In the last post I outlined an argument for the social world being composed of multiple agencies besides the human and for these agencies being governed by their own immanent teleological intentionalities that are often at odds with one another. Melanie keeps bugging me about questions of ethics and politics, asking what ethics and politics this all entails. Truth be told, I don’t know. I know what humanist ethics and politics I advocate, but I believe this ontology broaches a whole set of difficulties that lead to very different ways of posing these questions. That said, within the framework of humanist ethics, I think we have to have an accurate understanding of the social world we inhabit if we’re to pose ethical questions well. If we don’t know what sort of beings we are and what sorts of agencies populate the social world in which we exist, I believe we’re doomed to pose the wrong sort of ethical and political questions.
In this post, however, I wanted to draw attention to a related point pertaining to an offhand remark I made in my last post. Having underlined that perhaps other agencies– and, in particular, agencies often reduced to human intentionalities such as technologies, media, economy, language, etc. –I made the offhand remark that the evolution of a technological system as understood by folks like Simondon and Stiegler need not involve any usefulness to be a very real evolutionary tendency in its own right. Here I contest the thesis that the being of technologies (and I’d make similar arguments with other systems) consists in their purposiveness for humans. Rather, there are dynamics internal to technical systems that call forth, as it were, particular technological innovations even if they’re not particularly wanted by humans or useful to humans. Just as an organ first evolves and then finds its use or adaptive function, there are probably all sorts of technological innovations that arise simply because of tensions internal to the technical system (and here I flag that I’m just using technology as a case study for a broader point).
read on!
However, in the same context I noted that technologies, like anything else, have to find ways to get themselves replicated and that one way they do this is by being useful to humans. Since most technologies have not yet developed a capacity to replicate themselves they still parasitically rely on humans to reproduce themselves. This entails that part of the “fitness landscape” of technologies consists of human brains, bodies, and social fields. A fitness landscape is the environment an entity must navigate in order to get itself replicated. This concept is closely related to that of “regimes of attraction”, but places the emphasis not on how “virtualtypes” (a play on “genotype” referring to the virtual structure of entities) actualize themselves, but rather on the selection pressures that preside over the evolution of an agency or a new virtual/actual type. If a particular technology is to get itself successfully replicated, then it must devise all sorts of strategies for navigating this environment, seducing humans, and thereby getting itself replicated.
This simple observation, I think, opens a rich and fertile field for the investigation of how various agencies evolve. Each agency has both an endological and ecological fitness landscape. The endological fitness landscape of an agency refers to the internal constitution of that entity and the tensions that exist within it playing a role in how the system subsequently evolves. The term “endology”, of course, is designed to evoke connotations of “ecology”. Let’s take the case of hominids to illustrate this point. When hairless apes such as ourselves became bipedal this generated all sorts of tensions (many of which we still suffer from to this day) in the internal architecture of our bodies that led, on evolutionary time scales, to engineering innovations in our body structure. To cite a humorous example, anthropologists have sometimes wondered why females in our particular type of primates have particularly pronounced breasts, whereas other species of primates don’t. One theory is that sex in other, earlier primates tends to take place a tergo. With the evolution of bipedal primates, a substitute for the posterior had to be found now that humans were now encountering each other primarily from a frontal point of view. Those earlier hairless apes that had more pronounced breasts were selected because, well, I won’t spell out the rest of the theory.
Perhaps more convincing cases of endological fitness landscapes in the evolution of hairless hominids such as ourselves would be the way in which weight is distributed differently across your lower organs when we adopt a bipedal form of locomotion. Suddenly new pressures are placed on our skeletal structure, our organs (in particular, our digestive system), and so on. Indeed, our upright stature is a key contributor to many of the problems so many of us suffer. This new distribution sets up an “endological” problem that gradually selects for various new bone, organ, and digestive structures. Endological evolution can be found all over the place. In the early years of the steam engine I understand that the steel used for railroad tracks had a tendency to curl up and separate from other sections of the railroad track. This caused all sorts of terrible train accidents. Here we encounter an endological problem within the steam engine technical system that presided over the development of new types of steel for railroad tracks. Immanent to the technical system itself was a field of tensions that played a role in subsequent evolution of the system. Similar endological evolution took place in the evolution of the governor in steam engines.
