The Banal Infinitude of the Outward Urge

Darren Jorgensen is interested in the relationship between seriality and space travel. To set the context, he first refers to Kant's writings on cosmography, which argue that the sight of the stars brings about elation because they imply an infinitude not only in nature but also in one's own mind. Kant knows they are far away, but maintains that our capacity to think this distance, to grasp the dimensions of the universe, produces a supersensible pleasure that exceeds the bodily senses. Jorgensen is clearly more interested in Hegel's well known, critical response. Essentially, Hegel regards such cognitive pleasures as domesticating the vast and incommensurable. He describes Kant's mathematical sublime as a bad infinite because it does not really grasp the totality of infinity by making it amenable to the human mind. For Hegel then, the bad infinite is constituted by an endless reproduction of the identical to itself that induces boredom (in other words, a series of differences are turned into simulitude).

Jorgensen then uses various examples to illustrate how representations of space travel transform the infinite into the simulitude of domesticity. To this end, he provides historical contextualization with reference to the work of dissident American sociologists such as C.Wright Mills and William H.Whyte, who critically examined the alienation inherent in the new workplace, associated with bureaucracy, meritocracy and new technologies. Faced with this new cognitive complexity, what is striking about the space program is how its participants typically did not perceive the relationship between their subjecthood and society as exploitative. To the contrary, argues Jorgensen, they chose to interpellate themselves into their social position.  This isolation is produced through the "relation of exteriority between the members of a temporary and contingent gathering" (257). Thus the subject is constituted by relations with a social mass that is external to it. Sartre uses the example of people standing at a bus stop to illustrate this interpellation of the modern subject. Each pedestrian is, in this queue, as much other to themselves as to others, constructed "through Others in so far as they are Other than themselves" (261). He turns Karl Marx's concept of alienation into one of "seriality", in which people choose to be alienated from themselves (262-4). There is no better example of this psychological development within capitalism than false personalization, in which an entire personality is simulated for the benefit of office relations or customer service (Riesman 271). While Riesman wants to set legal limits to the psychic dangers of false personalization, Sartre recognizes that, to some degree at least, the person chooses to become this very lie.


Jorgensen thus suggests that this serial process of self-interpellation complements the "bad infinity" by which space exploration is represented and enacted. He emphasizes in particular the significance of "domestication" in regard to the massive public relations role performed by Life Magazine in its coverage of space travel as a "manly" pursuit- a point not lost on other commentators. 

Indeed, herein lies the beginning of an explanation for the characteristic "anal retentiveness" of astronauts. To be such a serial "organization man" requires nothing less than a capacity to suppress introspection. In this sense, according to Jorgensen, it is telling that Neil Armstrong is the only Apollo 11 crewmember who has not released an autobiography, and refuses to grant interviews to this day. Armstrong's demeanor was commonly likened to a machine, while Mike Collins reproached Buzz Aldrin as too introspective during the flight, and thereby violating the set parameters of their training. What I found particularly shocking was the extent to which this training meant receptiveness to (serial) repetition rather than to what had never been experienced before by any other human being. Aldrin concedes that "philosophy and emotion" did not figure in the equation, and once they were on the lunar surface they were solely preoccupied with finishing their experiments within the alloted time. Aldrin sounds like he is paraphrasing Baudrillard then when he goes so far as to remark that his time on the moon was identical to the training simulations, and the simulations to the experience of space travel itself. His autobiography also clarifies how this enforced absence of reflexivity eventually took a heavy personal toll, which resulted in assorted intemperate behaviour upon his return (such as marital infidelity).


Jorgensen also notes the parallels between this representation of domestication in Life Magazine and some science fiction. He uses this passage from J.G. Ballard's "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" to illustrate how the sublime is described as the infinite, yet through repetition of the same becomes Hegel's "bad infinite":


"Our instruments confirm what we have long suspected, that the empty space across which we traveled from our own solar system in fact lies within the interior of the station, one of many vast lacunae set in its endlessly curving walls. Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves all lie within the boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes the cosmos. Our duty is to travel across it on a journey whose departure point we have already begun to forget, and whoses destination is the station itself, every floor and concourse within it".

As Jorgensen puts it, "This incredible image, of an endless series of transit lounges and concourses, captures the conjunction of the infinite within the historically specific space of the foyer or the waiting room". In another piece describing the "mediocrity" of Arthur C. Clarke's fiction, Jorgensen adduces further examples of such juxtapositions of the mediocre and the sublime, with particular reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The banality of the daily routines of the crew and other travelers are presented at a very deliberate pace (which detractors have referred to as "overlong" and "boring"), until Dave Bowman passes through the Stargate, only to then find himself in a bourgeois interior that brings to mind Jorgensen's description of Ballard's short story. Domestication indeed! Lest you need a reminder:

Another virtue of Jorgensen's work is that it provides a readymade explanation for the willingness of the serial character types in Clarke's fiction, unencumbered by psychic complexity as they are, to accept their own deaths in space:

 "It is from within this contrast of the mediocre and extraordinary that Clarke returns to his role as propagandist for space travel. In his extraordinary scenes of characters dying in outer space, the contrast works to minimize the dangerous aspects of interplanetary and interstellar travel, as if ending one's life off the Earth were a trivial matter. In 2010(1982), a taikonaut is facing death alone on Europa, an ice moon of Jupiter. His ship has been destroyed by a giant life-form that unexpectedly crawled out from the ocean beneath the ice. The taikonaut recognizes the significance of his discovery of life on another world, and calls back to a Russian spaceship making its way into Jupiter space: "I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me. And - when the next ship comes home - ask them to take our bones back to China" (50). The name of this character offers the continuity deprived him by death, as it extends infinitely and immortally with civilization into outer space. Mortality is subsumed by this concern for the greater potential of technology that has carried him into outer space".

