(((Knowledge Ecology)))

@KnowledgEcology

Tag: Knowledge Ecology

May 21, 2013

Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway Sawyer Seminar Notes

Isabelle Stengers

Cosmopolitics and reconstituting worlds; Concrete political clashes between worlds; 1995 majority of French population believes the future of their children to be worse than their own; the end of the trust in progress; Globalization; sacrifice for competition; Political Ontology; civilizing modern practices

What are concepts good for? Science wars—scientists and critical thinkers—rationality, universality; modern hegemony—knowledge cannot be about representation only

Concepts have a power; the self-confirming power of representationalism; the concept of practice is introduced to divide scientists (to break “Science” up); open up a space for thought in which the monolithic figure of objective knowledge is broken

Reformulating the claims of the sciences rather than directly denying them—situating objectivity as a rare achievement. The particular and exceptional nature of objective interpretation; the general reduction.

Disembedding what has to be enrolled as a witness. The production of reliable witnesses. The indifference of the prospective witness to the experimenters question. If the witness speaks for itself it is not a reliable witness.

If relevance—rather than knowledge—was the goal adventure rather than conquest may have been the outcome of experimental practices. Civilizing scientific practitioners. The creation of new adventurous questions. The idea of civilized practitioners is as speculative as the idea of “Political Ontology.”  The concern for relevance is thwarted by the blind imperative for objective knowledge.

Knowledge Economy—knowledge is a matter of representation only, but not the kind of verification critical thinkers are after. Speculative economies, bubbles, and crash economies are taking control over the production of scientific knowledge. The machine may run without the need for reliable knowledge.

The question of an ecology of knowledge or of practices is a question of a political and practical struggle against that which is destroying all practices. How can this ecology—a capacity to link; to present oneself in a civilized way—extend to other than human persons?

Can we avoid the curse of tolerance? “We know better, but just have to ignore those others.”

Are we able to admit that we are bound to coexist with others—Pachamama—beings who have their own ways of demanding consideration.

This is beyond separating scientific practices from general knowledge. “Politics” in its Greek sense is maintained—a gathering of people congregated to discuss an issue. “Cosmos” is there to signify the limitations of this political process.

Other than human entities enter the political scene. Partial connections liable to articulate divergent worlds. Marisol and political ontology. Marisol wants to ontologize politics and interrogate the link between diplomacy and politics. Other than human entities are to be recognized as political protagonists. A radical re-invention of politics that bears on ecology/equality.

Equality and homogeneity of the space that gathers a political community. Extended to the spokespersons for nonhuman communities. Things defined as a matter of collective concern. Bruno Latour; entangled realities of things. Isonomia; more than human world vs. other than human entities.

Matters of belief; matters of concern. We may all agree that the earth has been mistreated; we may all suffer the consequences of modern irresponsibility. Paying attention to what has been recklessly ignored. Slowing down in order not to reduce more than human entities.

The challenge of animism. The entities themselves; taking seriously the commandment “not to regress.” The ecology of practice and cosmopolitics complicate the meaning of this statement. Not in a world that is mute, but is more than human. Negotiating the consequences of an other than human injunction. Reverse cosmopolitics.

The challenge of animism is the point where a strange equality is achieved.

Only a naturalist would organize into Descola’s categories. Organizing schemes; neuronal attractors.

Deleuze/Guattari—Rhizomes; ecological anarchy; heterogenous practices; not a free for all; the connections must be effectively produced. Scientists as diplomats creating rhizomatic links. Conflicting ontologies.

The challenge of animism could be evaded by the power of the injunction if the injunction is given a more than human power. More than human entities have to be recognized so that they do not become overpowering. We are demanded to feel that we feel the high responsibility of determining what it is that really exists and does not exists

Those who claim to be animists—that say that rocks really have soul, power, purpose etc.—have no real word for “really.” The “do not regress” commandment and the statement “other than human entities really have power.”

Reclaiming means recovering what we have been expropriated from and that we have to recover from this expropriation. “Do you really believe in . . . ?”

The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in the streets. Those witch hunters are no longer in the streets, but are replaced by the modern pride that we are able to determine by ourselves what really exists. We are the heirs of social and cultural eradication in the name of civilization.

The point is not to feel guilty. But, following William James, to open up a “genuinely” effective option. Starhawk: claiming the past is not a return to an authentic past, but learning to feel the smoke; to reactivate memory and imagination. Respective milieus.

Those who sneer and those who are sneered at.

Is it possible to reclaim animism? The other than human entities really exist. David Abram. Animism is no longer here an anthropological category. Not reducing the craft to a matter of illusion(ism). If there is an exploitation it is the magician himself who is exploited. Senses for participating in the metaphoric capacity of things. The flux of participation. We are a particular kind of animist. Animated by signs, and animating them. The spell of written text; the alphabetic text as able by itself to experience strange scenes and other lives.

The compulsive insistence on either/ or attitudes. Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. The idea requires some bodily contortion; assemblages; a coming together of heterogeneous components. The manner of my existence is my participation in assemblages. Animation; agency; desire; assemblage; reflexivity; the experience of detachment. What is really responsible for what?

Assemblages and William James’s radical empiricism. Not experience as critically purified—subject and experienced object. Relating animism, assemblages, and radical empiricism is a dangerous move because it may appear to comforting. We are pondering experiences other people have written down.

The erotic power of ideas animating the human soul (Plato). Imperfect realization. The possibility of imperfect realization; not knowing the search that animates us. Metamorphic sources make themselves felt. The violent history of ideas.

How can we grant this kind of intentionality to other beings? The text imposes itself as an entity of human province only. Animism is a typical anthropomorphic fantasy.

Improvising words—words with academic restriction. “Magic”—of an event, landscape, music—protected by “metaphor” it is safe to use. Ignoring that we are interfused with something else that may or may not be intentional (we do not really care whether the interfusion is intentional or not).

The sad monotonous voice instructing us not to become mystified. The role of illusions. The craft of magic. Naming it such is in itself an act of magic; conjuring a sense of discomfort associated with the word. How can we accept such a return to supernatural beliefs?

Fictions have a power to shape us—to empower or enslave us. “Fiction” is a poor defense against the shaping power.

Empirical practices of immanent attention. Whitehead and diagnosis. Toxicity. Contemporary witches are radically pragmatic. Interpreted in terms of assemblages. Does change belong to the goddess-as-agent, or to the

If magic is to be reclaimed as an art of participation then assemblages are reframed as empirical.

Disloyal fabulation. Discreetly dismantling academic habits. Confusing the gaze of inquisitors. New habits of knowing what makes us think and feel differently.

The west and the rest. The devastating machine now destroying even the sciences. Equality; all peoples cultivate a manner of animism. Living together or becoming-together. Agents for anti-colonial alliance. Treaty making is not a new universal in a world where many worlds may exist. Not the west and the rest. Treaty bound.

Civilizing the demanding power that commands us not to regress. Immanent attention. Speculative Fabulation; participating in political ontology after learning to relate to the more than humans that make us a people. Politics with the metamorphic efficacy of rituals. Situated by that which one cannot betray without losing one’s soul. An ecology connecting milieus; animating in order to be animated.

 

Donna Haraway 

Isabelle has given us a kind of a feast which is impossible to comment upon. Some kinds of questions that may provoke certain kinds of conversations I would like to see enabled.

SF; speculative fabulation; string figures; animating cosmopolitical critters. Scientific fact. Science fiction. Speculative Feminism. Its temporality is “So far . . . “ To produce with another; to jest; speculative joking—serious joking.

It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories. Marilyn Strathern. Working by partial connections; analogy. Two dissimilar things held together not to find common identity or differences but to let them systematically exam one another.

THINKING THOUGHTS WITH THOUGHTS

Not to establish what is true, but what is happening reciprocally. Indigenous politics. Cosmopolitics. These words are swirling among us. Ordering avalanches of data.

Graphing SF. Psychotic tree structures in their lines of transfecting; transforming. Cat’s cradle figures. This kind of art depends on the machine. Incredibly competent digital transmogrification.

The gift of symbiosis that the bacteria provide the earth. Over the chemical top-ness. Homages  to the gift of symbiosis; multi cellularity, The peopling of the earth; the other than human peopling of the Earth. The level of detail at which we are all lichens. The challenge of animism.

Urusula Le Guin. The Word for World is Forest. How Forests Think. Freud. The practice of lucid dreaming. Infecting the imagination with color.

Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitical critters are IDEAS. The doings of ideas populate the territory. Taking her ideas seriously. Otherwise she is completely incomprehensible.

Isabelle is a craftspersons (philosopher) for the building of the lures of propositions for abstractions. Not “mere” abstractions. The building of abstractions that hold worlds together—fragile, more than humans, other than humans, not methodological individualism. Abstractions coming together like Margulis’s endosymbiotic critters.

This is the kind of work that Isabelle does. What kind of FRIGHT is she trying to make available to us? Some kind of reclaimed other-than-human. [What trouble is Donna trying to evoke]

Isabelle is concerned with the phrase “concrete situations.” The really real. The actual etc. (Marisol challenging Isabelle). What is the suspicion of concrete situations? One of the most important things in Isabelle’s cosmpolitics is the outcome of experimental scientific achievements. Science’s experimental achievements—scientists at risk to materials, answers, colleagues, other stake holders, agnostics—something that holds is a radically pragmatic, full of consequences, agonistic achievement.

Concrete situations have a kind of “LAND HO!” — tell me what’s really in play here. If you have “good will” any one can describe in plain language what’s really happening. Isabelle thinks this is plainly neurotic. [Concrete situations are outcomes not givens?]

Isabelle is concerned with the uncritical “concrete situation.” That you can just be “clear” about what you mean and what’s happening. Here we run into a forest of odd terms—humans and nonhumans—they seem to inhabit (can be made to inhabit) the once Euro West. The experimental practices are not born of Western worlds alone. Greece is not the birthplace of Europe. [There is not a disagreement here—this is a false problem Haraway and Stengers do not need to debate].

Choreographed and complex relationships between humans, machines, bosons, horses, inclined planes, archived mouse parks, mice, etc. can count as nonhumans. Collectively these are more than human in Isabelle’s lexicon. Other than humans seem to do something else (Or “earth others”—Val Plumwood). The other than human; there’s trouble there. It doesn’t seem to be includable within cosmopolitics or the more than human.

Thou shalt not regress. The problem of animism. Why are we back in the language of colonial developmentalism? Descola’s semiotic square. The technology of the square. Isabelle is suspicious of generalizing a “developing organism.” Why has Isabelle set up the problem in this way? Isabelle is saying hold still; we’re going to honor this commandment.

Haraway: The problem of animism should not be posed as question of development or regression. This should not hold so much weight. Isabelle’s demands are more interesting and complex than this. Relations between the indigenous and cosmopolitics. Indigenous cosmopolitics. Is this oxymoronic?

Some kind of politics as usual has been suspended when a mountain is made visible—and made visible by a specific person who can make it visible—in politics. Cuzco. Confrontations. Forceful entities making claims on everyone—whether you believe in them or not. Forces are making demands in ways that are rather recent, or in some aspects are recent, and are consequential for (maybe) reconstituting worlds.

Isabelle is a radical pragmatist; we share the same enemies. Humans and their machines are a “people” where intentional individuals play a very small role.

Isabelle’s language is anti-inflammatory and immune system boosting, rather than something that should give me allergies. Isabelle and I share the same enemies: the notion of ecological services; knowledge economy; truth over illusion; the power to dispel others of their illusions in the interest of my truth because I have given myself that power.

Moments of literalization that claim to speak for the really real—whether or not they are spoken by Europeans or not.

What should be understood in the “Thou shalt not regress” is not whether sentient mountains really exist, but not sorting out whether or not sentient mountains exist. The point is to leave alone the sorting. Civilizing won’t work either. We cannot pronounce what exists and what doesn’t. Or what is truth and illusion; these separations are part of eradication—mountains, ideas, soils, practices. The power of extermination, genocide, and sorting.

To reclaim, but not to restore. Reformatting and reclaiming and SF. What comes into the world that way and whether one throws one lot in with it. Zoo. Ooz. Open structures of participation. Who leaves is not under your control. Whoever you are. The power to leave is very important to everything Isabelle means by politics.

Metamorphic transformation. Recognizing what animates us. What Isabelle is asking is that we be with those who share practices of disloyal fabulation. We have to actually experience transformative fright. The world we thought was there is not. It undoes what we thought we were. Worlding vs. ontology. What is and what is not. Who is using ontology how? Isabelle does not use ontology in order to sort.

The history of heresy. Rooting out heretics. The forced act of belief. Coerced belief. Deeply felt belief can still be coerced. “I believe . . .” is a very Christian—not Greek or Jewish—thing to say. The Christianization of the Greeks.

There are ways in which Isabelle and I [Donna Haraway] are barely secularized. Is indigenous cosmopolitics an oxymoron? Different uses of ontology. Powers acting, pressing, having affects, whether or not anyone believes in them or wants them to. “Sentience” is a very baggage filled word.

Producing a powerful fright with “Thou shall not regress.” Radical pragmatism and opening to experimental situations.

Killing and “carrying capacity.” The failure to put together ontological politics. Destruction of Navajo land and sheep.

 

Q & A 

Isabelle:

Ideas are critters to be honored and feared. The invention of humans. Whitehead and Plato. This is another aspect of ideas. “Human” is an idea; a soul animated by ideas. We are the people of ideas. Ideas may have the status of other than human beings, and the problem is knowing them. They are dangerous; more complicated than us fabricating them. The fury of an imperfect realization of ideas. The westerners who see themselves as “the people” or “human” and not among other people.

The point is not to honor the “do not regress” command, but to take it as a divine power that marks that we have not honored or received what makes us human. It is important that we honor or learn to receive. If we re-member that we were made humans, than we can acknowledge that others are made otherwise. We cannot dream of a freedom from the “do not regress.” Super market spirituality (“no limitations”).

Donna:

Oncomouse. The first patented animal. An instance of cyborg; a particular kind. Oncomouse as who am I; the implosion of propriety forms; sacrificial surrogacy; detailed technical knowledge; practical relationality with flesh. A non-optional origin story of who we are. Oncomouse is a little bit like Plato’s human; Linneaus’s homo sapiens. Somehow Oncomouse is now a player in the world of ontological politics and cosmopolitics. She is my sister. You can’t repudiate her.

Your [Isabelle’s] relations to proprietary biology do not work for me.

Isabelle:

Oncomouse is a victim of worse and worse science.

Donna:

I don’t think that’s true. I think you like it less and less. The proprietary issue; the financialization of biology etc.

Isabelle:

Oncomouse is part of my world.

Donna:

I think you become a critic when money enters biology.

Isabelle:

I would fight my own indigenous politics against the knowledge economy

Donna:

I think I’m more worried about Plato . . .

Isabelle:

Patents do not need reliable knowledge. Just correlations that can be appropriated. Oncomouse may be my sister, but she has been misused.

Donna:

Well . . .

[Questions/comments—Marisol de la Cadena].

Isabelle:

Cosmopolitics as slowing down of political good will.

Abstractions are very concrete.

Metamorphic efficacy.

 

7 comments
March 18, 2013

The Question as Medium

The philosopher is tasked with the work of responding to a series of complex and evolving questions: What is being? How do we know? What is a good life? Who are we? Such inquiries are so formative in the history of philosophy that gaining a solid grip of their influence on philosophic practice is itself almost tautological: Philosophy is the pursuit (love, etymologically) of these questions, and the emergence of the right questions is in turn the wisdom or love of philosophy itself. In philosophy the role of such deep questioning has always been of central importance.

But there are also smaller questions that are easier to study as they unfold and shape the dynamics of a specific philosophical event. One such event is evidenced by the back and forth between a conference speaker and her audience. The speaker presents her material and patiently awaits a response from her peers. Here an important deconstructive moment occurs when responding to the question. The philosopher must determine what the question being asked does to the content of what she has presented. We find such practices of deconstruction widespread in philosophy. One can find, for example, a Jacques Derrida painstakingly analyzing the conditions within which questions are framed, what is made possible by the question, and what becomes inaccessible by framing inquiry in a certain way. The philosopher can decide whether the question is adequate to her content and proceed to respond based on her assessment.

The question I ask myself when observing this phenomena is how does the question impact the content of what is being said. Much ink has been spilled in twentieth century philosophy over the importance of “paradigms” (Kuhn) or “epistemes” (Foucault). To my mind the paradigm and the episteme provide deeply ecological accounts of human subject formation, and the recursive relationships enacted between human knowledge production, on the one hand, and the evolving plasticity of the human subject, on the other. For Foucault an episteme refers to the historical conditions of possibility within which the knowledge and discourse of a particular epoch is grounded. For Kuhn the paradigm refers to a very particular mode of research questioning enacted to stabilize the puzzle solving practices of “normal science.” These puzzle solving strategies have consequences for how humans and technical instruments are assembled, the goal being to refine the acceptable methods for studying a particular constellation of phenomena.

