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.

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... 

Facticity_Prime

So much philosophical intelligence hinges on comprehending the inescapable reality of facticity as disclosed via phenomenological encounter. Being is prior to knowing, and our corporeal relations with-in the world afford a primordial condition for ontological intimacy. Thus, we are always already at home in the universe.

The term is first used by German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and has a variety of meanings. It can refer to facts and factuality, as in nineteenth-century positivism, but comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Wilhelm Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism. The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung).

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) discusses facticity as the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he is not only referring to a brute fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical situation, e.g., "born in the '80s." Facticity is something that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left unattended. As such, facticity is not something we come across and directly behold. In moods, for example, facticity has an enigmatic appearance, which involves both turning toward and away from it. For Heidegger, moods are conditions of thinking and willing to which they must in some way respond. The thrownness of human existence (or Dasein) is accordingly disclosed through moods. [wikipedia]

We are well past the point where a shift in frames necessitates discussion about the ecology of know-ing, rather than the supposed solidity of know-ledge. Human knowing is a material and ecological process generated within particular structural and expressive matrices - never fully consumated nor completely detached from the facticity of its activities. Both 'matters of fact' (factuality) and 'matterns of concern' (Latour) are rooted in facticity. It is corporeal intra-action all the way down..

[][[]][]

Dasein is always marked by facticity. It does not exist as an independent thing hovering in a void, but always finds itself in a particular situation with highly specific possibilities. For the most part, this facticity does not take the form of knowledge. Too many philosophers have constructed their model of human being by imagining humans as entities that know the world. Heidegger sees that knowing is only a rare special case of the way that we deal with our environment… Knowledge is not primary, because it arises from out of the world. Dasein somehow has to rise above its usual interaction with the world in order to gain anything resembling knowledge. Dasein and world are bound together closely from the start. If this seems to eliminate the traditional problem in philosophy of how human beings can know a world lying outside of them, then so much the better. For Heidegger as for Husserl, this is a false problem that never should have existed in the first place. (Harman, Heidegger Explained, 2007:62 )

“The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said.” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p.94)

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).

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.

synthetic_zero

Any change in determining conditions is never a complete re-coordination of components, but rather a complex adjusting of variable elements according to intrinsic properties and extrinsic force. So it is with base materiality and so it is with any of our scaffolded sapient worldviews.

This blog has been a lot of things for me: an extension of my personality, a platform for sorting of interests, but more concretely it has always been a tool for inquiry and expression. Since 2009 i have explored a variety of obsessions: from speculative theory, fringe politics, evolutionary science and ecology to architecture, art, depth psychology and popular culture – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and human encounters in between. However situations change. I have changed.

These past few months have been tumultuous with regard to my conceptual grasping of the world and its entities. Step backs and switch-backs and revisitations have led to intensive thetic mutations and shifting political sentiments. Living and ‘managing’ routines, needs and psyches in the context of rapid dissolution and continuing reorganization of the world-flesh by anarchic forces of production (hyper-abstraction) and pseudo and mega wish-fulfillment(as a multitude of egos amplified exponentially) has brought me to the brink. Nothing I think I know makes sense in light of what I am experiencing. Its time to cross the threshold.

I am no longer driven to pursue individualized intellectual processing. On my own I am a mere glitch. Nothing but a momentary capture of language and associations. But with others I become more: we become. As an assemblage our powers are increased and new capacities emerge. And it is only in the ‘we’ that the Eaarth and its woven sublime can be adequately disclosed. Knowledge tokens and bio-understandings are always (co)enacted and disclosed socially, as intact ecosystems. Only thru collaboration between elements and materials do new configurations occur. The Madness of one becomes tempered by the madness of the more-than-one so that whole worlds (as multiplicities and spaces with differential dimensions) can be devoured, transformed and rebirthed. 

