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Future Bodies: Discipline, Control, the Yoga of Resistance

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Michel Foucault

When the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault’s: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault’s archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology and are in fact technologies in themselves albeit inner technologies) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control.  Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of disciplining technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves but, as William Gibson says, “the street finds its own use for things”. The future is a random other; what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the disciplining machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technoscience, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. Aurobindo’s yogic practice was part and parcel of his resistance to the colonialist occupation of India.
rc..


I picked up this astute comment from a new media blog:

“The focus of yogic teachings locates one’s body, emotions, thoughts, and the mind in constant interrelated state. The ultimate goal of yoga, therefore, is self-discipline of one’s own body in order to control one’s own mind, and eventually in harnessing its full power within. Docility and state discipline does the exact opposite of this process, taking the body away from the individual and controlling it through an organized system. As a result, the mind is also coerced into subjugation to the same powers. In that sense, the system of “control” that Deleuze proposes is a natural progression of the system of discipline, to adapt to a more fluid society and to discipline the mind and the body on a more flexible level. New means of discipline in their contemporary fluidity, just as in Foucault’s argument, are a result of new inventions, while even further inventions come out of the resulting forms of discipline………… ”

Here is Foucault from Discipline and Punish on the intellectual and political origins of the systems which seek to control the body:

Docile bodiesThe classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the techno-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body. These two registers are quite distinct, since it was a question, on the one hand, of submission and use and, on the other, of functioning and explanation: there was a useful body and an intelligible body. And yet there are points of overlap from one to the other. La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of ‘docility’, which joins the analyzed body to the manipulated body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power: Frederick II, the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments and long exercises, was obsessed with them. …………………


And now from Spark Notes some commentary on Foucault’s notion of docile bodies which were produced by the systems of discipline originating in the 18th century:

Docile Bodies SummaryFoucault begins with the ideal of the soldier in the seventeenth century. He is easily recognizable in body and action. The classical age discovered the body as the target of power. The docile body is subjected, used, transformed and improved. Eighteenth century projects of docility represented a new scale of control. The economy of the body became important. The modality of control implies uninterrupted, constant coercion, which is exercised according to a codification that partitions time and space. These methods are the disciplines, ways of controlling the operations of the body which imposed a relation of docility-utility. The disciplines had always existed in monasteries and armies, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they became a general formula of domination. A policy of coercion that acts on the body was formed. The human body entered a machinery that explored and rearranged it. A political anatomy and a mechanics of power were slowly born. We cannot write the history of different disciplinary institutions, merely map a series of detailed examples.“The art of distributions.” Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space, and employs several techniques: one) Discipline sometimes requires enclosure in a protected place, e.g. a school, factory, or barracks. two) Disciplinary machinery works on the principle of partitioning space; it is always cellular. three) The rule of functional sites would gradually code a space that architecture left at the disposal of several sites. four) In discipline, the elements are interchangeable because each is identified by its place in a series. The key unit is the rank or place in a classification. Rank begins to define the distribution of individuals in educational space.“Control of activity.” One) the timetable is an old inheritance, suggested by monastic communities. The division of time in disciplinary authorities increased. two) The temporal elaboration of the act. Time penetrates the body with all the meticulous controls of power. three) The correlation of body and gesture. Disciplinary power imposes the best relation between gesture and the overall position of the body. In the correct use of the body, nothing must remain useless. four) Body-object articulation. Discipline defines each of the relationships between body and the object (e.g. a rifle) it manipulates. five) Exhaustive use. The traditional timetable forbids men to waste time. Discipline provides a positive economy, and poses the principle of ever-expanding use of time. The “natural body,” which is manipulated by authority and classified, supercedes the mechanical body.“The organization of geneses.” As the eighteenth century progressed, different arrangements of time were evident; new technology developed in the classical period for regulating time, bodies and forces. The Disciplines were machinery for adding up and capitalizing time, in four different ways: one) by dividing duration into successive and parallel segments, each of which ends with a specific time. two) By organizing these segments according to an analytical plan. three) By finalizing these temporal segments with an examination to decide if a subject has reached the required level. four) By drawing up a series of series, and subdividing each series again. Dividing activities into series makes detailed control and intervention possible.Disciplinary methods reveal a linear, evolutive time. But at the same time a social time of a serial cumulative type existed, giving an idea of evolution in terms of “genesis”. The two great discoveries of the eighteenth century were the progress of society and the genesis of individuals linked to new technologies of power. At the center of the seriation of time was the procedure of exercise, a technology by which one imposes a repetitive or difficult task on the body. Exercise has a long history: it is found in military, religious, and universal practice as ritual or ceremony. Exercises became tasks of increasing complexity that marked the acquisition of knowledge and good behavior. Exercise was initially a way of organizing time towards salvation, but it became part of a political technology of the body.“The Composition of forces.” The military unit became a machine of many parts; there was a need to create smaller units out of a mass. This was similar to the idea of creating a productive force that was greater than its elements. Discipline became the art of composing forces to obtain an efficient machine. This demands explanation: one) the individual body becomes an element that is placed, moved and articulated. The soldier or body is inserted into a larger machine. two) The time of the individual unit is adjusted to the time of others. three) A carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise command of forces. The leader needs to signal in various ways to his charges.Discipline creates individuality out of the bodies that it controls. It is cellular, organic and genetic. It has four techniques: it draws up tables, it prescribes movements, it imposes exercises and arranges tactics. The highest form of disciplinary practice is war as strategy. Strategy makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states. The classical age sees the birth of strategy between states, but also the creation of a strategy by which bodies within states were controlled. This was a military dream of society, which referred not to a contract or the state of nature but to the cogs of a machine. While jurists and philosophers looked to the contract to explain the creation of society, the technicians of discipline created procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.AnalysisAgain, the body is the subject of attention. Now, however, the body is not subject to torture but to forces of discipline and control. Foucault analyzes various technologies that control and affect the body.Docility is achieved through the actions of discipline. Discipline is different from force or violence because it is a way of controlling the operations and positions of the body. The link to the idea of academic “disciplines” such as the human sciences is intended, and becomes important later. The fact that Foucault finds the roots of discipline in monasteries and armies is important. Monastic rules, which regulate the behavior of monks, and drill exercises in the army both emphasize self-control and obedience to rules, but from differing starting points. When Foucault talks of their extension over time, he does not suggest that everyone eventually became monks or soldiers. Instead, he argues that institutions like prisons, schools and hospitals acted like machines for transforming and controlling people in this period. To do this, they fixed individuals in time and space. Foucault thinks of these institutions in terms of machines and living organisms, hence the reference to political anatomy.The organization of individuals in space works according to certain rules. The whole process works within a larger space, such as the prison, which is divided into parts or cells. Discipline depends on the idea of a series, such as a line of pupils, or a rank of soldiers.The control of time is equally important. Foucault again traces the regulation of time back to monastic life. The idea that people are held in a series is preserved, only this time they are controlled by a timetable like that discussed at the beginning of section one. Foucault’s idea of a “positive economy” is hard to grasp. It essentially means that modern timetables aim to cram more and more activity into a day.Time also has broader effects. These effects are related to the technology of time that includes both machines like clocks and the political technology that regulates the individual’s time. The disciplines are not machines for calculating time in the same way as clocks, but rather ways of regulating time as the individual experiences it. Time is divided up like space. The convict’s day is divided into one-hour segments, for example, according to a detailed plan. The control of space and time is essential to Foucault’s disciplinary system because they are the most basic elements of human life. Regulating them affects the way in which people act and think; it is a particularly deep and effective strategy.Foucault begins with time and space as the individual experiences them, but he places this time within a large context. He argues that a wider type of time existed, in which everyone moved; he also argues that the eighteenth century invented the idea of the progress of society. Foucault is talking about the Enlightenment, an eighteenth century philosophical movement that was concerned with reason and human progress. He is unusual in that he links this movement, represented by writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant, to the development of prisons, timetables and other technologies. However, it is important to Foucault that philosophical texts and timetables are part of the same structures of power.Like the timetable, exercise derives from the practices of monasteries, and is yet another way of regulating the body through activity. Prayer, which was aimed at salvation, and military drills are examples of this original form of exercise. The key shift came when the purpose of exercise changed from the benefit of the individual to control. Unlike silent prayer, the “exercise yard” of a prison does not necessarily benefit the prisoners, Foucault would argue.The final element that Foucault analyzes is the idea of the body as part of a machine. This is a development of the division of space and time. Now, however, the body becomes a cog in a machine. Foucault does not argue that groups of people never existed before the classical period, but that the idea of arranging and controlling them was new. The power that arranges people, however, makes them into individual units. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but for Foucault the “individual” could exist only when massive groups were created. The group was not created from individuals, but vice versa. The idea of creating the individual as an object of knowledge becomes important later. Creating the individual out of the group contradicts the common philosophical view about the creation of society. This view argued that society came from a contract or agreement between men. Foucault reveals his opinion of modern society here: that you cannot choose to enter it through a contract, and that it controls you absolutely through technology and power.

