nature is what allows the world to be; on the other hand, everything that ties a given thing to the world is part of nature. since the time of German idealism, everything that goes under the name of human sciences has been a policing effort, at once desperate and despairing, to force the disappearance of any trace belonging to the natural from the domain of knowledge. At this point, it is completely normal for someone who calls him- or herself a philosopher to know the most insignificant events of his or her nation’s historical past, all the while ignoring the names, lives, or histories of the animal and vegetal species that provide his or her daily nourishment. But, apart from this form of illiteracy, the refusal to accord nature and the cosmos their philosophical dignity produces a strange form of bovarism: philosophy seeks at all costs to be human and humanistic, to be included among the human and social sciences, to be a science—even a normal science—like all others. By mixing false presuppositions, superficial pipe dreams, and a sickening moralism, philosophers have turned into radical adepts of the Protagorean credo: “Man is the measure of all things.” Deprived of its supreme objects, threatened by other forms of knowledge (be they the social or the natural sciences), philosophy has turned into a sort of Don Quixote of contemporary knowledge, engaged in an imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit; or into a Narcissus who looks back at the ghosts of its past, now empty souvenirs in a provincial museum. Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism—and an often moralized and reformist one at that. The debate over animals, which is strongly marked by an extremely superficial moralism, seems to forget that heterotrophy presupposes the killing of other living beings as a natural and necessary dimension of life. The debate over the rights of plants exists in a very minor form—at least since the famous chapter 27 in Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range (London: Trubner & co., 1872) until the classic article by Christopher D. Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review, 45 (1972): 450-501. On these questions, see the useful summary of philosophical debates in Marder, Plant Thinking, as well as the position expounded in Hall, Plants as Persons. Tradition tells us that Socrates was the first to impose it on philosophy to “disregard the physical universe” and to “confine” its study to “moral questions” The rise of specialization in the university system is based on a mechanism of reciprocal ignorance: to be a specialist does not mean to know more about a given subject, but rather to have obeyed a juridical obligation to ignore other disciplines. The idea of the primordial soup makes its first a appearance in a letter dated February 1, 1871, from Darwin to the botanist Joseph D. Hooker, which speaks of “a small warm pond”; and it reappears in the writings of Oparin and Haldane. The latter speaks of a “hot dilute soup” as the first site of life. At the climatic level, everything that is and has been constitutes a world. Climate is the being of cosmic unity. All climate presupposes this constant topological inversion, this oscillation that undoes the border between subject and environment, a role-reversing oscillation. Mixture is not simply the composition of elements but this precise relationship of topological exchange. Mixture is what defines the state of fluidity. A fluid is not a space or a body defined by the absence of resistance. It has nothing to do with the states of aggregation of matter: solids, too, can be fluids, without having to pass from a gaseous state to a liquid one. The structure of universal circulation is fluid, the place where everything comes into contact with everything else and comes to mix with it without losing its form and its own substance. Fluid is any matter that, regardless of its solid, liquid, or gaseous state, extends its form into an image of itself, be it as a perception or as a physical continuity. If all living beings cannot exist other than in a fluid environment, it is because life contributes to the constitution of a world of this sort, perpetually unstable and constantly caught up in a motion of self-multiplication and self-differentiation. If life always is and cannot but be immersion, then most of the concepts and divisions we apply to the description of anatomy and physiology, as well as the active exercise of the bodily powers that allow us to live—in a nutshell, the phenomenology of the concrete existence of any living being—deserve to be rewritten. This approach to the world as immersion seems to be a surreal cosmological model, yet we experience it more often than we imagine. In fact we relive the experience of the fish each time we listen to music. If, instead of drawing the universe that surrounds us starting from the portion of reality to which vision gives us access, we deduced the structure of the world on the basis of our musical experience, we would have to describe the world as something composed not of objects but of fluxes that penetrate us and that we ourselves penetrate, of waves of variable intensity and impermanent movement. Imagine being made of the same substance as the world that surrounds you; being of the same nature as music—a series of vibrations of the air, like a jellyfish, which is no more than a thickening of water. You will have a very precise image of what immersion is. If listening to music in a space defined exclusively by this activity (say, in a dance club) gives us such pleasure, it is because it allows us to seize the deepest structure of the world, one that the eyes, at times, prevent us from perceiving. We are not inhabitants of the Earth; we inhabit the atmosphere. plants have never abandoned the sea: rather they have brought it where it did not exist. They have transformed the universe into an immense atmospheric sea and have transmitted their marine habits to all other things. Photosynthesis is, in this sense, a cosmic process of fluidification of the universe, one of the movements through which the fluid of the world constitutes itself: what allows the world to breathe and keeps it in a state of dynamic tension. Plants, then, allow us to understand that immersion is not a simple spatial determination: to be immersed is not reducible to finding oneself in something that surrounds and penetrates us. Immersion, as we have seen, is first of all an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium. It is impossible to distinguish them physically and spatially: for there to be immersion, subject and environment have to actively penetrate each other; otherwise one would speak simply of juxtaposition or contiguity between two bodies touching at their extremities. Subject and environment act on each other and define themselves starting from this reciprocal action. Observed ex parte subiecti [from the subject’s angle], this simplicity is expressed as the formal identity between passivity and activity: to penetrate the surrounding environment is to be penetrated by it. Thus, in all space of immersion, to act and to be acted upon are formally indistinguishable. We experience this, for example, each time we swim. If any living being is a being in the world, every environment is a being within beings. The world and the living are nothing but a halo, an echo of the relation that binds them together. Niche construction theory rehearses Darwin’s finds in order to emphasize how living beings, even the simplest ones, are not just the victims of natural selection and how adaptation to the environment is not their only fate: they are equally capable of modifying the space that surrounds them and of handing down the new world to future generations. In this sense, by producing permanent and transmissible modifications from one generation to the next, living beings produce culture, which is not a human prerogative but rather a sort of inheritance that is not anatomical but ecological, an exosomatic inheritance.         