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Attending to the heterogeneity of experience I suggest works against the biases of both anthropocentric thinking and conscious perception especially vision which tend to exaggerate the distance between inside and outside such theories proposing that regions of our own bodiesparts of usare more deeply immersed in and immediately involved with the outside world in which we participate may enable us to become more receptive to our entanglements with unloved others and perhaps more inclined to intervene on their behalf.

Interestingly Massumi turns to Nietzsche to promote a concept of a subjectivity without a subject a doing without a doer.

The concept of heterogeneity occupies such central concerns as biodiversity diversity of kinds of life and humananimal relations how we understand the nature of differencesinkind informs our understanding of the limits and possibilities of encounters between species of different kinds our understanding of what if anything distinguishes human animals from other kinds of animal life and our understanding of the capacities if any that exist among human and nonhuman animals for concern and care across species lines.

In this section I turn to process philosophy to propose a more robust account of the effectivity of heterogeneous encounters.

So while it seems unlikely that we could ever really know what it is like to be a bat and while it is probably true at least in certain respects that a batas an abstraction from processes of becomingis a fiction asking what it is like to become a bat today when the precariousness of being is so intense may serve to remind us of all the things that remain and are worth fighting for.

Has the fungus hijacked Little Browns sensorymotor controls in a scheme to spread its spores beyond the walls of this cave?

In the multispecies encounter Nagel constructs differences in species kind function to estrange the participants from one another inhibiting Nagels capacity to understand and relate to the bat with whom he has come face to face Bat sonar though clearly a form of perception is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.

lucifugus. Who is driving this energy binge and toward what ends? Is P.d siphoning Little Browns energy for its own use?

He raised this point not because he believed that our current problems are trivial or that our devastating effects on the earths ecosystems should be accepted as inevitable or natural but rather because the tendency to avoid or deny the real forces of ecological destruction beyond the grasp of human beings is likely to demand that humans be able to controleven if only through their inactionecological destruction as such.

So approaching heterogeneities as tendencies allows us to better account for the creative potential of heterogeneous encountersfor the productivity of paradox.

The study finds dispersed dermal light sensitivity across the twospots body meaning that the animals capacities to sense changing intensities of light are not restricted to its eyes brain and central nervous system but rather are dispersedits highergrade sense organs are supplemented by less precise capacities for receptivity and responsiveness in its skin capacities enabling a direct response by the twospots skin to contrasts in light.

Warmblooded egglaying animals were birds. Coldblooded egglaying animals were reptiles. There was no place in this scheme for the platypus fig.

To approach say a fungus and an alga as individual members or representatives of a larger group defined by certain common structural characteristics distinct from those of any other group is to privilege the identity of that group at a particular moment over the transformational encounters through which its structural characteristics emerged and more important its capacities for further transformation both now and in the future.

The materialities of our bodies harbor experiences of their own which although inaccessible to conscious experience nevertheless help to compose it.

Bats are a highly diverse speciesbeing. In fact Chiroptera accounted for nearly onefifth of all mammal species in . Shortly thereafter however researchers stumbled upon piles of bats afflicted with what they would come to call whitenose syndrome one of the most devastating wildlife epidemics in recorded history which has killed millions of bats across North America and brought several species to the edge of extinction.

Whitehead continues Sense perception is the triumph of abstraction in animal experience. Such abstraction arises from the growth of selective emphasis.

I say that the turn to Nietzsche to advance this perspective is interesting because Nietzsche seems to me to argue that while it may be an error to project a doer behind a deed or to abstract a being from a process of becoming it is nevertheless a useful errorindeed it is an error without which we could not think or even live.

This essay approaches what is sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene as a period marked by a proliferation of unusual encounters.

Connolly among others who project a world of becoming replete with loose and partial connections. Where deep ecologists adhere to a cognitivist theory of experience and figure receptivity to entanglements with nonhuman others as a process of recognition and identification I ascribe to an immanent naturalist theory of experience and imagine receptivity to entanglements to be both more embodied and more uncertain.

My suggestion is that retaining a supple notion of things is more apt to sustain the ethical responsiveness so urgently needed today.

Thus Nagels central contention in his essay is not about the bat per se or even about the constraints species differences impose on multispecies encounters rather it is what the bat as a fundamentally alien form of life helps us to appreciate that subjective experiences cannot be reduced to objective factsfacts that again because they are physical are knowable from any perspective.

Like the unusual encounters opening this essay the confrontation of M. lucifugus and P. destructans is an encounter of formerly unacquainted assemblages.

