Nietzsche on 'the will to life'

Entangled materiality as potency - without the awkward vitalisms of previous discarded attempts at explanation. An inherent potency as relentless as it is undefinable..

  “Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian … Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Where does power come from? It congregates, co-habituates, coagulates, and reverberates via the expressive modes of existing assemblages as they express their structural relation. Affect writ large, and distributed according to whatever field of possibilities it negotiates in the making of bodies without limits other than those set out in the generative dynamics (historicity) involved in each and every specific ontic composition. To affirm the will to life is simply to acknowledge the facticity and potency of existence however ex nihilo it may seem from within.

on clear and present morality

In “Their Morals and Ours”, Leon Trotsky laid out some sobering reflections on justification and sentiment:

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man [sic] over nature and to the abolition of the power of man [sic] over man [sic]…  

Morality is one of the ideological functions in this struggle. The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. It pursues the idea of the “greatest possible happiness” not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality. The mixing of this cement constitutes the profession of the petty-bourgeois theoreticians, and moralists. They dabble in all colors of the rainbow but in the final instance remain apostles of slavery and submission.

The dabbling and application of moral sentiments is the emotive’s approach to ethical deliberation and action. Without clear and present investigation - critical as well as syncretic - we humans become slaves to the dominant ideologies (as infomatic regimes) infusing current institutions of extraction and alienation.

And for what? For whom? Know your enemy, both within and beyond.

HENRi

Yet another fantastic speculative ontography of sentience:

“HENRi is an emotionally powerful short film, which explores human existence at the most fundamental, personal level—what it means to be a conscious individual. 

Hundreds of years in the future, a derelict spacecraft, controlled and powered by a human brain, floats aimlessly in the outer reaches of space. HENRI, the name of the ship's power system, is an acronym which stands for Hybrid Electronic / Neuron Responsive Intelligence, and was the first of Earth’s Neuro-Tech space exploration research vessels. Trapped in the cold, mechanical prison of the vessel, the “brain,” which has no recollection or concept of self, gradually begins to experience disjointed images of its former life—images it cannot understand. Carrying the remains of a crew long dead, and becoming increasingly self-aware, HENRI experiences the instinctual desire to be free. Yearning for freedom and yet unable to move, the brain devises a plan to build itself a mechanical body from parts of the ship. Maybe then it will understand the images it is seeing—maybe then it will feel alive.”

Written and Directed by Eli Sasich, produced by Jefferson Richard and Dominic Fratto, and starring Keir Dullea and Margot Kidder.

Learn more: HERE

The Transcendental Positionality of Experience?

[ please note: this is only a draft fragment of a work-in-progress]

Part 1 / Transcendental Positionality [0]

Žižek is correct about the formal structure of the “I am” in the intelligibility of the universe. Without situated experience there can be no formal appeal to the Other, and no logical grounds upon which we can say that we know anything at all. Awareness is always already situated: a perception from a particular position within a terrain of possible perspectives. That is, the “transcendental subject” cannot be explained away without giving up all claims to knowledge.

1.1 - Framing the Transcendental

Transcendental philosophy includes approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology (which is a description or theory of being and its forms), but as the framework of validation of the very knowledge of being - what Immanuel Kant argued as the conditions of possibility for human knowledge. In seeking the transcendental conditions of knowledge previous to (a priori) any experience traditional metaphysics is converted to epistemology. Through such framings transcendentalism prioritizes the conception of being (thought) over the presence of beings (world) which describing experience.  

1.2 - Maintaining the Transcendental in the Empirical

Why must the transcendental positionality of experience be an ontologically distinct “subject” at all? Is it not the empirical case that our locus of awareness is an 'objective' cognizing body? In fact, the embodied cognitive action of sapient material assemblages can be indexed directly to the "phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh" while maintaining arguments for the transcendental positionality of experience. Despite the phantasmal extension of phenomenological awareness and experience via synthetic symbolic association and projection the empirical subject is the locus of perception out of sensation.