Once we begin to look, we find endological fitness landscapes and evolutionary processes all over the place. Marx theorized an endological development of contemporary society as a result of contradictions or antagonisms internal to capitalism. Riffing on the extended mind hypothesis, Ross wonders whether the intertwined bodies of lovers constitute a mind. Here, in the dance of lovers, both inside and outside the bedroom, there are certainly all sorts of endogenous tensions within the system they constitute, playing a key role in both how their relationship evolves (Badiou seems to be getting at something along these lines in his analysis of love as a truth-procedure) and how their bodies come to mesh with one another. Graham talks about how philosophers toil at concepts for years and decades, trying to mesh them together. Within a philosophy there are endogenous tensions that play a significant role in how the system subsequently evolves. Likewise, in a school of thought– say Lacanianism –there are always endogenous tensions that play a key role in how the school of thought develops over time.
However, for many of us it’s going to be the ecological fitness landscape that marks the place where the rubber really hits the road in our social and political analysis. The ecological fitness landscape refers to the relations entities share to one another and that create the adaptive field an entity must navigate to get itself replicated. Returning to the example of the evolution of technologies, much of the environment of technologies consists of human brains, societies, economics, and other technologies (there’s also the brute physics of our universe, the availability of certain resources, and so on). In the technology-human ecology, we here encounter a rich domain of analysis pertaining to human affectivity, embodiment, and cognitive capacities. As I suggested, one strategy a technology can devise to get itself replicated is by being useful to humans. Microwaves have been pretty successful because they’re useful in food production in all sorts of ways. However, there are a variety of other ways in which a technology can seduce humans to get itself replicated. A technology might merely amuse us, serving no particular use or function, as in the case of so many iPod aps that simply make us chuckle. Technologies might serve as markers of status or class privilege like Bentley’s, thereby carving out an ecological niche for themselves. They might appeal to our baser instincts like the manner in which the internet has, in part, gotten itself replicated throughout the world by evolving internet pornography as a strategy for seducing people to rely on the internet. It might appeal to our simultaneous desire for solidarity or connection and desire to remain separated as in the case of text messaging technology. It might even be that a technology simply “hacks” (to use Bogost’s term) our brain. This might be the case in certain highly addictive stupid games that we compulsively play. These games are much like the “Oscar Meyer Wiener” song that exploits certain characteristics of our brain such that we’re unable to get the damned thing out of our head once we hear it.
And, of course, technologies create all sorts of evolutionary tensions as a consequence of their ecological environment. Take the transition from DOS to Windows in the history of PC platforms. Insofar as the primary ecological space of computers consisted of human brains and bodies, DOS posed formidable ecological challenges in getting computers replicated because of the strong demands they placed on human memory and skill. For human users DOS required a costly expenditure of valuable bio-memory power and skill that simply wasn’t seductive to many users. For this reasons computers had to evolve strategies to get themselves replicated throughout the social sphere by creating operating systems intuitive to the embodied and cognitive systems of hairless apes such as ourselves (and, of course, it was not only computers seeking to advance their fitness in this ecology, but operating systems as well). Windows– and more justly Apple’s operating system –devised all sorts of seductive strategies by, to use McLuhan’s vocabulary, retrieving certain features of primate phenomenology (pointing, grabbing, storing in niches like squirrels and birds, the use of vision rather than representational code in the forms of icons, and so on) and exploiting these hairless ape characteristics. In this way it was able to seduce a public that didn’t see much value in knowing the complicated code behind the appealing icons. Of course, lurking in the background here is also economics as a fitness landscape. Apple made the fateful decision of targeting educational institutions, whereas PCs sought to seduce the business world.