Its adherents are inclined to experience themselves as estranged from the physical world because that world is seen to operate in accordance with a causal scheme that is fundamentally different from the scheme governing the subjective world of experiencing beings subjects enjoy at least some degree of freedom and selfdirection whereas objective matter blindly obeys mechanistic laws imposed on it from without.

To illustrate this I turn next to whitenose syndrome a catastrophic example of the emerging fungal wildlife diseases on the rise worldwide.

I turned to process philosophy to illustrate how a vision of heterogeneities as graduated contrasts within and between things can account for their creative potential when heterogeneities are set into motionwhen we attend to things not just for what they are but also for what they can do and becomefor the activities particular to them their capacities to do and to become.

Such an image inspires a sense of estrangement both from other experiencing subjects and from the world in which we all participate.

The contestable perspective I advance here holds that how we think exerts a strong influence on both how and what we feel and thus that less anthropocentric understandings of the human and its relations to nonhuman nature have the potential to inspire a more ecological sensibility one more attentive to and concerned for the welfare of nonhuman others such as bats.

The logic of mutual inclusion refigures species differences by placing both human and nonhuman animals on what Massumi calls an animal continuum.

On the other hand when approaching their encounter as an encounter of tendencies because the focus is already on capacities and activities rather than characteristics it is easier to make sense of the productivity of a heterogeneous encounter The rockclinging abilities of fungi combined with the lightusing abilities of photosynthetic organisms hone these organisms into a new unitlichenswith combined capacities.

This emerging wildlife disease got its start in an unusual encounter between Little Brown and Pseudogymnoascus destructans a newly documented species of fungus.

These days we are witnessing with unusual frequency encounters that are themselves unusual a young seal on a cattle farm in Australia for example twentyone miles from the nearest ocean a sea lion seeking refuge beneath an SUV on the busy streets of San Francisco a polar bear traversing a Canadian village almost as if planned on Halloween.

Feeling slightly less at home in ourselves then may enhance our feeling of responsibility to care for the home we share with others.

Extinctions and population declines sparked by species introductions are contributing at this very moment to the larger phenomenon of animal species death recently termed the Anthropocene defaunation which Rodolfo Dirzo and colleagues argue is not only a conspicuous consequence of human impacts on the planet but also a primary driver of global environmental change in its own right.

This image of an objective materiality opposed to subjective experience is an image of what could be called after Whitehead a bifurcated nature.

Perceived differences in kind pose a danger on the deep ecology view because they authorize differential more specifically hierarchical valuations deep ecology holds that ecological wellbeing entails the ideal of harmony and that harmony requires that humans recognize that all living things possess equal value themselves includedthat they adopt that is a biocentric as opposed to anthropocentric ethics.

Massumi too ascribes to the view that how we think exerts a strong influence on how we experience and intervene in the world.

I contend that unless incompatibilities within and between things are affirmed as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world the tendency to focus on the suffering and destruction caused by human activity is liable to slide into a demand that all suffering and destruction be subject to the control of human beings.

On what basis could humans be moved to act on behalf of these bats and how would they do so if they tried?

Heterogeneities in an Age of ExtinctionMultispecies Ethics Earlier I suggested that the concept of heterogeneity occupies central concerns within multispecies ethicsthe kinds of beings that exist the nature of the relations within and between them their capacities to perceive or otherwise apprehend those relations and their potential if any for care and concern across species lines.

In Thomas Nagel staged what has since become an iconic multispecies encounter in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Nagels argument that humans cannot know what it is like to be a bat because they cannot experience the world as a bat does is in some respects hard to dispute a bats capacity for echolocation for exampleas Nagel convincingly arguesmakes a bats experience of the world hard even to imagine for a human being.

Such an ethics if adopted by enough of us should on this account restore the ecological harmony lost with the onset of anthropocentric thinkingperceiving.

The classical example of symbiosis is between fungi and algae or alternatively fungi and cyanobacteria. The rockclinging abilities of fungi combined with the lightusing abilities of photosynthetic organisms hone these organisms into a new unitlichenswith combined capacities to take energy from the environment turn it into the stuff of life and degrade ambient gradients .

Here again it is difficult to parse host from pathogen are Little Browns midday excursions bids to expel P.d by exposing it to sunlight?

Hard to say. Returning to Massumis logic of mutual inclusion which seeks to account for that which interpenetrates without losing its distinction P.d and Little Brown are partially infused into one another yet remain irreducible to the other that one cannot say who is doing what means that there is still more than one who.

In process philosophy becoming is granted priority over being while process philosophers generally do not deny the existence of things subjects objects structures etc.

