boundary 2

Tag: philosophy

  • Jensen Suther — Back to Life? The Persistence of Hegel’s Idealism (A Response to Karen Ng, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic)

    Jensen Suther — Back to Life? The Persistence of Hegel’s Idealism (A Response to Karen Ng, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic)

    a response to Karen Ng, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic (Oxford University Press, 2020)

    by Jensen Suther

    ~

    The question of Hegel’s idealism has haunted the traditions of philosophy and critical theory for nearly two hundred years. In Marx’s early works, he polemicizes against Hegel’s alleged rationalization of the modern state on the basis of his Science of Logic. Adorno conjures the indelible image of the Hegelian system as “the belly turned mind,” swallowing up the empirical world.[i] On the philosophical side, Schelling—Hegel’s contemporary and former mentor—objects to Hegel’s supposed prioritization of spirit over nature, while thinkers from Heidegger to Foucault spurn Hegel’s rationalism, his apparent neglect of contingency.[ii] In more recent history, the debate over Hegel’s idealism has taken the form of a contest between purportedly “metaphysical” and “non-metaphysical” readings of his system, represented by figures like Stephen Houlgate and Robert Pippin, respectively. As has recently been pointed out, this repeats with a difference, in a de-politicized form, a much older contest: between Left and Right Hegelianism.[iii] Haunting each of these contexts is the specter of a problem that, ironically, Hegel was the first to rigorously identify: the “subjective idealism” of Kant’s critical project. It is the problem of the imposition by mind of its own form on recalcitrant matter; the threat of a permanent disjunction between mind and world; a divide beyond which knowers cannot reach, the infamous no man’s land of “things in themselves.” The most ambitious recent accounts of Hegel—from Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows to Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust—have sought to clear Hegel of the charge of subjective idealism and to demonstrate the objective purport or world-directedness of his most fundamental categories. Hegel’s odds of beating his case have never looked better.

    Yet in several major ways, it could be argued, even these attempts have failed to fully vindicate the Hegelian project. As a number of commentators have noted over the years, thinkers like Pippin and Brandom have not done full justice to Hegel’s naturalism, a key ingredient in his attempt to overcome the subjective idealism of his two great predecessors, Kant and Fichte. For example, J.M. Bernstein and John McDowell have challenged Pippin’s disavowal of Hegel’s Aristotelian and post-Kantian emphasis on the category of life. As Pippin and Brandom have argued, human action cannot be satisfactorily explained in naturalistic terms. If we want to know why a young nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, we do not ask which neurons fired when, or which physiological mechanism enabled his fingers to pull the trigger. We ask what his reasons were, why such an action showed up as worth undertaking under such conditions. For the anti-naturalists, then, what must be avoided is scientific reductionism, the cession of distinctly philosophical territory to neurobiology, but also bad metaphysics, the mythical idea of a world-creating spirit or of spirit as the “end” of nature. Whereas Pippin and Brandom have frequently argued that a hard distinction between spirit and nature, the space of reason and the space of causes, is at play in Hegel’s thought, McDowell in particular has sought to show that the anti-naturalists have a “boot-strapping” problem, whereby reason comes to look “supernatural” or “spooky.” According to McDowell, nature is not reducible to a disenchanted “space of causes,” since it also consists in the purposive activity of self-organized living beings, plants and animals. Such organisms establish a context of meaning internal to nature, which rational beings like us activate in a distinctly self-conscious, discursive, social, and historical manner. As McDowell argues, human freedom or reason is not “a kind of exemption from nature, something that permits us to elevate ourselves above it,” but rather “our own special way of living an animal life.”[iv] Likewise, in Bernstein’s critical writings on both Pippin and Brandom, he has argued that the “living” nature of rational agents is not only essential for rendering the idea of agency intelligible; it also has crucial implications for political questions surrounding social organization and what an emancipatory society would actually require—a key concern of all students of Hegel’s philosophy.[v]

    This critical discussion has unfolded over the course of several decades and has in recent years come to something of a head. Karen Ng’s new book, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic is the latest installment in the debate over Hegel’s naturalism and an important contribution to the ongoing “analytic” reassessment of Idealism in general and of Hegel’s Science of Logic in particular. The key claim of Hegel’s Concept of Life is that the idealist project of articulating the a priori conditions of action and experience remains radically incomplete “without a systematic accounting of life’s essential and constitutive role” in cognition (4). Ng is not alone here; other thinkers have recently defended the centrality of life to Hegel’s project, including Terry Pinkard, James Kreines, and Thomas Khurana, in addition to Bernstein and McDowell. An important neo-Aristotelean strand of Idealism scholarship has also exhibited a preoccupation with the question of life, as illustrated by the work of Michael Thompson and Robert Stern. But Ng takes her account to be distinguished by its singular focus on the systematic implications of Hegel’s logical concept of life, which is meant to specify—in a Kantian vein—a fundamental condition for the intelligibility of objects as well as of reason itself. Indeed, the most prominent refrain throughout the book is the claim that “life opens up the possibility of intelligibility as such” and that “life opens up the space of reasons itself” (7, 10).

    In the tradition of McDowell and others, Ng’s book turns to the concept of life to overcome the limitations of the strand of Hegel scholarship often associated with Pippin’s path-breaking work from 1989, Hegel’s Idealism, which reads Hegel in terms of his inheritance of Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique. While Ng does bring into view some essential components of a possible solution to problems raised by Pippin’s account, her work also exhibits some of the major pitfalls of a new naturalism. At the same time, Ng’s program should be starkly contrasted with the critique of Pippin’s work undertaken by thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston, who have sought to downplay claims about the priority of Hegel’s Science of Logic within the Encyclopedia (his system) and have defended a Schelling-inspired materialism against the “rationalism” of analytic Hegelianism, often in the name of a radical politics.[vi] Ng defends the priority of the Logic and is critical of the later Schelling—with a Marx-informed critical theory as the ultimate horizon of her philosophical endeavors.[vii]

    Hegel’s Concept of Life is a lucid, meticulously researched work that uncovers neglected yet deeply consequential aspects of Hegel’s thought, from his critique of Fichte’s underdetermination of the “objective” dimension of subjectivity to the explosive role played by the concept of life in the Logic. Divided into two parts, the book comprises three chapters on the concept of purposiveness in Kant and Hegel and five chapters on the “purposiveness of thinking” in the Logic. The work demonstrates a mastery over a broad swath of idealism scholarship and is positioned in relation to several contemporary debates, key among them the debate over the way in which Hegel inherits the Kantian project. This is both where Ng’s book makes its most important contribution and where—in certain crucial respects—it comes up short. As I will argue below, Ng’s own solution to the problem of subjective idealism fails to adequately address Hegel’s renovation of Kant’s understanding of self-consciousness and his famous Transcendental Deduction, which creates significant problems for her account as a whole.

    Ng announces early on her intention to displace what she calls “the apperception view” (13), a reading of Hegel she identifies with the work of Pippin, McDowell, and Brandom. This is already a somewhat problematic move, both because of the major disagreement between McDowell, on the one side, and Pippin and Brandom, on the other, over the naturalism question and because of significant differences between all three regarding the apperception issue itself.[viii] It is also worth noting that Ng does not engage with McDowell’s extensive discussions of the basis of reason in the activity of life, in the chapters on Aristotle in Mind and World but also in “Two Sorts of Naturalism” in Mind, Value, and Reality.[ix] Ng subsumes McDowell under the “Pippin reading,” frequently citing his famous claim regarding the “unboundedness of the conceptual” in Mind and World, but she ignores the naturalist argument—fervently contested by other proponents of the so-called “apperception view”[x]—that underlies McDowell’s notion of conceptuality. Drawing on Aristotle, McDowell works to overcome the idea that the spontaneity of thought is unconstrained by empirical reality and thus entails the “frictionless spinning” of our concepts. Against this view, he argues that reason is not a non-natural faculty operating separately from the perceptual capacities we share with other animals; rather, the true difference lies in that our sensible faculties themselves bear a rational, conceptual form.[xi]

    The differences just alluded to are levelled by Ng’s notion of the apperception view. Nevertheless, in broad strokes, this view holds that the crux of Hegel’s idealism lies in his attempt to fulfill the promise of the B-Deduction of Kant’s first Critique. That promise, so the claim goes, was to demonstrate that “the synthetic unity of apperception” is the original source of unity for both concept and intuition, understanding and sensibility. In the Deduction, Kant had shown that the pure categories of the understanding confer conceptual unity on the content delivered by the pure forms of intuition, space and time. What Kant calls “transcendental logic” is not an account of the formal rules of thinking regardless of the content (what he calls “general logic”) but an account of “the rules of the pure thought of an object.”[xii] Kant establishes that the unity of the content of experience is a function of the self-conscious or “apperceptive” application of the categories in judgment, the basic unit of thought in Kant’s account. Pure concepts or categories are not heuristic devices or rules of thumb that one can choose to follow or not; they are rather rules that we give to ourselves just in judging anything to be the case. The categories determine how we must judge if experience is to be intelligible.

    According to Pippin (and McDowell), Hegel radicalizes Kant’s position by arguing that there is no non-conceptual, species-specific form of intuition (space and time) that constrains the categories constitutive of knowledge; that self-consciousness alone determines the categorial conditions for the possibility of objects of experience. The conceptual is thus “unbounded” and does not “fall short” of “things in themselves”[xiii]; it is not limited by or relegated to the brute fact of “our” forms of intuition. Hegel’s Science of Logic thus does not need what Kant calls the “Transcendental Deduction,” whose aim was to demonstrate the applicability of the pure categories to the forms of intuition. All that is required is a “Metaphysical Deduction,” a derivation of the pure categories themselves. Hegel’s Science of Logic just is such an expanded metaphysical deduction, the determination by pure thought of the concepts required for determining a possible object—not just “for us” but as such, for any possible knower.

    On Ng’s view, the approach of the Pippin camp overestimates the significance of Kant’s Deduction argument and yields a “subjective idealism”—that is, a “prison-house” view of categoriality that cannot make contact with the empirical world (13). For reasons that will become apparent, I think this is a faulty objection, but Ng’s second criticism of the apperception view—which pursues a line of argument first developed by Bernstein and McDowell—is closer to the mark. Thinkers like Pippin and Brandom “affirm self-consciousness’s beginnings in life while stripping life of any positive explanatory force in the theoretical and practical activities of self-determining reason” (Ibid). For example, in Brandom’s influential reading of the master/slave dialectic, he claims that part of what is demonstrated by the “struggle to the death” over the desire for recognition is that “the life one risks is not an essential element of the self one is thereby constituting, while that for which one risks it [a position of recognized authority] is.”[xiv] Brandom’s approach must ignore Hegel’s own claim that “self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as is pure self-consciousness,”[xv] but it also renders inexplicable the relationship between sensibility and rationality, desire and freedom, nature and spirit. As Ng will proceed to argue, in a systematic manner virtually unparalleled in contemporary Hegel scholarship, self-consciousness has its ground in the category of life, without which the categories of reason, spirit, and self-consciousness would lack content, a determinate relation to the world.

    In contrast to the apperception view, Ng aims to demonstrate the outsized influence of Kant’s third Critique on Hegel’s project, arguing that the key to the Logic is Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s category of “inner purposiveness,” which was employed in the third Critique in two key ways. First, Kant tried to show that the account of judgment in the first Critique was radically incomplete and troubled by a lingering problem of “cognitive fit” (45-6). In other words, Kant had not shown that nature actually exhibited the unity and regularity that the pure categories of the understanding were supposed to impose, leaving room for the possibility of what Ng calls “empirical chaos,” following Henry Allison (32). The category of substance may empower us to judge the unity of an object with properties persisting in time, but it is not able to grasp that object as a member of a species, as living or as non-living, and so on. In the third Critique, judgment assigns itself a new principle—the principle of purposiveness—in order to guide the formation of empirical concepts and the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which must presuppose the systematic unity of nature.

    Second, the principle of purposiveness licensed the distinction between law-governed, mechanical processes and the sorts of activities characteristic of living beings. This marked what Hegel refers to as “one of Kant’s great services to philosophy,”[xvi] his formulation and revival of the Aristotelian idea of inner purposiveness. Whereas the use of trees to make paper gives them an “external purpose,” relative to our ends, plants have the specific parts that they do (limbs, leaves, roots) and behave in specific ways (heliotropism, photosynthesis) in order to satisfy the “inner purpose” of their own self-reproduction (and the reproduction of their kind). A tree with a “sick” limb or dried up roots is deficient not by any external lights but by its own lights, in accord with its own purpose of maintaining itself. For a tree to be a tree, it must act to satisfy its purpose, “actualizing” its species-concept (Gattung), which furnishes a normative standard prescribing how individual trees ought to be. According to this Aristotelian conception of “actuality” (energeia), for something to be actual is for it to act in accord with its concept, to fulfill the potential (dynamis) its matter embodies.[xvii]

    Yet on Kant’s picture, purposiveness is merely a “regulative” rather than “constitutive” principle—a principle that judgment “heautonomously” requires of itself for scientific inquiry but that it does not “autonomously” give to nature as a principle genuinely constitutive of the objects of experience (47). Following Allison, on whom Ng relies extensively in the book’s early chapters, she argues that this distinction does not really hold up under scrutiny, that the “as if” character of regulative judgments itself seems to commit one to “the thought that nature is purposively constituted such that teleological explanations are satisfactory” (59). And it is precisely here where Hegel will seek to rescue Kant from himself, by showing that purposiveness is not just a regulative principle with merely subjective validity but a principle with actual purchase on objectivity. Ng emphasizes that Hegel is posing the “quid juris” question of our right to employ the concept of life and that he overcomes Kant’s subjectivism by showing that life is the “objective context in which subjects, objects, and their relationship come to have meaning at all” (7). There is little question that this is what Hegel is trying to do. The issue is how Hegel achieves such an overcoming of Kant.

    In developing the thesis of life’s constitutive role in cognition, Ng is careful to defend Hegel against the charge that he is a hylozoist who believes that all matter is living, that nature is one big organism or world-soul, and that all judgments are teleological judgments premised on the idea that everything has a purpose. As Ng makes clear, Hegel does not hold such views: the Science of Logic “eschews making substantial claims about the construction of matter” and is rather concerned with “a theory of conceptual form and activity” (63). Indeed, Hegel takes there to be and argues for a necessary distinction between mechanical/chemical, biological/organic, and rational/spiritual modes of being. Not everything in the world is living, but the inanimateness of the world is only intelligible from the standpoint of life—of living beings for whom the distinction between the living and the non-living, between the mechanical and the teleological, matters (226). It matters to the snake, for example, that it be distinct from its environment, that it not be just another inert thing. It strives to resist the mechanical and chemical process of decomposition, which threatens to reduce it to dust.

