Bruno Latour - Reenacting Science

Bruno Latour gave a lecture titled 'Reenacting Science' at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland on February 20th 2012:


 

 h/t Adam Robbert

Bruno Latour - From Critique to Composition

From DCU:

Bruno Latour visited Dublin City University on Friday, February 17th for a special seminar on interdisciplinarity, the arts and the sciences, entitled 'From Critique to Composition'. Prof Latour is a leading figure in contemporary anthropology and science studies, but the reach of his influence is truly interdisciplinary.

In a provocative discussion with academics and students from many disciplines, Prof Latour signalled that the old certainties of science that have existed since the 17th century are under threat, both as a work of knowledge and an institution. By referencing how current environmental crises are placed under categories of study such as 'Gaia theory' and 'the anthropocene era', Prof Latour asked that the concept of 'nature out there' with its 'matters of fact' no longer be the only goal of ' the sciences' but rather to address our common world by identifying 'matters of concern'. Prof Latour continued his Irish visit with a public lecture in the Science Gallery on Monday 20th. 

The seminar, and Prof Latour's trip to Ireland, was organised with the combined efforts of the Celsius interdisciplinary research group at DCU, the French Embassy and the Science Gallery, with special thanks also to Trispace, DCU.

Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at the London School of Economics and in the History of Science department of Harvard University. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris where he is also the Vice President for Research. After field studies in Africa and California, Prof Latour specialised in the sociological analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies on science policy and research management, influencing the fields of Science and Technology Studies and political ecology. His books include Laboratory Life, Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies and Politics of Nature. 

h/t Adam Robbert.

Evolving Eternity

“Art is Lies that tell the Truth” — Pablo Picasso

One of my favorite things about blogging is getting the chance to communicate and exchange ideas with so many intelligent, aware and educated people. As a non-academic I don’t believe there would be any other way to exchange the thoughts, information and research I do here. I am so grateful for this opportunity.

I was reminded just how true this is last week in debate with Adam, Matt and Jason about eternal objects, form, universals, philosophical concepts generally and the nature of ‘mind’. To be sure, there are many notions and positions each of us defend which overlap and/or complement each other, but there seem to be some important divergences as well. I am fairly certain that we all share a naturalistic understanding of consciousness and human life, but our points of reference and discursive aims tend to act as barriers (at least for me) to commensurability and agreement about some of the key issues at play. No doubt we will continue to work through these issues as we go along our individual ways, but I truly appreciate all the comments and enjoy the time they afford me to reflect.

A great example is Matt Segall's recent response to my previous post on matter and contingency (here). Matt's response continues our discussion (started here) about Whitehead, eternal forms and materialism with a beautiful post (here) about the “becoming of being” and the eternal. Matt’s words overflow this post with the kind of wisdom that becomes possible only when genuine inquiry and mythopoetic intelligence meet.

Fortunately Matt's post also reminded me of a special piece of wisdom I hope I never forget: that every story we tell about the world and how it works remains simply a story. Some stories are crafted to tell us a whole lot about natural facts and scientific objects, while others are created to help us interpret those facts, and move us beyond our meager technical perceptions into expanses of imagination unencumbered by the contingencies of physical existence. And so any story I might want to tell will ultimately leave out much of what someone else’s story is capable of telling.

So what differences exist between the stories I want to tell and those Matt wants to tell? Quite a lot as it turns out, but not in a way that should disparage what either one of us are up to. Overly simplified, I would characterize our interests as moving in opposite theoretical directions while seeking to end up covering the same cosmological grounds. That is to say it seems to me that Matt wants to think the Absolute (unity), with an eye towards cultivating the existential implications which flow from an acquaintance therein, while I want to think the Possible (multiplicity), with a wonky fish eye towards negation and the positive mutations that come from reigning in our animal speculations. (I wonder if a Tibetan Buddhism vs. Zen Buddhism analogy might be apt here?) Both orientations are positive and inherently worthy of exploration, and both projects seek to understand the cosmos as a living, evolving and mysterious process. Our differences, then, can only serve to amplify a broad curiosity shared by both, while also animating our discussions and debates with many critical considerations. And for that I can only be thankful.

