How do you like the Weather Now?
thinking about the Subject / Object divide, Agency and Environment
Any warmer in the winter yet?
Presidient Trump is probably correct that fossil fuels will stimulate the economy. But are we still being good stewards of the environment?
Extinction Tesla
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/40e8c92b-8a5f-464c-a37c-6ed8b7a36272.jpeg
The Wrong Amazon is Burning
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/aee032d5-00f9-4f9a-9385-3f528ea9ab5c.jpeg
from https://lemmy.world/c/activist_and_polemic_art
Masters of Non-Mastery:
attuning the bodily unconscious
in the era of anthropogenic climate change
by Michael Bradley Grotz
March 2021
Introduction
This thesis will examine the anthropocene (the contemporary geologic era resulting from man-made climate change) in the context of the writings of three thinkers: Gunther Anders, Michael Taussig, and Timothy Morton. Among the authors there are both correspondences and signature concepts, but all maintain the need to approach our world in a different way than the status quo of today.
Against Technological Neutrality in the Anthropocene
One of the most suppressed intellectual positions of our time is the rejection of technological neutrality. It is as though the statement “technology is neither good nor bad, it is only a matter of how you use it” is an automatic catechism to be endlessly repeated and never critiqued. However, in light of the present condition of our world in this new epoch, what but technology is the fundamental cause of anthropogenic climate change? In fact, it is not homo sapiens (anthropos) that is the direct cause of climate change, it is the fossil fuel driven and agricultural technologies utilized by particular humans in the modern industrialized and digitized nations that have changed the climate. There are different tool use regimes humans have lived with and are living with today in differently organized societies. Therefore, the “anthropocene” is a misnomer. In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton agrees that “there are some substitutes for the Anthropocene,” but
Haraway’s and Latour’s suggestion that we call it the Capitalocene misses the mark. Capital and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, not its direct causes. If the cause were capitalism, then Soviet and Chinese carbon emissions would have added nothing to global warming. (2016: 23)
I would suggest that, just as in the terminological discussions of Moore’s “capitaloscene” or Haraway’s “chthuluscene,” that technoscene is a more accurate term. It would be difficult to deny that modern industrial technologies (engines, drilling and mining rigs, factories, power plants, etc.) are not the direct cause of carbon emissions.
Gunther Anders is one of the few thinkers who has had the courage to argue against technological neutrality. Once the husband of Hannah Arendt, Anders had every right to explore the significance of the “technological-totalitarian empire” (1968: 16). With Anders we are encouraged to ask: is technological advancement really a force for good? Whatever one’s values or political ideology, technology is recruited to serve one’s ends. But is our form of technological sophistication precisely why we are afflicted with the harms we find in the world which our politics would remedy? In the following sections we will survey Anders thought on the world of humans and machines and then juxtapose these with the views of Taussig and Morton.
The Subjectivity of a Sorcerer’s Temporality
Anders maintains that the goal of technological totalitarianism is simultaneity, the “elimination of time. The timeless society (rather than the classless society) is the hope of tomorrow” (2014: 244). Through technology, space and time have become “modes of absence” (2014: 253). Anders takes note of the differential between the timing circuits of our technologies and that of our biological clocks, which exists because we have “not yet become ‘wireless’ (funkbar)” (2014: 248). Today, however, we are fast approaching a wireless synchronization with machine time.
Immediate satiation of the desires of the consumer is the objective of our technology and “the mediation of technology attempts to make mediation superfluous” through a “return to immediacy” (2014: 240). We experience a “forgetting of each passing moment” and live through an “unnoticed sequence of moments” (2014: 210) having become “ahistorical beings” (2014: 220). With instantaneous wireless and waveform technologies operating at the speed of light, “a pointillism of existence arises, from which all continuity is banished, because it is composed at each passing moment of new born offers that do not last longer than an instant” (2014: 249). All is fleeting. Unlike historical chronicles, the narrative changes in real time from moment to moment and no history endures. What does the elimination of time mean? Immediacy means that the present is always kept in isolation. The past does not inform us anew and nothing in the future can be discovered that is new. Immediacy means that the now is forever invariant and no alternative can be imagined. What can be done? There is little hope nor is fear of any use, but “in the shock of our powerlessness, there is in a sense the power to give warning” (Anders, 1961: 9).
