Jennifer Gabrys describes the potential impact of her research in a 2014 paper titled "Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City" in which she utilizes the "governance through milieu" concept of Michel Foucault. But what is that? "Biopolitics 2.0," as she terms her particular version, is less about governing individuals or populations and more about establishing environmental conditions in which responsive modes of behavior can emerge. Foucauldian governance through milieu is continually in process, and unfolds, materializes, or fails in unexpected ways, as human and more-than-human entanglements inevitably emerge.
“Using the idea of “governance through milieu,” Michel Foucault tried to capture those forms of steering and control which did not seek to influence individuals as units, but rather focused on their “environment.” Here the environment referred to systems of relations, which these individuals were embedded in and functionally dependent upon. In doing this, Foucault himself borrowed the concept “milieu” from Georges Canguilhem. According to Canguilhem, the contemporary notion of milieu refers to relationality itself, where it is impossible to separate the object from its environment.It is very difficult to merely act, or persuade others to act, regardless of how nuanced one's physical understanding of Earth systems may be, or how noble, in intention, one's appeal to a sense of interbeing or humanistic values may be. Instead it may be more fruitful to create an environment, a milieu, in which action can take root and from which it emerges. When behavioral therapists attempt to change individual habits, one of the most effective strategies (among others) is to prevent the problematic situation from occurring to begin with by taking steps to separate a person from the triggering conditions and replace those conditions with healthier alternatives. (Or perversely, make them more available, if addiction and maladaptation is one's goal.)
“Since the 1980s, Foucault's idea of government through milieu inspired several influential research agendas: Foucauldian scholars historicized colonial attempts to use different milieus, or complex material and institutional infrastructures, to control at a distance those colonial subjects who were deemed unable to reflexively govern themselves. Urban sociologists and media theorists focused on infrastructural milieus’ effects on social and political practices. Environmental sociologists and historians created a new term, “environmentality,” to analyze the emerging global climate governance. While these government-through-milieu studies developed in disparate fields, they share a focus on the governmental effects of different types of material milieus, be they urban architecture, roads or digital networks.”
A case could be made that we are unable to effectively govern ourselves under the social conditions that are all too common today. The direct route of appealing to reason cannot succeed so long as the wider milieu, the environment, in which these appeals are made isn't addressed. A seed cannot take root and grow if it isn't planted under the right conditions. Likewise, citizens under the sway of nationalist propaganda, xenophobic fears, and struggling under inequitable social conditions, cannot easily be persuaded to act in their best interest or prioritize the issues that affect them most. Explorations of biopolitics and "governance through milieu," as understood by Foucault (and Nikita Moiseev, among others) may help to address this situation.
The first observation is that when conditions are bad, people are less receptive to rational arguments, experience more internal conflict, and have increased difficulty with self organization. The corollary is that good government is more likely to emerge from a healthy environment, this particularly applies to the educational and intellectual conditions of a society, but more broadly includes many factors. If these conclusions are true, then if we want to persuade rational action on issues of concern, appealing to traditional notions of agency, whether individual or collective, is entirely inadequate. Instead of seeking to influence individuals, we must shift the focus to our environment, the systems of relations (both physical and social) which we are embedded in and functionally dependent upon.
Tim O'Reilly has been advancing the notion of "government as platform", or "Gov 2.0". He is considered the most enthusiastic promoter of algorithmic regulation (though Rahwan and Pentland may have taken that title lately), which is the modification of government policies via open data feedback. There's certainly plenty of curiosity, and skepticism, regarding this idea. Now with human computation and cyber-physical-social systems, the notion of environmentality has been expanded greatly. Shifting the point of intervention from the agent to the environmental systems of relations is a framing strategy that hasn't been utilized as widely as it might be. Maybe Gabrys' Biopolitics 2.0 deserves closer attention.
Just as for Heidegger "technicity" gets rid of the idea that some entity is the ground of all being, for Foucault biopower reveals the irrelevance of the sovereign state as the source of political power. But whereas the social understanding of technicity is well advanced, this is not the case with biopower. As Foucault puts it: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king." Since all forms of power are bottom-up, embodied in the style of everyday practices, the understanding of power as emanating from the sovereign or the state is incorrect. What Foucault offers instead is "a critical philosophy that seeks the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of... transforming ourselves." (Dreyfus) The implications of this Foucaultian notion of power for the structure of society could be as transformative as technicity has been for material culture and the new possibilities it created.
Postscript(s):
1. The way we exercise power has resulted in exceeding several planetary boundaries. Consequently we’ll need to either reconceive our notions of “power,” or our notions of “we,” or both. Cultural posthumanism examines and questions notions of who we are, that is to say, what "human" and "human nature” mean. And as a result of this process, power is inevitably re-examined as well. It may be that one cannot effectively address the Anthropocene without productively engaging with posthumanism.