How different this all seems when compared to one of the stories in John Wyndham's The Outward Urge (which ahuthnance alerted me to, thank you). Wyndham depicts a nightmare scenario in which a manned flight to Mars is plagued by psychological problems, one surmises, because they were apparently unable to just readily switch into Kantian "supersensible" mode. All but one of the crew disappear, and he is so disoriented he struggles to find his way back to the landing point. With no possibility of redemption-- no altruistic suicide here-- he confronts an inevitable, meaningless death in a remote, alien location. This is obviously much closer to Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime and Lovecraft's "cosmic horror". 

So, just imagine reclining on the surface of Mars or one of Jupiter's moons,Io, replete with dense plumes of volcanic vapor, as well as its sheer proximity to Jupiter itself offering a sublime experience. Sure,you would quickly succumb to radiation exposure on Io, but perhaps you could still momentarily savour some sense of the terrible beauty you were witnessing by constructing an interior monologue-- something like Batty's epitaph in Blade Runner-- ironically though, because there would be no one to share the experience with, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe", and then, "all gone now, like tears in rain".   

I imagine this would constitute the true limit case, notwithstanding the fact that even the proponent of cosmic horror himself, H.P. Lovecraft, privately allowed the following as justification for continuing existence in the face of the cosmos' abysmal purposelessness:

 "I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I refrain from suicide—the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. These reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory- impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future."

Of course, once circumstances are such that there is not even a slender possibility of future "delights", it becomes more difficult to say which inner resources one could draw on for compensation. I have to remind myself, especially after reading Jorgensen, that I cannot play out this scenario in my mind to an imagined soundtrack, however appealing it may be to try to come up with a fitting "desert island disc". I could imagine Lustmord's The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, an Elliott Smith ditty or whatever, piping through my space helmet, but even they would be a comforting aesthetic sentimentalization in the context in question- or rather, what Jorgensen would call a "domestication" of infinitude. You know, kinda like the domestication in the final scene of Space Cowboys:




Even so, that won't quell my musings or prevent my listening habits from stimulating further reading. For now at least, I'll sign off with some Chris Butler pics and a few other things that illustrate both sides of what I've been discussing here.

"Unclouded by conscience or delusions of morality...

...It's structural perfection matched only by its hostility..."

These were the android Ash's words in Alien, as he confessed his admiration for the creature that was systematically wiping out the crew of the Nostromo. In this post, I'd like to consider some of their thematic implications.

Firstly though, I have a confession of my own to make: sometimes I can be a little slow to post the various things I've seen and heard. So I don't pretend to be breaking the exclusive of Ridley Scott outlining the premise of the Alien prequel he's working on. I also take it as read that the film will be steeped in Lovecraftian lore:

"It's set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver's character Ellen Ripley]. It's fundamentally about going out to find out 'Who the hell was that Space Jockey?' The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle — there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomer's chair....
[The film] is about the discussion of terraforming — taking planets and planetoids and balls of earth and trying to terraform, seed them with the possibilities of future life".

Less obviously though, I'm also interested in how the hopes invested in the film may be related to the process of rationalisation. Weber's thesis described a situation where charisma would be one of the few means available to break the "iron cage". This can tell us something then about the appeal of auteur theory, with the pantheon of "great directors" acting as circuit breakers on the model of mass serial production that is business as usual in Hollywood. Reading fan reactions and reflecting on my own expectations in light of this most recent event contributes to the sense that the Alien series is one of the most self reflexive ever made: at every level they are obsessed with the meaning of (re)production.

Other readers of Weber's work, not least Habermas, were critically aware of how attempts to manifest the surrealist project in everyday life, as per Bataille, amounted to a horror story (see The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; but also recall Andre Breton's claim that the simplest surrealist act would be to open fire on a crowd with a pistol). Bataille so feared the utilitarian calculus that he deliberately avoided systematising his own thought, but in so doing, argues Habermas, he provided inadequate contextualisation to prevent it becoming a philosophical wildcard.

It might also be said that Alien is sympathetic to Habermas' perspective as the film makes use of surrealist H.R. Giger's designs to horrific effect to demonstrate the consequences of the surrealist project literally colonising "the lifeworld". Indeed, there is a telling scene in Alien Resurrection where the evil scientists who had attempted to breed the xenomorphs in captivity for their own purposes, find themselves fused to the wall of the hive. But they are so transfixed by the biological/aesthetic qualities of the creatures ("my beautiful butterfly") that it comes as a shock to them when their creation lumbers over to casually bite off the top of their heads. Like Ash before them, these scientists had failed to heed Habermas' words. You might call this "blowback".

