On Finding Ourselves in a State of Exception (Part 1)

Giorgio Agamben

 

We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: where are we now? 

And it is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.

 

 

I.

 

A state of exception is one which grants the powers that be the right to suspend parliamentary procedure and transcend the rule of law in the name of the greater good - or, as in the case of the coronavirus pandemic, public health.

Although the idea that a ruler or government may need to take extraordinary measures in order to deal with an emergency of some kind is nothing new, the concept of Ausnahmezustand was introduced into modern political philosophy by Carl Schmitt (someone who, as a prominent member of the Nazi Party, knew a thing or two about creating and exploiting a crisis situation in order to consolidate and extend power).     

 

The concept was then further developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in his book State of Exception (2005), argues that rule by decree has become an increasingly common phenomenon in all modern states. To illustrate this, he traces out the manner in which the September 11 attacks mutated into a war on terror; something which involved invading Afghanistan and bombing Baghdad, but also justified the creation of a surveillance system (in the name of homeland security) which placed everyone under suspicion. 

 

The key thing is: temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent once they are put in place; i.e., the exception becomes the rule ...

 

 

II.  

 

And so, here we are in 2022 ... 

 

But, asks Agamben, where are we now as we enter a post-pandemic world? 

 

To try and answer this question, Agamben has collected 25 short texts written during the state of exception triggered by Covid-19 [a]. Reflecting upon the Great Reset affecting Western democracies, he observes with astonishment as a majority of citizens not only accept but demand unprecedented limitations on their freedom.

 

Agamben took a lot of criticism for these short texts, including from fellow intellectuals who, rather than think through the political and ethical consequences of the measures taken during the pandemic, gleefully supported mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing rules, and programmes of mass vaccination.

 

But he should, rather, have been commended for his courage in speaking up and speaking out when so many remained silent or simply echoed the official line that biosecurity (and protecting the state health system) is all that matters.  

 

 

III.

 

Agamben cerainly doesn't mince his words: he explicitly states at the outset, for example, that, in his view, "the dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy - with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions" [8] and replace it with a new order that smells suspiciously despotic. 

 

We've not seen anything like this in Europe since 1933, "when the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler, without formally abolishing the Weimar Constitution, declared a state of exception that [...] effectively invalidated the constitutional propositions that were ostensibly still in force" [8] [b].

 

New governing techniques - sold to us via a compliant media and our favourite online networks - combine ideals of wokeness and wellness into a kind of zen fascism. But, rather touchingly, Agamben remains optimistic; he can still envision new forms of resistance "and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them" [10] [c]. 

 

I'm not quite sure I understand precisely what he means by this politics to come, but he insists it will "not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the techonological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it" [10] [d].

 

Hmmm ...

 

 

IV. 

 

The coronavirus pandemic was one thing: the climate of panic cultivated by the media and authorities in order to establish a state of exception was something else. Who now would disagree with that? With the fact that the response to Covid-19 was disproportionate to say the very least. 

 

But then it provided the ideal pretext for imposing exceptional measures and increasing the level of fear that has been "systematically cultivated in people's minds" [13] in recent years; fear which makes us regard everyone as a vector of infection. 

 

Even those individuals who appear perfectly fit and well may be asymptomatic plague-spreaders. In fact, the apparently healthy are more dangerous than the obviously sick - so it becomes necessary to lock everyone up (or down) just to be on the safe side. 

 

And if this results - as it must - in the deterioration of human relationships, well, too bad; "even loved ones must not be approached or touched" [15]. Bare life is better than risking even the tiniest chance that one might get seriousy ill and die. 

 

But, unfortunately, bare life and the fear of losing it, "is not something that unites people; rather, it blinds and separates them" [18]. A society that values survival at all costs (which is even prepared to sacrifice freedom) ultimately isn't a society at all. 

 

And it certainly isn't a dwelling place; a Heideggerian word that Agamben seems to cherish, much like Byung-Chul Han, who in his most recent work insists mankind no longer knows how to dwell on the earth and under the sky [e]. It's certainly hard to dwell when you are socially distanced from other mortals and think that communicating on Zoom is preferable to meeting face-to-face. 