    As I have noted, Ng’s books aims to show that Hegel solves the problem of subjective idealism by virtue of the category of life. Yet what I want to begin to highlight here is that Ng’s approach leaves unanswered the question of how Hegel’s method of the derivation of such “constitutive” categories is distinct from Kant’s. Because of Ng’s denial of the centrality of Hegel’s take on the “deduction” issue (13), she misses an essential aspect of Hegel’s solution to the general problem of the subjectivism of the categories. As will become clear, Ng tends to treat life as a mediating category that ensures that cognition has content through its “living” contact with the empirical world. By contrast, on the interpretation of Hegel I want to defend, the Logic is concerned with the very intelligibility of a world as a world.[xviii] Life plays an essential role in this latter enterprise, but that role cannot be properly specified outside of an account of two key moves in Hegel: (1) Hegel’s overcoming of the Kantian distinction between transcendental and general logic, through which Hegel shows that there can be no coherent account of the pure forms of thought (general logic) that is not already an account of the pure forms of things (transcendental logic).[xix] And (2) Hegel’s radicalization of Kant’s strategy in the metaphysical deduction, whereby we do not just derive “our” “conceptual scheme” but the categorial form of being itself, in light of which any empirical being is in principle thinkable.[xx]

    In this context, it is also worth mentioning a problem on the level of rhetoric. Hegel calls the notion of inner purposiveness “one of Kant’s great services to philosophy [eines der großen Verdienste Kant um die Philosophie],”[xxi] whereas Ng repeatedly misquotes Hegel as saying that it is “Kant’s great service to philosophy” (6, 16, 260), going so far as to use the modified phrase as the title to chapter two. This is symptomatic of the general tendency towards one-sidedness in her study, its neglect of Hegel’s emphasis on Kant’s other great service: his articulation of the transcendental unity of apperception, which is the basis for the self-determination by thought of the necessary constraints on the thought of an object.[xxii] As the frequently cited passage reads: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the “I think,” or of self-consciousness.”[xxiii] A further consequence of Ng’s neglect of the structural significance of apperception—a consequence related to the inability of her Hegel to fully overcome subjective idealism—is that she cannot explain such claims as: “Every thought-determination of the Logic has revealed itself to be insufficient in some way […]. Very often in Hegel, these failures are couched in terms of one-sidedness, fixed dualisms, abstractions, or internal inconsistencies” (248). As we shall see, such inconsistencies are inconsistences internal to thinking, to which thought must be “apperceptively” responsive if it is to consistently think the thought of being—and ultimately the thought of thought itself.

    At the end of chapter two, Ng introduces one of her major interpretive theses, that Hegel’s notion of the “concept” is best understood in terms of the Kantian idea of inner purposiveness. In Kant, the categories are predicates of possible judgments, rules that prescribe how one ought to judge; they are necessary for the determination of any empirical content. By the concept, Hegel means to capture the general idea of such self-legislated normative constraints. The concept is thus Hegel’s theory of conceptuality. Ng’s claim is that inner purposiveness is constitutive of conceptual activity, that acting and believing in light of norms derives its self-determining character from the internally purposive structure of life (62). This claim is worked out in detail in the third chapter of the book, which is one of its best. Turning to Hegel’s Fichtekritik in his first published work, Ng highlights the Schellingian aspect of Hegel’s critique: while Fichte makes important progress by demonstrating the primacy of practical rationality and the irreducibility of the “self-positing” of the I, he conceives the natural, embodied self as merely subject to mechanical laws and thus—in Hegel’s words—as “dead” (88). As Ng shows, this results in a picture of the I as engaged in an “infinite” struggle to subsume its recalcitrant nature under the dictates of reason, undermining its purported autonomy. The Hegelian solution, in brief, which Hegel shares with the early Schelling, is to grasp the “objective subject-object” (life) as bearing a non-mechanical, internally purposive form and thus as being “speculatively identical” with the “subjective subject-object” (self-consciousness) (107). That is, reason is not something wholly heterogeneous to life but is a higher and freer actualization of the same self-organizing form. As I understand this claim, rational agents are constrained by the necessity of satisfying the internal purpose of self-maintenance, but the requirements that specify what counts as successful self-maintenance are, for beings like us, not simply given but must be recognized by us and are subject to change, giving rise to the complex historical dynamic for which Hegel’s philosophy is best known. This barely scratches the surface of this rich and suggestive chapter, which also contains an important and highly original account of Hegel’s appropriation of various Kantian transcendental strategies for his deduction of life prior to the Logic.

    Towards the end of part one, with the “apperception view” in her sights, Ng argues that Hegel answers the quid juris question of our entitlement to the concept of life “not by presenting life as a category among others in a metaphysical deduction” but by arguing that, without life, self-consciousness would itself remain unintelligible (111). While this is intended as a characterization of Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, it also applies to Ng’s understanding of Hegel’s task in the Logic. As she further clarifies in Chapter 4 (an illuminating account of the engagements with Kant and Spinoza in the Logic of Essence), Hegel attempts “to provide, in the logical context, a series of arguments for the constitutive character of inner purposiveness for any account of self-conscious conceptual activity whereby determinations of thinking have the power to determine actuality” (126). Chapter 4 traces the transition from the Logic of Essence to the Logic of the Concept, showing how Hegel derives the standpoint of subjectivity—of which life is the first, immediate form—through a development of the concept of “actuality,” glossed earlier in terms of Aristotle’s notion of energeia. Through a demonstration of the emptiness of Spinoza’s conception of substance as the necessary cause of all finite things (137-8), Ng’s Hegel defends a version of what Paul Redding has called “modal actualism” (Redding 2017), the view that possibility and necessity are constrained by what is actually the case. (Kant’s theory of pure intuitions is also “actualist” in this sense, insofar as they are meant to limit the application of the pure categories to reality.) Contrary to widely held views about Hegel’s position, he establishes in the Logic of Essence the “necessity of contingency,” which grounds the idea of real rather than merely logical possibility: it is logically possible (it does not violate the law of non-contradiction) that the moon might be made of cheese, but it is not really possible—the contingent conditions are not in place for such a possibility to be actualized (145).

    Yet actuality remains “blind,” in Hegel’s words, reducible to mechanical necessity, without the notion of purposive self-actualization. Ng’s illuminating example is of a musician whose father’s death prompted him to cultivate his musical talent; his father in turn was shot and killed in a war. Does that mean that the bullet that killed the musician’s father was the cause of his musical career? The potential endlessness of such explanations—what about the causes that led to the bullet’s production?—reflects their unsatisfying nature. They point to the need for an internal explanatory principle, whereby the son can be grasped as determining for himself that music was worth taking up and pursuing (154-55). In holding himself to such a principle (in valuing himself under the description of the “practical identity” of musician, to borrow Korsgaard’s phrase),[xxiv] the son becomes subject to a norm, a criterion of success and failure, in light of which he must discriminate between what he ought and ought not do as a musician. Likewise, it can thus be asked whether he is “actually” a musician, whether he is not just pretending, perhaps acting on his father’s wishes, or just temporarily sublimating his grief. It is “actuality” in this sense of purposive striving that secures the determinacy of objectivity in Hegel’s account, constituting things as the distinct things that they are and furnishing a truly satisfying—that is, internal and self-determined—principle of explanation.

    Note that this does not mean that all things are “actual” in this sense. An inanimate entity like the moon does not have an internal purpose; to explain its constitution and its orbital activity, we must make reference to natural laws. It is thus subject to a lower explanatory principle, mechanism, which depends for its intelligibility on the activity of self-actualizing living beings, which distinguish themselves a priori from inert matter, just in striving to be what they are (155-56). While Ng does not make the point in this way, one can say that there are three fundamental principles of explanation, which pure thought requires of itself in judging anything to be the case: (1) laws, which govern the constitution of the inanimate; (2) purposes, which govern the self-constitution of the animate; and (3) reasons, which govern the self-legislating activity of the rationally alive. The progressive adequacy of such principles lies in their ability to render intelligible each prior criterion of explanation, with reason itself grounding the very idea of explanatory principles by virtue of its recognition that it alone is the source of their normative authority.[xxv]

    At the end of the Logic of Essence, however, we do not yet have an account of the dynamic of such self-actualization, which necessitates the transition to the Logic of the Concept. Over the remaining three chapters of Hegel’s Concept of Life, Ng develops an account of life as the “immediate form of the Idea,” Hegel’s term of art for the unity of concept and reality in self-determining activity. The Idea is meant to grasp Hegel’s notion of “immanent universals,” the species-concepts in light of which living beings constitute themselves as the kinds of beings they are. To return to my earlier example of plant life, the concept of a succulent is not just an organizing category for taxonomic purposes but a principle of self-organization for certain types of plants.[xxvi] As Ng argues, life is to be understood as the “original judgment” or activity of rendering intelligible (171, 259), since living beings must distinguish between what is worth pursuing and what ought to be avoided, what counts as pleasurable and what counts as painful. They thus posit a distinction between themselves and their external environment and a distinction between themselves and their species-concept, which they must constitutively strive to fulfill.

    On Ng’s account, this notion of a distinction internal to the living being is Hegel’s way of inheriting Hölderlin’s famous claim that judgment (Urteil) is the “original division” (Ur-Teil); as Hegel himself puts it, “Judgment is the self-diremption of the concept.” Whereas in Hölderlin judgment is the original division between subject and object that renders being in itself permanently inaccessible, Ng’s Hegel dispenses with the prelapsarian notion of unscathed being and understands the originary division in terms of life (168), which constitutes the immediate form of a meaningful responsiveness to reality, opening up the very space of determinate being. As Ng points out in a footnote (171n9), this interpretation diverges from that of Dieter Henrich, who claims in his path-breaking account of Hölderlin’s influence on Hegel that Hölderlinian being is replaced by Hegel not with life but with spirit (Geist).[xxvii] This again raises the key difficulty of Hegel’s method of deriving the categories: if the judgment enacted by living beings is itself only intelligible as such from the higher standpoint of self-conscious knowing, can it truly be said that life has explanatory priority over Geist in deducing the concept of full-blooded being?

    Nevertheless, Ng proceeds to argue that it is because life is distinct from and “lie[s] outside cognition” that it secures cognition’s determinate, contentful relation to empirical reality (258, 257). There are three necessary constraints on the idea of life. First, life must always be embodied in a living individual, which can feel irritated or excited by external stimuli on the basis of its purpose of self-reproduction. Second, life must consist in the metabolic activity of consuming and assimilating an external environment on which the living individual is inherently dependent. Third, life must always exemplify a genus (Gattung), which dictates how the embodied individual is to live (the life of a wolf is distinct from that of an elephant) and what would count as successful reproduction. It is because the species-category (Gattung) constitutive of living individuals cannot be grasped from the standpoint of life (living beings are not conscious of their species membership) that the transition to “Knowing” is required. This final category in the Logic actualizes the three constraints on life (Corporeality, Externality, and the Genus, as Ng enumerates them) in a distinctly self-conscious—social, historical, recognitive—form. “This self-conscious reflexivity transforms the determination of life,” Ng writes, “but it does not eliminate its distinctive contribution as the immediate schema of any possible unity of Concept and objectivity” (277). Knowing is grasped as the fundamental condition for rendering intelligible the idea of “intelligibility” itself, but it does not “leave nature behind,” to cite Pippin.[xxviii]

    Ng’s account of life as “original judgment” is a real contribution to our understanding of Hegel and should be carefully studied by students of the Science of Logic (and, I would argue, those interested in the issue of life in Marx). But tendentious readings of proponents of the “apperception view” as well as fundamental ambiguities in her own formulations regarding the “deduction” issue mar her approach. On the first point, Ng often greatly overplays her differences with Pippin in particular, as in a footnote early on in the book in which she takes remarks by Pippin out of context to obscure his own acknowledgment of the indispensability of Kant’s account of “reflecting judgment” in the third Critique (5). Pippin has long emphasized that the theory of judgment provided in the first Critique is insufficient, that the crucial move made in Kant’s later work is his demonstration of the necessity of a non-subsumptive, reflective form of judgment oriented by the “particular.”[xxix]

    Such moments not only weaken Ng’s argument on a rhetorical level; they are symptomatic of a more substantive difficulty: her contention that life lies “outside cognition” and is irreducible to acts of apperceptive judgment. Ng suggests that the addition of the category of life is what prevents Hegel’s “metaphysical deduction” from entailing subjective idealism, but this misses Hegel’s fundamental renovation of the Kantian notion of deduction, which now consists in the self-determination by thought of what would count as an intelligible conception of being. The apperceptive nature of any thinking lies in its minimal responsiveness to the demand for reasons: in writing this review, I take myself to be writing it as reviews ought to be written and am on that basis susceptible to mistakenness, open to the potential need for self-correction. In brief, this notion of self-conscious judgment accounts for the peculiar dynamic at the heart of the Logic. In resolving to think the thought of anything at all, pure thought tasks itself with thinking being as it ought to be thought and with thinking thought itself—the capacity for making sense of being—in its intelligibility.[xxx] To try, for example, to think of the object of thought solely under the rubric of “quantity,” as if judgments of magnitude were sufficient to account for the being or determinacy of objects, results in the “apperceptive” recognition that quantitative predicates are unable to specify what they are quantities of.[xxxi] This necessitates the legislation by thought of the new category of “measure,” which is a self-defeating attempt in its own right to grasp quality and quantity as co-constitutive. Thought thus determines for itself not just what “we” must think but a genuine requirement on being itself, in its potential knowability: objects cannot be—because not intelligible as—mere collections of magnitudes or quanta.

    As Hegel remarks, Kant had already attempted to “turn metaphysics [the forms of being] into logic [the forms of thought], but [he] gave to the logical determinations an essentially subjective significance out of fear of the object.”[xxxii] Hegel makes clear that his own approach to the deduction will lie in the self-development of “pure self-consciousness,” its determination of the pure categories constitutive of any possible judgment and of any possible object of judgment. As he puts the point against Kant:

    If there was to be a real progress in philosophy, it was necessary that the interest of thought should be drawn to the consideration of the formal side, of the ‘I,’ of consciousness as such, that is, of the abstract reference of a subjective awareness to an object, and that in this way that path should be opened for the cognition of the infinite form, that is, of the concept. Yet, in order to arrive at this cognition, the finite determinateness in which that form is as ‘I,’ as consciousness, must be shed. The form, when thought out in its purity, will then have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and to give it as a necessary content—as a system   of thought-determinations.[xxxiii]

    What Hegel means here by the “abstract reference of a subjective awareness” is a formalized notion of consciousness, “pure thinking,” abstracted from any notion of experience. At issue is not the consciousness of the Phenomenology, confronted by an external object, but the very concept of a possible object, “pure being.” Hegel is giving an account of the form of any possible empirical act of knowing as well as the pure form of the object of any such act. Thinking in the context of the Logic has itself as its object and thus the determinations of any possible thinking as its content. In the end, thought has its own self-determining form as its content, the thought of pure thought itself.

    We are in deep woods here, but the basic point against Ng is clear: throughout her book, she argues that the purposive drive of thought towards its own self-comprehension is a product of its “living” nature, which is itself understood to be irreducible to thought (120). In a recent review of Pippin’s book, Ng claims that since “intelligibility rests on immanent species-concepts actualized in things in themselves as a ‘foundation,’ this would appear to be independent of any acts of apperceptive judgment.”[xxxiv] But in the passage cited above and elsewhere in the Logic, Hegel argues that at each moment in the text, self-consciousness is giving a progressively more explicit account of itself. That is, even the concept of life, in its three distinct moments, is a self-specification by thought of the activity of thinking. In this sense, life both is and is not a thought-determination like the others. It is in the sense that life is self-legislated by thought. If the category of life were not a product of the apperceptive unity of thought, it would be hard to understand how it relates to the text as a whole, as the “science of pure thought.”[xxxv] Life does not lie “outside” cognition but is the first attempt by thought to grasp the condition of any act of cognition.