In the ahistoricity of technology, in the immediacy of machine time, we are possessed by “irrationalism” and lack all “fore-sight” with only a “momentary exigency” in which we ask “never what lies outside our task” (1961: 284, 285). We are “behaving irrationally . . . because we live in such a rational system” (1961: 286). We view “irrationality as morality” and “the absurd . . . is just the normal condition” (1961: 287). This leads to a cluster of interrelated concepts which Anders deploys to explain the relationship between these contradictions. First, what Muller (2016: 100) calls the Promethean Gradient, where
the even steeper and unsurmountable slope that separates “what we can make” (machen) from “what we can imagine” (vorstellen), “what we can do” (tun) from “what we can feel” (fuhlen), “what we can know” (wissen) from “what our conscience can register” (Gewissen). This gradient . . . is ultimately a manifestation of the growing “a-synchrony” of the lived experience of the body (Leib) and the machines (das Gerat) to which it is exposed.
In other words, “we are inverted Utopians: ‘while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing’” (Muller, 2016: 100). Another variation on this theme is illustrated by the metaphor of Goethe’s Sorcerers Apprentice: for we know not what we do. Anders (2014: 292) uses this story to reveal the irrationality of utilitarianism and pragmatism:
if we live in a world of total irrationality—and thus as sorcerer’s apprentices; if, imprudent and without foresight, we assign to our “broomsticks” the most outrageous “psychic” functions; if we are not fully aware of the fact that these “spirits,” once evoked, will never take us into account: then we are behaving irrationally not despite the fact that we live in a system with the most highly developed division of labor and extreme rationalization, but because we live in such a rational system.
These variations on the gap theme share in common an asynchrony and disjuncture between present and future, between the conceptualization of the current paradigm and imagination. We know not what we do to the future, we only know what we want in the present (even if we know not why we want it other than because as good consumers the script of the past has already been stipulated). This state of affairs produces a temporal pattern which shapes our subjectivity. Anders characterizes the modern technocratic world we live in as a conformist system of subjects. Our conformist system is an Orwellian counterintuitive (think war is peace) because it
is liberal not despite, but rather because of the fact that it is an integral system. And it is terrorist not despite, but rather because of the fact that it is gentle. And we are its victims not despite, but rather because of the fact that we are not aware of our slavery. (2014: 129)
According to Anders, this oxymoronic and contradictory structure of society produces and is the result of dividuals, “those whose affects are totally divorced from the nature of their effects [their consequences]; those to whom it is not permitted to feel what they are doing” (2014: 122). Dividuals are the result of living in a sorcerer’s temporality where we fail to imagine all he implications of the technologies we create. As dividuals, we have undergone “reverse coining” through our interactions with technology:
since there is no apparatus that does not totally change us . . . the coiner and the coined are interchangeable. If today there is someone who coins, it is not we who coin the machines, but to the contrary: it is the machines that coin us. We are transforming ourselves into their “imprints,” their “expression.” (2014: 304)
We have experienced “dehumanization without measure” (1968: 12). Coined by the machine, through “co-mechanization” we are “eliminated as human beings” (1968: 16). Our “machines take by conquest” so we live in an “empire of the machines” that is a “global machine” (1968: 16, 15). These machines “expel and eliminate like trash” anything that just will not do in the “thousand year Reich dreamed of by all machines” (1968: 16).