the world, is by definition the life of others: the ensemble of other living beings. The mystery that needs explaining is therefore the inclusion of all in the same world, and not the exclusion of other beings—which is always unstable, illusory, and ephemeral. What is more, through the concept of niche, one restricts the sphere of influence and of mundane existence to limitrophe space or to the set of factors or resources that are immediately related to the living subject. To recognize that the world is a space of immersion means, on the contrary, that there are no real or stable frontiers: the world is the space that never lets itself be reduced to a house, to what is one’s own, to one’s digs, to the immediate. Being in the world means to exercise influence especially outside one’s own space, outside one’s own habitat, outside one’s own niche. It is always the totality of the world one lives in, which is and will always be infested by others. The air we breathe is not a purely geological or mineral reality—it is not just out there, it is not, as such, an effect of the earth—but rather the breath of other living beings. It is a byproduct of “the lives of others.” In breath—the first and the most trivial and unconscious act of life for a huge number of organisms—we depend on the lives of others. But, above all, the life of others and its manifestations are reality itself, the body and the matter of what we call the world or the medium. Breath is already a first form of cannibalism: every day we feed off the gaseous excretions of plants. We could not live but off the life of others. Conversely, every living being is first of all what makes possible the life of others, a product of transitive life, which is capable of circulating everywhere, of being breathed in by others. The living being is not satisfied with giving life to a restricted portion of matter that we call its body; it also gives life especially to the space that surrounds it. That is where immersion lies—the fact that life is always its own environment and that, because of this, it circulates from body to body, from subject to subject, from place to place. It surrounds us and penetrates us but we are barely aware of it. It is not a space: it is a subtle, transparent body, barely perceivable by touch or by sight. But it is from this fluid, which envelops everything, that we have the colors, forms, smells, and tastes of the world. In this same fluid we can encounter things and let ourselves be touched by everything that exists and does not exist. It is this fluid that makes us think; is is this fluid that makes us live and love. The atmosphere is our first world, the medium in which we are wholly immersed: the sphere of breath. It is the absolute medium, that in which and through which the world gives itself, that in which and through which we give ourselves to the world. More than absolute container, it is the stirring of everything, the matter, space, and force of the infinite and universal interpenetration of things. The atmosphere is not just a part of the world that is distinct and separate from others, but the principle through which the world makes itself inhabitable, opening itself to our breath and itself becoming the breath of things. One is always, in the manner of the atmosphere itself, in the world, because the world exists as atmosphere. The year 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the first shipment of Colombian cut flowers exported to the international market. Flown on a jetliner from Bogota to Miami on October 18th, 1965, this shipment was worth $20,000 and coincided with the foundation of the migration of an industry in search of cheap labor, fertile soil, and an equatorial climate that provides 12 hours of sunshine all year. By the late 1960s, fueled in part by fears of the spread of communism in Latin America, hundreds of millions of dollars in grants began to pour in to Colombia’s agricultural sector from the US Government in hopes of increasing economic cooperation between the two countries. In 1966, jobs that paid a daily wage of $16 in California and Florida, began to move to Colombia, where an average agricultural worker earned just $0.82 a day. Today, Colombia’s flower industry has grown into the country’s leading non-traditional agricultural export, producing record sales in 2014 of 222,566 tons, worth 1.37 billion dollars. It occupies 14% of the world market, surpassed only by Holland, which accounts for 56%, and Colombian flower exports represent 80% of the US market share. The flower sector represents the leading source of employment for women, who account for 65% of the industry’s workforce, in the rural areas of Colombia that are home to industry’s operations. According to Asocolflores, the trade association representing approximately 80% of Colombia’s flower exporters, an estimated 130,000 people are employed in the industry and another 50.000 jobs are created by related economic activity. Few other formal jobs are available in flower-growing regions, where employees work six days per week, earning the minimum wage of $256 per month, spraying, cutting, thorn removal, and packing thousands of flowers every day. During peak seasons, for example the weeks and months leading up to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, employees reported that work weeks can exceed 100 hours. Women, many of whom are single heads-of-households, are exposed to numerous toxic chemicals that have been linked to higher rates of birth defects. This report’s findings corroborate previous research, which shows that this work tends to be carried out with little health-related protective equipment leading to high rates of chronic work-related illnesses. Many flower companies with operations in Colombia do not comply with labor standards established by domestic legislation, international conventions, and in some cases ‘ethically certified’ type labels that are attached to the exported flowers. Policy makers in Colombia and abroad, as well as Colombian institutions such as the Labor Ministry, should play a critical role in guaranteeing the rights of workers. We hope that the information presented here will urge these actors to take a more proactive role in ensuring that intended advances in this sector will transform into real action. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, international consumers who buy Colombian flowers should have access to the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions about how they are spending their money. In 2014, more than 100 flower workers gathered in an auditorium in Facatativa to celebrate what they call International Flower Worker’s Day, known in much of the world as Valentine’s Day, to discuss organizing strategies – specifically ways in which to confront repeated occupational health issues faced by sector employees. The facilitator asked the crowd: “How many of the people present started a career in flowers many years ago and now find themselves less beautiful than before, and feeling much older than we should at our age? I would ask you to raise your hands, but know that so many of us suffer from carpel tunnel syndrome and torn rotator cuffs, that we can’t lift our arms.” Those present laughed and nodded in agreement, but this moment of dark humor initiated a more serious discussion. The audience was made up of people, almost all younger than 50, who sat with canes or crutches between their legs. Others wore their arms in slings. Some people appeared to be healthy, but when they stood up, their bodies moved cautiously. The research team was repeatedly told that the Colombian flower industry prefers to hire younger workers who can work longer hours and sustain thousands of daily repeated motions (which can over time often result in the development of chronic injuries) and that the short-term and intermediary-based contracting model makes it easier for companies to ‘weed out’ employees whose bodies’ capacity has been diminished and who are therefore likely to work at a slower rate. This creates a climate in which many workers choose to conceal work-related injuries, work while