From Joseph Carew:

“Although phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and more recently Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion argue for the primordial unity of consciousness and the lived body or the self's immanent auto-determination from the unfolding of givenness of the flesh (which indicates the disappearance of a radical subject-object distinction by the interpenetration of both in embodiment), Žižek makes the claim that such descriptions are intrinsically lacking insofar as they fail to take account of the experience of the monstrous and the traumatic irrevocably tied to the essence of human being. One cannot merely replace classical subjectivity with a more organic theory of experience that intertwines consciousness with a phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh…

Arguing against postmodern theorists like Derrida and Foucault, who claim that the subject itself is merely an empty, accidental construction that arises out of the flux of historical experience, Žižek contends that by forgetting the ontological schism between mind and body that enables the self to be determined according to linguistic and political forces in the first place, they lose sight of the very formal structure of the I that is required even to speak of the endless temporal variations of selfhood within the contingent upsurge of sociocultural activity. The unceasing play of cultural difference, the non-finite proliferation of identities and discourses, can only be adequately understood through the transcendental framework offered by Cartesian subjectivity because, as that which prevents human activity from being explicable through solely natural or biological grounds, it supplies the formal-universal structure through which such change is rendered possible. [source]

Žižek and others are correct: individuality must be accounted for and reckoned - as our creaturely capacity for differentiating awareness is a 'transcendental' feature of intelligibility. However, there are so many different ways we can frame and understand how such an awareness can be achieved, and the most credible among them do not involve Descartes and Žižek's massive errors.

From actualizing the Cartesian fantasy of an “ontological schism” between experience and physicality, or mind and body, knowing hominid bodies enact degrees of operational individuality, or "agency", via the emergent operational capacities of neurologically instantiated experience and complex gross materiality via a system of combinatorial auto-affective expression - or what we can refer to as empirical existenz. The objective matrix of human existenz is thus an immanent achievement of a capacity for positional awareness (sentience) and elaborate cognition (sapience) organically generated by an dynamic ecology of potent assemblages and flows.

Catastrophia?

To embrace change and entropy, and to know and feel the ubiquity of ontological vulnerability, is to fall in love again and again with Real – that dark, fleshy, ungrounded ground of wilderness teeming within and without, unbound. To love the Real is to acknowledge and respect the potency of things and flows which perpetually deconstruct our words and thoughts, forcing us to confront the catastrophic tendency at the core of all being. To live is to die. And only when we learn to love and embrace that pulsating darkness at the core of material existence without truly knowing it can we gain intimacy in the world.

From Arran James:

“[C]atastrophic thought… an obsession with the wound and the ruin, the collapsing and the ecstatic, the obscene figures of human and nonhuman suffering, the withdrawn core of things concieved of as the thing in itself that doesn’t simply remain hidden but which actively resists actualisation. The end of the world as it’s apotheosis.” [source]

“[O]bliterated sculpture, wastelands, abandoned and decaying spaces, deserts- an aesthetic of urban collapse; depressions, schziophrenia, epidemics of anxiety and panic being produced by the excessive demands of capitalism’s infosphere, the post-traumatic subjectivity that becomes hegemonic in these last days of capital’s reign- the neuropsychological collapse of eviscerated minds; the Inevitable, both proximate and distal in the forms of the perishing of the individual organism in human death and in considerations of entropy, heat-death of the universe, and ecological catastophe- the intimate and cosmic levels of material collapse.” [source]

“[C]osmological time, which subsumes geological, evolutionary and historical temporalities within its manifold, is nothing but the working out of the original Catastrophe of Creation. The something that followed the nothing is only a symptom of the disturbance of nothing and its (anthropocentrically) slow return to itself.” [source]

This is just a sketch of a concept that signals the cognitive easing of traumas associated with gathering awareness of finitude. To be continued... 

The Metaphysics of Meaning - Part 1

In a recent post I challenged Adam Robbert to elucidate his use of the language of conceptuality, and to make explicit his understanding of the ontological status of concepts. Adam's response was, as usual, thoughtful and concise. In his response to a commenter on that exchange Adam asked a question I think gets right to the core of our discussion:

"From your view, then, are there anything like propositional statements?"