In the case of both epistemes and paradigms disruption is an always present possibility (“epistemic rupture” to crib a phrase from Gaston Bachelard, or “scientific revolution” to borrow Kuhn’s term). However, when I use the phrase “ecology of knowledge” what I am interested in is less the background conditions within which questions are framed (Foucault’s “historical a priori”) and more with giving an ontological description of the ecological relationships that emerge between the content of a philosophical statement and its encounter with a mode of questioning; or, more deeply: My concern is with the sensitive plasticity of modes of thought to different kinds of knowledges, and how these sensitivities shift during encounters with certain kinds of questions. In this sense the deconstructive moment remains an important aspect of understanding knowledge ecologies; it recovers the background of historical relations that shift in and out of different species of subjectivity.

However, beyond this archeological task, giving a descriptive ontological account of the encounter between knowledges and subjectivities is also central. (Of course there is no actual binary between the “archeological” or “deconstructive” moment and the ecological one. I am drawing a line of convenience to help organize my own thinking.) It is in this sense that I have begun to think about knowledges and questions as mediums of the kind that media ecologists interpret. In other words, just as different kinds of technological assemblages enhance, reverse, retrieve, and obsolesce different experiential possibilities within human organisms and the sensory ecology of a certain social epoch, so to can we study different kinds of questions and knowledges as mediums that reframe the ecological conditions within which human subjectivity is shaped. In fact, given the wide diversity of world views active on the planet today, I believe that giving such an ecologically descriptive account is essential to questions framed under the term “Cosmopolitics.”

A cosmopolitics of knowledge must explore and describe the influence of knowledge ecologies on human subject formation. The human organism, and possibly all organisms, is immersed not just in ecologies of other beings and constructed environments, but also within ecologies of knowledge that play every bit as profound a role in constituting the conditions of a given epoch. In this sense “the question” is an ecological actor capable of either sustaining the activity of the epoch (“normal science”) or of asking a new question, calling forward new modes of thought not yet believed possible (“epistemic rupture”). We should be able to produce an ontologically thick description — a genuinely radical empiricism — that takes into account the ecological relationships between knowledges, knowers, and questioners; and not just in terms of the episteme or paradigm, but in terms of the ongoing ecological signaling between all organisms and species of subjectivity. To the questions-themselves!

8 comments
March 12, 2013

The Impact of Correlationism

Levi Bryant has posted some reflections on the deployment, evolution, and potential shortcomings of the term “correlationism.” It’s an interesting read that covers some of the more baffling developments and associations that have become attached to this oft-quoted term, and the post has me reflecting on the impact that correlationism — and its adjacent speculative realist movement — has had on my own thinking. Now, I don’t use the term correlationism very much, almost never actually, and I don’t really consider myself to be a “speculative realist,” whatever that might mean, but I have been involved in my fair share of discussions surrounding both so it’s not like I’m divorced from these terms either.

In the first place correlationism is, for me, a problem that I have to get into rather than one I have to get out of. This has to do with the fact that my two largest intellectual influences — the sciences of ecology and speculative philosophy — both start off from a radically different position than those for whom correlationism is a problem, and for whom the critique of it is an innovation. That’s not to say that correlationism doesn’t usefully describe a particular set of philosophies, or that the responses the concept has generated are simple, unnecessary, or unhelpful. Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that correlationism is a concept that has emerged historically within the context of a very specific set of discursive circumstances, and that there are other discourse communities, other ecologies of thought and ideas, for which correlationism wasn’t the problem or tradition of thinking that needed to be challenged or overcome. I just happen to belong to one of those traditions within which correlationism might never have emerged as a topic of consequence.

But if correlationism is not a term I readily use, and not a problem I was trying to solve, what has correlationism done for the work I am doing? The answer is that it has made possible a greater variety of discussions with a greater variety of people. The concept of correlationism has redistributed discursive relations amongst philosophers. In my case it has increased my ability to dialogue with people working within continental philosophy, and made it possible for me to engage  these traditions in a much more complex way than was previously possible. However, even here the contribution of correlationism has to be thought within a larger ecology of knowledges, and within a movement towards speculative philosophy emerging in continental circles more generally. This movement seems to have had something of a slow build over the past few decades, but surely we can point to a kind of Deleuzian moment with an epicenter radiating out somewhere around the publication of Difference and Repetition in 1968 (and even earlier with his recovery of Henri Bergson in Bergsonism). Surely a more robust genealogy would reveal an even more distributed build through time.

The situation today is quite different. Indeed, we can now name a whole litany of new speculative texts in addition to those directly associated with speculative realism. Here we can mention Isabelle Stengers’ book Thinking With Whitehead, which has clearly had a huge impact on the way Whitehead is read in France and elsewhere, as well as Steven Shaviro’s book Without Criteria, which as had a very profound effect on my understanding of Kant, Deleuze, and Whitehead, and has opened up new avenues of discussion between continental and speculative philosophy. We’ve also seen works like Nature and Logos, which draws connections between Whitehead’s speculative philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophical research. There’s also been a renewed interested in older texts like Gabrial Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology. And There’s still much more on the horizon — the english translation of Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence for instance. There are countless more examples we could list.

All of these works point to an interesting shift, not just in continental theory, but in the ecosystems of thought that are now capable of interacting and mutating with one another in general. A new phase of parasitism and symbiosis has begun, and I think that the truly interesting syntheses of these disparate figures still lay ahead of us. Within this broader shift towards speculation correlationism has acted as a kind of rallying point in otherwise loose ecological zones. Here the object “correlationism” must be thought of as a conceptual actor with the agency to produce different kinds of discursive effects structurally coupled with different kinds of media. So even if it’s not a concept I hang my hat on every night it is one that has directly impacted the ecologies of knowledge in which I participate. At the end of the day it’s the increase in dialogue with a more diverse group of thinkers, a dialogue that I can attribute to this word “correlationism,” that I think has had the most impact on my work, rather than the problems to which the concept itself refers.

Leave a comment
February 24, 2013

The Aerobiosphere

Newly published research indicates that the sky above our heads is filled with complex living ecologies that contribute to global weather dynamics. In the words of one researcher, this “contributes significantly to the hypothesis that the atmosphere is alive . . . The possibility of microbes being metabolically active in the atmosphere transforms our understanding of global processes.” We’ve seen reports like this before, but freshly published research always brings these exciting ideas back to mind.

The report also reminds me of one of the arguments from my article in Thinking Nature (forthcoming . . . soon?). In that paper I suggest we need a new conception of media ecology expanded to include all organisms, and not just human ones. From this perspective the sky is not a given backdrop upon which evolutionary dynamics unfold, but a recursively active media ecology that is constructed by a series of entangled organisms. Organisms are media ecologists enveloped by the media ecologies of other organisms, and aerobiology is just one exotic example that highlights this point.

What I think is so interesting about this perspective is that it implies that the Earth itself is not just a ground, but also a medium that constrains and conditions the semio-energetic cascade of organismic and ecosystemic development. By re-thinking the Earth as a kind of media my hope is twofold. First, I think the idea can open up the possibility of a more porous and participatory encounter with the Earth as a malleable but constitutive entity that frames the possibility of all human activity. Second, media ecology can highlight the important role played by the material distribution of constructed environments in terms of the enactment of an organism’s worldspace.

The latter point has consequences for how we think about cognitive ethology too. If we think of the Earth as a media ecology, or a series of media ecologies, then we have to think of the enacted worldspace of each organism from a distributed and extended perspective. In other words, if we think of media ecologies as constructed zones that tamper with the sensory ratios and affective sensibilities of organisms, then we are obliged to conclude that each organism’s “ecology of mind” is extended beyond the sensory apparatus of the physical organism. It’s a sort of strange but striking image: The Earth fluoresces with the distributed cognition of billions of organisms and the flashing perceptual zones of a diverse anarchy of media ecologies of mind.