‘Reflections on Machine Consciousness,’ by William Irwin Thompson

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‘The Borg or Borges?:

Reflections on Machine Consciousness’

by William Irwin Thompson

Chap. 4 of Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture

I’ve taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. ~ ron

‘The Borg or Borges?: Reflections on Machine Consciousness’

“It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist.

“What is common to most of the practitioners in the new field of A.I. or Machine Consciousness is a preliminary move that eliminates the phenomenon one wishes to explore and then goes on to celebrate the scientific power of the engineer’s new academic discipline. Sloman and Chrisley show this eagerness to move away from the phenomenon of consciousness so as to feel more adequate with he tools and concepts of one’s discipline. “We start with the tentative hypothesis that although the word ‘consciousness has no well-defined meaning, it is used to refer to aspects of human and animal information processing’. This is equivalent to saying that dimensionality has no well-defined meaning, so let us define a cube as a set of lines. In a similar move of eliminativism, Susan Blackmore defines consciousness as an illusion generated by competing memes, but this confident Dawkinsian proclamation is a silly as saying that sunshine is an illusion generated by competing leaves.

“This atmospheric inversion from above to below, one in which a sky turns into the smog of a thickened air, happened once before in the world of knowledge, when Comtian positivism inspired a functionalist approach to the study of the sacred. The social scientists first said that in order to study the sacred, one had to study how it functioned in society; then having contributed to the growth of their own academic domain, they more confidently claimed that what humans worshipped with the sacred was, in fact, their own society. There simply was no such thing as God or the sacred, and so Schools of Divinity began to be eclipsed by the elevation of the new towers of the office buildings of the Social Sciences. Indeed, as I turn now away from my computer screen, I can see outside my window, the William James Building of Social Relations competing for dominance of the skyline with the Victorian brick Gothic of Harvard’s Memorial Hall.

“This clever move to eliminate the phenomenological reality of human consciousness as a prelude to the growth of a new robotics industry is a very successful scam, for it has helped enormously with the task of fund-raising for costly moon shots, such as the Japanese government’s ‘Fifth Generation Computer Project’ which promised to create an autonomously thinking machine in the 1980s. No one seems to talk much anymore about the failure of this project, but the gurus of A.I. continue to prophesy — as Ray Kurzweil now does — that by 2020, humans will be surpassed in cultural evolution by machines.

“Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that ‘nanobots’ are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. [1] Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulphed [sic] in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle.