Matt writes:

My process philosophy is rheological, like Michael’s; but it is not just that, not just a scientific study of the flow of matter in the world. It is also a love of the way of wisdom in the world. Philosophy–at least as it was known when the word, and the way of life, was brought forth and developed in the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers–is concerned not only with contingent flows but with the “becoming of being,” the way of eternity, the living unity of the temporal universe.

 I would like to think my philosophy is not "just" a minor riff on scientific studies of the flow of matter, but also a speculative pragmatism working with the raw empirical conditions of the cosmos to generate alternative modes of being, knowing and doing – at least on a personal level. The task I have given myself is to try to understand as much and as deeply as possible about the world we come from. For me this task entails a fierce refusal of the myths and lies that surround us, until such time as those myths and lies reveal ‘truths’ that can no longer be refused. My interests also deal squarely with the “becoming of being” but in a way that allows being’s becoming to intervene on the conceptions I am willing to make of it-them. So, in this spirit, to decide too strongly on the character of that which intervenes of-itself prior to the interventions themselves is to allow a symphony of accumulated human concerns to drown out the possibility inherent in the world itself.

Of course it would take a lot for me to cash such statements out in strictly philosophical terms, but I do believe such values require some sort of theoretical minimalism governed as much by the darker implications of the ecological sciences (method) as by speculative probings of interpretive innovation (theory). Moreover, the stories we want to tell about matter, energy, stars, planets, creatures, etc., need to embody a radical appreciation for all those humbling, visceral, morbid and raw facts and realities of material existence at their foundation. To think the cosmos and the planet as responsible earthly creatures we must think earthly and creaturely thoughts. We must not only think and talk about ‘matter’, but rather start from our perceptions and realizations of the reality that we are thinking-matter. In this context,  anything less than a critical, yet careful and rigorous, reevaluation of all existing myths, poetics and discourses seems to me un-thinkable.

Matt writes:

Natural science itself already assumes the unity of the universe, that it is cosmos despite its chaos, even where it seems to methodologically require that intelligent freedom be kept distinct from a contingent and purposeless reality (i.e., that some mixture of mentality not be assumed to exist already in all materiality). This seeming methodological requirement of a modest witness to objectify neutral matter cannot be metaphysically justified. Philosophy, if it is to be anything more than an apology for nominalistic materialism, is the attempt to think the complex unity of intelligence and nature, to participate in the One Life organizing the whole.

I certainly agree there is no reason to assume we could ever deploy a completely objective perspective in the world, but I also do not believe it is reasonable to assume that subjectivity already exists in “all materiality”. It seems to me that both positions deal in extremes and are equally ruinous to creaturely thinking (or what we might call wilderness thinking) because both assume far too much. The objectifiers assume neutrality and the subjectifiers (panpsychists?) project experientiality; the former fails to recognize the potency or vibrancy or inherent activity of matter and energy, whereas the latter fails to circumscribe their own functional capacities and attributes.

As for philosophy, some would argue it has a propensity for apologizing for whomever wields its intellectual authority, or for whomever creates the most fashionable set of arguments. Philosophy is whatever we make of it. In an academic setting it can be a set of commentaries on a canon. In a personal context it can be a value-system and guide for living. On the streets it can be a means of survival or style of communication. In a stratified class-culture it can be a weapon or a means of oppression. There are no solid boundaries with philosophical thought. The genre is thinking as such, and the actions are always decidedly human. “Alchemical hermeneutics” and “anarchic re-engagement” indeed.

Matt writes:

Eternity’s participation in time does not imply the erasure of contingencies or the permanence of physical laws. Laws are cosmic habits. They could have been otherwise. What couldn’t have been otherwise is that cosmic memory (i.e., intelligence as it acts in time) would form habits of some kind.

Eternity evolves and surprises itself in creative acts of novelty; our thought and our deeds are no exception. I don’t know if it could be otherwise and I don’t think we can assume. I only try to know what is. And we can only speculate about what could be by intimating ourselves as much as possible with what already is. We are expressions of a world as primordially potent as it is complex. Figuring out how this is so, what can be learned from it, and how best to live in/as it is the real challenge and opportunity before us.

Dorothea Tanning - Family Portrait (1954)

Dorothea Tanning passed away on January 31, 2012 in New York City. She was 101 years old. This painting says so much about the American family circa 1950s:

Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait (1954)

Matter, Contingency, Chaos and Math

Matt Segall provides some interesting comments in relation to our debate about formal and material causes: here.

