The Most Productive Possible Research Priorities, Composing, 05/05/2014

The last major chapter of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman is about what a post-human research program would look like. She lists some examples of existing works of philosophy and critical theory that constitute a post-human perspective, and describes what the university institution would look like with post-human priorities.

With regard to the content of this new mode of knowledge, post-humanity, I feel as though I fit in quite well. The central ontological ideas of my Ecophilosophy project are that the world is primarily constituted through relations and networks, that the significant motor of change in the world is dynamic tensions among systems and bodies, and that the mathematics best suited to describe these dynamics are non-linear, of a type most commonly arising in probability and complexity theory. 

Fractal geometry and complexity mathematics do more
than create beautiful images. But the images are also
beautiful.

That’s pretty much what Braidotti says a post-human theory would do, particularly her vision of post-human critical theory. So I would fit in well among her collection of fellow travellers, which includes feminist epistemology (such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Henrietta Moore, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Peter Galison’s embrace of “the end of grand systematic theoretical discourse” regarding science, the philosophical elaborations on complexity theory that have flowed from Deleuze and Guattari to Karen Barad and Luciana Parisi, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historicist approach to the development of climate change science, not to mention Katherine Hayles’ approach to the digital humanities. 

Of course, we have important differences in our visions, as her own philosophical vision is shaped by the background framework of critical theory: the conception of problems as texts to be interpreted, common in the critical theory context, doesn’t really appeal to me. In one way, this is a personal preference. My own background and education has been through self-identified philosophy departments, and my first years of philosophical education was in a department that was very historically-oriented in its research and teaching. So I have a strong background in that canon of dead white male Europeans (and some Americans at the end). 

If studying the history of philosophy teaches you anything (aside from a head for details and anachronistic language), you learn that there are many different ways to engage with conceptual creativity. Critical theory is just one set of approaches, one school of style, in a history that includes many different ways to develop new ways of thinking. It gave me that taste for pure conceptual thought that isn’t necessarily wedded to a single style of expression. Yes, most contemporary philosophy has a fairly standard form of the academic essay, putting forth arguments and responding to them, piece by piece. But consider some of the innovations in form. 

I’m not just talking about Heidegger or Derrida’s games with language, or even the way Deleuze and Guattari pack countless layers of signification into so much of their writing that uncharitable readers almost think it all nonsense. Look at Russell and Whitehead’s masterpiece of symbolic logic, the Principia Mathematica, and especially their early drafts and dead-ended attempts. How Kripke and Lacan crafted brilliant books from intricate lectures. Marx’s monstrous interdisciplinary beast, Capital. Hegel’s dialectic via aufheben. Spinoza's geometrical argumentation. The first-person narration of Descartes’ Meditations has more in common with the stream-of-consciousness experiments of Virginia Woolf than most of the scientific writing of his day. Kierkegaard’s army of conceptual personae. The ancient Greeks used forms of writing that have no modern analogue: the aporetic dialogue that obscures even the author’s own beliefs; the philosophical poem that expresses philosophy as praise to the gods. Nietzsche.

I’m no innovator in the form of philosophy. The Ecophilosophy manuscript is a pretty clear extended, multi-part essay making an argument for what kind of ethic and self-conception a person would have to hold to live authentically according to an ecocentric morality, and that we should start thinking of ourselves this way for the sake of our species’ survival. But I’m glad I don’t wed myself to a particular style straight out of the gate. Who knows what I’ll be writing in ten years?

Living Your End as an Affirmation, Research Time, 01/05/2014

There’s often a strange sort of synergy in my research, such as today, when I’m reading Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal at the same time as Rosi Braidotti’s chapter of The Posthuman on her philosophy’s engagement with the human experience or encounter with death. After all, Roth’s novella is a first-person depiction of a lothario facing his own mortality, which he understands as the last chance he’ll ever have to make regular love to a beautiful woman before his body simply breaks down from age. He is so pathetic in his desperation, yet he understands himself so well, that it makes such a slimy man dignified, or at least understandable. That’s the power of literature: Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Bolaño are masters at conveying the disgusting with dignity.