“Technologists are closer to paranoids than they are to mystics in the sense that they are literalists given to perceptions of misplaced concreteness; they always see spiritual experiences as the products of technology — as emergent domains that are caused by technological innovations, such as LSD or computer networks. The ‘difference that makes a difference — in the famous phrase of Gregory Bateson — between the mystic and the paranoid is that the mystic is in a state of wild cognitive and creative joy, the satchitananda of the yogi, but the paranoid is in a condition of anxiety and a cosmic sense of fixation on literalism and the control of reality through machines. Rather than saying her spiritual intuition has inspired her to see a pattern of connectedness to a world of higher dimensions, s/he claims to have been abducted by flying saucers who have implanted microchips into her head and are beaming directly into her brain from the mother ship.

“Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe. For them, technology is like the Catholic Baltimore Catechism’s definition of a sacrament: ‘an outward sign of an inward state’. For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a ‘Celestial Intelligence’ — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil’s vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’. ‘I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret’. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges’s use of the word ‘Babel’.

“The mystics, starting with Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo in the first half of the twentieth century, also prophesied that we were at a new stage in evolution, but they saw consciousness surrounding technology, and compressing and miniaturizing it into an antique fossil of intermediate cultural evolution as we passed on into a poshuman or ‘Supramental’ era in which we were welcomed back into the cosmic play.

“In the eight [or perhaps twelve - ed.] intensive dimensions that String Theory claims are infolded into the three dimensions of extension and the single dimension of linear time, we now can see that there is more room for humans to think in than we thought we had during the age of ‘the conquest of space’. So what Kurzweil conceives of as only possible through the concretization of a machine may actually be possible through a heightened sensitivity to other noetic dimension. Kurzweil would like the computer to be for him what the organ was to Bach: a way of releasing the human mind into the larger Mind of the universe.

“For the mechanists, the flesh is slow, sloppy, and wet, and, therefor, primitive. For the Christian mystics, the flesh is the body and blood of the living God. Slow and wet is the ontology of birth and the act of making love. Because the neurons are embedfdfed in an aquaeous solution, even distant neurons can particpate in a neuronal synchrony through vibrating in the musical harmonies of a single thought. Because the forty Hertz of this neuronal synchrony is slow compared to a silicon computer, it can orchestrate unplanned synchronies in acts of surprise, discovery, analogy, imagination, and metaphoric play. Fast is fine for the programmed crystaline world of no surprises and no dicoveries, but slow is better for the creative world of erotic and intellectaul play.

“If one speeds up a Beethoven string quartet, one may enhance the baud rate of data-processing, but one will no longer have music. In fact, with the increase in speed one has lost consciousness of the work. A Beethoven string quartet, is indeed, a rather sophisticated exploration of the nature of time and consciousness, and the interaction between the different instruments is an artistic recapitulation of the evolutionary development of the nervous system in which different channels of information had to be held over in time and cross-referenced with one another to form an ‘I’. In Beethoven’s 16th Quartet, the third movement, with the markings of ‘Lento assai, e cantante tranquillo’ is so slow as to hover at the very edge of melody and silence. Instead of looking to digital computers as a source for metaphors of mind, it would be more instructive to look, or listen, to music. In Kurzweil’s emphasis on speed as the unique excellence of mind, he has lived up to his German name too literally, and so, paradoxically, become langweilig. The field of consciousness has more to do with slowness and a higher dimensionality, even beyond the three of the physical volume of the brain, in which hyperspheres — or some other higher dimensional topology — involve simultaneity in a neuronal synchrony – in a pattern. A mind, in the opening words of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, is a ‘still unravished bride of quietness’, a ‘foster-child of silence and slow time’.