For Massumi it seems that a move away from things toward tendencies is thus not only a more accurate way of understanding heterogeneities but a more ethical way as well no longer hostile to differences for their transformative potential such thinking participates as a tendency among other tendencies selfdriving toward ever more inclusive immanent excess.

This logic sets heterogeneities in motionit seeks to understand heterogeneities less for what they are at any given moment than for what they can do.

What does it take they ask to capture human imagination in this perilous era known as the Anthropocene? If humans and bats are as alien to one another as Nagels essay implies can human beings come to appreciate the urgent plight of North Americas bats several species of which face the threat of extinction?

Once this interrelatedness is recognized the thinking goes ecologically ethical comportment follows since if we harm the rest of Nature then we are harming ourselves.

I offer this generic account of deep ecology to illustrate a general pointthat the concept of heterogeneity cuts across central concerns in multispecies ethics the kinds of beings that exist my relations to them my capacity to perceive or otherwise apprehend those relations and how I should respond to their needs and my own.

Here materialitythe stuff of our bodies and of the Earthis not merely awaiting instructions from without but is lively and inventive in its own right.

These theories assert that experience extends far beyond what is experienced consciously by a subject whether human or nonhuman. In this view consciousness is a highly sophisticated yet superficial register of experienceone that depends on and is partly organized by multiple heterogeneous forms of experience of lower degrees of complexity throughout an animal body.

The paradox of the platypus and the lichen is what Massumi calls a productive paradox a heterogeneous encounter out of which something new comes to be.

I engaged Massumis logic of mutual inclusion to illustrate that an emphasis on activities and capacities over characteristics is better able to explain the effectivity of unusual encounters such as those that would ultimately spawn the lichen and the paradoxical platypus but also those currently wreaking havoc within communities of bats across North America.

It endows human life with three gifts namely an approach to accuracy a sense of the qualitative differentiation of external activities a neglect of essential connections.

In a productive paradox the differences in play are not reducible to oppositions rather the paradox stages a creative zone of indiscernibility in which differences cooccur without coalescing enactively fuse without becoming confused in a dynamic proximity catapulting life into a transindividual movement of surpassing the given in the direction of the new.

destructans propagates by hitchhiking to new caves where it can spread some more. The relations of Little Brown and P.d are often figured as a hostpathogen relationship.

I turned first to Nagels iconic multispecies encounter between human and bat. Nagel was not concerned with multispecies ethics in his essay but I tried to show that a view of human and bat as fundamentally alien to one another is connected to the idea that subjective experience is opposed to objective fact.

Further the sense of estrangement inspired by such a bifurcated image may lend support to the idea of apartness at the heart of anthropocentrism among other isms.

Formal logics principle of the excluded middlewhat Massumi referred to as the alltoohuman logic of the one or the otheris hostile to life he says because it resents and consequently attempts to avoid or deny lifes processual character The world is in point of processual fact populated by events more so than things.

To make one perspective in seeing into the cause of seeing as such that was the clever feat in the invention of the subject of the I!

I presented one such draft during the Affect Theory Conference in Lancaster Pennsylvania and would like to thank both the members of the audience and my fellow panelists especially Courtney ODell Chaib for their thoughtful comments and questions. Special thanks to Patrick Giamario who offered extensive comments on two drafts of the essay.

rocks rivers Styrofoam. Nagels ultimate aim in his essay as I understand it is to defend experience from the transparency and monotony that physicalists attribute to it.

Instead of a humancentered perspective on existence in which humans are thought to be above superior to or outside the rest of Nature a number of deep ecologists have called on their readers to appreciate that ontological boundaries between living beings are illusorythat there are no boundaries and everything is interrelated.

So to figure heterogeneities as tendencies is to think in a manner both more in touch with the rest of life and more affirmative of lifes processual character.

they attach greater significance to the processes out of which things emerge and through which they endure. Process thinkers break with the substance metaphysics dominating Western philosophy since Aristotle if substancebased approaches are concerned above all with what there is process stresses what is occurring as well as ways of occurring.

As one commentator notes It was axiomatic among European taxonomists at the time that all milkproducing animals give birth to live young and so by definition are mammals.

Yet because Massumi does not identify sources of hostility to life beyond anthropocentric thinking an approach to multispecies ethics inspired by this logic to which I turn in the final section seems to me to risk undermining its noble intention of fostering care among humans for human and nonhuman others.

Thus in process thought reality is best understood in terms of modes of change change of every sortphysical organic psychologicalis the pervasive and dominant feature of the real.

Nagels characterization of the bat in these terms reflects his view that a kind of life or species is shaped in important ways by its sensory apparatuses and that its morphology strongly influences the types of activity and varieties of function that can be performed by members of that species.

