Larval Subjects .

This week my metaphysics students and I are beginning with Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Before jumping into Being There, we are first reading “The Extended Mind“, an article co-authored with David Chalmers where they first introduced the extended mind hypothesis. Chalmers and Clark are asking very basic and fundamental questions such as “what is cognition?”, “what is mind?”, “what are beliefs?”, and “what is a self?” Yet the basic nature of these questions yields answers that are, in my view, pathbreaking and of the utmost significance for not only cognitive science and philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and social and political thought. To be sure, there are others that touch on the sort of thesis that Chalmers and Clark put forward (Haraway, Stengers, and Latour immediately come to mind), but none, in my reading experience, in quite such a dramatic way as they do.

Marx famously argued that the essence of human beings consists both in production and in producing our own essence. In making this claim, Marx immediately problematized the assumption that we are all human in the same way, transforming the signifier human into– using Deleuze’s language –an “empty square” or moving target, such that we can no longer appeal to some unchanging essence of the human that would be the same under all historical periods and modes of production. To say that the essence of humans is production and that humans produce their own essence through their form of production is to effectively undermine the idea of a transhistorical and unchanging essence of humans. No doubt it is this thesis that would lead Marx to abandon the alienation hypothesis of his early work, for if there is no abiding essence of the human then it is difficult to defend a coherent concept of alienation. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to envision political engagement in terms different from those of emancipation.

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For those who are interested, here’s a link to the original Clark/Chalmers paper that set off their work. I emphasize that I haven’t read this paper yet, so I don’t know how many new things have been developed since.

Judging by a number of the comments in my Extended Mind and Political Theory post, there’s a lot of confusion as to just what the extended mind hypothesis is. Here is an excellent example of the confusion. One of the poster’s writes:

my “quibbling difficulties” (dismissiveness is always fun) are not with Clark; I think you need to reread my comments. I don’t like that he maintains the privilege of the mind (*it* is what extends, rather than anything else) but it’s *anything* but shocking.

The bolded portion of this passage is exactly the opposite of what Clark and others like Alva Noë are arguing. The thesis is not that mind extends itself into other things such as pencils and pieces of paper. Were this the case, then it would be perfectly appropriate to say that there’s nothing new here, because we would have minds on one side and the various things of the world on the other side. This would be a rather traditional view of mind standing opposed to world, such that mind projects itself on the world in a variety of ways. For example, in Hegel, the material world progressively comes to embody the mind in an externalized fashion. Here the picture that I draw or the tool that I fashion is an externalization of the interior space of my mind. Gradually the world increasingly comes to carry the mark of this interior space through the fashioning of matter.

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Andy Clark’s central, and surprising thesis, is that mind is not what exists between the ears, but is rather the mesh of brain, body, and world itself. At the beginning of Supersizing the Mind, Clark relates an anecdote from Feynman to illustrate this idea. Charles Wiener had expressed delight in discovering a collection of Feynman’s notes and sketches, indicating how wonderful it was to have a record of Fyenman’s day-to-day work. As Clark puts it, Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?” (from Gleick 1993, 409)

The point of this anecdote, in Clark’s view, is that the pencil and paper are quite literally parts of the mind in the process of cognition. What is on the paper is not, for Clark, something that merely records a trace of cognition, but rather the brain, body, and these external artifacts are all the cognition. In a manner that immediately brings Morton’s Ecological Thought to mind, it is this mesh that is cognition. Here it’s important to note that there is no Hegelian style idealism here. Clark is not asserting “the identity of substance and subject”, such that substance is subject and subject is substance. Clark’s position is thoroughly materialist. The pencil and paper are material entities. His point is that they are not merely props or tools for cognition, but that entities such as this play a key role in cognition by affording and constraining possibilities of cognition through their use.

Throughout his work Clark’s emphasis is on real-world cognition in insects, animals, artificial lifeforms (like cockroach robots) and humans. Biological and technological lifeforms, argues Clark, perpetually offload problems of cognition on the external environment so as to maximize real-time responses to situations and to minimize “expensive” computation (representation). Why for example, have a complicated mental map of my living room, when I can use the living room itself (as perceived by entities such as humans) as its own best model? In other words, organisms perpetually rely on the scaffolding of the world in their cognition. This scaffolding consists of relatively stable regularities in the environment. In the case of humans, Clark argues, a large part of this scaffolding consists of culture in the form of institutions, technologies, and language. Thus, for example, my iPhone is literally, for Clark, a part of my memory. Rather that relying heavily on internal memory to recall everyone’s phone number and email address, rather than encoding all of the dining recommendations I’ve heard from friends, family, and the media, I can instead simply turn to my iPhone and pull these things up. The iPhone itself becomes a part of the cognitive process. However, Clark’s thesis is much stronger than this. Cultural institutions and technologies begin to think for us. In Being-There Clark gives the example of an office where there are all sorts of subroutines for particular actions (“place the pink form in the bin labeled x”). The institutional structure does not require any centralized planner nor agents that have an overall representation of how the office works, but rather all the subroutines, including their material elements, collaborate in a distributed fashion together to produce a set of regular results. The institution as a whole has cognition in and through its mesh. This mesh wouldn’t be able to function without brains, but those brains are only a component in these cognitive processes. This is what allows us to claim that cultures and societies think. A big part of this thesis, and I can’t develop it in detail here, is that there are a variety of ways in which natural and cultural environments channel and structure cognition.