So moving forward (and backward and sideways perhaps) I will be focusing most of my energies on a new joint project - involving Arran (from Attempts At Living) and lurking-linker extraordinaire Dirk (dmf) and guided by a shared concern with evolving more sophisticated speculative and praxis-oriented responses to the continued collapse of contemporary ecological, socioeconomic and ideological realities. Below is a basic outline:

synthetic_zero

about: Synthetic_Zero is a project designed to explore the challenges and opportunities of being & becoming human after nihilism. The collaborative approach pursued here is intended as an experimental response to the various crises, disjunctions and unequally distributed realities of contemporary life. At different moments this website will act as research tool, culture hacking platform, and crucible for critical discussion – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and mutant encounters in-between. We seek to salvage and explore the various speculative and pragmatic opportunities afforded by established disciplines and traditions of inquiry (from philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, social work, and ecology) while simultaneously assembling insights and sensibilities from across the spectrum of human expression and engagement (from art, literature, architecture, urban design, indigenous politics, and various social movements). Our intention is to cultivate more flexible and adaptive modes of relating and existing. There are many ways to live among ruins and here we will explore most of them.

Archive Fire will continue to function as a space for personal reflection and individual explorations in rhetoric, style and self-expression - while all new formal and para-academic content will be shared at synthetic zero and will command most of my attention.

Thank you to all the readers, participants and the many supporters of this blog over the last 4 years. I hope you enjoy the new direction/focus here and please check out what Arran, Dirk and I are up to over at syntheticzero.net. Until then…

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

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) 

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.

We Are Bodies: Contra Husserl

Husserl’s “veritable abyss” is a temporal illusion of ocular sensitivity and factical depth. Reality is In-der-Welt-sein (etre au monde) without ontological remainder - and the origins of ontography are in thinking just how this is so. It is about the sensitive recursions of reflective corporeal bodies. 

From Carman & Hansen’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty:

I am constantly told that everything I enjoy about Merleau-Ponty's work can be found in Husserl, but I have never found this to actually be the case. The ideas I find most interesting in Merleau-Ponty's books often seem more like subtle departures from his predecessor than the mere reframing of old phenomenological questions.

The terminological boxes into which we press the history of philosophy often obscure deep and important differences among major figures supposedly belonging to a single school of thought. One such disparity within the phenomenological movement, often overlooked but by no means invisible, separates Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception from the Husserlian program that initially inspired it. For Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology amounts to a radical, if discreet, departure not only from Husserl’s theory of intentionality generally, but more specifically from his account of the intentional constitution of the body and its role in perceptual experience (Carman 1999: 205).

For example, in his posthumous works Husserl mentions the role of the body in perception, but the body inevitably appears as a kind of ‘phenomenological anomaly’ (Carman 1999: 206) where the body is neither internal to my consciousness nor external to me in the environment, but is “a thing ‘inserted’ between the rest of the material world and the ‘subjective’ sphere” (Ideas II, 161).

Yet in Merleau-Ponty – and from what I can discern in my own phenomenological practice – we find that it is precisely the body which anchors us in the world opening up the possibility of perspective and thus allowing for the very real actuality of self-affective states and material orientation. At no point is our body merely a thing observed, inserted between our experience (cogito) and the world, but is instead an ever-present nexus of auto-affective activity and tangibility. The sensitive and sustaining materiality of the body is the very source of our reflective activity.

As Carman suggests:

Unlike Husserl, but like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty looks beyond the subject/object divide to try to gain insight into the concrete structures of worldly experience. But whereas Heidegger does little more than mention the problem ofembodiment in passing, Merleau-Ponty bases his entire phenomenological project on an account of bodily intentionality and the challenge it poses to any adequate concept of mind. Embodiment thus has a philosophical significance for Merleau-Ponty that it could not have for Husserl (1999: 206).

Taking the problem of embodiment and corporeality seriously entails a radical reassessment of the very conceptual distinctions on which Husserl’s fame rests. Indeed, “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?)” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167). Our bodies do not appear to us through some kind of pure ideation where we might then take ownership, our bodies are always present as the constitutive matrix from which our ideas begin to cohere and take structure. Which is to say, 'we' do not have bodies, rather we are bodies: “we are in the world through our body, and insofar as we perceive the world with our body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 206).

Brené Brown - The Price of Invulnerability

From TEDx:

 Synopsis: In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times -- joy. This talk by Brené Brown will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships -- and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning:

 

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent a lifetime studying courage, shame, authenticity, wholeheartedness and vulnerability. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.