Same Difference and Tautological Exchange
Setting aside the trivialities and diversions, we are ideologically undifferentiated when it comes to what is at stake. Even the apparent non-conformist is just another identitarian conformity, since “a chorus of various voices, which proclaims in unison, ‘we are not conformists,’ confirms what it rejects by the way it rejects it,” just as in “cultural politics, the occupation of enemy positions is just as important as their ‘destruction’” (2014: 141-143). Protests and “happenings” are exploited by the establishment for the same reason (2014: 254-255). When all is said and done, there is a coordinated consensus and so the “minimum of difference” between speakers to preform a dialogue
will no longer exist among the congruists, who will comprise the perfect conformist society of the future: in view of the fact that everyone will be supplied with the same things, everyone will know the same things, too. And this means that every listener will only be able to hear the same things that he would be able to say; and that he who speaks would only be able to say what anyone else can hear for themselves. (2014: 103-104)
Unsuited to democratic process, without the capacity for dialogue, we are trapped in a “collective monologue” (2014: 104). The “new function of speech” in conformist society is “a tautological exchange” and it is not even an exchange, it is a “declining schema of vivacity, that is, the illusion of an exchange” (2014: 104). Unpresent communications take the vivacity out of dialogic language and make it a one-way command line. There has been a neutralization of the difference between speaking and listening; ours is “speech that obeys what is heard (horiges Reden) . . . conformist speech has become a mere co-speaking of what is endlessly heard . . . man is now a being who speaks only because he is a being who listens” (2014: 197). Instead of creative beings, we have become a swarm of repetitions. We are no more than inductions of the hegemon signal.
Interpretation, Opinion, and Electric Submission
In our thoughtless repetition of the on-point Orwellian newspeak of the day, the difference between interpretation and factum in mass media has been neutralized (2014: 191). It is as if the reality of hermeneutics has ceased to exist. There is no such thing as interpretation. We have become the telegraphic mouthpieces of prejudices, mere “consumers of opinion” (2014: 192). Communications technologies are “today’s secret dictators” (2014: 198). Technology is a dictator of whom we are not conscious:
As for those who are supplied or molded in this way, however, they no longer realize anything at all about their supplied and molded existence. They undoubtedly consider the points of view that have molded them to be their own points of view. And given that what is molded by way of this soft terrorism are not just their points of view, but that rather it is their souls that are thoroughly subjugated, in fact they feel free (and most often, unfortunately, even happy). It is not surprising that they—and here the falsehood of the situation reaches its culmination—consider those few people where really are free, and who manage to marshal the power to resist being molded, to be bona fide saboteurs of freedom and treat them as such. There has never before been a historical movement in which the principle of the counterrevolution, that is, the principle of getting the people to mobilize against themselves, has celebrated a triumph that even approaches the scale of the victory won by conformism under the flag of the freedom of those who have become un-free. (2014: 199)
The objective in a “monolithic society” such as our own is “to hold the single individual in an inescapable grip to force the individual to assume a communal way of being (Mitsein)” and this is achieved through “acoustic submission” (2017: 41). One could also speak of electronic submission. Since “no quiet place remains,” the moment we “must hear” is the moment when we no longer have “any option other than belonging to this world and becoming obedient (gehorsam) or even being fully under its spell (hörig)” (2017: 41). These machines of sonic and electromagnetic noise are “machines of subjection” and “the acoustic realm is the realm of unfreedom. As hearing beings, we are unfree” (2017: 41). As physical, resonant beings, we are unfree in a world of constant irradiating noise. “Yes, incessant noise can prevent people from ever becoming themselves,” writes Anders, and “with this the conformist ideal of de-privatisation is achieved” as we are “caught in the web of sound” (2017: 41). We are finally caught in the web of all physics. Laplacian causality is too close to breaking down the last barriers in our understanding that divide free will from determinism. No ephemeral mortal can become themselves because the accumulated scientific knowledge of perduring society has the knowledge and power to determine individuals, who cease to be individuals and have become tokens of the collective type. There is a frequency following response that entrains the masses “because listening creates conformity” and we are bound “within a horizon that is traced by the acoustic leash” (2017: 42). We are Promethean animals with “unfelt chains” (Muller, 2016: 158).
Immersed in the medium of noise, Anders realizes that “we had never truly ‘been outside’, we had never really been ‘free’” (2017: 42). Our sense of “self” is contingent upon our being connected to the external self. We do not know what freedom or being and thinking for ourselves means. To a certain extent, we have always been influenced by external mechanisms, being forever contingent. But our technologies have alienated us from ourselves to a entirely different degree. Now, we must superimpose with the broadcast, always echo and never depart from its perpetually iterated narrative in order to exist: “‘I am participating there, therefore I am here, therefore I am’” (Anders, 2017: 43).