My intuition is that the thesis of extended mind has tremendous social and political implications (which sadly Clark doesn’t explore in his work as far as I can tell, but which is a boon for all of us working in the vein of OOO). Here I will only bookmark some of these implications, opening a space to develop them in the future. First, if Clark’s thesis about the extended mind is true, we can’t speak univocally about the “human”. Foucault had already recognized this in the close of The Order of Things when he spoke of “the death of man”. In speaking of the death of man, I believe Foucault had dimly glimpsed the death of man thesis (in OT he showed how “man” was the product of a set of institutional and discursive constructions, i.e., what Clark calls “scaffoldings”). If the extended mind thesis is right, then there will be as many different minds as there are brain-body-world assemblages. Marx glimpsed this when he argued that the factory worker and the farmer were two entirely different species in the Manifesto. He develops this further in his chapter on the working day in volume 1 of Capital where he shows how the industrial factory fundamentally transforms the nature of homo sapian existence. Here we sorely need a well developed version (not just nods, but fine-grained analyses) of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethology as developed in A Thousand Plateaus, where the being of entities is understand in terms of what they can do, not by representational resemblances (recall the famous thesis that “the work horse is closer to the ox than the race horse”). Here sorting of entities isn’t based on embodied resemblances, but on capacities to do. When this is meshed with the extended mind thesis, we begin to sort cognizing beings based on extended assemblages involving brains but also world and technologies (this, incidentally, is what allows us to take into account arguments that discuss the role that privilege plays for particular groups and that the absence of privilege plays in other groups).

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Hat tip to Mel. These two articles (here and here) do a nice job articulating claims about extended cognition or the manner in which technologies change the nature of thought. From the first article:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

In discussions with cultural and literary theorists I sometimes get the sense that work investigating online modes of communication, ARGs (alternate reality games), video games, television, etc., is somehow a sort of trick. That is, the subtext seems to be that academics should be engaged in serious work(tm), analyzing high literature and art, and that those that work on film, modes of internet discourse, ARGs, video games, television, and so on are folks that have managed to game the academy so as to find a way of meshing their cheeto eating tendencies (pop-cultural fluff) with their academic work. Although there is certainly a lot of fluff out there in the ever growing body of pop-culture research (just as there is in literary studies), I think this severely misses the point.

If these things are worthy of investigation, then it is not on the premise that somehow all cultural production should be approached in an egalitarian fashion that treats them all as having equal merit (an aesthetic judgment), but because these things have become dominant modes of communication that pervade our entire lifeworld and which constitute the dominant mode of symbolic activity for humans. Although I have myself engaged in quite a bit of semiotic analysis of pop-cultural entities like films and television shows, what really interests me is not so much the content and meaning of these things, as the technologies themselves. As always, the work of Walter Ong and Friedrich Kittler are invaluable here. What they both investigate, in their own way, is the manner in which writing technologies transform the very nature of our cognition. Thus, for example, differential calculus is literally unthinkable prior to the advent of writing. Where the primary mode of cultural transmission is oral in character, the use of equations divested of narrative and rhythmic content simply cannot get a foothold in the world due to how our minds are put together. With the advent of writing it becomes possible to think the world and relate to one another in an entirely different way. As Vernant notes in his ethnography of the Greeks, the inscription of laws on public buildings in the market place changed the nature of the law by transforming something that could shift from speech act to speech act across time, into an enduring persistence standing there as something literally written in stone.

This is the significance media studies. Not only is there the issue of how the Gutenberg printing press transformed the nature of the world, but in our own historical context, there is the issue of how different forms of computer programming, telephone communication, satellite communication, internet communication, visual and auditory forms of communication such as we see on television and in film, structure the nature of social relations and cognition in very different ways.