Theorizing Vulnerability

“We inhabit a time when things have become more fragile and urgently in need of delicate tending. At the same time, a large section of the populace is belligerently opposed to recognition of this condition. It is a time when militant pressure to engage the fragility of things must be joined to acknowledgment of the limited ability of the human estate to master the world. It is thus a paradoxical time.” - William E. Connolly

Vulnerability is a ubiquitous characteristic positioning us in relation to each other, the state, the earth and the whole of existence. I argue that ecological vulnerabilities, corporeal vulnerabilities, existential vulnerabilities, and sociocultural vulnerabilities are different manifestations of a fundamental ontological vulnerability intrinsic to reality.
All existences and objects are exposed and mingle with innumerable elements and essences, all of which combine, dissipate, re-combine, and affect other bodies in ways that can be only imperfectly or partially foreseen or forestalled. Bodies are fundamentally worldly: open and extended outwards in order to sustain and nourish themsleves. Our bodies are intrinsically processual: capable of touching and being touched by other bodies and things, exposed to possibilities we can neither completely enumerate nor fully articulate. 

In her 2004 book Precarious Life, Judith Butler wrote:

"The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my “will,” my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?" (p.26) 

In this sense, my body is ontologically sense-able and therefore response-able to so many other entities (both human and nonhuman) and, perhaps more disturbingly, perpetually open to the precariousness and wildness of being as such. A basic acknowledgment and exploration of this fundamental openness can generate all kinds of social, ethical and existential considerations and conversations regarding human beings. As Merleau-Ponty reminded us, “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. xvi-xvii ).

Judith Butler again:

"Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others. Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition? (Ibid., p.29)  

As an important and productive bridging concept between disciplines, theorizing vulnerability in all its onto-specific manifestations is at the core of what I term applied ontography. Applied ontography as I practice it seeks nuanced, non-dogmatic and pragmatic understandings of the dependencies, individuations, interdependencies, flow patterns, meshworks, connections, boundary limits, causal networks, assemblages and material potencies from which our lives and social institutions emerge. Such provisional understandings are then put to use through direct engagements with the practical and political projects of everyday hominid life. To be sure, the resulting heuristics, working models and tentative frameworks are only the expressive/epistemic dimension of these practical (infra-structural) engagements at work in the world - to be used, revised and refigured in relation to specific contexts of application.

In the introduction to Frames of War (2010), Butler wrote:

"I want to argue that if we are to make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work, and the claims of language and social belonging. To refer to “ontology” in this regard is not to lay claim to a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their political organization and interpretation. The “being” of the body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology." (pp. 2-3) 

In the video below participants in The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2012: "Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities," directly address issues of vulnerability in ways that highlight the importance recognizing vulnerability as a universal characteristic of the world we inhabit. The video features brief but fascinating presentations from eminent academics in a variety of fields, and includes a interesting panel discussion with Martha Albertson Fineman, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Colin Dayan, Ilaria Vanni, and moderator Elizabeth Castelli. Each participant discusses the political and practical implications of recognizing and better theorizing vulnerability at multiple scales in the context of their unique projects and research.

This event took place on March 3, 2012 at Barnard College:

 

In The Autonomy Myth (2005), Martha Fineman discusses the “universal, constant and complex” nature of vulnerability and interdependency at the level of health-care and politics, showing how the metaphysics/ideology of the so-called ‘autonomous liberal subject’ is a (mis)leading assumption at the heart of most dehumanizing Western capitalist cultural activities.

Here is Judith Butler again, from Precarious Life (2004):

 "One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value." (pp. xii-xiii)

"[T]here is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.  

Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do." (Ibid., p.31)

On Being and Coping - Part 1: Ontic Relation and Object Access

“Sensing is not ruled by the ‘I think’ which, according to Kant, must accompany all apperception. In sensing, nothing is apperceived. The sensing being, the animal, does not confront its world as a thinking being, but is, rather, related to it simply in uniting and separating.” (Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman, 1963: 197) 

“Language scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely even while it arranges it in order. Through language, we can never grasp what matters to us for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears” (Bataille, Eroticism, 1986: 274).  

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions."  (Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 2007: 1)  

Arran James has responded (here) to my last post (here) with a generous exploration of the thesis that ‘absolute withdrawal’ is a feature of epistemic relations (hermeneutics) only and not of structural relations (material affectivity) of objects generally. In short, objects are absolutely autonomous of our conception of them. Objects are never equivalent to our perceptions, interpretations, or stories. Yet, however accurate such a claim may be, it also remains the case that many objects can and do encounter – affect, influence, absorb, activate, dissolve, empower, etc., – each other directly in structurally efficacious ways beyond or at least ‘below’ conceptuality. This is the crux of my divergence with object-oriented ontologies (OOO) [see here for more detail].

