding functions, convolutions, vermicular spaces (henceforth, Nemat‐space) which eventually unground the solid without erasing it. On this deep compositional level, the solid conducts the convoluting functions of the solid‐contaminating void, in the form of vermicular lines—“worms” (Nemat) as Lovecraft suggests, or “worm‐functions” (the Nemat‐ function): itinerant lines in the form of knotted holes, or the other way around (Negarestani 2008: 47).
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The dynamic traits of Dune’s “ecological notation” would more properly be called gestural rather than generic in the Laruellian sense, gesture here being defined as “a form of transcription with several possible meanings, using an ordinary [act and/or] fact as a ‘hook’ to catch thought—for example, a geographical site, an historical fact, a function, a gesture related to a profession, even a well‐known theological form or myth” (Schwaller 1985: 8). “The gesture refers to a disciplined distribution of mobility before any transfer takes place […]. The gesture envelops before grasping, and sketches its unfolding long before denoting or exemplifying: already domesticated gestures are the ones that serve as references; a gesture awakens other gestures: it is able to store‐up all the allusion’s provocative virtualities, without debasing it into abbreviations” (Châtelet 2000: 10).
Gestural ecology is best understood in the context of a predatory (predator‐prey) ecology that is engineered to track, trap and hook worm‐movement across given expanses; the hook also happens to be the very technical device that permits humans to interact directly with the underground spice‐producing sand‐worms of Arrakis (Fremen, for instance, use hooks— actual hooks—to attach themselves to moving sand‐worms, to climb and then ride them; “A worm!, Kynes thought with a surge of hope. A maker is sure to come when this bubble bursts. But I have no hooks. How can I mount a big maker without hooks?” Dune I: 308). The hook of “gesture” becomes the “elusive stratagem” (Châtelet 2000: 12) of an ecological perspective that uses the interaction of elemental movements across landscapes (e.g. sand and water) as bait to track, trap, and eventually manipulate/change that landscape (e.g. to track, trap and manipulate the movement of spice‐producing sandworms across the Arrakeen landscape). The gestural framework of ecological notation—its ‘hook‐like’ mechanism—is what enables this science to track (i.e. localize), translate (i.e. decompose) components, so as to identify and manipulate mechanisms of activity and transcribe movement across landscapes. “Ecological notation” or gestural diagrammatology thus becomes an interventionist science as well as the normative basis for the cultural transmission of “ecological literacy” and religious obedience amongst the population. As the first imperial planetologist of Arrakis, Pardot Kynes tells his son Liet:
The masses of Arrakis will know that we work to make the land flow with water […]. Most of them, of course, will have only a semimystical understanding of how we intend to do this. Many, not understanding the prohibitive mass‐ratio problem, may even think we’ll bring water from some other planet rich in it. Let them think anything they wish as long as they believe in us […]. Religion and law among our
masses must be one and the same […]. An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population”; Dune I: 310).
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Ecological notation becomes the ‘hook’ (the device) for the development of a diagrammatical planetary science as well as the vehicle for the spreading and extending of a Gaian (terra‐ecological) religious point of view that can effectively control and communicate with an entire hostile human population. “Diagrams work as prosthetic devices that become vehicles of intuition and thought […]. [They are] “strategies for spreading and stretching [i.e. extending] dimensionality” (Knœspel in Châtelet 2000: xiii, xv; Mellamphy 2013: 14). The mobile ‘logic’ of a gestural rather than generic perspective on ecology would operate not principally by way of theoretical knowledge (e.g. the logos of the contemplative mode of the theoretician), but by way of a more practical “cunning intelligence” or mètis which tracks, traps and transcribes “processes of convergence and adaptation of the gesture into a technique which makes it possible to speak of a technical line of descent”9):
Cunning, […] tricks, […] and the ability to seize an opportunity […] give the weaker competitor the means of triumphing over the stronger, enabling the inferior to
outdo the superior rival […]. To bring about a reversal of the position mètis must foresee the unforeseeable. Engaged in a world of becoming and confronted with situations which are ambiguous and unfamiliar and whose outcome always lies in the balance, wily intelligence is only able to maintain a hold over being and things thanks to ability to look beyond the immediate present and foresee a greater or lesser section of the future. Vigilant and forever on the alert, mètis also appears
multiple […] many‐coloured, […] and shifting […]. Finally, mètis, wily intelligence possesses the most prized cunning of all: the ‘duplicity’ of the trap which always presents itself as what it is not and which conceals its true lethal nature beneath a reassuring exterior (Détienne and Vernant 1978: 27).