    By the same token, life is not like the other thought-determinations in that it is an explicit attempt to specify what it means to be a sense-maker, in the sense that Pippin misses and in the sense that Ng defends. In Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, Pippin shows that Hegel entitles himself to—does not just arrogate—a “constitutive” rather than merely regulative category of life: Hegel argues against the Kantian idea that pure concepts are “empty” by showing that “pure thinking’s determination of the necessary moments of possible conceptual determinacy are just thereby a specification of objects in their knowability.”[xxxvi] Nevertheless, Pippin tends to treat life as a possible object of judgment rather than as an initial specification of its active, objective form. In a response to Ng’s contribution to a symposium on Realm of Shadows, Pippin raises the worry that such an approach would render “the results of the logic species-specific and so provincial,” while also noting the “obviousness” of the fact that “any thinker must be alive to be thinking.”[xxxvii] Yet what Pippin merely takes for granted (the “fact” of any thinker’s living nature) is a categorial constraint on the form of subjectivity that his own reading of the Logic enables us to properly ground. While Ng does promote the unfortunate idea that Hegel is advancing a “formal anthropology,”[xxxviii] there is another way to understand the “life of thought,” made possible by Pippin’s conception of logic as metaphysics. For Hegel, thought is not an anthropological idiosyncrasy, an accident of Homo sapiens, nor is life a mere accident of thinking beings. As Hegel writes, “The fact that [the subject] is a living being is not contingent but in accordance with reason.”[xxxix] Accordingly, it is not that thought is necessarily restricted to some one species. There could or could not be other species of rational animals, whether in this galaxy or in another one, whether in the past or in the future. The point, however, is that thinking must be the activity of a living being to be thinking, in any possible universe. The logical category of life is both given to thought by itself (through apperceptive awareness of what further thought-determinations are required by the failure of the prior categories of the Logic) and can be understood to grasp a “proto” or “immediate” form of what, at the highest level, will be living, embodied apperceptive spontaneity. Life is the proto-form of apperceptive spontaneity and rational agency is self-conscious life.

    Ng attempts to tie everything together by pursuing a reading of Hegel’s notion of the Idea in terms of her earlier account of the Differenzschrift. In many ways, this is a productive strategy, but in at least one crucial respect, it is radically distorting. Ng draws on a pivotal remark from Faith and Knowledge in which Hegel suggests that the forms of intuition in the B-Deduction of the first Critique are already synthetic unities produced by apperceptive spontaneity. “From this passage,” Ng writes, “it is usually inferred that Hegel therefore does away with an intuition theory altogether and concentrates instead on a theory of thought’s autonomous self-determination” (251). Ng goes on to argue—against this Pippinian approach—that Hegel does develop an intuition theory, under the rubric of “life.” Yet this is precisely where Ng’s reliance on the Differenzschrift leads her astray: the Science of Logic as a whole is Hegel’s “intuition theory,” insofar as it is an attempt to grasp the form of any possible intuitive or empirical content, a “this-such” (an individualized, context-dependent token of a type).

    We can thus identify the fundamental problem with Ng’s overall argument. Life as a category cannot alone resolve the “subjective idealism” problem without a deduction of the status of categoriality in general. Without the renovated account of Kant’s Deduction, Ng’s emphasis on life as a category simply kicks the problem “down” a level: why would life on its own be any better equipped to guarantee the objective purport of the categories, including the category of life itself? This is what is at stake in Pippin’s thesis—argued for at length in his recent work, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows—that logic and metaphysics are shown to “coincide” in the Logic. That is, Hegel’s logic (the science of pure thought) articulates a consistent metaphysics, the science of pure being. Life plays a crucial role in specifying the basic form of purposive responsiveness to empirical reality, but it does so as part of the broader attempt to grasp being in its intelligibility.

    The systematic significance of Ng’s neglect of Hegel’s appropriation of the apperception thesis can be seen in her discussions of the transitions in the Logic. One example of how this plays out is Ng’s discussion of mechanism, chemism, and teleology, which comprise Hegel’s account of “objectivity” within the subjective Logic. Ng argues that we can understand the movement from mechanism to teleology and ultimately to life in light of life’s capacity for self-determination: mechanism, for example, is a “violent” external determination of the object by a law rather than a self-determination on the basis of an inner purpose (229-230). The problem with this interpretive tact is that it presupposes the category of life, rather than showing how mechanism, for example, fails on its own terms. Mechanism fails not because it is not yet life but because lawfulness is unable to adequately specify objects in their determinate individuality. As Hegel himself puts it, in his inimitable way, mechanism “does not have the objects themselves for its determinate difference; these are […] non-individual, external objects.[xl] Life not only grounds the activity of “rendering intelligible” but also fulfills (or begins to fulfill) the demand for an account of being in its intelligibility. Because Ng neglects or greatly downplays the status of the Logic as the “science of pure thought,” she is forced to derive a criterion for the inadequacy of the paradigms of objectivity from a later point in the text—a decidedly un-Hegelian procedure.

    Ng’s belief in the recalcitrance of life to thought has consequences for her understanding of the status of the Logic, its transitions, and perhaps most importantly, the account in Hegel’s text of the form of rational action. In the otherwise excellent sixth chapter, which rigorously reconstructs the Concept-Judgment-Syllogism sequence in the “Subjectivity” chapter, Ng follows Paul Redding in arguing that Hegel is committed to a “weak inferentialism”—a counter-position to Brandom’s “strong inferentialism” that holds that the role judgments play in inferences is not sufficient to account for the determinacy of their content (189). For Ng/Redding, this is an aspect of Hegel’s inheritance of the Kantian notion of reflecting judgment, a form of judgment indexed to its particular perceptual, experiential context. The “original judgments” made by living beings about what ought to be done under certain environmental conditions for the sake of their self-maintenance are judgments of precisely this sort. What it means to be a good friend here and now is situation-dependent, cannot be deduced from a general rule, and is thus a matter of “objective judgment” rather than syllogistic inference (240). By the same token, Ng does invoke Aristotle’s notion of the practical syllogism to explain the operation of the species-concept (Gattung) in the context of rational life. The major premises in practical syllogisms constitute the “inner purposes” of rational animals: I am your friend; friends go to their friend’s piano recital; I attend your recital (239). I satisfy my purpose of being a friend in attending the recital and thus constitute myself as the kind of rational being I am.

    Ng’s account of the logical form of inner purposiveness in terms of Aristotle’s practical syllogism is exactly right, but in her attempt to assert the priority of judgment over syllogism, her account falters. She helpfully invokes John McDowell’s “uncodifiability thesis” (the idea that judgments about what to do in concrete situations cannot be codified as universal principles),[xli] but she draws the wrong lesson from his argument. She writes that concrete situations “render the practical syllogism superfluous” because “self-determining, internally purposive activity cannot be reduced to being the conclusion of a sound practical syllogism” (241). Yet this misses the way the practical syllogism is distinct from theoretical syllogism, as underscored by McDowell and others (Wiggins and Nussbaum both come to mind).[xlii] It is rather that the practical syllogism is itself not reducible to the deductive theoretical model, insofar as its minor premise (“friends go to their friend’s piano recital”) is always a matter of what shows up as worth doing or avoiding in a concrete situation. The practical syllogism cannot be rendered superfluous because it is the very form of rational activity—what renders such activity intelligible as the distinctly intentional, reason-responsive activity that it is. This is why Hegel writes that “the connection of purpose is therefore more than judgment; it is the syllogism of the self-subsistent free concept that through objectivity unites itself with itself in conclusion.”[xliii] Practical syllogisms result not in “sound conclusions” (thoughts about what to do) but in actions themselves, which embody the syllogism as a whole. Moreover, as thinkers like Brandom have argued, the content of the concept of friendship is dependent on its use: each “objective judgment” about how to be a good friend inflects and transforms the concept of friendship, constituting it anew for future agents.[xliv] Ng’s understanding of the practical syllogism as a superfluous form used to retrospectively make sense of or to explicitly formulate practical purposes reflects her view that the category of life secures thought’s determinate relation to the empirical world as well as her hard separation of cognition from life. In contrast to Ng’s view that the practical syllogism is epiphenomenal, Hegel’s point is that the practical syllogism is what allows the objective judgment of life to become fully articulate, to come into its own.

    One might ask what the broader stakes are of an intervention that unfolds at such a high level of abstraction—indeed, the highest level of abstraction. One key “concrete” implication of her approach can be seen in her recent article, “Ideology Critique from Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory.” Ng draws heavily in the piece on her account of the Idea in the Science of Logic, which is held to provide a universal criterion for assessing ideologies as reason become unreason, “social pathologies, wrong ways of living” (393). She shows that in the conclusion to the Logic, “Hegel transforms the critique of reason into a critique of rational forms of life,” arguing that reason has empowered itself to reflexively examine its own collective and historical activities (396). Drawing on the three aspects of life delineated above (corporeality, externality, and the genus) and Axel Honneth’s idea of a “formal anthropology,” Ng develops an account of Marx’s notion of species-being as “providing formal, anthropologically rooted conditions of self-actualization that are subject to historical variation and yet substantial enough to help us identify social pathologies” (398). For instance, one of the three aspects of the anthropology she provides is the formal condition of “embodiment” (corporeality in the terms of the book), which is thought to provide “the basis for critiquing and assessing ideological distortions of practices surrounding health, for example, the commodification of health care” (402).

    Yet the problem with adopting embodiment as a critical criterion is that it establishes an ahistorical standard of “health,” against which historical “pathologies” like commodification are measured. This is a direct result of Ng’s claim that life lies “beyond cognition” in her reading of the Logic. If the commodification of health care is a form of suffering, it is not because it runs athwart the formal category of embodiment, but rather because commodified health care fails to fulfill its own promise, cannot adequately provide the care that it purports to provide, a historically novel need whose fulfillment we now recognize as essential. This marks the contradiction of a historical form of health, not a deficiency according to an anthropological criterion. Embodiment is a formal condition of the historical unfolding of rational life. But as such, it is too thin a category to function as a critical yardstick. Indeed, throughout history, embodiment has itself often been considered a sickness or stain, a condition to be overcome, as in Novalis, the model for the “beautiful soul” in the Phenomenology: “Life is a disease of the spirit.” As we learn from Hegel, embodiment is a logical constraint that pure reason must give to itself—not an anthropological given it simply discovers. Accordingly, while a truly free form of life would recognize the embodied nature of spirit as a positive condition rather than as a negative restriction, what counts as successful embodiment, as sickness versus health, is determined by us, on the basis of collective self-legislation.

    What is needed, consequently, is not a formal anthropology (as Ng claims), but a speculative account of the formal conditions for the possibility of a critical theory. And to be fair, Ng takes us a long way in the right direction. Hegel’s Concept of Life is a valuable work of Hegel scholarship, contributing in major ways to our understanding of the Logic of the Concept and to many other aspects of Hegel’s text. It breathes new life into what is arguably Hegel’s most important work, whose radical ambition is to bring reason to consciousness of its own status as living. It is crucial, however, to keep in view Hegel’s radical renovation of Kant’s deduction, if we are to truly have a chance of achieving the holy grail of an absolute idealism. We must not forget either of Kant’s two greatest services to philosophy: the concept of life (inner purposiveness) and the original synthetic unity of apperception.

    _____

    Jensen Suther is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a range of academic publications, including Modernism/modernity and The Review of Metaphysics. 

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [i] See Marx (1970) and Adorno 2004, 23.

    [ii] For the clearest statement of Schelling’s position, see Schelling 2008, 134-163. In Heidegger (1988), the issue is framed primarily in terms of Hegel’s prioritization of subjectivity over time, in contrast to Heidegger’s prioritization of time over subjectivity. For Foucault’s claim that we should “free ourselves from Hegel,” see Foucault (1998).

    [iii] See Comay (2013).

    [iv] McDowell 2000, 65.

    [v] See the magisterial chapter “To Be Is to Live, to Be Is to Be Recognized” in Bernstein (2015); for a more sustained critique of Pippin, see Bernstein (2017).

    [vi] For a recent critique of Pippin and Robert Brandom, see Žižek (2015). While I am sympathetic to Žižek’s critique of Pippin’s “transcendental dualism,” I think his own proposed solution—a Schellingean naturalism—is anti-Hegelian and serves to undermine the principle of freedom on which German Idealism—and ultimately Marxism—is founded. See also Johnston (2018). For Pippin’s response to Žižek, see Pippin (2012); for his response to Johnston, see Pippin (2018c).

    [vii] See Ng’s article—discussed below—on the implications of Hegel’s logic of the “Idea” for ideology critique, Ng (2015).

    [viii] For a concise enumeration of those differences, see Pippin (2018b).

    [ix] There is one minor exception to this. While Ng does engage with McDowell’s arguments about the practical syllogism (see the discussion below) as well as with his conception of the “deductive impotence” of the Aristotelian categorical in the case of rational animals, the only allusion in her book to his distinctly naturalistic understanding of self-consciousness is in a short footnote just a few pages before the end (277n47).

    [x] See Pippin (2007).

    [xi] One difficulty with McDowell’s account is that some of his formulations suggest that we are born “mere animals” and become rational animals through initiation into a language; see McDowell 2000, 125. If human children are merely animals, what renders their motivations and desires—as distinct from those of non-human animals—susceptible to being shaped by reason? For McDowell’s view to be coherent, he would have to acknowledge that human animals are born with a distinctly rational form of the power of self-maintenance, which is not, therefore, first obtained but only fully actualized in adulthood. For my own account of the actualization of the structure of self-maintenance by rational animals, see Suther (2020).

    [xii] See Kant 1998, A55/B80.

    [xiii] See McDowell (2000).

    [xiv] See Brandom 2007, 130. See also Brandom’s comment regarding the prospects of analytic philosophy: “My hope is that by slighting the similarities to animals which preoccupied Locke and Hume and highlighting the possibilities opened up by engaging in social practices of giving and asking for reasons, we will get closer to an account of being human that does justice to the kinds of consciousness and self-consciousness distinctive of us as cultural, and not merely natural, creatures” (Brandom 2001, 35). Yet by ceding an account of our nature to Lockean and Humean thought, Brandom misses the Aristotelian account of nature that preoccupied Hegel. On that account, culture is not simply other than nature but is a distinctly rational form of the natural.

    [xv] See Hegel 2018, 112/§189. Not to mention Hegel’s further claim, in the Logic, that life is not simply “left behind” in the progression of categories. As he writes in the Encyclopedia, “The absolute idea is first the unity of the theoretical and practical and, by this means, at the same time the unity of the idea of life and the idea of knowing” (Hegel 2010a, 299/§236A).

    [xvi] See Hegel 2010b, 654/12.157. Translation modified.

    [xvii] For Aristotle’s development of the concept of energeia, see books VII-IX of Aristotle (2016). For an important book-length argument for the translation of energeia as “activity,” see Kosman (2013).

    [xviii] For a full defense of such a reading, see Suther (2020).

    [xix] Hegel links Kant’s distinction between transcendental and general logic to his subjectivism at Hegel 2010b, 40/21.46-7. It is crucial, however, to understand that Hegel is not simply running the two together and trying to derive things themselves from thought, as in the rationalist tradition. For an extended defense of Hegel against the rationalism charge, see chapter two of Pippin (2018a).