Let me first say that I find it extremely difficult having to grapple with Whitehead’s system at the same time as attempting to remain open to possible points of engagement with Matt’s unique perspective. Right now I cannot detect where Matt’s reading of Whitehead ends and his own thoughts on these issues begins.

To be quite honest (although not intended maliciously), I’m not overly interested in getting too involved in what Whitehead thinks on these matters because, from what I can determine so far, I would have to willfully become entangled in all sorts of categorical disagreements and questionable debates to even begin translating Whitehead’s metaphysics into something I can work with. Not that WH’s system is completely useless, unworthy of exploration, or that it is just plain silliness, because obviously that would be an absurd claim to say the least, but rather that I, personally, find little philosophical use in repurposing concepts and discourses that seem to me to be based on dubious frames of reference (e.g., ancient Greek categories) and faulty premises (e.g., panpsychism).

Now I know such statements might come off as extremely arrogant (which is undoubtedly a fair assessment), but I would suggest that my position is motivated more by important strategic and practical impulses. For example, let us assume that Western philosophy is indeed a series of “footnotes to Plato”. By that logic are we not simply locked into patterns of thought and reference that remain overdetermined by what a single person (or school of people) has imagined? I find the idea that this might be the case extremely terrifying. Do we really want to assume that the limits and heights of human imagination have already been mapped out by a long-dead pre-scientific Greek aristocrat? I’m not convinced. I respect the ‘giants’ we all stand upon but I also think we are at a point in cultural history where we can do much much better.

As an alternative to canonical reinvestment what I suggest is a radical rethinking of human experience, conception and activity via an anarchic re-engagement with contemporary ecologies of practice and knowledge. For me this starts with phenomenological inquiry and involves a rigorous methodological pluralism, but what else this might entail can be left for later discussion. For now I just want “anarchic re-engagement” to signal a disenchantment with institutional discourses and traditional categories that lies at the heart of my discomfort with trying to understand the cosmos in explicitly metaphysical terms.

However, this is not in any way intended as a criticism of Matt, as my impression of him has always been that he possesses a keen intellect and demonstrates an amazing degree of sensitivity. I simply offer the above statements as a prefatory note to let Matt and other readers know where I am coming from AND, more importantly, that my interest in this discussion is squarely on finding out what Matt thinks about these issues. Matt, I am more interested in finding out what you have decided about the nature of reality outside of (or at least beyond) what you have read about in some guy's book.

That said, let me shift gears and address some of Matt’s specific points:

Matt writes:

“Occasions decide which forms will ultimately come to characterize the actual world of their experience. Forms are not ‘imposed’ upon actual occasions from outside. Much of the character of experience, especially for lower grade occasions like electrons and photons, is decided unconsciously through conformal prehension of past decisions. Physical science concerns itself with the general habits of such low grade occasions. But higher grade occasions like ravens, coyotes, and primates, are not so determined by physical prehensions of past actualities, since they have a heightened experience, through conceptual prehension, of future possibilities. In human occasions of experience, this futural perception reaches its near apogee. In Process and Reality, Whitehead discusses our conceptual prehension of eternal objects in terms of consciousness’ capacity for negation–to see the facticity of not only of that grey rock there and to know it could have been otherwise, but to see the whole of the visible universe and know the same.”

Setting aside the assumptions about the supposed panpsychic character of such interactions (an assumption I vehemently reject), I'm happy to read Matt accepts that 'form' is generated through actual occasions, but from what is expressed above I still don’t understand ‘eternal objects’ as being anything more than the reification of possibility abstracted from actualities. I don’t have too big a problem with such abstractions, as they are generally helpful with generating innovative responses to complex situations, however reifying them as “eternal” makes no sense to me. We only have limited access to the contingencies of nature as they have unfolded so far and there is nothing that leads me to believe that the so-called “laws of nature” won’t change barring some future cosmic event. So what makes them "eternal"?

Maybe we can work in Meillassoux here a bit with regards to taking contingency to its ultimate conclusion. If there is truly no non-material, external or ‘eternal’ reason for cosmological “laws”, then maybe we should embrace immanent chaos as a positive truth about the world and attempt to build our knowledge from that? Unlike Meillassoux however, I believe that the experience and truth of finitude leads not to the Absolute, but to the resolute – as pragmatic coping flowing from a realist attitude.