If I had the means available, I'd like to write a book on critical theory called Everything I Know About Philosophy I Learnt from the Alien Films. In my version of Alien Resurrection's hive scene, I'd substitute Bataille and certain other philosophers for the scientists. Let the punishment fit the crime, you might say. Another way of putting it is in terms of thinkers committing a common category mistake and being forced to reap the consequences. For example, here is how a recent limited reading of Whitehead's work is taken to task. It could serve equally well as an admonishment by a science court of any number of scientists in the Alien series:

"Consequently, it is one thing to claim, with Shaviro, that from the purely aesthetic perspective destruction (or robbery) is justified by the degree of novelty that is released into the world, but it is quite another thing to pose this justification from the perspective of another living society that has just been robbed to become "food" for the creation of the new beautiful order. According to Whitehead himself, this is where the nature of reflective judgment becomes ethical and concerns the moral issue of creativity that must be "reactively adapted" to fit each living occasion of novelty. Even though creativity becomes "the highest notion of the ultimate generality" in Whitehead's metaphysical system, it cannot serve as a kind of categorical justification for every actual occasion of "craving for intensity", for novelty and adventure, in short, for every act of robbery. It is clear that there is a moral dimension to Whitehead's system as well, a second critique that is hidden behind the first and primary affirmation of the general notion of creativity, and I would even suggest that certain negative and critical feelings (or what Whitehead calls "negative prehensions") can also belong to the creative process in the production of new "discordant feelings." Of course, these negative prehensions need not necessarily lead to new prohibitions against beautiful feelings as in most traditional Marxian critiques, which would be tantamount to a prohibition against eating, and according to Whitehead, would result in the loss of inter-play between living societies and the environment composed of other societies, both organic and inorganic. However, it could lead to a construction of "critical aestheticism" that would be capable of both "creativity" and "critique".

Numerous lebensphilosophie style conceptions of creativity could have served equally well as illustrations of the category mistake. Hans Joas is someone who understands where Habermas was coming from, but attempts to be more thorough in bringing together creativity and critique, to avoid any limitations associated with the aforementioned "traditional Marxian critiques". There is a danger that the creative turn can amount to the same thing as the universal calculus: the only real ground for guilt is a lack of self-interest. Moral behaviour is the acquisition of a value. Certain goods have a higher value simply because others desire what you have. It matters less whether this entails imposing your will on others as long as you make it. This becomes an end in itself, another form of instrumental rationality to legitimate all perversity, strangeness and eccentricity. Again, as Ash said of the xenomorph, "I admire its purity".

This might explain why so many figures in the esoteric underground, including Nikolas Schreck in this unintentionally hilarious clip (and his offsider, here wearing a monocle for effect) for example, develop a social Darwinian philosophy (described fittingly by Anton LaVey as "basically Ayn Rand's philosophy with some ritual thrown in", while Schreck prefers to talk in terms of how "it is difficult to explain something of this majesty and glory to mortal minds"). It also speaks to why provocateurs such as GG Allin felt entitled (while naked, covered in blood, and smeared in human excrement) to stage an afterlife to his performance by inciting a mini-riot in the streets of New York City (Allin died of a heroin overdose several hours after this footage was taken).

I recommend reading Colin Campbell's piece, which I have in part drawn on here, for an intriguing take on how the discourses of decadence used to frame the horror associated with transgressive culture are informed by a serial logic, with reference to C.S. Lewis' The Bell and the Hammer. In this post I have wondered about where and how to situate the popular appeal of the Alien films with respect to the continuum Campbell describes. Does it amount to resistance or complicity?

How Kevin Bacon cured cancer

This interesting program, which was clearly intended to popularise science, screened on the ABC last night. Disappointingly though, sociology was conspicuous only by its absence (and the same could be said of the graph theory of Leonard Euler). Network science was heralded as "the science of the 21st century", and Duncan J Watts provided a major focus for the program. Now I just happen to also own a copy of Watts' book, Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age, in which an intellectual debt to sociology is frankly acknowledged. Simmel is specifically mentioned on account of his theory of triads as the fundamental unit of group structure (p58), and this long sociological pedigree extends right through to today, as evidenced by the Journal of Mathematical Sociology and actor network theory.
Elsewhere on this blog I have referred to actor network theory in critical terms, which by extension makes me less sanguine than the makers of this documentary that network science is going to necessarily have a positive democratising effect by reminding us all that every problem is essentially a "small world" problem because of our interconnections. Indeed, the program counteracts its own intentions in these respects by demonstrating the increasing penetration of network science into the Westpoint Military Academy. Its proselytisers at Westpoint even credit it with helping them to capture Saddam Hussein.