This in turn has the potential to heighten our receptivity to our entanglements with these others and to perhaps inspire a heightened sense of urgency regarding their welfare.

This does not mean however that such an image enhances ones sense of kinship with other subjects for in this view of a bifurcated nature experience is understood narrowly as the conscious experience of a unified and selfcontained subject one who directs the objective materiality of its body from within.

Ecotones of experience can be understood as more public sides of ourselves participating both directly and immediately in events on the outside of conscious experience unbeknownst to us.

It might encourage us to ask for example whether the activities and capacities usually performed by seals sea lions and polar bears have been frustrated overwhelmed or undermined and what that might mean for our own capacities to do and to become on the rapidly changing planet we inhabit together.

Within ecotones of experience the boundary separating self from world is especially porous and vague though that boundary is tricky to draw no matter where we try it.

Recent research in the biological sciences showing that the skin of both octopuses and humans responds directly and immediately to fluctuating intensities of light without the involvement of either eyes or brain lends support to theories of experience articulated by Nietzsche Alfred North Whitehead and other philosophers of becoming.

This is possible researchers believe thanks to the presence of opsins in the animals skin lightsensitive proteins involved in vision and long believed to inhabit its eyes alone.

And this would distract he thought from the urgent need to address the troubles we are contributing to today. We seem unlikely Cronon continued to make much progress in solving these problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we ourselves cannot inhabit.

Adopting a more capacious vision of experience in which not one but multiple registers of experience come together to compose the conscious I may have a similar effect.

For although Nagel and the physicalists disagree about the relationship between matter and mindfor physicalists the latter is reducible to the former at least in principle while for Nagel it is notthey seem to share a common vision of matter as mechanistic and as knowable through and through.

To borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche We have to learn to think differentlyin order at last perhaps very late on to attain even more to feel differently.

Remaining mindful of the fact that the sophistication of conscious sense perception can divert attention from our more intimate and vital relations to others may work against the tendency to treat what is presented in conscious perception as exhaustive of what is and of our relations to it.

Realizing this equivalence in turn inspires those who have attained selfrealization to value all forms of life equally and to thereby contribute to the wellbeing of the whole.

In recent years research in human biology has found evidence of a similar phenomenon among human beings human skin is able to sense ultraviolet light in the same way as human eyes because skin cells contain rhodopsin the same photosensitive receptor that the eye uses to detect light.

Tendency here as subjectivitywithoutasubject is best understood not as a driver willer or effector but as a driving willing effecting with nothing behind it but its own forward momentum.

Indeed researchers now believe that for a wide range of species photoreceptors can be found throughout animals bodies where they regulate lightmediated behavior that exists below the level of consciousness and that doesnt require having an extremely precise knowledge of a light sources location in space or time.

Further as we saw in the context of evolution sometimes this zone of mutual influencing takes on or rather gives birth to a life of its own the lichenplatypus.

The central insight I wish to take from Nietzsche here is that a way of thinkingin our case a way of figuring heterogeneitiescan be evaluated not only for its truth value but also for the way of experiencing and acting that it tends to promote among its adherents.

A process orientation to heterogeneities seeks to account for their creative potentialfor the fact that occasionally out of the contrasts within and between things something new comes into being.

Of course the impact of such encounters exceeds any lowgrade sense of unease they might engender among human beings. Unusual encounters known as species introductions for instancea key driver of extinctionshave proliferated in recent decades as detailed by Elizabeth Kolbert in her important book The Sixth Extinction.

From this perspective heterogeneity is a condition of creativity from time to time for better or for worse out of the contrasts within and between things something new emerges.

Attending to the heterogeneity of experience thus alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendencies of both anthropocentric thinking and sense perception to play up the foreignness of the larger world beyond and the other beings who inhabit it.

I concur with deep ecologists and others that Western philosophys anthropocentric bias functions to anesthetize its adherents to their intimate relations to and entanglements with other kinds of life.

To bring out and play up an animals capacitiesthe kinds of things the animal can doas well as the styles and logics according to which the animal performs the activities particular to it Massumi treats what I have been calling heterogeneities as modes of activity or tendencies.

I proposed that appreciating multiple grades of experience both multiplies and softens the contrasts between matter and mind and between self and world and the other selves who inhabit it.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Mike Albert Jane Bennett Bill Connolly Adam Culver Charissa Gorman Nidesh Lawtoo Zach Reyna Mort Schoolman chad shomura and Franziska Strack and to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Environmental Humanities whose comments and suggestions greatly improved earlier drafts of this essay.

