Massumi
by Adam Robbert
Taking account means an event inflecting the arc of its becoming as a function of its feeling the influence of other events, either in its initial conditions or en route. An electron is an occasion of experience for Whitehead. It ‘takes account’ of the electromagnetic field of the nucleus of the atom in the dynamic form expressed as its orbit and in its quantum character (the unity of the dynamic form expressed as its orbit and energy level). The electron registers the ‘importance’ of its fellow creatures of the nucleus, and expresses it in the dynamic unity of its own pathmaking. The trees along a river take account of the surrounding mountains in how they are able to take in the rain washing down from them, negotiating with their shadows for their growth, or availing themselves of the mountain’s protection from the wind. The life of a tree is a ‘society’ of occasions of experience whose taking-account of other events—weather events, geological events, the earth’s gravitation, the sun’s rising and setting—contributes to a continuing growth pattern. Tree rings are one of the ways in which this growing lived abstraction is seen for itself. Our taking in the pattern at a glance is a semblance of a life. But even outside any encounter with human perception, the electron, the mountains, the tree involve perceptions. They are perceptions in themselves: they are how they take account, in their own self-formative activity, of the world of activity always and already going around (Semblance and Event, p. 26).
I just don’t get what the impact of such rhetorical moves of personification is supposed to be, or how it can be cashed out in terms of ethics/politics.
If we can’t treat other objects as truly other (alien?) than how are the dynamics of our everyday political lives any different?
There’s two different layers we need to address here. I’ll try and cover them briefly.
First, Massumi’s account above shouldn’t be taken as a rhetorical move. The point is not to force mountains and trees into “the sacred image of the same” (as Haraway might put it) , but rather to re-correct a bifurcated view of Nature that results in an incoherent account of human perception, narrowly, and causality at large, more generally. This is both an ontological and scientific issue, and not just a matter of writing flowery prose. Any disagreements should be on this level.
Second, the alien question. If we reject the bifurcation of nature (which I do) then we have to rethink what alien/alterity means. Sartre and Pascal had a very different concept of alien(ation) that I can use to juxtapose with my own. For S&P the universe itself is entirely alien, a result of their following Descartes/Galileo’s bifurcated account of causality and perception. This produces an interesting notion of alterity, but fails (in my opinion) to do justice to a richer understanding of causality. The task then becomes to understand alterity without bifurcating our notions of Nature.
My own concept of alterity is different and tries to address this problem. If we take something like Massumi’s account above as adequate (again, I do) then alterity can be understood not just in the negative, as that which is radically nonhuman, featureless, qualitative-less etc. but also in positive terms in that we can approach different phenomena–trees, mountains, rivers–as agents that “take up” an environment in much the same way that humans do, but in radically different ways. I take this to be akin to what TMorton is doing with “strange strangers” and GHarman with his radicalized reading of Levinas/Heidegger.
Alterity is perhaps the central issue of ethics/politics, but alterity is recognized as alterity precisely because a medium of exchange across radical difference is possible. I take this exchange to be possible by a Whiteheadian reading of causality. Something/someone does come stumbling across the void, whether human or not. The problem then becomes one of Latourian translation.
Sorry — longer than I thought it would be.
no as always I appreciate the effort, here I’m not interested in debating Massumi’s characterization (no real point to such exchanges that I can see) but in trying to understand it’s impact, or potential for impact . Maybe when you have more time you could flesh out this idea that ” a medium of exchange across radical difference is possible” that’s where I don’t see how we can come to such attunements (as I have also asked @ Immanence) such extra-human senses in ways other than something like Pickering’s mangle of practices or Morton/Bennett’s stategic anthropomorphization. When I hear folks like Massumi/Shaviro talking I think ok but if we are going to have say a public hearing on an engineering project and need an environmental impact statement how would this new world play out and I suffer a failure of imagination.
I wanted to give a DMF-ish reply with just a link, but GOOGLE is so horrible these days, circling the search wagons for booksellers & academic journals, so that articles formerly available (back in December) from researcher web-sites can no longer be found (at least not easily). What I wanted to point to was the work of Restoration Ecologist Douglas W Larson and colleagues at the University of Guelph in Ontario. You can probably find the article I’m thinking of, “Community Structure of Epilithic and Endolithic Algae and Cyanobacteria on the Cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment”, where the scientific techniques used are perfectly Whiteheadian and fundamentally trichotomic. This is in response to DMF wondering how Massumi’s Whiteheadian approach would relate to the world of environmental impact statements.