Another point of interest for me was how it is particular hubs, or nodal points if preferred, that are instrumental in how a network distributes its flow of information. By extension, referencing my earlier post, one could use BlogPulse as a bibliometric tool to determine the major hubs in the Continental philosophy blogosphere, by tracking conversations to see who most consistently captures the attention space in the first instance.

But I should finish by returning to my point that the program was not reflexive enough to situate its complicity in maintaining the hegemony of science as a public discourse. Watts mentions Asimov's Foundation series in his book, Asimov's novels positively reference sociology, and another scientist mentions Asimov again [without mentioning sociology] in the film, reminding us that we are living in a world where science, and even science fiction, are afforded more public legitimacy than sociology. Although that thought is quite depressing, it is still worth watching the program as evidence of the phenomenon of homophily, where that which is similar tends to cluster in a network. I regard homophily as a heuristic relative of the term I like to bandy about, seriality.

The Continental Philosophy Blogosphere: Noosphere or Public Sphere?

I'm deep in the throes of editing a paper for an academic economics journal, so my thoughts here will have to be impressionistic and require future unpacking. But I'm in a playful mood and need to unwind for a moment. Suffice to say, I'm struck of late by the serial effect of so much of what passes for critical analysis in the blogosphere: take the latest Continental philosopher who refers to "capital", and then apply said reading method to the film, dubstep album etc of your choice. In my earlier "Crash" post I touched on a few characteristics of the kind of "interpretive community" that may have generated these tendencies, and I've wondered ever since if they could bear closer examination in terms of a sociology of knowledge, or the perspective I'm more familiar with, social epistemology.

The questions asked would need to be reflexive ones about why these people blog, which should ideally help to elucidate any commonalities between them. It would also have to be determined why this reading method has proliferated to the point where it seems to be the preferred option when it comes to sociocultural theory in the blogosphere. A cynic might argue that it has to do with Donald Campbell's infamous "fish scale model of omniscience", where those who conduct the least amount of empirical research are particularly suited to the mobile conditions of a network society. When such individuals have tenureship, one can expect to find them disproportionately represented at international conferences. When there is no tenureship, cyberspace substitutes as the preferred space for generating network connectivity. Crosscutting both situations, however, is the tendency for depth of knowledge to explode in direct proportion to interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary mobility.

What typologies could potentially be used to draw the relevant distinctions? As I see it, there are essentially 3 choices. Surprisingly, in a moment of rare lucidity, Slavoj Zizek has managed to sketch 2 of these, which could serve as heuristic devices when investigating the blogosphere of Continental philosophy. In his words:

If I understand this point of a one-mind-entity correctly, then it's a version of cyberspace I didn't mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-Cartesian one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the feminist, deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably know there is another, let's call it the New Age school of cyberspace-ideology. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...
...the Noosphere...
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that's precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind.

The first alternative is clear enough, but I'm wondering if the second has any explanatory power when it comes to understanding the curious phenomenon in which capitalism is portrayed as increasingly emancipated from human agency, and that it is this inherent tendency that might explain its current dysfunction? I suspect the answer would be "yes", insofar as the Continental response, for all of its rhetorical appeal to complexity, merely complements the widespread disenchantment with human subjectivity as the driver of change on the contemporay scene. We are typically presented with portrayals of the "alien" nature of capital, which affords the Continental commentariat the luxury of just in effect sitting back and anticipating how the disaster will play itself out. Only at that point may the rising crescendo of voices proclaim the emergence of a "new mutation"; in Deleuzian terms, for example, something like "a non facialised individual", and/or a realisation of the promise of "the multitude" (Hardt & Negri). If these preliminary speculations are amenable to further analysis, then their provenance might also be traced back even further.

For example, here is how the social epistemologist Steve Fuller interprets the opportunism of the Continental movement [sic]:

Intellectual pathologies of our times I: Continental philosophy

Generally speaking, today’s stereotype of the intellectual is the continental philosopher – a quasi-literary, somewhat deep figure of French or German origin. The origin of this image is normally traced the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who regarded himself as a ‘universal intellectual’, very much on the model of an Enlightenment figure like Voltaire. However, this image came under serious reconstruction after the disappointments of the student revolts in the 1960s. At this point Michel Foucault emerges as a downsized and more academicised version of the Sartrean intellectual. Here we shall explore how continental philosophy provides intellectual rationalisation for political impotence that has spread to cover a wide range of movements, including feminism.

The third alternative is one which I am more familiar and sympathetic with. What needs to be determined here is the extent to which the blogosphere can be modelled on a public sphere. Unlike the Continentals, it is a perspective less preoccupied with the complexities of "the virtual", than the development of new concepts and their practical, collective applications, such as "information war". A key figure here is Frank Webster, who is one of the most renowned, sociologically influenced, critics of the idea of "the information society". A further advantage of his work is that it spares one from the option of having to endure the crude polemicism that oftentimes features in exchanges between the Continental blogosphere and its opponents. Like Fuller then, Webster has developed a detailed system of thought which offers the promise of constructive criticism when engaging with the mediation of ICTs by capitalist interests.

