The Mouth That Eats Itself (2026) @SUPeR, Copenhagen
with Carl Olsson & Mandus Ridefelt
with Carl Olsson & Mandus Ridefelt
The Mouth That Eats Itself (2026) by Carl Olsson is available to order from our webstore
CLAIRE ELISE:
Hi. Thank you so much for coming. It's really a pleasure to be here and to see so many of you here. My name is Claire, and at the back is Polymnia. We are running Becoming Press, which is just an independent publishing house based in Berlin. We publish a lot of contemporary philosophy and what we call “minor theoretical literature,” and we just released, last week, our 17th book and it’s a book by Carl Olsson — we loosely describe it as a book about geography, but as you will see, there is a kind of specific angle on geography that Carl’s work is exploring. And so there's a kind of reversal of what we think geography is compared to what the philosophical way of thinking about geography.
We'll also be joined by Mandus [Ridefelt], who some of you may well know, who will also contribute something to the discussion or contribute something to the lecture, as well as, make a discussion with Carl. Without further ado, I will invite Carl to begin his presentation.
CARL OLSSON:
Excellent. Thank you so much, Claire. And, thank you, Claire and Polymnia for choosing to publish this somewhat, esoteric and crazy book. And, thank you also to everyone who has managed to get in here and who are currently trying to get in. Now as Claire said I'm going to be talking for a little while, I'm going to be talking for a little while, and, then, we're going to do a little bit of a storytelling session, I suppose, and then I will talk a little bit about the book and what I'm trying to achieve in it, as well as ask what a “philosophy of geography” might mean.
And then Mandus will be saying a few things, because I do think that we're sharing a kind of research program, and a way of thinking about the natural world in a slightly... I would call it “the horror story way,” but, we shall see what Mandus thinks. The psychoanalyst and writer Géza Róheim thought that, just like in dreams, the characters that appear in fairy tales represent different aspects of a single subject. Keep this in mind. This here is Little Red Riding Hood: Once upon a time there was a young lady who lived next to a forest with her mother. Because she always wore a red cloak — let's imagine — she had been gifted, people called her Little Red Riding Hood.
One day, her Mother asked her if she would not bring a basket of food and wine to her Grandmother, who lived deep in the forest and had fallen ill. Little Red Riding Hood said yes, and so she set out on a path to her Grandmother's house. Soon, however, she came to a crossroads, and there she met a large wolf. “Hello, my Dear” said the wolf, “where might you be off to all alone?” “Why, Mister, I'm going to visit my sick Grandmother who lives on the other side of the forest. I will bring her food and wine” replied the girl. “I see” said the wolf, who had quickly thought of plans for both lunch and dinner for himself.
He continued, “I know a meadow with beautiful sunflowers that you can pick for your Grandmother. Take the path to the left here. It's not very far.” So Little Red Riding Hood thanked the wolf, and did just as he had told her — bringing some flowers would be wonderful and make Grandmother very happy indeed. And sure enough, she found a meadow with the sunflowers. She took her time and picked only the tallest, most beautiful flower she could find. Then she continued on her way to her Grandmother. In the meantime, of course, the wolf had continued on the right path, taking aim at the Grandmother's house. He knew the forest like the back of his paw, and he was strong and fast, so he got there very quickly.
The wolf knocked on the door three times. “Who is it?” said a frail voice from inside. “It is I, Little Red Riding Hood” replied the wolf, with his best impression. “I have come with food and wine, because, Mother, said you weren't well.” For a time nothing happened. Then the wolf heard faint footsteps, and soon after the door was unlocked, and as it creaked open, the wolf fell upon the Grandmother and ate her all up. She did not even have time to scream. Now the wolf was very full, but he had not yet finished eating. He got into one of the Grandmother's old nightgowns and crawled into her bed.
It was quite late when Little Red Riding Hood eventually arrived. Her visit to the meadow had delayed her, and the sun was about to set. She knocked on her Grandmother's door. “Who is it?” said a frail voice — It's good timing, eh? — “It is I, Little Red Riding Hood” replied the girl, “I have come with food and wine and a beautiful flower, because Mother said you weren't well.” Well, for a time nothing happened, and then the same faint voice returned. “Come on in, then; the door is unlocked and I am too sick to get out of bed.” Little Red Riding Hood opened the door and entered the house.
It was dark and it smelled weird, as if an unwashed animal had been there. The girl approached the bed in the far corner of the room. Her Grandmother laid in it, dressed in an old nightgown. She really looked unwell. “Come closer, dear” said the figure in the bed. So she did. “Oh, Grandmother, how strange your eyes look.” “Oh, it is so I can see you better.” “But your stomach is so large.” “Oh, that is so I can fit all the food and wine you've brought.” “Your mouth is so wide.” “And that is so I can eat you all up” said the wolf as he leaped out of bed and did just that.
Little Red Riding Hood did not even have a chance to scream. But as the wolf swallowed Little Red Riding Hood, something very peculiar happened because the little girl, her Grandmother, and the wolf were all one. [The wolf had eaten itself.] And all that was left was a single sunflower on the ground. A beautiful blossom of truth. The Mouth That Eats Itself — that is the book — travels deeper and deeper into a single problem. An action that undoes the deed. I suppose one can read a book in two different ways: (1) as a kind of philosophical treatise on geographical thinking and, freedom or emancipation, and (2) one can probably read it as a horror story.