It is common to rebuke the new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies as falling prey to a primitive animism that attributes agency, desires, and intentionality to matter and things.  Following a heated discussion about how things act upon us, influencing what we do and how we relate to one another, an archaeologist friend of mine disdainfully quipped that the fallacy of my position is that our cars cannot love us back.  He continued, claiming that things don’t do anything to us, but rather that it is always we who put things to use according to our aims and intentions.  When I evoked examples such as bars across public benches and spikes under overpasses to prevent homeless people from sleeping in these places, he would have none of it, and continued to insist that I was claiming that things have emotions and desires.  Not only did he refuse the idea that our agency is distributed, that it doesn’t arise simply from us alone, but arises from how we related to the things of the world around us, but he did so with an outraged vehemence that I have great trouble understanding.  Why is it that the idea that we don’t walk on the earth, but with the earth– that the gravity of the earth is part of what allows us to walk as can be clearly seen from the fact that it is impossible to walk on the moon –such a disturbing and threatening idea?  Why is it so difficult to see that the blind man’s cane is a part of his sensory apparatus?

My friend’s response– one that is common and ubiquitous in my experience –reflects a deep and ancient conceptual grammar that underlies our thought in all disciplines and practices; one that I believe we desperately need to abandon.  The distinction between subject and object reflects a further distinction between the active and the passive, the animate and the inert.  Within this conceptual framework, matter and things are a priori passive and inert, and therefore can only be recipients of action, objects of action, and never actors themselves.  In this regard, things are targets of our action and are for the sake of our use and mastery.  Here we are all Aristotlians, seeing matter as a passive, formless medium that requires form in order to become a substance or thing.  That form can never originate from the matter itself, but requires the outside agency of a subject– the craftsman that forms the clay into a brick by placing it in a mold –or God.  If some sort of subject is always necessary for formation, then this is because matter is conceived as necessarily inanimate and inert.  Matter cannot itself do anything, but rather can only have things done to it.  It will be observed that this way of thinking embodies a will towards calculation, domination, and mastery at its core…  A will that is at the heart of the ecological crisis we now find ourselves in.

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From time to time the question arises as to just how materialist and immanentist ontologies are able to handle universals.  For the materialist universals are regarded with suspicion.  The reason for this resides not in some sort of relativism or social constructivism, but from the apparent ontological nature of universals.  Where the materialist is committed to the thesis that everything is material or physical, universals seem to be incorporeal.  Take a quality like “red”.  We can readily understand red in material terms as a physical event occurring when particular wavelengths of light are refracted off of the surface of an object and interact with nervous systems structured in a particular way.  Redness is not something that an object has, but rather is a happening that occurs or takes place through the interaction of various material beings such as photons of light, the surface of an object, and nervous systems.  Turn off the lights and it’s not that we cease to see red that is still there but veiled in darkness, but rather that red ceases to take place.  Suggesting that the object is red even when the lights are out is a bit like saying that the sun rises.  The sun only appears to rise.  What is in fact happening is that the earth is spinning, creating the illusion that the sun is rising.  It’s the same with qualities like color.  They only appear to possess a color, when in fact color is a complex physical event that involves a variety of interacting entities.

So far we aren’t in the domain of universals but just interacting beings.  The more difficult thing to understand is something like redness as a universal.  When we speak of universality we are not speaking of a shared belief that all people possess, but rather shared properties that all entities of a particular kind share in common with one another.  No doubt there are many idiots out there that don’t know that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides of a right triangle.  Whether or not people know it is irrelevant to whether or not this relationship is universal.  This is because this relationship is a feature of right triangles, not a feature of belief.  Universally all right triangles in two dimensional space possess this characteristic.

What’s mysterious here is how something– these universal features –can simultaneously be in many places at once.  Setting aside the complications of quantum mechanics, material entities all seem to have a location in time and space.  Universals are strange in that they seem to be everywhere and nowhere.  Redness as such is simultaneously in every red object and in no red object.  What, then, is redness as such?  What is right triangleness as such?  Is redness something over and above red events?  Is it, the universal, an entity in its own right over and above the entities in which it manifests itself?  There’s a whole series of considerations that easily lead one to such a [Platonist] view.  For example, even if a single right triangle doesn’t exist in the entire universe it would nonetheless be the case that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides.  This seems to suggest that these properties of triangles are real in one of Lacan’s senses of being something that “always returns to its place”, while not being dependent on material existence in time and space.  If you have difficulty seeing this, keep in mind that we have mathematical knowledge of geometrical and mathematical entities that can be found nowhere in nature but which is nonetheless absolutely true.  Shouldn’t considerations such as this lead us to conclude that there’s an entire class of ideal entities that exist independent of material entities and that are absolutely real?  For the materialist, of course, this will be an incredibly disquieting thesis.  What’s next, we start introducing souls and god?

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For anyone who’s interested, here’s the table of contents for Onto-Cartography.  I’m about 2/3rds of the way through editing it and should, with luck, send it to Edinburgh this week.