I did once come across a superb Adorno quote from Minima Moralia that speaks to the sense of how the historical moment can give the tenured Continental philosopher an innate sense that they are a fraud (which I'll have to track down again). It's particularly frightening when this sense of powerlessness is compensated for by the overzealous marking of students' work. The image which came to my mind was of some of the younger dons, who are more likely to perceive students as future competition, thereby increasing a feeling of insecurity, as resembling Jack Torrance in The Shining; except in the philosopher's case the university substitutes for the Overlook Hotel. In each scenario, the place where they toil merely teases out the innate destructive capacities by giving them a space for their free reign. Word counts and body counts hence become indistinguishable as writing transmutes into a form of serial violence repeated ad infinitum (Mark Seltzer style)........

But rather than end on such a pessimistic note, I can at least report that my preliminary research on the noosphere has yielded an interesting science fiction find: the anime, intriguingly titled, in light of my last remarks, Serial Experiments Lain. I hope I can track it down some time.

Oh yes, and I can't forget about some other pertinent observations concerning the death of libertarianism at this point in our economic history. It would follow that seasteading is merely a retreat into degenerate utopia once the signs of market failure have become too obvious to ignore (and in the case of the seasteaders, too obvious to deal with).

Biological seriality

Once upon a time, people questioned my sanity when I speculated about the growing imbrication of biological thinking and forensics. Well, I wrote a thesis about the topic, and I've just come across the following (hot off the press). Needless to say, the operating assumptions of the scientists are hopeless bunkum, which opportunistically chime with the cynicism of our increasingly dominant biocultural ethos, thereby guaranteeing in all likelihood a healthy amount of research funding into the forseeable future:

Bumblebees teach police to catch serial killers
Tomas Martin @ 30-07-2008
What do busy busy bumblebees and sinister serial killers have in common? They both stray far from their home when doing plying their trade, according to scientists from the University of London. When foraging for nectar, a bumblebee will create a ‘buffer zone’ around its nest that it won’t drink the flowers in, so that predators and parasites don’t follow it back to its home. The researchers found that this buffer zone was very similar to the pattern created by serial killers when they kill their victims. By studying the paths of bumblebees they hope to give forensic experts better clues as to where a killer might live based on his killings. We’d better make sure we keep the bees alive then.

"Not tonight dear, I have to reboot": Predictions of Robot Intimacy

I have to acknowledge The New Atlantis as comparable in quality to the kind of intelligent conservatism offered by Robert Manne (who has proven himself one of the most perceptive critics of the Howard era, in contrast to gasbags such as Andrew Bolt, Paddy McGuiness and Piers Akerman). The following piece appeared a while back, so it has taken this long to clear my schedule enough to mention it here. I see it as a companion piece to not only my earlier posting on "Mangobot" and Japanese robotics, but the documentary Arguing the World, which captured my attention many years ago, and traced the origins of the neocon intellectuals, such as Irving Kristol, who were contemporaries of sociologists such as Daniel Bell that later moved to the Right; this is significant because in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism Bell in effect breathed new life into longstanding fears (e.g Culture and Anarchy) about the corrosive effects of cultural populism (later focused by other critics on postmodernism/cultural studies) as well as the emergence of the postindustrial "information society".

It is fitting then that The New Atlantis continues in this vein, and manages to do so by sounding like common sense, that is empirically grounded, rather than devolving, in the final instance, on some conception of an unchanging "human nature". Or rather, it is underwritten by a peculiar form of essentialism, perhaps with an elective affinity to Intelligent Design advocates, that we humans are too protean and complex to be programmed or imitated by any form of Artificial Intelligence.

This is exactly the kind of claim that Artificial Life advocates have more explicitly set out to challenge with their references to autopoiesis crosscutting all lifeforms. This does little in itself though to challenge the observation that even in the so-called "robot kingdom", Japan, such initiatives have been generally unsuccessful thus far in gaining acceptance (anyone watching the clip I've included of Paro, will quickly see why it failed in hospitals; it is simply annoying).

On a more theoretical plane, one can easily picture an army of Lacanians waiting in the wings to seize on the implications of the following statement (the "mirror stage" writ large):

"It is important, Breazeal emphasizes in her published dissertation Designing Sociable Robots, “for the robot to understand its own self, so that it can socially reason about itself in relation to others.” Toward this goal of making conscious robots, some researchers have selected markers of self-understanding in human psychological development, and programmed their machines to achieve those specific goals. For example, Nico, the therapeutic baby bot, can identify itself in a mirror. (Aside from human beings, only elephants, apes, and dolphins show similar signs of self-recognition.) Kismet’s successor, “Leo,” can perform a complicated “theory of mind” cooperation task that, on the surface, appears equivalent to the psychological development of a four- or five-year-old. But these accomplishments, rather than demonstrating an advanced awareness of mind and self, are choreographed with pattern recognition software, which, though no small feat of coding cleverness, has none of the significance of a baby or an elephant investigating himself in a mirror".

And this is to say nothing of the fitting critique of Rodney Brooks' materialist reduction of humans to "nothing more than machines", letalone the delightful skewering of David Levy's Love and Sex With Robots:

"The latter half of Levy’s book, a frighteningly encyclopedic treatise on vibrators, prostitution, sex dolls, and the short leap from all of that to sex with robots, scarcely deserves mention. Levy begins it, however, with the familiar story of Pygmalion, in a ham-handed act of mythical misappropriation".

