Let Man Be the Measure of All Things as All Things Culminate in Their Measurement, Research Time, 10/07/2013

I finished My Mother Was a Computer yesterday afternoon, and am about to embark on the most difficult reading the utopias project has asked of me so far: I’m going to get back into Hegel. 

I’m not about to spill all the beans here, especially because there are literally years ahead of me working on a project where Hegelian conceptions of history and time play a significant role, and this blog updates daily. But Hayles marks a good transition for me in this research, in terms of how her book ends. 

One of the ideas in Hayles’ last chapter is her discussion of the “anthropic principle” in physics. Essentially, this is the idea that because we exist, the universe must have the physical constants and underlying laws that permit us to exist. The flaw in this reasoning: it mistakes an effect for a cause. Another way to think about the flaw in this reasoning: taking some contingent facts (our existence and the physical regularities and natures that are the conditions for our existence) for necessities. Mistaking what is the case for what must be the case.

My suspicion is that the Hegelian approach to history commits the same fallacy of reasoning. Taking the contingent fact of our current existence (or in his case, his current existence in 1820s Prussia) for a necessity to which all the significant structures of the past condition and constitute. The causal history of the universe necessarily brings about the subjects who, through their power of thinking and understanding that history, create it. 

I have a serious problem with this idea, mainly its flagrant and nauseating egotistical humanism. Of course, as I explore Hegel’s Philosophy of History, I’m sure to find more nuance than my brief summary above. The man wouldn’t have been as influential if he didn’t have a little flexibility in his thought. But sometimes, I’m not so sure. If one common theme can be found in the Hegelian-Marxist trajectories of political philosophy and action, it’s that history seems to culminate in the revolution that allegedly creates a new workers’ state for humans in which all resources are mobilized to create humanity’s new Eden. When history is defined in terms of human goals, then there will be no room in your thinking to consider that which isn’t human. This despite nonhumans making up the vast majority of what exists and has existed.

The Hegelian rejoinder to this might be that only humans have history anyway, and that there was no history before humanity. Now, that sentence certainly does seem to stack the deck against Hegel. You might accuse me of a bias before I start my exploration again, but that was an actual conversation I had with one of the most remarkable Hegel-influenced philosophers in the United States. But that’s a subject for A History Boy.

Even Cyberspace Still Needs a Place, Research Time, 8/7/2013

Right now, I’m about halfway through reading N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer as part of my research for my utopias project.* Chapter five of this book can practically be called “Lessons from Cryptonomicon.” One of the things I like about applying ideas from literary theory to philosophy (in this case, its political and technological dimensions) is blurring lines between philosophy and fiction. 

*More on the utopias project in one, or more likely several, History Boy posts.

My fiction projects are informed by my philosophical writings and explorations.** And Hayles reads Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon as a philosophical text about the nature of rebellion, authority, the bonds of friendship, and the complex connections that can run across the chaos of material history. What most interests me for this post, though, is a point she makes about one of the dreams of cyberspace: the internet as a place that exists on a different plane from physical reality.

**More on how my fiction is philosophical (and perhaps vice versa) in many, many future installments. 

This is an old stereotype about the internet: that cyberspace is on some kind of different plane from real space, that the connections you make on the internet aren’t bound by old-fashioned limitations like physical contiguity. But really, that’s a sad, sad lie. Because the internet can link us so quickly with a huge variety of different places around the world, this idea has become prevalent in our culture that it doesn’t really exist in space. I think we now know how naive this notion really is, but it’s still part of our conceptual heritage when it comes to the internet, and it’s true in part. One reason the Arab Spring happened was because the dictatorial/totalitarian governments of the revolting countries couldn’t control people’s communication on the internet. But this was only because the servers the revolutionaries were using were in different countries. 

Because the internet still has to have a place to be. Those files have to sit somewhere. It could be on a server farm in Sweden or Cupertino, or, as in Stephenson’s book, in an enormous cavern in an obscure Pacific Asian island sultanate. And those servers must still be physically linked to your computer through undersea cables and satellite signals. Physical places and physical connections, all of which are vulnerable to physical threats and accidents. Huge swaths of India lost internet access for days a few years ago because one ship was careless about where it dropped anchor and snapped a cable. No matter how idealistic and utopian we may feel sometimes about the potential of the internet when it’s at its best, we have to remember that it’s still a physical network of hard drives and wires. Our works are inescapably physical. Our knowledge never escapes media.

The problems that physical distances and locations can cause for communication and closeness are important for one of my fiction projects, but that’s for another time (and probably many more times after that).