On the longing to connect
“The natural world thinks by transforming itself as a subject,” Andreas Weber explains in his book Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (2017). Subjectivity is not restricted to the human animal. Our subjective worlds (and those of other animal species, though still unknown to us) are structured in a way that is replicated in the patterns by which nature organizes itself. “The relationships within an ecosystem constitute something like the synapses of a landscape’s nervous system,” he explains, prompting an image of an ecosystem’s natural processes as a vast network of interconnected neural pathways (the way mycelium fungi and plant roots mesh together to create mycorrhizal underground networks) out of which something close to cognition — the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought and experience —can finally emerge.
Natural ecosystems, for Weber, are not only deeply interconnected but can also analyze information and make predictions based on information shared through those connections, which is both a form of creative thinking and a way of imagining. Out of nature’s boundless connectivity, then, a kind of subjectivity shapes itself, perhaps not an awareness of being a separate entity, but an awareness nonetheless. And yet, how can we know? We can only speculate that this vast interrelated network Weber describes is as capable of thinking as our human brains are. Capable of imagining itself into being, imagining itself as being, growing and expanding, driven by the longing to experience in and through connection with others. Because a being, Weber reminds us, even at the simplest cellular level, does not just want to connect: being itself is the very urge to connect; a continuous, unremitting longing. To be is to desire, not just to live, but to grow, “to unfold ourselves in a productive way,” to transform, through entanglement, through intricate patterns that are both orderly and chaotic, like the synapses of a nervous system and the complex tapestries woven in mycorrhizal underground networks — neural pathways carved out in the soil.