“Slowness is fundamental to the nature of consciousness, and here I would define consciousness as the phase-space of the perceptual-motor system. I would argue that in the evolution of consciousness, as far back as the spirochete, it was the delay-space between two different channels of sensory registry, say between light and dark, on the one hand, and acid or base — or a glucose gradient — on the other, that enable the molecularly lingering traces to be cross-referenced with one another in the formation of an interpretative domain, such as ‘Danger!’ or ‘Flee!’ [3] One channel of sensory registration can be a digital gate, a matter of plus or minus, but when two or three differing sensory registrations are cross-referenced to one another, an emergent domain is brought forth. We move up to a new meta-level – like lines forming the higher dimensionality of a cube or hypercube. An interpretive domain is a subjective experience of a sentient being that can suffer precisely because it has an identity, and is thus, quite literally, identifying with its sensory registrations in an experiential interpretation of its ontological condition, its life. The neuroscientist Francisco Varela like to use the Buddhist concept of ‘grasping’ to mark this aspect of a being identifying so totally with its sensory registrations. As multiple channels of sensory registration develop, a network develops that stabilizes the delay-space, and this is its central nervous system. The natural history of an organism’s structural coupling with its environment expresses a reinforcing pattern of response, and this stable response is its identity, its fundamental stabilization of time, its egohood, or, at least, its fundamental Eigenheit. If these autonomous identities reproduce themselves with heritable variation over time, we call this evolution.

“An engineer can be clever and construct a machine that says ‘Ouch!’ instead of flashing a red light, but this gnostic demiurge is mimicking consciousness to trick humans. The machine is not a sentient being capable of suffering, and, by imaginative extension and recapitulation of suffering, capable of experiencing compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings.

“The mechanists are still not free of the mentality of Galilean Dynamics with its linear system of single causal reductionism. This kind of causal narrative is especially characteristic of the school of Eliminativism of Paul and Patricia Churchland. The simple and linear binary gates of 1 and 0 are fine for artificial neuronal nets and wights, but if one wishes to enfold complexity and make it portable for the life of a unique individual, then the sloppy and chaotic folding of proteins in a cell or of neurons in a brain is the way to go. The brain is actually the most complex smalls structure we know of in the universe. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the mechanists have perverted evolution, for it is the wet and the biological that is the truly advanced design, and our clunky and rigid metalo-plastic computers are the primitive idols of our literal-minded American technoculture. So I side with the mystics and think that the mechanists are caught in the boomerism of American hypercapitalism and are simply hawking their wares.

“In this unreflective boomerism of American hypercapitalism, one has to hype one’s project to attract venture capital. If one begins to discuss the possible side-effects of the invention , the shadow-side of the design, or the complexity that is the deep background to the object that is being foregrounded, then the investors head for the the exits, afraid of law suits. Ironically, this process of self-deception and faulty design only increases the likelihood of lawsuits, for all products have unforeseen side-effects. In our American rush to production and marketing, we take a protein out of context, a gene out of context, a cell out of context, a plant out of an ecology, and a brain out of the context of its complete body incarnation, and we seek ways to sell drugs, genes, patented plants, organs, and soon, perhaps, entire beings. Perhaps  Monsanto and Microsoft and Disney will soon be able to effect a merger that will enable them to patent cultures and EPCOT can take it to the next level. Or could it be that this hostile takeover of culture is what is truly frightening the Muslim world?

“The simultaneous fascination and repulsion of Islamic culture to American techno-idolatry is not surprising. Whenever there is a new emergent state of being in the transformations of culture, all of humanity does not immediately shift to the new mentality. If a space voyager wandered around Italy in the fifteenth century, seeking to interview people concerning their excitement at being alive at the time of the Italian Renaissance, most people would not know what the interviewer was talking about. They were still living in the Middle Ages, and would continue to do so until their death.

“And so it is now, for most scientists and businessmen are not aware of the implications of complex dynamical systems or of the cultural shift from modernism and the industrial nation-state to planetary culture. So when I am writing about the emergence of a new  post-religious spirituality that is in resonance with science — as foreshadowed in such figures as Einstein — I am perfectly aware that I am living in the ‘sunset-effect’ time of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Fallwell, and that for the billions alive at this moment, their commitment to religion is not about to disappear any time soon. Actually, things need not always disappear in evolutionary extinctions, they can just become surrounded by a new envelopment that is invisible to them. The anaerobic bacteria in my guts are still doing their thing, just as they did billions of years ago before the new atmosphere of oxygen sent them scurrying into the comforts of the dark.