Matt continues:

“The contingency of nature is not mere chance, but the result of will--will which leans toward more degrees of freedom as moves through the series of natural kingdoms, at first an unconscious flow of emotion, only later rising to the level of the symbolic and intellectual articulation of emotion.”

If Matt would permit me to translate “will” to mean the inherent potency of energy-matter as it has continued to evolve and become expressed as complexity, then I wouldn’t disagree with the claim above. I think the more complex assemblages of energy-matter become (the more depth they have) the more degrees of “freedom” (behavioral plasticity) can be achieved. The capacity for cognitive recursion and symbolic re-mediation of primal impulses in humans allow us to express a unique kind of potency (affectivity) in the wider field of activity (wilderness of being).

Matt writes:

“You argue that 'pure difference' is at the base of materiality, but I am uncertain what you mean. Wouldn't its supposed 'purity' already be a sign of contamination by identity? Its the old ("archaic"?) problem of the one and the many, of cosmos and chaos.”

By pure difference I mean the original asymmetry of spatiotemporal distance and elemental diversity inaugurated by the primordial expression of potency in our cosmos, otherwise known as the “big-bang”.  I don’t think the issue of the one and the many is much a problem at all - beyond the limitations of hominid brains - but rather a basic fact about the unitas multiplex we all come from. (see also Badiou’s arguments for the “radical originality of the multiple”)

Matt then writes:

"The challenge Plato left for philosophy is how to think the in between. Contemporary physics, so far as I understand it, no longer studies nature as substance, but as interlocking processes of formation. This is not all that different from the Schellingian interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, as unpacked by Iain Hamilton Grant."

I would argue that “interlocking processes of formation” are substances. A substance is any composition capable of affecting or being affected in a manner that expresses a temporally consistent structure (what Bryant calls 'endo-structure'). Yet all substances remain intra-active at various scales and vulnerable becoming impinged upon or entangled with a wide range of other material assemblages. Materiality is simply what the cosmos is doing in its anarchistic expansion, diversification and complexification.

To be sure the way I think about “matter” has very little in common with how it may have been conceived in the past. From what I can determine material substances are active, open and implicated in a variety of complicated relationships which make any actual occasion or assemblage a temporal achievement readily vulnerable to destruction (annihilation) and/or further construction (emergence). This is, of course, leads directly to my thesis of precarious causality - as the dynamic flow and differentiation of energy-matter intrinsically capable of generating complex, wild and intra-affective ecologies. To think the "in between", then, is to think about relationaility of inter- and intra-affective substances, and the ways in which particular relationships afford spaces and occasions for possibility and novelty to arise. 

One of the reasons why I think OOO is so compelling for a lot of people is because we intuitively sense the importance of thinking ‘the many’ (as substances or “objects”) at the same time as acknowledging ‘the one’ (as immanence or flat ontology). I’m not sure overemphasizing the objectal features (e.g. temporal consistency) of reality at the expense of process, as some versions of OOO seem to do, is the best way forward, but I certainly respect the notion of irreducibility and individuation at play in the work of certain authors.

Matt writes:

“In my prior post, I wasn't referring to sunsets as eternal possibilities, but to a particular shade of red realized in the sunset. "Red" certainly cannot be explained by reference to the physical bodies you've listed, though I would agree about its ecological origins. "Red" is what Whitehead called a subjective eternal object, capable of realization in any number of actual occasions though not reducible to any one in particular or to all in summation.”

And what exactly requires us to conceive of the occurrence of “red” as an object, much less an eternal object? To endorse such an interpretation is to sneak Platonism in the back door.

First of all the color red is not an object. Red is merely what happens when you get a particular set of material assemblages together in particular spatiotemporal configurations. When certain onto-specific entities (e.g. humans, suns, earths, hydrogen atoms, H2O molecules, etc) and certain amounts of light are assembled “red” occurs.

Of course this opens all sorts of questions about subjectivity, but I’ll short circuit that debate for now by suggesting that subjectivity itself is a unique activity matter is capable of expressing under certain circumstances. Capacities for imagination, apprehension and intellection are emergent features of complex assemblies of matter.