2. The "extinction rebellion" demonstrations of mid to late 2018 are the sort of thing one should expect, very appropriate really - a rejection of the notion that humans have a right to destroy nature, which is something that is quite plain to see if one just bothers to look. We are not the center of this world, nor the measure of all things. This is a rebellion against “Vitruvian man”, that iconic image and the emblem of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Faith in the unique, self-regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason forms an integral part of this high-humanistic creed, which was essentially predicated on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance ideals.” As Bert Olivier writes, "it is no surprise that since the end of the Second World War humanism has been subjected to one critique after the other, emanating from feminism, postcolonial studies, anti-racism, anti-nuclear, pacifist and animal rights movements, among others."
3. “The conventional Humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to… position subjectivity in a continuum with the totality of things.” (Braidotti 2017) This is critical to understanding the approach of posthumanism, but it is not new in and of itself. According to philosopher Walter Benesch, the Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras* of Clazomenae (500 BC) asserted that the world of objects was a continuum of all things in all things. Every thing had some of every other thing in it… nothing can ever be completely separated, that is, cut off from everything else. We live in systems that live in us… the human in nature and nature in the human. (Benesch 1997) Surely Anaxagoras recognized the same difficulties that posthumanists do today.
Benesch studied Eastern philosophy as well as being familiar with early Greek philosophy; the language of continua is shared both by Anaxagoras (and related schools of thought), and Chinese Taoists and Neo-Confucians. The similarities between these and posthumanism are impossible to ignore. Now contrast this with the atomistic (particle) view of reality espoused by another Pre-Socratic, Democritus of Abdera (460 BC), which defines our contemporary perspective of the world and hence our notions of what it means to be human. As Benesch concluded, “These Pre-Socratic poles of ‘essence as continuum’ versus ‘essence as particle’… are the source of our definitions, our knowledge, and our values.” Notice, this is exactly what posthumanists like Braidotti are seeking to uncover and highlight. It is a return to an ancient debate.
*Born on the coast of present-day Turkey, Anaxagoras lived in Athens for some thirty years until he was indicted on the charge of impiety and sentenced to death. He left Athens and spent his remaining years in exile. His materialistic beliefs and teachings were based on three principles of metaphysics:
No Becoming or Passing-Away
Everything is in Everything
No Smallest or Largest
4. "In Mahayana thought, particularly Huayan, interdependent causality is understood as an all-embracing web of causal relations defining reality: to say that something is real is to say that it participates in causal relations with everything else that can be said to be real. As opposed to a linear conception of causality, this is a "holographic" model in which at every moment, everything is, in some sense, simultaneously the cause and effect of everything else. This approach acknowledges reality, but not fundamental reality, and acknowledges causality, but not first cause, thus avoiding the kind of ontological commitment which Buddhism generally takes to be the most proximate cause of suffering.
A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena or "perfect interfusion." This includes the views that "practicing one teaching is practicing all teachings." This is not only an effective slogan to encourage people to practice, but more importantly a kind of pragmatic value of perfect interfusion. [Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “interbeing,” probably not coincidental.]
Sources:
Imre Hamar, "Reflecting Mirrors: Perspectives on Huayan Buddhism" (2007)
Alan Fox, "The Practice of Huayan Buddhism" (2015)
5. In an interview with Carl Jung, which aired on the BBC televison series "Face to Face" in 1959, John Freeman asked Jung about whether he believed a third world war was imminent. Keep in mind that this was during the climate of the then ongoing Cold War. Jung replied, in part:
"We need more
understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists
is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of
it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be
studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil."
Fast
forward 57 years, and we have Reza Negarasanti, an Iranian philosopher
and writer. Steven Craig Hickman writes: "Negarestani’s project brings
the Enlightenment mission of Kant to its logical conclusion in the
erasure of the human(istic) world view, and of the human as such.
Instead, as he’ll remind us, we are now heading to an open field of
possibilities..." As Cary Wolfe says, "this thing we call “human” is
bound up with all sorts of forces and factors that aren’t “human” at
all." What's more, per David Roden, humans have no "essence" to begin
with anyway. So what are we to make of Jung's injunction to study human
nature?
Negarestani said:
"The practical elaboration of making a commitment to humanity is
inhumanism." It should be noted at the outset that his use of the term
"inhuman" is very different from the conventional meaning, whose synonym
is unethical or immoral. Instead, it denotes more of an "alterity," the
state of being other or different; otherness. Jung wrote at length
about the need to confront difficulties of similar scale. And Jung's
fascination with alchemy and its symbolism of opposites means that he
would likely understand Negarestani's comment instantly. We
are obliged to pursue a line of reasoning to its conclusion, no matter
where it may lead us. And as we approach a clearer understanding of
human nature, it evaporates before us, dissolving into various inhuman
forces and factors, and prompts a reconceptualization in which the
figure of the "human" appears, at first glimpse, unrecognizable. But I
would suggest it is far more real.
6. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' “How We Became Posthuman” is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention.” And it has to be among the best books, perhaps the best, on this topic I have read, certainly from a foundational perspective. The fact that it was published in 1999 and we still haven’t fully internalized the wide ranging implications of these insights speaks volumes. Hayles succinctly identifies a key problem with our conventional understanding of agents, autonomy, subjectivity, and therefore any project (such as humanism) for which these are foundational concepts. This is the reason Foucault and Jennifer Gabrys lured me in. Hayles writes:
According to Hayles, autonomous will is an illusion, and “distributed cognition” is the real nature of our condition. “Even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components.” From this perspective, in so many words, if distributed cognition doesn’t solve climate change, nothing will. There’s no other game in town. Hayles is sensitive to concerns such as climate change that affect “the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.” That is the last line of her book. (p291) In a sense, the majority of our current models already implicitly acknowledge the distributed nature of cognition, though I would argue they (and we) would benefit far more if this network/systems/distributed view was more explicitly acknowledged.
I love this paragraph about the “erotic anxiety” brought about by a way of thinking so fertile that it could synthesize the social and natural sciences into a single field of inquiry. Lately this possibility has been entertained a lot, but without a full appreciation of the implications that Hayles draws out. Why? Erotic anxiety over “pleasurably tight coupling” (Haraway) and reconstituted boundaries. In philosophy and psychology, eros is the desire for wholeness, and although it may initially take the form of passionate love, it is more accurately a desire for "psychic relatedness," a desire for interconnection and interaction. It is the will to live, to create life. Herbert Marcuse wrote "Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight."
7. It appears to me that strategies for control, whether in business or politics, are concentrating less on objects, spaces, or bodies, and more on boundary conditions, interfaces, and rates of flow. This is simply because it is nearly impossible to separate an object from its environment (that is, the systems of relations in which it is embedded and functionally dependent upon). Or to put it another way, the subject and object do not exist in isolation, but interpenetration. Consequently, if you want to understand or influence something, no matter how big or small, then you must understand all the sorts of forces and factors it is bound up with. From this it is also clear that effective governance would likely focus less attention on individuals or populations per se, and more on establishing the environmental conditions in which responsive modes of behavior can emerge. (See also 無為.)
8. “Materialism” is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions. “New materialism” or “vital materialism” reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter, as an active force, is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience.
9. Norbert Wiener wrote “Let me lay the ghost of another pseudo-scientific bogy: the bogy of ‘wholism.’ If a phenomena can only be grasped as a whole, it is completely unresponsive to analysis.” And if whole systems are unresponsive to scientific analysis, then they are not available for serious inquiry. “The whole is never at our disposal.”1
This raises an interesting question. Is holism an incorrect view of reality, or does it rather reveal the limitations of scientific inquiry and present a challenge, one to be investigated at the frontiers of complexity theory? I believe Weiner’s frustration with those who ignore such limitations suggests the latter more than the former. But as Katherine Hayles revealed, Wiener was also disturbed by the possible lack of boundaries for the liberal human subject, which holism would imply.2 (Ironically, Wiener’s area of scientific inquiry later created the tools for making the intractable problem of holism more receptive to analysis.)
According to Spinoza, all things are simply modes of a common substance, and every mode is in turn a mosaic of simpler parts. Deleuze took this a step further, pointing out that all things have the ability to affect and in turn be affected by other things. This entails continual invention, and the formation of alliances, assemblages, and synergies (per Peter Corning).3 All things can both mod(e)ify and be modified by others. We need a conceptualization of the part-whole relationship that reflects this “mosaicism," as Bennett persuasively argues.4 This process is already well underway. Haraway shows how we are letting go of the dictates of bounded, possessive individualism, human exceptionalism, and zero-sum games, and replacing these with a paradoxical world of holobionts, holobiomes, and symbiogenesis within an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.5
1 Thomas Rid, “Rise of the Machines” (2016)
2 N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Became Posthuman” (1999)
3 Peter Corning, “Synergistic Selection” (2018)
4 Jane Bennett, “Vibrant Matter,” chapter 2 “The Agency of Assemblages” (2010)
5 Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” chapter 3 “Sympoiesis” (2016)
10. Midway through reading Jane Bennett's book "Vibrant Matter," I reflected upon how profoundly the easily overlooked material conditions of my life influence my thoughts and desires. Something as innocuous as changing my posture can reorient my priorities and mollify my senses. The recursive loop of actions and wants offers numerous points of intervention. "Vibrant Matter" provides one of the most useful entry points for how to address environmental issues. Like her material subject matter, her book forms a node within a network of academic research that intersects with similar issues, an assemblage of critical scholarship. And it suggests numerous potential avenues for cross-fertilization with other areas. Unfortunately, it is also a somewhat foreign perspective for most people, and might require a bit of translation before it can work its way into broader public awareness.