1 comment
October 29, 2012

The Conceptual Force of Knowledge Ecologies: A Modern Cosmogram

From now on, politics is something entirely different from what political scientists believe: it is the building of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive composition of the common world (Latour: 2004). What is common to this vast transformation is that politics is now defined as the agonizing sorting out of conflicting cosmograms (Tresch: 2005). Hence the excellent name Isabelle Stengers has proposed to give to the whole enterprise, that of cosmopolitics, meaning, literally, the politics of the cosmos (Stengers: 1996) – and not some expanded form of internationalism (Beck: 2006).

- Bruno Latour

For the past several years I have devoted significant portions of my time to understanding what I now view as an experimental investigation into the ontological status of ideas, concepts, and knowledge. The phrase I have given to this project — “Knowledge Ecology” — has been traveling with me since around 2007 when I first began formulating my thesis that knowledge and its relation to knowers has a predominately ecological character. In 2008-2009 I began my first attempts at composing a proposal for my M.A. thesis. I wanted to link natural, social, and humanistic sciences into a transdisciplinary framework united by the principles of ecological and evolutionary thinking. My thesis then, which I still largely hold to, was that, in order to make sense of — and in order to meaningfully intervene on — the human situation, we need to understand the constitutive role played by three interdependent ecological domains: natural ecologies, media ecologies, and knowledge ecologies. (I have since dropped the phrase “natural” in order to separate the scientific principles of evolutionary ecology from the homogenizing and hetereonormative implications often associated with deployment of “natural” categories of anything.)

The above diagram represents my latest effort to understand the conceptual force of knowledge ecologies visually. The diagram draws from two primary sources: Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of nature and Bruno Latour’s critique of the split between Nature and Culture diagnosed in We Have Never Been Modern and The Politics of Nature. The horizontal axis represents the belief that the world is split into two types of qualities, primary and secondary. The vertical axis represents the belief that the world is further split between two poles, nature and culture. The intersection of these two axes results in the separation of facts and values at an ontological level. My thesis is that this conceptual arrangement has affective force independent of its logical content. In other words when we think about knowledge ecologically we have to understand it in terms of it as a being-productive-of-affects in addition to its being-as-statement-of-truth. The cosmogram has agency insofar as it enforces certain regimes of truth at the expense of others, and acts as a tool by which societies feel justified in legislating claims about philososphy, politics, bodies, health, ecology, religion, and the nature of human experience.

Some of these affects are as follows. In the wake of the bifurcation of nature modern humans — and all beings capable of sense, really — are relegated to a secondary status. We remain second class citizens (a phrase I picked up from Terrence McKenna) in a worldview dominated by the apartheid of sense and being; the one possesses all of the qualities, value, and experiences but enjoys no ontological reality; the other enjoys ontological reality but has no foothold in the everyday experience of living things. I have noted this state of affairs in the upper-right hand corner of the diagram (“Politics but not facts; values but no truths”) and the bottom-left hand of the diagram (“Facts but no values; truth but no politics”). This state of affairs is terrible news for politics which must integrate the knowledge acquired through the third-person objective scientific understanding with the first-person morals, aims, and needs of concrete life.

The goal of political life, as I see it, is the struggle to compose a common world — a public in Latour and Dewey’s sense of the word. On one level this requires that we generate a completely different kind of cosmogram to help us forge and deploy new social relations. For my part, I think that in order to design more meaningful multispecies collectives of humans and nonhumans I believe that part of our work must be to investigate the nonhuman world of cosmograms, and to develop more sophisticated theories regarding our understanding of how sensitive, vulnerable, and plastic the human psyche is. We are beings amidst ecologies of shellfish, coral, and oak trees, but also ecologies of extraordinarly subtle and distributed cosmograms as well. As Latour says in the epigram at the top of this post, this work is in part “defined as the agonizing sorting out of conflicting cosmograms,” and, I would add, the production of new ones as well.

1 comment
August 23, 2012

Ecology of Minds

Excerpt:

Knowledge ecologies pre-date human beings by at least the 4 billion years within which life has existed on Earth, and possibly much longer; in this sense knowledge ecology can be seen as a subsection of a wider field of study known as “ecosemiotics,” which human ecologist Alf Hornborg, following Uexküll and Bateson, describes beautifully in the context of a rainforest ecosystem:

As Uexküll and Bateson have both in different ways shown, the material interactions of organisms in ecosystems presuppose their exchange and interpretation of signs…this can be generalized for the entire rainforest ecosystem. In a myriad similar ways, each organism and species exists by virtue of its capacity to perceive and interpret the world around it. An ecosystem is not a machine, where the various components mindlessly fulfill their functions as a reflection of the external mind of the engineer. Ecosystems are incredibly complex articulations of innumerable, sentient subjects, engaging each other through the lenses of their own subjective worlds (2001, p. 125).

Thus, in the case of human knowledge ecologies (which can be separated only abstractly from other ecologies), we find that humans are not alone on Earth in enacting perceived worlds. Rather, it is the human who arises within an already emplaced, living, and effulgent hum of other beings and their worlds. Amidst the pre-existing knowledge ecologies of orchids, chrysanthemums, and bonobos the human’s own mind is partly configured and extends outwardly, touching the surrounding landscapes with thoughts, language, and ritual. In other words, the human mind-space is only a small portion of a much larger ecology of minds that stretches across the Earth’s biosphere, and this matters when thinking about what ecology means.

4 comments
August 17, 2012

Ideas Are Things Part 2

Excerpt:

While knowledge ecologies are not exclusive to humans, it is in the context of the human that we find the explosion of many new knowledge ecologies (e.g., worldviews, paradigms, ideologies, myths, and other subtle ecosystems) exerting their own gravitational pull upon other actualities of experience. To be sure, an idea may not have the physical substantiality of a hammer or submarine, but it would be difficult to argue that ideas don’t impact the material conditions of the entities around them. In many cases it is an idea (neoliberal economics, for example) that is the decisive factor in generating relations between humans and nonhumans. A study of knowledge ecologies would thus include the role ideas, worldviews, paradigms, or ideologies play in co-shaping human and more-than-human worlds.

11 comments
August 15, 2012

Ideas Are Things

Excerpt:

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of a more complex reality.

11 comments
August 13, 2012

The Noetic Reef

Excerpt:

Uexküllian ontology is remarkable in that it underscores the material relationships between beings — their enmeshed, evolutionary, ecological, and interdependent existences — but also foregrounds that this tangled array of species has interior dimensions. In addition to the material ecologies of beings there are also, simultaneously, iridescent ecologies of living minds grappling and shaping one another in complex ways that cascade through creature to creature. The Earth appears in this light as a giant noetic reef, a world-generating orb home to billions of subjective experiences both ancient and new; a beautiful image indeed, and one worth holding on to.

5 comments
May 2, 2012

Speculation and Ecology: Some Notes for Friday’s Talk (updated)

Ecology is typically defined as the study of relationships between organisms and environments, and the relationships between organisms to one another. This essay suggests another way forward: a re-visioning of ecology in the context of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. By thinking ecology with Whitehead we will be able to demonstrate a simple and surprising truth: all relations of any kind—be they between sea anemones and coral reefs or between philosophers and the world—are ecological in nature. By generalizing the definition of ecology to include relations of any kind, we expand our notions of what ecology is all about, and our ability to enact a cosmopolitics—a planetary thought for a planetary ecology—is greatly enhanced. But what, we might ask, does speculative philosophy have to do with ecology? Are we not mixing the empirical world of the natural sciences with the subjective world of a philosopher’s fantasy? I’m going to suggest that in order to actually understand the meaning of ecology—and in particular the possibility of an ecological ethics—we have to speculate, using the best of our sciences and the best of our imagination to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

3 comments
May 1, 2012

Matter, Media, and Mind: Essay Complete

It has been a good week for finishing up writing projects. I just completed a new essay entitled “Matter, Media, and Mind: A Threefold Approach To Ecologies.” I’m attaching the full pdf HERE. Many of the ideas presented in this paper will be the focus of a talk I am giving at the California Institute of Integral Studies this Friday, as part of their annual founder’s symposium. In the spirit of Whitehead’s return via various ecological philosophies, I hope that this essay can go some ways to re-visioning what ecology means for us in the twenty-first century. Here’s an excerpt from the portion on “Knowledge Ecologies” (from which this blog gets its name):

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding differed aspects of a more complex reality.

 

Leave a comment
March 26, 2012

More Thoughts on Embodied/Extended Minds

In response to my previous post, blog aficionado dmf linked to THIS very interesting talk which includes some criticisms of the extended/embodied mind hypothesis from philosopher of mind Robert Rupert. Below is an extended version of my initial response.