A crucial point here is that these ecological fitness landscapes are not unilateral in the evolutionary drift they instantiate, but are often bilateral. It’s not simply that the PC, for example, exploits an already existing set of affects and cognitive capacities that we’ve inherited as a result of our meaty evolution, but rather that one strategy technologies and other agencies deploy consists in the actual domestication or cultivation of “human” beings. Technologies do not merely exploit existing embodied features to their advantage, but transform embodiment by generating new forms of affect, desire, and cognition. I did not need to blog before I began blogging. The software platform behind blogs and email lists created new forms of cognition, desire and affect that I didn’t have before. In this regard, blogging domesticates me, transforming me into a suitable host to replicate its software platform. Here then we need not only an investigation of how certain discourses, institutions, technologies, animals, etc., exploit our forms of cognition, desire, and affect that we’ve inherited from our ancestors, but we also need a form of analysis that investigates how these things generate new forms of cognition, desire, and affect that we then become entangled within and dependent upon.
Larval Subjects . 
May 10, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Thanks for the mention of my musing on the mental assemblage in the act of sex, where… mind = brain + body + the other person’s body (or part of their body, i.e., genitalia, anus, mouth)…I think you put it a bit more eloquently than I did with your whole “dance of lovers” — quite a bit classier than the “mindfuck” I was suggesting.
And you were dead on with the example of the capitalists not acting as they do because of a character flaw, but because of certain compulsions which propel them to pursue certain ends by certain means. As Marx wrote:
But I think that there are even further dependencies at work in the field of agencies you discussed in this entry. For example, the reproduction and elaboration of technologies are dependent not only on humans in general, but upon the society in which those humans live. Take the massive acceleration in the turnover of technology reproduction under capitalism, a pace unprecedented in any other epoch. Then, as you brought up, you wondered about the agency of humans versus the “agency” of capital that compels human beings to act a certain way in order to maintain their social position, etc.
This brings us to a question about agency, especially the agency of an entity like capitalism. For it might well be said that capitalism has its own form of agency, but a non-teleological agency. Capitalism as a system is wholly impersonal; it possesses nothing analogous to what we would call “intentionality.”
So we might say that capitalism has agency in the same way that Spinoza’s Substance has absolute agency, but no free will, just pure efficient causation. Both capitalism and Spinoza’s Substance act only with reference to themselves, unconstrained by anything external to them, but they proceed mindlessly according to an internal logic. For Spinoza’s Substance, this logic is mechanical and straightforward. For Capital, this logic is dialectical and antagonistic.
And so the brainless agency of this all-encompassing social force, capitalism, affects and structures the agency of the human beings that move within it. To deny structure in the name of agency — where that structure does indeed exist — is actually disempowering. The dynamic of the value-dimension of capital, when it manifests itself in the form of relative surplus-value, demands a constant overhaul of the technical and organizational means and relations of production. New technologies replace themselves at record speeds; certain digital devices are doomed to obsolescence within the space of a few years.
So perhaps what I’m driving at is that you might speak of multiple agencies, but I would argue that the only agentic capacity of some entities (like capitalism) is to structure the agencies of others. And so there is a complex web of mediations which entangle agency in structure and vice versa.
May 10, 2011 at 11:26 pm
“Here I contest the thesis that the being of technologies (and I’d make similar arguments with other systems) consists in their purposiveness for humans.”
In my dissertation I had to think about the relation between a subjective ‘sense of purpose’ experienced by the subject and a collective ‘sense of purpose’ that could be widely appreciated within a particular subcultural formation.
Deleuze (in _Hume_ p125) describes a general relation of ‘purposiveness’ that, in part, involves “subjective tendencies of achieving and promoting goods” which are the “effects of the principles of affectivity, impressions of reflection and of the passions.”
What this got me thinking about, especially in relation to the phrase ‘a sense of purpose’, was purpose as an event. Sure there is the passionate or affective dimension, what I would call enthusiasm, but then there is the flipside closer to what you are referring to here when talking about ‘purpose’.
I think there is a strong crossover here with some of the work by ‘stratoanalyst’ Jon McKenzie in his book _Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance_. He talks about the different meanings of the word ‘performance’ (theatrical, technological, managerial/governmental). The evental correlate of ‘performance’ for a given technology is the given ‘task’ for which a technology has been designed.