 

Like Agamben, I don't believe you can sustain or create a community based on new digital technology alone. In the end, hell is not other people, but the suspension of real friendships and physical contact with others.     

 

 

V.  

   

One of the great zombie-mantras of the pandemic - certainly here, in the UK - was: Follow the science [f].

 

But perhaps instead we - particularly journalists - ought to have interrogated the scientists. Because it is often mistaken - and often dangerous - to entrust everything to those in white coats:

 

"Rightly or not, scientists pursue in good faith the interests of science and, as history can teach us, they are willing to sacrifice any moral concern in this pursuit. No one will need reminding that, under Nazism, many esteemed scientists executed eugenic policies, never hestitating to take advantage of the camps for the performance of lethal experiments they considered useful for the progress of science [...]" [44-45]      

  

Experimental vaccines anyone ...?

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (ERIS, 2021). 

      This work was originally published in Italy as A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica, (Quodlibet, 2020). 

      All page numbers in the post refer to the updated English edition which has added chapters.

 

[b] Some readers will baulk at this hypothesis and find it silly (or offensive) to compare what is happening in Europe now with what happened in the 1930s. But Agamben insists that the liberal democratic order is "being replaced by a new despotism that, with the pervasiveness of its controls and with its suspension of all political activity, will be worse than the totalitarianisms we have known thus far" [42]. 

 

[c] Agamben would hate my description of his thinking as optimistic. As he tells one interviewer (Dimitria Pouliopoulou): "Pessimism and optimism are psychological states that have nothing to do with political analyses: those who use these terms only demonstrate their inability to think." [64]

 

[d] Speaking with Dimitria Pouliopoulou, Agamben says this about his idea of a politics to come: "For a careful observer it is difficult to decide whether we live today, in Europe, in a democracy that sees increasingly despotic forms of control, or in a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. It is beyond both that a new, future politics will have to appear." [69]

 

[e] See Byung-Chul Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022). I reflect on this book in a post that to be published shortly. 

[f] Whilst Agamben hints at a zombie-like aspect of the pandemic when he refers to human bodies "suspended indefinitely between life and death" in a twilight zone, unable to escape "its strictly medical boundaries" [64], I can't help thinking first and foremost of the ever-brilliant Mark Steyn whenever I hear someone utter the phrase follow the science: click here. 

 

To go to Part 2 of this post, click here.

On Following the Science

Follow The Science Art Print 

Designed and sold by halibutgoatramb

redbubble.com

 

 

When politicians says they will follow the science it means they are abdicating their duty to think and their responsibility to lead; they are hiding behind experts in order to justify their decisions and excuse their inevitable mistakes; Chris Whitty is basically a human shield employed to protect Boris Johnson. 

We repeatedly heard this phrase from UK government ministers during the Covid-19 pandemic - and I'm sure we'll hear it again this winter, if and when they decide to bring back social distancing, reintroduce mandatory mask wearing, and impose a new lockdown.

 

It is, as I indicate, a form of political cowardice and dishonesty, as well as a (perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of how science works; one that relies upon a rather slippery notion of consensus, when, in fact, there is no scientific agreement about how best to deal with a viral pandemic. 

 

Epidemiological models, based on what we have so far discovered about Covid-19, can vary greatly depending on the assumptions made by the modellers and how the data produced is interpreted and then implemented as actual policy. As one commentator has noted, government ministers "can trawl for evidence that suits their purposes or invest selectively in the types of research that are likely to show them in a favourable light" [1].  

 

Ultimately, the public are being misled whenever a politician claims to be simply following the science, even if political choices are (to a greater or lesser degree) informed by scientific findings. This is not because all politicians are liars or inherently corrupt; they may well be sincere in their belief that they are following the best scientific advice. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't guarantee "that this advice reflects an unbiased, unambiguous picture of how different policy options will work out in practice" [2].       

 

It's a shame that members of the mainstream media haven't done more in pointing this out. Too often during the pandemic, journalists simply followed the government's line in the naive belief that they were thereby also following the science. How refreshing it would have been if Laura Kuennsberg, for example, had stood up at a press briefing and reminded the PM that science does not think ... [3]

 

     

Notes

 

[1] Alex Stevens,  'Governments cannot just "follow the science" on COVID-19', Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, (June 2020), p. 560.  Click here to read online.  