As I’m listening to Robert Rupert I hear him saying that, as far as defining what counts as a cognitive process goes, we should limit ourselves to that which is central to all cognitive processes (i.e., the brain inside your skull) rather than include the multiplicity of objects that might become participant in some specific cognitive act (i.e., using a pen and paper to perform some mental operation).

But by suggesting that we limit cognition to only its core processes (in the brain) we fail at understanding how that brain is already constituted by a variety of environmental factors. So, for example, Rupert discusses the interest extended mind theorists have had with the role literacy plays in the constitution of new forms of consciousness (citing the widely-held hypothesis that literate societies are in some substantial way different from pre-literate societies). If I’m hearing him right, Rupert suggests that this historical analysis is all well and good, but his interest is in how the brain is constituted internally here and now, and not as it changes as part of some historical trend. For Rupert, what is essential to the brain’s cognitive functioning doesn’t change in any significant way when brains are shifted across contexts (i.e., they tend to act the same regardless of environment).

If this is a correct reading of Rupert’s analysis, then I would say my difference with him is that I take environmental factors in cognitive activity to be influential not only at the moment of use, but as enduring features of a media-rich cognitive landscape that, because of the nature of media environments, will have an increasing impact on the minds of the people inhabiting those environments (which will tend towards a recursive increase generated by the way different media ecologies enact different sensory modalities). In this sense I don’t think we can study cognitive organization outside of the media contexts in which it is being studied, even if there are certain physical parameters brains require to operate transversally across all media environments. This doesn’t mean that I think ion channels obey different laws in sixth century China than in twenty-first century San Francisco, it means that I think the globally enacted world that appears for an observer is very sensitive to the conditions of media environments and this matters when talking about what “cognition” is.

Now, everything that I have said above is for the most part already figured in to both the enactivist paradigm and media ecology more generally. What I am interested in doing is adding a third ecological dimension to the equation: if enactivism corresponds to the material sensory-couplings of organisms and their environments; and media ecologies refer to the modes by which organisms extend those sensory couplings; then a knowledge ecology explores the ways in which an organism’s psyche is extended or transformed through the use of different concepts, ideas, ideologies, or paradigms. Thus in much the same way that, “media ecology is the study of media as environment” I would forward that knowledge ecology is the study of knowledge or mind as environment. There would then be three integral ecologies of matter, media, and mind; each folding, shaping, and re-constructing one another in increasingly subtle ways. I have come to think of this schema as parallel to Whitehead’s threefold account of the actual occasion (subject, datum, and subjective form in shorthand). In this sense my little model isn’t really a theory of cognition so much as it is a threefold of account of relations and causality based in ecological thinking; where cognition is interpreted from a much broader, cosmological perspective. Stay tuned.

1 comment
February 14, 2012

An Argument for the Ecology of Knowledge: Aesthetics and Causality

Michael at Archive Fire responds to my previous post HERE. Our ongoing dialogue has now moved beyond the ontological issue of withdrawal in object-oriented philosophies and onto distinguishing between different types of relations (causal and epistemic) and how these distinctions might impact our reasoning about ontology. These exchanges are practically becoming a regularly scheduled part of the program over on this little corner of the web and I’m quite enjoying them. Below is my response that includes some of my arguments regarding the ecology of knowledge.

Michael starts off with some inaccurate assumptions about Whitehead, which I shall have to correct in order to better highlight my position. I don’t hold Michael’s one-sided treatment of Whitehead against him since Michael openly admits to not having read much of Whitehead’s work. Certainly there is nothing wrong with that, its not necessary for both of us to have read all of the same material for us to have a fruitful discussion, but it does mean that I shall have to backtrack a little bit again and articulate further Whitehead’s position since I find it so philosophically compelling and supportive of my own. I place the blame on myself for not being as clear as was necessary in our earlier discussions, and hopefully this round can increase our mutual clarity. To be sure, my incessant appeal to Whitehead should not be read as an attempt to hitch my cart to the horse of Whitehead’s process philosophy (I have a number of disagreements with Whitehead) but his work is such a clear influence on my own that it would it be strange not to cite him as an inspiration.  Here it goes.

First off, Michael is concerned that Whitehead is not empirical enough. Michael writes, “Although I am not as familiar as I would like to be with Whitehead’s ontology, I see no compelling reason why we should graft a speculative ontology on to what can be easily described through empirical investigation of the materials and dynamics involved.” This is a great criticism, but doesn’t necessarily apply to Whitehead. Whitehead’s metaphysics is based on two general tensions we find manifesting in different ways all throughout his work. Some of the common tensions include: speculation and empiricism; contingency and mathematics; reason and experience; or cosmology and philosophy. Whitehead doesn’t privilege one category over the other but rather suggests that speculation and empiricism are both equally necessary. Here Whitehead uses the metaphor of the aeroplane which takes flight (always from a specific set of contingent circumstances) into the speculative imagination, and then lands (again into a specific set of contingent circumstances). The goal of speculative philosophy is thus this ongoing process of taking off and landing where speculation involves taking the risk of an imaginative wager and building a cosmology, while philosophy involves the ongoing task of criticizing the blind spots that any cosmology will necessarily generate.

The term “Speculative Philosophy” thus seeks to embody the tension of lived, contingent experience, with the reality that there is a concrete world buzzing with activity outside of our own body’s particular field of awareness. Here speculative philosophy embodies many of the same tensions as the now-fashionable term “Speculative Realism.” Of course Whitehead’s success in balancing speculation and philosophy is something anyone is free to challenge. In my own opinion his philosophy is more than adequate in an empirical sense recognized by the sciences, but definitely falls short of being a rigorous empiricism in the sense of situating his own body within the power dynamics of history, culture, class etc. (though to Whitehead’s credit he does argue against all kinds of pernicious scientific theories regarding biological and genetic reductionism already in the 1920/30s – and I think this is a rather good testament to his critical thinking skills). Thus I think we can say that Whitehead is empirically adequate in a gross sense regarding the insights of the physical sciences, but empirically lacking in the socio-historical sense recognized by critical theorists. Regardless, the point is that there is plenty of empirical methodology happening throughout Whitehead’s work so our criticisms are better directed elsewhere.

But lets address a little more theory vis-à-vis Michael’s arguments. The tension between speculation and philosophy that Whitehead seeks to enact is more than a methodological approach, its also mirrored in his ontology. Actual occasions, for instance, collapse the distinction between (for example) primary and secondary qualities; causation and perception; or quantitative and qualitative dimensions. Whitehead offers that actual occasions are complexly mental-physical, where “mental” refers to general state of prehension rather a fully generalized state of apprehension (the latter referring only to entities with cognitive abilities). I have suggested earlier that we might call Whitehead’s ontology “panexperiential” but we could just as well call it “pansemiotic.” Pansemiosis refers to the position that all entities—to whatever limited degree—are sign interpreters even if only at the level of basic physical or chemical reactions. Here signs and causality are inextricably intertwined all of the way down. [Side note 1: I find great sympathy here with Tim Morton’s position on causality and aesthetics—its very similar to what I am trying to argue in that the causal and aesthetic seem to be one and the same. This has important consequences for thinking about both epistemology and ecology.]

Take the example of the ecosystem form instance. While it is true that epistemic processes are interactive features of an ecosystem, it is simply not true that these processes emerge only with the human, or even with the “higher animals.” In this sense ecosystems are semiotic (i.e., interpretive) all of the way down. We can call this approach to ecosystems “ecosemiotics” or “biosemiotics.” If you are interested in reading about the former I suggest looking at Alf Hornborg’s work The Power of the Machine if you are interested in the latter, any of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s research will help immensely. The point here is that epistemic relations are not simply emergent properties of complex chemical and molecular reactions. Rather, epistemic relations (which I take as synonymous with semiotic relations) are constitutive features of ecosystems as such. The ecosemiotic view in this way transforms the split between causal relations and epistemic relations, throwing the two into and ontological blender that requires a fundamental rethinking of cosmology and ecology. In other words, at no point in either chemical or biological processes is there any such thing as “just” causal relations—these relations are simultaneously causally interactive and semiotically interpretive. Knowledge ecologies thus predate human actors (and whatever complex mammals you want to throw on the list) by billions of years. Its our job as humans to align human knowledge with the other ecologies of knowledge, rather than the other way around.

