Coexistence and the Work of Revolution

In “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, anthropologist David Graeber asks an extremely important question:

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

What is revolution? This might be the core political question of our time. In contemporary conditions where all hitherto categorical distinctions (between nature and culture, subject and object, etc.) and conventional boundaries (between human bodies and machines, between nation-states and corporations) are bleeding into each other or melting away, what resources are we to call upon in order to begin forging more humane and positive political commitments?  The very context of our lives and social actions has never been so ambiguous and massively distributed, and yet so manipulated, managed and massaged. Where do we begin?

In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“In all revolutions there are members of the privileged class who make common cause with the revolutionaries, and members of the oppressed class who remain faithful to the privileged. And every nation has its traitors. This is because the nation and class are neither versions of fate which hold the individual in subjection from the outside nor values which he posits from within. They are modes of co-existence which are a call upon him. Under conditions of calm, the nation and the class are there as stimuli to which I respond only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those pre-conscious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment becomes explicit. But it appears to itself as anterior to decision.” (p.423)

Here Merleau-Ponty accepts the conditions in which political bodies are both determined and self-determining, however haphazardly such agency might seem. It is the gathering up, positioning and self-organizing power of individuals in situ - the ‘taking a stand’ in the world – that links their imaginations and motivations to lived contexts and affords them the opportunity to transform pre-reflective conditionings into explicit revolutionary commitments. In this sense, the work of being and becoming human is always a revolutionary act in that what is latent or merely possible in us, and circulating throughout our dynamic modes of existence, is always in the process of being expressed and assembled. The very act of becoming and being human contributes the co-invention of worlds. And so political situations are always ecological and cosmological.

Transcorporeal politics, then, is fundamentally about developing, tinkering with and contesting distributed modes of generation wherein social assemblages and agentic bodies of all ontic varieties are engaged and politicized at the different levels of material and expressive organization appropriate to their functioning. Each complex matrix of possibility is a composite of material flows, associations and proximities affording different political moves, tactics and forms which includes but are never limited to symbolic representation and discursive exchanges. We always co-determine our world with other humans and non-humans (and in-humans) through reciprocal but often uneven exchanges of properties, powers and capacities – setting the very conditions for what then becomes possible. And within this simultaneously wild  and contingent field of compound possibility what we do, as one kind of being among others, affects the capacities and sustain-ability of a myriad of other entities, communities and tangible networks. The work of the revolutionary thus becomes the engagement of whole worlds: an ecological praxis enriched through sapient and sensitive explorations which flow into deliberational alterings of the very modes of our relative becoming. Revolution is co-evolution always and forever.

[[ hat tip to Adam Robbert and Jeremy Trombley on the Graeber piece ]]

Manuel DeLanda - Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture

April 9, 2004, 'Art and Technology Lecture Series' 

at Columbia University: 

Manuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952) is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, DeLanda focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.

Manuel De Landa is the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School EGS, and former Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York). He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010), and Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011) 

Politicizing the Real: Borromean Critical Theory and Material Phenomenology

Below is Levi Bryant's recent lecture at York University in Toronto talking about onto-cartography and what he has been calling 'Borromean Critical Theory'. My comments follow.

 

I have been a supporter of Levi Bryant's work for years. I certainly have moments when I grumble about this or that technical-theoretical issue but in the main I'm fascinated by how Levi's framework balances a consideration of the substantial existence of assemblages or units ("objects") with an appreciation for the complex subsistence of things, as they partake of and interface with a wider field of materials, forces and processes. Levi's recent turn to "machines" as a technical concept designed to code the compositional activity or powers of things offers a refreshing Deleuzean option for moving beyond the false antagonisms of those who privilege objects over process, or visa versa.

In the lecture above Levi re-works Lacan's borromean knot formulation to tease apart three distinct but interacting ontological registers which - when appropriately mapped and respected on their own terms and for how they contribute the fabric of the world - call for a more inclusive critical and political theory. Note that Levi deviates from Lacan's own usage of the three registers by recoding 'the Real' with a more materialist and naturalist resonance.

As Levi has written previously:

The three orders are phenomenology (or the Imaginary), semiotics (or the Symbolic), and the material (or the Real). Phenomenology or the Imaginary investigates the lived experience of human and nonhuman entities such as bats, octopi, computers, queer bodies, and so on. It investigates the openness, through channels, of various beings to a broader world. Semiotics explores various structures of coding where they exist. Materialism and naturalism (the Real) investigates the features of materiality and how they influence assemblages (natural geography, physics, neurology, the speed at which communications can travel, the calories needed to live and work, and so on)...  