Matt writes:

“Qualities like redness, and quantities like the number 17, cannot be explained by reference to materiality, since materiality itself would be meaningless without reference to quality and to quantity (which for Whitehead, unlike Kant, are not categories of the human mind, but forms of definiteness characterizing prehension in general).”

I’m not sure I follow you here Matt, but I can only respond by saying that I believe the number 17 taken by itself is a mere abstraction – a utilitarian projection of possibility gleaned and tokenized from actual instances and embodied encounters of multiplicity.

In Where Mathematics Come From (2000), George Lakoff and the psychologist Rafael Nunez  argue that our inborn ability to distinguish objects, to recognize very small numbers at a glance and to add and subtract numbers up to three, has allowed us to develop mathematics via an ever-growing collection of metaphors. From our common experiences of standing up straight, pushing and pulling objects, and moving about in the world we devise a whole host of abstract ideas and then internalize the associations among them. In this sense, maths are primarily human generated systems of abstraction and symbol manipulation, however useful and important. In fact, Lakoff and Nunez argue that we create and come to use most abstract concepts this way.

“Conceptual metaphor is a cognitive mechanism for allowing us to reason about one kind of thing as if it were another. …It is a grounded, inference preserving cross-domain mapping—a neural mechanism that allows us to use the inferential structure of one conceptual domain (say, geometry) to reason about another (say, arithmetic).” [Lakoff and Núñez 2000: 6]

 As for "quality", well, again, I don't subscribe to the notion that all existing entities have experience, so that would lead us into a debate about what human consciousness entails and the how we might reject the quality/quantity distinction in favor of more precise ontological categories, and so I will leave that for another discussion.

Object-Oriented Art?

I'd like to know more about WTF this guy is up to:

This Elemental Life

In response to my recent comments about embodiment and ontology Matt Segall writes:

“Forms can have no cause or effect independently of their realization in and through some actual occasion. But still, form cannot simply be reduced to its material instantiations, either. Forms, in Whitehead's terms, are possibilities of definiteness. They determine (or allow occasions to determine) how an occasion will be characterized. If we dispense with forms as ontologically basic, we have not at all sided with concrete reality over abstraction. On the contrary, without the participation of eternal objects (Whitehead's term for forms in his reformed Platonism), "matter" and "energy" can take on no definite quality. They remain vague abstractions lacking all particularity.”

Here I think Matt is presupposing the function of the term in dispute (i.e.‘form’) prior to explaining why “matter” is incapable of expressing structure of itself. Instead, I argue that ‘matter’ and energy express formal relations via the differential distribution of their primordial properties. That is, energetic-materiality is an expression of primordial activities (the pure difference at the origin of manifestation) which have unfolded temporally to generate a wide range of contingent and dynamic associations and intensive differences. And some of these activities and compositions have further coalesced into highly complex and emergent ‘occasions’.

I want emphasize the self-organizing properties or sufficiency of energy-matter rather than support archaic formulas that posit ‘form’ being imposed on ‘matter’ from without. Matter is a self-sufficient potency that becomes structured according to the primordial cosmological constraints and intensive differences inherent to particular temporal evolutions. The immanent possibilities of actual occasions, then, are expressions of the morphological capacities inherent to the life-trajectory of particular (cosmological and historical) material realities.

"Just as capacities of thought, of being, are made in lived bodies, in complex and delicately conjoined tissues and processes, and just as powers are inherent in all matter, materialism also requires that the capacities of activity, thought, sensation, and affect possible to each composition whether organic or not are shaped by what it is, what it connects to, and the dimensions of relationality around it." (Fuller 2005: 174)

At base, my conception of “matter” only signifies the structural efficacy (tangibility) of cosmo-historical occasions and assemblages as they continue to evolve. How “matter” actually operates and what it involves is still up for debate, but I would argue that it is without a doubt stranger, more active and self-organizing than has hitherto been assumed.

Matt continues:

“To be concrete means less to be material than it does to be some actual occasion with this or that particular shade of definiteness. These shades of definiteness, say the red hue characterizing the sky during yesterday's sunset, are eternal possibilities awaiting and only sometimes gaining temporal realization. In our cosmic neighborhood, matter-energy/space-time participates in specific forms of definiteness constraining what is possible; these can be symbolically expressed via mathematical notation (what Whitehead refers to as the objective species of eternal object).”