 

[2] Ibid.  

[3] I'm borrowing the provocative claim made by Heidegger in Was Heisst Denken? (1954): "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht." See the English translation - What Is Called Thinking? - by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 8.

 

 

Watching the World Turn Day-Glo: Notes on Plastic Eating Bacteria

Image: Shutterstock / Wikicommons / Big Think

In the above picture we can observe Ideonella sakainesis happily feasting on a plastic bottle;

 breaking down polyethylene terephthalate into terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol - 

two delicious and yet environmentally benign substances.

Another good news story from the world of science and serendipity ...

After the discovery in 2016 of a bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic at a Japanese waste dump, researchers have now (accidentally) created a mutant enzyme that accelerates the break down of polymeric materials by around 20%.  

The international team were initially attempting to determine the exact structure of the enzyme produced by the bug, which, like all enzymes, is basically a large protein molecule composed of a long chain of amino acids. For this they used an intense beam of X-rays that is 10 billion times brighter than the sun and capable of illuminating individual atoms that might otherwise withdraw into darkness.

It looked as if the structure of the enzyme was very similar to one evolved by many bacteria to digest cutin - a waxy, water-repellent substance used by plants for protection. By slightly tweaking it, however, they discovered that they had inadvertently made the enzyme even more efficient at breaking down PET (the plastic most commonly used to make soft drink bottles). 

The new and improved enzyme takes only a few days to start the process of disintegrating the plastic; if left to degrade in the oceans, in comparison, it can take hundreds or even thousands of years. What's more, researchers are hopeful that this process might be significantly speeded up still further and thus play an important part in tackling the problem of what to do with the one million plastic bottles that are sold each minute around the globe.

One way they might possibly optimise the performance of the mutant enzyme is to transplant it into extremophile bacteria that enjoy living at temperatures over 70c. At such heat, PET changes from a hard to a viscous state, making it liable to degrade between 10 and 100 times faster.

It has to be said, this new research into enzyme technology is, to me at least, incredibly exciting and must hold out promise for the future. For not only are enzymes non-toxic and biodegradable, but they can be produced in large quantities by micro-organisms.

Having said that, it still remains crucial to reduce the amount of shit we produce and throw away in the first place. But this is surely a positive development - though not as astonishing as the fact that plastic-eating bugs evolved in the first place ... 

Note: those interested in reading the published research for themselves should see Harry P. Austin et al, 'Characterization and engineering of a plastic-degrading aromatic polyesterase', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018): click here.  

Musical bonus: to listen to the X-Ray Spex track from 1978 that inspired the title to this post (and to see the band fronted by the inimitable Poly Styrene performing on Top of the Pops), click here.

Vantablack: Notes on the Science of an Uncanny Colour and a Skirmish in the Art World

A technician holds up a sample of Vantablack against 
a silver foil background - et voilà! an instant black hole

Image: Surrey Nanosystems

I: Manufacturing the Void: On the Science of an Uncanny Colour

Despite Spanish songsters Los Bravos tautologically insisting that black is black, actually there are degrees of darkness to be considered. In other words, there's black, there's super black, and then there's Vantablack ... 

Vantablack is an uncanny substance composed of a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays which are grown on a substrate using a modified chemical vapour deposition. It is the darkest material ever made, absorbing almost 100% of radiation in the visible spectrum and creating the illusion of a black hole whenever it's applied to the surface of an object.

When light strikes an object covered in Vantablack, instead of reflecting as it normally would, thereby allowing the eye to see the object, it becomes trapped and continually deflected among the tubes, flattening out all appearance of depth. Eventually the light is absorbed and dissipated as heat.

There have, of course, been similar substances developed in the past; NASA, for example, had previously developed their own super black. But Vantablack is the baddest and the blackest of them all - the veritable prince of darkness.