The purpose of a technology or technique (or evolutionary development) is to fulfill a given task which it performs efficiently (or competently) or not. The ‘taskness’ of this action is partially determined by the *sense* distributed across the agent performing a given task to a degree of performance, to the action/task itself, and to the character of the performance. I suggest the *sense* of the task (purpose, performance, action/task) and the various elements that come together to constitute it is not innate to these elements, but is an immanent part of the ‘expressed’ of the task.
May 11, 2011 at 1:08 am
there is no One in this World; thats the result of all this; and we should be able to embrace that odd result
May 11, 2011 at 7:36 am
logging domesticates me, transforming me into a suitable host to replicate its software plaet
May 11, 2011 at 3:10 pm
I don’t want to seem like one of those Marxists who ascribes everything to capitalism, reducing all problems to the social formation in which we live. But your example of the “fitness landscape” of technology seems to me inextricably intertwined with the dominion of capital, such that the landscape which technology must traverse is the terrain of capitalism. Georg Lukács pointed out long ago how capitalism creates a sort of “second nature,” with its own set of laws that individuals of that society had to obey and which technical innovations must navigate.
At different levels, there are human agents, inventors, designers of new software or gadgetry, who exercise their agency in the production of new technologies. A point that is often made is that many technical innovations have been purely accidental, that discoveries have been made even where they were not sought. Perhaps there is some sort of hidden logic by which technology “branches out” of its own accord, but this branching out is mediated by the human agents with which it interacts as well as the requirements of the socioeconomic system it inhabits.
As Marx and Engels wrote:
The technologies deployed by society may have their own inner logic, a sort of brainless teleology, but they obey the whip and command of capitalism. If the technical basis of the mode of production does not constantly revolutionize itself, capitalist society can no longer be maintained. Some might say that this might not be such a bad thing, but the collapse that would result would not bring about progressive change. It would mean a new dark age.
I am not denying that there are agencies that inhabit the structures or “fitness landscapes” in which they act. Decisions are made. Choices are given. But these are limited by the dead labor of all who came before, who helped shape the conditions that presently obtain. Transmitted from the past, they constitute the unchosen, unselected set of conditions and social relations within which we may exercise what limited agency we can.
May 11, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Ross,
I don’t disagree that technology as it exists today are deeply entangled with capitalism. Not at all. Two points, however. First, not all social systems are capitalistic. Where issues of ontology are concerned we need an ontology robust enough to account for the dynamics of technology in these other types of societies. Second, while I certainly agree that technology plays a significant role in the evolution of technologies (it’s a part of the fitness landscape of current technologies), I don’t believe that capitalism alone is sufficient to account for all the evolutionary developments of technology. As I remarked in the post, there are endological reasons that technologies evolve in one direction rather than another, as well as a variety of ecological reasons. Those ecological reasons will include dynamics of capitalism (for example, it’s likely that we don’t see a lot of alternative fuel cars due, in part, to capitalism) but will also include things like brain structure, affectivity, the shape and movement capacities of our bodies (some technologies just don’t mesh well with our bodies and thus don’t get taken up), as well as what you call “dead labor” and what I would call an “ecological niche”. For example, another reason that we don’t have hydrogen cars and why, currently, fully electric cars are unlikely to take off is because there isn’t the infrastructure to support them (hydrogen gas stations, proper electric stations to recharge electric cars, etc). The presence or absence of this sort of infrastructure, while entangled with capitalism, is of a different nature in the sort of selection pressure it places on the development of technologies.
May 11, 2011 at 4:44 pm
As a follower of Adorno, I’m always uncomfortable with ontologies. But you’re right that technologies were produced in precapitalist societies, albeit at a much slower rate. I think the broader point is that no matter what new technology is produced, it always is somewhat related to the form of society in which it is created. Capitalism is only one kind of society, and there are many which came before it, true. As of right now, I doubt that there are non-capitalist societies still in existence on the earth, except perhaps in those places of the most extreme isolation from the rest of Society (and because of the global nature of capitalist development, I do think that we can refer to society as a unitary entity). Capitalism just happens to be unusually dependent on the constant revolutionizing of the technical basis of production, and so there’s a sort of “treadmill effect” that starts going in terms of technological growth once relative surplus-value takes shape.