Adam, I’m totally in agreement with your critique of Sartre & Pascal, where “the universe itself is entirely alien, a result of their following Descartes/Galileo’s bifurcated account of causality and perception”. You might even agree that the underlying problem is the “negativity” that infects so many who renounce any sort of teleology in nature.
Thanks for your always stimulating posts! Mark
thanks for the reply unfortunately I don’t have access to the full-text, does the work go beyond ANT (and really all of the hard sciences) style acknowledgments of the impacts that elements/objects have on each other to ascribing something like minds/affects to them and how these voices/intentions/interests are to be integrated into our decision making process, to be given a seat at the table?
Also are those of us on the non-telos side of the spectrum blinkered by “negativity” or embracing our all too human tendencies of fallibalism in good pragmatist style and with/in the interests of a gay science?
Sorry, Dirk, for not noticing your reply until now! I really am an overworked civil servant, struggling to get a new release of data collection software out to “the field”. (I use only a sporadic browser rather than an always-on reader
Anyway, the work I cited about algaeic lifeforms “on the cliffs of the Niagara escarpment” was strictly science, but, perhaps, motivated by other desires – and seemed to accept the trichotomic perspective that I adopt from Peirce. Taking an alien phenomenology perspective, my interest in these lifeforms is that they are among the oldest continuously-living life-forms on dry land: “The limestone cliffs along the Niagara Escarpment are more than 233 million years older [than the Jurassic Period, about 175 million years BP] and predate any animal on the earth’s land surface”. Therefore, the lichen-algae-cyanobacteria communities of the Niagara escarpment could be 300-400 million years old.
When I’m in a Terrence McKenna mood/mode I like to speculate on what such ancient beings could teach us! I imagine the interaction as something like the that of the Slow Seer, Fassin Taak, trying to be an ambassador to the Nasqueron Dwellers who “inhabit a gas gaint on the outskirts of the galaxy” in Iain M Banks’ 2004 novel, THE ALGEBRAIST; or, more recently, the Ambassadors in China Mieville’s EMBASSYTOWN.
I was arguing (along with Matt, I think) for an immanent teleology of desiring machines, taking aim, not accepting direction. It’s fascinating how this concept of “teleology” can magnetically attract so many dogmatic meanings that inspire otherwise open-minded people to draw “lines in the sand”! Clearly, this is some sort of portmanteau word.
I very much appreciated the link to Richard Sennett’s “Architecture of Cooperation” lecture. Had Charles Peirce been in the audience he would have been applauding: Very trichotonic! 1) dialectical / dialogical, 2) declarative / subjunctive, 3) sympathetic / empathic. In my experience, “negativity” refers precisely to the dialectical / declarative / normative mode that Sennett sees as manifesting the will-to-power attempt at domination through opposition. So, I guess “positivity” might be the word for the speculative side that opens up “spaces of ambiguity”. It seems that the “non-telos side” sees this the other way around. Makes for interesting discussions!
Some cites from the article to which I referred, indicating how what Massumi describes philosophically can be translated into the methods of science: “Multivariate methods of community ordination were applied to three separate data sets: frequency of endolithic algae and cyanobacteria; frequency of epilithic algae and cyanobacteria; and cover of all epilithic organisms. Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA)” was used to analyze species spatial patterns. Subsequently, “Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA)” was used to add “environmental variables measured within each plot”, influencing “the positioning of samples along the ordination axes”.
I bet these methods would adapt easily to Justus Buchler’s METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL COMPLEXES.
Thanks for posting this, I will have to return to it when I have a bit more time to really get into it. Along similar lines, I have been reading Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought. I’m only into chapter two but it has some affinities with what is presented above. I think, though, Whitehead comes with a phenomenology baked into his cosmology already, whereas phenomenologists have quite a bit more work to do when it comes to teasing out a cosmology. Regardless, there is affinity in both directions. I shall have to return to your question later since time constraints permit me from giving a good answer right now. A post on panexperientialism and alterity seems immanent in the near future, though.
my pleasure and no worries there is no rush on working these things thru
Ian Bogost has nicely laid out the “catch-22″ that I have been trying to voice over at Levi’s in his response to Levi’s preview of his new book on alien phenomenology.
I’ve started a response here (also as part of an essay I am working on):
http://knowledge-ecology.com/2012/04/03/alien-tongues-and-the-language-of-things/
Bogost’s book also just arrived on my doorstep and I’m sure that many of his insights will work their way into these discussion in the future.