Combining Bennett's insights into the political implications of vital materialism (especially those extrapolated from Dewey and Rancière) with Judea Pearl's analysis of causality, intervention, and mechanism would be interesting. Pearl quoted Alan Turning, who wrote "The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages. The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up. ...If he can trace a cause for some weakness he can probably think of the kind of mutation which will improve it." Turing was right in that we can analyze causality in this way, and I think his approach would be amenable to Bennett's "new materialist" understanding, though to my knowledge this hasn't been explicitly looked at. As Bennett points out, "The machine model of nature, with its figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. It has been challenged by systems theory, complexity theory, chaos theory..." (91). But how could it not be scientific? What Bennett is doing throughout her book is attempting to synthesize the ideas of many theorists on the subject of material relations, and central to her process is criticizing the binaries that we uncritically fall back on and that pervade our viewpoints. Even the title of her book is intentionally provocative by suggesting an ostensibly oxymoronic synthesis: "Vibrant Matter." So when she says matter is not inert, she's saying that insofar as we assume the binary of animate/inanimate to inform our worldview, and into which all things can be categorized, respectively into the one or the other column, this is no longer scientific. In fact, such terminology has become so thoroughly contaminated with cultural associations that it is probably easier to replace it with new terms.
We are in a better position today, following work done in social physics and cybernetics by Sandy Pentland and Rodney Brooks (respectively), to begin to realize Lovecraft's notion of "correlating dissociated knowledge." If we can expand the notion of social physics to be even broader than what Pentland originally intended, we may approach the sort of understanding Bennett suggests is required. I don't think it would be too presumptuous to say that such a project would catalyze dramatic changes in philosophy, science, politics, and economics (understood as industrial ecology).
Returning to my earlier claim that Bennett outlines a very promising entry point for environmental and health related issues, Bennett asks "What, in sum, are the implications of a (meta)physics of vibrant materiality for political theory?" (94). Here is where she turns to Dewey, Rancière, and Latour. I won't repeat her here, but her argument is worth reading in full. "Is the power to disrupt really limited to human speakers?" (106) Clearly not. Easily overlooked, but one of the greatest sources for political disruption has been and will remain environmental change. Understanding how climate change burst onto the political scene in the last 50 years requires an understanding of nonhuman actants, and, Bennett would argue, a corresponding gestalt shift in perception. ...Bennett says we are "selves who live as earth," as Haraway noted "we are all compost." The symbolism of dirt is powerful, as the metaphor "dust to dust" clearly attests.
11. If Bennett's exploration of agency in "Vibrant Matter" isn't rigorous enough, then Hayles' book "Unthought" provides a closer look. While we have generally been unaware of the cognitive contribution provided by our environmental milieu, her analysis suggests this may be increasingly hard to overlook. Hayles attempts to formulate the idea of a "planetary cognitive ecology" that includes both human and technical actors. As she writes in the preface, "We live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale... My hope is that these ideas will help move us toward more sustainable, enduring, and flourishing environments for all living beings and nonhuman others."
This reminds me of David Grinspoon’s hypothesized Sapiezoic (inspired as it was by Vernadsky's noösphere, among others). Grinspoon asks, "In analogy to our new understanding of human health, rather than assuming we're the disease, can we seek to play the balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the commensal microbiome of Gaia? ...People are in great need of some larger perspective. We need to have a long-term vision of where we want to go to help us through this time of alarming short-term threat." Maybe Hayles has that vision. As she writes:
"If decentering the human is a major thrust of contemporary cultural theory, including animal studies, posthumanities, new materialisms, and other such projects, the entire basis for cognition shifts to a planetary scale, in which human actors are but one component of complex interactions that include many other cognizers. Whether consciousness is a crown or a burden, or both together, must be reevaluated in this larger context of planetary cognitive ecology — and perhaps beyond planetary as well." (110-111)
"Then the question becomes... how networks of non-conscious cognitions between and among the planet’s cognizers are transforming the conditions of life, as human complex adaptive systems become increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages. If contemporary cultures in developed societies are presently undergoing systemic transformations that are profoundly changing planetary cognitive ecologies, as I have argued, then the humanities should and must be centrally involved in analyzing, interpreting, and understanding the implications. Anything less is a disservice to their missions — and to the world. To riff on the quotation with which I began: It all depends on what kind of world you want." (216)
Hayles uses the terminology of cognitive science to analyze how power is created, extended, modified, and exercised by "cognitive assemblages." Here she makes her case that "cognizers at all levels" are ethical actors who "have special roles to play in our evolving planetary ecologies." (This reminds me of Peter Corning's oft-repeated statement that "a complex modern society is, in essence, a collective survival enterprise." Hayles just extended the notion of society to include cognizers at all levels.)
6. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' “How We Became Posthuman” is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention.” And it has to be among the best books, perhaps the best, on this topic I have read, certainly from a foundational perspective. The fact that it was published in 1999 and we still haven’t fully internalized the wide ranging implications of these insights speaks volumes. Hayles succinctly identifies a key problem with our conventional understanding of agents, autonomy, subjectivity, and therefore any project (such as humanism) for which these are foundational concepts. This is the reason Foucault and Jennifer Gabrys lured me in. Hayles writes:
“Moreover, the idea of the feedback loop implies that the boundaries of the autonomous subject are up for grabs, since feedback loops can flow not only within the subject but also between the subject and the environment. From Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject, the version of the "human" with which I will be concerned.”
“If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.”
“In the posthuman view conscious agency has never been "in control." In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures. If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of course, this is not necessarily what the posthuman will mean - only what it can mean if certain strands among its complex seriations are highlighted and combined to create a vision of the human that uses the posthuman as leverage to avoid reinscribing, and thus repeating, some of the mistakes of the past.”
 |
| Source: How We Became Posthuman |
I love this paragraph about the “erotic anxiety” brought about by a way of thinking so fertile that it could synthesize the social and natural sciences into a single field of inquiry. Lately this possibility has been entertained a lot, but without a full appreciation of the implications that Hayles draws out. Why? Erotic anxiety over “pleasurably tight coupling” (Haraway) and reconstituted boundaries. In philosophy and psychology, eros is the desire for wholeness, and although it may initially take the form of passionate love, it is more accurately a desire for "psychic relatedness," a desire for interconnection and interaction. It is the will to live, to create life. Herbert Marcuse wrote "Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight."
7. It appears to me that strategies for control, whether in business or politics, are concentrating less on objects, spaces, or bodies, and more on boundary conditions, interfaces, and rates of flow. This is simply because it is nearly impossible to separate an object from its environment (that is, the systems of relations in which it is embedded and functionally dependent upon). Or to put it another way, the subject and object do not exist in isolation, but interpenetration. Consequently, if you want to understand or influence something, no matter how big or small, then you must understand all the sorts of forces and factors it is bound up with. From this it is also clear that effective governance would likely focus less attention on individuals or populations per se, and more on establishing the environmental conditions in which responsive modes of behavior can emerge. (See also 無為.)
8. “Materialism” is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions. “New materialism” or “vital materialism” reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter, as an active force, is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience.
 |
| Symbiogenesis |
This raises an interesting question. Is holism an incorrect view of reality, or does it rather reveal the limitations of scientific inquiry and present a challenge, one to be investigated at the frontiers of complexity theory? I believe Weiner’s frustration with those who ignore such limitations suggests the latter more than the former. But as Katherine Hayles revealed, Wiener was also disturbed by the possible lack of boundaries for the liberal human subject, which holism would imply.2 (Ironically, Wiener’s area of scientific inquiry later created the tools for making the intractable problem of holism more receptive to analysis.)
According to Spinoza, all things are simply modes of a common substance, and every mode is in turn a mosaic of simpler parts. Deleuze took this a step further, pointing out that all things have the ability to affect and in turn be affected by other things. This entails continual invention, and the formation of alliances, assemblages, and synergies (per Peter Corning).3 All things can both mod(e)ify and be modified by others. We need a conceptualization of the part-whole relationship that reflects this “mosaicism," as Bennett persuasively argues.4 This process is already well underway. Haraway shows how we are letting go of the dictates of bounded, possessive individualism, human exceptionalism, and zero-sum games, and replacing these with a paradoxical world of holobionts, holobiomes, and symbiogenesis within an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.5
1 Thomas Rid, “Rise of the Machines” (2016)
2 N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Became Posthuman” (1999)
3 Peter Corning, “Synergistic Selection” (2018)
4 Jane Bennett, “Vibrant Matter,” chapter 2 “The Agency of Assemblages” (2010)
5 Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” chapter 3 “Sympoiesis” (2016)
10. Midway through reading Jane Bennett's book "Vibrant Matter," I reflected upon how profoundly the easily overlooked material conditions of my life influence my thoughts and desires. Something as innocuous as changing my posture can reorient my priorities and mollify my senses. The recursive loop of actions and wants offers numerous points of intervention. "Vibrant Matter" provides one of the most useful entry points for how to address environmental issues. Like her material subject matter, her book forms a node within a network of academic research that intersects with similar issues, an assemblage of critical scholarship. And it suggests numerous potential avenues for cross-fertilization with other areas. Unfortunately, it is also a somewhat foreign perspective for most people, and might require a bit of translation before it can work its way into broader public awareness.