And I agree about the ecological reasons. At first, big business, and the majority of the capitalist hierarchy was resistant to “Green” technologies and so on. But as recent developments indicate, they’ve now embraced it wholeheartedly, knowing that there is a large market for such “eco-friendly” products and thus that there is much money to be made. No matter how superficially, the environmentally-conscious has been adopted by mainstream capitalism now. Everything’s “organic” or “sustainable.” It’s a great way to move merchandise.
May 11, 2011 at 6:10 pm
In Gould’s critique of Dawkins’ “selfish gene” idea of gene-level selection in evolution, he argues that genes have not been an evolutionary “individual” that is selected for ever since they became trapped in complex structures like cells, organs and organisms. This is because they are unable to interact directly with their environment and therefore it is not the gene which can be selected for–unless the gene is connected to its “shell” in a linear fashion, but this is not the case, since, between the gene and the organism, we see a number of emergent properties which circumvent this linearity. Gould argues that Dawkins’ error is in noticing how the gene acts as record keeper of selection (recording and transmitting the ultimate decision of selection) then assuming that this means it must be an individual which is selected for. But record keeping and adaptive individuality are not the same, and only in special cases does the gene interact directly with its environment and therefore get itself selected in or out of that environment.
I mention that because I would be more prone to suspect technology to be something like a record keeper for a selection which occurs at a different level entirely. There is also the further confounding factor that, technology, like any aspect of culture, can evolve in an explicitly Lamarckian fashion, where changes to a technology within its own lifetime can literally be transferred to the next generation of technology.
But this all has to do with why and if technology itself really is driven to replicate itself. If it is, what isn’t?
May 11, 2011 at 10:13 pm
I am not sure how helpful this is, but given that you’re thinking so much about situatedness, I wonder whether going back to ethos
might help to elaborate an ethics?
And two other thoughts, or uncertainties, or expressions of personal theoretical warinesses: 1) I hesitate over teleologies. This is partly because Lyotard taught me to be suspicious of them, for their difference-erasingness. And related to this, I am wondering about ‘replication’. 2) Do objects seek replication? Or do they seek differential proliferation? It seems to me that in evolution (and I’ll confess I find evolutionary theory annoying, mostly because breasts indicate breast desire indicate arse desire because penetrative reproductive sex except arses wait whut? it all feels like such a *boring* story to tell, when there are so many more interesting (queer) ones!!) one can either tell a teleological story (which we like, coz we like progress etc) or one can tell a story of differentiation and proliferation, of usefulness hitting dead ends and extraordinary uselessness becoming ever more varied. Am I missing something essential about replication and teleologies here?
May 11, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Hi Wildly,
I think there are good and bad forms of teleology. The bad form of teleology is the sort of teleology we find in certain versions of theology where goals or purposes are intrinsic to the very being of the world and where everything is designed (by some divine figure) to serve some particular teleology. This is the sort of teleology figures like the notorious minister Falwell like to evoke when they say something like Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the behaviors of the people of New Orleans. We also find this sort of teleology in certain readings of Hegel’s dialectic or Marx’s historical materialism. Here all of history is tending towards some sort of intrinsic goal.
Good teleology, in my view, does not begin from the premise that goal, purpose, or telos is already intrinsically encoded in things, but rather attempts to give a generative account of how teleology comes into being at all. How did we ever come to be the sorts of beings that can have goals? How do organizations and social groups come to have goals. Here we don’t begin from the premise that these goals are already there at the origin of a thing, but instead seek to give an account of the conditions under which those goals come to be produced and how, once produced, they come to feed back on the system and modify its behavior in all sorts of ways. For me, an account of how the particular norms we embrace come into being is of crucial importance. We shouldn’t treat those norms as ready-made things that fall from the sky, but should investigate the social, material, affective, and cognitive processes by which norms come into being.
