Tag: Deleuze

Drone Theory and Bearing Witness

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A review of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World, Michael Richardson, Duke University Press, 2024.

Nonhuman witnessingHow to witness a drone strike? Who—or what—bears witness in the operations of targeted killings where the success of a mission appears as a few pixels on a screen? Can there be justice if there is no witness? How can we bring the other-than-human to testify as a subject granted with agency and knowledge? What happens to human responsibility when machines have taken control? Can nonhuman witnessing register forms of violence that are otherwise rendered invisible, such as algorithmic enclosure or anthropogenic climate change? These questions lead Michael Richardson to emphasize the role of the nonhuman in witnessing, and to highlight the relevance of this expanded conception of witnessing in the struggle for more just worlds. The “end of the world” he refers to in the book’s title has several meanings. The catastrophic crises in which we find ourselves—remote wars, technological hubris, and environmental devastation—are of a world-ending importance. Human witnessing is no longer up to the task for making sense, assigning responsibility, and seeking justice in the face of such challenges. As Richardson claims, “only through an embrace of nonhuman witnessing can we humans, if indeed we are still or ever were humans, reckon with the world-destroying crises of war, data, and ecology that now envelop us.” The end of the world is also a location: Michael Richardson writes from a perch at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and Autonomous Media Lab. He opens his book by paying tribute to “the unceded sovereignty of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation” over the land that is now Sydney, and he draws inspiration from First Nations cosmogonies that grant rights and agency to nonhuman actors such as animals, plants, rocks, and rivers. “World-ending crises are all too familiar to First Nation people” who also teach us that humans and nonhumans can inhabit many different worlds and ecologies. The world that is ending before our eyes is a world where Man, as opposed to nonhumans, was “the unexamined subject of witnessing.” In its demise, we see the emergence of “a world of many worlds” composed of humans, nonhumans, and assemblages thereof.

From Drone Theory to Drone Art

Nonhuman Witnessing begins with a piece of drone theory. The proliferation of drones on the battlefield, and the ethical questions that they raise, has led to a cottage industry of “drone studies,” with conferences, seminars, workshops, and publications devoted to the field. Richardson adds his own contribution by asking how witnessing occurs within conditions of drone warfare and targeted strikes from above. Drones are witnessing machines, but also what must be witnessed: new methods and concepts have to be designed to make recognizable encounters with nonhuman systems of violence that resist the forms of knowing and speaking available to the eyewitness. To analyze the witnessing of violence, as well as the violence that can be done by nonhuman witnessing, Richardson turns to theory and then to the arts. Drawing from media studies literature, he complements the notion of media witnessing, or witnessing performed in, by, and through media, by his own concept of “violent mediation,” or violence enacted through the computational simulation of reality. He also borrows from Brian Massumi the notion of ontopower, the power to bring into being, and the operative mode of preemption that seeks to define and control threat at the point of its emergence. For Richardson, drone warfare is characterized by an acceleration of the removal of human agency from military decision-making. Violence is made ubiquitous; it can take place anywhere at any time. The volume of data produced by drone sensors far outstrips human capacities for visual or computational analysis. They are transformed into actionable data by on-board autonomous software systems that rely on edge computing and AI algorithms. In a logical progression, “automated data collection leads to automated data processing, which, in turn, leads to automated response”: an ultimate end of the militarization of violent mediation is thus the “elimination of the human within technological systems to anything other than the potential target for violence.” By opposition, art insists on what makes us human. The paintings, photographs, and other art forms presented by the author emphasize the awesome power of unmanned airplanes such as the Reaper, the destruction they cause on the ground, their impact on the daily lives of those who remain under their surveillance, and their incorporation into local iconographies such as traditional Afghan war rugs. Art makes sensible the “enduring, gradual, and uneven violence done to the fabric of life” by killing machines that escape traditional forms of human witnessing.

Despite the evocative power of the concepts and artworks presented in Nonhuman Witnessing’s pages, there is a disconnect between drone theory and drone reality. The use of drones by the U.S. for targeted killings is highly publicized, because it is the most controversial, but quantitatively it remains very minor in comparison to surveillance missions. The subject of drone theory is less the drone as such than it is the drone as an illustration of the violence waged by the United States in the Middle East following the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. New versions of the theory still have to incorporate the use of drones by new actors and in other theaters of conflict: in the Syrian civil war since 2012, during the short war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, in the Houthi insurgency against the Yemeni military supported by Saudi Arabia, and, of course, since Ukraine’s aggression by Russia in February 2022 and in Israel’s offensive against Gaza following Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The logic of preemption that characterized the United States’ war on terrorism is less manifest in these evolving situations. So is the role of AI and embarked computer systems: drones increasingly appear as a low-tech, low-cost solution, a weapon of the poor and savvy against more formidable enemies. Drone warfare and lethal autonomous weapon systems raise some complex strategic, ethical and legal questions that have been examined by a number of authors. But they are far from the “killer robots” decried in the critical literature—or hyped as a selling point by arm producers and media commentators. Richardson’s arguments against signature strikes—i.e. strikes based on behavioral patterns rather than on identity (personality strikes)—are valid and have indeed led to a reduction in targeted killings ordered by the U.S. in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia. But civilian killings such as the one described in the opening of the book show not that the drone is an imprecise weapon, but that it has been used in an imprecise way, just as a needle can be used imprecisely. Drones, like other pieces of military technology, can serve as inspiration or subject-matter for artists and theoreticians. But as much as drone theory is based on biased empirical ground, drone art is not a recognizable category beyond the avant-garde genre of drone music, which bears no connection with military drones whatsoever.

