So Real It Could Never Have Existed, Research Time, 10/01/2018

Marcel Proust’s Combray never existed. James Joyce’s Dublin never existed. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s New York never existed. Jacques Audiard’s Paris never existed, no matter how real it feels.

The experience of reality through art, when the art is good-quality, is always more powerful than real experience of the places. This is the point about art that Gilles Deleuze made through his last analyses in What Is Philosophy?.

What would David Bowie's world be, if we tried to say he created a
world – like Audiard's Paris, David's New York, and the others? You
could say he invented a world called David Bowie, with diverse,
strange, and ordinary lands and creatures. A world that can contain
more multitudes than he did himself, as we add to it with our own
creations, through sampling and inspiration. A world that can
outlast him as a monument and as a life in a billion minds.

When you create an assemblage of pure affectivity – percepts distilled into an arrangement in space and time of sensory data – you’ve created an experience more essential than the real city.

A few months ago, I was in Paris, and I found it a beautiful city, even though my experience was dragged down a little by the filth of the subway system and the smell of diesel smoke and particulates that hung in the air like the carcinogenic flatulence of a concrete dragon.

Now watch A Prophet or Dheepan, and you’ll experience a more visceral Paris than you ever could by flying there, walking around, and eating at the wonderful restaurants. The digestive problems of their excessive bread consumption doesn’t hit you when the banlieue towers become venues of small epics of war and justice.

The production of artworks separate real bodies from the affects through which we experience them – replication in artistic media takes care of the separation.

Like I said yesterday, the medium itself doesn’t matter. The stereotypical artistic medium is painting, but that’s only the most obvious method of replicating bodies and processes in a medium through their affects alone. An individual painter produces visual affects with paints on a canvas.

Cinema, for example, does the same with moving images on film or in a video file. It differs in being a collaborative medium, but they’re replicating reality with affects alone, creating a more visceral, powerful experience than the contingent movement of reality could manage.

Even when an actor's performance is so deeply inspired by the real
events of his life, what goes on film is a replication of that life. The
real life of a Tamil Tiger child soldier is a messy, paradoxical,
boring, slow, tedious life bumping from one port of call to
another as a stateless refugee barely recognized as a person under
any law under whose reach he falls. On the cinema screen, he's
distilled that life into a narrative, into a glare that brings all
the intensity of that driftwood existence to a fleeting
relationship between you and a camera.
Antonythasan Jesuthasan, star and story plotter of Dheepan.

An actor, when the cameras are rolling, is performing a character. Quality performance comes from profound emotional mimicry – even Method acting is mimicry, it’s just more soul-wrenching mimicry. But a good actor knows that she’s producing work meant to be experienced for an audience, through the camera.

So if you want to argue over how well a particular work of art reproduces the real experience of its subject matter, you’re going to argue uselessly. Spin your wheels. See how far it gets you in understanding how artistic production actually works.

Deleuze understands this replicating production as constituting a territory from the relationship between the artwork and its viewers. Sensation itself constitutes a new territory – not in the floors of the museum or the screens of a cinema, but in the dynamic interaction of an experiencer and the bodies and processes producing her sensations.

Experience itself is territory. If any of you reading Gilles Deleuze for long enough to get this far* still thinks experience only ever happens in your head, I severely doubt that you’re paying any attention. Or else you’re just trolling a man who’s been dead for more than two decades.

* Or start with What Is Philosophy? like I did.

Experience is a relationship of an organism with its world, constituted from a dynamic field of sensory affects. Art is the experimental, creative, progressive craft of pushing the boundaries of what the field of experience can do. Not nearly all the time, of course. But that’s what art does at its most intense.

Always look to push limits. Or at least give them something of a nudge. It doesn’t have to be the limits of an entire artistic tradition – very few can manage that balance of genuine virtuosity and the social networking skill to make your work prominent enough to be noticed at that scale.

But as a creator, push yourself. Keep trying something different, no matter how well the same old dance will pay. Life is at its most noble when it’s pushing limits.

Playing With Sensations, Research Time, 09/01/2018

There’s no way to write about Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of art – or theory of art, or conception of art, or however you want to categorize it depending on context – without sounding dirty. So let’s agree that there are going to be double-entendres all over this discussion and move on.

As he writes in What Is Philosophy?, there are three ways to capture the diversity of existence in human activity. He calls these ways chaoids, then never talks about them again because the phrase comes in the conclusion of his last book.