“For example, one implication of complex dynamical systems for capitalism is a new version of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ in which bottom-up causation replaces top down controls. [4] Both socialism and monolithic corporate capitalism are top-down systems of control that seek to monopolize markets and control governments through lobbying, donations, and control of the media. This form of old capitalism is intimately conjoined to modernism, the emergence of the middle class nation-state, and the Galilean Dynamical Mentality. The new capitalism could be a more synergistic system of mtual wealth generation in which groups if inventors bring forth a new cultural-ecology. It is a vision of the World Wide Web and the Internet that is more in tune with Linux than with Microsoft.

“Now just as the Inquisition and the Counter Reformation sought to block the Renaissance, so these gigantic corporations like Microsoft or Monsanto are seeking to block the planetary renaissance and this new possibility for capitalism by maintaining the dualistic systems of the domains of the extremely rich and the extremely poor. Microsoft wishes to own the new cultural-ecology of the noosphere, and Monsanto, and other companies, are seeking to own the genome of plants, animals, and humans. We may slide into a dark age of religious violence with multinational corporations functioning as a tribal amphictyony of competing war lords so that our emergence to an enlightened planetary culture may have to wait a century or two. The Medicis of the Italian Renaissance started out as a merchant class, but they ended up as an aristocracy in the gaudy displays of wealth so characteristic of the baroque economy that was based upon African slavery. The spiritual opening of the Italian Renaissance became blocked by the Inquisition, the Counter Reformation, and the Age of Absolutism. Humanity had to wait until the eighteenth century for the Age of Revolution to pick up where the Italian Renaissance left off. But if we are lucky, the new form of middle class capitalism that is wed to information technologies and complex dynamical systems may outcompete the recidivist capitalism of the plantations of Monsanto and Microsoft.

“At the moment, however, it does not look good, as President Bush et alia are wedding imperial capitalism to Christian fundamentalism with its repression of complexity in the arts and sciences in a state of permanent war against terrorists, first foreign, but soon domestic. As Ashcroft has said, carrying on in the tradition of J. Edgar Hoover and Senator McCarthy, those who would restrain him with their misguided liberal notions are ‘only giving ammunition to the enemy.’

“The boomerism of hypercapitalism that we see expressed in Kurzweil’s millenarian vision of the technological replacement of humanity can be easily hitched to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s corporate agenda to surround and contain humanity in a perfect system of high tech defense. Here it might help to recall that the high philosophic science of Heisenberg and von Weizsacker joined in with the corporate agenda of I. G. Farben to assist in National Socialism’s drive to defeat Bolshevism. And E. O. Wilson’s consilient campaign to unify all the sciences also comes at a timely moment to help the Right Wing’s desire to eliminate ‘secular humanism’. [5] By eliminating philosophical divergence and the distinct cognitive approaches of different disciplines, Wilson’s ideological program of elitist unification would serve to remove the humanities and their tradition of liberal humanism in a new scientific version of a Talibanic state of consilient unity. Total explanations soon become totalitarian states. Dissent can be labeled depression and ministered to by the contributions of the pharmaceutical industry. With Ritalin in the school, Prozac in the universities, Zoloft in the prisons, Ecstasy in the discoes, and Viagra in the Senate, American can indeed be a peace with itself to let Kurzweil’s machines inherit the Earth.

“The cultural evolution of consciousness I had in mind, when I coined the phrase ‘planetary culture’ in more halcyon days, was one in which art, science, and a post-religious spirituality — like the atmosphere, continents, and ocean of a Gaian system — are never unified, but remain free and independent of one another’s control, the better to embody complexity and explore the three extensive and the eight intensive dimensions of a universe made out of the music of vibrating strings.”

Footnotes:

[1] See Ray Kurzweil, EDGE [Internet Magazine], March 25, 2002; see also his The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999). See also Hans Moravec, Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)

[2] Jorge Luis Borges. ‘The Library of Babel’ in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 58.

[3] I argue this point at greater length in my chapter ‘The Post Evolution of Consciousness; from Spirochete to Spinal Chord’ in Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996; 1998), pp. 17-44.