I have never seen evidence of any of that. Definiteness is not granted by God nor is it imposed by the eternal laws of nature, but is the result and expression of the inherent potency of matter contingently related. “Matter-energy/space-time” does not participate in forms, it is the very ground upon which participation is possible. Sunsets are not “eternal possibilities” but immanent actualities generated through the emergent activities and collaboration of photons, electrons, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, earth, etc., etc., as they are “stacked” into particular living ecologies. World-flesh is self-sufficient complexity.

UPDATE: Levi Bryant has a great post explaining why hylomorphism just doesn't work: here. Levi writes:

Matter is both structured and anarchic. Order does not descend from above, but is rather always a communistics or anarchistic result… Which is to say it is always the result of the collaborative interplay structured matters that are simultaneously passive and active. It’s hard to overcome our will to mastery (which is really, I think, what hylomorphism is libidinally about), but hylomorphism is metaphysically mistaken, epistemically mistaken, and politically and ethically dangerous. Bergson famously argued that there’s no such thing as disorder, but rather “disorder” is just the absence of order that we’d like to have for the sake of our own action or aims. Simondon and Deleuze make similar points, though in a far more refined way. These arguments continue to hold today, yet they still, I think, have not been heard. Ontology, politics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have still not become flat… Which is to say, anarchistic and communistic.

Hell yeah anarchistic and communistic... A veritable Wilderness of Being.

Embodiment, Information and Fundamental Ontology

In response to my recent post on a paper by Katherine Hayles (here) Adam Robbert has provided a fairly salient criticism of Hayles' characterization of Richard Dawkin’s self-gene theory, on the way to opening up some interesting questions about the relationship between the notion of embodiment and information theory.

To be sure, what I like most about both Hayles and Dawkins in this context is their shared notion that humans are compilations, or kludges: assembled actants organized via the often divergent agencies (potencies) of their parts, and defined by complex levels of operation - and thus never truly singular or completely withdrawn from their own influential parts nor the environment in which they subsist. Humans and non-humans are assemblages with distributed agencies expressed in the collaboration of parts and whole, and not individualities cut off from the depth and multiplicity of their inherent animating dynamics.

In relation to information theory, Adam writes:

"A quick thought on Kauffman. As far as I know, Kauffman is using mathematical principles to deepen our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. I raise this point in connection to Hayles comment that 'we are first and foremost embodied,' a comment which I have no problem with in principle but begs the question: if Kaufmann is right then some how organizational patterns in the universe can be preserved and re-instantiated through the development of different self-organizing systems. In other words, the universe has an organization-preserving capacity (or “memory,” as Whitehead might say) and so we ought to consider what this means for embodied particularity (Whitehead attempts a solution to this, but that’s another story). So, I like where she draws attention to the dynamism between metaphor and constraint but I wonder if she doesn't privilege constraint (a la the British empiricists) when it seems that we do in fact inherent (always contextualized) patterns of information. I say this more as a point for further discussion than out right disagreement."

I’m not sure I follow here? No pattern exists independently from the actual material-energetic systems in which they are observed. “Organizational patterns” are abstractions from embodied systems not expressions of them. Mathematics is a patchwork system abstracted models and metaphor which represent physical systems but should never be confused for the actual systems themselves. That is to say, there are no actually existing trans-material organizing impulses or patterns “within” material-energetic systems. Let us not mistake map for territory here. To do so is to accept, however implicitly, a Platonic theory of ideas/essences.

Generally I find information theory to be unhelpful for ontography. The cosmos is not made of ones and zeros but of differential intensities and assemblages of energy and matter. Humans have reified naturally occurring extensive and intensive binary groupings and sets of relations through the use of numbers/symbols – but, again, operationalizing human representations of actual systems does not necessarily entail that the “patterns” we envision are anything other than observed tendencies inherent to onto-specific assemblies.

Moreover, I’m not sure what Adam means by a universal “memory” - unless we want to talk about something like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic resonances, in which case I am not at all convinced. (Can you explain a bit more Adam?)

Adam continues:

“In short, I’m interested in how speculation and empiricism meet in the world. The former generates the capacity for metaphor, hypotheses, mathematics, memory, and imagination; while the latter provides quantification, history, particularity, and embodiment. Of course the one has never existed without the other, and not it’s not even clear to me that the two can be distinguished in anything but an analytic way.”