The most puzzling, strange films, like Nicholas Roeg's beautiful The
Man Who Fell to Earth, are often only difficult when you try to
understand their stories and images as having some explicit,
straightforward meaning. But the best artists rarely make meaning
the central point of their works – those who do end up writing
horribly pedantic screeds. Polemics in disguise. Let the images
play out before you, see how they all fit together, then you'll
likely understand a puzzling, strange artwork better than when you
were trying to understand what it meant.

Chaoids because they’re three different ways humanity has of hooking into the flows of chaos and making chaos into sensible reality. Those three forges of chaos into reality are philosophy, science, and art. They transform the relentless churn of chaos into, respectively, variations, variable, and varieties.

What does that mean for art? It means that art captures and preserves all the varieties of sensations in complex media in a pure manner. This even includes narrative art like fiction and non-fictional writing, and the stories of movies and television series. It includes the aural arts like music, singing, and audio narrative.

Examples of visual arts like painting and sculpture are easy to embed in a written blog post, but Deleuze would never be so reductive about something like this, and if you think he is, you’re misunderstanding his writing.

What could Deleuze mean by ‘pure’ in this case, though? That art preserves sensations in all their varieties in a pure manner. Think about it this way.

If you want to build most things, you have to add something – some material, some representation – to the event that you want to preserve. A monument is the preservation of an event, whether it’s a person’s life or a moment in history. But monuments themselves never preserve the event itself.

Artistic works don’t have the same ambition. You can interpret the hell out of an artwork, looking at what it signifies and represents, of course. Entire intellectual industries are built on this kind of interpretive work, for better or worse. But the art itself doesn’t exist for the sake of what it means or represents.

An exploration of the ideologies that were interwoven with the Futurist
art movement in Italy will still be important to Utopias, I've just put
them to the side for a bit, while I work on concepts and currents for
other parts of the book. But part of any philosophical engagement
with art is the resistance of artwork – ontologically meaning-neutral –
to any ideology. The tension is especially present in Italy's Futurism,
where a terrifying ideology was deeply interwoven with the
motivation of the artistic creations themselves.
The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni.

Art puts the events themselves in the medium – an artwork is an assemblage of sensory affects. Whatever meanings exist in them, even in narratives and explicitly linguistic artworks, are secondary to the affects themselves, the sensations.

Even in reading and narrative, meaning becomes sensory, and meaning only returns through more complicated critical readings and interpretations. Interpretation is a separate contribution to the sensory assemblage of an artwork – an assembly of sensation.

His explanation of this in What Is Philosophy? actually did fit with the way I’ve made art – my stories, novels, scripts, and plays. As I outline a story, conceive of a character, interpretation and appearance play back and forth in my mind as I think about the possible meanings of what I’m assembling.

But ultimately, a character is an assemblage of action and thought, and a story is an assemblage of events, whether of plot or of more dynamic character collision. As a machine of interlocking components – characters, plots, settings, imagery – my fiction works in different genres and media build their own logic, their own structure.

An artwork is a machine. Its reality is its functioning, the dynamic interlocking of all its components. Meaning comes later, if at all. Its existence is brute. There-ness. Enter the gallery. Pick it up. Press play.

The Agency of Swarm, Jamming, 24/11/2016

Yesterday’s post ended up mostly being a recollection of my lifelong affiliation with nerd culture, and why I’m trying to move beyond it today. It was a political and ethical post about how nerd culture has become increasingly identified with resentful grievance and hatred instead of creativity and openness.

About how a community of people that considers itself a home for freaks and weirdos became a pit of racism and misogyny. I couldn’t help but meditate on that sad transition as I wrote my explanation* for why I’ve come to presume that geeks and nerds hide horrible, hateful beliefs about everyone around them.

* Which is not an apology for stereotyping that guy on the subway, because I’m not sorry at all.

But I still want to make a few notes here about swarm intelligence. I’m not sure how concepts of swarm intelligence will appear in any of my future work. But when it comes to understanding today’s media ecology and communications infrastructure, getting your head around the concept of swarm is required thinking.

I should start from its agency. That’s the toughest part of swarm intelligence to wrap your head around. We’re accustomed to thinking of intelligence as being wrapped up with self-consciousness, with intentionality.

That is, we think of intelligence as having a direction of attention – at least an ability to direct and focus your attention. An intelligence might not focus their attention all the time – consider when you’re in a deep sleep, or addled by severe sickness like heart attack symptoms or heatstroke, or close to an overdose of some dissociative drug like ketamine.