With Borromean Critical Theory we thus get three reductions (in the Husserlian sense), because certain things can only be understood within each of the three orders. With the Imaginary we get the “phenomenological reduction” which consists in observing the observer, or how particular entities such as tardigrades, wolves, rocks, and satellites encounter the world about them. With the Symbolic we get the “semiotic reduction” which attends to how discourse, narrative, language, signs, and the signifier structure the world. Here we bracket the referent (the Real) and the lived (the Imaginary), and instead just attend to the diacritics of language in parsing the world. Finally, we get a “naturalistic reduction” in the domain of the Real that brackets meaning and the signifier (the Symbolic) and lived experience (the Imaginary), instead adopting what Husserl called the “natural attitude” and attending to the constraints of chemistry, physics, neurology, physiology, natural geography, and so on. There are certain things that can only be understood and know within the natural attitude, which is why we must here bracket lived experience and semiotic analysis. Paradoxically, we today live in a theoretical context where we need the resources to return to the natural attitude to discern the power that materiality exerts on life. [source]

To relate Levi's project here to some of my recent posts I suggest that discerning differences between 'the Symbolic' and 'the Real' is roughly equivalent to my proposed separation between epistemic relations (semiotic activity) and structural relations (material-energetics). Corresponding to the mode of openness that humans are there we experience a structural presentness between things prior to their being inscribed in epistemological regimes of truth. As complex assemblages with emergent capacities our mode of openness is both bodily (structural/corporeal) and reflective (epistemic), but never entirely one or the other.

Where things get tricky in the translation between Levi's model and my own distinctions here is where each of us might suggest phenomenal experience or 'the Imaginal'  fits in. To do justice to this topic I would need a separate and much longer post, but in general I will suggest that 'subjectivity' or human experience is wholly Real: which is to say, material and therefore does not require 'its' own register. Our situated animal experience is generated from the sensual-material opening of our bodies among other bodies, and as an activity-in-the-world without ontological remainder.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, was rather clear about the fundamental corporeal nature of subjectivity. In The Phenomenology of Perception he wrote, "the body is our general medium for having a world" (p.169).  Worlds open up viz. bodies. And this sensual-tangible horizon is entirely of the material-energetic plane of existence. When we perceive and experience the world we do so as sensitive-coping bodies vulnerable to being affected and able to affect the Real precisely because we partake in the consistency of structure and force that is matter-energy. We are experientially open to the world as Real because we are of it:

"Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves" (p.153).  

And as Evan Thompson (2011) notes:

"Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that conscious experiences are interior states of the mind or brain that stand as causal or epiphenomenal intermediaries between sensory inputs and motor outputs. Consciousness is rather a form or structure of comportment, a perceptual and motor attunement of the whole animal to its world. In our human case, this attunement is primarily to an environment of meaningful symbols and the intentional actions of others." [source]

Comportment is how we take a stance in the world as structured beings among actual assemblages and material flows. Merleau-Ponty borrows the notion of comportment from Martin Heidegger, who wrote:

Comportment stands open to beings. Every open relatedness is a comportment. Man’s open stance varies depending on the kind of beings and the way of comportment. All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand… (Essence of Truth)

And this experiential-bodily comportment is entirely of the order of the Real (material-energetic), just as 'consciousness' is nothing other than the dynamic expression of vibrant materials in action and milieu.

For me the point at which Levi's Borromean framework breaks down is precisely where subjectivity as phenomenal experience is abstracted from our fundamental way of being-open-in-the-world, of being sensitive material-energetic systems.  As interesting as a neo-Lacanian ontology is for all sorts of projects (as Levi demonstrates above)  I believe bracketing out the phenomenological from the material is a fatal mistake. It is fatal in two senses: first, it reinforces an explanatory gap between 'consciousness' [sentience] and materiality that evokes and supports all sorts Cartesian conceptual dead-ends and confusions about how embodied experience, intentionality and animal judgement emerge and operate in the world; and secondly, it generates all sorts of epistemological problems in terms of how we might traverse registers and gain access to the Real (issues of knowability).

