Dear Gary,
The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such
subjectivity would not assume that the boundaries between the
human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily. Nor that they are
largely meaningless. Rather, the drawing of such boundaries would
be where the political comes into play.
That is a good / important point. So, while these boundaries might in themselves be rather arbitrary, the act of drawing them and the choice how and where to draw is deeply political. One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on
Chantal Mouffe's definition of the political as a decision taken
precisely in an arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the
concept of the 'cut' to those of diffraction and intra-action that
Annie pointed us toward in the work of Karen Barad.
Ah, interesting to link back to Mouffe’s work, will re-read some of her work with this in mind!
And yes, the ‘cut’ belongs to this exploration, as well as other figures, such as ‘rupture’, ‘negation’, ‘erasure’ - for someone who comes from the field of the arts such figures feel familiar - the only thing to be careful about is not to think exclusively in ‘negative’ categories since we are also looking for more ‘generative’ approaches.
Many thanks for your feedback!
bests, Eric
—————— Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities
and Posthumanities etc. Actually, a nicely packaged version of
that material (with pictures and everything) has just been
published in the Techne: Art+Research series as The Inhumanist
Manifesto: Extended Play. If you're interested, you can download
it for free here:
http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf
Best, Gary
On 11/12/2017 01:44, Eric Kluitenberg
wrote:
Dear Gary,
Thank you for your highly articulate and critical
questions, which deserve a far more thorough answer than I can
provide here with limited time available. Still I want to
respond in brief to some of the issues / problems you raised.
The mention of
Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its undermining of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the
nonhuman brings to mind
Graham Harman’s presentation of his work in Prince
of Networks. Here Latour is portrayed as having
given us ‘the first object-oriented philosophy’, on the
grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human
subject’ in his thought. We cannot split ‘actants into zones of
animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject
and object. Every entity is something in its own right….
This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, blue
whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single
step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of objects
replaces the long tyranny of human beings in
philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from Latour’s The
Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the
galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this
morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will
not be sorry you were not there... Things
in themselves lack nothing.’
Yet, for all this, the work of both
Latour and Harman is shot through with humanism, the
consequences of which they do not think through
rigorously. After
all, the zebras
don’t care whether Latour writes about them or not. In
themselves they lack nothing -
including books by Bruno Latour presumably. So what - or
rather who - is Latour writing these books for, containing as they do original philosophical
ideas and ontologies that are attributed to him as unique,
individual, named, human author or personality, to
the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman actors,
and published (in the case of Facing
Gaia [Polity, 2017])
on a ‘copyright, all rights reserved’ basis with a
for-profit press?
Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of
Latour’s publishing politics, quite obviously part of the
global reputation machine. Nor do I have to or feel the need
to defend him on this point, and for that matter also have my
own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside
from the issue of collusion with copyright / for profit
publishing - in the past I have attempted to reach a subtle,
balanced, reasonable public position on copyright by uttering
the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck it!”).
I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not
(yet) overly familiar with your work, and I think on your
website the last part of the biography does a good job at
summarising what is obviously a thoroughly developed position.
I’m thinking here particularly of the section Reinventing the
Humanities and Posthumanities” Let me quote you from there:
"To decenter the human according to an
understanding of subjectivity that perceives the latter as
produced by complex meshworks of other humans,
nonhumans, non-objects and non-anthropomorphic elements and
energies (some of which may be beyond our
knowledge), requires us to act differently as theorists from
the way in which the majority of those associated with the
posthuman, the nonhuman and the Anthropocene, act. We need
to displace the humanist concepts that underpin our ideas of
the author, the book and copyright, together with their
accompanying practices of reading, writing, analysis and
critique.”
So, in this view then we cannot continue copyrighted
publishing practices exactly because they reinstate a human
subjectivity that is detached from the material and immaterial
networks that we are all immersed in and composed of. And this
in turn implies that if we want to reach a non-anthorpocentric
understanding of ‘ecology’ (and work with that practically)
then we need to renounce such confining and detaching
practices and instead really embrace the notion of 'the
collective’ (in Latours' terms the collective of humans and
nonhumans), which collapses not so much the boundaries between
man and nature as between ‘society’ and nature.
By and large I think I agree with you on that. However, I
still find this idea of Latour to start thinking in terms of
‘the collective’ a very useful one to get rid of the redundant
dichotomy of society and nature, and start thinking about
larger interconnected networks that produce what we used to
call ‘the social’. This is a set of ideas introduced in his
Politics of Nature, back in 2004, as a response to the
stagnation of ecological (‘green’) politics.
My feeling is that Latour takes a very pragmatic position
when it comes to his engagement with politics (one might argue
overly pragmatic - he would call it ‘realist'), in that he
tacitly accepts that politics is still seen as made by humans,
and mostly in the interest of humans. Rather than dreaming
about replacing the whole system of human (-centric) politics,
he is considering ways in which the nonhuman can be brought
into politics - where one suggestion for instance is that
humans should become spokespersons for nonhumans who cannot
speak for themselves in the arena of human politics. His aim
here is to start engaging democratic politics in the
‘progressive composition of the good common world’ (of humans
and nonhumans) - and his ultimate aim is to 'preserve the
plurality of external relations'.
I could see this as a potentially fruitful strategy for
opening up the current frame of human-centric politics, so
this is where his thinking for me seems productive.