Now that I've been reading the novella The Dying Animal, I
have an even greater desire to see how they adapted it into
a film as Elegy. So much of the character and philosophy
develops through the voice of the narrator, I wonder what
they managed to do instead.

But this post isn’t really about Philip Roth. It’s about a curious way of thinking about death that avoids this crisis. It’s a very old way to understand your mortality, but it’s very difficult to master. Unlike most protagonists of Roth’s novels, it requires letting go of the ego. 

I know that’s an old idea, so old that it’s become cliché, especially in the middle of a generally liberal urban landscape where simple Buddhist and Daoist ideas fly around the culture like leaves on a windy Fall day. But it is very difficult for most people. Braidotti follows (without saying the man’s name, as is something of a modern convention) the notion of Henri Bergson that life’s diversity and ecological fluctuation and transformation constitutes a powerful force in itself. Bergson himself spoke literally of a vital force, which, like most of his terminology, is essentially insightful, but a little too naive to accept. But the basic principles of ecological science rely on complexity theory, the mathematics of turbulence, thresholds, and phase transitions, a conception of the world as a collection of populations, a world in constant flux.

In the face of a world whose primary property is its constant roiling change, the world of life, of ecosystems, the traditional notion of the purity of the subject becomes laughable. This is a basic point in my own Ecophilosophy manuscript: if we’re going to develop a self-conception in which an environmentalist consciousness is common sense, it’s going to require seeing the subject as a product of the world, not its purpose. A reasonable scientific attitude shows that well enough. You learn enough about cosmology, ecology, biology and its central principles of evolution, and you’ll understand yourself as one member of a species that arose from contingent processes in a fragile world. The role of philosophy is working out the implications of this framework for a theory of subjectivity, our ethics, and our social moral principles. It would be a subject that was equally fragile.

Not only would we conceive of ourselves as fragile, we’d be okay with that. We often conceive of ourselves as an absolute presence in our lives. Roth’s narrator, David Kepesh, accepting the inevitability and proximity of his death, writhes in desperation as every experience reminds him of the end of his life. Braidotti, in contrast, conceives of the dying person as someone who waits peacefully, and with some enthusiasm, to be dispersed throughout the flux of becoming that is life. Losing the membrane that separates you from your surroundings is the end of everything for the Modernist, the Humanist. For the Posthumanist — we could also call her a Poststructuralist, Bergson, Deleuze, Spinoza, or maybe even a secular Buddhist — it’s a radical departure, the beginning of a new journey.

To achieve this state of mind, we would have to accept in every fibre of our thoughts that the universe is larger than we could ever be ourselves, that what matters includes far beyond our daily concerns. I don’t know how many people could actually manage that.

What Does It Mean to Dehumanize? Research Time, 29/04/2014

One of the common features of continental philosophy that follows Heidegger’s model and ideas is the notion that we have slowly become dehumanized. But I’ve always been uncertain, at least myself, as to what this means, and the field offers many perspectives, but little consensus. Of course, this is just how I like my philosophical fields, with many different interpretations and perspectives in dynamic tension with each other. So, in dialogue with Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, I offer a few hundred words on what dehumanization is.

Richard Lindner's "Boy With Machine"
appeared in Anti-Oedipus, which conceived
of humanity as actually being machines.

For someone who entitles a sub-section of a chapter “Becoming-Machine,” the image of humanity Braidotti sketches is far from what anyone would call dehumanized. I’d say that it’s more vibrantly alive than most humans ever actually manage. Her concept follows the line that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set out: if our subjectivity is constituted from the affects that our body generates in its interaction with its environment, then humanity is becoming increasingly mechanized as more of our lives incorporate technology. 

Martin Heidegger would have been appalled, but that harried old social conservative was dreaming of an Eden that never really existed. My old PhD supervisor documented research ten years ago in his book Knowledge and Civilization that the human brain was plastic enough that its architecture kept developing long after birth. This is one of humanity’s fundamental unique features in the world of nature. Our tool use was far more intimate than any other animal: not only did we make creative use of them, but the ability to manipulate tools and build artifacts is deeply integrated with our neurology. It’s as if our own technology (even when it was simple as a flint knife) is a second, worldly womb.