As one continues reading, I think the path will probably lead to the second option, sort of inevitably, because philosophy and geography share a special relationship that makes the confluence of exposition and horror kind of inevitable. Geography tells the stories that let us inhabit the world — that is what it does. And philosophy, at least when it does what it should do, beats around on the ground until some angry wasps come out. So the book operates with — what I would think of as — a biological concept of freedom or autonomy, where biologists are talking about emancipation from the environment. This is a question of how we can even differentiate ourselves from our surroundings — I think this is good to keep in our in our heads as I continue talking about this kind of biological backdrop, [certainly] as we get deeper into more philosophical territory. [The book] operates with something that's also entitled “the Problem of Space,” and what I mean with this is the challenge of how to divide undifferentiated space into an organism and an environment so as to break nature in two.
All animals — in fact, all living beings — must solve this problem until the moment they die. One could even think of life as a history of emancipation, of trying to break nature in various ways; to stand out from what one is not. And all of us, we have our own means of doing this and have our own ways of achieving the solution to this problem. Often one does it through dedicated organs and acts of sort of partial self-sacrifice; we can think of Freud, when he writes in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” that there is that dead outer layer of skin that is sort of sacrificed to the world and sort of mediates and sort of keeps everything at bay.
Something is given to the world so that the remainder can stand out, and be free. There's this French writer and theorist, Roger Caillois, who wrote an essay ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, which is one of my favorite texts. It's amazing. His basic claim is that mimicry — when an animal sort of tends to look like another animal; though I would extend this to camouflage, and in general, any way of blending into the environment — is not adapted, but is a rather morbid phenomenon. He calls this, in general, — because he has connected in a more general way, as we're going to see soon — a legendary psychasthenia, a sort of way of blending into the environment.
And that is dangerous, as one can really lose oneself by compromising too much. Think of this praying mantis, or perhaps a stick bug that on an evolutionary time scale, has ended up looking very much like certain objects in its environment. But we might perhaps think of a chameleon that does so on a much shorter timescale and can sort of change the color of its skin to look like what it is not. Caillois appears to identify — and this is me speaking a little bit, but this is what it seems like to me — three types, or levels perhaps of a legendary psychasthenia, and I sort of add their corresponding presuppositions, because in order to blend in and lose ourselves — if we sort of assume that we actually have to stand out in the first place — what's interesting is that together these three levels trace, what Caillois himself calls a diagonal line through nature, [and in doing so] linked towards that no human science has [otherwise] connected — in the same way that there is no general science of three legged objects, even though there probably might be.
So he sort of invents a study of of blending in and getting lost. So first of all, as we saw in the example with a little praying mantis, there's the body and the sort of the corporeal being of an animal or an organism, and we can think of how the stickbug or the praying mantis tend to look like the environment it lives in; like a flower or a leaf. Secondly, he cites perceptual experience and how in some psychiatric disorders sometimes associated with certain hallucinations, for instance, where we lose track of the boundaries of personal space, changing and becoming lucid, and so on. And third — and most interestingly, perhaps — he thinks about conceptual self-representation, modern concepts of space.
If you give me a second, I will just read what he has to say because I quote him in the book, but the gist of it is this meme that was floating around a couple of years ago. So bad stuff. “It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates. At one point, among others, it is dispossessed of its privilege, and literally no one no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitude, and indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary signs, insular spaces, affirmative spaces, Fermat-Christoffel Hyperspaces.
Abstract. Generalized. Open and closed spaces. Spaces dense in themselves, thinned out and so on. The feeling of personality considered as the organism’s feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined.” That is what Roger Caillois thinks. I think he is a little bit wrong, in terms of where the problem lies, but I think he is right in essence. The real problem, I think, does not concern unfamiliar concepts of space that seem alien to us, but how we represent ourselves in relation to the forces of nature, basically vis-a-vis causality.
We can talk about ourselves in many ways, including some quite strange ones. We routinely switch between “images of ourselves in the world” to borrow a term from the philosopher Wilfred Sellars, who talks about images of “man in the world.” I can talk about myself as a person, as a free being, and a moment later I can talk about myself as a pile of molecules, fully part of the causal order. For Sellars, these two ways of representing ourselves can clash, but they don't really undermine one another in a serious way, because both rely on a single form of experience in which we changed, and we have a kind of an inalienable remainder.
That means that we can talk about ourselves in this way. Now, I can talk about myself in that way. I can represent myself in a Fermat-Christoffel Hyperspace, as opposed to — though I don't quite know what that is — kind of unproblematically, the problem happens when the content, rather, of a self representation, interferes with the sort of the inalienable remainder. We can think of it, perhaps, as the Chameleon's skin and not just a color being kind of implicated in the transformation, which makes shifting between inhabitable self-representations possible. Remember that geography thinks about inhabiting the world. The Mouth That Eats Itself argues that the third level of psychasthenia that Caillois identifies, if it is meaningful at all, is inherently geographical, and has some very real consequences.