    [xx] Hegel calls his rewriting of the metaphysical deduction an “immanent deduction” of the concept, at Hegel 2010b, 514/12.16. Ng takes note of Hegel’s notion of an immanent deduction but reads it exclusively in terms of “his attempt to provide, in the logical context, a series of arguments for the constitutive character of inner purposiveness for any account of self-consciousness conceptual activity” (126). Yet this ignores Hegel’s vitally important claim that “the content and determination of the [concept]” have been provided on the basis of the deduction—that is, the determinate content of being itself.

    [xxi] See Hegel 2010b, 654/12.157. My emphasis.

    [xxii] Hegel uses this same phrase at Hegel 2010a, 245/§171 to refer to Kant’s partial satisfaction of the demand for “a totality determined by thinking” of the “various species of judgment.”

    [xxiii] See Hegel 2010b, 515/12.18.

    [xxiv] See Korsgaard 1996, 101.

    [xxv] See also Hegel 2010b, 675/12.175: “Finite things are finite because, and to the extent that, they do not possess the reality of their concept completely within them but are in need of other things for it—or, conversely, because they are presupposed as objects and consequently the concept is in them as an external determination.”

    [xxvi] See Hegel’s discussion of how the features of animals are not just “distinguishing marks” useful for subjective classification but “the vital point of animal individuality,” in Hegel 2010b, 717/12.219.

    [xxvii] See Henrich 2007, 132.

    [xxviii] This is the unfortunate, waggish title of Pippin’s first critique of McDowell, in Pippin (2005). To be fair, Hegel himself does sometimes talk this way: “[The being of spirit] is this motion of freeing itself from nature” (Hegel 1978, 93). Yet this must be understood, as Hegel explains in that context, in terms of an emancipation from given notions of “human nature” and from determination by natural necessity, rather than in terms of an emancipation from life, embodiment, finitude. Pippin would not deny spirit’s inseparability from nature, but he offers no positive account of what that inseparability (the nature of spirit’s “nature”) looks like and often just takes it for granted. In a word, spirit does not strive to leave nature behind but to render life activity fully free. Or as Hegel puts it: “The fact that [the subject] is a living being is not contingent but in accordance with reason, and to that extent [she] has a right to make [her] needs [her] end. There is nothing degrading about being alive, and we do not have the alternative of existing in a higher spirituality. It is only by raising what is present and given to a self-creating process that the higher sphere of the good is attained” (Hegel 1991, 151/§123A, my emphasis). That we have genus requirements is given; what those requirements are has been determined historically through violence and domination and—more recently—debate and negotiation; and why they are sustained is a matter of rational deliberation over what would constitute the good life, a flourishing world we could call our own.

    [xxix] See, for example, Pippin 1997, 140, for an earlier account of Hegel’s reliance on the Kantian notion of reflecting judgment. For a more recent account of the crucial role played by reflecting judgment in the Science of Logic, see Pippin 2018a, 290-91.

    [xxx] This is the reading of the Science of Logic defended in Pippin (2018a).

    [xxxi] Hegel 2010a, 168/§106A.

    [xxxii] Hegel 2010b, 30/21.35.

    [xxxiii] Ibid., 41-42/21.48.

    [xxxiv] See Ng 2020, 7.

    [xxxv] Hegel 2010b, 38/21.45.

    [xxxvi] Pippin 2018a, 289.

    [xxxvii] Pippin 2019, 1072.

    [xxxviii] Ng 2015, 401.

    [xxxix] Hegel 1991, 151/§123A.

    [xl] Hegel 2010b, 644/12.147.

    [xli] McDowell 2002, 65-69.

    [xlii] See Nussbaum (1985) and Wiggins (1998).

    [xliii] See Hegel 2010b, 656/12.159.

    [xliv] See Brandom 2002, 48: “What we actually do, perform, and produce affects the contents of the conceptual norms, and so what inferences and exclusions determine what we ought and ought not to do, perform, and produce.”

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge.
    • Aristotle. 2016. Metaphysics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
    • Bernstein, J.M. 2017. “‘Our Amphibian Problem’: Nature in History in Adorno’s Hegelian Critique of Hegel.” In Hegel on Philosophy in History. Edited by Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2015. Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Brandom, Robert. 2001. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • —. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • —. 2007. “The structure of desire and recognition: Self-consciousness and self-constitution.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, no. 1: 127-150.
    • —. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Comay, Rebecca. 2013. “Hegel: Non-Metaphysical, Post-Metaphysical, Post-Traumatic (Response to Lumsden, Redding, Sinnerbrink).” Parrhesia 17: 50-61.
    • Foucault, Michel. 1998. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion and translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press.
    • Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood and translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2010a. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic. Translated by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 1978. Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Volume I. Introductions. Edited and translated by M.J. Petry. Boston: D. Reidl Publishing Company.
    • —. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2010b. The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Heidegger, Martin. 1988. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
    • Henrich, Dieter. 1997. The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin. Edited by Eckart Förster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    • Johnston, Adrian. 2018. A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Kosman, Aryeh. 2013. The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Marx, Karl. 1970. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right. Translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • McDowell, John. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • —. 2002. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • —. 2000. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Ng, Karen. 2015. “Ideology Critique from Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory.” Constellations 22, no. 3: 393-404.
    • —. 2020. “Science of logic as critique of judgment? Reconsidering Pippin’s Hegel.” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 4: 1055-1064.
    • Nussbaum, Martha. 1985. Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    • Pippin, Robert. 2012. “Back to Hegel?” in Mediations 26, no. 2.
    • —. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2018a. Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
    • —. 1997. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2007. “McDowell’s Germans,” in European Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 3: 411-434.
    • —. 1995. The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • —. 2018b. “Reading Hegel,” in Australasian Philosophy Review 2, no. 4: 365-382.
    • —. 2019. “Replies to critics,” in European Journal of Philosophy 27: 1065-1074.
    • —. 2018c. Review of A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    • Redding, Paul. 2017. “Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism.” Critical Horizons: 1-19.
    • Schelling, F.W. J. 2008. On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Suther, Jensen. 2020. “Hegel’s Logic of Freedom: Towards a ‘Logical Constitutivism,’” in The Review of Metaphysics 73, no. 4: 771-814.
    • Wiggins, David. 1998. Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Žižek, Slavoj. 2015. “In Defense of Hegel’s Madness.” Filizofija 24 no. 4: 785-812

     

     

  • Ben Murphy – The Universes of Speculative Realism: A Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

    Ben Murphy – The Universes of Speculative Realism: A Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

    Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014)

    Reviewed by Ben Murphy

    Steven Shaviro begins The Universe of Things (2014) promising a “new look” at Alfred North Whitehead “in light of” speculative realism. The terms of this preface ought to be reversed though, since what follows Shaviro’s introduction is actually a “new look” at speculative realism “in light of” some Whiteheadean ideas. This distinction is important: readers should not seek out The Universe of Things for an introduction to Whitehead qua Whitehead or even a “new look” at Whitehead vis-à-vis current issues of cultural and critical analysis. (Indeed, better options along these lines include, respectively, Shaviro’s own earlier book, Without Criteria (2009), and the more recent University of Minnesota Press collection The Lure of Whitehead (2014).) Universe, on the other hand, is better described as an attempt to map the cumulative geography of speculative realism, a philosophical movement which Shaviro stresses should be referred to in the plural: speculative realisms. Speculative realisms (and its sibling endeavors like object oriented ontology and new materialism) are perpetually in search of heterodox traditions and forgotten figures—philosophical antecedents sought for foundational credence and inspiration. And in this sense Shaviro’s incorporation of Whitehead is the latest in a lengthening line: Graham Harman recuperates a certain version of Heidegger, Jane Bennett returns to Spinoza and Bergson (among others), and, more far afield still, Ian Hamilton Grant champions Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But if these and other thinkers raid the archive to consolidate new and distinct philosophical templates, Shaviro’s survey is decidedly more evaluative than constructive. Working Whitehead into the cracks of speculative realism, Shaviro widens that movement’s internal fractures in order to expose, and at most nuance—rather than overturn, reverse, or revamp—its prevailing assumptions.

    Shaviro’s critical take on speculative realism relies on two recurring moves: first, an overarching unification and, second, a subsidiary distinction. First, in the name of unity, Shaviro stresses that speculative realisms hold in common a core desire to step outside what he—following French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux—calls the correlationist circle. As reiterated by Shaviro, the primary target implied by this phrase is Kant’s position that the world is only knowable and approachable through thought. “We” can never grasp an object “in itself” or “for itself” in isolation from its relation to us, the thinking subjects. This insistence means that any account of the world and reality is fundamentally an account of the world and reality as accessed through and by human thought. Speculative realisms are unified in wanting to get beyond this self-reflexive loop. Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Ian Hamilton Grant (the school’s four founding fathers)—as well as fellow travelers—shed the correlationist straight jacket by theorizing (or, better, speculating) about the real world, the world of the “great outdoors” (another Meillasoux coinage) or, as Eugene Thacker puts it in his “horror of philosophy” series, the world “without us.” (For a very different account which disputes whether “correlationism” refers to a fair or even a meaningful reading of Kant, see David Golumbia’s “’Correlationism’: The Dogma that Never Was,” recently published in bounday 2.) As Shaviro notes, there’s a timeliness to this “anti-correlationist” critique, since casting the philosophical net beyond the circumscribing human mind seems a deadly serious endeavor in the face of impending ecological catastrophe. Still, the warming planet is just the most obvious and palatable hook that initiates what Shaviro calls the “changed climate of thought” (4) recently amenable to speculative realism. And if both new materialism and object oriented ontology are more prone to non- or para-academic environmental and ecological interventions, then speculative realism is more interested in revisiting and recasting the history of philosophy.

    A commitment to outfoxing correlationism unites speculative realism, but Shaviro’s second move—that of division—hinges on pinpointing the particular strategies employed to achieve this revisionary project. Repeatedly in Universe, Shaviro splits speculative realism into two main factions. On the one hand, Meillasoux and Brassier pursue lines of thought that Shaviro calls “eliminativist”: for these admittedly nihilistic thinkers, correlationism is undone by the revelation that thought is “epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without efficacy” (73)—that thought doesn’t rightly and necessarily belong anywhere in the universe. For Shaviro, Brassier goes further in approaching the “extinction of thought” than Meillasoux, who saves thought from complete elimination by introducing a deus ex machina according to which thought and life emerge “ex nihilo” and simultaneously from a universe previously devoid of both (76). The contrast to this first faction is found in Harman, Grant, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. Instead of proposing that thought is fundamentally inimical to the universe, this coalition of speculative realism wagers that agency and thought are everywhere. Positing the “sheer ubiquity of thought in the cosmos” (82), this position reaches its apotheosis for Shaviro in a panpsychic vision where all things—animate and otherwise—are sentient (if perhaps not exactly conscious). Shaviro places himself in this second faction only after making a further distinction that separates him from Harman in particular. Whereas Harman, according to Shaviro, stresses the withdrawn nature of objects—withdrawn in the sense that the object must always “recede” from its relations (30)—Shaviro joins Whitehead (and Latour) in making a distinction between epistemological withdrawnness and ontological relations (see 105). Where an object may always hold something in reserve from what is knowable to the perceiving mind (as Harman insists), even this measure of the object that is reserved may be affected and changed by modes of contact that elude knowledge and understanding. Because of “vicarious causation” and “immanent, noncognitive contact” (138, 148) (a mode of contact that Shaviro never satisfactorily distinguishes from more popular usages of the term “affect”), an “occult process of influence” occurs that is “outside” any correlation between “subject and object, or knower and known” (148). The object, then, is not so utterly withdrawn as Harman’s narrowly epistemological account suggests. So between eleminativism and panpsychicism as extremes of the speculative realism spectrum, Shaviro says, we’re faced with a “basic choice” (83).

    Describing correlationism and the various offerings to get beyond it is standard fare for speculative realism. But what Universe lacks in originality it compensates for with breadth of analysis and consistently careful, patient exposition. Shaviro admirably treats a wide swath of speculative realists (plus quite a few philosophical giants from both continental and analytical traditions), and he does so with a tone perpetually modulated for utter clarity. Absent is any of the obfuscating rhetoric or over-the-top claims that one might expect from someone who sets out to correct Kant. In part Shaviro’s achievement stems from his own outsider status. His rich body of academic work—on everything from film studies to music video aesthetics to sci-fi infused accelerationism—as well as the light touch on display here and throughout his superb and eclectic online presence (see: http://www.shaviro.com/) stand him in good stead as a welcome interlocutor and guide. Approaching speculative realism as a kindred but not coincident thinker, he’s able to recapitulate his own coming-to-terms with ideas in a way that translates well to other sympathetic non-initiates.

    Apart from style and tone, though, Shaviro’s approach is also commendable for a self-avowed pragmatism of ideas. In an aside in the first chapter, Shaviro applauds Isabelle Stengers for the insight that “the construction of metaphysical concepts always addresses certain particular, situated needs” (33). “The concepts that a philosopher produces,” Shaviro continues, “depend on the problems to which he or she is responding. Every thinker is motivated by the difficulties that cry out to him or to her, demanding a response” (33). While a fair representation of Shaviro’s own admirably simple and workmanlike prose, these statements also epitomize the generous spirit that urges Universe. Shaviro is careful to explain the fruits and situational benefits of every idea that he treats, perhaps especially those ideas that he wants to challenge—an attractive way of grounding philosophical ideas which, being speculative by definition, sometimes feel quite flighty.

    The discussion of panpsychism that spans chapters four and five is the most exciting and original element of Universe. In part this is because it draws on a body of work in cognitive science and the philosophy of biology that Shaviro knows well and that is fresh fodder for discussions of speculative realism. His discussion in this section also has the added charm of giving itself over to the speculative freedoms afforded to speculative realism itself. As Shaviro recognizes, speculative realism is at its best when it joins with speculative fiction in the common task of “extrapolation” (10). Thus in considering panpsychism we’re teased with the notion that slime molds have thoughts (88). Less bogged down by the minutia of distinctions between this SR thinker and that, Shaviro joins a more diverse group of thinkers to consider, for instance, Thomas Nagel’s question about what it’s like to be a bat. Well aware of the absurdities attendant to a truly panpsychic vision, Shaviro lets speculation carry the day, and it’s a pleasure to follow him through a romp that ties the questions of speculative realism to a longer intellectual tradition of sometimes strange twists and turns.

    Also helpful and fresh for speculative realism—although somewhat hard to square with the rest of this book—is Shaviro’s first chapter, which shows how Emmanuel Levinas helps us appreciate speculative realism even as Whitehead’s “aesthetic” mode of “contrast” departs from Levinas’ “ethical” encounter with the Other. Where for Levinas the encounter trumps self-concern, for Whitehead both self-concern (or “self-enjoyment”) and “concern” for the Other are poles best understand in balancing counterpoint (rather than conflict). Apart from being the most detailed analysis of Whitehead’s thought—and, indeed, his thought as it changed in his long arc of writing—this opening account is valuable for SR in arguing that a commitment to circumventing correlationism need not be an ethical project in the traditional sense. In other words, in Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead, a philosophy geared towards the object world “without us” isn’t premised on care. The problem here and elsewhere in Universe, though, is the fuzzy usage of the term “aesthetic.” As I’ve suggested, chapter one deploys this term opposite Levinasian ethics in a frustratingly negative mode of definition: aesthetics is said to be what is not ethics. While gaining some clarification in the volume’s titular chapter (see 52-54), the aesthetic remains unclear even when given new treatment in a discussion of Kant that occupies the last ten pages of the book. Here “aesthetic” is set against knowledge (or epistemology) rather than ethics, and, as my discussion of Shaviro’s disagreement with Harman suggests, “aesthetic” comes to mean something like noncognitive contact, or “affect.” If these disparate senses of the “aesthetic” are related or even mutually inclusive, Shaviro doesn’t do enough to show how.