My response is as follows:

First, that human animals can make ‘propositional statements’ is uncontroversial. Humans are capable of all kinds of expressions. What is at stake here is how propositional statements come into being and whether or not they have a relatively autonomous existence beyond the interplay between neurological functioning and physical coding in texts, images and so on. The only requirements for statement-making are bodies capable of memory, recursion, articulation and mimesis, as well as the existence of socialized natural language (as learned reference and gestural flexibility) and a community of interlocutors.  Until those statements become marks on a page or sound recordings (thus coded) there is nothing about making such statements that suggests the relatively autonomous existence of an object that can be called a ‘concept’.

Interactions between perceptive-sapient bodies and ambient information affordances unfold according to the skillful difference navigation and mediation (as you say) by bodies/assemblages phylogenetically and ontogenetically oriented towards coping-with-in complex causal and information rich environments. And this embodied communicative dance between complex expressive and/or potent entities conditions, but does determine, our active and reactive coping responses within particular ecologies via the formation of information rich brain patterns/habits instantiated in relation to prior and ongoing exposures to socially instituted references and speech-acts. Sapient-bodies generate, store and recall a range of neural-semantic associations that are communicable – and thus available to be captured in codes, text, images, etc. – between sapient bodies, therein receiving feedback and varying degrees of intensive expression and reciprocal activations and reactivations, in ways that coordinate subsequent thetic brain patterns (“understandings”) and behaviors.

Again, cognizing bodies (things A) are endowed with particular capacities and acquired brain habits. These bodies communicate with each other via natural language and personal memory/recall in relation to socially circulated semiotic tokens (things B) such as writing, images, materials, etc. The communicative (gestural, verbal, symbol-deploying, material) dance between things A and B generates informational complexity, and thus “meaning’ via consequential expression, expectation and response. There is nothing about communicative encounters that requires us to posit ghostly mediating entities (things C) such as ‘ideas’ or ‘concepts’. Semiosis is something that happens between material objects (things A and things B) within niches of differential assembly and potencies – affording various time-space possibilities (cf. Heidegger’s ‘clearings’).

In this onto-story, then, ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ are not autonomous entities circulating among humans and media, but words (nouns) created to describe and ultimately misrepresent enacted and consequential, and therefore “meaningful” relationships between bodies and semiotic tokens and media within situations (ecologies). And mistaking the semantic/informational aspects of the enactive realities these relations generate and maintain for relatively independent objects sets up what I believe to be a damaging onto-theology of transcendental meaning.

Herein we could enter into a discussion about the importance of a nihilistic (re)turn to primordial affection and the subsequent deflation of doxic thought, but perhaps this is not the appropriate context for that discussion. I will only suggest here that what drives the most sophisticated forms of nihilism - and thus post-nihilist thought - is realization that only relations and materials exist, and that semantically laden embodied experience is an emergent capacity and epiphenomenal expression – albeit phenomenologically rich and existentially significant.

I think the core issue I have with Adam’s model is the way he (and almost every other intellectual I know) reifies the relational patterns that obtain between brains, media, and/or social objects (i.e., texts) as things-in-themselves. As ontographers I think we need to be more rigorous, precise and clear when distinguishing between assemblages, relations, processes, and flows. Our historical linguistic practices and semantic habits no longer work. We have an awkward and kludged semantic heritage that has become, in large parts, obsolete in the context we now seek to exist with-in. So we need to jettison certain aspects of existing semantic infrastructures and fashion (salvage and design) new semiotic compositions – if only because we need to adapt better to reality and design healthier niches. And thinking about and using words like ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ as objects is part of the rotted superstructure of reference and metaphysics I see as problematic.

The Anthropocentrist Loop?

One of the core motivations in peddling a postnihilist rhetorics (as praxis) is an interest in disrupting the cognitive hegemony of anthropocentric thought. Meaning and rationalizations are local human expressions, not constituent features woven into the fabric of the cosmos. Yet, all human action seems to be routed through self-referential circuits of existential concern and human-focused interest. Inflated egos everywhere – with only a hint of the kind of perspective-taking required to speculate about what it might ‘be like’ to be an otter, or an orchid.