It is, in other words, a geographical problem. But to see this, I think we have to do a little bit of work to liberate geographical thinking from its historical sense as both a mere discipline with a history that people at university kind of do and also the sense of geography is simply the lay of the land, the actual land, and restore it to its essence. What is geography then? In the broadest sense, it is about telling stories that we can live in. We can position ourselves in the world. The difference between France, the country, and a France-shaped geometrical object, whereas the former is a geographical entity and the other is simply some kind of geometrical thing.
Geography tells inhabitable stories. Doreen Massey, a very influential British geographer, writing — I think this book is from 2005 — was part of a kind of a movement. About 20 years ago, there was a tendency in the discipline of human geography to want to get closer to space, to sort of establish a more intimate connection that was both methodological and also a way of kind of epistemological. People wanted to know space in a more embodied and closer way than simply looking from far away when they were producing geographical knowledge and studying how the world was. So Massey, among others, ushered geographers toward a more intimate conception of space intended almost like a shift of physical position from an imagination of a textuality, at which one looks, towards recognizing one's place within a continuous and multiple processes of emergence.
Interestingly, she mentioned that this sort of sense of space was meant to feel exciting and dangerous, and it created a lot of excitement, among geographers, but the sense of danger has remained almost completely missing. We can also note that Massey shifts the motive — in a way, a little bit — of geography, from a landscape image or a map to a self-portrait. It is about being inside of the space, and I think it is best to think of this as a discovery rather than as a shift, merely in the discipline, because geography was, structurally, always about self-portraiture. Self-portraits are claims. My self-portrait doesn't have to look anything like me.
I just have to identify myself by judging that the figure is I. And so does this guy. Geography works just like this. I judge that I am in space and in time, and I tell a story about myself in the world; I posit myself in the world. So this lets me create a picture of myself in the world. I can think of myself in this way or in that way. I give myself over in some kind of imagistic form. So what am I? And now we get a bit deeper into the philosophy. And we're going to talk a little bit about Immanuel Kant. He discovers this great concept of “a transcendental unity of apperception,” which is roughly kind of “cognitive self-consciousness.”
Basically, it's the unity in virtue of which I can represent myself in time and claim that my representations belong to a single consciousness. It is marked typically by the possibility of adding, “I think” to all of my cognition. So whenever I think something I can always add that is I who thinks it: “I think that I am thinking this now,” “and I think that I'm talking about this now and so forth.” Notably, these acts of cognition are supposed to be spontaneous, which is to say not caused: they are free from the causal order. What Kant means with this is massively controversial when we get into the fine prints, but let's just leave it here.
Interestingly, Kant was also a philosopher of geography, perhaps one of the first to take this seriously, even though he didn't do a good job with this geographical knowledge when he wrote about what the world is like. He believed that geography was a part of Weltkenntnis — knowledge of the world. And the other part of this project was anthropology. Basically, we could study geographical facts and learn about the world so that we would be able to inhabit it a little bit better; we would become better citizens of the world was his idea. Now, the distinction between geography and anthropology for Kant was notoriously a messy distinction, but basically geography was meant to study humans as they were in nature and anthropology, at least what he called “pragmatic anthropology,” was meant to study humans as rational persons — as free beings — doing their thing — to study humans as rational persons — as free beings — doing their thing — moral subjects and so on.
And so geographers distinguish the human figure from the ground, and the anthropologists fill in all the details. It's quite a beautiful picture, which already has the form of a self-portrait in a way. And here perhaps we can think of the distinction in these terms, where a thinking self posits in these terms, where a thinking self posits something in the world, [something] that is a sort of something in the world, [something] that is a sort of modification of their space and time, but, perceive something that has been given to them in space, and we can study the free persons, and then we can study we can study the free persons, and then we can study ourselves as beings in the world.
And what we will note here is that the philosophical implications of this distinction were quite significant, at least as far as geography is concerned, because every contradiction that stems from natural necessity impinging on our freedom, is relegated to the level of our self-portraits, our transcendental, the freedom in virtue of which we construct the self-portrait is never called into question. We simply don't have to think about there being a potential problem. If we just quickly go back to Caillois construing his problem as one of causality, whenever there is a problem of “are we free?” or “are we purely part of a strictly causal nature?”, we can always think that there's a conflict between two pictures of the human being — and that is great, and we don't have to think about that as being a problem for our ability to think this distinction in the first place.
That is great, and it really solves the problem — as long as we don't think about it. Now, the problem with repression is that it works really well until it doesn't, and even though it would be erroneous and contradictory to collapse to collapse the conditions into what they condition. It remains possible to do so as a thinker of thoughts, to step into the world and get caught up in its causal rigors, to, as it were, think of thought as unfree and as not thought. And here comes then, the danger that Massey had promised. Kant has this amazing thing in a parenthesis that sounds a bit like a magic spell: Apperceptionis substantiate, which is, when he elaborates he calls this “abruption of hypostatized consciousness,” i.e. treating one's consciousness as an object.