Indeed, had I been the one naming it, I'd have called it Satanic black, rather than Vantablack (VANTA being an acronym derived from vertically aligned nanotube arrays); a name given by the British company Surrey NanoSystems who invented it, and who have identified a wide range of potential applications for the substance thanks to its emissivity and scalability. These include improving the performance of telescopes and materials used in solar power technology.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the military are also interested in how Vantablack might be used as thermal camouflage and increase the invisibility and all-round stealthiness of stealth aircraft.       


II: Brushes at Dawn: On a Skirmish in the Art World

Artists too have expressed an interest in this new (anti-)colour, which offers so many fascinating opportunities for deception and design. Unfortunately, however, they're not going to get the chance to use it after the sculptor Anish Kapoor proved to be (a) quick off the mark and (b) something of an arsehole; obtaining as he did an exclusive license for artistic use of Vantablack, causing outrage amongst others in the art world, including Jason Chase, Christian Furr, and Stuart Semple.

The latter, for example, retaliated by developing a strong shade of ultra-fluorescent pink - as well as a cherry-scented deep black colour - to which he attached (non-binding) clauses to the effect that Kapoor was not allowed to purchase them. The sculptor responded in December 2016 by posting a picture on Instagram of his raised middle finger dipped in Semple's pink paint.     

Jason Chase, meanwhile, teamed up with a company called NanoLab to create his own super dark colour which he named Singularity Black. Unlike Kapoor, he made his new black fully available to others artists should they wish to experiment with it in their work.
   

There are several ways to view this tiff between artists; one might see it as an example of the petty stupidity and rivalry that is, unfortunately, all too common in the creative industries. On the other hand, one could argue that it demonstrates the supreme importance of black within the art world, described by Renoir as la reine des couleurs and by Matisse as more than a mere colour - Black, he said, is a force that simplifies everything.   

Indeed, as Kapoor himself recognised, much of the fuss over his exclusive rights to Vantablack is due to the profoundly emotive nature of the colour: "I don’t think the same response would occur if it was white".

Notes

To find out more about Vantablack, visit the Surrey Nanosystems website by clicking here. 

For more details of the colourful skirmish between Kapoor and Semple, see the article by Adam Rogers, 'Art Fight! The Pinkest Pink Versus the Blackest Black' in Wired (22 June, 2017): click here. 

The line quoted from Kapoor at the end of this post is from an article by Brigid Delaney, '"You could disappear into it": Anish Kapoor on his exclusive rights to the 'blackest black', The Guardian (26 Sept., 2016): click here.  

Of Contrails and Chemtrails (with Reference to the Case of Kylie Jenner)

Kylie Jenner reflecting upon chemtrails 

I have to admit that I make very little effort to keep up with the Kardashians and their extended family network. But it's been brought to my attention that one of their number, Kylie Jenner, recently tweeted her concern about the issue of so-called chemtrails ...

"It's heartening to discover", said my correspondent, "that when not revealing her charms, this talented young model, actress, entrepreneur and media personality, is courageously attempting to expose the truth about those mysterious white lines across the sky that the authorities pretend are perfectly harmless ..."

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

Because those mysterious white lines are in fact nothing more than water vapour in the form of ice crystals and, as such, are of course entirely innocuous. In other words, chemical trails don't really exist; they are simply condensation trails (known as contrails) produced by aircraft engines burning hydrocarbons at cruise altitude, as re-imagined within the paranoid world of conspiracy theory. 

Depending on the ambient temperature and humidity, contrails may be visible for only a brief few moments, or they may persist for hours and spread to be several miles wide, coming to resemble natural cloud formations. Either way, they do not contain unknown bio-chemical agents deliberately sprayed for sinister purposes by secret government agencies.

Such claims - originating in the late 1990s - are often based on mad fantasy and shocking scientific ignorance. However, despite repeatedly being shown to be absurd, they still persist and attract followers; including, it seems, glamorous celebrities such as Miss Jenner. It's an unfortunate fact that when experts and officials deny the existence of chemtrails, believers interpret this as further evidence of a cover-up.

Lunatics, it seems, have always been prone to lifting up their eyes and looking to the heavens for signs; if not of God's greatness, then of man's inherent wickedness ...

Notes

Anyone interested in the latest research into this by a large number of atmospheric scientists might like to see an article by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira and Steven J. Davis entitled 'Quantifying expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program', in Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, Number 8 (10 Aug 2016), IOP Publishing Ltd. Click here to read online, or here to view as a PDF.