Now one might be inclined to wonder if I am setting up a kind of unnecessary dualism here by distinguishing between structural encounters and epistemic encounters? That is a fair question. To be sure, I am supporting a kind of weak version of the classical distinction between "the sensible" and "the intelligible". But I am NOT suggesting that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are different substances. They are not. What I am suggesting is that there are different kinds of interactions taking place at different levels of complex materiality (strata). Which is to say material affectivity and structural relation occur at different levels and in different ways than epistemic relations that are often independent of processes of apprehension, signification and "translation".

Without a doubt embodied cognition (which in my usage includes both emotion and logical operations, in mingling proportions as per neuro-anatomy) involves recursion and includes projective subjectivity (‘qualia’) – what I refer to as the phastasmic character of experience, and what Lacan refers to as 'the imaginal’ – not present in less complex objects. Not all material assemblages/structures are capable of mental operations (“mind”) because cognitive activities/powers involve distinctly emergent capacities irreducible to less complex physical processes. Such recursive-phantasmic capabilities (powers) are specific to entities with central nervous systems, and are what affords animals an emergent capacaity for iconic/symbolic signification and epistemic memory. And he biological capacities for recursion, memory, signification and synthetic apprehension (or animal coding) are precisely what allows for what I refer to above as epistemic relations. We experience and imagine; we sense and we code. It is the activity of signifying, apprehending and relating to the world via epistemic coding which remains ‘absolutely withdrawn’ from other entities.

So I certainly agree with Heidegger, Harman, Morton and others when they suggest that objects are never equivalent to our animal interpretations and conceptions. The crucial point with regard to my disagreement with OOO is that embodied human thought as an onto-specific capacity is deployed and operates differently in the world than how, say, dynamite works in relation granite. Non-signifying objects (such as dynamite) often interact with other objects (like granite) in ways that make a structural difference to their material composition below the level of explicit cognitive acts. There are different kinds of entities which enfold different levels of organization, activity and relation, and these differences make all the difference. [see here for more detail]

By this I do not suggest some sort of naïve ‘billiard-ball’ causation where pure substances rub up against each other, but rather that certain types of assemblages/objects relate in ways that directly influence the operational character or functional arrangement (structure) of others through the exchange of information and energy. Causality is never simple or unmediated but always complex and precarious. And so the sorts of interactions (events) that take place between entities are entirely contingent upon the kinds of entities involved - relative to their material and onto-specific capacities. ‘Withdrawal’ at a non-cognitive and pre-reflective level of materiality is then an issue of structural access via complexity (or ‘depth’) and material composition as opposed to an issue of epistemic access within representational thought.

I must admit at this point that my awareness of the problematics of epistemic access/relation is precisely why I enjoy Tim Morton’s project as much as I do. Tim is brilliant at pointing out the alienation, epistemic problems and associated existential anxieties generated by the inability of humans to come to grips with the gap between our apprehension/interpretations and the things-in-themselves (cf. Derrida on undecidability). Morton’s “dark ecology” offers a way forward to begin to thematize (rationalize?) this epistemic gap while simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically activating an uncanny appreciation for the structural intimacy of the world, or of what he calls ‘the Mesh’. I will certainly have much more to say in the coming months about the possibilities Tim is setting forth in his recent work, but I just wanted to acknowledge here the profound influence Tim’s work continues to have on me in this regard.

With that said, let me return to some of the wonderful points Arran brings up in his post. Arran writes:

Michael rejects the idea that objects are absolutely withdrawn from one. Instead, Michael suggests that all objects are ontically open to one another in such a way as to establish an ‘intimacy’. This would also be the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity: how could we speak of alterity if things never encountered one another at all? The point is that if objects were absolutely withdrawn they would recede from any point of access whatsoever. In such a world no thing could ever be touched, held, burnt, used, left, ignored, known etc.

I don’t know if I have ever stated it quite that way but Arran is correct, I maintain that some kind of access, namely structural access/relation, is required as “the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity”. This doesn’t mean that we can come to total knowledge of any particular entities, because, as I argue above, epistemic closure is impossible, but that through the various structural (complex and multi-leveled) relations with things we can at the very least gain some intimacy with them by phantasizing symbolically and communicating with each other about them. Without structural access/relation alterity would be unintelligibility and epistemic coding impossible.