Though this is a natural illusion, I have a tendency to just not really make a distinction whenever I go about the world between myself as sort of the condition of thought, and also that which I think, but when we consider and judge it, and sort of make it a sort of a logical and conceptual call about it, it amounts to an error. He discusses this as a kind of a paralogism. The example here, the classical example is, Descartes when he says “I think, therefore I am” to which Kant replies, “okay, René, but you don't know what you are... You have no right to say that you are a substance simply because you think and know that you are, but you don't know what you are because of that.”
And Descartes is at least a little bit lucky because he posits his thinking substance — he posits himself when he says that “I think, therefore I am”; I am a thinking substance, he says — but he posits it in a way that does not leave thought being caught up in unfree nature. that does not leave thought being caught up in unfree nature. The substance is free. His dualism might be erroneous from Kant's point of view, but it never becomes more than an error. The second version of this abruption has more teeth and is better understood as perhaps a dialectical disaster — as a di-sa-ster — under it, we can imagine a certain scenario playing out between Descartes and a bartender; this is a scenario written by the great philosopher Sergio Satellite on YouTube.
They say Descartes went to a bar. The bartender asked, “Will you have anything to drink?” To which Descartes replied, “I think not,” and then vanished. Now the thing is that the error created by thinking thought in the natural world, as a part of the natural world, virtually achieves the gist of SergioSatellite467’s joke. Unfree thought is not thought, and so there is no thinking subject. Ergo, the subject vanishes or fails to just stay in the first place. Such is the situation prevented by Kant's “anthropological fix” which I have in mind this sort of rendering of the conflict between causality and free humans into the project in the world, the study of empirical human beings.
We can also think of it like this: Here, I think, or Little Red Riding Hood thinks that she is not free, and there is a conflict between the liberty [of the wolf and] of the free Grandma, and there is a conflict between these two ideas and they can resolve it between themselves; it's amazing. If, however, we start thinking about ourselves in the world as thinkers, as Massey and others made intelligible — or has at least gotten us on the track to do in geography — we are ending up in a position that is a little bit more like this: where the conflict ends up being between the conditions and what is conditioned.
And since we are operating with a biological concept of freedom, as said in the beginning, we can consider the loss incurred by thinking — “thinking” — unfree thoughts, we fall back toward space and the rift in nature, which we, in some sense {are}, closes up a little. We fail to create the sort of freedom, and make the appropriate sacrifice, to give this sort of imagistic form to the world. We destroy the conditions, the sort of the means of doing that, and we lose a little bit of our freedom. And as this is also a horror story, it will attempt to catch its reader in the wolf's jaws.
We're going to sort of think a little bit “unfreely” when we read the book, towards the end of it at least. For those who are coming from a slightly more methodological [background] or are interested perhaps in some ethical consequences of this project, we can perhaps infer some. Give that we can close the rift between ourselves and the environment; given that we can betray ourselves to space, then: Geographers who advocate for methods that abandon representation and are sort of in favor of creating affects and emotions, and get closer into the world, should at the very least, be a bit careful. Deleuze & Guattari, what they talk about with “becoming-animal” risks virtually achieving what it seeks, in a way.
I'm not going to go too deep into this. We can also, perhaps more interestingly consider what happens to someone who believes that the coming of a sort of “capitalism = AI machine God” is inevitable, and that our only recourse is to melt into the process a way of thinking that we have no freedom, but even our thought can only serve something that is inevitable, in a kind of fatalistic way. What happens to them? This man here is Nick Land, if you don't know him, don't look him up. And, if you do, you might find this funny. This is a sea cucumber, which is an a notoriously unfree animal.
It lacks sort of a central nervous system and so on. But if we look a little bit closer... They kind of start looking very similar. I'm going to leave you with this image... This is sort of what might happen to us if we start thinking too unfreely. And this is essentially the kind of drama that the book is about. I think, it's quite difficult to talk about in a way, because it's really one of these cases — usually when you are working with a horror story or an adventure novel, I suppose, — it's hard to kind of summarize its gist — and I think this is one of those cases, where it's best to just kind of go along [with it] deeper into the underworld and see where it might lead.
And, with this, I'm going to, leave it over to Mandus to talk about some “Sloth Philosophy”, I think, and, hopefully you will be able to see the kind of the continuities, because I do think that there is a certain style of thinking about both the society, the human beings and the natural world that is sort of taking place here. And for this reason, I appreciate Mandus’ work and I'm very happy that [he] want[ed] to contribute here. So, thank you for coming and listening to this madness.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
I don't know if there is enough of these. This is for if you go astray — I made this together with Stephen's help the other day — and you can look deep into the eyes of this sloth. Please pass them around. Okay. Thank you, Carl. And thank you for having me as a part of this great achievement of a book. So I will talk about sloths. I'm in the midst of writing a book about animals that don't move, animals that don't move, and trying to think about what life means if you subtract movement from it. So, this is the section about sloths. In a 2025 prank call radio show, two radio hosts called up a guy named Thomas.