We might also note here that the framework I am proposing is entirely consistent with the enactivist paradigm within which even single cells engage in basic modes of semiotic relationship with their environment. It is the autopoietic closure of a cell that creates not just a physical membrane, but an interpretive membrane that puts the cell into a dynamic relationship with its ecology. So, does that mean that humans and cells are exactly the same in their semiotic structure and capacity? Of course not! Here Whitehead is of some further assistance. Whitehead suggests that “societies” (enduring groups of actual occasions) can be distinguished by grades of intensity so that a higher-grade society (like a Human or a baleen whale) has all kinds of different capacities (e.g., symbol making, cognitive apprehension, self-reflection, or imagination) than more basic societies. For these reasons I continue to think that human epistemic activities are different in degree and not in kind from any act of interpretation whatsoever. [Side note 2: Graham Harman has also suggested that a “speculative psychology” might be helpful to sort out some of these issues, I believe in Guerilla Metaphysics].  

A few concluding statements then. Whitehead’s philosophy and my own arguments for the ecology of knowledge are at the end of the day, I think, fully consistent with any empirical arguments that can be drawn from the sciences of physics, chemistry, or biology (or at the very least they do not require a break from established scientific truths—this is also a criteria I have learned to respect and appreciate from Whitehead’s work). In short, I maintain that the human processes of imagination and cognition are kin to other cosmological processes such as the emergence and evolution of ecosystems or the spinning of spiral-armed galaxies. Its all cosmos to me folks; but don’t get me wrong, you won’t find me conceding my position to the so-called scientific reductionists (whoever these mystery-men might be…). The cosmos is richly experiential far outside the boundaries of the human skull so much so that I maintain that experience is a constitutive feature of relations in general; that these relations are ecological in nature; and that, while the human may be the place where the cosmos begins to recognize these qualities in itself, the human is not the place where experience gets to be cordoned off into the ghetto of anthropocentric fantasies. Its ecologies of experience all the down as far as I can tell.

13 comments
January 25, 2012

Precarious Causation!

Its the clever term Michael proposes in his latest volley in our ongoing discussion about withdrawal and object-oriented philosophy. If any of you are still interested in this now weeks-long debate head over HERE to read Michael’s new post. I’m reposting my response to him below:

Read the rest of this entry »

1 comment
January 7, 2012

Words as Events

h/t Dirk Felleman who directed me to THIS short little gem of a post. I was particularly taken by this passage which reminds me quite a bit of how I would describe a knowledge ecology:

Words are not just the way we order the world. They are the way we re-order the world, over and over again. When we speak and write well, we are at the border of sense and non-sense, the world coming in and out focus, in and out of chaos, in and out of order.

I want to suggest, then, that while certain things and experiences may be unnameable, they are not ineffable.  Words are events that interact with other events.  When we speak some sublime experience — an experience that cannot know categories or concepts, an experience that is utterly itself, sui generis and infinite — we don’t necessarily domesticate its unwieldiness. We don’t necessarily categorize it, move into the realm of the known, into the realm of safe knowledge. We do not necessarily profane its sanctity.

Words are not just sounds and marks. Look at these words here. Look at the spaces between the letters, between the words, between the paragraphs: there is space. The same is true when we speak (at least usually; sometimes, I do drone on and on).  Silence and emptiness is an essential aspect of language.

1 comment
December 6, 2011

How Language Shapes Thought

I was just sent a great essay entitled “How Language Shapes Thought: The Languages We Speak Affect Our Perceptions of the World” which has proven to be a great read. There have been variations of this thesis emerging in linguistics since at least the 1930′s following the so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” that, broadly stated, suggested the languages people use shape their relationships to other people, their sense of space and time, and their relationship to the more than human world.

To me this sounds like a rather obvious supposition, however it is only recently that linguists and cognitive scientists have been able to collect the empirical data to support such a view. This article, for example, argues the following:

People communicate using a multitude of languages that vary considerably in the information they convey. Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities. In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one’s mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time. The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized (p. 63).

And further concludes by stating:

What researchers have been calling “thinking” this whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot of adult human thinking where language does not play a role. A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human (p. 65).

I think the future of linguistic research of this variety will start to look more like media ecology (broadly construed) than the current cognitive linguistic emphasis on universal grammers. In this sense, the particularity of a language group (including its unique grammer and lexical output) seems to have just as much impact on human cognitive development as any deeper, underlying structure to produce language as such. I think there are good grounds to suggest then that, just as media ecology has emerged as the study of “media as ecology,” we can also say that a new kind of “linguistic ecology” is emerging that treats language as an ecological domain recursively linked to other ecological domains (including knowledge ecologies!)

What does this look like? Well, the media ecologists are well and far ahead when it comes to the type of research programs I am suggesting vis-a-vis the study of knowledge ecologies. Fortunately, it seems that media ecology research can provide a template for how to research knowledge ecologies. There is already a great deal of historical evidence, for example, on the difference between oral and literate cultures (cf. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy). For Ong, the differences between orality and literacy are not surface-level “aesthetic” differences that can be united by a deeper structure in human cognition. Rather, Ong puts mediums of communication on par with the human enactment of things like causality, temporality, and sensory perception. Oral communication, for example, stresses auditory sensation and the immediacy of sound as a resonating, vibrating medium of exchange. Literate communication, on the other hand, stresses the visual sensation, requires a concept of linearity, and emphasizes a disjunction between subjects.

I think what we are seeing with the emergence of new research programs into the nature of language is an increased awareness that languages, ideas, words, paradigms — I’m not entirely clear how to sort these terms — act in a Latourian sense that reveals a much more subtle plain of activity than what is generally construed by the natural sciences of ecology. As I have proposed before, I think the way forward (in part) lies in articulating not just one ecology but three ecologies; a material, media, and knowledge ecology. These three ecologies require an awareness of what Graham Harman calls “undermining” and “overmining.” In the above article, for example, it seems clear that the effect of language on human cognitive development cannot be reduced only to underlying, universal structures of human cognition. Nor can languages be reduced to sociocultural contexts and historical events. It seems, rather, that even individual words can have impacts on human perceptions and cognitive development.

The surprising conclusion here is, and this won’t come as a surprise if you already accept the thesis of extended cognition, that words are in some sense “outside” of individual human speakers even though they appear to be generated from “inside” human skulls. Languages, worldviews, paradigms, and lexicons in some sense constitute a different sort of “object” replete with their own autonomous effects on material worlds. I would argue that, up until recently, Latour has skirted the issue of actors that occupy an ambiguous place in peoples psyches (he doesn’t have much an articulated psychology), though it seems that we are now in a place to consider what an ecology of knowledge may look like alongside of the greater ecologies of actuality, and in that sense include what Latour calls a “cosmogram” alongside of other actors like stethoscopes, MRI machines, and iPhones.

 

2 comments
December 5, 2011

Knowledge Ecology Turns One

Its been just about a year since Knowledge Ecology went online and I thought I would take a moment to riff on media, philosophy, and what on earth might be going on with this blog. Knowledge Ecology (like so many other theory sites) is part experimental laboratory, part discussion forum, and part autonomously acting digital entity — in other words, a great place to get ideas off the ground and try to formulate them in a coherent way. Some of these ideas end up taking flight, occasionally reaching a comfortable and stable orbit. Others crash before they even leave the hangar. Such is the nature of experimental philosophy.

It is no surprise to me that new species of thought co-emerge with the arrival of new mediums. Experimental metaphysics, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology — all are expressions not just of human theorists expounding a view, but of a new media ecology chattering with the voices of screens, networks, and wifi. Online theorizing offers us a new approach to philosophy, one that is particularly amenable to speculative thinking. In this sense I’ve come to think of the writings and clips that end up on this blog as the philosophical equivalent of a mixtape. For this reason Knowledge Ecology probably has more in common with musicians and artists than with scientists or philosophers. Of course this is only part of the story, as much of what appears here is grounded in science and philosophy.

There is no shame in admitting that most of the ideas that end up on Knowledge Ecology are the sparks flying off from bigger problems and ideas I am working through in more traditional mediums. Perhaps its because I have a general interest in media theory, but the comparisons between blogging and academic publishing still seems off to me. Blogging will never replace books, journals, or conference papers, but I never saw that as being the case, nor even a particularly interesting question. Artists throw mixtapes online precisely because, perhaps for the first time in history, the artist can create music in real-time, convincingly both intuiting and deploying the cultural zeitgeist simultaneously. In that sense, the blog, as a medium, is more like a mixtape, the book more like a full-length album, and a conference more like a live performance.