This is precisely where my pragmatic commitments come to the fore. If humans can only have structural access to things-in-themselves, and only ever fashion approximate knowledge of objects and assemblages through signification practices and epistemic phantasies, then what actually matters is how we pragmatically act, react and cope in the world in relation to them. Insert all the references to Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and ‘family resemblances’,  Rorty’s ‘ironism’, and/or any other post-critical concessions you want right here. The bottom-line is that immanent structural – or perhaps infrastructural – relations have traceable consequences via the onto-specific powers or potencies (or what Bryant refers to as ‘pluri-potencies’) of things at a pre-reflective level of direct material-energetic affectivity. And the distal stories (narratives, ontologies, etc.) we tell ourselves about these consequential interactions – however poetic or meaning-full, or instrumental (useful) they may be – are basically coping mechanisms to help us make our way in the wild world as fully enfleshed beings-in-the-world.

In a passionate and radically illustrative passage Arran writes:

Absolute withdrawal is a thesis of absolute autonomy of every substance from every other substance to the point where all and every thing vanishes. But that isn’t the world we live in. We live in a world of violence and suffering, of bullets and bombs, of fast food and big screen TVs, of kissing lovers, and 4 year old boys who refuse to let you write blog posts. We live in a world where we’ve gathered a fair bit of knowledge. Hard knowledge garnered from natural science. In other words, it seems that the claim that objects are absolutely withdrawn is false.

As a psychiatric nurse I know that such a claim is false. I use drugs synthesised by psychopharmacologists that, once injected into the flesh, directly do things to the patient’s nervous system. Conversation and phenomenographic accounts of patient experience also relate how this can profoundly alter the way patients couple to their environments. This leads to the enaction of profoundly different worlds. Thinking on such an example is illustrative. I can only do my job because people have had direct if partial access to things. I can only do my job because other things have direct access to still more things. The generation of and radical difference between my experience of an episode of medication administration and my patient’s is only possible because of the specific ways in which we and the things involved in that situation are open to each other. That openness constitutes the kind of intimacy that provides us with experiential evidence of the impossibility of absolute withdrawal. Instead, situations or worlds are produced by the unique ensemble of interoperating operations of uniquely relating substances.

There is no way I could provide a better account than Arran has above. I believe ontographic rigor insists that we respect the power and interdependencies of the things-themselves. When we respect the things-in-themselves we give to them what is theirs but not more: we respect their contingent existence and finitude, and we acknowledge their ontic particularity and irreducible complexity, but we also appreciate their dependencies and the affordances they require to exist. So in this context anthropomorphizing the cosmos by projecting cognitive capacities onto pre-cognitive processes is a failure of ontographic imagination. We simply should not insist that every entity operates according to our all too human metaphysical proclivities. Instead, hominid ontography insists that we attempt to code  our formal relations with entities in ways most consistent with what each thing or assemblage can do structurally via their powers and capacities, and with the networks or ecologies which support and co-enact them.

[[ to be continued ]]

God and the Organism: A Dialogue with John Protevi

John Protevi is one of the most stimulating cross-paradimatic philosophers working today. His profound exploration of the possible intersections between Deleuze, cognitive science and dynamical systems theories is a powerful example of how empirical research and speculative philosophy can fit together to illuminate the complexly of human existence on this planet. His book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (2009) is one of my all-time favourites. Learn more about John's work at his website: here      

From Christopher Long's Digital Dialogue series:

 

Digital Dialogue 56: God and the Organism from Christopher Long on Vimeo.

Description: John Protevi, Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University, joins me for episode 56 of the Digital Dialogue, God and the Organism. John's work focuses on Continental phenomenology and, more specifically, on contemporary French philosophy. In addition to his many publications on embodied cognition and French philosophy, his book, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, came out with University of Minnesota Press in 2009, and he has another book, Life, Earth, War: Deleuzean Interventions, forthcoming with Minnesota Press.

h/t dmf

Extinction, Denial and Adaptation: Towards Post-Nihilist Praxis?