No worries about finding evolutionary theory annoying. I find phenomenology boring as, even in its most embodied formulations, I find it far too humanist and Cartesian in flavor. While there are a variety of valuable things that phenomenology has taught us, I think it also stunts thought in a variety of ways and is inadequate for thinking about the social (because so much of the social is not, in fact, given in any lived experience), the biological, the natural, the linguistic, and the technology. Setting those problems aside, let’s return to your criticism of the story about breasts presupposing desire. This is exactly what evolutionary accounts don’t do. From an evolutionary perspective, desires are themselves something to be explained. We can’t begin from the premise that desires are pre-coded and pre-given, but must instead give an account of how they came into existence in the first place. Remember that for evolutionary theory it’s never the case that a purpose first exists and that then some organ or feature comes into existence to serve this purpose. No, in evolutionary theory it’s always the case that some minor variation first comes into existence, and then has adaptive value leading it to be selected for (simply because the organism survives and reproduces) thereby carrying it on in subsequent generations. In other words, in evolutionary processes nothing ever comes into existence for reasons of utility.
Here’s an interesting queer story about homosexuality from an evolutionary point of view (I’m not saying I endorse it, just that it’s interesting). A standard view of queer activity argues that homosexuality is contrary to nature because it doesn’t lead us to reproduce. What might the evolutionary theorist argue? The evolutionary theorist would first point out that same sex interactions are pervasive throughout world cultures and history and extremely common. They would then ask what adaptive value homosexual value might have for hominid social groups. In other words, if homosexuality interactions are common and pervasive throughout human cultures (and they are!) then, from an evolutionary point of view they must have some sort of survival and reproductive advantage. If they didn’t, those early hominids that engaged in homosexual sexual activity wouldn’t have been selected for and these tendencies would have died out. Bio-theorists such as Kim Sterelny argue that our particular form of cognition or cognitive ability arouse out of a set of adaptations that led to cooperation among hominids. As Sterelny puts it, rather than eating the pig we just caught all by ourselves, we instead share that pig with the other members of our tribe. This cooperation, in its turn, led to a series of cognitive developments (understanding and cooperating others require a unique set of cognitive abilities and affective features) that drove the development of the peculiar form of human cognition and affectivity we enjoy today.
This thesis about cooperation sheds insight into the adaptive and reproductive value of homosexual behavior. It’s been suggested that a good deal of human cooperative capacities first evolved among women when primates, due to a number of climate changes, left the forests and began to forage on the plains. The plains led to a foraging lifestyle that involved a lot of walking. That walking is hard for women carrying children. Those women that were willing to carry the children periodically probably got selected for in evolutionary processes, leading us hairless primates to have something like a “cooperation gene”. (Here it’s also interesting that hairless apes such as ourselves are unique in undergoing menopause where we live without the capability of reproducing for another twenty or so years… what was the adaptive value of that? also, what is the adaptive value of synchronized menstruation and the hiddenness of periods of fertility in women?) Now as far as female same-sex interactions, we can imagine that these activities created solidarity among women (you tend to be well disposed to people you’re having sex with) and this solidarity, in its turn, helped to promote the sharing of food, carrying and feeding of children, shared breast-feeding, etc. In other words, same-sex intercourse has a reproductive value among women by promoting solidarities that, in their turn, enhance the likelihood of children living.
Some similar would be the case in male same-sex activities. These activities promote solidarities among men, making it more likely that 1) they will work well together hunting, 2) that they will share food, and 3) that they will be better disposed to the offspring of other men. Homosexuality promotes the group solidarity of the tribe as a whole, which is probably the reason that we see so many coming of age rituals in “primitive” cultures involving some form of same-sex interaction (the Kaluli come to mind). It seems that humans have evolved or developed a lot of strategies for producing these sorts of solidarities. For example, in a lot of “primitive” tribes monogamy is the exception rather than the rule? What’s the adaptive value of this? Well if people aren’t monogamous but get around then they’ll never know who their children are and who the fathers are. If you don’t know who the father is and who your child is, you’re more likely to nurture all children in your tribe and form strong relations with the men in your tribe. I think these stories are pretty interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the way they blow the critiques of queer sexuality out of the water that we often hear from both a secular minded community and the religious community.