The power of algorithms

Whereas the chapter on “witnessing violence” used outdated evidence and questionable theory, the second chapter, “witnessing algorithms,” addresses more recent concerns and state-of-the-art technologies: ChatGPT and other applications of machine learning, deepfakes, synthetic media, mass surveillance, and the racist or misogynist biases embedded in algorithmic systems. It is based on the same conceptual swing that understands witnessing algorithms as both algorithms that enable witnessing and algorithms as entities that must themselves be witnessed. Theoretically, it draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of machines as assemblages of bodies, desires, and meanings operating a generalized machinic enslavement of man, and of affect theory as interpreted by Brian Massumi and his grammar of intensities, virtual power, and futurity. Based on these references, Richardson proposes his own notion of “machinic affect” understood as “the capacity to affect and be affected that occurs within, through, and in contact with nonhuman technics.” Machine learning and generative AI can lead to false witnessing and fabrication of evidence: hence the weird errors and aberrations, the glitches and hallucinations that appear in computer-generated images or texts. “Like codes and magic, algorithms conceal their own operations: they remain mysterious, including to their makers.” But instead of denouncing their lack of transparency and demanding to open the proverbial black box, Richardson starts from algorithmic opacity as a given and attends to the emerging power of algorithms to witness on their own terms. Doing so requires the bracketing of any ethical imperative to witnessing: witnessing is what algorithms do, regardless of their accuracy or falsity, their explainability or opaqueness. Facts do not precede testimony: registering an event and producing it take place on the same plane of immanence that makes no difference between the natural and the artificial. Examples mobilized by Richardson include the false testimony of deepfakes such as the porn video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother; the production of actionable forensic evidence through the automatic detection of teargas canister images by Forensic Architecture, a British NGO investigating human rights violations; the infamous Project Maven designed by the Department of Defense to process full-motion videos from drones and automatically detect potential targets; and computer art videos making visible the inner functioning of AI.

Richardson adds to the existing literature on AI by asking how algorithmic evidence can be brought into the frame of witnessing in ways that human witnessing cannot. But he only hints at a crucial fact: most machine learning applications touted as capable of autonomous reasoning and intelligent decision-making are in fact “Potemkin AI” or “non-intelligent artificial intelligence.” The innovation sector lives on hype, hyperbole, and promissory futures. Likewise, media reactions to new technologies always follow the same tropes, from the “disappearance of work” to the advent of “intelligent machines” or “killer robots.” But the reality is more sobering. Deepfakes produce images that are not different in nature from the CGI-generated movies that dominate the box office since at least two decades. Forensic Architecture, the human rights NGO surveyed in the book, makes slick graphic presentations used as exhibits in judicial trials or media reportages, but does not produce new evidence or independent testimony. State surveillance is a product of twentieth century totalitarianism, not the invention of modern data engineers. Algorithms are biased because we designed them this way. The magic we see in AI-powered services is a form of trickery: their operating mode remains hidden because service providers have an interest in keeping it so. As Richardson rightfully notes, “machine learning systems and the companies that promote them almost always seek to obscure both the ‘free labor’ of user interactions and the low-paid labor of digital pieceworkers on platforms such as Mechanical Turk.” As such as human work will not disappear with automation, it would be a mistake to believe that human witnessing will be substituted by nonhuman forms of bearing witness. There are many human witnesses involved in the production of nonhuman witnessing. Instead of anticipating the replacement of humans by other-than-human agents, we would do well to examine the concrete changes taking place in human witnessing. The debasement of all forms of public authority, the hijacking of political institutions by private interests, the commitment fatigue in the face of too many horrors and catastrophes seem to me at the root of the crisis in human witnessing, for which the nonhuman offers no solution.