More significantly, anthropocentrism narrows the associative cognitive-neuronal tunnel within which we can evaluate the overall necessity, function and agency of otters, orchids, or even carbon-dioxide molecules. This makes for bad ontography and therefore even worse social design. Thus deflating the aspirations of folk transcendentalisms inherent in the cultural codes of Western thinkers, viz. a perpetual negation of its doxic contents, can make room for new circuits of evaluation and habits of communication wherein humans interface and relate with nonhumans in a more authentic and ecologically tenable way.

http://hontor.deviantart.com/art/Anthropocentrism-136154462

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“There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.” ― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 

“In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.” ― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet (in the sense that they are considered to have a moral status or value higher than that of other animals), or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective. The term can refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism.

the ecological a priori?

Adam Robbert bringing the Foucault and Deleuze eco-style: 

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).

Evan Thompson on network-relational sapience?

Evan Thompson's new book Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (2014) is a hot topic among para-philosophic types these days. I have only been able to glean bits and pieces but won’t get around to reading it until later this year. I’m just bookmarking this here as a reminder.

Here are two excerpts, with some under-formulated comments as chaser:

the brain is always embodied, and its functioning as a support for consciousness can’t be understood apart from its place in a relational system involving the rest of the body and the environment. The physical substrate of mind is this embodied, embedded, and relational network, not the brain as an isolated system.(p.37)

Understanding human sapience as "embodied, embedded, and relational" is where it’s at. Literally. For reals. But in this book Thompson seems to advance a specific (and familiar) philosophical claim: the self is a process, not a thing or an entity, generated in the network dynamics of interacting brains, bodies, and worlds.

At the same time, we can’t infer from the existential or epistemological primacy of consciousness that consciousness has ontological primacy in the sense of being the primary reality out of which everything is composed or the ground from which everything is generated. One reason we can’t jump to this conclusion is that it doesn’t logically follow. That the world as we know it is always a world for consciousness doesn’t logically entail that the world is made out of consciousness. Another reason is that thinking that consciousness has ontological primacy goes against the testimony of direct experience, which speaks to the contingency of our consciousness on the world, specifically on our living body and environment. (p. 102)

Panpsychists take note: your infatuation with your own awareness provides little justification for believing that other objects/assemblages are aware (or experiencing) as well. The most intrusive and self-centered form of ontography follows from believing animal characteristic exemplify existence broadly considered. Sentience and sapience are emergent properties generated via complex elemental materials.

The term “emergence” comes from the Latin verb emergo which means to arise, to rise up, to come up or to come forth. The term was coined by G. H. Lewes in Problems of Life and Mind (1875) who drew the distinction between emergent and resultant effects. [h/t Bill Harryman for this and much more]

to build from the actions of others?

Resonating bodies connect and coordinate through the mutual involvement of powers and capacities, intensifying and expanding, becoming more than parts and sums - carving niches and generating socialities from the actions of others. It's not about individuals or collectives, agency vs. structure, but about interdependent actions at multiple levels and with differential rhythms. Thinking the particular modes and movements of any existing ecology is about thinking the 'in-between' of individuals and groups via an ongoing engagement with the specificity of things.

Although I find the distinction between exteriority (the physical) and interiority (the mental) unhelpful and a bit distracting, in the quote below Adrian seems to clearly discern the importance of thinking how entities are always being and becoming-with other things as assemblages.

"An ant colony builds itself from the actions of its members: gathering leaf litter, sticks, bits and pieces of the environing world, tunneling, communicating, building, nursing. None of these ant “individuals,” not even the queen herself, could act in this way without the rest of the colony. Both the body and the mind of the colony—its “objective” parts, those we can see, describe, dissect, and measure, and its “subjective” parts, which are the moments of felt decision that turn an ant this way rather than that way in its crossing of a trail in a forest, or those that bring a team of ants together to haul a large leaf or dead grasshopper—these are all dispersed in space, they are spaced, detached from each other physically (or so it appears when we observe them), but mentally, in terms of the interactive processing of signs and relations, they are networked together into a coordinated collectivity. The network of the colony is not only made of those ant bodies, but also what they are capable of and what they do with things—with soil, leaves, sticks, pieces of food. By most objective measures, anthills are cities: they include complex systems of transportation, communication (pheromone-based), ventilation, sewage disposal, food production (the farming of plants, the growing of fungus, the raising of aphid cattle), cooperative labor, warfare, and slavery." - Adrian Ivakhiv

The Cruelest Animal?