Combining Bennett's insights into the political implications of vital materialism (especially those extrapolated from Dewey and Rancière) with Judea Pearl's analysis of causality, intervention, and mechanism would be interesting. Pearl quoted Alan Turning, who wrote "The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages. The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up. ...If he can trace a cause for some weakness he can probably think of the kind of mutation which will improve it." Turing was right in that we can analyze causality in this way, and I think his approach would be amenable to Bennett's "new materialist" understanding, though to my knowledge this hasn't been explicitly looked at. As Bennett points out, "The machine model of nature, with its figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. It has been challenged by systems theory, complexity theory, chaos theory..." (91). But how could it not be scientific? What Bennett is doing throughout her book is attempting to synthesize the ideas of many theorists on the subject of material relations, and central to her process is criticizing the binaries that we uncritically fall back on and that pervade our viewpoints. Even the title of her book is intentionally provocative by suggesting an ostensibly oxymoronic synthesis: "Vibrant Matter." So when she says matter is not inert, she's saying that insofar as we assume the binary of animate/inanimate to inform our worldview, and into which all things can be categorized, respectively into the one or the other column, this is no longer scientific. In fact, such terminology has become so thoroughly contaminated with cultural associations that it is probably easier to replace it with new terms.
We are in a better position today, following work done in social physics and cybernetics by Sandy Pentland and Rodney Brooks (respectively), to begin to realize Lovecraft's notion of "correlating dissociated knowledge." If we can expand the notion of social physics to be even broader than what Pentland originally intended, we may approach the sort of understanding Bennett suggests is required. I don't think it would be too presumptuous to say that such a project would catalyze dramatic changes in philosophy, science, politics, and economics (understood as industrial ecology).
Returning to my earlier claim that Bennett outlines a very promising entry point for environmental and health related issues, Bennett asks "What, in sum, are the implications of a (meta)physics of vibrant materiality for political theory?" (94). Here is where she turns to Dewey, Rancière, and Latour. I won't repeat her here, but her argument is worth reading in full. "Is the power to disrupt really limited to human speakers?" (106) Clearly not. Easily overlooked, but one of the greatest sources for political disruption has been and will remain environmental change. Understanding how climate change burst onto the political scene in the last 50 years requires an understanding of nonhuman actants, and, Bennett would argue, a corresponding gestalt shift in perception. ...Bennett says we are "selves who live as earth," as Haraway noted "we are all compost." The symbolism of dirt is powerful, as the metaphor "dust to dust" clearly attests.
 |
| Source: Unthought |
This reminds me of David Grinspoon’s hypothesized Sapiezoic (inspired as it was by Vernadsky's noösphere, among others). Grinspoon asks, "In analogy to our new understanding of human health, rather than assuming we're the disease, can we seek to play the balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the commensal microbiome of Gaia? ...People are in great need of some larger perspective. We need to have a long-term vision of where we want to go to help us through this time of alarming short-term threat." Maybe Hayles has that vision. As she writes:
"If decentering the human is a major thrust of contemporary cultural theory, including animal studies, posthumanities, new materialisms, and other such projects, the entire basis for cognition shifts to a planetary scale, in which human actors are but one component of complex interactions that include many other cognizers. Whether consciousness is a crown or a burden, or both together, must be reevaluated in this larger context of planetary cognitive ecology — and perhaps beyond planetary as well." (110-111)
"Then the question becomes... how networks of non-conscious cognitions between and among the planet’s cognizers are transforming the conditions of life, as human complex adaptive systems become increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages. If contemporary cultures in developed societies are presently undergoing systemic transformations that are profoundly changing planetary cognitive ecologies, as I have argued, then the humanities should and must be centrally involved in analyzing, interpreting, and understanding the implications. Anything less is a disservice to their missions — and to the world. To riff on the quotation with which I began: It all depends on what kind of world you want." (216)
Hayles uses the terminology of cognitive science to analyze how power is created, extended, modified, and exercised by "cognitive assemblages." Here she makes her case that "cognizers at all levels" are ethical actors who "have special roles to play in our evolving planetary ecologies." (This reminds me of Peter Corning's oft-repeated statement that "a complex modern society is, in essence, a collective survival enterprise." Hayles just extended the notion of society to include cognizers at all levels.)
12. Hayles on the topic of biosemiosis and the semiosphere: "As you know, biosemiotics did not originate with information theory but with von Uexküll’s umwelt theory. It therefore addresses the process of meaning-making by considering the meaning-maker as a subject with a specific world-view, that is, its umwelt. This makes it fundamentally different from the purely quantitative (and subjectless) information postulated by Shannon and Wiener. What I especially like about biosemiotics is precisely this subjective orientation, which it combines in a very convincing way with empirical research on biological processes ...I am experimenting with the idea of biosemiotics and overlapping (never entirely coinciding) umwelten of humans and computational media. Yes, there are profound differences in embodiment, but there are also functional homologies."