The concept of the show was to call up people after they went on a first date with someone and ask them why there was no second date back after the first encounter. The other side of the equation, in this case a woman called Kelsey, would wait on the line and jump into the interrogation after some initial questions on how and why things had turned out the way they did. Thomas’ case was that, even though Kelsey seemed like a completely average person in terms of expected activity levels, it was all too laborious. They had gone to the movies and a short walk to the grocery store.
This was too much, too extra and too speedy for the lifestyle of Thomas. After a long series of deadpan responses delivered with calm, unintrusive confidence, Thomas’ got the final judgement. They called him a “sloth” and in one go they stripped him of his right to look for love within the kingdom of bustling activity and connection-making. Thomas replied “Sloths are adorable.” Until recently, the fact had passed right under my nose — this animal, known for its slow lifestyle, was actually, in the English language, named after the cardinal sin of sloth. The first record of the South American dwelling animal had being adorned with this heretic name dated back to 1610, long after ‘sloth’ has been used as the ultimate psychosomatic indolence, and clearly after the entrenchment of the Lutheran order, where the spirits and bodies hoarded virtue only through diligence.
And I’m still looking for the animal called gluttony. Also Goethe participated in this persecution of the slothfulness and the sloth itself. In Faust, Goethe recruits the image of sloth In Faust, Goethe recruits the image of the sloth as a poetics of sinful wager where the “I” unsubscribes from the living in case of the sloth having taken over. This is Goethe’s little poem, here: “If I ever lie contented on a bed of sloth, May I be done for then and there! If ever you, with lies and flattery, Can lull me into self-complacency Or dupe me with a life of pleasure, May that day be the last for me!
This is my wager!” However, in Goethe’s heterodox writings on paleontology, the sloth appears again. Goethe takes note of how the sloth Goethe takes note of how the sloth through “impatience developed an absurd, aesthetically displeasing morphology.” This [was written] by a Goethe scholar. This leads Goethe to imbue the prehistoric sloth with what is called an “Ungeist” or counter-spirit. The counter spirit is an upset of the supposedly harmonious developmental scheme of the kingdom of life. And this strange morphology of both the prehistoric and contemporary sloths are no accident. Rather, the basis of becoming the Ungeist can be found in the primary evolutionary wager of the sloth — how far can one go in terms of minimizing one’s movement and still remain an animal?
So, some facts about sloths: In fact, sloths are the ancestors of much less sluggish lifestyles. 30 million years ago, there was an ice-age that lasted until around [20] thousand year ago, where giant ancestral sloths have swum and roamed the environments browsing and grazing through the vegetation and pelagic habitats... During this time, many animal lineages swelled up, acquiring larger bodies as a direct selection pressure to be able to withstand colder temperatures. A bigger body implies a larger volume in relation to its surface, leading to better heat retention, perhaps too good, even so. When the ice cap melted and temperatures rose, most of these megaloid sloths perished due to the inverse problem — their bodies were too big, which made overheating a serious problem.
So when they were hunted by the spears and arrows of humans, they were running and increasing their body temperatures and then essentially combusting in the process; they could not run because they overheated. Soon, the only sloth population left and the only ones left are the sloths we have today that live in more stable tropical climates. Today’s sloths remain hanging, suspended from tree branches and moving only with extreme slowness and deliberation. What brought about this transition? How did the sloth turn out to be our best approximation of an immobile mammal? There exists two kinds of sloths today, the three-finger one — Bradypuses — and the two-finger one — Choleupuses.
The three-finger one is called Ai, and the two-finger one is called Unai. It’s funny that, since Goethe wrote about the Ungeist that one sloth is supposedly negating the other sloth’s name, but this is has no etymological basis whatsoever. This is a coincidence, you can say. Today, both sloth groups share the defining feature of extensive adaptations to tree life, as well as being among the lowest energy consuming animals known. The reduction of locomotion and the peculiar adaptations for a life hanging upside down is “one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution known among mammals.” While not breeding together, these two sloth groups have, over the course of evolution, reached the same adaptive strategy to maximize their survival.
When on the move, the sloth’s average speed is around 0,25 km/h. It is not only their capacity of changing location that takes place with notable slowness, but also the way they grasp with their large claws and shut their eyes. When I watch a sloth, it causes an almost time dilation-like experience. When I watch a sloth, it causes an almost time dilation-like experience. Something this large should not be moving this slow. And indeed, when accounting for body size, the speed of movement is by several multiples the slowest among animals. The primary reason for the slow motion is, unsurprisingly, to minimize energy consumption. leen though the sloth’s source of nutrients, leaves, might be abundantly available, leaves have pretty sparse energy contents in relationship to the weight and demand a lot of metabolism to be able to be taken up.
So the sloth can't just eat more, because the stomach is already running at a full speed, like you can't just add more leaves and get more energy out. And so runs the game of evolutionary tradeoffs, where limiting [...] has not only been limited for its need of energy, but stabilized at a physiology that is hard capped on how much it can do, perhaps similarly to humans with chronic fatigue. While many other energy minimizing adaptations exist, I will only further discuss the, perhaps, most striking one — the fact that they live in a suspensory lifestyle, upside down. And while hanging, they do not expend any energy.