    For all its merits, Universe suffers heavily from being stuck between monograph and essay collection. One searches in vain for the absent promise that the book’s chapters can be read collectively or in isolation, approached in order or at random. Such a promise, at least, would admit that the chapters don’t serially build to anything in particular. Lacking this or any other clues from Shaviro, though, we’re faced with seven relatively short offerings that loop back on one another with frustratingly little meta-commentary. Much of the mapping of speculative realism as I’ve described it above via unification and division, for instance, appears essentially verbatim in chapters two, six, and seven. The treatment of Harman—both agreement and disagreement—in particular makes continual reappearance. The same could be said of the discussion of panpsychism, which is interesting the first and perhaps even second time but quickly turns suspect as it is recycled through chapters three, four, and five with only the trimmings changed. The mere fact that bits of argument can appear at the beginning and end of the book in essentially the same form (and with Shaviro seemingly unaware of such repetitions) leaves the reader wondering about the value of a journey that feels constrained to a treadmill. A more cynical reader might look to, and find answer in the book’s editorial meta-data, which reveals that the first three chapters are previously published. Insofar as Universe excels at any one thing, then, it may be at academic entrepreneurialism—a feat of (re)publishing in which a triplet of core essays are surrounded with the sort of rhetorical packing peanuts which actually detract from ideas that would be more forceful as standalone articles. The reader already deep inside the sweep of SR may find plenty in this extended cut edition, but those more casually interested will be better served to read independently (as interests dictate) “Self-Enjoyment and Concern” (on Whitehead, Levinas, and SR), “The Actual Volcano” (Shaviro’s primary disagreement with Harman), and “The Universe of Things” (a broad strokes and bouncy introduction to the promises and riddles of SR, new materialism, and object ontology). Each has gems of insight owed to Shaviro’s exhaustive research, and reading them apart from one another—perhaps even in their original contexts—would lessen the rather tiresome burden of trying to figure out how they all fit together.

    Ben Murphy is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on 19th and 20th century American literature, the history and philosophy of science, and critical theory. His essay on James Dickey’s Deliverance and film adaptation is forthcoming from Mississippi Quarterly (2017), and you can also find his writing at ETHOS: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics and The Carolina Quarterly. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/ben-murphy

  • Alexander R. Galloway — From Data to Information

    Alexander R. Galloway — From Data to Information

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    In recent months I’ve been spending time learning Swift. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about data structures. Swift has a nice spectrum of possible data structures to pick from — something that I’ll have to discuss another day — but what interests me here is the question of data itself. Scholars often treat etymology as a special kind of divination. (And philosophers like Heidegger made a career of it.) But I find the etymology of the word “data” to be particularly elegant and revealing.

    Data comes from the Latin dare, meaning to give. But it’s the form that’s most interesting. First of all, it’s in the neuter plural, so it refers to “things.” Second, data is a participle in the perfect passive form. Thus the word means literally “the things having been given.” Or, for short, I like to think of data as “the givens.” French preserves this double meaning nicely by calling data the données. (The French also use the word “data,” although *I believe* this is technically an anglicism imported from technical vocabulary, despite French being much closer to Latin than English.)

    Data are the things having been given. Using the language of philosophy, and more specifically of phenomenology, data are the very facts of the givenness of Being. They are knowable and measurable. Data display a facticity; they are “what already exists,” and as such are a determining apparatus. They indicate what is present, what exists. The word data carries certain scientific or empirical undertones. But more important are the phenomenological overtones: data refer to the neutered, generic fact of the things having been given.

    Even in this simple arrangement a rudimentary relation holds sway. For implicit in the notion of the facticity of givenness is a relation to givenness. Data are not just a question of the givenness of Being, but are also necessarily illustrative of a relationship back toward a Being that has been given. In short, givenness itself implies a relation. This is one of the fundamental observations of phenomenology.

    Chicago datum

    Even if nothing specific can be said about a given entity x, it is possible to say that, if given, x is something as opposed to nothing, and therefore that x has a relationship to its own givenness as something. X is “as x”; the as-structure is all that is required to demonstrate that x exists in a relation. (By contrast, if x were immanent to itself, it would not be possible to assume relation. But by virtue of being made distinct as something given, givenness implies non-immanence and thus relation.) Such a “something” can be understood in terms of self-similar identity or, as the scientists say, negentropy, a striving to remain the same.

    So even as data are defined in terms of their givenness, their non-immanence with the one, they also display a relation with themselves. Through their own self-similarity or relation with themselves, they tend back toward the one (as the most generic instance of the same). The logic of data is therefore a logic of existence and identity: on the one hand, the facticity of data means that they exist, that they ex-sistere, meaning to stand out of or from; on the other hand, the givenness of data as something means that they assume a relationship of identity, as the self-similar “whatever entity” that was given.

    The true definition of data, therefore, is not simply “the things having been given.” The definition must conjoin givenness and relation. For this reason, data often go by another name, a name that more suitably describes the implicit imbrication of givenness and relation. The name is information.

    Information combines both aspects of data: the root form refers to a relationship (here a relationship of identity as same), while the prefix in refers to the entering into existence of form, the actual givenness of abstract form into real concrete formation.

    Heidegger sums it up well with the following observation about the idea: “All metaphysics including its opponent positivism speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of his presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence.” In other words, outward appearance or idea is not a deviation from presence, or some precondition that produces presence. Idea is precisely coterminous with presence. To understand data as information means to understand data as idea, but not just idea, also a host of related terms: form, class, concept, thought, image, outward appearance, shape, presence, or form-of-appearance.

    As Lisa Gitelman has reminded us, there is no such thing as “raw” data, because to enter into presence means to enter into form. An entity “in-form” is not a substantive entity, nor is it an objective one. The in-form is the negentropic transcendental of the situation, be it “material” like the givens or “ideal” like the encoded event. Hence an idea is just as much subject to in-formation as are material objects. An oak tree is in-formation, just as much as a computer file is in-formation.

    All of this is simply another way to understand Parmenides’s claim about the primary identity of philosophy: “Thought and being are the same.”

    [Contains a modified excerpt from Laruelle: Against the Digital [University of Minnesota Press: 2014], pp. 75-77.]
    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    By Dale Carrico
    ~

    Science fiction is a genre of literature in which artifacts and techniques humans devise as exemplary expressions of our intelligence result in problems that perplex our intelligence or even bring it into existential crisis. It is scarcely surprising that a genre so preoccupied with the status and scope of intelligence would provide endless variations on the conceits of either the construction of artificial intelligences or contact with alien intelligences.

    Of course, both the making of artificial intelligence and making contact with alien intelligence are organized efforts to which many humans are actually devoted, and not simply imaginative sites in which writers spin their allegories and exhibit their symptoms. It is interesting that after generations of failure the practical efforts to construct artificial intelligence or contact alien intelligence have often shunted their adherents to the margins of scientific consensus and invested these efforts with the coloration of scientific subcultures: While computer science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence both remain legitimate fields of research, both AI and aliens also attract subcultural enthusiasms and resonate with cultic theology, each attracts its consumer fandoms and public Cons, each has its True Believers and even its UFO cults and Robot cults at the extremities.

    Champions of artificial intelligence in particular have coped in many ways with the serial failure of their project to achieve its desired end (which is not to deny that the project has borne fruit) whatever the confidence with which generation after generation of these champions have insisted that desired end is near. Some have turned to more modest computational ambitions, making useful software or mischievous algorithms in which sad vestiges of the older dreams can still be seen to cling. Some are simply stubborn dead-enders for Good Old Fashioned AI‘s expected eventual and even imminent vindication, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And still others have doubled down, distracting attention from the failures and problems bedeviling AI discourse simply by raising its pitch and stakes, no longer promising that artificial intelligence is around the corner but warning that artificial super-intelligence is coming soon to end human history.

    alien planet

    Another strategy for coping with the failure of artificial intelligence on its conventional terms has assumed a higher profile among its champions lately, drawing support for the real plausibility of one science-fictional conceit — construction of artificial intelligence — by appealing to another science-fictional conceit, contact with alien intelligence. This rhetorical gambit has often been conjoined to the compensation of failed AI with its hyperbolic amplification into super-AI which I have already mentioned, and it is in that context that I have written about it before myself. But in a piece published a few days ago in The New York Times, “Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test,” Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at U.C. San Diego and Director of a design think-tank, has elaborated a comparatively sophisticated case for treating artificial intelligence as alien intelligence with which we can productively grapple. Near the conclusion of his piece Bratton declares that “Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers.” Of course these figures made their headlines by making the arguments about super-intelligence I have already rejected, and mentioning them seems to indicate Bratton’s sympathy with their gambit and even suggests that his argument aims to help us to understand them better on their own terms. Nevertheless, I take Bratton’s argument seriously not because of but in spite of this connection. Ultimately, Bratton makes a case for understanding AI as alien that does not depend on the deranging hyperbole and marketing of robocalypse or robo-rapture for its force.

    In the piece, Bratton claims “Our popular conception of artificial intelligence is distorted by an anthropocentric fallacy.” The point is, of course, well taken, and the litany he rehearses to illustrate it is enormously familiar by now as he proceeds to survey popular images from Kubrick’s HAL to Jonze’s Her and to document public deliberation about the significance of computation articulated through such imagery as the “rise of the machines” in the Terminator franchise or the need for Asimov’s famous fictional “Three Laws of Robotics.” It is easy — and may nonetheless be quite important — to agree with Bratton’s observation that our computational/media devices lack cruel intentions and are not susceptible to Asimovian consciences, and hence thinking about the threats and promises and meanings of these devices through such frames and figures is not particularly helpful to us even though we habitually recur to them by now. As I say, it would be easy and important to agree with such a claim, but Bratton’s proposal is in fact somewhat a different one:

    [A] mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal. If we look for A.I. in the wrong ways, it may emerge in forms that are needlessly difficult to recognize, amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits. This is not just a concern for the future. A.I. is already out of the lab and deep into the fabric of things. “Soft A.I.,” such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon recommendation engines, along with infrastructural A.I., such as high-speed algorithmic trading, smart vehicles and industrial robotics, are increasingly a part of everyday life.

    Here the serial failure of the program of artificial intelligence is redeemed simply by declaring victory. Bratton demonstrates that crying uncle does not preclude one from still crying wolf. It’s not that Siri is some sickly premonition of the AI-daydream still endlessly deferred, but that it represents the real rise of what robot cultist Hans Moravec once promised would be our “mind children” but here and now as elfen aliens with an intelligence unto themselves. It’s not that calling a dumb car a “smart” car is simply a hilarious bit of obvious marketing hyperbole, but represents the recognition of a new order of intelligent machines among us. Rather than criticize the way we may be “amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits” by reading computation through the inapt lens of intelligence at all, he proposes that we should resist holding machine intelligence to the standards that have hitherto defined it for fear of making its recognition “too difficult.”

    The kernel of legitimacy in Bratton’s inquiry is its recognition that “intelligence is notoriously difficult to define and human intelligence simply can’t exhaust the possibilities.” To deny these modest reminders is to indulge in what he calls “the pretentious folklore” of anthropocentrism. I agree that anthropocentrism in our attributions of intelligence has facilitated great violence and exploitation in the world, denying the dignity and standing of Cetaceans and Great Apes, but has also facilitated racist, sexist, xenophobic travesties by denigrating humans as beastly and unintelligent objects at the disposal of “intelligent” masters. “Some philosophers write about the possible ethical ‘rights’ of A.I. as sentient entities, but,” Bratton is quick to insist, “that’s not my point here.” Given his insistence that the “advent of robust inhuman A.I.” will force a “reality-based” “disenchantment” to “abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being” which he blames in his concluding paragraph with providing “theological and legislative comfort to chattel slavery” it is not entirely clear to me that emancipating artificial aliens is not finally among the stakes that move his argument whatever his protestations to the contrary. But one can forgive him for not dwelling on such concerns: the denial of an intelligence and sensitivity provoking responsiveness and demanding responsibilities in us all to women, people of color, foreigners, children, the different, the suffering, nonhuman animals compels defensive and evasive circumlocutions that are simply not needed to deny intelligence and standing to an abacus or a desk lamp. It is one thing to warn of the anthropocentric fallacy but another to indulge in the pathetic fallacy.

    Bratton insists to the contrary that his primary concern is that anthropocentrism skews our assessment of real risks and benefits. “Unfortunately, the popular conception of A.I., at least as depicted in countless movies, games and books, still seems to assume that humanlike characteristics (anger, jealousy, confusion, avarice, pride, desire, not to mention cold alienation) are the most important ones to be on the lookout for.” And of course he is right. The champions of AI have been more than complicit in this popular conception, eager to attract attention and funds for their project among technoscientific illiterates drawn to such dramatic narratives. But we are distracted from the real risks of computation so long as we expect risks to arise from a machinic malevolence that has never been on offer nor even in the offing. Writes Bratton: “Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.”

    But surely the inevitable question posed by Bratton’s disenchanting expose at this point should be: Why, once we have set aside the pretentious folklore of machines with diabolical malevolence, do we not set aside as no less pretentiously folkloric the attribution of diabolical indifference to machines? Why, once we have set aside the delusive confusion of machine behavior with (actual or eventual) human intelligence, do we not set aside as no less delusive the confusion of machine behavior with intelligence altogether? There is no question were a gigantic bulldozer with an incapacitated driver to swerve from a construction site onto a crowded city thoroughfare this would represent a considerable threat, but however tempting it might be in the fraught moment or reflective aftermath poetically to invest that bulldozer with either agency or intellect it is clear that nothing would be gained in the practical comprehension of the threat it poses by so doing. It is no more helpful now in an epoch of Greenhouse storms than it was for pre-scientific storytellers to invest thunder and whirlwinds with intelligence. Although Bratton makes great play over the need to overcome folkloric anthropocentrism in our figuration of and deliberation over computation, mystifying agencies and mythical personages linger on in his accounting however he insists on the alienness of “their” intelligence.

    Bratton warns us about the “infrastructural A.I.” of high-speed financial trading algorithms, Google and Amazon search algorithms, “smart” vehicles (and no doubt weaponized drones and autonomous weapons systems would count among these), and corporate-military profiling programs that oppress us with surveillance and harass us with targeted ads. I share all of these concerns, of course, but personally insist that our critical engagement with infrastructural coding is profoundly undermined when it is invested with insinuations of autonomous intelligence. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin pointed out that when philosophers talk about the historical force of art they do so with the prejudices of philosophers: they tend to write about those narrative and visual forms of art that might seem argumentative in allegorical and iconic forms that appear analogous to the concentrated modes of thought demanded by philosophy itself. Benjamin proposed that perhaps the more diffuse and distracted ways we are shaped in our assumptions and aspirations by the durable affordances and constraints of the made world of architecture and agriculture might turn out to drive history as much or even more than the pet artforms of philosophers do. Lawrence Lessig made much the same point when he declared at the turn of the millennium that “Code Is Law.”