Each of these formats co-evolve with one another and the novel effects of doing theory online, in public, and to a mostly anonymous crowd, remain to be seen (though I suspect that these global interactions, occurring at the speed of light, can only strengthen what is perhaps the main thesis of this blog: knowledge is ecological in nature, itself a qualitative variation of a more basic ontological thesis: all relations of any kind are ecological relations). But where is it all going? If I am superstitious about anything its about talking about ideas or plans that haven’t come to fruition yet. There is nothing worse than laying out too many plans in advance, only to discover later that one’s time was spent mostly planning and not doing. (I’ll be brief about this question, but here is what you can expect in 2012: in the immediate, I’m working on two essays in the vein of speculative philosophy, one for Thinking Nature and one for O-Zone. I’m also co-editing a volume on integral approaches to ecology for SUNY press where I have three essays — one I’m writing solo, one a co-written general introduction to the volume, and a third co-written chapter on Object-Oriented Ecology. I’m also applying to PhD programs. More on that soon hopefully).

Knowledge Ecology runs parallel to, and intervenes on, all of these other activities without canceling any of them out. It has become a space where ideas deploy themselves in an incomplete, nonchronological fashion. In the past, for example, I did a tremendous amount of outlining to keep track of all my research, now much of it shows up on Knowledge Ecology in draft form. Usually the posts that end up here are ideas I am working through for the first time, and this has both positive and negative consequences. Despite the fact that online theory is clearly the intellectual equivalent of a freestyle, the distinctions between academically publishable works and ideas being worked out on blogs is still too blurry in the minds of many to be meaningful. Thus we often find the critics chiming in to a post as though it were a firmly established treatise, worked out for dozen of years, carefully crafted in the hands of an able master. Fortunately, these types seem to be few and far between, and most participants in this online bohemia readily grasp that blogging is much more suited to constructing ideas than breaking them apart (comment debates can be hell, as we all know).

So, If you happen to be a regular reader of this site (because apparently I have those) I only have one thing to offer in return for your help in constructing the ideas that appear here: take whatever  ideas you want from this site and use them in whatever constructive manner you see fit. There is only one caveat here; ideas are meant to be responsible to the real worlds they are actively engaged with, and blogging is incredibly helpful insofar as it stems the hideous hoarding that can take place behind university walls and expensive journal subscriptions. Its time we fully democratized all forms of knowledge, and I see no better time do it than right now, whilst having a grand time exploring the dark mysteries of this little corner of our universe. If an idea you find here strikes you as meaningful, helpful, or grounds for a strong critique, grab it and use it, just make sure you pay it forward!

In the spirit of democratizing knowledge, thanks for reading!

8 comments
November 6, 2011

Words and Worlds: Lingis on the Ecology of Knowledge

The further I explore the work of Alphonso Lingis, the more profoundly touched I become by the depth of his insight. Take the following quotations from his work in The First Person Singular. The first situates the relation between the human use of words in relation to world, the second expands this line of thinking to consider the perspective of other species, slowly eating away at our notions of inside and outside; individuals and collectives; representations and perception:

Words order our action: they organize our environment by segmenting it and demarcating paths and instrumental connections and by invoking possibilities and predicting consequences. They signal what has to be safeguarded, nurtured, repaired or built, and they sort out resources and urgencies. Our words are not only indicative or informative but also imperative: they launch and command our action or inaction (p. 28).

Extensive biological research has now shown that other species from pigeons to primates recognize what they perceive with a categorical intelligence…Coral fish, butterflies and wasps, birds of paradise and hummingbirds, zebras and foxes bear surface colors and patterns and utter distinctive cries with which they both recognize one another and are drawn to one another (p. 67).

In the first quotation Lingis draws our attention to the categorical intelligence which humans, as wielders of language, use to re-arrange the rubrik’s cube of phenomenal experience. In the second, we are invited to consider that this is not an exclusively human capacity, but is a categorical intelligence possessed by numerous other species. Lingis in this way forwards what one could call a biosemiotic framework that situates the human activity of categorical intelligence and symbol making amidst a wild and vast kaleidoscope of interacting semiotic activities performed by other species.

Lingis lifts the rock of first-person subjectivity from its dark, damp soil to reveal that what lurks beneath is not a solid and fixed unity, nor merely a socially constructed historical nomad, but rather the scurrying of thousands of microorganisms, organelles, and cells activated amidst a universe filled with other living beings. Indeed, first-person subjectivity is itself an ecological complex, filled with the mesh of what Tim Morton calls “strange strangers” — each intimately interwoven with our own being, each irreducibly alien to our own identity.

Thus we find ourselves in the staging grounds of not just a renewed conception of the first-person perspective, but also of the character and being of knowledge and its relationship to the world. “When we speak about things” Lingis writes “they become clearer; they break apart or connect up differently; words may well make things and situations first appear” (p. 37). And he continues:

Words, just because they fragment things and grasp them with their outlines or skeletons only or focus our attention on some unnoticed detail or some relationship with remote things, can cast over things strange auras and spells…With words we move lightly over things. And words, with their streaming and their syncopation, their soft or hard, warm or cold tonalities, their beat and their micromelodies, their rumble and their hisses, their harmonies and their dissonances, pick up and amplify the sonorities loud and latent in things. In doing so, they consecrate things and events (p. 62).

Note the attention Lingis pays to the tactility of words — the way they, in his prose, seem to leap from beyond the cranium and actually come into contact with various features of the world around them. In this light, I think, one might say that words act as objects in the world and the manner by which they act is ecological.

Words transform not just the environments which they disclose, but also feedback upon the one who uses them, transforming the subjectivity of the speaker in an ongoing and recursive way. How can we see this? Lingis highlights the important role paradigms play in scientific research, and their impact on research workers in a passage that could have come straight out of Kuhn:

The rational community subdivides into various scientific and technological communities. Communication within a scientific discipline or among workers in a technological field is based on the determinations of what could count as observations, what standards of accuracy in determination are possible, how the words of common language are restricted and refined for formulating observations in various scientific disciplines and practical and technological uses (p. 86).

And this one which could have come straight out of Latour:

[Paradigmatic observations and generalizations] function with collectives, connected by sympathies and antipathies, alliances and jealousies, devoted to enrichment through the exploitation of resources, labour sources, and markets; to collective defense; or to colonial, imperial, or corporate expansion. They direct movements of people seeking attachments and alliances with families, clans, other cultures, destitute people, with historical achievements and with landscapes and ecosystems. They animate gatherings and schisms within “society” and launch milieus, gangs, packs into adventures and follies (p. 89).

I have previously referred to a similar state of affairs through what one might call “The Ecology of Paradigms” the basic lesson of which I would now frame — following my encounter with object-oriented ontology — as the simple statement: paradigms are objects that shift relations amongst material systems, social power structures, and human psychologies. In other words, paradigms, like any other object, act in ways that are irreducible to both their emergence in defined relations (e.g., through the specific scientific practices which engender them) and to their originally defined purpose (e.g., their instrumental or utilitarian aims).

Thus we have so far seen that words, knowledge, and, in particular, paradigms, play a part in reconfiguring the larger ecologies of actuality they come in to contact with in a concrete, physical way. But paradigms also play a role in constituting the human research worker as she deploys a specific paradigm. On this point, Lingis writes:

The established rational discourse of the sciences and technologies not only organizes the regions of observed nature, implements, societies, and histories with its empirical laws supplying reasons for observations and its theories supplying reasons for empirical laws, but it also orders the discourse of individuals. The rational discourse of the sciences and technologies depends on speakers whose utterances formulate insights that can only be the insights of real individuals, who undertake to answer for what they say, to supply evidence for its truth (p. 90).

Words and worlds are indeed linked as independently existing, interactive actualities. The ontology which describes this relation is object-oriented. The ethics which organize the goals of such an inquiry are cosmopolitical. The way forward is ecological.

1 comment
October 6, 2011

Shaviro on Panpsychism/Eliminativism

In his essay “Panpsychism And/Or Eliminativism” (which I highly recommend everyone read) Steven Shaviro writes:

Beyond this, the real problem with Meillassoux’s and Brassier’s accounts is that they both assume that matter in itself — as it exists outside of the correlation — must simply be passive and inert, without meaning or value. But isn’t this assumption itself a consequence of the bifurcation of nature? It is only an anthropocentric prejudice to assume that things cannot be lively and active and mindful on their own, without us. Why should we suppose that these are qualities that only we possess, and that we merely project them upon the “universe of things” outside us? Eliminativist arguments thus start out by presupposing human exceptionalism, even when their explicit aim is to humble and humiliate this exceptionalism. If you take it for granted that values and meanings are nothing but subjective human impositions, then it isn’t hard to conclude that they are ultimately illusory, for human beings as well as for other entities.