Similarly,
you write, on the one hand, that what is 'most important
about the conception of the Anthropocene is that it
makes the distinction between "Man" and "Nature"
redundant.' Yet on the other, is there a risk of the
differentiation between the human and nature being
reemployed in your position paper? I’m thinking of the
emphasis you place on:
1) the kind of human subjectivity we associate with the
arts and with intuition, as well the importance that is
placed on a subjective stance. Of course an emphasis on
subjectivity doesn’t necessarily have to mean a
reinforcement of the human/nature distinction. So I was
wondering, could you perhaps say something about how the
particular form of subjectivity you have in mind differs
from the traditional humanist subjective
stance that is associated with the liberal arts and
sciences (and which endeavours to keep those boundaries
very much intact)? How does the form of subjectivity you are
referring to take account of and assume the redundancy of the human’s
boundaries with the nonhuman?
This question I have already answered a few years ago in
the conclusion of the Legacies of Tactical Media network
notebook (published in 2011/12 under anti-copyright) - page
52:
"In the era of online commodification of the
social and the willing participation of a mass of
affective-labour-slaves the question is justified how to
undo these organised forms of innocence?
Simply leaving the network behind hardly seems an attractive
or sensible approach. (…)
A more effective strategy might be to abandon innocence
itself. Embrace your shattered self. Indulge in a lovers’
impurity. Enjoy your co-option, relish your commodification.
Play the game of simultaneous singularisation and
heterogenesis. Infect the network. Submit knowingly to your
perverse subjectivity in order to escape the perversion of
subjectivity."
So I am arguing for a perverse subjectivity, one that is
entirely cognisant of its own constructed / decentred /
fragmented composition, consisting in part of utterly
incommensurable flows and processes - to be fully aware of
all this and still relish the cult of the subjective to create
a locus from where to act rather than not to act at all.
In my understanding such a perverse subjectivity would
already assume that the boundaries between the human and
nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily, or that they are largely
meaningless, etc.. But still cherishing it as a priced
possession.
(Perhaps
related to this is the desire for ArtScience to ‘find
its own “genius” - that what sets it apart from other
worthwhile human endeavours’. The way this is phrased
seems to suggest it is definitely a human, and not a
collective HumanNonhuman, endeavour - albeit the humans
in question should be amateurs rather than
institutionalized, bureaucratic professionals.)
My point was more that this insistence on the subjective
can help to bridge a certain experiential gap where
(collectively) we know what is going wrong on a planetary
scale and yet cannot translate that into something that is
meaningful on a personal level and can spur us into action.
The practices formerly know as art can still be helpful here
in finding ways to bridge this experiential gap but they need
some form of subjectivity as a base from which to act, albeit
a dramatically transformed (perverted) one compared to the
classical notions of subjectivity you are drumming up here.
2) the singular human - and to my mind all too
frequently male and ontology-building - personality
such as Bruno Latour or
Siegfried Zielinski. As far as your notion of the ‘singular
personality’ is concerned, is it the concept of the
‘singular’ that is doing most of the heavy lifting here,
in that singularities can be
understood as being different from (sovereign, unified,
self-identical) individuals?
My hopelessly basic answer to this question would be that
you can have a very large number of individuals that have no
discernible singularity when it comes to their thinking and
behaviour patterns - I don’t want to be arrogant, it’s fine to
be quotidian, unremarkable, unspectacular and so on. Yet there
are these moment of singularity when something remarkable and
altering comes into being, though these are usually the result
of a conjunction of a wide range of processes and flows that
are much larger than the individual they might be attributed
to later on - so the singular personality is a marker, a sign
post if you will of such moments of coming into being and
transformation (in science, art, engineering, technology,
culture) - just to be clear such moments also occur in
physical non-human systems of course, but the sentence you
referenced was in the context of a discussion of technological
transformation.
3) the nonhuman ‘(animal and plant life,
minerals, gasses, water, air, and technological
infrastructures)' as being precisely different from the
human -
rather than, say, ‘Nature’ being irreducibly
interconnected and intertwined with ‘Man’ in a manner
that places both sides of this relation in question. If
we want to be consistent with the idea that the
human/nature distinction is redundant, do we not need to
make an argument that develops more along the lines of,
say, each being born out of its relation to the other:
of nature and the ‘nonhuman’ (including most obviously
minerals, gasses, water and air) already being IN the
human? Wouldn’t this bring us closer to being beyond
human and nonhuman in science and
art, in the sense of your reference to Nietzsche’s
beyond good and evil?
Yes, I think that I agree with this - that is also very
much in line with what you have been arguing on your biography
page discussed earlier.
Moreover, if we wanted to be generous, couldn't
we say that it is just such a reworking of the
distinction between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ that Symbiotica are engaged in?
Yes, if the objective is to reach a deeper understanding of
how each (‘human' / ‘nature’) is being born out of its
relation to the other ( ’nature’ / ‘human’) then this would be
a possibility. However, the explicit aim within this is to
turn this insight into a personally meaningful experience, so
within that a different type of aesthetic sensibility must
also be mobilised (the primary function of art in this
constellation), and then from this personal appreciation this
experience must be made actionable on a collective level - and
with that we are again in the realm of politics.
Hence we need three different modalities of operating to
get anywhere in view of the disastrous ecological situation we
are facing. This is not a ‘merely academic’ matter, much more
a ‘matter of real concern’.
———
Thanks again for these tough questions that I have
haphazardly tried to provide an answer to here...
:)
all bests,
Eric
--
Dear Eric,
Thanks for this.
I like the idea of singular nonhuman personalities and systems producing moments of when something transformative comes into being. And that of using a perverse subjectivity to escape the perversion of subjectivity.
The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity would not assume that the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely meaningless. Rather, the drawing of such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.
One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal Mouffe's definition of the political as a decision taken precisely in an arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the concept of the 'cut' to those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in the work of Karen Barad.
Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities and Posthumanities etc. Actually, a nicely packaged version of that material (with pictures and everything) - which also responds to debates in ArtScience - has just been published in the Techne: Art+Research series as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play. You can download it for free here:
http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf
Best, Gary
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