Today as unusual encounters continue to proliferate might a greater emphasis on the activities and capacities particular to species kinds augment our sense of the transformative potential of such encounters?

Moving beyond that bias on this account entails reaching selfrealization a state of consciousness in which human beings recognize their identity with the rest of nature and realize that their own interests are equivalent to or at least indistinguishable from the interests of the larger whole.

Thus heterogeneities while illusory are nevertheless real obstacles to the kinds of thinking and doing that deep ecologists associate with the flourishing of the self the other and their common world.

Heterogeneities on the Move Deep ecology as we saw above regards what I have been calling anthropocentric thinking as a central force of ecological destruction and seeks to promote a more ecological understanding of the human and its place in nature to work against that destruction.

These partly autonomous zones of experience with their own capacities for receptivity and responsiveness suggest that there is more to experience than what is experienced of it by the conscious subject.

The world is made of verbs and adverbs more primordially than nouns and adjectives. Thus a logic concerned with thingsobjects subjects structures and so onand their attributes is not only out of touch with the rest of life on this account but also hostile to it.

Such behaviors include the timing of daily cycles of alertness sleep and wake mood body temperature and numerous other internal cycles that are synchronized to the changes of night and day.

Encounters are by their very nature both plural and diverse encounters are engagements across difference confrontations for example between beings of biologically different origins.Unusual encounters are unusual in the sense that they bring familiar kinds of things together in unfamiliar and perhaps slightly unsettling ways.

Sense perception Whitehead remarks is a sophisticated derivative from the more primitive bodily experiencethat is our feelings of our essential connection with the world without and also our own existence now.

But that is as far as my agreement with deep ecology extends for its vision of interspecies concern and of the enhanced ecological health that flows from it tends to obscure heterogeneities in order to arrive at its ideal of an undifferentiated and harmonious whole.

Reducing experience to consciousness inclines us to attend only to the most superficial of our relations to the events bodies and forces outside our experience the relations discernible in conscious perception.

Massumi formulates this logic to unsettle a tacit assumption thanks to which for example Nagel can effectively dramatize the irreducibility of subjective experience to objective fact by staging a multispecies encounter the assumption that different kinds of things such as species kinds are mutually exclusive.

Such questions are at the heart of multispecies ethics. An approach to multispecies ethics will be shaped in important ways by its understanding of heterogeneities or differencesinkind such as species differences.

Let us begin with the octopus. The octopus is a master of disguise. Considering the extraordinary range of not just colors but textures that octopus bodies can assume it may seem odd that as far as scientists can tell octopus camouflage operates through vision alone.

What emerges from an encounter of previously unacquainted assemblages? What initiates such encounters and what might they signal if anything about the condition of the wider world in which they occur?

With the aid of these opsins then octopus skin appears to exert an agency of its own it bypasses the animals brain to respond directly to contrasts in light initiating a process of outward transformation without consulting the agent of the central nervous system.

Symbiogenesis is exemplary here Symbiogenesis an evolutionary term refers to the appearance in symbiotic partners of new behaviors new metabolism new tissues new organs or organelles and new gene products etc .

Lichens are not plants but symbiotic organisms which are part fungi. A substance orientation to heterogeneities will have a harder time accounting for such novelty since from this perspective the categories fungi and algae are said to exclude one anotherone cannot belong to both.

I attempt to elaborate more fully an insight that emerged from my engagement with Nagel that the effects of a heterogeneous encounter may exceed what registers of those effects in conscious awareness.

Let me try to explain. In the play of productive paradox the heterogeneities or tendencies brought together not only fail to exclude each other but actively enter into each other in the sense that having come facetoface each exerts an influence on the other.

Vision in particular exaggerates our independence from others by figuring our relations to them geometrically across space and time reinforcing the idea of ourselves as selfcontained and closed off from one another.

A process approach to heterogeneities which seeks to emphasize the activities and capacities performed by different kinds of things not only their distinctive attributes may thus encourage a more capacious sense of the possibilities and risks presented by unusual encounters such as whitenose syndrome.

Heterogeneities Within and Without Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat urges Nagel knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Writing in a different context William Cronon once argued that a sound environmental ethic must heed the unassailable evidence that many of the environmental changes we now face also occurred quite apart from human intervention at one time or another in the earths past.

In part of this essay I take up the vision of experience Nagel brings to his multispecies encounter experience he says is essentially perspectival and therefore cannot be reduced to objective fact.

This continuum frustrates the anthropocentric tendency to hold humans above the rest of nature thanks to the humans exemptionwhether because of its purportedly unique capacity for consciousness reason language or something elsefrom the mechanistic causal scheme said to be governing the latter domain.