Tags: biopolitics, biopower, cultural hegemony, environmentality, eco-environmentality, embodied cognition, enactivism, extended cognition, extended self, externalism, functional contextualism, contextual behavior science, Michel Foucault, governmentality, milieu, postmodernism, situated cognition, situationism, social constructionism, transcorporeality, parliament of things (Latour), actor-network theory, posthumanities, posthumanist politics
Sources:
Jennifer Gabrys, Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City (2014)
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016)
Jennifer Gabrys, Becoming Planetary (2018) "The prevailing genre of the human has excluded more-than-human entities and relations."
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Soviet Policy Sciences and Earth System Governmentality (2018)
Gabriela Valdivia, Eco-Governmentality, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (2015) (Eco-governmentality is a Foucauldian-inspired power analytic.)
Hubert Dreyfus, "Being and Power" Revisited, (from "Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters," 2003)
Thomas Lemke, An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism (2018)
Rosi Braidotti, Inhuman Symposium: Posthuman, All Too Human? A Cultural Political Cartography (2015) (The history of philosophy is intensely political. We could ask ourselves the question: If Spinoza in the 17th century already had an understanding of the unity of matter with flows of becoming, then how come his philosophy disappeared and we are in for two and a half centuries of Descartes? That may be because dualism is a much simpler system of governance, and Spinoza's nature-culture philosophy displaces the centrality of Anthropos.)
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Critical Theory (from "Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures," 2016)
Rosi Braidotti, A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities (2018)
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of a Posthumanist (2017) "Being posthuman is not a mark of contempt. "Human" never was a unitary term to begin with, but rather one that indexes access to rights and entitlements. No amount of universalism can conceal the fracture, the internal contradictions and external exclusions that have always composed a notion of the human. Rather, subjectivity is on a continuum. The knower is not Anthropos alone, but a more complex - embodied and embedded, non-unitary, relational and affective, nomadic and collaborative subject." (What do you see when you look in the mirror? Anthropos alone? Or a more complex - embodied and embedded, non-unitary, relational and affective, nomadic and collaborative subject? What is seen? What is not seen?)
Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Manifesto (2005) “First we had God, humans and nature. The rationalists dispensed with God, leaving humans in perpetual conflict with nature. The posthumanists dispense with humans leaving only nature. The distinctions between God, nature and humanity do not represent any eternal truth about the human condition. It merely reflects the prejudices of the societies that maintained the distinctions.”
David Roden, Deconstruction and excision in philosophical posthumanism, The Journal of Evolution & Technology 21/1, (2010), 27-36. "The posthuman, according to Hayles, does not signify the “end of humanity” but the end of a conception of the human as self-present, autonomous agent that “may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice."
David Roden, Roden on the Posthuman & the Transhuman (2014) “Posthumanists reject anthropocentrism; they may, but need not, claim that humans are becoming more intertwined with technology.”
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution (2015) (How does the notion of the "holobiont" help shape a posthuman perspective? E.O. Wilson once said if he could start his life over he would work in microbial ecology. Perhaps the ecology of the microbiome is a good place to begin.)
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (2010) “Humanism gives us an overly simple picture of what the human is. Posthumanism points toward the necessity of moving beyond the philosophical simplifications of humanism (many of them self-flattering, of course!) to arrive at a much thicker, more complex and layered description of this thing we call “human” and how it is bound up with all sorts of forces and factors that aren’t “human” at all (our “animal” biological inheritance and how it shapes our emotions, our behavior, our needs and wants; our ecological embeddedness as creatures of evolution in a web of life not of our making; the ahuman exteriority and technicity of the archives and prostheses of memory and culture, and so on).”
Cary Wolfe, Is Humanism Really Humane? (2017)
Francesca Ferrando, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations (2013) "As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse."
Stefan Herbrechter, What is Critical Posthumanist Education? (2018) "We’re no longer happy with traditional ways of defining what it means to be human. We are struggling to define us, and questioning the process of definition itself, whether defining is a helpful move because defining is always against others. But we’re in this together, we need everybody, and this opens up wider questions about where a possible future lies."
Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin (2015) "No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too... All critters share a common “flesh,” laterally, semiotically, and genealogically."
Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble (2014) "We are all lichens now. We have never been individuals. From anatomical, physiological, evolutionary, developmental, philosophic, economic, I don’t care what perspective, we are all lichens now."
Kaisa Kortekallio, Becoming Compost (2017) (Posthumanism critiques the modern tradition of human exceptionalism, domination of the material world, and the categorical separation of nature and culture.)