Acknowledgments

Introduction:  For a Renewed Materialism

Part I.  Machines

1.         Towards a Posthuman Media Ecology

1.1.      Common Prejudices About Machines

1.2.      Varieties of Machines

1.3.      Posthuman Media Ecology

2.         What is a Machine?

2.1.      Machines Operate

2.2.      Machines are Split Between Their Powers and Products

2.3.      Machines are Binary Machines:  Trans-Corporeality

3.         Alien Phenomenology

3.1.      Machines are Structurally Open and Operationally Closed

3.2.      Alien Phenomenology, Second-Order Observation, and Post-Vitalist Ethology

4.         Machinic Assemblages and Entropy

4.1.      Machinic Assemblages

4.2.      Assemblages and Individuals

4.3.      Extended Minds and Bodies

4.4.      Entropy

Part II: Worlds

5.         The Structure of Worlds

5.1.      Ecologies of Worlds

5.2.      Content and Expression

6.         Topologies of Time and Space

6.1.      Space

6.2.      Time

6.3.      Overdetermination

7.         Gravity

7.1.      The Gravity of Things:  Overcoming Occult Explanation

7.2.      Gravitational Relations Between Machines:  The Objects

7.3.      Subjects, Quasi-Objects, and Catalysis

7.4.      Happenings and Events

8.         Earth, Maps, and Practices

8.2.      Geophilosophy:  A Revised Concept of Nature

8.2.      The Three Dimensions of Geophilosophy:  Cartography, Deconstruction, and Terraformation

Conclusion

Bibliography

I’m pleased that my last post on naturalism has generated some interesting discussion– pro and con –about naturalism.  As I reflect on that discussion, it occurs to me that “naturalism” is one of those nebulous terms that means a variety of different things.  For some naturalism seems to mean eliminativism, of the variety advocated by the Churchlands.  For others naturalism means reductionism of the type advocated by evolutionary psychologists such as E.O.Wilson.  There, all social phenomena are explained in biological terms pertaining to reproduction and survival.  For others, naturalism means positivism.  I do not advocate any of these positions, though I do think that theorists like E.O. Wilson shed important light on human behavior.  I just don’t think they tell the entire story and that there are other causal factors involved that can’t be reduced to reproductive and survival aims.  I take it that this is part of the importance of meme theory.  There are a number of problems with meme theory, but one thing I think it does underline well is that there are replicators besides genes– cultural units –that contribute every bit as much to why humans are as they are and these replicators have “aims” other than biological reproduction and survival.  Here, for example, we might think of soldiers facing almost certain death as they storm the beach at Normandy.  They are acting on behalf of memes not genes, and are acting on behalf of aims that can’t be reduced to biological survival or reproduction.  I think Lacan’s theory of desire nicely outlines these sorts of motivation.

For me, naturalism has a very broad meaning and is an open-ended project.  I think there are three basic axioms one must endorse to count as a naturalist.  First, one must hold that there is no supernatural causation, only natural causation.  Put differently, there is nothing outside of the world.  Note that this thesis says nothing about what natural beings exercise causal force in the world.  Reductionists, for example, seem to hold that only atoms, genes, and neurons have causation.  I believe that things like signifiers, narratives, discourses, institutions, objects (what I now call machines), atoms, neurons, genes, etc., all have causation.  In other words, I reject that form of reductionism that only treats atoms or genes or neurons as having causation.  I just don’t think that one has to privilege the agency of one type of being– say atoms –to be a naturalist.

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I received an interesting email today asking questions about idealism as OOO understands it.  Since a number of people have asked questions like this, I thought I’d address it here as others might find it of value.  The author writes:

I was present at one of your keynote speeches in the spring of this year.

I am a bit confused about the term idealism and its relation to realism. I have read most of your book Democracy of Objects but still have this question.

Why is not possible to be both an idealist and a realist?

Can one not believe in real objects which are ideal. I seemed to have learned that idealism was in opposition to materialism. And I understand that anti-realism is opposed to realism. But it seems like anti-realism and idealism always get associated.

Is this necessarily the case? Wasn’t Plato both an idealist and very much a realist since he believe that the ideas or the forms were the most real?

Good questions.  Idealism, like materialism, is one of those highly polysemous terms that has a variety of different meanings.  It seems that Marxists use the term “idealism” to refer to any position that is 1) ahistorical, and 2) that explains the world in terms of intellect rather than practices and labor production.  When Marx “turns Hegel on his head”, he thus saying that the social world as we know it arises from modes of production, not principles of Spirit unfolding throughout history.  When he criticizes someone like Plato as an “idealist”, he is doing so because Plato treats the forms as eternal and unchanging, rather than giving an account of how various values and ways of living arise out of conditions of production.

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