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) 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.
On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall <m...@garyhall.info
<mailto:m...@garyhall.info>> wrote:
The mention of Latour in the context of theAnthropocene and its
undermining of thehuman’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the
nonhumanbrings 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./”
http://www.garyhall.info (biography - bottom of the page)
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
traditionalhumanist 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 redundancyof 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
andontology-building- personality such as Bruno Latouror 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
Cheers, Gary
--
Gary Hall,http://www.garyhall.info
Professor of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University
Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
RECENT:
'The Inhumanist Manifesto':
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/29/24
'Posthumanities: The Dark Side of "The Dark Side of the Digital"' (with Janneke
Adema):
http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0019.201
Pirate Philosophy:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/pirate-philosophy
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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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