Leibnizian Universals and the Subliminal
This “mechanized totalitiarianism” (1968: 17) takes away our freedom and debases our creative autonomy. How does this “co-mechanization” in a technological totalitarian society dispossess us of our autonomy? Direct force elicits an opposing reaction. Oblique, indirect force does not, since, under the threshold of corporal confrontation, it does not activate our defenses. Oblique forces are effective because they are automatic reflexes, not decisions to be made. Direct force is not required. This is because “for conformist societies two distinctions lack validity . . . the distinction between explicit and implicit coercion” and “between assimilating and being assimilated” (2014: 94).
Conformist society is a somnolent, subliminal society. The automatism of the subliminal and the daylight of the conscious have merged. We are not conscious of our unconsciousness; we “do not realize that [our opinions] are supplied and molded” and this aspect of human psychology has been leveraged through
experiments with the so-called “subliminal” manipulation of man. . . . One is influenced by petites perceptions—to borrow a phrase from Leibniz—and with subliminal stimuli . . . the subliminal, which—as we said, it was Leibniz idea, conceived in connection with the ‘differential’—was inherited by Freud as a concept of the ‘unconscious’ . . . Later, in the hunt for the locus minoris resistentiae of the buyer they came up against his unconscious and set to work . . . The Leibnizian legacy has therefore attained the honor of being a psychotechnical con game to take advantage of the masses. (2014: 198-199)
Anders examines sirenic advertising where “to be = to be advertising-conscious” (2014: 110). The advert is a Leibnizian “universal grammar,” the sign that gets all the attention, all the eyeballs—winner take all. The subliminal and universal mean that there is no autonomy or variation, no vital, creative activity. In the unimaginative world there is only one winner, all diversity is loser. The substrate mind is all humanity and there is no individuation apart from function and the division of labor. The individual objections of an Antigone, conscious and vital, are eliminated by the orchestrated mass unconscious, the universal hegemony of the Creons, the Eichmanns.
Anders describes advertising techniques of “hidden and subliminal persuasion” as “nonviolent aggression” (2014: 109) and concludes that “the methods of seduction will be all the more bloodless and humane, the more bloody and horrible are the goals and the risks we assimilate” (2014: 199). Even during the tranquility of “sleep,” the most bloodless and humane time of our days, “the technologists of the subliminal” intrude, what dreams may come (2014: 137). For, Anders writes in a recursive formula of positive feedback,
the more integral a power is, the more mute is its order. The more mute an order is, the more obvious is our obedience. The more obvious our obedience is, the more secure is our illusion of freedom. The more secure our illusion of freedom is, the more integral the power. (2014: 98)
We have become dividuals. For the most part, we have minimized the qualitative difference between humans and machines in a conformist society and have forfeited the novelty of free creation and discovery, those aspects of ourselves that are most unique and least machinic.