Surely such encounters raise questions of belonging but do they qualify as political? Do they merit ethical attention and if so what would be the basis and criteria of such an ethics?

I imagine these semiautonomous zones laced with processes of receiving and responding to influences from without as ecotones of experience transitional areas between two or more distinct ecological communities in which the self shades off like an ombré into the wider world beyond.

The process appears even more mysterious considering the swiftness with which it unfolds given that cortical visual processing tends to be among the slowest processes of thoughtperception in animals with sophisticated brainbody networks.

In whitenose syndrome a zone of indiscernibility between the little brown bat Myotis lucifugus hereafter Little Brown and a fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans leverages the capacities of both to spread the fungus to caves across North America decimating bat populations as it goes.

What ensures in such a world that all these differences will get along? Recall that for Massumi heterogeneities are best understood as tendencies and that tendencies can combine forces without mutually excluding each other.

Such interactions and interinvolvements can be traced only when Little Brown and P.d are seen to partly infuse one anotherto come together in such a way as to make it difficult to tell them apart even as they never lose their distinction altogether.

Massumis philosophy not only affirms heterogeneities but seeks to promote them the more differences the better. This accords with his view that life broadly construed grows both more heterogeneous and more complex over time.

Attending to such heterogeneities I argued alerts us to more public dimensions of ourselves which we can understand as ecotones of experience transitional zones between inside and outside where I shades off into the wider world beyond and it shades off into me.

For now I would like to highlight the usefulness of the logic of mutual inclusion to account for lifes own hostilities something Massumis focus on novelty and productivity tends in my view to obscure.

Moreover while these more vital and public registers of experience are not directly accessible to conscious experience remaining mindful of them I suggested may make us more receptive to our entanglements with the events bodies and forces we experience as being outside ourselves.

In Nagels humanbat encounter differences in species kind function to depotentialize the encounterto foreclose the sorts of meaningful exchange that would have been open to the participants had they belonged to the same species.

Here I would like to raise the possibility that taken too far a move away from things toward tendencies risks obscuring real incompatibilities between activities of different kinds such as the asexual reproduction of Pseudogymnoascus destructans and the survival of little brown bats.

In Nagels case for example an image of objective matter opposed to subjective experience figures materiality as inert and mechanistic and therefore susceptible to mastery by human beings and subjects of other species kinds.

Experience Nagel argues is essentially perspectival unlike physical facts or facts that can be observed and understood from many points of view the facts of experiencefacts about what it is like for the experiencing organismare accessible only from one point of view.

To pursue this vision of experience in which consciousness is but the most sophisticated and therefore superficial grade of experience in an animal body I turn next to recent research in the biological sciences.

Nagel does not restrict consciousness to human beingsindeed he suggests that even simpler organisms may enjoy some form of itbut he does draw a sharper line between the kinds of things capable of experience organisms and the kinds that are not e.g.

Where such a vision projects a metaphysical holism and harmonious unity among living things at least once humans purge themselves of anthropocentrism I follow the lead of thinkers such as Nietzsche and William E.

In contrast to the view that the selfs identity can be reduced to consciousness and that mind directs the body Rosalyn Diprose explains that for Nietzsche the body is what compares and creates and that thought and the ego are its instruments.

But rather than reduce or diminish conscious experience to objective fact this discussion I hope inspires an appreciation for the wondrous complexity and even ingenuity of the experiential processes on which higherlevel conscious experience depends.

So consciousness on this account no longer appears as the sole domain of experience but is seen to emerge from the complex interactions and interinvolvements of a heterogeneous array of microexperiences inaccessible to consciousness but on which it depends for its possibility.

Thus rethinking the heterogeneity of matter and mind in less binary termsas grades for examplemay contribute to contemporary efforts in the environmental humanities and elsewhere to cultivate a sense of implication or entanglement with others.

Is Little Brown waging war against the intruder? Unclear. A little while later once P.d has had some time to settle in Little Brown will rouse from its sleep with unusual frequency even embarking on daytime flights in the middle of winter.

It moves so fast by exploiting bats social behaviortheir tendency to huddle together as they take refuge from the harsh winterand it spreads so widely by cajoling Little Brown to take it for a ride P.

These studies confront us not only with a unified subject of consciousness but also with dispersed microsites of experience below the register of conscious awareness where micro agents contribute to and help to compose the qualitative experience of the larger being.

To account for the creativity of heterogeneous encounters including those out of which the platypus evolved process philosopher Massumi has argued that it is necessary to overcome this alltoohuman logic of the one or the other.