That’s our intentionality. Imagine an intelligence without intentionality – you’re awake and alert to what’s around you, able to act and react to the affects of your environment. But you have no focus at all. That’s a swarm.

And we usually think of intelligence as being aware of itself. You have some sense of identity. You have a memory of notable past events, and of your close companions among other intelligences – pets, bosses, friends, the older woman who’s always on the evening shift at Tim Horton’s.

You remember these relationships, and you have some ability to reflect on yourself – maybe strategize for future plans, maybe wonder about your place in the world or the universe. That’s fundamentally what self-consciousness does.

Now imagine an intelligence without any of that memory and identity. You might have immense power, speed, have an incredibly complicated set of abilities that emerge from the spontaneous movement of your individual parts.

That’s the intelligence of the swarm.

But what are all those individual parts? What makes a swarm intelligence different from the unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes that cause intelligent life itself?

What are those processes that literally make me and you and everyone we know? Here are some examples. Embryo development. Everyday metabolism. Cell division. Because a swarm is different from these other spontaneous processes.

The parts of all those unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes are all themselves unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes.

A swarm's parts are intelligent creatures. Focussed, reflective, planned activities are the processes generating unfocussed, unreflective, spontaneous processes.

Who are these intelligent creatures? A swarm could be composed of viruses, locusts, social media trolls. Or it could be composed of fish, migrating caribou in the middle of a long daytime run through the tundra. The cars and their drivers who manifest a massive traffic jam when one guy hits his breaks for a moment three kilometres up.

A swarm body acts and has intelligence of a kind because it formed and moves in the world, always in response to the affects of its environment. It has that much unity – unity of motion and response. Very simple kinds of action. A collection of intelligent animals move together and constitute a swarm’s parallel of a very simple bacteria.

So About This PostHumanism Thing Again, Research Time, 27/11/2014

When I first got word that my Ecophilosophy manuscript would be considered for a slot in a book series broadly about posthumanism, I started looking into works that explicitly engaged with the concept. This is where my series of posts about Rosi Braidotti’s work this April and May came from. 

When I first discovered The Venture Bros.,
I thought it was a sign that we as a culture
had finally gotten over our techno-futurist
dreams. I guess not.

As I said a couple of days ago, my thoughts about transhumanism are noteworthy mostly because I so rarely think about transhumanism. I always found the philosophy played better as science-fiction concepts, and most of the straight philosophy of transhumanism ends up stuck in techno-futurist dreams that I thought we had gotten over. The techno-futurist dreams of the 19th and 20th centuries all blew up in our faces when the totalitarian regimes of Europe and Asia nearly destroyed humanity’s moral sense, and this was followed by the global ecological crisis hitting us with pollution phenomena so enormous and strange that you have to be crazy just to understand them. 

The Pacific Trash Vortex is a thing that is real, and we made it. That’s just my personal favourite example of this terrifyingly surreal ecological crazy of our civilization. So the idea at the heart of transhumanism that a whole-hearted embrace of technology will save us from ourselves is kind of laughable to me.

Posthumanism is an amorphous collection of philosophical perspectives that basically acts as a variety of rejoinders to this freakish optimism of the transhumanist vision. And at the moment, I’m looking into an essay collection by Cary Wolfe called What Is Posthumanism?, a title and a jacket description that made me think it would be quite useful for the new introduction to the Ecophilosophy project that sets it in the posthumanist context.

Wolfe’s book doesn’t quite do that; I think Braidotti’s work is best suited to forming a ground to a new introduction. Wolfe is a little too much of a Derrida fan for that. I first came across his work in the initial research when I was composing the manuscript in 2011, in my doctoral program at McMaster. He wrote a very illuminating essay, called “Meaning as Event-Machine” that closed the multi-author collection Emergence and Embodiment, which was about philosophical explications and implications of systems theory.

Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay helped me see the core problem with mainstream systems theory, that it isolates perceiving bodies from each other and the world semantically, even while they do perceive the world’s affects. If meaning is idiosyncratic to the perceiver, then communication is impossible. So the fact of communication is either an illusion or a paradox, which Wolfe illuminates with a parallel to Jacques Derrida’s ideas.*

* Yes, you can illuminate an idea with a reference to Derrida. Now put away your snark and be nice or go back to work for philosophical Buzzfeed.

