A very interesting project

In China Europeans and Chinese meet in front of the ecological mutation

http://modesofexistence.org/reset-modernity-a-shanghai-perspective-4-7-may-2017/

This is the image that comes to my mind:

(A way of cooking meat in Crete)


The ecological mutation rocks all kinds of actors around the world. And if we speak about us humans, Latour points that it makes us think: where we are, when we are, who we are. (And also what will happen of us)

When elephants meet, little ants (as a Modern Greek feels) take careful steps. I can only experience such a meeting obliquely, as part of a different collective (a subcollective of the modern Greeks), a collective (the Greek Orthodox) moving along a different trajectory. I listen about the meeting of the Europeans and the Chinese and I am thinking of the modern attack, the defamation project, that both indigenous Greeks (Orthodox Christians) and indigenous Chinese (from other faiths) faced from Elightened elites and their aggressive modernism. (Actually I wonder what is the "constitution" of the Chinese delegation? Are there some local maverics in it?)

But this is an unfair thought, because the project Latour promotes is (in my eyes) a real negotiatory opportunity. Actually less of a negotiation (for who among the powerful europeans has ginen Latour the mandate to negotiate for them? - Europeans are like ancient Athenians and one wonders what is for them practical and important endeavor and what is an intellectual passtime) and more of a real training field for people around the world to develop their negotiatory powers, their skills to think about the moderns and negotiate with the moderns under somewhat less uneven conditions (for of course economic and military power is most of the time available to the one side, and moderns tend to produce and support  mutations of "correctly thinking" people in the people they meet). It is like a training in powerful rhetorics that perhaps can undermine the moderns' security that they are the best thing around.

There is a connection between the Shanghai and similar projects and AIME. I feel the connection more through the reference to all other non-human actors that are involved and how they change the nature of the meeting between the moderns and the others.

AIME for me is a proposal for a new language, which accepts in language the kind of power that we find traditional cultures to accept (it is not "just words"), and which challenges the subject-object division in which most semi-moderns and moderns were socialized and even the geometric cutting up of reality in human bodies (bathed in human agency) and non-human objects. AIME tries to get the scent of life and follow it.

Since I am a Greek Orthodox I find myself appropriating AIME in my perspective. Actually I find AIME generative, I find in it affordaces that make my perspective move. For me the locus of AIME is the synodic meeting. In its more intense and clear, humans and non humans meeting enflamed by the presence of the Holy Spirit [REL]. In media res. Uncertain in their subjectivities, uncertain in their goals, under danger and hope and faith and love. Then the varieties of the dimension of richness ([MET], [FIC], [ATT], [NET]). In each case the possibility of life and death. Then another pole of intensity, the body of Christ, [POL] . Then the associated varieties of the dimension of structure ([REP], [REF], [MOR], [DC]). Finally the pole of intensity of creation [LAW]. And the associated  varieties of the dimension of time ([HAB], [TEC], [ORG], [PRE])

I wrote these not from the point of view of the  anthropology of the moderns, but trying to distance myself from the modern side of the hybrid that I am and use this way of talking about the moderns (which some moderns find useful for their anthropology) in order to speak about my experience as an Orthodox Christian so that my life can find affordances in the experience of the moderns who, in the very end, and from my tradition's line of approach, are our brothers and sisters and we all end up leaving in sisterhood with the creation (war whithstanding since the end of times is not a human construction). Or otherwise part of all these lines knit together to form the cloth that Gaia is (as I appropriated this [FIC] object).

From my point of view therefore anthropocene is not a cutting point. The cutting point is still Christ's taking up our flesh and calling us to follow Him as Church. The anthropocene is a painful part of the unfolding of this story.

PS. I think that each recognizable study leading to "knowledge" , falls under either of the below
a) Control or influence ( assessing truth/ being effective)
b) Communicating (Truth in communication/ Meaning)
c) Becoming resonant of a higher order (An order of Values)
d) Personal change (Metanoia)

AIME, as a study, seen as a whole, is I think declaratively hostile to a), declaratively friendly to b), tacitl;y hostile to c) and tacitly friendly to d).
But different appropriations do not have to keep the hostilities of the "parent" approach.