And if anyone is interested in Kylie Jenner's tweet from 25 May 2015 on chemtrails, here it is:

On the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge in Nietzsche's Early Philosophy

Portrait of Nietzsche as a Young Professor
 University of Basel, 1872

What Nietzsche terms in his early writings the knowledge drive, is something he favours subjecting to strict control. For whilst it powerfully propels modern science, it does so in a promiscuous and indiscriminate manner that is incapable of determining value. To give it free reign is, at the very least, a sign of vulgarity.

The role of the philosopher, therefore, is to act as a kind of guardian and ensure that science serves life and furthers the aim of culture; left unchecked, the will to truth will ultimately result in nihilism. But this subordination of the knowledge drive isn't accomplished by means of metaphysics, or the establishment of a new faith. It requires, rather, the granting to art new powers and responsibilities. 

Readers in the analytic tradition of philosophy who are unfamiliar with German Romanticism, might be surprised at this. But, for the youthful Nietzsche, writing as an ardent devotee of Richard Wagner, philosophy - whilst it might rely upon similar methods to science - is, in its desire to invent beyond the limits of experience, a form of art and a continuation of the mythical drive. It is thus essentially pictorial and not mathematical in its expression.

What's more, according to Nietzsche, the reason why philosophy retains its value - and, indeed, a higher value than science - is because it continues to concern itself with notions of beauty and human greatness. Of course, this makes philosophy a refined form of anthropocentrism; one that transforms all nature into man's own image and posits all being as a permanent correlate of thinking, thereby demonstrating its radical incompatibility with scientific realism.     

Leaving us in no doubt about what this means, Nietzsche writes: "Man is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself ..." A little later, he adds: "We are acquainted with but one reality - the reality of thoughts". And, as if to show how Kantian he remained in his epistemology, he concludes: "The world has its reality only in man: it is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men." 

Nietzsche doesn't at this point flatly deny the existence of the thing-in-itself or dispute the possibility of facts, he simply argues that because objects are mind-dependent, we can say nothing about them outside of this relationship. In other words, for Nietzsche - as for other sceptics - we can only know reality as it appears to us. Consequently, Nietzsche privileges art over science, as art, of course, is all about appearances and attempting to form representations of reality (i.e. pictures of the world that are ever more complete).  

Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche feels sensory knowledge is more than mere illusion; that it's adequate to the truth of the world and that the mind mirrors what is, because the mind of man has itself evolved out of matter and not out of thin air. The mind might structure and colour things, but it doesn't do so in an entirely arbitrary manner; even if its reflections are distorted, they are not entirely false or simply the product of dreamy idealism.

In other words, objects may conform to mind - but mind is itself an object. Thus, breaking out of the correlationist circle and directly accessing what Meillassoux terms the ancestral realm that exists prior to humanity (or, indeed, any forms of sentient being whatsoever), is not a major concern for Nietzsche. Indeed, even in his later, supposedly positivist mid-period, Nietzsche is still primarily concerned with what is true for us (mankind) and his model of science remains distinctly gay and tied to his understanding of art.

Ultimately, what does an arch-vitalist care about arche-fossils ...?    

See: Nietzsche, 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990). The lines quoted are from sections 80, 94 and 106.

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part I)

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)

According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp that all the modern world’s seriousness is confined to science and the "prodigious power of technology". Lawrence refers to this (poetically) as the triumph of the machine.

Whilst Nietzsche doesn't entirely deplore this fact, happy, for example, to support the experimental practices of science, he is by no means able to affirm the above development without reservation; not least of all because he identifies modern science as the descendant and heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a machine-embodied unfolding of the ascetic ideal; an expression of mankind's pathological will to truth.

Thus, for Nietzsche, science and technology is fundamentally nihilistic in character, full of thinly veiled metaphysical prejudices and productive of reactive knowledge-forms which may yet prove fatal not only to the Christian moral culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se as it puts on ice all the illusions which are necessary for the sustaining of culture and, indeed, life itself.