Taussig’s Bodily Unconscious
Just as in Ander’s writings, Michael Taussig in Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown examines the subjectivity of living in the type of world that has produced the anthropocene. But Taussig not only analyses the present condition, he also offers a way out—a saving power in the unconscious. As in Anders critique of the subliminal, the key is the mimetic faculty of the “bodily unconscious.” Taussig writes,
“Maybe it’s not the body that misperceives but the mind? Who could say? And does it matter? The fact that I have to ask whether this be body or mind indicates the problem of consciousness and the existence of some other intelligence that I call the bodily unconscious, and what that physiologist of shock and homeostasis, Walter B. Cannon, called ‘the wisdom of the body.’” (2020: 73)
Here Taussig alludes to Cartesian Dualism or the mind-body problem of consciousness with an implicating question. If the determination of reality is in question, if perception is not an automatic process of the body, but a mediation between body and mind, there must be something that bridges body and mind, the subliminal of the mind and body, or, the bodily unconscious. The problem in these questions is a problem of mimesis, because we are not zombies and all our functioning is not an automatic repetition of processes. There is a subliminal layer that accounts for mimetic differences. Zombies do not need consciousness, they only react reflexively:
‘The problem of consciousness,’ wrote Nietzsche in The Gay Science, ‘first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it. . . . All of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing oneself in the mirror.’ The thinking that becomes conscious, he avers, ‘is only the smallest part of it, let’s say the shallowest, worst part—for only that conscious thinking takes place in words.’ (2020: 188)
Again, consciousness, the mind, is only the apex of self-awareness and the body is the depth of thinking that does not take place in words. This depth of thinking is the body’s wisdom, but yet again there is a depth to this body, for in it we find the world. Taussig writes,
“Especially with meltdown the problem is that the body does not exist outside of its relation to the cosmos. Why is this a problem? you ask. It is a problem because the new dispensation propels bodily unconscious worlds into consciouness and vice versa. Global warming alters the boundaries between mind and mater. Knowing what not to know—as with Foster Wallace’s tennis player about to play the decisive serve—is no longer autonomous.” (2020: 74)
The boundaries of the body and mind and the body of the world move. We might recall “the growing ‘a-synchrony’ of the lived experience of the body (Leib) and the machines (das Gerat) to which it is exposed” (Muller 2016: 100). The boundaries move in an asynchronous way just as simultaneity is demanded of us by the machines. Taussig writes, “What I mean here by ‘knowing what not to know’ is becoming conscious, as in a flash, of what are normally unconscious bodily processes interacting with other bodies’ bodily processes” (2020: 151). “the bodily unconscious, in which the body came to mean my body, your body, and the body of the world” (2020: 11). Asynchrony is not an autonomous but a shifting parameter, a variable relationship between the body and the cosmos.
Knowing what not to Know and the Mastery of Non-Mastery
But Taussig offers a solution to the problems both he and Anders analyzed. He calls it the Mastery of Non-Mastery (MNM), which is similar to the concept of wu wei in Taosim: “the indirection of that mastery of non-mastery which Brecht, borrowing from the Tao, described as ‘. . . that yielding water in motion / Gets the better in the end of granite and / porphyry’” (174). In another sense,
Mastery of non-mastery is a shamanic conjuring with the bodily unconscious, a variant of which is called ‘proprioception’ whereby without knowing it, your body unthinkingly adjusts to space. It is as if you are actually a part of the rooms and hallways, open skies and fields, streets and subway tunnels you pass though. (2020: 133)
MNM is ecological in dimension, just as an organism is situated in an environment where the boundaries between the organism and the environment are interlinked and reciprocal. Taussig is seeking to operate on a level that is equal to that of the environment and the changes taking place on a global scale. The reason for this is because,
As regards the mastery of non-mastery, the point is that habit is mimetic power and only mimetic power can dislodge it. The all-consuming power of habit (William James’s ‘fly-wheel’ of society), exists as mimetically implanted force in the body, which is to say in the socially acquired practices sustaining everyday life that may have been millennia in the making; to wit: For millennia men dreamed of acquiring absolute mastery over nature of converting the cosmos into one immense hunting-ground. It was to this that the idea of man was geared in a male-dominated society.” (2020: 157-58)
In other words, the “mastery of non-mastery (MNM) is the disorganization of the organization of mimesis” (16). The contemporary nexus of habit must change on the level of the bodily unconscious. This does not mean we do more of the same:
Mimesis is thus not replication. We could say it is repetition with a difference and not that it is this, being the same and being different, that is magical, not in a conceptual logic sort of way but in the materiality and sensuality of the items hovering in their medley of connectedness. (2020: 125).
But this is an ironical proposition, an oroborous, as is inevitably present in any closed system: “such is the overload of mimetic delirium and metaphoric sublimity that the organization of mimesis as the basis of the domination gives way to its disorganization through the mimicry of mimicry.” (20).