I think the evolutionary conception of replication is interesting because it’s not as if genes want to be replication, rather replication is something that happens. Certain evolved features increase the likelihood of replications, others do not. There is no purposiveness or “desire” behind these processes, yet they still display features of intentionality and the emergence of blind design. It would be the same with technologies. They don’t want to be replicated, but certain blind processes take place that increasingly lead them to be replicated.
May 11, 2011 at 11:07 pm
I forgot to add that I’ve written about ethos somewhat along these lines as well: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/inhuman-ethics/
What’s described in the passage you quote is a rather humanistic conception of ethics that still sees the ethical as moving from the human body to other humans. That’s fine so far as it goes, but when I talk about working through ethical implications of these positions, I’m not referring to ethical conceptions in humanistic thought. I take it that those problems are fairly easy to address. I’m talking about whether we now need to acknowledge ethical duties to animals, technologies, mountains, etc., etc., etc., and what non-anthropocentric grounds we can give for these things. Talk of embodiment and situatedness won’t get us very far here because that’s a still thoroughly anthropocentric index.
May 12, 2011 at 12:36 am
Levi,
I usually don’t tend to worry as much about personal ethics as I do about politics, but does that mean that we have to begin to think of other things as ends-in-themselves? Because Kant in the second Critique only considers other moral beings (beings endowed with the moral faculty) to be worthy of consideration as ends-in-themselves.
And that is more or less where I stand, except that I realize we don’t presently live in the Kantian kingdom-of-ends (though this is largely what Marx thought a postcapitalist society would look like). The hackneyed Gandhian imperative to “Be the change you want to see in the world” is rubbish. Marx and Lenin were explicitly opposed to prefigurative utopianism.
So I’m also hoping that someone wouldn’t be trying to extract some sort of vegan ethics out of this with respect to animals, or nature as this sort of untouchable Dauerwald wilderness. I am much less interested in thinking about these concepts on an individual level, and am much more concerned about how these questions are to be addressed socially. Like, what can nature, or the animal kingdom, be for society? How can we reshape the world to fit society’s needs?
May 12, 2011 at 12:45 am
Ross,
As a good historical materialist I begin from the position that we can’t treat norms or ends as pre-existent universals that fall from Platonic heaven, but that we need to attend to the historical and material processes by which values and norms come into being. How is it that we come to treat certain things as ends-in-themselves, to value certain things, and to generate certain norms? These things don’t explain, nor are they given, but rather they are the very things to be explained. With that said, if it is indeed true that the “brain is in the mind” rather than “the mind in the brain” and that we are cyborgs in the sense of being assemblages that include a variety of implements outside of our skinbags as necessary features of what we are, this does shift a number of the ethical questions we pose. As I’m sure you’ll agree, those in the neoliberal and liberal tradition see the ethical as being restricted to the body or skinbag of a person. To wrong a person is to assault their body and nothing else. However, if it is true that minds are extended, a big part of what I am is not simply my body, but also all that scaffolding that makes me the specific mind that I am. Here we find a really nice and happy convergence between Marx’s conception of concrete and material freedom (it’s not enough that I can simply sell my labor, the very conditions in which I work determine my freedom or lack therof) as opposed to the abstract freedom of the liberals pertaining only to rights, privacy, the body, etc. However, things get more complicated. If my mind as a blind man consists of “blindman-body+seeing-eye-dog” it would seem that the dog itself has ethical worth in its own right.
May 12, 2011 at 2:55 am
I find the postings and comments extraordinarily interesting. Still, I have to wonder at the necessity of rehabilitating the concept of “mind” in the first place.
Why bother calling an assemblages of bodies a “mind”? It would make more sense to me to refer to the assemblage of blind-man/seeing-eye-dog in bodily terms as, for example, an extended organism or an extended body without organs (depending on the assemblage’s overall degree of de/stratification).
Is the desire to retain a concept of “mind” perhaps a bit nostalgic and conservative? I haven’t noticed any particular reason for its rehabilitation. The concept of assemblage seems to make the concept of mind redundant.
