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Book Review: Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
For this reader of David Abram's text, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, · three main "pop outs" appear in his writing. One is the lovely, recurring synesthetic imagery, experiences, and language. The best (strength) of his book is about these experiences. As inspirational material, Abram provides words and new metaphors for those who seek to emulate his journey, or after experiencing similar intimations, lack the words to make them legible and coherent. His language could also become an invitation to others who might be less sensitive than he is, and limited to reading 'nature's text' from an existential periphery, only rarely apprehending the kinds of 'insights' Abram obviously experiences and aptly shares. The second was a sense of familiarity with his ideas: the supreme cybernetic of Gregory Bateson. A third might be that this eco/biosemiotician recognizes in much of what David Abram writes a popularized and even "new age" version of eco/ biosemotics proper: the beginning of a question rather than an answer.
Ultimately, the book "works" as a uniquely personal journey and exploration of Bateson's supreme cybernetic, sadly, without giving proper credit where credit is due. (It is odd, for example, that Bio- Eco-semiotician Kalevi Kull is mentioned in his acknowledgements but no posthumous acknowledgement of Bateson, a key figure in semiotics, can be found. Equally odd is the fact that Dr. Kull's name is mentioned but the entire text says almost nothing about eco/biosemiotics.)
On this account, only if one has not read Bateson (e.g. MIND as an aggregate) does David Abram seem remarkable or original. In a Batesonianlike manner David Abram ponders:
"What if there is, yes, a quality of inwardness to the mind, not because the mind is located inside us (inside our body or brain), but because we are situated, bodily, inside it-because our lives and our thoughts unfold in the depths of a mind that is not really ours, but is rather the Earth's?"
Nor can anyone be denied the return journey and experience of reproducing (confirming?) or identifying with Batesonian "truths"; sharing these with a new generation. However, Abram is no Gregory...