Sloths extremities are turned into stiff hooks that are connected to the skeletal base with massive tendons. Instead of clinging with fingers to remain attached to the branch, or with bipedals that constantly adjust their balance and posture, sloths hook onto their branches and pass the gravitational force through the inert skeleton. They just hang as inert [skeletal structure], they don't need muscular force to remain in the same place. The force vector counteracting the gravity is [offered] almost exclusively by the tendons and bones. By hanging on an inert hook and reversing the orientation of the body in the gravitational field, the sloth has a head start in its quest to avoid movement.
Similarly to many other animals that adapted to minimal movement, the sloth has a rudimentary sensory system, especially concerning its vision. The sloth is close to blind, and the little vision it has is almost monochromatic. The monochromatic way of seeing is a direct adaptation to the color conditions of the treetops. All year round there is a lot of green trees in the tropics, since most of the environment of the sloth is green or shades thereof, chromatic differentiation is not very important. Monochrome is enough to find another leaf or two. Similarly, sloths avoid predation, not by any sophisticated sensorium that allow for early detection or exit before the threat has materialized, but instead, by remaining in the treetops and barely moving — and in many cases they're also literally overgrown by algae on their backs — sloths have minimized the risk of predation simply by avoiding detection.
As an example of extreme mammalian adaptive strategies, we describe the sloth as [being] at a moment in evolutionary history where it's about to almost merge with the tree. The more and more we look at them, the sloths seem more and more like pseudo-motile appendages of the tree itself. And certainly the essence of the sloth doesn't fall far from it, as the otherwise constraining mammalian characteristics of movement and thermal regulation have been reduced into the minimum, the sloth has, similarly, as many non-moving animals, merged with its medium of nutrition, like a sea sponge planted within the stream of tiny bacteria or deep sea plankton, sloths sit solemnly in the stream of regenerating leaves, adjusting its limb movement to the swaying branches.
This is also where [both] Goethe’s Ungeist and the prank call persecutionists return in a different form. For Goethe, the strange morphology seemed to betray a formative spirit that had failed to find an adequate expression into the world. For these purposes, I, again, note how this degenerate form is a direct consequence of the slowing adaptation, [that has...] Anyway — the sloth has become the tree. That's the point that I was trying to get to. But certainly the failure might lie elsewhere as well. What Goethe encounters in the sloth is a body in which the conventional science of animation has been evolutionarily withdrawn. The sloth remains empathically alive while moving away from the appearances through which animals adjoined with the order of the living.
This kind of withdrawal opens up an extension of well known strategies of camouflage, mimicry, and more generally, perhaps, crypsis, not only is this an act of manipulating one's appearance as to avoid detection taking place at the level of empirically, well-formed parameters, the trouble that Goethe and the prank callers are running into is a form of animation that, from within, thwarts the idea it is supposedly manifesting. Just like Eugene Thacker points out the paradoxical nature of life as instances of being and life as an absolute principle of vitality, the life of the sloth is adapted to point away from its own place among the living and moving.
In cases of camouflage, these are usually reversible or minimally taking place as a game of representation. The camouflage diverts appearance away from essence. I look like something I am not. Yet, in the case of the sloth, the adaptive regime and its morphological absorption of its arboreal habitat, there is no other thing within the sloth than the effort of becoming hard to detect. The conditions of concealment have entered anatomy, metabolism and behavior at levels that do not change with the mood of the sloth. The disguise has become a fundamental evolutionary commitment. Rather than avoiding being seen, the sloth encountered within its habitat, has evolved into having nothing to show, of being anatomically unable to present itself. The Ungeist inhabiting the sloth turns into a residual of locomotion, loitering around within the periphery of animation and more than anything else, telling me that “I’m actually not here, yet I remain.” That's it.
CARL OLSSON:
Thank you. I like sloths.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
Sloths are amazing. Carl, can I ask you about your idea of [freedom] — when you're speaking about freedom, why do you think freedom needs a reformulation within your framework?
CARL OLSSON:
It's not so much that it needs a reformulation, but I just think that it's sort of the connection that makes everything possible, in a way. Basically if we're going to think about unfreedom, we also have to think about freedom in a similarly, continuous sense. And if we're going to think about unfreedom, the sort of unfreedom that connects different animal species in various ways, such as the sloth and the praying mantis and Nick Land, we have to also have a concept of freedom that sort of equally connects everything up. And I think, when I'm referring to freedom and autonomy in the text, and also now, I'm talking about...
I mean, there's a long tradition in theoretical biology, where people talk about autonomy, but quite recently there has been a movement by a number of people such as Mossio & Moreno — I can't remember the first names — but there have been a number of attempts in the past ten years, to think about freedom as the basis from which to start thinking about life in general. And I think this is quite a useful tool to kind of take up and, [extend] both into various human phenomena and ways of thinking, but also to just use this sort of diagonal line that connects various things up. And for me, the entire problem of crypsis — which is a concept that sort of encompasses camouflage and mimicry and so forth — is very interesting because there is a sense in which this makes animals free, in the sense of prolonging their lives, in the case of the sloths, making it able to have an autonomous process, but at the same time at some kind of cost.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
Yes, you had this beautiful formulation at the beginning with the “sacrifice of skin.”