So we have always been technological in our essence, which makes the concept of becoming-machine a little less freaky. Braidotti considers this conception of humanity an ecosophical, or a transversal matter. What these words mean have a touch of epistemology about them. We normally divide our knowledge into discrete categories, and the disciplines have been splintering as our knowledge of the world has grown. But the phenomena that constitute the world influence each other paying no heed to the disciplinary divisions of humanity’s sciences. Real affects in the world transverse our categories of knowledge. The only category of human science that can really handle this transversality is ecology, the science of multifaceted connections among wildly different things. In a more general form, ecology is the science of how the interactions of a multiplicity of multiplicities constitute a single, incredibly complex field of interaction.

Ecosophy: the philosophy where the one is the many. Plato would have a lot to learn. 

So if dehumanization isn’t a matter of changing what humanity physically is, what could it be? Some of Braidotti’s remarks on the horrors of the 20th century’s politics and war accord with my own thinking. The perpetrators of political violence, both at the policy-making level and the police officers on the streets, must slowly become inured to the psychological effects of violence if they want to continue doing their jobs. Consider what I find most disgusting about realpolitik thinking: treating everyone you encounter as an element of a strategy to achieve geopolitical objectives. Their singular personalities are forgotten so that they can be manipulated and used for some global-scale interest.

Because you have to deaden yourself to empathy to carry out such thinking efficiently, you effectively numb your empathetic senses away. And without empathy, I can’t really say that you’re a human.

Life Makes Hope If You Let It, Research Time, 25/04/2014

I sometimes think about what makes the difference between a student of philosophy and a philosopher. One idea that I keep returning to is that a student defines his philosophical perspective with terms that are already part of the vocabulary: reliabilist, utilitarian, Hegelian, Davidsonian. A philosopher just carries out her conceptual explorations and arguments, and other philosophers are obstacles or fellow travellers.

Rosi Braidotti is definitely a fellow traveller, almost to the point where she’s anticipated ideas of my own. She pitches her philosophical project of post-humanism as part of the Spinozist tradition that understands all matter as inherently active, that moving bodies interacting to constitute more complex bodies and structures basically amounts to self-production. Physicality itself enables freedom because all bodies have the potential to articulate all that they can do. Braidotti calls herself a vital materialist, but unlike Jane Bennett, who figured into a small role in my thesis, she is able to escape the mystical metaphors of historical alchemy and the phenomenology of metallurgy and actually develop this idea as a philosophical concept.

My imperative in crafting my own take on the vital materialist concept was the ecological crisis. The human self-conception that saw nature and humanity as inherently opposed and alienated, two poles of an everlasting zero-sum conflict, has only gotten us into the trouble of a potential extinction, so we really should drop the whole idea and think of something else. So I developed a vision of the subject as constituted from a complex field of interacting affects out of some concepts from molecular biology and standing on the shoulders of Deleuze and Guattari. Free of the mystical mumbo-jumbo that too often still haunts environmentalist philosophy, I built a conception of the self that was also its world. She and I share this basic environmentalist imperative, but she has some additional imperatives that arose from her lifelong professional dialogue with feminism, post-colonialism and the related race theory, and 20th century anti-humanism.

A challenge of 20th century philosophy is whether the
Enlightenment's concept of social progress through
technocratic science could lead anywhere other than
Holocausts.

One of the particularly interesting bits of argument to arise from her book in relation to these other traditions, at least for me, is her conception of anti-humanism. Basically, the 20th century in Europe, especially leading up to the barbarism of the Second World War, was interpreted as the crash of the Enlightenment conception of humanity. The notion that scientific knowledge could control every aspect of human life for the better ran up against the fact that, far from enabling the moral progress accompanying the technological, that vision resulted in moral degradation as humanity was ignored in favour of mechanism. The hypocrisies of colonialism also fed anti-humanism, as the end of Europe’s military empires led to the imperial governments rightly being called out as hypocrites for all their talk about universal freedoms while carrying out serious political, social, and racializing oppression.