experiencing pain, and aggravate their ailments. Distinct types of occupational health conditions seem to manifest themselves in relation to the specific type of tasks that workers perform. PASO’s research indicates that employees who cut flowers are more likely to develop carpel tunnel or tendonitis, because every day they squeeze shears thousands of times to cut stems. Meanwhile, employees who sort flowers are more likely to injure their shoulders and develop torn rotator cuffs, due to motions required to constantly organize flowers into the correct place; when one shoulder becomes injured, employees will often switch to their weaker arm and develop torn rotator cuffs in both shoulders. Rashes, sore throats, headaches, and colds are common among groups who come into direct contact with flowers, due to toxic pesticides and interaction with the allergenic Astromeria flower. The industry should be applauded for dramatically reducing the use of pesticides in recent decades; however scientific studies continue to point to adverse health risks associated with continued exposure to these toxic chemicals. A de facto industry standard appears to be that only men are assigned the task of fumigation, which could indicate a recognition of related health concerns on the part of the companies. A remarkable 50% of the flower sector employees surveyed believed that their health had been negatively impacted by their jobs. This indicator increased consistently according to the number of years that a person had worked in the flower sector. Of 85 survey responses provided by workers with a full career of work in the flower industry (20 years or more), more than 3 out of 4 believed that their health had been negatively affected. 47% of all workers reported being injured or ill in the past year, most commonly associated with pain in various parts of the body including arms, hands, back, neck and headaches. The most common conditions reported, either self-diagnosed or by a doctor were tendonitis, carpel tunnel syndrome and torn rotator cuffs. Stress, migraines, rashes, sore throats and colds were also reported at high rates. Union activist Beatrice Fuentes speaks with hundreds of flower sector employees each year about occupational health problems at a workers’ rights center called Casa de Las y Los Trabajadores de las Flores. She described some of the medical challenges faced by workers, particularly after the deregulation of Colombia’s healthcare system in 2002: “After 12 years of cutting flowers, my arm started to hurt and it became harder for me to do my job. I went to my general health practitioner (EPS) who asked me several questions, ran tests on me and ultimately determined that I had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis due to my activities cultivating flowers. They referred me to the ARL, my company’s occupational health service provider, to receive treatment. When the ARL asked me what I did at home. I responded that I take care of my children and do normal things like peel potatoes, do laundry and wash dishes. They ran a series of tests, and then told me that I had developed these conditions because of everyday activities and my age. At 31 years old, I was told that I had tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome because of excessive motions related to peeling potatoes, ironing my kids’ clothes and washing dishes. They told me that they could not approve medical restrictions for me and that I would have to seek medical attention from my general practitioner.” In other parts of the Colombia, union leaders have been repressed with violence and its leader have been the targets of systematic murders, but in the flower sector, companies tend to simply shut down operations where workers have organized. Perhaps the most famous case involved the US-based multinational Dole Food Company, which controlling 20% of the export market at its peak in the early 2000s. By 2004, many workers joined the union Sintrasplendor in efforts to improve substandard labor conditions, end wage theft, and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. In response, Dole launched an aggressive campaign to suppress worker organizing and signed a collective bargaining agreement with a company-friendly ‘union’ called Sinaltraflor, which made no improvements to working conditions. Despite the International Labor Organization’s recommendations that the company negotiate with Sintrasplendor, instead it fired union leaders and closed plantations where employees had joined the union. By 2009, Dole had sold or closed all its operations in the Colombian flower sector due, presumably, to an annual decline in the dollar-to-peso ratio, which hurt their exports. However, companies in the Bogota savannah told their employees that unions were responsible. This report describes a panorama in which Colombian flower sector employees suffer due to poverty wages, long working hours, sexual harassment, occupational health and safety issues, the repression of union rights, violations of employees’ freedom of association, and the use of intermediary agencies between labor and employers. In many of these areas, hardships are exaggerated for women, who make up most the workforce. In stark contrast to statements made by governments and the private sector lauding the flower industry for the benefits it has provided for working families, PASO documented a scenario in which sector employees are living in poverty, suffer from chronic work-related disabilities (while continuing to work), are the victims of gender discrimination, and are forced to choose between unemployment or working inhuman hours during peak seasons. Meanwhile most employees are not hired by the company that profits from their activities, but rather through short term contracts with intermediary agencies, and lack job security, while efforts to organize unions are illegally repressed. It also became apparent that most of the people affected are largely unaware of their rights or workable solutions that could be generated at the grass-roots level. This scenario evidences the lack of any real will on the part flower companies or government institutions to guarantee decent labor conditions for sector employees. While the principal opportunity to remedy the situation lies in the hands of Colombian oversight institutions, the United States government has also become a long-term stakeholder through investments, trade agreements, and the Labor Action Plan. PASO and Global Exchange urge these governments to engage with the private sector and civil society to exhaustively research the problems identified in this report, and to take concrete action to hold flower companies accountable for labor abuses according to domestic and international regulations. In addition, we urge Colombian and international civil society organizations, including unions and labor confederations, to act so that employees are better equipped to demand the enforcement of their own civil and labor rights. This will require a strategy that includes supply chain research, consumer pressure campaigns, and political advocacy, but – most importantly – training and organizing strategies with Colombia flower sector workers. Unions in this sector are up against incredible odds and without the real support of workers in other economic sectors, regions, and countries, bringing about change will be next to impossible. Lastly, we recommend that consumers in the United States and throughout the world take our findings into account in deciding how to spend their money on holidays, such as Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.           I dream a savage alphabet of twenty-five letters and a boy who purrs. (Not so unusual as all that, I am told.) My inability to separate my credits in the present world has possibly cost me grants I saw no way to apply for. It has surely cost me one residency.                    