CARL OLSSON:
Yeah. And this is precisely what happens in the case of the sloths. But it's also a very interesting case because it has this — I get so excited about this — but, it has this metabolic dimension to it in the same way that we in certain ways have this cognitive dimension to our sacrifice that we use to blend in and to almost sacrifice an image of ourselves to the world.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
I would like to ask one more question and then I think we can also, see if there are any questions from [the audience]. There is a lot of talk these days around where these boundaries between cognitive agents — who is thinking?, who is alive? etc., that is being forced as you mentioned a little bit... Do you think that the concept of freedom can... Or what divisions between different life-forms do you get with your way of thinking? It's perhaps a hard question.
CARL OLSSON:
It is perhaps a hard question. Can you give a counter-example, if you had a different way of thinking, what would be the divisions? If, for instance, we used intelligence instead.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
I think what I'm getting at is [whether] the Kantian way translatable into non-human agents?
CARL OLSSON:
Not really. Yes and no. I guess this is also an attempt to kind of naturalize Kant a little bit. The problem is that that is very anathematic, if you will, to what Kant would himself would think is possible, because he really wants to think about freedom as transcendental {or free and absolutely uncaused}. The thing that I try to do is to insert the sort of biological freedom that is produced or generated by thinking ourselves as free into the biological concept of freedom. So I'm trying to think [about] the physiological consequences of a style of thought that Kant himself would have just called “thought,” that, as sort of a way to generate freedom for ourselves, especially when we represent ourselves within the environment.
So I think that is the way I try to make it work and then the counter to this or the counterfactual example, if you will, that I'm using in the book is precisely what happens if you stop thinking in this way, because if you have something that generates freedom in a certain way, what happens if you take this away, and that way it becomes something that you can measure because suddenly if you remove this... how slow can this the sloth be and still sort of remain, in some sense, emancipated, metabolically, from its environment, for instance. And how unfree can we think of ourselves and still be, who we are?
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
Can I also ask why is this a horror story, in your opinion?
CARL OLSSON:
It's a horror story because, both it's written a little bit like a horror story, and, it's also a horror story because — I think towards the end of the book — I’m trying to get us to think unfreely in a way that would be manifesting a kind of contradictory answer, to think about thought in nature in a way that will probably, potentially at least, implicate the reader a little bit, and it becomes — and this is kind of per definition a sort of nonsensical act, but nevertheless, we try to carry it out in the book — implicated in something impossible sounds to me like the definition of a horror story.
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
That's an amazing way of putting it. Are there questions from the audience?
CLAIRE ELISE:
Maybe I could offer a question, because we spoke, maybe a few months ago, and I'm curious to see what you're thinking about this a few months later. We talked about this famous scene from Werner Herzog with the Penguin — this “nihilist penguin” seems to “give up on life” and wanders into the abyss. And like, in terms of the horror story of this, we're talking about an animal, like a mantid, that has managed to “speciate itself,” it’s individuated from everything else — it's standing out. It's not another type of creature. It's also not the background. And one of the ways that it gained its autonomy, from, say, environmental pressures like predation, is that it has adapted to look like its environment.
So as a part of trying to stand out and be a stable individual, let's say, it has ended up coming with the cost of its image being totally consumed by the environment. So the horror story is that the more you try to individuate yourself, you suddenly find yourself, consuming yourself — and this is part of where the title comes from. And we spoke about this a little bit in terms of this penguin, and I wonder if you have any thoughts about why does the penguin walk into space...
CARL OLSSON:
The penguin really likes space, is the short answer. The slightly longer answer is that I think there is one problem that is left a little bit unresolved in the book. At a certain moment I say that there is almost like “a will towards returning to space,” almost like Freud and his idea of the death instinct, which Caillois also has like a version of when he talks about mimicry, I sort of argue that it's not really like that, but rather it's more like... Simply in virtue of standing out, it’s sort of like if you throw something up, it's bound to kind of come down again, at least if you climb up on a little stair, at least you can fall down and sort of lose some of your freedom and sort of sacrifice too much.
There are then — and I'm a little bit torn between which of these it really is — is there some kind of agency that would have us return into the environment? If so, is it internal to us, or is it something that belongs to something else that is placed within us? And I think, it's funny that you mentioned the penguin, because I suppose — I'm not sure if it will become the sequel or whatnot — but what I'm working... What I'm thinking about a lot now is precisely to see in a slightly more material way if there is a sort of a “call of the wild,” but “a call of space” to really kind of draw us in under certain circumstances.
And how to characterize and think about the particular manner of causality that such an “alien will” or agency would impart on us. So, in terms of answering the penguin, I don't think it fits very well into what's into [the book] here, but I think there is an active problem there in terms of the relationship between the organism and the surrounding environment. And I also think that what we call, geography and sort of geographical thinking is very much implicated in that kind of relationship, too. We can think of [those] expeditions and so on where people randomly go to the Arctic and then just die; why would you even do that?
