For Foucault, then, the nonhuman impresses itself onto anthropic space through the production of laws and regulations, the production of material infrastructures that manipulate human behavior and perception, and the enforcement of practices that condition human beings. In Foucault’s understanding, the human is always born into a larger historical condition that is not of the same kind as any one person’s individual experience, an experience that is, to an indeterminate degree, an effect of historical trends rather a starting point for historical evaluation.
Similarly, for Deleuze, nonhuman forces already act on the inside of human experience. Here all knowing is an inter-species effort; multiple species are always on the inside of anthropomorphic space, undermining it from within. The Kantian transcendental subject is for Deleuze a complex and multiple collective of diverging syntheses of cognition and perception. If Foucault initiates a move from the transcendental a priori to the historical a priori then Deleuze initiates a similar movement—from an historical a priori to an ecological a priori. Crucially, the enfolding of divergent species into human cognition marks not just an ecological basis for all human thought—a mark that suggests that all human thought is dependent on a multiplicity of nonhumans living and dying on the inside of human subjectivity—but more cosmically that human cognition is a higher dimensional enfolding of spacetime itself, a synthesis that makes the vastness of the cosmos thinkable to the human mind.What I like about Adam's framing of F & D here is his seemless demonstration of how each of these Frenchies are already thinking ecologically in their appeals to structure and materiality, without having explicitly stated as such. Reading Adam's post (here) reminds me exactly why the work of these two gents is so near and dear to me: each attempts to think about the structural dynamics embodied in material relations of power, subjectivity and episteme in an ecological manner.
I cannot stress enough how important it seems to me to find ways of operationalizing the insight that nonhuman forces always already act on the "inside" of human experience, as the non-human-in-human - the dark flesh conditioning and positioning hominid experience. Experiencing bodies are complex multiplicities of synthesizing assemblage - higher dimensional enfoldings of space-time...
"[M]an and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other – not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 4-5).
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"I cannot stress enough how important it seems to me to find ways of operationalizing the insight that nonhuman forces always already act on the "inside" of human experience"
hey m, if you find some way(s) to do this please let us know.
I believe it starts with axiomatic negation - the (neuro)logical instantiation of a ‘radical’ skepticism or awareness of the inherency of bounded rationality, brain-blindedness, cognitive bias, and negative capability. This fundamental cognitive development releases or at least modifies the spell of so much implicit idealism installed in our thinking as children as we enter the symbolic as language bearing creatures (echo Lacan here). Humans are bewitched by language and signification activities based on a pre-reflective thetic net of manifest imagery and habitus (operating via neuronal association and metaphor) that generates all kinds of coping-styles, projections, rationalizations, and recursive reference circuits, etc., such that we ignore, reject, confuse, explain away, flee, the always already viscerality and materiality of experience and thus existence. Moreover, we actively denial the ubiquitous and acute presence of finitude (cf. Becker), as well as mistake our implicit maps for a multitude of actual territories, in order to deal with the trauma (or “cut”) and creeping potency of the Real.
What aberrant creatures we are! So self-alienated from the elemental texture of our being and becoming that we will dream a thousand dreams and work to make them “real” before we will humble ourselves enough to feel the vulnerability and precarity that circulates within and without endlessly. I believe that once we end the self-imposing exile of transcendental thought, and accept the ephemeral nature and limits of language and narrative, the nightmare of ideology and doxic cognitions can be modified enough to begin to think materially (not materialistically, which is itself another form of idealism) and ecologically – that is, in relation to and along with the nonhumans within and without – in ways that deflates our willingness for unreflexive self-delusion and transforms our practices.
And this is not to say we can ever “get outside” or transcend the effects of our semantic copings (as communication is required), just that the only way we can fuller appreciate and articulate the immediacy and practicality of immanence is through the advent of a pitch black nihilism that does not dwell on its own achievements (as pessimism does) and thus gives way to a radically adaptive tentativeness of thought in/as ction and plasticity of praxis.
So there’s that.
How might we cultivate such cognitive developments? Via a combination of pedagogic, meditative, technologic and dialogical techniques of cultivating humans. Therein lies the rub…
Without wishing to sound too basic or something, I think this knowledge already is operationalized in the very foundations of practices like medicine. This is also born out by the question-answer:
"How might we cultivate such cognitive developments? Via a combination of pedagogic, meditative, technologic and dialogical techniques of cultivating humans. Therein lies the rub…"
This is a practice we've always been involved in and- to tell the truth here- it is the most nihilistic forces, those of the transcendetalists, the religious, that have done so most successfully.
In a sense we're really asking the question that has always been asked: what is to be done? I choose that particular question, with all its weight, because when we're talking about 'radical adaptiveness', if this isn't going to mean a reactive responsiveness that is incapable of framing fields of operation in its own terms, then we're talking about tactics.
This is a risky job because this way of understanding 'radical adaptiveness' brings us very close to talking in Leninist terms.
Again, in returning these questions to the political I don't intend to deflate their other concerns but to suggest that when we talk about having a collective self-relation we might that pursues these various modalities of praxis- pedagogic, meditative and so on- we're talking about a kind of collective practice of care of the...species, the group?
When we're talking about praxis it we seem really to be talking about project of 'collective self-mastery'. And we have to be very careful with how that plays out.
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