    It is well known that special interests with rich patrons shape the legislative process and sometimes even explicitly craft legislation word for word in ways that benefit them to the cost and risk of majorities. It is hard to see how our assessment of this ongoing crime and danger would be helped and not hindered by pretending legislation is an autonomous force exhibiting an alien intelligence, rather than a constellation of practices, norms, laws, institutions, ritual and material artifice, the legacy of the historical play of intelligent actors and the site for the ongoing contention of intelligent actors here and now. To figure legislation as a beast or alien with a will of its own would amount to a fetishistic displacement of intelligence away from the actual actors actually responsible for the forms that legislation actually takes. It is easy to see why such a displacement is attractive: it profitably abets the abuses of majorities by minorities while it absolves majorities from conscious complicity in the terms of their own exploitation by laws made, after all, in our names. But while these consoling fantasies have an obvious allure this hardly justifies our endorsement of them.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that the collapse of global finance in 2008 represented the working of inscrutable artificial intelligences facilitating rapid transactions and supporting novel financial instruments of what was called by Long Boom digerati the “new economy.” I wrote:

    It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes. Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters [are] engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that our discomfiture in the setting of ubiquitous algorithmic mediation results from an autonomous force over which humans intentions are secondary considerations. I wrote:

    [W]hat imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is ‘coming from code’ as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren’t coders actual persons, for example? … [O]f course I know what [is] mean[t by the insistence…] that none of this was ‘a deliberate assault.’ But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of [one user’s] confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations… What if the conspicuousness of [this] experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? … We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don’t, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don’t joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone committing extrajudicial murder in all of our names. [An] experience of algorithmic cruelty [may be] extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still ‘opt out’ from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that so-called Killer Robots are a threat that must be engaged by resisting or banning “them” in their alterity rather than by assigning moral and criminal responsibility on those who code, manufacture, fund, and deploy them. I wrote:

    Well-meaning opponents of war atrocities and engines of war would do well to think how tech companies stand to benefit from military contracts for ‘smarter’ software and bleeding-edge gizmos when terrorized and technoscientifically illiterate majorities and public officials take SillyCon Valley’s warnings seriously about our ‘complacency’ in the face of truly autonomous weapons and artificial super-intelligence that do not exist. It is crucial that necessary regulation and even banning of dangerous ‘autonomous weapons’ proceeds in a way that does not abet the mis-attribution of agency, and hence accountability, to devices. Every ‘autonomous’ weapons system expresses and mediates decisions by responsible humans usually all too eager to disavow the blood on their hands. Every legitimate fear of ‘killer robots’ is best addressed by making their coders, designers, manufacturers, officials, and operators accountable for criminal and unethical tools and uses of tools… There simply is no such thing as a smart bomb. Every bomb is stupid. There is no such thing as an autonomous weapon. Every weapon is deployed. The only killer robots that actually exist are human beings waging and profiting from war.

    “Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment — this philosophy of technology exactly — that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.

    I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” — as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean — since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.

    The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.

    I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts — especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces — with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.

    Bratton wants to narrate as a kind of progressive enlightenment the mystification he recommends that would invest computation with alien intelligence and agency while at once divesting intelligent human actors, coders, funders, users of computation of responsibility for the violations and abuses of other humans enabled and mediated by that computation. This investment with intelligence and divestment of responsibility he likens to the Copernican Revolution in which humans sustained the momentary humiliation of realizing that they were not the center of the universe but received in exchange the eventual compensation of incredible powers of prediction and control. One might wonder whether the exchange of the faith that humanity was the apple of God’s eye for a new technoscientific faith in which we aspired toward godlike powers ourselves was really so much a humiliation as the exchange of one megalomania for another. But what I want to recall by way of conclusion instead is that the trope of a Copernican humiliation of the intelligent human subject is already quite a familiar one:

    In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud notoriously proposed that

    In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus… The second blow fell when biological research de­stroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin… though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on un­consciously in the mind.

    However we may feel about psychoanalysis as a pseudo-scientific enterprise that did more therapeutic harm than good, Freud’s works considered instead as contributions to moral philosophy and cultural theory have few modern equals. The idea that human consciousness is split from the beginning as the very condition of its constitution, the creative if self-destructive result of an impulse of rational self-preservation beset by the overabundant irrationality of humanity and history, imposed a modesty incomparably more demanding than Bratton’s wan proposal in the same name. Indeed, to the extent that the irrational drives of the dynamic unconscious are often figured as a brute machinic automatism, one is tempted to suggest that Bratton’s modest proposal of alien artifactual intelligence is a fetishistic disavowal of the greater modesty demanded by the alienating recognition of the stratification of human intelligence by unconscious forces (and his moniker a symptomatic citation). What is striking about the language of psychoanalysis is the way it has been taken up to provide resources for imaginative empathy across the gulf of differences: whether in the extraordinary work of recent generations of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars re-orienting the project of the conspicuously sexist, heterosexist, cissexist, racist, imperialist, bourgeois thinker who was Freud to emancipatory ends, or in the stunning leaps in which Freud identified with neurotic others through psychoanalytic reading, going so far as to find in the paranoid system-building of the psychotic Dr. Schreber an exemplar of human science and civilization and a mirror in which he could see reflected both himself and psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s Copernican humiliation opened up new possibilities of responsiveness in difference out of which could be built urgently necessary responsibilities otherwise. I worry that Bratton’s Copernican modesty opens up new occasions for techno-fetishistic fables of history and disavowals of responsibility for its actual human protagonists.
    _____

    Dale Carrico is a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which he received his PhD in 2005. His work focuses on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by a commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory. He is a persistent critic of futurological discourses, especially on his Amor Mundi blog, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • Something About the Digital

    Something About the Digital

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    (This catalog essay was written in 2011 for the exhibition “Chaos as Usual,” curated by Hanne Mugaas at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway. Artists in the exhibition included Philip Kwame Apagya, Ann Craven, Liz Deschenes, Thomas Julier [in collaboration with Cédric Eisenring and Kaspar Mueller], Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, and Antek Walczak.)

    There is something about the digital. Most people aren’t quite sure what it is. Or what they feel about it. But something.

    In 2001 Lev Manovich said it was a language. For Steven Shaviro, the issue is being connected. Others talk about “cyber” this and “cyber” that. Is the Internet about the search (John Battelle)? Or is it rather, even more primordially, about the information (James Gleick)? Whatever it is, something is afoot.

    What is this something? Given the times in which we live, it is ironic that this term is so rarely defined and even more rarely defined correctly. But the definition is simple: the digital means the one divides into two.

    Digital doesn’t mean machine. It doesn’t mean virtual reality. It doesn’t even mean the computer – there are analog computers after all, like grandfather clocks or slide rules. Digital means the digits: the fingers and toes. And since most of us have a discrete number of fingers and toes, the digital has come to mean, by extension, any mode of representation rooted in individually separate and distinct units. So the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …) are aptly labeled “digital” because they are separate and distinct, but the arc of a bird in flight is not because it is smooth and continuous. A reel of celluloid film is correctly called “digital” because it contains distinct breaks between each frame, but the photographic frames themselves are not because they record continuously variable chromatic intensities.

    We must stop believing the myth, then, about the digital future versus the analog past. For the digital died its first death in the continuous calculus of Newton and Leibniz, and the curvilinear revolution of the Baroque that came with it. And the digital has suffered a thousand blows since, from the swirling vortexes of nineteenth-century thermodynamics, to the chaos theory of recent decades. The switch from analog computing to digital computing in the middle twentieth century is but a single battle in the multi-millennial skirmish within western culture between the unary and the binary, proportion and distinction, curves and jumps, integration and division – in short, over when and how the one divides into two.

    What would it mean to say that a work of art divides into two? Or to put it another way, what would art look like if it began to meditate on the one dividing into two? I think this is the only way we can truly begin to think about “digital art.” And because of this we shall leave Photoshop, and iMovie, and the Internet and all the digital tools behind us, because interrogating them will not nearly begin to address these questions. Instead look to Ann Craven’s paintings. Or look to the delightful conversation sparked here between Philip Kwame Apagya and Liz Deschenes. Or look to the work of Thomas Julier, even to a piece of his not included in the show, “Architecture Reflecting in Architecture” (2010, made with Cedric Eisenring), which depicts a rectilinear cityscape reflected inside the mirror skins of skyscrapers, just like Saul Bass’s famous title sequence in North By Northwest (1959).

    DSC_0002__560
    Liz Deschenes, “Green Screen 4” (2001)

    All of these works deal with the question of twoness. But it is twoness only in a very particular sense. This is not the twoness of the doppelganger of the romantic period, or the twoness of the “split mind” of the schizophrenic, and neither is it the twoness of the self/other distinction that so forcefully animated culture and philosophy during the twentieth century, particularly in cultural anthropology and then later in poststructuralism. Rather we see here a twoness of the material, a digitization at the level of the aesthetic regime itself.

    Consider the call and response heard across the works featured here by Apagya and Deschenes. At the most superficial level, one might observe that these are works about superimposition, about compositing. Apagya’s photographs exploit one of the oldest and most useful tricks of picture making: superimpose one layer on top of another layer in order to produce a picture. Painters do this all the time of course, and very early on it became a mainstay of photographic technique (even if it often remained relegated to mere “trick” photography), evident in photomontage, spirit photography, and even the side-by-side compositing techniques of the carte de visite popularized by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in the 1850s. Recall too that the cinema has made productive use of superimposition, adopting the technique with great facility from the theater and its painted scrims and moving backdrops. (Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the end of A Night at the Opera [1935], when Harpo Marx goes on a lunatic rampage through the flyloft during the opera’s performance, raising and lowering painted backdrops to great comic effect.) So the more “modern” cinematic techniques of, first, rear screen projection, and then later chromakey (known commonly as the “green screen” or “blue screen” effect), are but a reiteration of the much longer legacy of compositing in image making.

    Deschenes’ “Green Screen #4” points to this broad aesthetic history, as it empties out the content of the image, forcing us to acknowledge the suppressed color itself – in this case green, but any color will work. Hence Deschenes gives us nothing but a pure background, a pure something.

    Allowed to curve gracefully off the wall onto the floor, the green color field resembles the “sweep wall” used commonly in portraiture or fashion photography whenever an artist wishes to erase the lines and shadows of the studio environment. “Green Screen #4” is thus the antithesis of what has remained for many years the signal art work about video chromakey, Peter Campus’ “Three Transitions” (1973). Whereas Campus attempted to draw attention to the visual and spatial paradoxes made possible by chromakey, and even in so doing was forced to hide the effect inside the jittery gaps between images, Deschenes by contrast feels no such anxiety, presenting us with the medium itself, minus any “content” necessary to fuel it, minus the powerful mise en abyme of the Campus video, and so too minus Campus’ mirthless autobiographical staging. If Campus ultimately resolves the relationship between images through a version of montage, Deschenes offers something more like a “divorced digitality” in which no two images are brought into relation at all, only the minimal substrate remains, without input or output.

    The sweep wall is evident too in Apagya’s images, only of a different sort, as the artifice of the various backgrounds – in a nod not so much to fantasy as to kitsch – both fuses with and separates from the foreground subject. Yet what might ultimately unite the works by Apagya and Deschenes is not so much the compositing technique, but a more general reference, albeit oblique but nevertheless crucial, to the fact that such techniques are today entirely quotidian, entirely usual. These are everyday folk techniques through and through. One needs only a web cam and simple software to perform chromakey compositing on a computer, just as one might go to the county fair and have one’s portrait superimposed on the body of a cartoon character.

    What I’m trying to stress here is that there is nothing particularly “technological” about digitality. All that is required is a division from one to two – and by extension from two to three and beyond to the multiple. This is why I see layering as so important, for it spotlights an internal separation within the image. Apagya’s settings are digital, therefore, simply by virtue of the fact that he addresses our eye toward two incompatible aesthetic zones existing within the image. The artifice of a painted backdrop, and the pose of a person in a portrait.

    Certainly the digital computer is “digital” by virtue of being binary, which is to say by virtue of encoding and processing numbers at the lowest levels using base-two mathematics. But that is only the most prosaic and obvious exhibit of its digitality. For the computer is “digital” too in its atomization of the universe, into, for example, a million Facebook profiles, all equally separate and discrete. Or likewise “digital” too in the computer interface itself which splits things irretrievably into cursor and content, window and file, or even, as we see commonly in video games, into heads-up-display and playable world. The one divides into two.

    So when clusters of repetition appear across Ann Craven’s paintings, or the iterative layers of the “copy” of the “reconstruction” in the video here by Thomas Julier and Cédric Eisenring, or the accumulations of images that proliferate in Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenschied’s “Comparative History of Classic Animated GIFs and Glitter Graphics” [2007] (a small snapshot of what they have assembled in their spectacular book from 2009 titled Digital Folklore), or elsewhere in works like Oliver Laric’s clipart videos (“787 Cliparts” [2006] and “2000 Cliparts” [2010]), we should not simply recall the famous meditations on copies and repetitions, from Walter Benjamin in 1936 to Gilles Deleuze in 1968, but also a larger backdrop that evokes the very cleavages emanating from western metaphysics itself from Plato onward. For this same metaphysics of division is always already a digital metaphysics as it forever differentiates between subject and object, Being and being, essence and instance, or original and repetition. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we see here such vivid aesthetic meditations on that same cleavage, whether or not a computer was involved.

    Another perspective on the same question would be to think about appropriation. There is a common way of talking about Internet art that goes roughly as follows: the beginning of net art in the middle to late 1990s was mostly “modernist” in that it tended to reflect back on the possibilities of the new medium, building an aesthetic from the material affordances of code, screen, browser, and jpeg, just as modernists in painting or literature built their own aesthetic style from a reflection on the specific affordances of line, color, tone, or timbre; whereas the second phase of net art, coinciding with “Web 2.0” technologies like blogging and video sharing sites, is altogether more “postmodern” in that it tends to co-opt existing material into recombinant appropriations and remixes. If something like the “WebStalker” web browser or the Jodi.org homepage are emblematic of the first period, then John Michael Boling’s “Guitar Solo Threeway,” Brody Condon’s “Without Sun,” or the Nasty Nets web surfing club, now sadly defunct, are emblematic of the second period.

    I’m not entirely unsatisfied by such a periodization, even if it tends to confuse as many things as it clarifies – not entirely unsatisfied because it indicates that appropriation too is a technique of digitality. As Martin Heidegger signals, by way of his notoriously enigmatic concept Ereignis, western thought and culture was always a process in which a proper relationship of belonging is established in a world, and so too appropriation establishes new relationships of belonging between objects and their contexts, between artists and materials, and between viewers and works of art. (Such is the definition of appropriation after all: to establish a belonging.) This is what I mean when I say that appropriation is a technique of digitality: it calls out a distinction in the object from “where it was prior” to “where it is now,” simply by removing that object from one context of belonging and separating it out into another. That these two contexts are merely different – that something has changed – is evidence enough of the digitality of appropriation. Even when the act of appropriation does not reduplicate the object or rely on multiple sources, as with the artistic ready-made, it still inaugurates a “twoness” in the appropriated object, an asterisk appended to the art work denoting that something is different.

    TMu_Cyborg_2011_18-1024x682
    Takeshi Murata, “Cyborg” (2011)

    Perhaps this is why Takeshi Murata continues his exploration of the multiplicities at the core of digital aesthetics by returning to that age old format, the still life. Is not the still life itself a kind of appropriation, in that it brings together various objects into a relationship of belonging: fig and fowl in the Dutch masters, or here the various detritus of contemporary cyber culture, from cult films to iPhones?

