My research project investigates the agency and vibrancy of the mountain called Rysy. This 15 million year old granite giant lies beyond standard human scales and sentience, it cannot speak, move, or die. Thus, it is considered inert, inanimate, and devoid of agency. Such matter is conventionally considered a part of nature to protect, or a resource to harvest. This approach is not limited to mountains. We inhabit a material world in which geological matter sustains social systems and infrastructure. It is soil and fuel. It is cars, batteries, houses and bridges. It answers to our plans and needs. We continue to reduce matter to the dualist perspective of humanism. To paraphrase Heidegger's words: The human is “weltbildend”, and the rock is “weltlos”(2012).
Following the words of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who said „relationships are potential vectors of transformation”(2019), I propose to foster intimacy with those strange nonhumans, and to apply it as a lens that can offer a more nuanced perspective. Intimacy-oriented interaction requires attention and care to notice the multiple presences of others. It is not only a basis for a full appreciation of the vast and intricate web of interdependent relationships that constitute a mountain oikos (Thiele), but perhaps also a step towards transgressing the perceptual boundaries, starting with our preconceptions of the mountain.
As Michel Serres argues, to grasp this intricate web of dimensions and relations one needs an interdisciplinary journey where the bodily experience plays an exceptional role. “Who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange, take the plunge” (2008).
I set out to experiment with what Serres describes as “voyage from the familiar to the strange” as a way of questioning the “conventional” account of the mountain as a landscape or a resource. This means challenging preconceived ideas of our place in the world and rethinking dominant notions about the mountain that is not an ontological outside, but a flux of influences in which the observer is submerged (1982).
To delve into the lived experience, the research project engages walking practices (in its various modalities). This seemingly banal practice makes room for the body and aims to foreground the question of the body as a collaborator in the process of knowledge production – the process which is conventionally dominated by the logo- and ocularcentrism which distance and separate us from the direct environment. Walking practice facilitates direct interaction between the subject and the object. Walking is a form of being in contact with the mountain, of being in-touch. Through this repetitive process the researcher becomes physically and emotionally embedded in the field. Here, a permanent and complex flow of information takes place, walking and the theoretical inquiry progressively and iteratively refine one another which allows me to consider walking a transformative practice and constitutes a foundation of an autoethnographic study.
Interwoven with the walking practice is the exploration of the multiple perspectives on the mountain. Narrative interviews with people whose lives are entangled with Rysy, who live or work there, can offer concrete examples of how this mountain influences their processes and practice, culture and values. Those different accounts can expand our perspective on Rysy’s agency and vibrancy. The austere granite ranges can be as important to the geologist as they are to the merchant or a philosopher. The collection of short stories creates a patchwork — mimicking the mosaic of perspectives and knowledges out there.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana University Press, 2012.
Serres, Michel. The Troubadour of Knowledge. University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability.” Common Knowledge, vol. 25, no. 1-3, 2019, pp. 143–162.
Thiele, Leslie Paul. Indra's Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World. MIT Press, 2013.