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project is part of this extended calling out of the European/Western humanist tradition. His angle revolves around a distinction of two conceptions of life: bios and zoê. Bios is the conception of a life as a human citizen with full political rights and capacities. Agamben contrasts this with zoê, or bare life, the organism whose killing is permitted, and even rather unremarkable. I first encountered Agamben during my Master’s degree, when a class I sat in on slowly read through his first book of the Homo Sacer series. It’s clear from the connotation of the term that zoê is the conception of life that emerges from the camps: a human whose death is unremarkable, of no more consequence than exterminating a mouse. If this is where Enlightenment humanism takes us, then there’s no use for Enlightenment at all.

Braidotti has a more hopeful point of view here: she redefines zoê in the vital materialist sense of life, the fundamental activity from which all the complex structures of the biosphere (and the universe as a whole, if you take a wide enough view) constitutes itself. Bios in this view is the problematic concept, because what matters on that conception is an exception from the material world. Only in the anthropocentrically human conception of participation could a life be politically relevant; all other forms of life and matter were ethically immaterial. Braidotti and I make no exceptions when it comes to political relevance, only how that relevance occurs. It requires an entire redefinition of what a political process is, but we’ve been working on it. And we’ll keep working on it. What else is philosophy for, but radically rethinking what we once presumed to be true?

Ethical Posthumanism: Why Nietzsche Is My Hero, Research Time, 23/04/2014

Rosi Braidotti’s work is fascinating, and I think some of her ideas will be important figures in new drafts of my Ecophilosophy project, and will likely join the flow of ideas taking shape on my back burner in the Utopias project.* For one, admittedly superficial, point, she and I share the same general view of Georg Hegel’s philosophy of history. Because he reads European culture as uniquely expressing self-reflective reason, Hegel gives the most profound justification of Eurocentrism. Rationality itself privileges Western man over other paradigms of culture and thought. Braidotti and I both call shenanigans on this entire project.

* For those of you wondering how I can so quickly shift projects from the front to back burners as contingent events like feedback from consulting colleagues, conference deadlines, or upcoming job opportunities assail me — I’m a professional. We work on multiple projects at once and have a lot of priorities to deal with. This is the life of the modern intellectual and writer. So get used to it.

I touched yesterday on what precisely transhumanism is, the philosophical engagement with the possibility of transcending or overcoming the limitations of the human organism through technology. I’ve only recently become interested in it because it strikes me as a more whitewashed iteration of the brutal Futurism of Marinetti, the vision of humanity remade through industrial machinery. While I was researching the Ecophilosophy project, however, I just thought of the transhumanist project or perspective as naive. It was barely worth my engaging with the scene because not even a critical thought about whether technological progress is ethical or ecological progress even appeared to me. But the transhumanists I knew of were the most obnoxious, like Max More. And even their role in the Utopias project will be minor at best — modern transhumanism seems a pale shadow of the real first technological utopian, Filippo Marinetti.

It is frankly a beautiful cover, which
reflects its fascinating content.

Braidotti arose from a tradition that combined feminist political philosophy with the ontology of difference of Gilles Deleuze. And when I say she’s part of that tradition, I really mean that this is a basic account of how she approaches philosophy herself. I like to think of good philosophers as constituting their own traditions, even if in the next generation, we don’t find too many self-professed Braidottians. Her posthumanism doesn’t have the violent thrust of the transhumanist vision of progress, instead asking a subtler question of what in our current conceptions of humanity needs to be overcome. More will come on this notion as I read more of her book last year on the subject.