I would argue no clear distinction can be made outside of talking about very specific methodologies (perceptual tools) and discursive practices. All human interpretation involves speculation because our conceptions are inherently limited, iterant and full of différance. That is, our epistemes are intrinsically withdrawn from the objects of our conception. Even “quantification” is abstraction in this sense.

The problem, as I have said many times before, is that humans become enamored and entangled in the partiality of our ‘maps’, to the extent that we tend to misunderstand our abilities and capacity for engaging possibilities inherent to our direct relations with the ‘territory’. The main issue as I see it is that we need to develop more adaptive and less dogmatic speculations within general ecologies of energy-matter, perception and practice in order to cultivate healthier sense-abilities and modes of being. And a fundamental move towards such creative re-groundings and action would be to recognize the fundamental structures of possibility – first through deep phenomenological investigation and then with pragmatic dialogical gestures.

In terms of what Hayles has to offer, embodiment, situatedness, constraint are realities that should never be willfully displaced based simply on the whims of speculative metaphysics but instead integrated into a speculative praxis grounded in perceptual attenuation and practical projects.

Elemental Flesh?

Although I think Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “matter” in the passage below and elsewhere is somewhat archaic and anemic, I hold the truth of the world-flesh as self-evident. The tangibility and facticity of the world is the immanent location of action – the absolute ground of consequence, continuity, intimacy and causal precarity; and thus all meaning.

Prior to thought and “translation” there is the Real as potent possibility:

“The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the things as well as my own body) some "psychic" material that would be – God knows how - brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts "material" or "spiritual." Nor is it a representation for a mind: a mind could not be captured by its own representations; it would rebel against this insertion into the visible which is essential to the seer. The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now. Much more: the inauguration of the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a word: facticity, what makes the fact be a fact.” – Merleau-Ponty [source] 

UPDATE:  Access, Ontological Intimacy and Thickness 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty’s writes,

“[H]e who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at... It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body.” (p.134-135)

Hayles on Specificity, Constraint and Complex Agency

N. Katherine Hayles has long been one of the most cogent thinkers flowing from the nebulous half-world of literary criticism. Her razor sharp insights into the operating assumptions animating complexity theory, cultural productions of scientific discourse and philosophy can act as an immunization for intelligent readers from the pernicious contaminations of mutant philosophic metaphors and underconcretized speculation. Hayles criticizes and enriches a wide range of socially relevant discourse formations, from the folk-metaphysics of information theory to the self-effacing fantasies of contemporary posthumanism.

In the paper linked below Hayles compares and explores the rhetorical structure and key assumptions embedded in the work of Richard Dawkins, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari. Along the way, Hayles demonstrates the importance of taking embodiment, constraint and onto-specificity seriously when investigating real-world systems. And humans, as Halyes later demonstrated in her amazing book, How We Became Posthuman (1999), are no exception: we are first and foremost embodied, and that embodiment - and the actions deriving thereof - are located and specific.

Here is a key passage from the text:

“Juxtaposed, these two versions of the posthuman indicate that a principal area of contestation is the struggle to envision what will come after the fracturing of consciousness. Is the goal to develop new forms of consciousness, either through displacement into other entities or through emergent behaviors achieved in and through artificial life forms? Or is the goal to experience an unimaginably vast range of behaviors that are literally unthinkable as long as consciousness reigns as the arbiter of identity? In different ways, both of these alternatives decontextualize our relations to each other and to the non-human world. Both deny that distributed cognition implies distributed agency—Dawkins by giving all the agency to the genes and none to conscious human subjects, Deleuze and Guattari by giving agency to the desire that alone drives the endless mutations and transformations.

I prefer a third alternative, in which constraints act in dynamic conjunction with metaphoric language to articulate the rich possibilities of distributed cognitive systems that include human and nonhuman actors. Neither completely constrained nor entirely free, we act within these systems with partial agency amid local specificities that help to determine our behavior, even as our behavior also helps to configure the system. We are never only conscious subjects, for distributed cognition take place throughout the body as well as without; we are never only texts, for we exist as embodied entities in physical contexts too complex to be reduced to semiotic codes; and we never act with complete agency, just as we are never completely without agency.” (Hayles 2001:158)

 Read More Here: Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari (2001), by N. Katherine Hayles