the totality defines a relationship of radical and absolute interiority, which nullifies any distinction between container and contained. Because, if everything is everything, not only does each thing contain all other things, but a thing has to find itself within no matter what other thing—what is more, in the things it contains. The fact of being contained in something coexists with the fact of containing this same thing. The container is also the content of what it contains. This identity is not logical, it is topological and dynamic. Every object is a site for every other object and, conversely, to be a place is to find one’s world in every other thing. In a certain sense, any thing is a world—where the world is no longer the ultimate, unreachable horizon given only at the end of time and at the farthest extension of space, but the intensional identity with any of its objects. Being in the world no longer means finding oneself in an infinite space that contains everything else; it means being no longer able to experience being in a place without finding this place in yourself, and thus becoming the place of your place. The world is the force that reverses any inherence into its opposite, transforms any ingredient into a place, and any place into an element of the same compound. They are hidden and invisible to the vast majority of animal organisms, who compete for attention on the platforms of terra firma. Sunk as they are in a cryptic, cloistered world, they pass their lives without the slightest idea about the explosion of forms and events that swarm between Earth and sky. Roots are the most enigmatic forms of the plant world. Their body is often infinitely large and infinitely more complex than its aerial twin, the one that plants let appear in the light of day: the total surface of the root system of a rye plant can reach 400 square meters, that is, a suriface 130 times larger than that of the the plant’s aerial body. The origin of roots is obscure, and it is not easy to distinguish their forms. The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: first kinds of roots were functional modifications of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves. It is as though plants lived two lives at the same time: one aerial, bathed and immersed in light, made of visibility and of an intense interspecific interaction with other plants and with other animals of all kinds; the other chthonic, mineral, latent, ontologically nocturnal, chiseled in the stony flesh of the planet, in synergistic communion with all the forms of life that populate it. These two lives do not alternate and do not exclude each other: they are the being of the same individual, the only one who succeeds in reuniting, in its body and in its experience, the earth and the sky, the stone and the light, the water and the sun, and to be the image of the world in its totality. Imagine that, for each movement of your body, there is another one that goes the opposite way; imagine that your arms, your mouth, your eyes have an antithetical correspondent in a matter that mirrors perfectly the one that defines the texture of your world “I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes!” The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant Fidelity to the Earth—the extreme geotropism of our culture, its will, and its insistence on “radicalness”—has an enormous price; it means devoting oneself to the night, choosing to think without the Sun. Philosophy seems to have chosen, several centuries ago, the way of darkness. Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun. there is no Earth that is not intrinsically tied to the Sun, there is no Sun that is not in the course of making possible the superficial and profound animation of the Earth. To the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology. This is not, or not only, to make the simple assertion that the stars influence us, that they govern our life, but to accept all this and to add that we also influence the stars, because the Earth itself is a celestial body among others, and everything that lives on it (as well as in it) is of an astral nature. There is nothing but sky, everywhere, and the Earth is one of its portions, a state of partial aggregation. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definitive horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself. There is nothing but sky, everywhere The Earth is a celestial body, and everything in it is sky. The human world is not the exception in a nonhuman universe; our existence, our gestures, our culture, our language, our appearances are celestial. To recognize the astral nature of the Earth is to make astrology—the science of the stars—not just into a local science, but also into the global and universal science: the task is no longer to understand the dominion of the stars over us—their governance—but to understand the sky as the space of flux and of influences. It is not just that biology, geology, and theology are no more than branches of astrology; on this model, astrology becomes a science of contingency, unpredictability, irregularity. The sky is not the site of the return of the same. To perceive the world in depth means to be touched and penetrated by it to the point of being changed and modified by it. For a sessile being, knowing the world coincides with a variation of its own form—a metamorphosis provoked by the outside. This is what one calls sex: the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us to go, to change, to become other. Reason—the flower of the cosmos—is a force of multiplication of the world. It never gives the existent back to itself, to its numerical unity, to its history, to its genealogy; instead if multiplies bodies, renews the possible, sets the past back to zero, opens up the space to an inconceivable future. The reason-flower, at last, does not compress the plurality of experience into a unique “I,” does not reduce the difference of opinion to the uniqueness of a subject; it multiplies and differentiates subjects, it makes experiences incomparable and incompatible. Reason is no longer the reality of the identical, the unchangeable, the same; it is the force and structure that constrains each thing to mix with its similars by means of the dissimilar in order to change its face; it is the force that leaves in the care of the world, leaves up to chance encounters, the task of redesigning from within the face of its components. Reason is a flower: there was no need to wait for humans or higher animals for the technical force of fashioning the matter to become an individual faculty. Plants are the ones that tamed this force in order to make it vibrate to the very rhythm of life and of its generations. It is thanks to plants that life has become the space of reason par excellence; it is thanks to plants that life and world coincide without rest. Reason is a flower: one could express this equivalence by saying that everything that is rational is sexual and everything that is sexual is rational. Rationality is a matter of forms, but form is always the result of the movement of a mixture that produces variation, change. At the other end, sexuality is no longer the morbid sphere of the infrarational, the site of murky and nebulous affects. It is the structure and ensemble of the encounters with the world that allow everything to let itself be touched by the other, to progress in its evolution, to reinvent itself, to become other in the body of resemblance. Sexuality is not a purely biological fact, an outburst [élan] of life qua life, but a movement of the cosmos in its totality: it is not an improved technique of the reproduction of the living but the proof that life is just the process through which the world can prolong and renew its existence exclusively by renewing and inventing new formulae of mixture. In sexuality, living beings make themselves agents of cosmic brewing, and mixture becomes a way of renewing beings and identities. Reason is a flower: reason is not and can never be an organ with well-defined and stable forms. It is a corporation of organs, a structure of appendages that calls into question the entire organism and its logic. It is principally an ephemeral, seasonal structure who existence