Basically, we affect each other, but all we manage to do is hopefully harmonize our mutual irritations. It really helped me understand perception and language as a field of affects. Yes, we basically just create fields that disrupt each other, but those fields can interact harmoniously, and the patterns in those affects actually constitute meaning, like the patterns of fluctuations in radio waves making the content of our transmissions. Semantics emerges from syntax. It’s only a mysterious paradox if you don’t think that’s possible. To you people I say, go learn how radio works.

But I’m not really a fan of Derrida precisely because he sticks with the pessimistic view. Because all we do is affect and irritate each other, he mourns the loss of the more profound communion that we all thought communication really was. So I was a bit disappointed to see what a devotee Wolfe is of Derrida’s fundamental frameworks. 

Even so, he does much more interesting things with Derrida than I expected to see. To be continued . . . 

They Aren’t the Villains This Time, Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night, Reviews, 26/10/2014

It took me a while to get around to seeing it this time, but In the Forest of the Night was well worth the wait. It was a remarkable Doctor Who story, not just because it finally had a child cast written by someone who actually knows how to write children properly. Myself, I’m a pretty big egomaniac when it comes to my own writing talents, but one task that I definitely have no idea how to do is write a child well. 

Danny Pink does a proper job of thinking of the children.

I know how to write a child badly. One way is to make them an idiot. Another is to make them so precocious that you want to smash their favourite toy just to laugh while they cry. Children don’t have quite the same singularity as adults because they haven’t yet learned how to speak with subtext yet. I think this is why real-life adolescents are especially insufferable; they’ve started incorporating multiple meanings into their speech, but are still largely terrible at it, so I cringe at their poor performance at covering up how horrible they are.

Children, on the other hand, have a special way of bullshitting that’s almost an anti-cover-up, as in a brief little comedy flashback when Danny and Clara discuss how remarkable it is that their students are not being twats in this very strange situation of a forest that’s grown up in the middle of London overnight. When Danny draws a triangle on a whiteboard, indicates an angle with an X and asks Ruby (appropriately cast as a ginger), she tells him that it’s right there at the top of the triangle on the board.

“But what’s its value, Ruby?” asks Mr. Pink.

“Why are you always asking me, sir?” pleads Ruby.

Frank Cottrell Boyce clearly knows how to write children, and I think he should be the go-to writer whenever Doctor Who needs any character under age 12. He’s written both the novel and the screenplay of Millions, as well as three sequels to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang children’s novel that have actually been artistically successful. It’s a rare feat. 

But aside from his ability to craft multiple child characters in a single story who are not only non-obnoxious but also genuinely interesting, Boyce has made a wonderfully hopeful ecological fable in Doctor Who, which,

SPOILERS

aside, is both a fantastically insightful tale as well as being fantastically naive. I’m on something of a home field here, as I wrote an entire doctoral thesis (under consideration for formal publication) on ecological philosophy. I describe it this way, and not as environmental ethics, because the scope of my Ecophilosophy manuscript is actually broad enough to constitute a complete philosophical perspective on how human society can adapt ecological principles to its structure and daily habits. 

In academic philosophy, writing on the environment means writing environmental moral philosophy, applying the existing moral theories of the philosophical tradition to questions of how to deal with human industry and environmental protection. There are moral principles in my Ecophilosophy manuscript, but the main thrust is adapting principles from the ecological and biological sciences (following the lead of several writers who had done so already) into the framework of the philosophical tradition to build a framework of human nature and self-conception that would result in ecologically sustainable habits on a personal and civilizational scale. 

Another theme I like this season is how frequently the
Doctor has been interacting with children, foregrounding
his importance as a mythical children's hero, even in a
season whose stories have a much more adult sensibility
thanks to their horror content.

In the Forest of the Night is about a forest that appears worldwide overnight, and the narrative follows the Doctor, Clara, Danny, a very special child named Maebh, and the rest of the gifted class from Coal Hill School figuring out what precisely is going on. Eventually, they’re able to figure out that the voices Maebh hears isn’t genuinely a sign of mental abnormality, but a burgeoning telepathic ability.*

