For anyone who is interested, here’s the text for my talk on flat ethics at UTA this Thursday: bryantutaflatethics. I do not yet arrive at any determinate positions regarding flat ethics, but do feel that I’m getting a better sense of what a flat ethics might be and what problems or ethical questions it might generate. There’s also a sneak peak at the revised ontology of machines I’m developing for Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media here. The concept of machines is far more elaborate than is suggested in this text (the chapter on Machines takes up around 60 pages in Onto-Cartography), but this gives a sense of what I’m getting at. I’ve found the concept of machines to be extremely productive for analytic purposes, leading to a whole host of interesting questions and analyses of the various different types of objects of the world. I’ve also introduced incorporeal machines into my ontology, much to my surprise. In the paper above you’ll find discussions of flat ontology, ethical machines, why I think humanist critiques of OOO and flat ontology are misguided, anthropocentric flat ethics, and posthumanist flat ethics. At any rate, I’d love to hear what others think.
October 17, 2012
October 17, 2012 at 6:19 am
Hey, Levi: the only question I have is in your division of incorporeal/corporeal when you say:
“Some machines are incorporeal, such as mathematical equations, recipes, national constitutions, scores of music, philosophical and scientific theories, etc. Other machines are corporeal such as the tanuki raccoon dog of Japan, planets, neutrinos, and rocks.”
I guess I have a conflict with this dualistic approach of incorporeal/corporeal… i don’t see any separation between these two types of entity. The reason I say that is simple, even as I write this sentence I’m interacting with physical material objects that then through math and logic are manipulated through physical hardware and transformed into binary code that is translated into bits that are trasnported to the servers on the web from my own machine conveying the very material thoughts that I’m now about to publish. Are these incorporeal or corporeal? Is there a difference? What makes something incorporeal or corporeal? Is it a kind of object? Why not admit that all objects are material and have effect/affects within the physical? I think we have divided things because of their types, and through some need of linguistic habit rather than admiting the logical truth that thoughts are material as well, which means math is productive of material activation, language too.
October 17, 2012 at 7:16 am
I waver back and forth on this too. For a long time I took a hard line stance that these things are purely material for the reasons you cite. I’m less certain these days. While I’m inclined to say every incorporeal entity requires a corporeal material body to inscribe it (writing, encoding, etc), the iterability of things like mathematical equations and the way they retain their identity across different inscriptions suggests they can’t be reduced to their inscriptions. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, this is just where I’m at right now.
October 17, 2012 at 11:45 am
I enjoyed your paper Levi. I am curious about the composition of flat ethical machines, particularly as it relates to issues of agency. Perhaps this is part of the incorporeal/corporeal concern. And ultimately I suppose I am more interested in developing a flat ethics for the purposes of understanding how ethical systems do work than what they should be (for much the same reasons as you argue that flat ontologies are useful for addressing social inequities). So, for example, one might investigate the flat ethical machine that produces the decision to conduct off-shore drilling. One might be inclined to see the big picture of oil companies, governments, etc. and construct an ethical machine built of those aliens (as you term them toward the close of your paper). On the other hand, in a more Latourian sense, one might be more ant-like and follow the alien-phenomenological trails starting from where the drill hits the ocean floor.
For myself, I remain uncertain of how to work out how to ascribe thought and agency to objects/machines. If we think of these things as relational (as I am probably more inclined right now), then I don’t “have” agency but rather participate in relations where agency arises. By extensions I wouldn’t have ethics either but participate in relations that make selections and valuations. If we think of the oil rig not as an inanimate machine but as a leviathan-like assemblage of human and nonhuman parts with a distributed cognitive network and an emergent alien phenomenology, then we can begin to describe both the ethical relations among those parts and the ethics of the oil rig in relation to the ocean. None of that will tell us whether we should or shouldn’t have oil rigs; it will only investigate the ethical machine that informs how the oil rig makes selections and valuations. That investigation might suggest how a different oil rig machine/assemblage might be designed that would develop a different ethical machine, but that design process would clearly happen elsewhere in a different ethical-machinic, alien phenomenological set of relations (e.g. an engineering firm). Alternately, the same flat ethical investigation might become a means for making the oil rig operate as an object in an object-oriented democratic process (as Latour uses the term) to legislate for or against offshore drilling. I.e., one would argue that what an oil rig selects and values does or doesn’t fit with what the legislative ethical machine selects and values (and that as such the legislature should take some appropriate action).
One could say that this is what already happens, but that would be the point right? A flat ethical investigative method wouldn’t directly say “behave differently.” Instead it would be the partner of a flat ontology which doesn’t proclaim that we are suddenly different ontologically but rather that we can improve our understanding of ontology. From the perspective of activism then, such a flat ethics would ideally lead to more effective rhetorical and political tactics (just as a flat ontology might).
October 17, 2012 at 9:33 pm
Hi Levi, I enjoyed your paper too. It’s interesting to think in terms of output, since ethics has often become a concern where the output is pre-determined and then the means sought to fulfill it. (By any means necessary, for the love of God, etc.) Conversely, if one extends the thought of means while suspending output (ends), it leads to a recognition of the contingency of whatever comes next. That’s one definition of flatness, which admittedly has a human tenor to it, but it seems applicable to other objects as well. Rocks and paper airplanes, while they’re pre-disposed to some outputs and not others, have no projected output, because they have no goals, only means.Their ethics is already flat. The same could be said of mathematical equations, which of course have an output (a product), but not a projected output. Is there an example of a non-human machine whose ethics are not flat? That would be pretty exciting — sort of like finding extra-terrestrial intelligence.
October 18, 2012 at 3:45 am
[...] response to my talk on flat ethics, noir realism raises some interesting questionsabout my defense of the existence of incorporeal [...]