My own encounter with this notion of posthumanity came from engaging with Nietzsche, which is why I consider Braidotti a fellow traveller, now that I’m growing familiar with her work. In the proliferation of academic writing, she is another voice that is worth reading, which is more than can be said for many (quite possibly myself included, and I write this project, of all things). The problem with the technological forms of transhumanism is that they are closely integrated with economic factors. As far as I'm concerned, it's of no use creating a new cybernetic iteration of humanity if only the super-rich will be able to invest in the enhancements, if only those who can afford it can enter cryogenic sleep, or enhance their lifespan and perceptual abilities with technological additions. Most people will be left behind in a technological transhumanism. But an ethical posthumanism, which Nietzsche was really the first to develop, or at least the most influential single figure to do so, is democratic. Reconsidering one's ethics and self-definition is a task that has no price tag. All it takes is to think about your life in a particular way that calls the moral values you have long taken for granted into question, and develop new practical priorities in the face of problems to which those old values are inadequate. The transvaluation of values sounds like an epic cultural shift, and in fact constitutes one. But such a shift is so mundane that it happens all the time, as moral priorities change with every generational changeover.

More to come.

Ethical Posthumanism: That There Can Be More, Composing, 22/04/2014

It’ll take a while to get there, but it’s coming.

Some of the people I’ve recently consulted with on my Ecophilosophy project have given me very interesting, but unexpected feedback. Most of the unexpected feedback I’ve gotten about the project has to do with suggestions to include particular ideas that seemed natural to them, and as I think about them, they have a curious origin.

The most common kind of feedback I get on my article and book manuscripts are questions about why I didn’t include some particular philosopher. Some of the first editorial feedback I got on the Ecophilosophy project was a suggestion that I read Nicholas Agar. He’s a New Zealander professor who specializes in environmental moral and political philosophy, and wrote a short book that I quite enjoyed. I incorporated some ideas of his 2001 book Life’s Intrinsic Value into the first chapter of the manuscript. 

Nicholas Agar wrote a later book that
critiqued philosophical transhumanism,
which I'd probably enjoy, and I'd agree
with a lot of it. I haven't read it, though.

But I found his ideas couldn’t take on the more central role to the argument that my consultant felt they should. While my own project engages with the long-standing debate over the intrinsic value of nature, it isn’t a work of value theory as such. Really, the manuscript only touches on value theory long enough to describe its tools as inadequate to a task that requires a larger redefinition of how we understand the world and act in it. The core conceit of the Ecophilosophy manuscript is that people who think as we do are never going to be able to accept that nature itself has some form of value intrinsically, or at least without necessary dependence on human evaluation. But the manuscript isn’t about to resurrect any imagined Edenic perspective of semi-vanished indigenous people. Pretty much anytime an indigenous person shows up in environmental moral philosophy as an idealized figure, the atmosphere gets way too racist for me.

The basic point of the Ecophilosophy manuscript is developing a conception of humanity and its place in the universe that encourages environmentalist activity while also preserving productive aspects of scientific and technological knowledge and practice. This was the point that my most recent consultant made when he pointed me toward the posthumanists, particularly Rosi Braidotti. I’ve only just started exploring her work, but I already find it rather fascinating. I can understand why I had never discovered her work before — it’s rooted in the feminist philosophical traditions that I rarely exposed myself to in my undergraduate years, and that after those years I felt too embarrassed until now to plunge into for the first time. However, because we both lean on Gilles Deleuze as a significant conceptual influence, so in this regard at least, she’s a fellow traveller. Instead of incorporating her into an early chapter for the sake of criticizing, as I did with Agar’s work, she can instead supplement my final conclusions. Precisely how, I’m still figuring out, but I think this is the direction I’m going in.

I didn’t know it when I started the project, but I suppose it makes me a transhumanist of a sort. I say ‘of a sort’ because, as with most labels I temporarily adopt, my own version of it is so singular and, to a degree, idiosyncratic, that describing myself with that term misleads you about what I actually think instead of helping explain it. Transhumanism often revolves around embracing technology to overcome our human and organic limitations, essentially to become supermen. That’s the cartoonishly simple version, anyway. 

My own work is better characterized as posthuman. As a slogan, I could call it ethical post-humanism. The typical transhumanist conceives of human transformation using technological modification. I consider it important for humanity to change how we understand ourselves, to begin an ethical transformation.