This approach to identity and difference was of course common among early taxonomists witness their bemused irritated and even suspicious reactions to the paradoxical platypus a creature with fur duck bill and webbed feet that laid eggs and suckled its young.

These studies seem to me to illustrate the Nietzschean notion of a subject as multiplicityof a self composed of multiple zones of experience subsisting outside even as they organize to enable the subject of conscious experience.

Massumi formulates a new logic that of mutual inclusion to make room for the one and the other. The logic of mutual inclusion would not deny that the platypus is paradoxical rather it would urge the irritated taxonomists to rethink paradox.

I contend that appreciating the heterogeneity of experience may enable us to become more receptive to our entanglements with other species kinds even if we cannot strictly speaking know what it is like to be them.

P.d does not waste any time its incursions into bat caves are swift and unforgiving and once inside a hibernaculum the fungus can trigger what is known as a mass mortality event extirpating the local bat populations settled in for winter.

The explanatory power of the included middle zone of indiscernibility is not restricted as I understand it to the creative potential of heterogeneous encounters it is adept at capturing the destructive potential of such encounters as well.

The encounter of P.d and Little Brown features Massumis included middle or zone of indiscernibility. Early on before P.d has had a chance to manifest Little Brown who is hibernating is already burning substantially more fat than the typical uninfected M.

This mutual influencing is what Massumi calls the included middle or zone of indiscernibility between them. His idea is that one receives such influence as enrichmentas an added capacity a new power for action in the future.

I revisit that essay here because its questioncan human beings know what it is like to be a bat?is a timely one whitenose syndrome an emerging wildlife disease has killed more than seven million bats across North America since .

Tendencies he says can combine forces without mutually excluding each other tendencies resonate or interfere with each other stunt or prolong each other sap or boost each other capture each other or enter into mutually beneficial symbiosis.

Reading Nagels essay today thus invites the sorts of questions posed in recent years by scholars in the environmental humanities including Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose regarding the deaths of what Rose and van Dooren call unloved others.

Because this receptor is also involved in the skins melaninproducing defense against DNA damage researchers have concluded that as soon as you step out into the sun your skin knows that it is exposed to UV radiation.

I suggest that a vision of a unified subject of experience inspires a false sense of estrangement from the events bodies and forces on the outside of experience including bats and the whitenose syndrome with which they are afflicted today.

Yet differences in species kind are of secondary importance here for Nagel invokes the bat as a means of dramatizing the irreducibility of what he calls subjective experience to objective factof dramatizing that is their irreconcilable differenceinkind.

So one feels estranged from the world because one seems not to belong to it what happens out there cannot be accounted for in the terms with which one accounts for ones own behavior and the behavior of other subjects.

He asserts that anthropocentric thinking which for him means thinking in terms of things and their attributes is hostile to the processes of becoming through which the future flows from the past and hence to life itself.

As I interpret it the evidence presented by this research suggests the need for a more capacious vision of experience experience now extends throughout an animal body and assumes a multiplicity of both forms and gradesit appears that is heterogeneous.

They also suggest that there is more to a heterogeneous encounter than what registers of it in conscious awareness. I explore this latter insight further in part where I turn to Brian Massumis logic of mutual inclusion.

While I do not agree with deep ecologists that affirming the heterogeneities we encounter in experience as real entails anthropocentric thinking it seems to me that certain ways of figuring that reality are more apt to promote anthropocentrism than others.

While this fungusbat encounter seems to me to be better figured as destructive than as productive focusing on the encounters included middle does call attention to its effectivity to what the encounter does for better or for worse.

. So strong was their sense that an animal must be either mammal or reptile that a number of the taxonomists deemed the specimen before them a hoax the bill of a duck attached to the skin of a mole.

But to talk in terms of Little Brown host on one hand and P.d pathogen on the other and of a relationship in between is to wrestle with terms too blunt to trace their complex interactions and interinvolvements.

I have relied on deep ecology in this essay as a contrast against which to engage two thinkers who affirm heterogeneity if in importantly different ways and to promote an approach to heterogeneities as graduated contrasts within and between things.

In part of this essay I explore Massumis approach to heterogeneities as tendencies in greater detail and consider why he calls the logic of mutual exclusionof the one or the otheran alltoohuman logic hostile to lifes creative transformations.

Nietzsche also contends that human beings are not the only ones to commit such errors of thought even the lowly amoeba simplifies and equalizestreats as equal what is merely similarand indeed must simplify and equalize if it is to survive.

Yet a recent study suggests that octopus eyesight does not exhaust the animals capacities for visual perception the skin of the California twospot octopus hereafter twospot responds to fluctuating intensities of light without any input from its eyes.