Very entertaining to be sure, but more compelling from a sociological perspective is the observation that sociality is not something that can be simply programmed in advance, but is in need of continual structuration (to employ Giddens' apt phrase). This is something I've noticed a lot recently, not only in regard to Randall Collins' work on interaction rituals and Artificial Life, but also in efforts to apply Sennett's conception of "craft" to ethnographies of virtual environments. The necessity here is one of gaining an understanding of the world as something which resists us, thus prompting a need to continually refine an autotelic self; hence repetition ideally implies an articulate, rather than compulsive, engagement with difference (in effect lending a new inflection to one of my favourite terms, seriality).

George Ritzer's "McDonaldization" of society thesis

Note to self: continuing today's theme of increasing rationalisation, have found some fascinating clips of Ritzer from the "McDonalidization" study page.

Interviews with George Ritzer
Content on these pages requires a current version of Adobe Flash Player.
Clip #1. Ritzer's inspiration for the book.
Clip #2. Ritzer responding to critics.
Clip #3. "The Starbuckization of Society."
Clip #4. Why students should read The McDonaldization of Society 5.
Clip #5. Importance of McDonaldization to students.
Clip #6. Resisting McDonaldization.
Clip #7. Future of McDonaldization.
Clip #8. Disneyization, Super Size Me, and Fast Food Nation.

http://www.pineforge.com/mcdonaldizationstudy5/index.htm

I close with an excerpt from a piece I read about privacy and the Patriot Act in relation to librarians, but which I would argue has wider applicability to the technological storage of information, and the financial interests handling them. In each case it has to do with a different form of privatisation which is determining what counts as “privacy” and “public” access. Perhaps this trend could also be construed as a form of McDonaldization:
“The surveillance and secrecy aspects of the Patriot Act are notable, but they are of a piece with public and private trends that predate the War on Terror. Henry T. Blanke, following on the work of Daniel Bell, David Harvey, Sue Curry Jansen and others, argues that the privatization and subsequent disappearance of information from public view is an essential feature of late-capitalist development. Blanke articulates the problem this way: "With the growing economic prominence of information has come the encroachment of corporate capitalism into the public information realm and a concomitant distortion of information issues and policies to serve private interests. At stake is the future vitality of democratic public spheres of independent art, inquiry, discourse, and critique" (Blanke, 67). As information is increasingly commodified and entered into the realm of capitalist exchange, the library finds its core mission--to provide free and equal access to information--systemically compromised. Take, for example, the role of for-profit database vendors in limiting information access. Database vendors like Elsevier, EBSCO, and ProQuest include a provision in most contracts that has a striking similarity to the gag order included in the Patriot Act. Most contracts, negotiated on an individual basis, include a confidentiality provision that prevents librarians from sharing the terms of their contracts with one another. Because we are prevented speaking openly about the contracts we sign, we are limited in our ability to organize against other parts of our contracts that undermine systems of sharing and access. For example, contract terms often force librarians to agree that material contained in a database won't be shared via our traditional interlibrary loan networks, and sometimes even demand that the library conduct surveillance of other libraries by requiring regular reports of who requests articles from the database via interlibrary loan. While less sensational and immediate than the Patriot Act, these tendencies of capitalism reduce access to information in fundamental ways. As a profession, we have few strategies for resisting the tyrannies of the capitalist marketplace”.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Librarians+and+the+Patriot+Act-a0158526546
Free Online Library: Librarians and the Patriot Act. by "Radical Teacher"; ... David Harvey, Sue Curry Jansen and others, argues that the privatization and ...www.thefreelibrary.com/Librarians+and+the+Patriot+Act-a0158526546 - 31k -

Survival horror: the machine dreams of late capitalism

A complementary thesis: "machine dreams" (how economics became a cyborg science), a book previously featured on this blog, and Jameson's postmodern waning of affect as a symptom of late capitalism. What is the most obviously successful cultural exemplar? I would argue it is the video and computer game industry, and this relationship awaits consideration in the field of ludology. My previous "machine dreams" post referenced the "fuck you buddy" ethos as descended from gaming theory, so it follows that a transition to a related commodity form would become conventional.

To be sure, discussion could have just as easily focused on recent horror films such as Saw, whose horror is entirely reliant on the assumption that people, when placed in any critical situation equating to the prisoner's dilemma game, will behave predictably in the most self-interested, reactionary manner. But nowhere is it more explicitly articulated than in the pronouncements of game designers who base their "survival horror" on the dynamics of small group relationships, comprised of minimal selves, by drawing on a limited repertoire of texts in a serial fashion; think of the treatment of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing as a confirmatory authority by the designers of upcoming titles such as Dead Island and Left 4 Dead. Antecedents in the culture industry can, of course, be traced even further back, to the dynamic traced by Marx, when he described Robinson Crusoe as the perfect embodiment of economic man (a kind of minimal self who adapts by learning how to rationally make use of his limited resources in the most efficient manner).