depends on the climate and atmosphere of the world in which it finds itself. It is risk, invention, experimentation. The flower is the paradigmatic form of rationality: to think is always to invest oneself in the sphere of appearances—not in order to express its hidden interiority, nor in order to speak, to say something, but in order to put different beings in touch with one another. Reason is only this plurality of cosmic structures of attraction that allow beings to perceive and absorb the world and allow the world to exist wholly in all the organisms that inhabit it. Against the ideal of a global, multidisciplinary, encyclopedic culture (the enkuklos paideia of the ancients), the university was born to affirm the need to support the liberal arts—techniques of freedom inherited from the ancients and deemed insufficient—with other forms of knowledge—most notably law, medicine, and especially theology. These forms of knowledge no longer aim at the whole and no longer form a harmonious and unitary structure. They separate the disciplines into different and incompatible existential paths: the jurist cannot be a theologian and the theologian is forbidden to be a jurist. For a long time, the sovereign gesture—par excellence—of the learned person was to bring together in him- or herself the most disparate forms of knowledge and to measure their unity in the breath of his or her awareness: the subject of knowledge—the one who says “I” in the cogito—always went beyond the limits of the disciplines, being always capable of seeing much farther than any one of them. With the university, the subject of knowledge and thought (the “I” of the cogito) is invited to make his or her cognitive subjectivity—his or her intellectual being and res cogitans [thinking capacity]—coincide with the limits of a discipline or an object. This epistemological limitation corresponds to a limitation that has a social, or rather a sociological nature. The birth of the university does not correspond to the birth of new forms of knowledge or to the birth of a new organization of knowledge, but to the formalization of a new organization of learned people [savants]. With medieval universities, the production and the transmission of forms of knowledge are for the first time the result of a corporation: after all, universitas is the technical term that names a corporation. Also for the first time, a corporation is no longer an association tied to a professional skill, a political aim, or an ethnic origin, but rather to a form of knowledge [un savoir]: it brings people together around the same form of knowledge, hence we are dealing here with an epistemological corporation. To know is to belong to a corporation. In this way the cognitive act is legitimized by a juridical connection and a political affiliation; the ideal of the bios theōorētikos [contemplative life] is immediately and necessarily shared with one’s fellows, socii. The relationship between the various objects of knowledge is thus defined on the basis of the juridical and social relation between various corporations of learned people. The cognitive limits of a discipline are those of the self-awareness of the corporation: the identity, the reality, the unity, and the epistemological autonomy of the discipline in question are no more than secondary effects of the distinction, unity, and power of the collegium [association] of the learned persons who govern it. Specialization is the epistemological translation of a corporate ideal of knowledge—of instituting the learned as a juridically closed community. The things we call disciplines or sciences (in the plural) are just the shadows of university corporations. And epistemology is just the effort—inevitable doomed to failure—to translate into scientific language a system of interdictions whose origin is purely social and of a moral nature. Nothing is originally philosophical; anything whatsoever—even things that do not and will never exist—can and must become an object of philosophical inquiry. In the same way, it is strictly impossible to recognize any stylistic continuity between one philosophical book and another. Throughout its history, philosophy has practiced all the available literary styles, from the novel to poem, from treatise to aphorism, from fairytale to mathematical formula. According to custom, all symbolic form is ipso facto philosophical, and none has the right to claim any higher capacity for achieving truth; no one style of writing is more appropriate to philosophy than another. The contemporary academic fetish for the uncertain Volapük of the essay with footnotes has no raison d’être from this point of view. A film, a sculpture, a pop song, but also a pebble, a cloud, or a mushroom can be philosophical with the very same intensity as a treatise of geology, The Critique of Pure Reason, or a dictum pronounced with the affected nonchalance of a dandy. Ultimately, it is impossible to distill a single method; the only method is an extremely intense love for knowledge, a wild, brute, indocile passion for knowledge in all its forms and in all its subjects. Philosophy is knowledge under the empire of Eros, the most undisciplined and rugged of all gods. It can never be a discipline: it is, on the contrary, what human knowledge becomes once it has recognized the fact that no discipline is possible, either moral or epistemological. To affirm the contrary, to bind philosophy to a series of pre-frozen questions, to problems specific to it, means to confuse it with some scholastic doctrine. This is why an idea can never be found in the archives: it embodies the point of cleavage of all tradition, the clinamen within each discipline that allows a specific form of knowledge to become paradigm, example. It is an ideal opposite to Socratic atopy: philosophical thought it nowhere and everywhere. Like atmosphere. “Here are only those that have influenced me most: Agnes Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); David Beerling, The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012); Edred John Henry Corner, The Life of Plants (Cleveland: World, 1964); Karl J. Niklas, Plant Evolution: An Introduction to the History of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sergio Stefano Tonzig, Letture di biologia vegetale (Milan: Mondadori, 1975); François Hallé, Éloge de la plante: Pour la nouvelle biologie (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Verde brillante: Sensibilità e intelligenza nel mondo vegetale (Florence: Giunti, 2013). Attention to plants is also central in contemporary American anthropology, starting with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s masterpiece The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), which is indeed centered around a mushroom, and with the works of Natasha Myers, who is also preparing a book on the subject. See especially Natasha Myers and Carla Hustak, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23.3 (2012): 74–117.   There is a good line by Giorgio Agamben: “The search for the voice in language, this is what is called thought” (quoted by Nancy 2002, p. 45)—the search for what exceeds language and meaning. “I don’t hear well” was the famous line uttered by Milošević at a mass rally in Belgrade in 1989; it quickly turned into a proverb, and started to epitomize the core of the Yugoslav crisis. In this further inversion, it is not the “subjects” but the Leader who is hearing-impaired, precisely when he is confronted with vox populi. But the voice of the people, in those circumstances, was pressing not for human rights and civil liberties, but for harsher measures and repressive action against “the enemies,” so the truth of the line is that he heard only too well, and very selectively turned a deaf ear. This extension of our story quickly demonstrates that the voice and hearing are also at the core of politics—I will come back to that. We use our voices, and we listen to voices, at every moment; all our social life is mediated by the voice, and situations where reading and writing actually take over as the medium of our sociability are, all things considered, much less common and limited (the Internet notwithstanding), even though, in a different and less tangible sense, our social being depends very much on the letter, the letter of the law—we will come back to that. We constantly inhabit the universe of voices, we are continuously bombarded by voices, we have to make our daily way through a jungle of voices, and we have to use all kinds of machetes and compasses so as not to get lost. There are the voices of other people, the voices of music, the voices of media, our own voice intermingled with the lot. All those voices are shouting, whispering, crying, caressing, threatening, imploring, seducing, commanding, pleading, praying, hypnotizing, confessing, terrorizing, declaring . . .