Are humans the cruellest animal in this unfathomable kingdom? Perhaps; but only because we are the ones who created the codes that inflate our typical affective capacities enough to even posit cruelty in the first instance. We are cruel because we created the speculative realm in which cruelty can be judged. This takes nothing away from the significances we mount and share and value in relation to each other's fabricated transgressions. We concern ourselves with what is and what registers in our dealings with each other and ourselves. Are we the cruelest? It seems so. But a more fruitful question might be: 'what are we willing to do about it?'


 

Post-nihil and the End of Resentiment?

Interest in the post-nihilist tendency is definitely on the rise. But what can be said about thinking that attempts to deflate thinking, other than its contradiction is not performative but narratological?

“Nihilism” is the linguistic-aesthetic form our anxieties take after the humiliating experience of having our phantasies displaced by a world outside our ego. But this is just step one in a much richer experience of humility.

Humans are fundamentally coping-beings: by composition and disposition we seek to make sense and understand ourselves in the context a world teeming with multitudes of others, and overflowing with danger and opportunity – creatures required by circumstance to adapt. But what adaptations are possible for us this late in the ‘game’?

Unfortunately many North Americans tend to reject such realizations and instead invest any accompanying dread of finitude, flesh and animality in delusions of transcendence, consumption and/or fantasy - with T.V or self-medication no less than simple commodities - in order to sooth the pain of their existential resentments and fear. To be sure, there are differences in the manner people respond, but i believe the push and pull of consumption, ego-centric hope and distraction remain paramount.

The task of conscious observers (and not just intellectuals) today is to begin to indulge rather than mask the nihilistic forces of contemporary life – forces that manifest and register existentially, environmentally, and poltically in a variety of objective ways. We must partake instead of continuing to deny the dark revelations of current crises in order to push each other towards more earthly, or creaturely, that is to say ecological modes of thinking and doing. Realizing and coping-with the transcorporeal facticity of life entails communicating and making explicit our intimate connections with the planet and its beings, but it also requires us to explore and engage the inherent precarity and ontological vulnerability with-in the natural world through association, design and infrastructure.

As Levi Bryant has stated:

It is our circumstances themselves, the material reality of our world, that has become nihilistic, not the thought of this or that thinker. Indeed, I suspect that many of us are terrified and anguished by this objective nihilistic darkness that approaches and that may very well have happened, as Timothy Morton suggests. Perhaps we are already dead and we just don’t yet know it.

Every step taken after nihilism is a movement towards something substantially more realistic and practical, yet significantly less dramatic. We return home to the dark wilderness within which we had always already carved our niches. And we need not resent this state of affairs. We can embrace the opportunities afforded us and celebrate our circumscribed and awkward freedoms by adapting and assembling, and fleeing the ruin machines of pathological culture and founding new communities. We can become different.

Nothing is more essential in a full and genuine apocalypticism than the coincidentia oppositorum which it realizes between an absolute No-saying and an absolute Yes-saying, one inseparable from the final advent of an absolute darkness and an absolute light.  This is luminously clear in Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, already the madman’s proclamation of the death of God (The Gay Science, par. 125) reveals that we are now straying as through an infinite nothing, night and more night is coming on all the while, a night of the world which is an apocalyptic night, and one which is the deepest ending in history. Here, the death of God is not only an ultimate historical event, it is the most ultimate event that has ever occurred, one wiping away our entire horizon.  

But even if this is the darkest of all nights, it is nevertheless the most glorious of all possible dawns, for it releases an absolute and final Yes-saying, a Yes-saying which is the very opposite of ressentiment, and a Yes-saying whose revelation is Nietzsche’s ultimate calling.  