In addition to this fundamental antipathy between vital illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims that science is incapable of serving as the foundation of culture because, unlike art, it knows nothing of “taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation, or exhaustion” and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create. At best, when coupled to the huge resources of capitalism, science is capable of building a tremendous industrial-technological civilization, such as our own, but, for Nietzsche, this is not a genuine cultural formation because, whilst it is certainly capable of organizing the chaos of existence and constructing a monolithic system or network, it lacks style.

Style, insists Nietzsche, always involves the constraint of a single taste. But it is not merely the imposition of universal laws or categorical imperatives; nor does it seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. The ideal abstractions of science may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form - logic - but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer.

Failing to make the distinction, the technocratic man of reason confuses bullying with a display of strength and mistakes force for power. This is perfectly illustrated in  Lawrence's novel Women in Love by the figure of Gerald Crich; a character driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare. Gerald’s world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow:

“The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly ...
   The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. ... The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. ...
   The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid.” 

If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give value back to such a world - and a little loveliness - is a concern shared by Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both fear, however, that so long as the nihilistic-scientific perspective retains its authority, there can be no revaluation. For such a perspective has not only made the barbarism of the modern world unavoidable, but it ensures the destruction of all other perspectives and modes of being.

And yet, perhaps there is hope to be found where we might have least expected to encounter it. This is one of the great lessons of encouragement given to us by Heidegger in his essay entitled ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. At the heart of this work are the following lines from Hölderlin: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.

Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes:

“To realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready.”

It is important that we avoid misunderstanding here; hope does not lie in the fruits of science and technology themselves and it is not, therefore, a question of accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a micro-chip can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and curse it as the work of the devil should rightly be challenged, then, on the other hand, technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater technological manipulation of life deserve also to be met with critical resistance.

Heidegger would surely have agreed with Lawrence that “the more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses”. Thus, if we are to find our way into a new revealing, then we will have to find a way to creatively manifest these forces. And if we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology, then we will need to resist the temptation of easy solutions and the blackmail of being either for or against science.

It is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For it is only by daring to think the latter, which is to say, move closer to the very danger that threatens us, that “the ways into the saving power begin to shine” more brightly.


Bibliography

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years before the Mast', essay in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', essay in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993). 
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).


Note: Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

Never Mind the Bildungstreib Here's the Science

Blackmetal Kant (2007) by King of Porn 

deviantart.com

Kant famously insisted that base matter lacks spontaneity; that inorganic substance cannot spontaneously generate organic life. To think otherwise would be a logical paradox, since the essential character of non-living things is their complete inertia or lack of vital purpose. What makes living things so rare and unusual is precisely the fact that they can spontaneously self-organize thanks to the presence of a formative drive which mysteriously enlivens the material of which they are composed. Kant calls this vital force (after Blumenbach) Bildungstreib. Jane Bennett conveniently glosses the term for us:

"Bildungstreib ... names a non-material, teleological drive that imparts to matter its functional coherence, it's 'organic' quality ... Bildungstreib is what impels an undifferentiated, crude mass of matter to become an organized articulation of cooperating parts, the highest version of which is 'Man'".

To be clear, Kant does not mean by Bildungstreib something that common folk and theologians might mistakenly term a soul. For whereas a soul is a metaphysical principle that can exist even in a disembodied state, Kant's concept is always embodied and only exists in conjunction with the mechanical activities of matter and subject to the Newtonian laws of physics.

Having said that, Kant does insist that the workings of Bildungstreib can never become fully known to us; such a drive remains fundamentally inscrutable. At best, we can learn about it indirectly by studying its effects. And what these effects teach us is that this formative drive operates under an internal constraint or purposive predisposition which directs the organism towards some end goal, "thus linking its becoming to a stable order of Creation".

In other words, things become what they are meant to become; only man has a free will and can thus to some extent overcome his own determining. Thus Kant sought to make the case "not only for a qualitative gap between inorganic matter and organic life but also for a quantum leap between humans and all other organisms."  

What, then, are we to make of Kant's flirtation with vitalism and his attempt to combine teleological and mechanistic explanations of life?