Gestural ecology tracks the chthonic mechanism contaminating and reengineering every ecology. Operating duplicitously rather than theoretically (i.e. trapping information rather than
9 “We know how Gilbert Simondon managed to illuminate processes of convergence and adaptation into a technique which make it possible to speak of a technical line of descent,” wrote Gilles Châtelet in his Enjeux du Mobile (Figuring Space, 2000: 10); “there are therefore families of diagrams of increasingly precise and ambitious allusions, just as there are lines of descent that are increasingly autonomous and concrete. And just as the technical object does not follow knowledge, so the diagram does not simply illustrate or translate an already
available content […]. A philosophy of the physico‐mathematical cannot ignore this symbolic practice which is prior to formalism, this practice of condensation and amplification of the intuition” (ibid. 10‐11). Compare Châtelet’s reading of Simondon here with Laruelle’s criticisms of the Simondonian theory of ‘technical objects’: “If there are technical objects,” writes Laruelle, “they are indeed those that Simondon describes, but we question here that— whether as ‘becoming’ or ‘concretisation’—they exist with scientific objectivity and define the technical Essence (of) technics. By contrast,” he continues, “what we are calling the technical Essence (of) technics is not itself ‘technical’: that is to say not a technical object and not understood from Simondon’s philosophy, from its reading or its re‐interpretation. Moreover, since the notion of object is here a philosophical notion par excellence, linked to that of objectification and to logos and to all Greco‐Simondonian ontology—if we can permit this shortcut—we will say rigorously, to correct Heidegger’s formula: the technical Essence (of) technics is nothing technological and cannot be understood by the notion of ‘technical object’, whether is a state of genesis or not, that is to say by technology in the highest sense of techno‐logos, which is that of Simondon” (Laruelle 1994: 211; my translation).
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formulating universal physico‐mathematical postulates), and modeling the ecological dynamics of predator and prey, gestural ecology would proceed not on the basis of science and cognition, but rather on the basis of the cunning intelligence of pre‐science and pre‐cognition which, in Dune, enables one to foresee and thus manipulate the ecological future:
Awareness flowed into that timeless stratum where he could view time, sensing the available paths, the winds of the future, […] the winds of the past: the one‐eyed vision of the past, the one‐eyed vision of the present and the one‐eyed vision of the future—all combined in a trinocular vision that permitted him to see time‐become‐ space. There was danger, he felt, of overrunning himself, and he had to hold onto his awareness of the present, sensing the blurred deflection of experience, the flowing moment, the continual solidification of that‐which‐is into the perpetual‐ was. In grasping the present, he felt for the first time the massive steadiness of time's movement everywhere complicated by shifting currents, waves, surges, and countersurges, like surf against rocky cliffs. It gave him a new understanding of his prescience, and he saw the source of blind time, the source of error in it, with an immediate sensation of fear. The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed—at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe (Dune I: 333).
Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the ecological designer/implementer/manipulator experiments with temporal materiality by making time into an experimental medium (“The vision lay clearly in her awareness now, a culture medium in which the present grew outward”; Dune II: 221), thus becoming the explosive herald and precursor of a predatory ecology that submits and thereby returns itself to the desert10 (a reversal of the earlier program of Gaian planetary ecology). In the end, what seems to be missing from Laruelle’s version of “generic ecology” is this mètic framework of duplicity, the chthonic underbelly that creeps beneath any Gaian ecological vision in which we may place our hopes: the terrifying realization that any eco‐ vision works like a trap11 in which the human is prey to/of a landscape that cannot be conceptualized exclusively in terms of Gaian, terra‐surface universality. “Given enough time for
10 The désêtrement of Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, ‘Ec(h)ology of the Désêtre: Essay on Trans- duction and Transmutation’ in Reza Negaretani, ed., Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Develop- ment VII: ‘Culinary Materialism’, 2011, 412‐435. 11 “Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about the behavior which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events which are seen to be ‘on line’. (That is, events which are set to occur in a related system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere, such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become the victim of what he knows ‐ which is a relatively common human failing. The danger is that those who predict real events may overtook the polarizing effect brought about by overindulgence in their own truth” (Dune III: 380).