The wilderness I have in mind here is the wilderness of a world of pure process a world we inheritors of subjectpredicate thinking are unlikely to feel a part of given our long history of thinking in terms of things.

Why an experiencing organism? In addition to being essentially perspectival experience for Nagel is essentially unified and subjective experience is the conscious perspective of a subjectorganism Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view.

Take deep ecology for example. Some scholars in this tradition have argued that there is no ontological distinction separating the human from other kinds of life and that any perceived distinctions are the consequence of Western philosophys anthropocentric bias.

He invokes Nietzsches discussion of lightning in which Nietzsche argues that it is an error to separate the lightning from its flash and to then take the latter for an action for the operation of a subject called lightning.

When Nietzsche describes the subject as invented he is not denying that it is real he is rather pointing to its historicity and hinting at another way we might imagine the relationship between the body and the experiencing I.

When Nietzsche describes the subject as invented he is not denying that it is real he is rather pointing to its historicity and hinting at another way we might imagine the relationship between the body and the experiencing I.

He invokes Nietzsches discussion of lightning in which Nietzsche argues that it is an error to separate the lightning from its flash and to then take the latter for an action for the operation of a subject called lightning.

Take deep ecology for example. Some scholars in this tradition have argued that there is no ontological distinction separating the human from other kinds of life and that any perceived distinctions are the consequence of Western philosophys anthropocentric bias.

Why an experiencing organism? In addition to being essentially perspectival experience for Nagel is essentially unified and subjective experience is the conscious perspective of a subjectorganism Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view.

The wilderness I have in mind here is the wilderness of a world of pure process a world we inheritors of subjectpredicate thinking are unlikely to feel a part of given our long history of thinking in terms of things.

Yet a recent study suggests that octopus eyesight does not exhaust the animals capacities for visual perception the skin of the California twospot octopus hereafter twospot responds to fluctuating intensities of light without any input from its eyes.

Nietzsche also contends that human beings are not the only ones to commit such errors of thought even the lowly amoeba simplifies and equalizestreats as equal what is merely similarand indeed must simplify and equalize if it is to survive.

In part of this essay I explore Massumis approach to heterogeneities as tendencies in greater detail and consider why he calls the logic of mutual exclusionof the one or the otheran alltoohuman logic hostile to lifes creative transformations.

I have relied on deep ecology in this essay as a contrast against which to engage two thinkers who affirm heterogeneity if in importantly different ways and to promote an approach to heterogeneities as graduated contrasts within and between things.

But to talk in terms of Little Brown host on one hand and P.d pathogen on the other and of a relationship in between is to wrestle with terms too blunt to trace their complex interactions and interinvolvements.

. So strong was their sense that an animal must be either mammal or reptile that a number of the taxonomists deemed the specimen before them a hoax the bill of a duck attached to the skin of a mole.

While this fungusbat encounter seems to me to be better figured as destructive than as productive focusing on the encounters included middle does call attention to its effectivity to what the encounter does for better or for worse.

While I do not agree with deep ecologists that affirming the heterogeneities we encounter in experience as real entails anthropocentric thinking it seems to me that certain ways of figuring that reality are more apt to promote anthropocentrism than others.

They also suggest that there is more to a heterogeneous encounter than what registers of it in conscious awareness. I explore this latter insight further in part where I turn to Brian Massumis logic of mutual inclusion.

As I interpret it the evidence presented by this research suggests the need for a more capacious vision of experience experience now extends throughout an animal body and assumes a multiplicity of both forms and gradesit appears that is heterogeneous.

He asserts that anthropocentric thinking which for him means thinking in terms of things and their attributes is hostile to the processes of becoming through which the future flows from the past and hence to life itself.

So one feels estranged from the world because one seems not to belong to it what happens out there cannot be accounted for in the terms with which one accounts for ones own behavior and the behavior of other subjects.

Yet differences in species kind are of secondary importance here for Nagel invokes the bat as a means of dramatizing the irreducibility of what he calls subjective experience to objective factof dramatizing that is their irreconcilable differenceinkind.

I suggest that a vision of a unified subject of experience inspires a false sense of estrangement from the events bodies and forces on the outside of experience including bats and the whitenose syndrome with which they are afflicted today.

Because this receptor is also involved in the skins melaninproducing defense against DNA damage researchers have concluded that as soon as you step out into the sun your skin knows that it is exposed to UV radiation.

Reading Nagels essay today thus invites the sorts of questions posed in recent years by scholars in the environmental humanities including Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose regarding the deaths of what Rose and van Dooren call unloved others.