Prisoners of codes evolved in pre-meltdown time, we are locked into the normal, not its exception. But then how do you invent a new cultural form geared towards the exception as the rule? How do you handle the apex of a thought that jumps the rails given that you too are part of the jump? In the problem, therefore, not the need for a new culture—a “a culture of catastrophe”—but the need for something like the mastery of non-mastery that doubles back on itself, so to speak, a twisting logic that meets at least halfway the exception as the rule? (2020: 29)
This is the same problem Anders met with in his critique of conformist society. How do we invent a new cultural form that saves us from catastrophe? We must operate on the mimetic faculty of the bodily unconscious. We must make it a habit to be ecologically sound. Given that you too are part of the jump: this movement is an ironical mobius. “Mastery of non-mastery,” writes Taussig, “is what Roland Barthes described as ‘an ethic, a guide to life lived through the twinklings of tact in an anecdotal discourse recruited to outsmart mastery’” yet this ironical turn leads to the question: “But doesn’t outsmarting mastery perpetuate mastery, if only in another form? This is what leads Barthes to say that the neutral refuses to dogmatize because the exposition of the non-dogmatic cannot itself be dogmatic” (2020: 10, 12).
Morton’s Dark Ecology
Timothy Morton in Dark Ecology also recognizes the need for an examination of the relationship between the unconscious and the ecology. The human unconscious is on an equivalent scale to the ecology and the changes taking place on a planetary scale;
there is a still more salient ecological observation we can make about the unconscious. Ecology, after all, is the thinking of beings on a number of different scales, non of which has priority over the other. When scaled up to what Douglas Kahn happily calls Earth magnitude, my conscious actions have an unconscious results that I did not intend. Even when I am fully aware of what I am doing, myself as a member of the human species is doing something I am not intending at all and couldn't accomplish solo even if I wished it. (2016: 22)
As a species, our unconscious operates at a magnitude isomorphic to a geologic scale. Conscious intentions of individuals taken in aggregate scale up to an unconscious effect. This is again the bodily unconscious of ourselves and the world, the locus of species caused climate change that needs to change if we are to prevent total meltdown.
In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton also recognizes the ironical movement of being an individual actor in a collective effect on a closed system—and he offers a solution:
“Instead of the fatal game of mastering oneself, ecognosis means realizing the irony of being caught in a loop and how that irony does not bestow escape velocity from the loop. Irony and sincerity intertwine. This irony is joy, and the joy is erotic. As Jeffrey Kripal puts it, gnosis is thought having sex with itself. This is not a dance in the vaccuume of an oukontic nothing. Eros is attunement, and if there is attunement there is an already-being. A dance that knows itself: unlike the patriarchal ‘Woman,’ a chora (container) who cannot know herself as such, ecognosis is a chora who can.” (2016: 155)
Morton is in alignment with Taussig’s view mastery as a “fatal game” of domination. Whereas in Taussig’s language the solution is the sublime disorganization of dominant mimicry through mimicry, Morton calls his solution ecognosis, also an ironical loop. As is to be expected with work on bodies, there is an erotic joy to be found in this unconscious body work. Eros is attunement, and when the bodily unconscious is attuned with the environment, joy emerges in contradistinction to the foreboding doom of a dark ecology. Taussig asks, “if I am correct in assuming that global meltdown amplifies mimetic and animistic impulses as never before, might mimetic excess provide us with a way out, providing a mutuality geared to the mastery of non-mastery” (2020: 5). Taussig’s “mutuality” of mimetic excess is Morton’s “attunement.” Mimetic excess, in other words, is ecognosis.
Conclusion
The three authors we have explored here all agree that domination or mastery of the world is the cause of our world’s demise. The power of carbon fuels to exert dominion over the body of the world is the direct cause of a climate change that threatens to leave swathes of humanity powerless to the dangers of a hostile climate—through flood, fire, and storm. Anders focuses on how technology has shaped a subjectivity that cannot imagine the full implications of the technologies it develops. The subjectivity therein shaped has several characteristics that deny human flourishing. Anders also examines the unconscious which both Taussig and Morton find to be essential in understanding the scale of climate change and the locus of positive change to come. Taussig and Morton find a solution in the unconscious; the former, the mutuality of mimetic excess, the latter, the attunement of ecognosis.
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