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 10 the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey, etc., etc, etc. […]. Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces” (Dune IV: 353).
When even religion can count as a force in the ecological feedback process in which predator and prey become completely overlapped (a condition of hypercamouflage12), then desert ecology (i.e. the tracking of movement across landscapes) becomes not merely or even chiefly a geographical or ideological matter but rather an ec(h)ological transduction qua interactional intelligence: “a sentient process of desertification which can be grasped only by 13 presupposing that war [between predator and prey for instance] is an autonomous entity free from its provocateurs. How is it possible to add more to this already‐a‐desert if your religion, politics and beliefs are still secretly fancying meadows and jungles?'” (Negarestani 2008: 132). Desertification becomes ecologically embodied in the transduction (i.e. convergence and adaptation) of prey and predator, human and inhuman.14 What Dune’s terror‐ecology reveals—and that which constitutes its Great Ecology of desertification—is the weaponisation of the underground movement of worm, water and sand, these latter becoming the real political operatives in Dune’s terrifying chthonic ecological vision:
What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space. If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are together, you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless mediocrity, a movement without ambitions
12 “If camouflage utilizes a partial overlap between two or multiple entities, hypercamouflage is the complete overlap and coincidence between two or more entities. In this terminal camouflage, the mere survival of a predator threatens the existence of the prey, even if the predator neverengages the prey. Hypercamouflage is associated with the warrior under Taqiyya or the Thing (John Carpenter's movie); it can be defined as a total withdrawal from the perception of friends and a dissolution into the enemy: the rebirth of a new and obscure foe” (Negarestani 2008: 241). Herbert also mobilizes the notion of Taqiyya (Dune IV: 215). 13 “It seems therefore that both the technocapitalist process of desertification in War on Terror and the radical monotheistic ethos for the desert converge upon oil as an object of production, a pivot of terror, a fuel, a politico‐economic lubricant and an entity whose life is directly connected to earth, while for western technocapitalism, the desert gives rise to the oiliness of war machines and the hyper‐consumption of capitalism en route to singularity, for Jihad oil is a catalyst to speed the rise of the Kingdom, the desert. Thus for Jihad, the desert lies at the end of an oil pipeline” (Negarestani 2008: 19). Clearly, in the Dune chronicles, ecology and jihad (holy war) overlap to such an extent that the “grand ecology” that returns Dune to the desert becomes synonymous with a religious “grand politics” of military war and terror. 14 “Friction had set up a worm dominance, the air around him full of the chemical exhalations from his temperature adjustments. The thing he thought of as his oxygen supercharger vented steadily, making him intensely aware of the protein factories and amino acid resources his worm‐self had acquired to accommodate the placental relationship with his human cells. Desert quickened the movement toward his final metamorphosis” (Dune IV: 328).
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 11
or aims. I show you that entire civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking ‘Why?’. I show you the false happiness and the shadow—catastrophe called Leto, the God Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness? (Dune IV: 403).
The terrible secret of the Dune chronicle is that Dune cannot be host to terra‐form culture (which Herbert likens to the “bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past”);15 it can only be the medium for a culture totally submitted to the desert in which the human being is the bait for and prey of the ultimate predatory mechanism: the movement of sand, water and worm that produces the spice mélange.16
Bibliography
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Craver, Carl. ‘When Mechanistic Models Explain’ in Synthèse 153.3, 2006, 355‐376.
Détienne, Marcel, and Jean‐Pierre Vernant. Les Ruses de L’Intelligence: La mètis des Grecs (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1974), trans. Janet Lloyd, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978).
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15 “Water was the ultimate power symbol on Arrakis. At their roots Fremen remained special‐application animals, desert survivors, governance experts under conditions of stress. And as water became plentiful, a strange symbol transfer came over them even while they understood the old necessities” (Dune II: 33). 16 “Fremen had always known to plant predator fish in their water cisterns. The haploid sandtrout actively resisted great accumulations of water near the planet's surface; predators swam in that qanat below him. Their sandworm vector could handle small amounts of water—the amounts held in cellular bondage by human flesh, for example. But confronted by large bodies of water, their chemical factories went wild, exploded in the death‐transformation which produced the dangerous melange concentrate, the ultimate awareness drug employed in a diluted fraction for the sietch orgy. That pure concentrate had taken Paul Muad'Dib through the walls of Time, deep into the well of dissolution which no other male had ever dared” (Dune II: 32).
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