May 12, 2011 at 3:10 am
I’m really only using the term because 1) it’s the term Clark uses, and 2) I lack a better term. There are a couple of schools of thought here. One has it that the mere use of mind retains an unsavory Cartesian lineage that we’re best to dispense with altogether. This might be called the 1984 “Newspeak” theory. It runs that if we stop using the term it will go away. There’s a lot to recommend in this thesis. Another theory runs that abandoning the use of terms like “mind” in favor of “assemblages” paradoxically reinforces the Cartesian heritage. Here the argument would run that because the term “assemblage” shares no associative lineage to “mind” it leaves all those Cartesian assumptions of mind as an interior computational space intact, thereby doing little to nothing to undermine them. The person talks endlessly about blind-man-dog assemblages while still unconsciously harboring all the same Cartesian assumptions. This position would then point out that linguistics and Derrida has taught us that meaning does not lie intrinsically in isolated signifiers, but rather is a product of the relations a signifier has to another signifier. Under this theory we do far more to undermine that Cartesian heritage by undermining the differential relations the signifier “mind” shares to other signifiers and by grafting it on to other signifiers pertaining to embodiment, affectivity, tools, other nonhumans, etc. In this way we might bring about a semantic drift of the concept that situates it in very different ways. Here we recognize that language is not merely defined by its history, but that it is a living, evolving thing opened to futurity. I’m not sure where I come down in this debate.
May 12, 2011 at 4:05 am
Thanks for the thoughtful and speedy reply. I like the idea that the “mind” should stand as a placeholder for a term that hasn’t yet arrived.
In any case, it’s nice to talk like everyone else, to say the sun rises and that I’m of two minds on this debate.
May 12, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Levi,
Actually Saussure taught us that about signifiers. Derrida just took it to its logical conclusion by deducing that there was no ultimate “Transcendental Signified.” Just a minor, non-pedantic correction.
May 12, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Just very briefly, on the fly, I gestured towards the Diprose ethos stuff not because I thought it was adequate to your purposes, but because I like, in that account, how situatedness/relationality becomes ethics itself. I’m not convinced that it’s inherently humanist, actually, and I’m a bit surprised that’s what you see there. Diprose herself would probably refuse that label (quite loudly) though with more of a Levinasian bent in mind. Which in turn is interesting because Levinas, imo, has to struggle so hard to *exclude* animals from his ethics (‘It’s uh, uh… the Face. Yeah. Which is not a *face*. It’s the Face. Which is mortality. Except it’s not just any mortality. Finitude. No, wait….’) that their exclusion becomes profoundly questionable, which in turn, for me, suggests that it could be drawn out further. It wasn’t a ‘here’s the answer you’re after!’ type reference, just something that prises open a little more space (especially compared to other accounts of ethics which remain too close to morals for my liking). That’s all I was really suggesting.
May 13, 2011 at 5:14 am
Wildly,
I don’t see how an ethics that focuses on the human body and how that body relates to other things in the world can be described as anything but humanistic. That’s the core of the Protagorean orientation. Such an approach necessarily places humans at the center of all questions. I’m not suggesting that it’s bad to discuss value for humans, only that this is nonetheless an anthropocentric orientation that I believe is inadequate to the sort of posthumanist orientation required at our particular historical moment. I get the sense that we mean different things by embodiment. For you embodiment seems to refer to the lived body of phenomenology. That’s part of the story, I think. But I believe any genuine theory of embodiment has to be both comparitive, looking at both animal embodiment and artificial intelligence/life, and must take biology seriously and be cautious about the idea that descriptive analysis vis a vis lived intentionality can really describe embodied experience. Absent this, I believe discussions of embodiment risk simply reinforcing a set of faulty conceptions of real embodiment and continuing, implicitly, a highly Cartesian legacy. What makes Merleau-Ponty so great is not his phenomenology, but the way in which he took biological and psychological research heing done very serious. Unfortunately a lot of his followersmhave not continued that practice.
May 13, 2011 at 7:54 pm
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/a-better-way-to-fight-obesity-new-smarter-supermarkets/238813/