Now and only now a history inaugurated by ressentiment is ending, an ending that is the ending of the actuality of every possible subject, and is that ending precisely because it is the death of God. Yet this is the very death releasing a final and ultimate nihilism, a nihilism which is the tomb of God, and a nihilism which is the very arena of the ecstatic affirmation of a uniquely modern or postmodern Eternal Recurrence.[source]

Post-nihilist praxis is thus an experimental mode of embodied enagement oriented towards operationalizing novel and actionable strategies, communications and adaptations to the myriad creeping potencies of nonhuman flows and assemblages both within and without. If we are to rebuild from the ruins of this mad civilization the important work to be done is decidedly practical.

The Rhythm of Things?

From ‘Rhythm-Studies’(2013), by Laura Marcus:

The concepts of ‘rhythm’ as motion and as connectivity, two of the central topics of emerge in Herbert Spencer’s influential writings on ‘The Direction and Rhythm of Motion’, in his First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In Chapter X of the volume, ‘The Rhythm of Motion’, Spencer argued for the omnipresence of ‘rhythm’, building up from the physical world and its laws to the realms of social organisation and human creative activity. ‘Rhythmical action’ – initially defined through the terms of ‘vibration’ and ‘undulation’ - is to be found in the impact of a rising breeze on a becalmed vessel or, on land, in the ‘conflict between the current of air and the things it meets’: ‘The blades of grass and dried bents in the meadows, and still better the stalks in the neighbouring corn-fields, exhibit the same rising and falling movement’. For Spencer all motion is rhythmical, and the physical universe exists in a mode of perpetual motion which he defines in terms of ‘a conflict of forces not in equilibrium’: ‘If the antagonist forces at any point are balanced, there is rest; and in the absence of motion there can of course be no rhythm’.

Spencer found rhythm not only at the largest levels (in, for example, geographical processes) but in the bodily processes – ingestion, excretion, pulsation – of each individual organism, and in human consciousness, whose rhythm he defined in the terms of a departure and return from and to mental states and feelings. A more conspicuous rhythm, ‘having longer waves’, he argued, ‘is seen during the outflow of emotion into dancing, poetry, and music. The current of mental energy that shows itself in these modes of bodily action is not continuous but falls into a succession of pulses’. The rhythmic dimensions of aesthetic expression start from the body, and ‘the bodily discharge of feeling’, and their naturalness is proven by the fact that they are also revealed in the cadences – the rise and fall - of ordinary speech…

[Jacques] Rancière brings ‘rhythm’ into this energetic field in his quotation from the modernist writer and critic Blaise Cendrars: ‘Rhythm speaks. You are … Reality has no meaning any more. Everything is rhythm, speech life...Revolution. The dawn of the world today’. Rancière comments: ‘The new common term of measurement, thus contrasted with the old one, is rhythm, the vital element of each material unbound atom which causes the image to pass into the word, the word into the brush-stroke, the brush-stroke into the vibration of light or motion’. In this passage from image to word to brushstroke to photographic/cinematographic image (these technologically mediated forms being one way of interpreting ‘the vibration of light or motion’) we find a desire to (re)connect artistic or aesthetic forms which had been artificially divided into the arts of space and the arts of time, or into the verbal and the plastic arts.”

SOURCE: HERE

Hardly A Problem At All?

I have been hoping to sit down and sketch out some ideas on what a 'theory of consciousness' might look like for a while now but never get around to doing so. The bottom-line, for me, is that "qualia" is the not-so-simply coordinated sensation of evolved functional life. If you bind together sensate bodies with particular organic capacities for recursion, retention (memory), association and projection (biological "imagination") – all of which can be explained with reference to neurology and functional anatomy –you get animals with a sense of self. Sapience emerges when ongoing rudimentary perceptual categorization is linked via neural reentry to emotionally coded / value-dependent memories creating a so-called “remembered present”, or emergent (and strange?) loop of referential awareness. The systemic coordination of the relevant biological components results in a dynamic and reactional neuro-functional core (see Edelman and Tononi 2000) and informational basin of attraction capable of generating what is traditionally know as internal volition or “intentionality”. This ‘wired’ complex generates structured (limiting and affording) ‘feelings’: a recursive neurocognitive simulacra of affective intensity. Thus “qualia” is what it feels like to be a particular kind of organic body. We collect and project and speculate and cope in our attempts at surviving, copulating and generally party hard via the interplay between evolved/emergent biological capacities and eco-social relations. Not much left to explain once all the details are traced out and observed in situ in my opinion.