[4] For an explanation of emergent properties and bottom-up causation in cognitive science, see Evan Thompson & Francisco Varela, ‘Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and consciousness’, Trends In Cognitive Sciences 5 (2001): 418-425.

[5] E. O. Wilson, Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

Toward a Theory of Phantasmal Media: An Imaginative Cognition- and Computation-Based Approach to Digital Media D. Fox Harrell (C Theory)

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Toward a Theory of Phantasmal Media: An Imaginative Cognition- and Computation-Based Approach to Digital Media

D. Fox Harrell

Introduction

To move beyond this tendentiously posed opposition, a meaningful distinction between these different ways of knowing–the improvisational and the compositional–must inevitably turn upon the axis of interaction. Improvisation must be open–that is, open to input, open to contingency–a real-time and (often enough) a real-world mode of production. … If we do not need to define improvised ways of producing knowledge as a subset of composition, then we can simply speak of an improvising machine as one that incorporates a dialogic imagination.
– George E. Lewis, “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager,” 2000. [1]

Computational media hold the power to improvisationally and dynamically combine formal manipulation of meaningful elements in new ways, at the same time as responding to user interaction. There is always a mixture between human interpretation of meaning, and the limited symbolic ways that machines encode meaning. This balance between computationally manipulable structure and ghostly, subjective human meaning is at the heart of the expressive potential of computing. This perspective on how computing can express evocative imaginative content does not attempt to define any singular vision for how expressive computational narrative, poetry, virtual worlds, social networking platforms, or any related forms should be realized. Rather, it is a perspective on how this interplay between human meaning and machine structuring of information can be the basis for poignant, specific, novel, and creative forms of expression. Computation must exhibit humility about its limitations for capturing the elusive world of human imagination with its blurry boundaries between the conscious and unconscious aspects of meaning, between clearly expressible discourse and affect, between sensory perception and mental imagery.

Yet, humble computing can still intervene beautifully when its ability to structure, change, and respond to information and input is orchestrated with sensitive consideration of the slippery process of human interpretation and experience. So, rather than providing a perspective on computational expression based on defining eventual future forms, the focus here is on various ways that humans negotiate interplays of structure and subjectivity. It is a cross-medial perspective that finds parallels in the balance between orchestrated form and improvised chaos (and political forthrightness) of Charles Mingus’s compositions such as in his “Original Fables of Faubus,” and the balance between richly lyrical poetic content and a rigid experimental structure in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. [2, 3] The aesthetic potential of computing technologies noted here is inspired by the parallels between a concern for lush prose coexisting with procedurally structured form as in Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a Traveler and the co-habitation of romantic melodies with highly theorized twelve-tone compositional techniques in the classical works of Alban Berg. [4, 5] Jean Toomer’s book Cane is an inspiration point as its lyrical portrait of the rural south in the United States jumps from poetry to prose with abandon, and is rooted in a multiply marginalized perspective. [6] Similarly, Samuel R. Delany’s interweaving of 1980s anxieties of HIV/AIDS with a swords and sorcery world in “Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” is influential as contemporary social concerns drive the development of an experimental narrative form. [7] Especially, the forms of computational expression envisioned here are informed by works in which subjective meaning can emerge from experimental content structure as in Akira Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon, which is based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story “In a Grove.” [8, 9] The tale of a brutal rape and murder is told and retold from a variety of perspectives: from the vantage point of the victims, the perpetrator, and a by-stander. Meaning is constructed through the concrete knowledge that the event did take place and the shifting, conflicting reports of the event given by the characters. The conflicts between the different points of view are used to create an emergent statement about the human condition and the absence of truth as exemplified in the following dialogue from Rashomon:

Priest: If men don’t trust one another, then the earth becomes a hell.
Commoner: Right. The world’s a kind of hell.
Priest: No! I don’t want to believe that!
Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?
Woodcutter: None makes any sense.
Commoner: Don’t worry about it. It isn’t as if men were reasonable.