* Some of the comments at Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode get into the controversy that the story seems to actively discourage children with mental illnesses from taking their medication. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, but it’s common in North America to give heavy sedatives to two-year-olds to control hyperactivity. The last couple of generations of children are, if anything, over-medicated to the point of worn-out teachers, overbooked doctors, and overworked parents making them drug addicts before the start of puberty. Doctor Who is a modern myth for our society, through which we deal with major social questions through allegory. This was largely an ecological story, but we can have a behavioural-pharmacological theme running under it as well (if any show can have two allegories running under it, it’s one where the lead has two hearts ;) ). I had behavioural difficulties of my own as a child, particularly a short temper that would lash out whenever I felt afraid, and being very easily frightened that other people were going to hurt me. My mother had the good sense to avoid following the orders of doctors whose first instinct was to reach for their prescription pad before even meeting me. My problems were better solved with cognitive behavioural therapy to improve my consciousness of my own desires, urges, and thought processes. That, however, took the time and effort of a caring and sensitive child psychiatrist, which is too often too much for anyone to commit to.

This telepathic ability is that Maebh can communicate with trees. In the mythical context in which the imagery of the story places us, this is the ability to communicate with the world of faerie. But in the more scientific context in which I understand our mythical narratives, she can literally communicate with trees. 

After all, Doctor Who has always been about awakening
children to the wonders of the strange, so that we never
rest content with a world that feels familiar to us. If we're
never afraid of what's different, we'll be open to
understanding the alien, an epistemic issue on which
the future of our species could very well depend, and . . .
Wait, did I get the wrong picture again? Well, at least
this mistake was easier to make.

Our era’s ecological crisis is, in a fashion, a failure to communicate, or rather a failure to understand the ubiquity of communication. If I can be extremely quick in this argument, one of the ideas I dealt with in my Ecophilosophy manuscript was an underlying principle of systems theory. The mathematical models of systems theory are excellent at describing ecological relationships, because ecological processes are the interactions of multiple overlapping feedback loops at a variety of scales, all affecting each other in unique ways. 

However, the only things that can move back and forth between bodies in systems theoretical models are affects, and the influential philosopher of systems theory, Niklas Luhmann, therefore concluded that there is no true communication among bodies. This is because affects can have no content, only form, that form being a pattern of disruption across various media.**

** I should give props to a wonderful essay by Carey Wolfe for explaining this notion quite clearly, and connecting it with core themes of nihilistic post-modernism that are essential to the early work of Jacques Derrida. I disagree with it completely in the larger sense, but this only helped me solidify my own interpretation of the general post-modern paradigm, as a split between the hopeless nihilism of Derrida and the joyful perspective of Gilles Deleuze.

However, as anyone familiar with information theory or the most profound ideas in contemporary philosophy of language can tell you, form IS content. To communicate is to send a particular pattern of fluctuations across some medium, and have it transition to another medium while keeping the pattern intact. Thought or language is the recognition and interpretation of such patterns. A given pattern doesn’t have content or not in itself alone; it has content if an interpreter of that pattern can make sense of it. So content emerges from the relation of interpreters and media. 

The core lesson of In the Forest of the Night is that we
shouldn't run from what's strange and frightening (no
matter how central running is to Doctor Who), because
listening to what is beyond our knowledge and learning to
understand it could save our lives.

The core human mistake we’ve made that got us into this ecological crisis is that too many of us only know how to understand human language, and every other kind of pattern transmission among bodies, we take to be a mere affect. The Doctor begins to solve the problem of In the Forest of the Night when he realizes that Maebh can understand the patterns transmitted among plants. In the scene in the glowing glen, the Doctor is able to translate the plants’ patterns into human speech.

If only it were that easy to understand the lives of all the other organisms and ecosystems on our planet, we’d live in a much more harmonious, clean, and just world. 

Humanity is lucky In the Forest of the Night, because this time, the trees are here to save our ecosystems from dangerous solar activity. The sun brings life, because it supplies Earth with the energy to produce metabolisms and ecosystems, but it brings death because it’s also an enormous ball of nuclear fusion explosions. The trees are giving us a chance not to destroy our own world with our stupid, short-sighted thinking that can't understand ecological relationships, as when David Cameron orders all the trees burned down instead of trying to understand what happened.

And we forget because we humans are stupid, and so few of us know how to communicate with anything but what’s already just like us. It’s hard enough to get people to learn a second human language, let alone speak with trees. Communication is simply finding new ways to understand all the transmissions that surround us all the time. 

As the Doctor says, if we remembered that, there would be no war and no injustice. But we forget to probe what we can do, and instead rest stupidly content with what we already know, as if that’s all that’s worth knowing.

In the Forest of the Night. A classic.