Jane Bennett is obviously attracted to the notion of Bildungstreib. For her, it gestures towards the kind of inhuman and ahistorical form of agency that she needs to make her own model of vibrant matter feasible. Whilst for Kant any such drive would have to have a divine origin, Bennett thinks it "both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such". 

But for me, as for Daniel Dennett and others who happily subscribe to a mechanistic materialism and remain confident that science will eventually explain in a perfectly adequate manner how life emerges from dead matter thanks to a chemical process, vitalism is not a profound philosophical insight, but simply a failure of critical intelligence and imagination.

In fact, a new study published recently by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Milan, hints at the spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA four billion years ago and shows how the self-organizing properties of these DNA-like molecular fragments - just a few nanometres in length - may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough and stable enough to act as a basis for primitive life.

In other words, contrary to everything Kant and the vitalists who have followed him like to believe, these new findings provide further evidence for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms.  


Notes

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted were taken from the sub-section of chapter 5 entitled Bildungstreib, pp. 65-69.

For those interested in reading at length what Kant has to say on this subject, see his Critique of Judgement (1790), available in numerous English translations, including the one by Werner Pluhar, (Hackett, 1987), cited by Jane Bennett in her text. 

For those interested in the reading more about the new scientific study I refer to above, click here.  

D&G: What is Philosophy?

Image by Dick Whyte

One of the things I like about Deleuze is that he never gave up on philosophy. That is to say, he never had any problem with calling himself a philosopher and of happily subscribing to an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Stoics. 

This, by his own admission, didn't make him better than others of his generation who seemed slightly embarrassed by the title of philosopher, or felt guilty if their work too might be shown to belong to the history of Western metaphysics, but it did make him the most naive or innocent.

But what is philosophy for Deleuze? He answers this question very clearly and very beautifully in his final book written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, entitled - appropriately enough - What is Philosophy? In this text, Deleuze argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of mediating chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.

First and foremost for D&G, philosophy is neither concerned with the contemplation of ideas, or their communication; rather, it is concerned with the creation of new concepts. This is its unique role and why the philosopher might best be described not as the lover of wisdom, so much as the creator of concepts. 

This is not to deny that the sciences and arts aren't equally creative. But only philosophy creates concepts in the strictest sense of the term (as singularities or events, never as universals). In giving philosophy such a distinct history and role, D&G are not claiming any pre-eminence or privilege for their own work; they fully acknowledge that there are other equally important, equally profound ways of (non-conceptual) thinking. Science and art are not inferior modes of ideation, but they mediate chaos differently (with the latter defined not as a void of disorder, but a virtual realm of infinite possibilities).

Science, for example, in contrast to philosophy, is concerned with inventing functions that are then advanced as propositions in discursive systems to be reflected upon and communicated as such. It wants to find a way to give chaos fixed points of reference and to slow things down; to make chaos a little more predictable and, if you like, a little more human. Philosophy might like to give style to chaos (i.e. a level of consistency) via the construction of a 'plane of immanence', but it is happy to retain the speed of birth and disappearance that is proper to chaos.

Again, this is not to denigrate the work of physicists and mathematicians and D&G are at pains to stress that they find as much admirable experimentation and creation within Einstein as within Spinoza.

As for art, it takes a different approach: if philosophy is all about concepts and science all about functions and their elemental components known as functives, then art is concerned with percepts, affects, and sensations. D&G write:

"Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent ... of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves ... They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art being a sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

- Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1994), p. 164.

Obviously the work of art is created by the artist, but it stands or falls on its own; i.e. it exceeds the life of its own creator. Further, it draws the artist (and the viewer, reader, listener) into a strange becoming - producing them as much as they produce it and giving everyone a little chaos back into their lives.

If, as we have noted, philosophy adventures into chaos via the plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition: this, for D&G, is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition (which could just as well be the concern of science), but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art, like science and philosophy, is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos. It is obviously related to science and philosophy, but should not be thought of as an aesthetic mish-mash of these practices. D&G conclude:

"The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distinguished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these ... is better than another ... The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification."

- Ibid., pp. 198-99. 

Ultimately, we should be grateful for the gifts that they bring us: unlike religion, which has done nothing except open a great umbrella between us and reality in an attempt to protect mankind from chaos. But that's another post ...