Larval Subjects .

Luhmann argues that society consists entirely of communication.  In order for society to continue to exist it must produce new communications from moment to moment, for the ones that just took place fade away or disintegrate.  In order for new communications to be produced, someone must be ignorant.  If there were no one who didn’t know, then there would be no reason for communication to take place and society would cease to exist.  A communication that merely repeats what is already known has no reason to be communicated.  Communications that merely exchange existing knowledge therefore very quickly lead to the entropic decay of the social system.  Recall when John F. Kennedy, Jr’s plane crashed and the cable news networks reported on its nonstop.  People tuned out.

Academia is not merely distinguished by its disciplines, but is also a social system.  Like any other social system, academia must produce new communications in order to exist.  A good move in research is thus not one that produces knowledge, but one that produces new forms of ignorance.  For in producing new forms of ignorance, a good theory will ensure that new research and controversies can emerge.  We could even say that the aim of education is to create ignorance rather than knowledge.

I wonder if we could make the same claims about ethics.  If we treat ethics as a form of communication– rather than approaching it primarily as a theory of the right and wrong, the good and bad, and the good life –could we say that ethical theory has to produce new forms of evil and wickedness to ensure that communication about ethics continues as a social practice?

In his beautiful Birth of Physics, Serres writes,

The theory of simulacra [Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book IV] is a theory of communication:  edges, envelopes, wraps, flying through object space, as objects or from transmitters to receptors.  We know how these skins are shed, how these delicate carapaces become detached at transmission.  And we know how, that is, at what speed, they cross the space of communication.  At the end, at reception, the sensory apparatus enters into contact with this delicate film.  Thus, sight, smell, hearing, and so forth, are just senses of touch.  The theory of simulacra is a singular case of the general theory of flow, communication is one circulation among others, knowledge is no different than being.

Like all philosophers passionately concerned with objective reality, Lucretius was a genius of touch and not vision…  Knowledge is not seeing, it is entering into contact, directly, with things [sic.]; and besides, they come to us.  (106 – 7)

What we have here is one of the fundamental fault lines determining whether your position is genuinely materialist or idealist.  By Book IV of <em>De Rerum Natura</em>, Lucretius finds himself confronted with questions of perception and knowledge.  In Book I, he had adopted the principle that “nothing can come from nothing” as the first axiom of his ontology.  By this he meant that everything must have a natural, material, or physical cause to take place.  This makes perception (and communication; which is a subspecies of perception) rather mysterious.  My cat is over there, I am over here.  How can I perceive what is over there when I’m not directly touching it?

read on!

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The always smart blog Attempts at Living has a nice post up responding to my last post.  I particularly liked this bit:

As Levi suggests, these materio-pheneomenological effects of chrono-political acceleration and the attentional economy mean that power operates at the physiological and neurological level (in a sense, RS Bakker’s neuropath would just be a direct intensification of processes that are ongoing), Such is to take Foucault notion of an ‘anatomy of power’ and to literalise it; power is anatomical, physiological, and neurological.It is also to finally be done with the need to ideological theories based on false consciousness. This isn’t to say that educative work is no longer a political consideration but to assert that theories that take the consciousness of the latent proletariat (as a class for itself) to be ideologically mystified are themselves mystifications of a much simpler, and therefore much more pervasive, problem. We live in time. If a worker lacks a good understanding of capitalism, if she votes for a right wing populist party (such as has just happened in the UK with UKIP making considerable gains in recent council elections) then this is not because she is stupid and not because the plutocratic class has manipulated her mind by inserting an ideological (ie: epistemic) veil between the real world and some delusional one I

If a worker spends 8 hours of her day at work, operating in two temporalities via her body and her immersion in a disembodying digital temporality, and must suffer the chronic overstimulation of her evolved attentional capacities, thereby generating a near permanent level of chronic anxiety, while not eating properly (lack of time; disordered eating- which is not necessarily identifical with an eating disorder but pervades our society; not enough/ not good enough sleep; tending to children, an aging parent or other dependents) then it is no wonder that she doesn’t have a good understanding of the political and economic condition of her age. There is no time for it! Chronic overstimulation and undernutrition mean her brain is burned out, exhausted, and she must get to bed rather than crack open a copy of Capital or Hatred of Democracy.

Read the rest here.

In my previous post, I discussed objects as monads.  As monads, each object or machine is an observer or experiencer of the world.  The structure of experience differs from monad to monad.  It consists of what a monad can encounter in its world, and how it operates on those inputs.  I suspect that monads like rocks have pretty uninteresting structures of experience.  Similarly, human experience of light or electro-magnetism is fairly dull compared to how mantis shrimp experience electro-magnetism (we experience 3 primary colors, while they experience 11 or 12.  They can see ultraviolet, infrared, and circular polarized light, whereas we cannot).  The world looks quite different for mantis shrimp.  The mantis shrimp has access to an entirely different world than us.

Likewise, as I suggested in a follow up post, monads like insurance companies are open to the world in a different way than we are.  Just like mantis shrimps and humans, insurance companies have their sense-organs and particular openness to their environment.  As far as I can tell, insurance companies are capable of sensing four things in their environment:  deaths, accidents, natural disasters, and fluctuations in the market.  Just like mantis shrimp that sense their environment, in part, through electro-magnetism or wavelengths of light, insurance companies have their medium through which their sense-organs relate to their environment:  forms or paperwork.  The forms we fill out when filing for coverage are the “light” through which insurance companies sense events in their environment.  In this regard, insurance companies are unable to register speech, because like subtle movements that only flies can perceive, speech moves too quickly to be registered by insurance companies.  Instead they require the slower medium of the paper or electronic form circulating throughout the apparatus of the bureaucracy.

read on!

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In response to my last post, dmf and Michael make some interesting remarks.  Dmf asks,

do/can I interact with an insurance company or rather with a particular salesrep, webpage, lawyer, or an answering-machine, etc.

Michael builds on this, remarking

What DMF is alluding to is that fact that insurance companies are sets rather than units. Whereas all objects are assemblages ontologically speaking there are different types of assemblages. Some assemblages are materially/structural continuous or extensively bounded (e.g., lawyers, sales reps, etc) and rightly considered ‘objects’, while others are primarily aggregate and extensively adjacent (corporations, social groups, etc), best described as ‘aggregates’ – no matter how operationally coupled they may seem. Attributing ‘thinghood’, then, becomes a tricky game of avoiding the polar tendencies of either over-exaggerating extensive connection and/or under-appreciating the intensity of cohesion and operational efficacy. Football teams and nation-states are not ‘objects’ but assemblages.

Coding this ‘delicate balance’ in relation to actual ecologies and the possibilities they afford is the task of ontography/onto-cartography proper, and has always been at the core of my discomfort with object-oriented rhetoric generally. Levi’s turn to “machines” goes a long way navigating these conceptual challenges.

What I want to argue, and I’ve been arguing it for a long time, is that entities like corporations, government agencies, institutions, and organized groups like, say, Greenpeace, are alien intelligences, minds, or animals that cannot be reduced to us.  In other words, we don’t need to look beyond our planet to answer the question “is there intelligent life beyond us?”  I believe that intelligent life other than humans is right here on the planet earth, it just takes the form of entities like corporations, government agencies, institutions and all the rest.  And just as alien intelligences are often depicted as terrifying in films such as War of the Worlds, these aliens are intelligences quite different from our own, with aims quite different from ours.  They are often every bit as terrifying as the aliens in a film like Independence Day.

read on!

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Recently Scott wrote a very generous post about my discussion of time in The Democracy of Objects.  There he worries that my conception of time reduces it to information and is anthropocentric.  This certainly is not my intention, so I thought it might be worthwhile to say a bit about how I conceive time.  The main thing is not to see time and space as containers of objects.  If it is true that objects make up the primitive or primordial constituents of being, then it follows that time and space has to arise from objects, rather than being containers in which objects are housed.  In this I follow Lucretius, Leibniz, and Kant; all of whom, in their own way, treat time and space as arising from objects (though, in the case of Lucretius, space is treated as primitive and irreducible to objects).

Before getting into a discussion of time in my next post, let’s begin with issues of terminology.  Rather than calling the entities that make up being objects (The Democracy of Objects) or machines (Onto-Cartography:  An Ontology of Machines and Media), let’s call them “monads”.  I draw the term “monad” from Leibniz’s ontology, without sharing endorsing all the characteristics he attributes to his monads.  It’s not a question of abandoning terminology, but of varying terminology in such a way as to capture dimensions of a concept that can only be partially expressed in language, while also evading the linguistic connotations that often accompany terms in ordinary language.  Thus, the term “object” has the advantage of drawing our attention to independently existing things, but has the drawback of leading us to think of something posited by a subject and that is a brute clod that just sits there for our gaze or regard.  The term “machine” has the advantage of drawing our attention to the way things operate on inputs producing outputs, but has the disadvantage of making us think only of technology, but not rocks, atoms, animals, clouds, and institutions.  For those unacquainted with the autopoeitic theory of Maturana and Varela (indispensable reading), there’s also a tendency to think of machines as clock-like mechanisms.

read on!

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