Figure 1: Kurosawa’s Rashomon is a film where the meaningful difference between multiple narratives adds poignancy.

Like the emergent statement regarding truth in the world from Rashomon, in the hands of a careful author of an expressive computational system, the use of “meaningful difference” between instances of output to allow a global meaning to emerge from repeated execution of the system can be a hallmark of the phantasmal media forms.

This perspective of the expressive potential of computational media bears with it a set of understood risks. It is more intangible, more difficult to define than describing a singular well-known form such as Hollywood cinema, a set of related endeavors like generative art, or even a lofty cultural vision like virtual reality (VR)-based interactive narrative. Rather, it is an approach to thinking about computational media and their future, it is a world view that centralizes culture and content, and is both a prescription and invitation for others to engage this world view. However, this world view is not unfounded, it is based in accounts of cognition, transmedial art traditions, computer science, and cultural theory, synthesizing and reconciling concerns from each. The world view here is both descriptive and prescriptive, it catches glimpses of what computational media can be through existing literature, video games, computational arts, and research, but it also outlines a vision of the future for a powerful new form of expression. It must be a vision that is both coherent and open ended. Finally, this perspective must be open enough so as not to exclude relevant computational media practices.

Rendering this vision of computational expression tangible requires new terminology. The name given to ideal examples of the type of meaning making systems considered in this article is phantasmal media. The term “phantasmal” may summon, for some readers, mental pictures of ghosts, spooks, apparitions, and specters. Yet here it does not refer to those supernatural entities, but rather to the human capacity to construct any other mental images both consciously and unconsciously. The focus is on two related perspectives on the phantasmal. Regarding the first perspective, that phantasmata are conscious mental images, thinkers such as W. J. T. Mitchell have argued that they are closely related to visual images and verbal images as well. [10] Such mental images comprise a range of meaning phenomena. They are imaginative meanings, but crucially are not restricted to language. They can refer to embodied sensations, cultural contexts, and more abstract ideas. Certainly, all of our engagements with media artifacts are accompanied by the mental work of interpretation. Yet, the focus of the concept of phantasmal media is a type of work that often concentrates (primarily through interactive and generative multimedia) on creating narrative and poetic mental imagery to express artistic and critical statements about the world.

see rest of article at C Theory

Jackson 2Bears: The Technological Unconscious, Animism and the Uncanny

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Jackson 2Bears
The Technological Unconscious, Animism and the Uncanny

This paper takes an interdisciplinary
approach to the question of technology by examining points of
convergence between Jungian psychoanalysis and Indigenous philosophy.
The theoretical trajectory of the text will consider traditional
Haudenosaunee cosmologies as a way of re-thinking contemporary
questions about our digital present and future, in turn proposing
possible means of engagement and resistance. Central to the text is a
critical analysis of select writings on the topic of dreams and the
unconscious by Carl Jung, while at the same time reflecting on
traditional Indigenous teachings extracted from the Haudenosaunee
theory of dreams. The end goal of the text is to develop an Indigenous
theory of technology that is faithful to traditional teachings, while
addressing the uncanny essence of digitality in contemporary times.


Link to Jackson2Bears

Code Drifts: Tethered to Mobility, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

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Critical Digital Studies Workshop, June 4, 2009Arthur & Marilouise Kroker: Code Drifts

Code drift is the spectral destiny of the story of technology. No necessary message, no final meaning, no definite goal: only a digital culture drifting in complex streams of social networking technologies filtered here and there with sudden changes in code frequencies, moving at the speed of random fluctuations, always seeking to make of the question of identity a sampling error, to connect with the broken energy flows of ruptures, conjurations, unintelligibility, bifurcations. When the Book of Genesis gives way to the Book of (Information) Genetics, we are suddenly exited into a culture of epigenesis with code drifts as its primary impulse, all the human anxiety of being tethered to mobility its primary affect, and the novel historical experience of literally being skinned by technology as the body is increasingly wrapped in the new nervous system that is the global data genome.



link to lecture