An adequate revolution: Copernicus or Kepler?

The shift we are presently seeing in the sciences of life, society and consciousness are happening against resistance imposed by entrenched world views. If we are to move past the notion of human exclusivism, that is a shift comparable to the Copernican shift in astronomy: the Earth is not the fixed centre of all things. Like the Copernican revolution, resistance comes from passionately help prejudices that enforce an order of power—–if humans are not the only valid epistemological agent, not the only historians, not the only moral beings, then this is a terrible threat to any number of economic, legal and aesthetic powers.

But the truly important shift, which depended on Copernicus but went far beyond, was Kepler’s abandonment of the circle and epicycles for the ellipse. So, too, the really terrifying and completely necessary shift in biology, social theory and consciousness studies is the abandonment of the individual for the social network of symbionts. Nutrition is a group effort, as is mood, immunity, reproduction—–and so also the formation and transmission of art, culture and language. There is no Kafka or Leguin without multiple bodies, some human and many not, each leaky talking breeding sack full to the brim with microbiota. At what scale does inspiration occur: hunger? lust? the reciprocated gaze? The ‘lonely’ walk through the woods, riddled with mycorrhiza and accompanied by a salivating dog that licked your sandwich when you weren’t looking?