    Because appropriation brings things together it must grapple with a fundamental question. Whatever is brought together must form a relation. These various things must sit side-by-side with each other. Hence one might speak of any grouping of objects in terms of their “parallel” nature, that is to say, in terms of the way in which they maintain their multiple identities in parallel.

    But let us dwell for a moment longer on these agglomerations of things, and in particular their “parallel” composition. By parallel I mean the way in which digital media tend to segregate and divide art into multiple, separate channels. These parallel channels may be quite manifest, as in the separate video feeds that make up the aforementioned “Guitar Solo Threeway,” or they may issue from the lowest levels of the medium, as when video compression codecs divide the moving image into small blocks of pixels that move and morph semi-autonomously within the frame. In fact I have found it useful to speak of this in terms of the “parallel image” in order to differentiate today’s media making from that of a century ago, which Friedrich Kittler and others have chosen to label “serial” after the serial sequences of the film strip, or the rat-ta-tat-tat of a typewriter.

    Thus films like Tatjana Marusic’s “The Memory of a Landscape” (2004) or Takeshi Murata’s “Monster Movie” (2005) are genuinely digital films, for they show parallelity in inscription. Each individual block in the video compression scheme has its own autonomy and is able to write to the screen in parallel with all the other blocks. These are quite literally, then, “multichannel” videos – we might even take a cue from online gaming circles and label them “massively multichannel” videos. They are multichannel not because they require multiple monitors, but because each individual block or “channel” within the image acts as an individual micro video feed. Each color block is its own channel. Thus, the video compression scheme illustrates, through metonymy, how pixel images work in general, and, as I suggest, it also illustrates the larger currents of digitality, for it shows that these images, in order to create “an” image must first proliferate the division of sub-images, which themselves ultimately coalesce into something resembling a whole. In other words, in order to create a “one” they must first bifurcate the single image source into two or more separate images.

    The digital image is thus a cellular and discrete image, consisting of separate channels multiplexed in tandem or triplicate or, greater, into nine, twelve, twenty-four, one hundred, or indeed into a massively parallel image of a virtually infinite visuality.

    For me this generates a more appealing explanation for why art and culture has, over the last several decades, developed a growing anxiety over copies, repetitions, simulations, appropriations, reenactments – you name it. It is common to attribute such anxiety to a generalized disenchantment permeating modern life: our culture has lost its aura and can no longer discern an original from a copy due to endless proliferations of simulation. Such an assessment is only partially correct. I say only partially because I am skeptical of the romantic nostalgia that often fuels such pronouncements. For who can demonstrate with certainty that the past carried with it a greater sense of aesthetic integrity, a greater unity in art? Yet the assessment begins to adopt a modicum of sense if we consider it from a different point of view, from the perspective of a generalized digitality. For if we define the digital as “the one dividing into two,” then it would be fitting to witness works of art that proliferate these same dualities and multiplicities. In other words, even if there was a “pure” aesthetic origin it was a digital origin to begin with. And thus one needn’t fret over it having infected our so-called contemporary sensibilities.

    Instead it is important not to be blinded by the technology. But rather to determine that, within a generalized digitality, there must be some kind of differential at play. There must be something different, and without such a differential it is impossible to say that something is something (rather than something else, or indeed rather than nothing). The one must divide into something else. Nothing less and nothing more is required, only a generic difference. And this is our first insight into the “something” of the digital.

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • Network Pessimism

    Network Pessimism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    I’ve been thinking a lot about pessimism recently. Eugene Thacker has been deep in this material for some time already. In fact he has a new, lengthy manuscript on pessimism called Infinite Resignation, which is a bit of departure from his other books in terms of tone and structure. I’ve read it and it’s excellent. Definitely “the worst” he’s ever written! Following the style of other treatises from the history of philosophical pessimism–Leopardi, Cioran, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and others–the bulk of the book is written in short aphorisms. It’s very poetic language, and some sections are driven by his own memories and meditations, all in an attempt to plumb the deepest, darkest corners of the worst the universe has to offer.

    Meanwhile, the worst can’t stay hidden. Pessimism has made it to prime time, to NPR, and even right-wing media. Despite all this attention, Eugene seems to have little interest in showing his manuscript to publishers. A true pessimist! Not to worry, I’m sure the book will see the light of day eventually. Or should I say dead of night? When it does, the book is sure to sadden, discourage, and generally worsen the lives of Thacker fans everywhere.

    Interestingly pessimism also appears in a number of other authors and fields. I’m thinking, for instance, of critical race theory and the concept of Afro-pessimism. The work of Fred Moten and Frank B. Wilderson, III is particularly interesting in that regard. Likewise queer theory has often wrestled with pessimism, be it the “no future” debates around reproductive futurity, or what Anna Conlan has simply labeled “homo-pessimism,” that is, the way in which the “persistent association of homosexuality with death and oppression contributes to a negative stereotype of LGBTQ lives as unhappy and unhealthy.”[1]

    In his review of my new book, Andrew Culp made reference to how some of this material has influenced me. I’ll be posting more on Moten and these other themes in the future, but let me here describe, in very general terms, how the concept of pessimism might apply to contemporary digital media.

    *

    A previous post was devoted to the reticular fallacy, defined as the false assumption that the erosion of hierarchical organization leads to an erosion of organization as such. Here I’d like to address the related question of reticular pessimism or, more simply, network pessimism.

    Network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: (1) “everything is a network”; (2) “the best response to networks is more networks.”

    Who says everything is a network? Everyone, it seems. In philosophy, Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. In literary studies, Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. In the military, Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. (But so too our enemies are networks: the terror network.) Art, architecture, managerial literature, computer science, neuroscience, and many other fields–all have shifted prominently in recent years toward a network model. Most important, however, is the contemporary economy and the mode of production. Today’s most advanced companies are essentially network companies. Google monetizes the shape of networks (in part via clustering algorithms). Facebook has rewritten subjectivity and social interaction along the lines of canalized and discretized network services. The list goes on and on. Thus I characterize the first assumption — “everything is a network” — as a kind of network fundamentalism. It claims that whatever exists in the world appears naturally in the form of a system, an ecology, an assemblage, in short, as a network.

    Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new grand récit. As metanarrative, the network will guide us into a new Dark Age.

    If the first assumption expresses a positive dogma or creed, the second is more negative or nihilistic. The second assumption — that the best response to networks is more networks — is also evident in all manner of social and political life today. Eugene and I described this phenomena at greater length in The Exploit, but consider a few different examples from contemporary debates… In military theory: network-centric warfare is the best response to terror networks. In Deleuzian philosophy: the rhizome is the best response to schizophrenic multiplicity. In autonomist Marxism: the multitude is the best response to empire. In the environmental movement: ecologies and systems are the best response to the systemic colonization of nature. In computer science: distributed architectures are the best response to bottlenecks in connectivity. In economics: heterogenous “economies of scope” are the best response to the distributed nature of the “long tail.”

    To be sure, there are many sites today where networks still confront power centers. The point is not to deny the continuing existence of massified, centralized sovereignty. But at the same time it’s important to contextualize such confrontations within a larger ideological structure, one that inoculates the network form and recasts it as the exclusive site of liberation, deviation, political maturation, complex thinking, and indeed the very living of life itself.

    Why label this a pessimism? For the same reasons that queer theory and critical race theory are grappling with pessimism: Is alterity a death sentence? Is this as good as it gets? Is this all there is? Can we imagine a parallel universe different from this one? (Although the pro-pessimism camp would likely state it in the reverse: We must destabilize and annihilate all normative descriptions of the “good.” This world isn’t good, and hooray for that!)

    So what’s the problem? Why should we be concerned about network pessimism? Let me state clearly so there’s no misunderstanding, pessimism isn’t the problem here. Likewise, networks are not the problem. (Let no one label me “anti network” nor “anti pessimism” — in fact I’m not even sure what either of those positions would mean.) The issue, as I see it, is that network pessimism deploys and sustains a specific dogma, confining both networks and pessimism to a single, narrow ideological position. It’s this narrow-mindedness that should be questioned.

    Specifically I can see three basic problems with network pessimism, the problem of presentism, the problem of ideology, and the problem of the event.

    The problem of presentism refers to the way in which networks and network thinking are, by design, allergic to historicization. This exhibits itself in a number of different ways. Networks arrive on the scene at the proverbial “end of history” (and they do so precisely because they help end this history). Ecological and systems-oriented thinking, while admittedly always temporal by nature, gained popularity as a kind of solution to the problems of diachrony. Space and landscape take the place of time and history. As Fredric Jameson has noted, the “spatial turn” of postmodernity goes hand in hand with a denigration of the “temporal moment” of previous intellectual movements.

    man machines buy fritz kahn
    Fritz Kahn, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)” (Stuttgart, 1926). Image source: NIH

    From Hegel’s history to Luhmann’s systems. From Einstein’s general relativity to Riemann’s complex surfaces. From phenomenology to assemblage theory. From the “time image” of cinema to the “database image” of the internet. From the old mantra always historicize to the new mantra always connect.

    During the age of clockwork, the universe was thought to be a huge mechanism, with the heavens rotating according to the music of the spheres. When the steam engine was the source of newfound power, the world suddenly became a dynamo of untold thermodynamic force. After full-fledged industrialization, the body became a factory. Technologies and infrastructures are seductive metaphors. So it’s no surprise (and no coincidence) that today, in the age of the network, a new template imprints itself on everything in sight. In other words, the assumption “everything is a network” gradually falls apart into a kind of tautology of presentism. “Everything right now is a network…because everything right now has been already defined as a network.”

    This leads to the problem of ideology. Again we’re faced with an existential challenge, because network technologies were largely invented as a non-ideological or extra-ideological structure. When writing Protocol I interviewed some of the computer scientists responsible for the basic internet protocols and most of them reported that they “have no ideology” when designing networks, that they are merely interested in “code that works” and “systems that are efficient and robust.” In sociology and philosophy of science, figures like Bruno Latour routinely describe their work as “post-critical,” merely focused on the direct mechanisms of network organization. Hence ideology as a problem to be forgotten or subsumed: networks are specifically conceived and designed as those things that both are non-ideological in their conception (we just want to “get things done”), but also post-ideological in their architecture (in that they acknowledge and co-opt the very terms of previous ideological debates, things like heterogeneity, difference, agency, and subject formation).

    The problem of the event indicates a crisis for the very concept of events themselves. Here the work of Alain Badiou is invaluable. Network architectures are the perfect instantiation of what Badiou derisively labels “democratic materialism,” that is, a world in which there are “only bodies and languages.” In Badiou’s terms, if networks are the natural state of the situation and there is no way to deviate from nature, then there is no event, and hence no possibility for truth. Networks appear, then, as the consummate “being without event.”

    What could be worse? If networks are designed to accommodate massive levels of contingency — as with the famous Robustness Principle — then they are also exceptionally adept at warding off “uncontrollable” change wherever it might arise. If everything is a network, then there’s no escape, there’s no possibility for the event.

    Jameson writes as much in The Seeds of Time when he says that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth and the end of nature than it is to imagine the ends of capitalism. Network pessimism, in other words, is really a kind of network defeatism in that it makes networks the alpha and omega of our world. It’s easier to imagine the end of that world than it is to discard the network metaphor and imagine a kind of non-world in which networks are no longer dominant.

    In sum, we shouldn’t give in to network pessimism. We shouldn’t subscribe to the strong claim that everything is a network. (Nor should we subscribe to the softer claim, that networks are merely the most common, popular, or natural architecture for today’s world.) Further, we shouldn’t think that networks are the best response to networks. Instead we must ask the hard questions. What is the political fate of networks? Did heterogeneity and systematicity survive the Twentieth Century? If so, at what cost? What would a non-net look like? And does thinking have a future without the network as guide?

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    Notes

    [1] Anna Conlan, “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010). 253-263.

  • The Reticular Fallacy

    The Reticular Fallacy

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    We live in an age of heterogenous anarchism. Contingency is king. Fluidity and flux win over solidity and stasis. Becoming has replaced being. Rhizomes are better than trees. To be political today, one must laud horizontality. Anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism are the order of the day. Call it “vulgar ’68-ism.” The principles of social upheaval, so associated with the new social movements in and around 1968, have succeed in becoming the very bedrock of society at the new millennium.

    But there’s a flaw in this narrative, or at least a part of the story that strategically remains untold. The “reticular fallacy” can be broken down into two key assumptions. The first is an assumption about the nature of sovereignty and power. The second is an assumption about history and historical change. Consider them both in turn.

    (1) First, under the reticular fallacy, sovereignty and power are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, foundation, or rigid creeds of whatever kind (viz. dogma, be it sacred or secular). Thus the sovereign is the one who is centralized, who stands at the top of a vertical order of command, who rests on an essentialist ideology in order to retain command, who asserts, dogmatically, unchangeable facts about his own essence and the essence of nature. This is the model of kings and queens, but also egos and individuals. It is what Barthes means by author in his influential essay “Death of the Author,” or Foucault in his “What is an Author?” This is the model of the Prince, so often invoked in political theory, or the Father invoked in psycho-analytic theory. In Derrida, the model appears as logos, that is, the special way or order of word, speech, and reason. Likewise, arkhe: a term that means both beginning and command. The arkhe is the thing that begins, and in so doing issues an order or command to guide whatever issues from such a beginning. Or as Rancière so succinctly put it in his Hatred of Democracy, the arkhe is both “commandment and commencement.” These are some of the many aspects of sovereignty and power as defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation.

    (2) The second assumption of the reticular fallacy is that, given the elimination of such dogmatic verticality, there will follow an elimination of sovereignty as such. In other words, if the aforementioned sovereign power should crumble or fall, for whatever reason, the very nature of command and organization will also vanish. Under this second assumption, the structure of sovereignty and the structure of organization become coterminous, superimposed in such a way that the shape of organization assumes the identical shape of sovereignty. Sovereign power is vertical, hence organization is vertical; sovereign power is centralized, hence organization is centralized; sovereign power is essentialist, hence organization, and so on. Here we see the claims of, let’s call it, “naïve” anarchism (the non-arkhe, or non foundation), which assumes that repressive force lies in the hands of the bosses, the rulers, or the hierarchy per se, and thus after the elimination of such hierarchy, life will revert so a more direct form of social interaction. (I say this not to smear anarchism in general, and will often wish to defend a form of anarcho-syndicalism.) At the same time, consider the case of bourgeois liberalism, which asserts the rule of law and constitutional right as a way to mitigate the excesses of both royal fiat and popular caprice.

    reticular connective tissue
    source: imgkid.com

    We name this the “reticular” fallacy because, during the late Twentieth Century and accelerating at the turn of the millennium with new media technologies, the chief agent driving the kind of historical change described in the above two assumptions was the network or rhizome, the structure of horizontal distribution described so well in Deleuze and Guattari. The change is evident in many different corners of society and culture. Consider mass media: the uni-directional broadcast media of the 1920s or ’30s gradually gave way to multi-directional distributed media of the 1990s. Or consider the mode of production, and the shift from a Fordist model rooted in massification, centralization, and standardization, to a post-Fordist model reliant more on horizontality, distribution, and heterogeneous customization. Consider even the changes in theories of the subject, shifting as they have from a more essentialist model of the integral ego, however fraught by the volatility of the unconscious, to an anti-essentialist model of the distributed subject, be it postmodernism’s “schizophrenic” subject or the kind of networked brain described by today’s most advanced medical researchers.