No big deal, right? The problem is many academic careers have been maintained in making much ado about not that much. So, unfortunately, many philosophers and humanity professors still haven’t read the memo on the explanatory powers of scientific research, nor have they been motivated to develop a reasoned response to how such findings completely obliterate the past musings of their heroes.

Much later I plan on mashing together and stretching out the details of a genuine pet theory on how sentience and sapience emerge but for now I just want to note that others are also trying to get past the pseudo-debate (in my opinion) about the so-called "hard problem of consciousness":

One of the many and varied modes of post-humanism hails an end to human exceptionalism and cognition-oriented models, and instead begins from one already integrated, dynamic and connected world. There is no ‘really hard problem’ about the relation between mind and world, for the mind is an effect of relations, not something that has to act in order to represent a world to which it must subsequently relate (Flanagan 2007). It is not the case that we begin life as observing, representing beings who then become through receptivity. Rather, in the beginning is a dynamic and world-oriented receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject or man emerges. It is from a primary openness to the world, a primarily sensed world, that there emerges the sense of one who sees.” – Claire Colebrook [source]

The "primary openness" of all assembled bodies (see here, here and here) takes place within the field of possibility or context afforded by a myriad of actual evolved-dynamic systems: a wild, uncapture-able matrix/ecology of affective materials, intensive powers, differences and assembled networks. This 'general ecology' (wilderness of Being) is simultaneously where we come from AND where we are thrown into. Referencing the deep (and dark) context in which all experience emerges requires and AND-logic that renders this simultaneity negotiable and all talk about how 'mind' and 'world' relate a little less problematic.

S.C Hickman on Hope and the Dystopic Impulse

The brilliant and always concise S.C Hickman has another insight-full post up at Noir Realism in which he writes:

The breakup of the Platonist view of reality and discourse that has, as Wittgenstein suggested, held us ‘captive’ within a Cartesian/Lockean picture that seeks both an objective essence and a cohesive, coherent, self has been replaced in our time by a “Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain (p. xxiii, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope).” Among those tools is language, words, which are no longer seen as ‘representations’ of an objective truth/reality, but as tools by which the human animal negotiates the complex horizon of social relations. Rorty sees this break with the idea that reality can be ‘represented’ as abandoning the correspondence ‘theory of truth’, which means that we no longer need to insist that truth, like reality is one and seamless.

The post-nihilist impulse unabashedly rejects discourses motivated by sentimental allusions to universals. The advent of hypermediation via communication and digital technologies has combined with what Ray Brassier has called "the negative consummation of the enlightenment", as well as the ever-expanding assaults on the living flesh and ecological stability of humans everywhere to create a crisis of legitimacy for every existing linguistic and normative institution on the planet. We do not inhabit a modern or even ‘postmodern’ world, we subsist in an advanced industrial calamity. The future of our species will depend entirely upon the willingness of people to abandon our previous and varied delusions for intensely reflective strategies of praxis and collective habitation. We have to design new delusions for vastly more pragmatic ecologies. The all too human project of becoming, being and coping-with happens between and often beyond both hope and despair.

Read the rest of Hickman’s post: HERE

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.”

Sonorous Beings

Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible (1969) :

“In a sense, if we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it. Already our existence as seers (that is, we said, as beings who turn the world back upon itself and who pass over to the other side, and who catch sight of one another, who see one another with eyes) and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (l'entendre). The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “copy reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear” (p.155).

The articulations of the flesh are primitive expressions inflected by emergent dynamical-structures. The elements speak through our gestures and intentions. "Once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside" (pg.136). We dance the world as Being.