—we can immediately see a difficulty into which any treatment of the voices runs: namely, that the vocabulary is inadequate. The vocabulary may well distinguish nuances of meaning, but words fail us when we are faced with the infinite shades of the voice, which infinitely exceed meaning. It is not that our vocabulary is scanty and its deficiency should be remedied: faced with the voice, words structurally fail. when we listen to someone speak, we may at first be very much aware of his or her voice and its particular qualities, its coor and accent, but soon we accommodate to it and concentrate only on the meaning that is conveyed. The voice itself is like the Wittengenstenian ladder to be discarded when we have successfully climbed to the top—that is, when we have made our ascent to the peak of meaning. The voice is the instrument, the vehicle, the medium, and the meaning is the goal. This gives rise to a spontaneous opposition where noice appears as materiality opposed to the ideality of meaning. The ideality of meaning can emerge only through the materiality of the means, but the means does not seem to contribute to meaning. Hence we can put forward a provisional definition of the voice (in its linguistic aspect): it is what does not contribute to making sense.It is the material element recalcitrant to meaning, and if we speak in order to say something, then the voice is precisely that which cannot be said. It is there, in the very act of saying, but it eludes any pinning down, to the point where we could maintain that it is the non-linguistic, the extralinguistic element which enables speech phenomena, but cannot itself be discerned by linguistics. Imagine someone reading the evening news on TV with a heavy regional accent. It would sound absurd, for the state, by definition, does not have an accent. A person with an accent can appear in a talk-show, speaking in her own voice, but not in an official capacity. The official voice is the voice devoid of any accent. “For what is science by the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money?” (Henry James, The Golden Bowl). Intonation is another way in which we can be aware of the voice, for the particular tone of the voice, its particular melody and modulation, its cadence and inflection, can decide the meaning. Intonation can turn the meaning of a sentence upside down; it can transform it into its opposite. A slight note of irony, and a serious meaning comes tumbling down; a note of distress, and the joke will backfire. Linguistic competence crucially includes not only phonology, but also the ability to cope with intonation and its multiple uses. Still, intonation is not as elusive as it may seem; it can be linguistically described and empirically verified. Jakobson tells the following story: A former actor of Stanislavskij’s Moscow Theatre told me how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the phrase Segodnja večerom, “This evening,” by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list of some forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in accordance with each of these situations, which his audience had to recognize only from the changes in the sound shape of the same two words. For our research work in the description and analysis of contemporary Standard Russian (under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation) this actor was asked to repeat Stanislavskij’s test. He wrote down some fifty situations framing the same elliptic sentence and made of it fifty corresponding messages for a tape recorder. Most of the messages were correctly and circumstantially decoded by Moscovite listeners. May I add that all such emotive cues easily undergo linguistic analysis. So all the shades of intonation which critical contribute to meaning, far from being an ineffable abyss, present no great problem to linguistic analysis; intonation can be submitted to the same treatment as all other linguistic phenomena. It requires some additional notation, but this is just the mark of a more complex and ramified code, an extension of phonological analysis. It can be empirically tested—with the help of Rockefeller (I love this detail)—that is to say, objectively and impartially. It is no coincidence that the “subject” of this experiment was an actor, since theater is the ultimate practical laboratory of endowing the sam text with the shades of intonation and thereby bringing it to life, empirically testing this every evening with the audience. Another way to be aware of the voice is through its individuality. We can almost unfailingly identify a person by the voice, the particular individual timbre, resonance, pitch, cadence, melody, the peculiar way of pronouncing certain sounds. The voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable. This fingerprint quality of the voice is something that does not contribute to meaning, nor can it be linguistically described, for its features are as a rule not linguistically relevant, they are the slight fluctuations and variations which do not violate the norm—rather, the norm itself cannot be implemented without some “personal touch,” the slight trespassing which is the mark of individuality. The voice without side-effects ceases to be a “normal” voice, it is deprived of the human touch that the voice adds to the arid machinery of the signifier, threatening that humanity itself will merge with the mechanical iterability, and thus lose its footing. Presignifying voices comprise the physiological manifestations such as coughing and hiccups, which appear to tie the human voice to an animal nature. Thus we can read in Aristotle: Voice then is the impact of the inbreathed air against the “windpipe,” and the agent that produces the impact is the soul resident in these parts of the body. Not every sound, as we said, made by an animal is voice (even with the tongue we may merely make a sound which is not voice, or without the tongue as in coughing); what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing; in voice the breath in the windpipe is used as an instrument to knock with against the walls of the windpipe. Lacan undertook a detailed reading of Symposium in the course of his seminar on transference (1960/61), and at some critical point he decided to consult his philosophical mentor, Alexandre Kojève. At the end of their exchange, as he was leaving, Kojève gave him this advice for further reflection: “You will certainly not be able to interpret Symposium if you don’t know why Aristophanes has hiccups” (Lacan 1991, p. 78). Kojève himself did not divulge the secret; he left Lacan rather perplexed, but he spoke in such a way that ultimately the entire interpretation depends on understanding this unintelligble voice, for which one can only propose the formula: it means that it means. in That Uncertain Feeling, a film made in 1941, we have one of those brilliant Lubitsch openings. A woman comes to an analyst because she has hiccups. To start with there is just a woman and a voice-symptom, the involuntary voice which condenses all her troubles, and which she doesn’t dare to call by name. It seems indecent, it doesn’t become a lady, it is too trivial, so she describes her trouble as follows: “It comes and it goes. When it comes I go, and when I come it goes.” Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream (1970) immediately became a bestseller, soon to be followed by The Primal Revolution (1972), The Primal Man (1976), and so on, and by a movement which, in the 1970s, promised to revolutionize psychotherapy. All that was needed was allegedly to regress to the deepest layer of oneself, to find one’s way to the origin of it all in the scream, thus liberating oneself from the repression of culture and the symbolic torment, and finally breathe freely, with the freedom of the infant. If psychoanalysis was from the outset “the talking cure,” then Janov’s last book title continues to announce: Words Won’t Do It. If the elusive mythical scream was at the outset caused by a need, then it retroactively turns into a demand surpassing the need: it does not aim just at the satisfaction of a need, it is a call for attention, for a reaction, it is directed toward a point in the other which is beyond satisfaction of a need, it disentangles itself from the need, and ultimately desire is nothing but the surplus of demand over need. So the voice is transformed into an appeal, a speech act, in the same moment as need is transformed into desire; it is caught in a drama of appeal, eliciting an answer, provocation, demand, love. Singing represents a different stage: it brings the voice energetically to the forefront, on purpose, at the expense of meaning. Indeed, singing is bad for communication; it prevents a clear understanding of the text (we need supertitles at the opera, which dispel the idea of an initiated elite and put the opera on the level of the cinema). The fact that singing blurs the word and makes it difficult to understand—in polyphony to the point of incomprehensibility—has served as the basis for a philosophical distrust for this flourishing of the voice at the expense of the text: for instance, for the constant efforts to regulate sacred music, all of which tried to secure an anchorage in the word, and banish fascination with the voice. Singing takes the distraction of the voice seriously, and turns the tables on the signifier; it reverses the hierarchy—let the voice take the upper hand, let the voice be the bearer of what cannot be expressed by words. Wovon man night sprechen kann darüber kann man singen: expression versus meaning, expression beyond meaning, expression which is more than meaning, yet expression which functions only in tension with meaning—it needs a signifier as the limit to transcend and to reveal its beyond. the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed. The voice is endowed with profundity: by not meaning anything, it appears to mean more than mere words, it becomes the bearer of some unfathomable originary meaning which, supposedly, got lost with language. It seems still to maintain the link with nature, on the one hand—the nature of a paradise lost—and on the other hand to transcend language, the cultural and symbolic barriers, in the opposite direction, as it were; it promises an ascent to divinity, an elevation above the empirical, the mediated, the limited, worldly human concerns. The illusion of transcendence accompanied the long history of the voice as the agent of the sacred, and the highly acclaimed role of music was based on its ambiguous link with both nature and divinity. When Orpheus, the emblematic and archetypal singer, sings, it is in order to tame wild beasts and bend gods; his true audience consists not of men, but of creatures beneath and above culture. The best witness is, after all, Narcissus himself, whose story, maybe not surprisingly, involves both the gaze and voice. But his curious “affair” with the nymph Echo, who could only echo his words, and could not initiate speech herself, is a story of a failed love and a failed narcissism. The voice returned was not his own voice, although it merely sent his own words back to him. It was his voice turned into the other, and he would rather die than abandon himself to the other (“‘Ante’, ait, ‘emoriar quam sit tibi copie nostri,’” says Ovid—“I’d rather die than fall prey to you”). And when the nymph died, only her voice was left’ it continues to echo our own voice, the voice without a body, the remainder, the trace of the object. hearing one’s own voice on tape always (or at least initially) fills one with horror and displeasure. One may well obtain narcissistic pleasure by looking at one’s image in the mirror, but listening to one’s recorded voice is unpleasant—the gap this introduces into “hearing oneself speak” is enough to disrupt narcissism; there is always something uncanny about it. Music is no laughing matter, to say the least. It cannot be taken lighlty, but has to be treated with the greatest philosophical concern and the utmost vigilance. It is a texture so fundamental that any license inevitably produces general decadence; it undermines the social fabric, its laws and mores, and threatens the very ontological order. For we must assign an ontological status to music: it holds the key to a harmony between “nature” and “culture,” the natural and the man-made law. This is also why music is treated in a very different way from painting, which poses interminable problems of imitation, copies, mimesis, and so on. Should we interfere with that sphere, everything is put into question and the foundations are undermined. Decadence starts with musical decadence: in the beginning, in the great times of origin, music was regulated by law and was one with it, but things quickly got out of hand one has to ban the polyharmonic instruments that permit free transitions among the modes, the “modulations,” and in particular the flute,” the most many-stringed of instruments” (ibid., 399d). There is in fact an additional simpler and more compelling reason for this: one cannot utter words while playing the flute. The wind instruments have the vicious property that they emancipate themselves from the text, they act as substitutes for the voice, they isolate the voice beyond words. No wonder Dionysus chose the flute as his preferred instrument (remember also Pan’s pipes, not to mention the mythical connections of the flute with the Gordon, and so on), while Apollo decided on the lyre. “We are not innovating, my friend, in preferring Apollo and the instruments of Apollo to Marsyas and his instruments” Aristotle will have to deal with the same problem. The liberal studies, with music in the highest place of honor, are quintessential to education; they are “proper for a freeman to acquire, but only in a certain degree, and if he attend to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the evil effects will follow” the voice undermines any certainty and any establishment of a firm sense. The voice is boundless, warrantless, and—no coincidence—on the side of woman. But if it introduces this fatal ambivalence, then the only consistent course would be to ban church music altogether—and indeed, this radical conclusion in the opposite extreme was drawn by the puritans: for fifteen years, from 1645 to 1660, the time of Cromwell, music was banned from the Anglican Church, music books and sheets were burned and organs demolished as “the Devil’s pipes” (see Poizat 1991, p. 44). God was restored to the Word, and to Silence. Considerable information about the nature of music and its role in the world is provided by the myths of creation. Each time that the genesis of the world is described with some precision, the acoustic element intervenes at the decisive moment of action. Whenever a deity manifests the will to give birth to itself or to another deity, to bring forth the sky and the earth or the man, it emits a sound. . . . The source from where the world emanates is always an acoustic source. (Schneider 1960, p. 132) Schneider cites several diverse instances taken from a variety of ancient and “primitive” cultures, and convincingly demonstrates the necessary link between the voice, religion, and the basic social rituals, the umbilical cord between the voice and a rudimentary social bond. The body implied by the voice, disembodied as it may seem, is enough to be cumbersome and embarrassing; in all its