I have never been able to understand why attributing qualities such as “passive” and “inert” – these are still qualities -  to nonhuman (and indeed, nonbiological) entities is suppose to be seen as more accurate, more scientific, or more philosophical. Shaviro, in the above quote, notes Whitehead’s “bifurcation of nature,” a phrase Whitehead used to describe the post-Cartesian dualism in thought (between, for example, primary and secondary qualities) which suggests that it is only with the advent of the human that anything like “meaning-making” occurs. The universe, in the bifurcated view, is a hollow, non-experiencing desert of activity, it is the human who, through their need for meaning, projects a series of historically contingent fabrications onto the extant cosmos.

Lets take a little journey – some of which will be rudimentary, but necessary for our aims. If we fast forward a few hundred years, and steep ourselves in a little basic biology and cognitive ethology, then we find that Descartes’ position was greatly mistaken. The evidence quite clearly indicates that the so-called “higher animals” (which to me is more like code for “the ones more like us”) also inhabit their own species-specific experiential domains. Furthermore, there is also evidence to suggest that complex organisms not only have a distinct sense-experience relative to their morphology, but it is also quite likely that individual organisms have their own psychology, and their own unique biographical history that shapes them – just as a human being experiences formative events that shape their psyches throughout their lifetimes. In 2011, I don’t think there is anything controversial about any of these claims.

If we take this trajectory a step further, we also find that unicellular creatures, such as an amoeba, also possess an “experience” of their environment. In cell biology, this has everything to do with the cell membrane – the skin around the cell which acts not only as a barrier, producing a differential between the “internal” world of the organism and the “external” world of the environment, but also acts as a zone of contact and interpretation. Again, any 6th grader who has taken biology already knows this.

The ability to reproduce this differentiation between the “internal” and the “external” is called “autopoiesis.” This zone of contact, which is always in a simultaneous state of production, reproduction, and decay, always interacts indirectly with its environment (we can use the term advisedly provided that we understand that the organism-environment coupling is a slippery and complex retro-activity). Thus, when Francisco Varela or Evan Thompson talk about “structural coupling” they are referring to the manner in which there is always a mediated interval between entities, and between entities and their environments.

Through the process of structural coupling, causality between an autopoietic unity (e.g., a cell) and it’s neighboring cells or environments, is always indirect. Environments cannot “cause” an organism to behave in a certain way, rather, causation is, again, mediated by the specific constitution and activity of the cell or organism which participate creatively in the unfolding causal chain of events. Such structurally coupled interactions cascade across a hierarchy of different levels (e.g., the cells in my body exist as part of the ecology of my body, just as my body exists within the ecology of San Francisco). Driving more to the point, it is the organism’s sensori-motor appartus (it’s somatic structuring) that “enacts” a particular state and set of variables from a more complex field of activity. In other words, at every level of biology, experience is occurring, and, not only is it occurring, but it is physically participating in the enaction of a life-world.

There is still nothing terribly controversial about the above two claims. Further, there is nothing anthropomorphic about either claim. Thus when we take in the evidence brought forth from both cognitive ethology and cell biology (we can choose less exotic versions of biology than enactivism and still come to the same conclusion, mind you) it makes perfect sense that human’s possess a deep experiential nature – its inherent to any biological entity. Humans are simply a different form, existing along a continuum, of experience-bearing organisms.

This is where things start to get murky, but we can, I think, breach the life-matter barrier without resorting to wishful thinking or anthropomorphism, and still see that non-biological matter also possesses a capacity for experience. It may be helpful to add here that, in addition to using the language of enactivism, we can also look to semiotics as a way of understanding the organisms relations to itself, other organisms, and non-biological entities. Biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer in his work Signs of Meaning in the Universe suggests that “biosemiotics” is a prevalent feature of any living entity. Hoffmeyer, in similar fashion to Varela and Thompson’s enactivism, suggests that organisms not only function through processes of “endosemiotics” – by which he means that the cells in your body are acting semiotically through processes of chemical signification and interpretation – but also that organisms inhabit “semiotic niches” which form an entangled symbol-interpreting mass across the Earth. Thus, in addition to a global ecosphere, there is, according to Hoffmeyer, a global “semiosphere.” (I’m not shy to point out that my phrase “knowledge ecology” has much to do with my reading of both Thompson and Hoffmeyer – a point which also implies that, though I don’t ultimately agree with Brassier and Meillassoux, I find their presence in the semiotic ecosystem valuable – but more on that later).

Lets get back to Whitehead and the problem of matter and experience. Recall that for Whitehead the post-Cartesian landscape is populated by a troublesome species of thought he calls the bifurcation of nature. In the beginning of Process and Reality Whitehead readily labels this position as “incoherent” and subsequently proposes his philosophy of organism. Whitehead’s ontological commitments are different than both Brassier’s and Meillassoux’s (at least I’m confident this is the case for the former, less so with the latter). As the name implies, the philosophy of organism takes the organism as it’s model for the universe, rather than the interness of matter. Whitehead’s organic realism thus views atoms, protons, and electrons as entities that are more like integrally functioning organic unities than the bits, bytes, or blocks of some scientific naturalisms. Here Whitehead, I think, makes the simpler – and more elegant – of two choices. Rather than trying to figure out how a non-feeling, non-experiencing cosmos can emerge as the subjectivity of the human, Whitehead sees feeling (“drops of experience”) as central to existence itself.

Whitehead’s actual occasions are each throbbing centers of experience that, when aggregated together in physical, chemical, and biological processes, produce a greater depth of experience, an increased mode of valuation. Thus, to my mind, the move attempted by the eliminative materialist is akin to a process that Michael Polanyi called “the epicyclic structure of belief.” In his essay “The Stability of Beliefs” Polanyi writes:

To the stabilising power of circularity we may add secondly the capacity of a well developed interpretative framework to supply secondary elaborations to its beliefs which will cover almost any conceivable eventuality, however embarrassing this may appear at first sight. Scientific theories which possess this self-expanding capacity are sometimes described as epicyclical, in allusion to the epicycles that were used in the Ptolomean and Copernican theory to represent planetary motions in terms of uniform circular motions. All major interpretative frameworks have an epicyclical structure which supplies a reserve of subsidiary explanations for difficult situations.

It is in this sense that I believe the eliminativist is performing a kind of Ptolemaic turn towards trying to eliminate experience – despite the gyre this puts subjectivity in – and despite the increasing evidence that it seems we live, however dimly, in a panexperientialist universe. Thus I suggest that meaning is a factor of any set of relations, and is not, contra Brassier, an exclusively human projection. Rather, the universe overflows with meanings-for in every possible direction. I am not troubled by the lack of meaning in the universe, I am troubled by the opposite – the tremendous realization that the cosmos is dripping wet with meaning; a vast, and sensual ecology of feeling and experience . For this reason I find Whitehead’s position more convincing than, definitely Brassier’s, and, probably Meillassoux’s.

Now, as I mentioned, I take an ecological approach to all things philosophical. This means a few things we should keep in mind, and they come standard issue if you are a) a pragmatic pluralist or b) an integral theorist. I am quite comfortable with promoting an ecological diversity of knowledge groups – I truly think this is the way forward. By this I mean that we ought to be encouraging epistemological, ontological, and methodological diversity. The problems to which thought should be responding to today are legion and there is no monopoly on right solutions held by any camp, tribe, association, or movement. Diversity is a healthy sign of an active and robust knowledge ecology.

However, this doesn’t mean, from an ecological point of view, that “everything goes” no, no. Interaction differentiates and individuates and I encourage debate and disagreement – provided that its done for a worthwhile aim. Thus I disagree with folks like Brassier and Meillassoux, even as I have a tremendous respect for two people that are clearly demonstrating an enormous amount of rigor and are, as best they can (and, to be sure, they are much further along than I in terms of articulating their ideas), forwarding a meaningful description of the cosmos (yes, it still bears meaning, even if it is the meaning-of-no-meaning).

All of this is to say that I think Shaviro is on the right track, and that I very much look forward to how these conversations continue to take shape.

13 comments
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 764 other followers