And so to me, it feels like there is a need to explain this in a way that isn't only sociological or sort of reducible to kind of one's individual agency. There is something like structural or a sort of mode of desire that is very specific to space, that sort of almost compels us or some people that are vulnerable to this, including people, including the penguin, which is also a social animal.
AUDIENCE 1:
So, I've always struggled with philosophy because I take things very literally, and I guess I'm just confused about whether this concept is something that plays out on an individual level or a collective level, and if it plays out on a collective level... How does inequality and that type of thing come into the picture? Because a lot of the time the lack of freedom is something that's inflicted by other human beings.
CARL OLSSON:
I think, in this case, it's considered largely on an individual level. Precisely because the individual level is sort of the prominent biological level. But of course, there are ways we can think about it collectively also. I guess the one way to think about it here is to think of — and it's another reason why this is a horror story, because of the extreme focus on the individual, that the collective is simply part of the environment from the individual's point of view, in the same way that, and this is quite a grim perspective, and it's not necessarily something I endorse or that we should think in this way, but certainly it is a possibility to think [this way].
And I think working through this also, there are many... It’s a book of conjectural commitments that are a little bit extreme in this way. And, I think, there is more perhaps to think about, especially in terms of freedom, since freedom for human beings, for instance is such a collective property that we, even biologically, emancipate ourselves from the world by being a collective and by organizing and by interacting, and at the same time as this is obviously or horribly unequal in terms of, who we are. So, I mean, the simple answer is that the book is hyperfocused on individuals.
AUDIENCE 2:
Thank you very much for your talk, and forgive me if you furnished us with an explanation for this, and I missed it, maybe.
CARL OLSSON:
That's very fine.
AUDIENCE 2:
I'm curious about sacrifice, because it's been applied a few times in relation to things as different as humans creating self-portraits, mantises that camouflage themselves with their environment. That seems like quite a human value judgment to make, you know, something in the natural world. Is your whole kind of ontology human centric, and we're able to sort of cast these judgments on natural phenomena?
CARL OLSSON:
I think in principle no. I guess one of the points of the biological autonomy discourse is that it, in principle, would give a sort of measurable idea of how free an animal is. In principle, you could think, even though a sort of interspecies comparison would be incredibly difficult, but at least you can think about how emancipated from the environment processes are and is a human being more liberated than a sea cucumber, for instance? Probably yes, in some sort of biological sense. I think many biologists who sort of work on this would probably say that, but of course, ultimately it is also going to have to come back on a value judgment.
I think we have perhaps some kind of intuitive sense for what feels like freedom and what doesn't feel like freedom. So, there is some kind of anthropomorphism involved in the practical judgment and the practical application, even though in principle, conceptually it should or would be possible to sort of think about it with the correct measurements, but, in essence, it ends up being kind of vibes-based — if you have kidneys to regulate the salinity level in your body, you're probably more freedom than if you don't.
CLAIRE ELISE:
Would you say that when you're talking about the scientific image — at some point you were talking to me about alienation and I wanted to ask more specifically, do you consider what is happening with the sloth and the mantid in terms of, they try to stand out from space and then they end up kind of being reabsorbed back into it, at least partially in terms of their image being captured. Like with the mantis, the image of the mantis is captured by the image of the flower. And there was something about the risks of the people who think too scientifically, or there are risks that come with scientific thinking, that relate to alienation in the sense that we were saying that if you think in terms of fundamental particles, it's very difficult to understand where you end and where the background begins.
So, do you think that that's kind of happening on the collective level of the human, a similar thing to the mantis, that the more we try to use science in order to sort of cement and stabilize our individual speciation and our whatever access to freedom. Do you think that there is a similar risk happening there?
CARL OLSSON:
In principle, yeah, probably. I think that there's certainly a way in which the less humanistically — in a way — we think about ourselves, of course, this is going to constrain who we are, and we're going to look unrecognizable, we're also going to sort of open up for being determined, and here is perhaps a collective way of using this in terms of thinking collectives, I do think that various technologies that predated prediction and the algorithms are sort of operating in the background of our phones all the time are certainly ways of manipulating us as animals, and yes, this is kind of binding us in a way.
And in this way Caillois is also perhaps right that the different, in a more straightforward sense, that we can be really alienated by strange representations of ourselves. Nevertheless, I have at least potentially the ability to — and all of us have the ability to kind of disconnect from this and sort of posit a different dimension myself. I can look at my phone and then I can think, “oh, but I'm Carl. I want to go to the supermarket and buy a potato,” and then I do that and so I have at least the prospect of sort of switching between images. But of course, the more we sort of use and think about ourselves in essentially these tractable terms, the more we sort of become just empirically bound up in a sort of thinking that is, I mean, directly designed to exploit our attention and make us unfree, in some way.
AUDIENCE 2:
During the course of your research, did you find anything about putting Sloths in fMRI scanners; I’m wondering if they think slowly as well?
MANDUS RIDEFELT:
Oh, I haven't gotten there yet, but that’s great, I wanna get there. I have seen squirrels in MRI, hibernating squirrels, but yeah, that's another story.
CARL OLSSON:
That sounds like an interesting story, though. Thanks to everyone for coming and spending some time listening to us talking and for joining in. It's great that you showed up!
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