As Bauman has also observed, apocalyptic fantasies of lone survivors afford a glimpse of what death must look like, and this assessment is apt insofar as looking is foregrounded more than feeling per se. So, the waning of affect described by Jameson, when translated into Raymond Williams's lexicon, becomes an emergent structure of non-feeling.

This paradoxical effect has been traced to some extent in Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand piece in the June 2008 issue of Body & Society, "Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope":

"They show, too, what is perhaps the most devastating aspect of zombie as metaphor for the current economy: there is no (evident) way out. Your only option, when faced with the zombie menace, is to kill or be killed. Either way you’re screwed, because you are dead, or you have become what you fear. The act of violence that removes the horror and threat of the zombie reconstructs me, the human, as zombie – a being that is only body, without empathy, without respect for life: very like the marketplace, in fact".

The "solution" therefore amounts to little more than a zero sum game (i.e. the logic of "fuck you buddy"). By the same token, this might explain the recent focus on creativity amongst many social theorists, say the turn to Castoriadis, who are less interested in following their cultural theoretical cousins, some of whom appear more preoccupied with unearthing emancipatory content in populist forms. I think it fair to say though that all fear a situation in which we would have no alternative other than sharing the same "machine dreams".

Other than the upcoming game, Earth No More, some imagery of which I've posted here, I will try to track down the film Equilibrium, which might be construed as a commentary on both the normotic Left and Right. But remember Barry Schwartz's point about "free choice" too in my earlier tedtalks post: opportunity costs are the price paid under more reflexive conditions because it makes us more disatisfied with what we had previously enjoyed. This gradually leads to a profound sense of disappointment with more attractive successor versions, whereby a self learns to withhold feeling from the world, because nothing is able to encompass the totality of what a "free" self is. It seems then that the culture industry has finally acknowledged this logic by turning an opportunity cost into a niche market. Hence cynicism can be repackaged as ironic postmodern sophistication once opportunity costs themselves are transformed into the cultural icon of the zombie (paralleling the flattened affect experienced by the consumer.

The Art of War

Here is an incredible companion piece to my recent posting on Nick Turse and the military "complex" he regards as capable of recuperating virtually anything to further its own evolution. I'll grant you that the post is quite old, but archiving is essential on this blog, in case good stuff disappears from the web. I found it incredible that Deleuze's thought is used by tacticians in the Israeli army. But that is not the only revelation:

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.
Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international ‘shadow world’ of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural ‘shadow world’ is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.
I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip).2 Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”’2 Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.
If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that moving through walls is a relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events might change your mind. To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. A Palestinian woman identified only as Aisha, interviewed by a journalist for the Palestine Monitor, described the experience: ‘Imagine it – you’re sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?’3
Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General, directs the Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains staff officers from the IDF and other militaries in ‘operational theory’ – defined in military jargon as somewhere between strategy and tactics. He summed up the mission of his institute, which was founded in 1996: ‘We are like the Jesuit Order. We attempt to teach and train soldiers to think. […] We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational architects”.’4 In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari. War machines, according to the philosophers, are polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis, made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another, depending on contingency and circumstances. (Deleuze and Guattari were aware that the state can willingly transform itself into a war machine. Similarly, in their discussion of ‘smooth space’ it is implied that this conception may lead to domination.)
I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. [...] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’6
To understand the IDF’s tactics for moving through Palestinian urban spaces, it is necessary to understand how they interpret the by now familiar principle of ‘swarming’ – a term that has been a buzzword in military theory since the start of the US post cold War doctrine known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. The swarm manoeuvre was in fact adapted, from the Artificial Intelligence principle of swarm intelligence, which assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees, soldiers) with little or no centralized control. The swarm exemplifies the principle of non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is transformed, according to the military, into a complex fractal-like geometry. The narrative of the battle plan is replaced by what the military, using a Foucaultian term, calls the ‘toolbox approach’, according to which units receive the tools they need to deal with several given situations and scenarios but cannot predict the order in which these events would actually occur.7 Naveh: ‘Operative and tactical commanders depend on one another and learn the problems through constructing the battle narrative; […] action becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes action. […] Without a decisive result possible, the main benefit of operation is the very improvement of the system as a system.’8
This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battle-plan is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians become combatants, and combatants become civilians. Identity can be changed as quickly as gender can be feigned: the transformation of women into fighting men can occur at the speed that it takes an undercover ‘Arabized’ Israeli soldier or a camouflaged Palestinian fighter to pull a machine-gun out from under a dress. For a Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem ‘to be everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?’9
Critical theory has become crucial for Nave’s teaching and training. He explained: ‘we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations. Theory is important for us in order to articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go. Without theory we could not make sense of the different events that happen around us and that would otherwise seem disconnected. […] At present the Institute has a tremendous impact on the military; [it has] become a subversive node within it. By training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive agents […] who ask questions; […] some of the top brass are not embarrassed to talk about Deleuze or [Bernard] Tschumi.’10 I asked him, ‘Why Tschumi?’ He replied: ‘The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction (1994) became relevant for us […] Tschumi had another approach to epistemology; he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view. [Tschumi] created a new grammar; he formed the ideas that compose our thinking.11 I then asked him, why not Derrida and Deconstruction? He answered, ‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.’12
In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive (a method of drifting through a city based on what the Situationists referred to as ‘psycho-geography’) and détournement (the adaptation of abandoned buildings for purposes other than those they were designed to perform). These ideas were, of course, conceived by Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city and break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, replacing private space with a ‘borderless’ public surface. References to the work of Georges Bataille, either directly or as cited in the writings of Tschumi, also speak of a desire to attack architecture and to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape ‘the architectural strait-jacket’ and to liberate repressed human desires. In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism. The military’s use of theory is, of course, nothing new – a long line extends all the way from Marcus Aurelius to General Patton.
Future military attacks on urban terrain will increasingly be dedicated to the use of technologies developed for the purpose of ‘un-walling the wall’, to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark. This is the new soldier/architect’s response to the logic of ‘smart bombs’. The latter have paradoxically resulted in higher numbers of civilian casualties simply because the illusion of precision gives the military-political complex the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments.
Here another use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’ becomes apparent. The military’s seductive use of theoretical and technological discourse seeks to portray war as remote, quick and intellectual, exciting – and even economically viable. Violence can thus be projected as tolerable and the public encouraged to support it. As such, the development and dissemination of new military technologies promote the fiction being projected into the public domain that a military solution is possible – in situations where it is at best very doubtful.
Although you do not need Deleuze to attack Nablus, theory helped the military reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself and others. A ‘smart weapon’ theory has both a practical and a discursive function in redefining urban warfare. The practical or tactical function, the extent to which Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres, raises questions about the relation between theory and practice. Theory obviously has the power to stimulate new sensibilities, but it may also help to explain, develop or even justify ideas that emerged independently within disparate fields of knowledge and with quite different ethical bases. In discursive terms, war – if it is not a total war of annihilation – constitutes a form of discourse between enemies. Every military action is meant to communicate something to the enemy. Talk of ‘swarming’, ‘targeted killings’ and ‘smart destruction’ help the military communicate to its enemies that it has the capacity to effect far greater destruction. Raids can thus be projected as the more moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that the military actually possesses and will unleash if the enemy exceeds the ‘acceptable’ level of violence or breaches some unspoken agreement. In terms of military operational theory it is essential never to use one’s full destructive capacity but rather to maintain the potential to escalate the level of atrocity. Otherwise threats become meaningless.
When the military talks theory to itself, it seems to be about changing its organizational structure and hierarchies. When it invokes theory in communications with the public – in lectures, broadcasts and publications – it seems to be about projecting an image of a civilized and sophisticated military. And when the military ‘talks’ (as every military does) to the enemy, theory could be understood as a particularly intimidating weapon of ‘shock and awe’, the message being: ‘You will never even understand that which kills you.’
Eyal Weizman is an architect, writer and Director of Goldsmith’s College Centre for Research Architecture. His work deals with issues of conflict territories and human rights.
A full version of this article was recently delivered at the conference ‘Beyond Bio-politics’ at City University, New York, and in the architecture program of the Sao Paulo Biennial. A transcript can be read in the March/April, 2006 issue of Radical Philosophy.
1 Quoted in Hannan Greenberg, ‘The Limited Conflict: This Is How You Trick Terrorists’, in Yediot Aharonot; http://www.ynet.co.il/ (23 March 2004) 2 Eyal Weizman interviewed Aviv Kokhavi on 24 September at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv. Translation from Hebrew by the author; video documentation by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel 3 Sune Segal, ‘What Lies Beneath: Excerpts from an Invasion’, Palestine Monitor, November, 2002; http://www.palestinemonitor.org/eyewitness/Westbank/what_lies_beneath_by_sune_segal.html 9 June, 2005 4 Shimon Naveh, discussion following the talk ‘Dicta Clausewitz: Fractal Manoeuvre: A Brief History of Future Warfare in Urban Environments’, delivered in conjunction with ‘States of Emergency: The Geography of Human Rights’, a debate organized by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke as part of ‘Territories Live’, B’tzalel Gallery, Tel Aviv, 5 November 2004 5 Eyal Weizman, telephone interview with Shimon Naveh, 14 October 2005 6 Ibid. 7 Michel Foucault’s description of theory as a ‘toolbox’ was originally developed in conjunction with Deleuze in a 1972 discussion; see Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1980, p. 206 8 Weizman, interview with Naveh 9 Quoted in Yagil Henkin, ‘The Best Way into Baghdad’, The New York Times, 3 April 2003 10 Weizman, interview with Naveh 11 Naveh is currently working on a Hebrew translation of Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997. 12 Weizman, interview with Naveh
Eyal Weizman

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/

Note to self: check out the "seriality" motif when I next get a spare moment:
Podcasts
Cultural Cartography: Roni Horn -

Added on 13/10/07Roni Horn presents a keynote lecture exploring ideas of site- specificity and seriality