living presence it is also like the corpse one cannot dispose of (as in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, 1955). There is no voice without a body, but yet again this relation is full of pitfalls: it seems that the voice pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the body at all, or disjoints the body from which it emanates. Hence all the troubles with what Michael Chion (1982) has called the acousmatic voice. “The Acousmatics were Pythagoras’ disciples who, concealed by a curtain, followed his teachings for five years without being able to see him.” Larousse follows Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 10): “[His pupils] were silent for the period of five years and only listened to the speeches without seeing Pythagoras, until they proved themselves worth of it.” The Teacher, the Master behind a curtain, proffering his teaching from there without being seen: no doubt a stroke of genius which stands at the very origin of philosophy—Pythagoras was allegedly the first to describe himself as a “philosopher,” and also the first to found a philosophical school. The advantage of this mechanism was obvious: the students, the followers, were confined to “their Master’s voice,” not distracted by his looks or quirks of behavior, by visual forms, the spectacle of presentation, the theatrical effects which always pertain to lecturing; they had to concentrate merely on the voice and the meaning emanating from it. It appears that at its origin philosophy depends on a theatrical coup de force: there is the simple minimal device which defines the theater, the curtain which serves as a screen, but a curtain not to be raised, not for many years—philosophy appears as the art of an actor behind the curtain. the evil master is merely the voice behind the screen, but it turns out that the effect of authority could be brought about my a mere gramophone, that is, by another screen disguising the origin. “The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today,” says Proust (2001, p. 418), lines written during the First World War and published in 1920. The narrator has to rush to the post office to take the call, and to partake of the magic whereby “the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them” (ibid.). But they rise at our side in a presence which is more acute, more real than the “real” presence, and at the same time the token of separation, the mark of an impossible presence, a phantom of presence, invoking death at its heart. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Pythagorean school was the first to institute the division into esoteric and exoteric knowledge, the esoteric being reserved for those who had seen the Master, and the exoteric for those who knew his teaching merely by his voice, so that the line concerned not the doctrine itself, only its form. Does not the term esoteric imply maintaining the veil after the veil has been lifted? “No one would know what the dog was doing,” was given as the reason. Next he tried the Edison Bell Company, the leading manufacturer of the cylinder phonograph, but again without success. “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs,” the company said. the dog exhibits the emblematic postures of listening; he is placed in an exemplary attitude of dog-like obedience which pertains to the very act of listening. Listening entails obeying; there is a strong etymological link between the two in many languages: to obey, obedience, stems from French obéir, which in turn stems from Latin ob-audire, derivative of audire, to hear; in German gehorchen, Gehorsam stem from hören; in many Slav languages slušati can mean both to listen and to obey; the same goes apparently for Arabic, and so on. Etymology offers a hint of an inherent tie: listening is “always-already” incipient obedience; the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward. There is something in the very nature of the voice which endows it with master-like authority (which lends itself perfectly to many political uses; we will come back to that). And the dog, in the phantasmatics of our culture, is the ideal embodiment of listening and obedience. “What was then in expressionism, with which the young Schönberg has a lot in common, called the scream, is not only something that eludes communication by renouncing the habitual articular of sense, but objectively also a desperate attempt to reach those who no longer hear” by using one’s voice one is also “always-already” yielding power to the Other; the silent listener has the power to decide over the fate of the voice and its sender, the listener can rule over its meaning, or turn a deaf ear. The trembling voice is a plea for mercy, for sympathy, for understanding, and it is in the power of the listener to grant it or not. Some of us are paperless. In this place those without papers carry all the civic emotion. This is called service. Even the most passionate resistances register as components of immeasurable repetition extending outwards from the body in all directions, like a tilework. This is a market. Always its scale is wrong. Thus we are introduced to our bodies, fashioning and adoring, cladding and coating, and the synthesis of our emoting minds is an environment. Beyond topography the sky purples. We have called it purple. We were standing outdoors in our bodies. We called hey Steve. We come here plainly and openly to be part of what change is. This is our face. The Office for Soft Architecture came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money. Buildings disappeared into newness. I tried to recall spaces, and what I remembered was surfaces. Here and there money had tarried. The result seemed emotional. I wanted to document this process. I began to research the history of surface.s I included my own desires in the research. In this way, I became multiple. I became money. There are curious histories of shrouds. That is not all. Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft. Of course it’s all myth. on peripheries over silent grass of playing fields the fizzy mauveness of seed-fringe hovering. Under the pavement, pavement. Containing only supple space, nostalgia feeds our imagination’s strategic ineptitude. Forget the journals, conferences, salons, textbooks and media of dissemination. We say thought’s object is not knowledge but living. We do not like it elsewhere. The truly utopian act is to manifest current conditions and dialects. Practice description. Description is mystical. It is afterlife because it is life’s reflection or reverse. Place is accident posing as politics. And vice versa. Therefore it’s tragic and big. What if there is no ‘space,’ only a permanent, slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning? Nothing is utopian. Everything wants to be. Soft Architects face the reaching middle. In Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas it falls between stud-farms and suffering, and close to sybarites. ‘Suburbs: Terrifying in times of revolution.’ The suburb is a child’s Versailles. Hence the cruel wit of the suburb. Though a completely revealed site, it yields only negative ontologies. The suburb is memory fattening to russet then paling to flush when it bursts before dropping as whiteness on parked cars. While ‘equilibrium’ is a lovely suburban word — with its horse-games and moot-courts and love-games and libraries — it seems sad and impossible that this interminably symbolic landscape finally does not refer to anything other than itself. Like one’s own childhood, the suburb is both inescapable and inescapably difficult to believe in, and as such, intolerably represents an elegance specific to our economy. Soft Architects believe that this site demonstrates the best possible use of an urban origin: Change its name repeatedly. Burn it down. From the rubble confect a prosthetic pleasure-ground; with fluent obliviousness, picnic there. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hang a social identity. It was Kafka who likened being accepted for a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations.