[talks]

Rubbing the Clinamen Raw: Notes on Post-Humanism

[05.2011]

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Rubbing the Clinamen Raw: Notes on Post-Humanism and Design

Benjamin H. Bratton
University of California, San Diego
for Humanity + Conference: Transhumanism and Design
Parsons, New York
May 15, 2011


    I appreciate the invitation to speak to you today and your indulgence of my doing so as a human-shaped screen image, as little bits of washed-out projected RGB and packet-switched compressed audio, which, along with my prepared images, may organize something like a speaking author. If it doesn’t, that is OK too, as my address today concerns precisely the persistent illusion of bodily coherence as it relates what we could call the cosmopolitics of post-humanism and post-humanist technologies, and their attendant philosophies of technology.
     Let’s start at the conclusion, or at one end of a certain trajectory of humanism; with Michel Foucault’s image of “man” as not only a very recent conceptual invention, but also one that is in the process of washing away, a word written on the beach now smeared smooth by the waves of the world.
    My argument, to reduce it in advance of itself as much as possible (and for the time being to ignore all the mechanisms that make the making of argumentation odd) regards the design problem and the design brief for post-humanism: (1) to move past vestigial humanism that would predicate speculation upon and design of the post-Anthropocene Era as the maximalization of human beings as the privileged unit of analysis and agency, and (2) to do so by naming, indexing, building, projecting and developing upon more genuinely post-humanist agency/authorship platforms that are much smaller than the Vitruvian scale, and/or much larger, more diagonal, more hybridized, more alien, more cyborgian, more fleshly, more cerebral, more animalian, more vegetable, and more mineral.  These already exist, and the job is to make them into formal ideas, words, thoughts, and images and to build upon them. Whatever future exponential amplifications are at work and in store for the computational flowerings of bio-neuro-molecular-urban convergneces and transvergences, what some weirdly call the Singularity,  that should be the emergence of diagrams of agency and embodiment that allow for less, not more, formal and procedural entropy than the Holocene provided for. More diagrams, not less. More species, not super-sized versions of a few generic models (i.e., Americans)




     You personally are not the design problem. Humanity, as opposed to the full territory of animality, distributed cognition, and promiscuous language, is also not really the design problem. In fact the deterritorializaiton of the human animal, and the specific diagram of the Human as a format that has been shuttled forward from the Enlightenment: that is the design problem. Just as Marx argued that the real product of capitalism is not things but “social relations,” the real product of evolution (which is never only natural or artificial) is not so much individual bodies than assemblages of techniques of adaptation (such as vision, fingers, fur, songs, and indeed, memory storage, energy storage, signal distribution, etc.) held together in fleeting embodied forms.  The real result of evolution are bio-social-technical relations. You (to the extent that you can be said to be a discrete thing among the ecology of things) are an iteration of the forces at work, a specific instance of a specific genetic and contextual bloom. Those forces themselves are the design space, and they are interested in all kinds of non-human, ahuman and post-human diagrams. But superhuman diagrams? Why? That’s so....Terran.
    Let’s go back to perhaps the key moment in the development of an informational and computational ontology  of the world, worldly matter and worldly processes. 1 AD.  For Lucretius, the Roman poet/scientist/ Epicurean philosopher, the universe is not comprised of solid forms on a physical plane but a field of ceaseless flux and churn. Think of dust motes falling and floating in the crepuscular light of a projector. Atoms tumble in the void, Lucretius calls them primordia or seminarerum, falling constantly downward. This is the state of things. What appear to us as solid forms are but clusters of atoms that have fallen into one another for a period of time, and which will in time fall apart. The name for the force of collision which causes these downward arcs to tumble into assemblage, is translated from the Latin as swerve. Atoms swerve, if by accident, and in accumulation the entropy of the void gives way to the negentropic formulation of the world. This economy of entanglement between atoms so located and so interdependent in their communication in flight, the fluid dynamics of form, we call the clinamen, and it has been a source of considerable meditation in continental philosophy; from Marx’s doctoral dissertation to Gilles Delueze’s The Logic of Sense to Michel Serres in The Birth of Physics. For our purposes, the clinamen is not just this spontaneous lurch of some thing from its programmed track but also the model that would posit the comprehensivity of the universe as the archive of such accumulated deviations.
     If we had more time we could draw lines between Lucretius and the Epicurean clinamen and the work of Leibniz: the development of calculus, the biliteral alphabet, the compossible table. Deleuze makes one such trace, and another drawn differently, is to conjecture, as others have, that the phase space of this atomic flux as arriving at the form we recognize as the world and the things of the world, is the accumulation of an algorithmic, computational portfolio of forces. This is the generic hypothesis of computational ontologies, from the Church-Turing thesis, to Wolframian genetic algorithms, and more specifically for this discussion Seth Lloyd on quantum computing and the informational fabric of the universe for which (though none of these contemporary projects would use the following words and for good reason) the clinamen, the instance of the swerve within the oceanic flux, the “smallest possible angle” of “infinitesimally small deviation,” is the fundamental unit of universal formation. Of course atomic and sub-atomic economies are not the same, but for the most generic version of the model the generative principle of the binary swerve, the zero into one, one into zero --be it “atom”  or quantum wave/particle shifting from its path/state  is the structural condition that conditions for structure. After Leibniz’s model of the compossible table, we can consider Lloyd’s conjecture of the total information space of the universe as a performance of “no more than 10120 ops on 1090 bits” as the ultimate scale of this cosmic, algorithmic phase space. The Earthly economy in which we toil is then obviously a algorithmic phase space several orders of magnitude more confined, if not diminished thereby. Further, for some the implications of Marcus Hutter’s AIXI algorithm, a sort of brute force mechanism for universal intelligence, suggest either that universe-as-simulation is  not possible but true, and/or that the entirety of form can be presumed to proceed from a typology of these sorts of recursive search operations. Forces form forms, verbs cause nouns.



   
   Whither humans and post-humans? A “diagram” is a generic geometric arrangement, defined within a certain set of dimensions, which organizes the confluence of forces, events, data-points, variables in its image. A diagram has no intrinsic content, but is as a generic typology a kind of extrinsic content of the forms that it structures. D’Arcy Thomspon’s famously dictated in 1917 that “form is a diagram of forces,” that the structures of the organism evolve in conversion with the physical forces that demand upon that body as a medium of the world, a body which is realization of endogenous (but not intrinsic) forces such as the expression of genetic code, and the exogenous (but not necessarily extrinsic) forces such as the different consumptive pressures we associate with both natural and sexual selections. The typology of forces results in turn in a typology of diagrams which index a typology phyla, genus, species, bodies, instances, across scale. The carving of minerals by time and the carving of animals and vegetables by time are in this sense homologous economies.
    Now then, what is the human diagram? Is it the Vitruvian conceit, that ultimately pre-Copernican geocentric view of the world radiating from the a human and Humanist center, as so many layers of prosthetic innovation? No. Is the premise of post-humanism one that seeks less to go around,  or decenter (please stop saying “transcend,” it’s embarrassing) the human diagram? For me yes. The innovation of the diagram is much more interesting than the innovation of humans, and much more so than any particular individual, but not as interesting in turn than the innovation of forces which form the diagram.  In fact, let me be blunt, the focus of post-humanism on the innovation of a particular individual is a sad diversion. You are not the 100th monkey, they are a dying mammal with a narcissistic personality disorder.  
    How do I mean? Consider vision, as a good bio-socio-technical assemblage. A force worth innovating. While the “eye” appears only after the Cambrian explosion, “vision,” the photo-receptor cells and proteins called opsins, evolved a hundred different times independently of one another. Humans, and animals, are but one medium for which the bio-socio-technical assemblage of vision can assemble the world, and it is through the capacity of photo-reception that different bodily diagrams, the surface of the photosynthetic leaf, for one example, or the optic-stereoscopic primate face, for another, structure and are structured by the evolution of these metamorphic solutions. (To speculate and engineer a new capacity of vision, (x-ray, thermal holography, microscopy, etc.) is to design an innovation in the assemblage of vision which can use humans as it locus, but which is finally an evolutionary arc that defines the human diagram more than it is defined by the human diagram: the plasticity of technologically-mediated vision is proof enough of this. The prosthetic character of technologized vision, then, should be thought in a manner inverse of our common sense. Instead of mediated vision as a human prosthesis, humans are the prosthesis of that evolutionary assemblage, technomediated vision (which is to say all vision.)    
   
    What is the human assemblage then? Let me quote Michel Serres,  “in your own body, for example, some of your neurons date from eight million years ago, but some date from the reptilian age, i.e. from hundreds of millions of years ago; your DNA is original with respect to that of your parents, but the fact of DNA dates from four billion years ago. And the atomic constituents of your body are thirteen billion years old.”  Consider then the myth of the Ship of Theseus. You’ve probably heard this as the joke about the original axe with which George Washington cut down the cheery tree. “Of course the head had to be replaced a couple times and the handle was replaced several times with newer wood, but it occupies the same place as the original axe.” It is the same haecceity, one might say. This is the human assemblage, we are nothing but.  Or consider Jacques Lacan’s story about the mirror stage of development. As infants we are, so the story goes, unable to differentiate mental images, memory, perception and wish; past, present, future, are jumbled into a continuous flux of image-desire. One day, upon encountering ourselves in the mirror, we perceive a unique object in the world, one that moves in the exact trace of the movements we feel ourselves to make. We realize that it is our reflection, and see that our reflection is a single, coherent, contiguous form with a distinct outline. It is a diagram in a way. We come to be fooled by the visual coherence of the form that we see in the mirror into believing that we are a single coherent ego, that we are psychically and biologically as singular and discrete as the image reflection. For Lacan this basic pathology drives ego-neurosis, and in some cases, psychopathology.  Or for those more predisposed toward neurophilosophy than the Heideggerian models of Lacan, consider the Churchland’s eliminative materialism which suggests that the presumed correlation between the idea of a thought that we experience as a specific form and the underlying synaptic activity in a brain have little direct homology and formal relation. The specificity of a thought as the expression of an analogous “thought-shaped” neuronal event goes out the window, and with it even more so the tiresome fiction of the individual human as the core central unit of serious analysis, speculation, design and emergent economics.  (In case it was not already obvious then, the “Ayn Rand” formula of individual maximalization, and some versions of libertarianism so derived including some of those that animate some of the Marvel Comics fantasies of some of the transhumanist discourse is neither rationalist nor futurist, but instead superstitious, reactionary and archaic.)
    Does exabyte, yottabyte, zettabyte computing reverse that dissolution, or hasten it? Now consider this in relation to an experiment that Gordon Bell directed at Microsoft in the last decade. What if we could record and playback the entirety of our worldly perceptions? All daily vision, audition, recorded in maximum resolution, with infinite storage and maximum, infinite playback, and one presumes the ability to trade files between recorders/recordees? What happens is not the triumph of the mega-ego, the coming of the superman/hyperperson, but instead, the revers of the mirror-stage development whereby here we lose the ability to differentiate past, present, and future, like the infant, and in this also lose the ego-coherency of individual person. We fall back into the flux with no single reflection to fool us into bizarre feats of narcissism. Not superhuman, unhuman. Now clearly this de-diagramming of the cognitive human is not the same as the de-diagramming of the biological human, but for this audience I don’t have to explain why one becomes the other. The complex of technologies enrolled in the “Singularity” narrative will, in their convergences, work less to concretize and amplify the empty content of the individual ego-person who mistakes their self-image as a design ontology, than it will serve to perforate and scatter the human as a meaningful category. Instead ecologies.  Is this point the moment of divergence between transhumanism and post-humanism as design programs? I vote for the later.
    After the volcano at Pompeii, archeologists in the 1860‘s discovered cavities in the ancient rock, human body shaped voids in the filled earth. Later they filled those voids with plaster to produce the forms of the bodies that disappeared there. That is the design space of the future, of the post-anthropocene: designing around the void left by the evacuation of the human diagram.  But humans themselves, you and I, are not diagrams, we are archives, we are gatherings of all the evolutionary diagrams of forces, bio-socio-technical assemblages, that have installed us at this precarious geopolitical arc. The situation has activated the archive-that-is-the-human in such a way so that we have consumed, as fossil fuel that is, as peat, the archive of pre-Cambrian life, in the blink of an eye, one century. That is the crisis of the Anthropocene: archives cannibalizing archives. Like at Pompeii (in that case Volcanic ash) that which destroys a civilization is also that which gives that civilization form for subsequent curious descendants, even if as negative shadow. In our case, is the convergence of technologies set on the evacuation of the human diagram (“Artilect War” or slow, quiet dissolution) that which provides for the durable after-image of the human diagram? Is that how to designate the post-Anthropocene, the geologic era after humans and humanism?

Tags: architecture, theory, bio media

Published: 05.14.2011

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