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985) "Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions. Chief among these are self/other. But why should our bodies end at the skin? Is there a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves? To be one is to be an illusion, and two is only one possibility. This is the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not and does not exist as a subject. When the integrity of natural objects is questioned in this way, control strategies no longer concentrate on objects, spaces, or bodies (as they do today), but instead on boundary conditions, interfaces, and rates of flow."
Michael Allen Fox, A New Look At Personal Identity (2007) "DNA certainly seems like a tempting physical carrier for personal identity, because it’s as identifying of oneself as anything can be. But even here, hopes are dashed for identity. The human body contains between one and ten trillion cells. It turns out that only ten percent of the DNA present within our bodies belongs to our own cells; the rest resides within the ten to one hundred trillion bacteria and other organisms of several hundred species which inhabit our bodies. Hence it now looks as if what counts as my body, although macroscopically quite specifiable, is, from the standpoint of genetic coding, only ten percent mine. This leaves us with the awkward conclusion (which we shall have to accept) that to be me is to cohabit my body with trillions upon trillions of other organisms, whose genetic coding radically deviates from my own DNA blueprint. My body is no longer simply my body."
Peter Wolfendale, The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens (2015) "The project of critical posthumanism deconstructs the humanities and reconstitutes them as the post humanities. The focus lies in dissolving the defining metaphysical oppositions of classical humanism such as between body and mind, nature and culture, and even biology and technology, and thereby undermining associated normative hierarchies in the realms of sex, class, race, and even species. ...Concern with theoretical responsibility motivated a parallel concern with practical autonomy. This formalized the emergent individualism of classical humanism and became central to the sort of subsequent political culture of modernity."
Benesch, Walter “An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy” (1997)
Benesch, Walter and Eduardo Wilner Continuum Logic (2002)
Steven Craig Hickman, David Roden and the Posthuman Dilemma: Anti-Essentialism and the Question of Humanity (2017) (David Roden believes that the whole gamut of metaphysical notions of Being and Substance derived from Plato/Aristotle and the traditions they spawned provide a misleading picture of reality. As he writes, “to say that a human essence exists is just to say that there is a set of individually necessary conditions for humanity.” Instead, Roden believes humanity has no fixed stable presence, no essence, and that we are formless, malleable, and open to alteration through adaptation and disequilibrium.)
Anna Marmodoro, Anaxagoras's Qualitative Gunk (2015)
John Sisko, A review of Anna Marmodoro's book (2017)
Anna Marmodoro, Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras's Metaphysics (2017) "Anaxagoras is the first gunk-lover in the history of metaphysics. He has a unique conception of gunk and a unique power ontology: power gunk."
Dan Lam, Drippy Blob-Like Sculptures Develop Sparkly Color-Changing Surfaces (An artistic interpretation of Anaxagorean gunk: Intricately detailed, yet formless, and infinitely decomposable.) "Dallas-based artist Dan Lam organizes her gloopy sculptural works into three categories that perfectly capture the form factor of her general aesthetic: Squishes, Drips, and Blobs."
Neil Badmington Theorizing Posthumanism (2003)
N. Katherine Hayles, Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions.
N. Katherine Hayles, Why We Are (Still) Posthuman (11/15/17) t=1:08 ("We participate in cognitive assemblages. The challenge of the posthuman is to create affirmative ways to go forward without abandoning the cognitive assemblages in which we are so deeply enmeshed, and that involves very complex questions about how regulations are to be forged in a way that will make this possible, how ethics needs to be rethought when agency is distributed between devices and humans, and so forth. So I think there is an enormous amount of work to be done. But without some vision of an affirmative future toward which we move, I don't see how we can begin on making that work.")
"The nonconscious has a tremendously important role to play in understanding human mental life. It can, for instance, provide new insights regarding the various affinities and commonalities we share with animals as well as technical systems. The tripartite framework can be envisioned as a pyramid, with modes of awareness at the top, supported by nonconscious cognition below it, and underneath that are material processes. While this metaphor grants the “highest” position to consciousness, it also allots to conscious/unconscious modes of awareness the smallest volume of space. This accurately reflects the conclusion that many cognitive scientists now accept, that human behaviour as a totality is comprised much more of nonconscious cognition than of consciousness. Which brings us back to the issue of profoundly questioning the implicit assumptions underlying the autonomous humanist liberal subject. ...This entails highly political questions that can point either toward an inclusive and progressive, or an exclusory, direction.")
Josephine Bosma, Interview with N. Katherine Hayles (1998) ("I am very interested in ideas of subjectivity that are not rooted in classical, traditional, liberal ideas. The liberal tradition really grows out of the notion that one owns oneself. First of all one owns one's body and from this ownership of one's body grow all the social institutions like market relations and so forth. This construction of the subject is bound up from the beginning with capitalist social and economic structure. There may be other ways to think about the subject that don't found themselves first and foremost on this notion of ownership. New technologies open up possibilities for rethinking other ways to begin to construct the subject.")
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