    Why is this a fallacy? What is wrong about the above scenario? The problem isn’t so much with the historical narrative. The problem lies in an unwillingness to derive an alternative form of sovereignty appropriate for the new rhizomatic societies. Opponents of the reticular fallacy claim, in other words, that horizontality, distributed networks, anti-essentialism, etc., have their own forms of organization and control, and indeed should be analyzed accordingly. In the past I’ve used the concept of “protocol” to describe such a scenario as it exists in digital media infrastructure. Others have used different concepts to describe it in different contexts. On the whole, though, opponents of the reticular fallacy have not effectively made their case, myself included. The notion that rhizomatic structures are corrosive of power and sovereignty is still the dominant narrative today, evident across both popular and academic discourses. From talk of the “Twitter revolution” during the Arab Spring, to the ideologies of “disruption” and “flexibility” common in corporate management speak, to the putative egalitarianism of blog-based journalism, to the growing popularity of the Deleuzian and Latourian schools in philosophy and theory: all of these reveal the contemporary assumption that networks are somehow different from sovereignty, organization, and control.

    To summarize, the reticular fallacy refers to the following argument: since power and organization are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation, the elimination of such things will prompt a general mollification if not elimination of power and organization as such. Such an argument is false because it doesn’t take into account the fact that power and organization may inhabit any number of structural forms. Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.

    Consider the kind of methods and concepts still popular in critical theory today: contingency, heterogeneity, anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, anarchism, chaos, plasticity, flux, fluidity, horizontality, flexibility. Such concepts are often praised and deployed in theories of the subject, analyses of society and culture, even descriptions of ontology and metaphysics. The reticular fallacy does not invalidate such concepts. But it does put them in question. We can not assume that such concepts are merely descriptive or neutrally empirical. Given the way in which horizontality, flexibility, and contingency are sewn into the mode of production, such “descriptive” claims are at best mirrors of the economic infrastructure and at worse ideologically suspect. At the same time, we can not simply assume that such concepts are, by nature, politically or ethically desirable in themselves. Rather, we ought to reverse the line of inquiry. The many qualities of rhizomatic systems should be understood not as the pure and innocent laws of a newer and more just society, but as the basic tendencies and conventional rules of protocological control.


    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here earlier in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism by Stefan Jonsson

    Reichstag

    a review by Peter Gengler
    ~
    The failure of interwar Central Europe’s democracies remains fertile ground for scholars in the 21st century. In particular, the Weimar Republic’s promises and failures, its vibrant intellectual and artistic communities, and its ultimate collapse in 1933 continue to fascinate and haunt academics and lay audiences alike. Weimar Germany remains the object of intense interest given the barbarity that followed its demise, yet it also serves as a compelling warning about the fragility of democracy.

    Stefan Jonsson’s Crowds and Democracy examines the tumultuous years between 1918 and 1933 in an original and bold manner, contributing fresh insights to what could otherwise prove a hackneyed subject. In particular, the study’s creative approach and analysis of “the masses” contributes to the literature on Germany’s and Austria’s interwar politics and culture, and more generally raises provocative questions about the challenges of participatory politics, democratic representation, and the individual’s relationship to these processes. Indeed, as Jonsson points out, Europe’s austerity programs and the public outrage, manifested in the recent resurgence of nationalist right-wing parties and fascist movements in the European Union, demand a renewed focus on interwar social movements.

    Stefan Jonsson’s background, training, and research interests suit him well for the type of multidisciplinary investigation that he attempts here. He received his Ph.D. in literature from Duke University, and currently is a professor of ethnic studies at Linköping University in Sweden. The subject of Crowds and Democracy continues Jonsson’s previous work, in which he charted the European understanding of the masses from 1789 to 1989. 1 The monograph under review explores 1920s Austrian and German mass psychology, crowd theory, and the idea of “the masses” not simply as intriguing phenomena, but rather as problems in their own right caused and produced by mass mobilization, the social sciences and arts, and the ambivalences of democracy. Given the author’s expertise and familiarity with different disciplines, Crowds and Democracy combines and commands the literature and theories of literary criticism, philosophy, and intellectual and cultural history in an impressive and authoritative way.

    Jonsson traces the trajectory of the discourse and idea of “the masses,” concentrating on the years between 1918 and 1933. Each chapter represents a sort of case study as he analyzes the works of intellectuals or artists who are symbolic of a particular school of thought or new direction in scholarship. Jonsson thus shows how the meaning of “the mass” became a subject of investigation after the 1890s by mass psychology and mass sociology. This widely accepted notion held that the mass represented the opposite of bourgeois individuality, organization, education, masculinity, and positive qualities in general—the crowd was defined through negation. This assumption nevertheless gave way to a variety of views that attributed rationality to the crowds and sought to understand their internal dynamics, seeing “the masses” as a social formation in their own right.

    Jonsson shows how, despite their increased scrutiny of the masses, German and Austrian intellectuals by the 1920s were no clearer on comprehending the phenomenon and coming up with a suitable theory for understanding it and that by this time no consensus on who constituted the mass and why they were so prevalent in interwar politics existed, though the dominant opinion among sociologists was that they were a symptom of crisis and instability—the “alarm bells of history” (84). These social movements were an “allegory,” Jonsson contends, “evoked by the need to mark powers of change that appeared to govern the world of modernity…the masses connoted a dimension of social existence that caused fear and anxiety precisely because it disrupted the horizon of values and meanings through which class and gender identities had until then been affirmed, cultural hierarchies secured, and social order constituted” (112).

    Though they aroused great trepidation, during the 1920s the idea of “the masses” saw greater contestation as well. Indeed, Jonsson concludes that “[t]o enter the cultural landscape of interwar Germany and Austria is to encounter competing views, theories, and images of crowds” (179), each with varying agendas and presumptions that constructed an image of them reflecting socialist egalitarianism and promises of a democratic society to cultural pessimism and fears of bedlam and anarchy. In short, Jonsson’s study seeks to trace the epistemological foundations of “the mass” in European thought.

    Complicating this study further, Jonsson argues that the discourses on the masses in interwar Europe actually revolved around the problem of democracy. The period saw a proliferation of contesting ideologies, each with a different view of how to constitute society and the polity. Between the poles of revolution and fascism, thinkers articulated various visions of the crowds that reflected the fractured political landscape. “The masses,” therefore, could be constructed in an exclusionary way or in such a manner that they heralded promises of a better future; the throngs of people heightened fears of proletarian revolution or inspired political action. “The masses” therefore touched on the fundamental problem of democracy: how to embody and speak for the people, how to organize them, and how to represent society as a whole. As Jonsson concludes, these social movements “were never anything more, and at the same time never anything less, than the signs and symptoms of unresolved problems concerning the adequate political, cultural, and aesthetic representations of socially significant passions and political desires” (253).

    There are a great many achievements that Jonsson can lay claim to. First and foremost, one cannot help but admire the wealth of material that Jonsson mines. Delving into novels, art, philosophy, historiography, and sociology, the author authoritatively marshals a wide range of sources and subjects them to astute analysis. A number of scholars ranging from the fields of literature, cultural studies, history, the social sciences, film, and art will find intriguing insights and benefit from the lens through which Jonsson reads this vast collection of materials.

    Historians of Germany will also be pleased that Jonsson’s treatment of the Weimar period was nuanced and avoided notions of an inevitable collapse into dictatorship. Moreover, Crowds and Democracy is not encumbered by the fascist specter. Jonsson quite rightly asserts that democracy in the interwar period—though crisis-ridden—cannot be reduced to Hitler’s rise to power. Thus, it is refreshing that Nazism is not the predominant focus. Though it may seem obvious for specialists, Weimar was not defined by fascism and the republic should be treated in its own right. Jonsson’s interpretation takes into account the crises and dangers facing the fledgling democracies, but he also is careful to differentiate his account by judiciously discussing the emancipatory ambitions within Germany’s and Austria’s first republics.

    Jonsson’s erudite treatment of the sociological profession in the interwar period is another remarkable feature of this study. Readers will be charmed with the ease and clarity with which Jonsson disseminates the writings of scholars such as Georg Simmel, Theodor Geiger, or Leopold von Wiese. The sections of the book concentrating on intellectual history convincingly demonstrate how the idea of “the masses” developed and how sociologists and thinkers contended with what was considered the core issue of the day. Moreover, Jonsson differentiates between the actual phenomenon of mass politics and the “idea” that was constructed by these intellectuals, with all of their presumptions and biases. The result is stimulating, as Jonsson places theorists in dialogue with one another and shows how European intellectual thought, psychoanalysis, and philosophy developed between 1918 and 1933.

    Despite these achievements, Crowds and Democracies also suffers from some deficiencies. To begin with, one wonders what audience Jonsson attempted to reach. The book’s intellectual density means that few beyond academia will find it accessible. Simply put: this is not an easy read. The long and meticulous analyses and focus on theory require an engaged and informed reader, especially since some of the historical context—while generally correct—is nevertheless cursory and assumes a reader well versed in Central European history.

    The organization, structure, and style of the book are also somewhat distracting. Generally, Jonsson’s study follows the trajectory of the discourse on “the masses” chronologically, but often subchapters elucidate a particular theme that requires back-tracking. The book essentially is a collection of essays, with the result that taken together, the book meanders and contains redundancies. Sprawling chapters ranging between 50 to over 70 pages could have been broken up more effectively. The argumentative thread is also not always clear; 47 pages in, the author is still explaining what his book will do and how it will be structured. The unclear organizing principle and diffused arguments and objectives detract from the overall work. The lack of a bibliography is also disconcerting. Crowds and Democracy would have benefited from greater organizational clarity and a sustained and coherent argument, thereby guiding readers through an already challenging intellectual terrain more carefully.

    These criticisms of style aside, there are also some shortcomings with Jonsson’s argument. His claim that “few authors have connected the theme of the masses to Weimar history in any deeper sense” (xv) implies that this book seeks to remedy this gap in the literature. Yet while Jonsson succeeds in his discussion of how “the masses” were viewed, he does not fully accomplish his goal of unifying the discourse on mass movements and the actual phenomenon itself. What we are left with is a study of how intellectual and cultural elites contended with “the mass” theoretically and aesthetically. This does not reveal, however, what goals mass politics had and what ideologies drove them. We have little sense of the dynamics of the social movements, what strategies they pursued, or the self-perception of these entities. Jonsson’s argument assumes that the perceptions of Weimar luminaries—as astute or revealing as they may be—had a profound influence on the construction and instrumentalization of the concept of “the masses.” But this phenomenon was not a mere academic or cultural construction. As the author himself points out numerous times, mass politics were a real and defining feature of the interwar period.

    A greater attention on what animated and inspired the crowd would have been of great relevance for the central issue at hand: how “the masses” were imagined and perceived. For instance, taking into account the role of the 1917 Russian Revolution as inspiration for some and specter for others would have both explained the aspirations and fears that Bolshevism unleashed in Germany and which informed how elites viewed mass politics. Not only was the prospect of a proletarian revolution the source for socialist ambitions, it also fueled the animosities of reactionaries who dreaded such an uprising. The intellectual content of the various völkisch movements, the desires for a Volksgemeinschaft, and the inspiration of Mussolini not only motivated rightwing factions, they also had a profound effect on how contemporaries viewed the crowds in the streets. Yet all of this is muted in Jonsson’s study, so that his connection of “the masses” to Weimar history is limited. As intriguing as the observations of sociologists and artists may be, it nevertheless fails to give the crowd agency and in any case is a very narrow focus. In short: a greater attention to the actual crowds and not just how they were perceived could have fleshed out the concept “the masses” more thoroughly. A firmer historical grounding would have only added to this study. 2 As it stands, from a historian’s perspective this book suffers from a lack of tangibility and empiricism, and offers only limited insight into the phenomenon of mass politics and Weimar political and cultural history.

    A second shortcoming with Jonsson’s argument concerns his methodology. The claim that discussion of mass politics was ubiquitous and seen as a bellwether for the modern age would have found greater resonance by broadening the analysis beyond cultural elites. It is questionable how central the thinkers chronicled in this study were to the public discourse of the era. Jonsson admirably outlines the contours of the theoretical construction of “the masses” and meticulously documents how they were viewed. Yet missing is a whole other discourse beyond the ivory towers of academia and the artistic community which contemplated the political stakes. How much of this debate depended on Freud, Musil, Adorno, or any number of other notable thinkers, some of whom wrote in exile or never even finished their analyses? Sources such as newspapers or materials of politicians engaged in mass mobilization would have enriched Jonsson’s study of how contemporaries viewed this phenomenon and capitalized on it or struggled against it. He does analyze socialist publications such as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, but a greater use of similar source types would have bolstered his argument. What about the NSDAP publication, The Völkischer Beobachter? Jonsson focuses on rightwing thinkers such as Ernst and Friedrich Gerhard Jünger for another viewpoint on mass politics, but surely other, more widely disseminated sources could have benefitted Jonsson’s study.

    Overall, Jonsson has approached the interwar period in a fresh and creative way, demonstrating that the struggle to represent and understand the masses reflected the instability of democracy and the perplexity of the modern individuality. Whether seeing masses as signals of cultural decline or promises of a new, egalitarian society, Jonsson admirably shows how the sweeping political and social changes after 1918 shook European thought to its core. It is not just a unique history of Weimar, but also an understudied aspect of the ambivalence of democracy and the problems of democratic representation. Intellectual historians, sociologists, and scholars of art and cinema will find Crowds and Democracy a rewarding read. Nevertheless, beyond specialists, this book will not find a wide readership, and those seeking to better understand Central European political or cultural history would be better served by starting with more empirical studies.
    _____

    Peter Gengler is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern German history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation is on expellee interest group politics and the construction and instrumentalization of expulsion narratives in public discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1944 and 1970. From 2014 to 2016, Peter will be conducting dissertation research in Germany with support of the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) and the Berlin Program.
    _____

    notes:

    1. Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Back to the essay

    2. For excellent historical studies of Weimar, consult Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 1993); Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001); and Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Back to the essay

  • Cinema & Painting

    Cinema & Painting

    image


    Michelle Menzies and b2er Daniel Morgan, with The Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, present Cinema & Painting:

    Cinema & Painting examines the intersection of two screen-based arts within the wider frame of digital culture. Organised around artists, both contemporary and historical, who make volumetric cinemas and paintings that spill off the wall, the exhibition maps the genealogy and continuing life of a modernist tradition of depth. By addressing the materiality of projective space—that physical zone beyond the picture plane activated by the body of the spectator in conjunction with the beam of the projector or the intricacies of painted forms—Cinema & Painting examines the interconnection of these arts not only in pictorial but in explicitly phenomenological terms.

    Hosted from 11 February to 11 May 2014. Find out more here, and check out the representative images for the gallery below.
    (cover photo: Phil Solomon, film still from American Falls, 2000-12. Digital video, altered archival footage.)


    image




















    Colin McCahon, View from the Top of the Cliff, 1971. Acrylic on paper.


    image
        Len Lye, stencil from Musical Poster #1, 1940. Paint on heavy card, occasional pencil inscriptions.


    image
        Jim Davis, film still from Sea Rhythms, 1971. 35mm transferred to digital video.


    image
        Matt Saunders, film still from Century Rolls, 2012. Digital video.


    MORE FROM THE GALLERY