In short, I think there are pragmatically more productive ways to conceive of the existence and relationship between the material-structural, semiotic-epistemic and human sentience that do not reinforce traditional metaphysical dualisms that produce their own philosophical impasses. Instead I propose a deflationary view of hominid phenomenology where 'the clearing' (or emptiness) that is situated biological perceptual awareness can be understood as an immanent feature of the Real, and radically open to the affective forces of elemental life. We need to re-cognize the sensitivity, sense-ability and sense-making nature of flesh beyond the binary of subject and object in order to become more fully conscious of the practical consequences of embodiment and our lived situations. Our practices, sciences and politics are now demanding of us something other than traditional categories.

What I find most intriguing in the quote above is Levi's claim that we now require the conceptual resources to "return to the natural attitude" which takes materiality seriously. I obviously believe this to be true, and attempting to understand and track why this is so continues to be a major pre-occupation. In a world where the ecological degradation of all systems capable of sustaining human life is accelerating, becoming and being more sensitive and responsive to our own materiality and the transcorporeality of the conditions of our existence is vital. We must become better at sensing, relating, coding and communicating about 'the Real', material-energetic tangible structureality of things if we are to be capable of coping, adapting and changing our relationships, politics and socioeconomic systems and arrangements within the current and ever shifting planetary (dis)order.

“From the vantage point of a philosophy of immanence set in a sensibility of care for this world, a pressing need today is to negotiate deep, multidimensional pluralism within and across territorial regimes” (William Connolly 2011: 83).

So while I have some reservation of the Borromean ontology Levi is working with here, I welcome his exploration of any discursive move that respects both the phenomenological  and semiotic aspects of contemporary existence while also strongly emphasizing the need for critical reflection on how we understand and more importantly interface with the non-linguistic, non-conceptual potency of matter-energy at both personal and political levels.

Dance As A Way Of Knowing - Alva Noë

"The world is its best representation." - Rodney Brooks

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. 'Externalism' about cognition and mental content is a pervasive theme in his work. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy. He is the author of the books Varieties of Presence (2012), Out of Our Heads (2009) and Action In Perception (2004).

I highly recommend all Noë's work as it mixes an exquisite blend of scientific rigor with highly sophisticated philosophical consideration. Noë argues that the way we frame the question of consciousness - the notions of 'mind', 'meaning' and neural substrates - muddles our understanding of what is basically an activity generated in the "complex causal dynamic interaction between brains, bodies and environments".  Noë work shows how sentient agents are never self-contained units of awareness but rather open living systems which only ever enact conscious experience in conjunction with the affording dynamic circumstances in which they exist. This understanding of sentience has major implications for  how we conceptualize the autonomy of agents and challenges the basis of contemporary politics and social design.



Noë from 'Home Sweet Home: Finding Ourselves', NPR, May 28, 2011:

“Consciousness isn’t something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.

Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for dance in the legs. (…)  

Both Cartesian dualism, with its insistence that the mind is separate from the body, and the contemporary dogma that that the thing inside us that thinks and feels is the brain, share a common premise: that there is a thing inside that thinks and feels and decides and is conscious. It is this assumption, shared by dualist and most neuroscientists alike, that really holds us captive. (…)  

There is as of yet no consensus on what a science of human or animal experience should even look like. I propose that what limits us, and what limits our science, is a dual misunderstanding. The first I have already indicated: we suppose that mind is in the head. No, we need to get out of our heads to understand the workings of the mind, to look at the way the animal is closely coupled to and involved with its environment. (…)  

We confuse the fabulous success of modern physics with grounds for believing that we live in the world that physics describes. And then we are confronted with the fact that the world of the physicist is a world devoid of colors and sounds and textures and odors and all the other qualities that fill up our experience. This tends to throw us back on our brains again: if the world isn’t really the way we experience it as being, then our experience must be something we confabulate, or that our brains confabulate for us. Back to the Cartesian capsule! (…)  

The basic laws of physics that support life are well understood; but this does not imply that we understand, in the terms of physics, how there is life!  

The thing is: we do not live in the world of physics. If that were so, then there would be no biology at all. No, humans and other animals live in niches. They, or rather, we, occupy landscapes of values — worlds made up not of quantum lattice structures, but of opportunities and obstacles, affordances and hinderances. Life, including our experiential lives, happen not in clouds of atoms, but on level ground, with others, surrounded by hiding places, food, friends and enemies.  

It is there, where we find ourselves, that we find the stage of our active lives and our active experience. We actually have the resources we need to understand ourselves. It is two dogmas of now antiquated modern science — that mind is in the head, and that the world is devoid of meaning unless we, or our brains, give it meaning — that creates the illusion — a meta-cognitive illusion! — that there is a hard problem of consciousness we are unable to solve.”