"Man can build his greatness on the nothingness that crushes him." - André Malraux

Levi Bryant has another fantastic post up (here) discussing the aim of speculative realism in relation to nihilism and extinction more generally. I think Levi is on target with his comments about how North Americans seem to be working through our growing realization of the possibility (probability) of extinction in the face of ecological collapse (among other calamities). I believe this “awareness” is still mostly registering on subconscious levels - i.e., biologically as toxins, ecologically as climate, hurricanes, floods – and denied or obfuscated on political and ideological levels, but it is definitely becoming expressed.

The following are some key passages from Levi’s post:

Everything hinges on asking why the critique of correlationism– the most contentious and controversial dimension of SR –has arisen at this point in history. Why have so many suddenly become impassioned with the question of how it is possible to think a world without humans or being without thought? It is such a peculiar question, such a queer question, such a strange question. Why, after all, would we even be concerned with what the world might be apart from us when we are here and regard this world? There are, of course, all sorts of good ontological and epistemological reasons for raising these questions. Yet apart from immanent philosophical reasons, philosophy is always haunted by a shadow text, a different set of reasons that are not so much of the discursive order as of the order of the existential and historical situation and which thought finds itself immersed at a given point in history. Over and above– or perhaps below and behind –the strictly discursive philosophical necessity for a particular sort of thought, is the existential imperative to think something. Here the issue is not one of establishing how a certain philosophical imperative demands a response to a strictly philosophical question, but of addressing the question of why a particular question begins to resonate at all at this point in history and not in others…

…if I were to hazard a guess as to why the critique of correlationism, the thought of a world without humans, has suddenly become a burning one, then my suggestion would be that this is because we are facing the imminent possibility of a world that is truly without humans. If it has become necessary to think the possibility of a world without humans, then this is because we face a future– due to the coming climate apocalypse –of a world that truly is without humans…

Culture can be seen as a symptomatic thinking through– veiled and concealed, while nonetheless present and on the surface right there before our eyes –of the Real of its historical moment. This seems to be the case with apocalyptic films and movements in recent decades. What we seem to be thinking through is the possibility of our own extinction or, at the very least, the extinction of the world as we know it.

Speculative realism is important because several of the authors involved seem interested in operationalizing the need for novel understandings and engagements with the creeping potencies of the nonhuman and the precarious. SR offers widely dispersed possibilities for reconsidering human thought and behavior after the hideous yet enlightening realizations of being-in-a-material-world.

My sense is that North Americans currently tend to reject such realizations and then bury the accompanying dread of finitude and animality through consumption and/or fantasy - with T.V or crystal meth no less than simply commodities - in order to sooth the pain of their existential fears and resentments. To be sure, there are variances in the manner people respond but i believe the push and pull of consumption and distraction remain paramount.

I’m reminded of Ernest Becker’s work in this regard:

“Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power¬lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his symbolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one accidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab-surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?” (Becker, The Denial of Death, p.58-59)

 As Heidegger argues with tremendous force in Being and Time, humans are fundamentally coping-beings. By composition and disposition we seek to make-sense and understand ourselves. We are the weirdo-beings that give a damn about being – creatures required by circumstance to adapt. But what adaptations are possible for us this late in the ‘game’?

As Levi states:

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.

I believe the task of intellectuals (and not just philosophers) today is to indulge rather than mask the nihilistic forces of contemporary life – forces which manifest in both subjective and objective ways. Partaking in the dark revelations of current ecologies can only push us further towards more earthly, or creaturely, that is to say materialist modes of thinking and doing. Thinking the visceral and consequential facticity of intercorporeality entails thinking about our intimate connections as immanent achievements (our continuity with ‘nature’) and our vulnerability (or precarity with-in ‘nature’) simultaneously. We will have to effectively integrate the facticity of matter as matter in order to generate useful and mutually understandable expressions and sentiments among participants (or at least those of us left behind, so to speak). The practical motivations of material and speculative adaptation and communicability are at the core of any possible species of ecological and humanist thought.

"[T]he disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the 'great chain of being' and defaced the 'book of the world' is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment" (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. xi)

 Of course, we could take up the lines purposed by Brassier, or by Laruelle, or the eliminativists, or cleanse our phantasies in the rhetorical psychedelica of Timothy Morton, or even come up with our own codes and performances capable of limiting thought and opening us to the intercorporeal facticity of life - to Life as Flesh - but even this would be only a gesture. The important work to be done is decidedly practical. We must build new infrastructures.