Ecological catastrophe

Richardson then turns to Pacific islands and the Australian continent to investigate the role of nonhuman witnessing in times of ecological catastrophe caused by the fallout of nuclear explosions and anthropogenic climate change. These territories, and the people they harbor, can testify to the world-destroying potential of these two crises: “just as the Marshall Islands and other nations in the Pacific were crucial sites for nuclear testing throughout the Cold War, so too are they now the canaries in the mineshaft of climate change.” Witnessing is not reducible to language or to human perception: when they take a continent or a planet as the scale of observation, they deny the human a privileged status for establishing environmental change or atmospheric control. The subject of the Anthroposcene is not the anthropos or Man as traditionally conceived, but an assemblage of humans, technologies, chemical elements, and other terraforming forces. Witnessing ecologies imply that ecologies can be made to witness impending crises and that there is an ecology of witnessing in which every element mediates every other. Drawing from affect theory and trauma studies, Richardson proposes the notion of “ecological trauma” to suggest the idea that trauma escapes the confines of the human body: “it can be climatic, atmospheric, collective, and it can be transmitted between people and across generations.” Ecological catastrophe has already been experienced by First Nations who have seen their environment shattered by settler colonialism, of which the British nuclear testings that took place on the Montebello Islands and at Maralinga in South Australia are only a late instantiation. The entire ecology—people, water, vegetation, animals, dirt, geology—was directly exposed to radioactive contaminants during the blasts and fallout, and no real effort to mitigate the effect on Aboriginal inhabitants was attempted. Polluted soil and sand melted into glass are the media used by Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, whose glassblowing structure adorns the cover of the book. Other aesthetic works also figure prominently in this chapter, from the aerial imaging through which the planet becomes media to poems by Indigenous writers bearing witness to the destruction of their lands. For Richardson, inspired by recent developments in media theory, “attending to the nonhuman witnessing of ecologies and ecological relations continually returns us to mediation at its most fundamental: the transfer and translation of energies from one medium to another.”

The idea that we should consider nonhumans as well as humans in our processes of witnessing and decision-making already has a significant history in the social sciences. It was first put forward by science and technology studies, or STS, and it is directly relevant for the examination of technological innovation or environmental degradation. Proposed by Bruno Latour, a French STS scholar, Actor-network theory, usually abbreviated as ANT, aims to describe any phenomena—such as climate change or large technological systems—in terms of the relationships between the human and nonhuman actors that are entangled in assemblages or networks of relationships. These networks have power dynamics leading to processes such as translation (the transport with deformation of an assemblage), symmetry (representing all agents from their own perspective) or, as proposed by Richardson, witnessing. It should not be confused with the idea that humans are incapable of witnessing events that are too large-scale or too complex to be grasped by the human mind. Indeed, history shows that local communities and scholars have long understood and monitored changes in the environment and their effect on human activities. In his late work, Latour also proposed the idea that since the environmental question was radically new, politics had to be completely reinvented. We should convene a “parliament of things” where both humans and nonhumans can be represented adequately and be brought to the stand to give testimony. Although Richardson scarcely refers to this literature—he is more interested in art critique than in science and technology studies—, he shares the view that nonhuman witnessing is politically transformative. His politics is anchored in the pluriverse (a world of many worlds), mindful of the myriad of relations between humans and nonhumans, inspired by the belief systems of First Nations, and predicated on the idea that “difference is not a problem to be solved but rather the ground for flourishing.” As he concludes, “there is no blueprint for such a politics, no white paper or policy guidance.” But it is already emergent at the level of speculative aesthetics and in the creative works that punctuate his book.

Thought in the Act

Nonhuman Witnessing is published in a series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi at Duke University Press. Richardson shares with the editors the taste for mixing art with philosophy and for engaging in high theory and abstract concept-building based on concrete examples. He borrows several key notions from Massumi (intensities, futurity, virtuality, preemption), who himself poached many of his insights in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. The new theories developed by these authors and others working in the same field go under the names of affect theory, radical empiricism, process philosophy, speculative pragmatism, ontological vitalism, and new materialism. Each chapter in the book follows an identical pattern. It introduces a new concept (“violent mediation,” “machinic affect,” “ecological trauma,” but also “radical absence” and “witnessing opacity”) that provides an angle to a series of phenomena. It develops a few cases or examples that mostly expose forms of violence that occur across a variety of scales and temporalities: military drones and remote wars (“killer robots”), algorithms (“weapons of math destruction”), and environmental devastation through nuclear testings and climate change (“the end of the world”). It covers both aspects of witnessing, as the originator of an act of testimony and as an object to be witnessed. And it uses artistic creations as illustrations of certain forms of witnessing that escape the standard model of bearing witness. The result makes a suggestive reading but sometimes lacks coherence and clarity. Richardson starts from an original idea (whether drones might become nonhuman witnesses) but stretches it a bit too far. For him, opacity is not a pitfall to be avoided but a quality to be cultivated. Rather than a contribution to theory, the book’s main impact might be on art critique. I truly admire the author’s ability to make art part of the discussion we have on humanity’s main challenges. I didn’t review the artworks curated by the author in detail, but their description makes the most lasting impression.

Writing French Theory in English

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A review of The Power at the End of the Economy, Brian Massumi, Duke University Press, 2014.

MassumiBrian Massumi owes his career to his ability to translate obscure texts into plain English, and to his penchant for doing the reverse. His first notoriety came from bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to an English-speaking audience. Without him, what became an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists may have remained a local event, known only to the francosphere. His meticulous translation from French into English proved that translating untranslatable language constitutes a challenge, not an impossibility. He may have understood Deleuze and Guattari’s work better than they understood it themselves: going through the detour of a foreign language allowed the text to shed some of its obscurities, and to take on new ones as the translator engaged in his own rap and wordplays. Meaning always exceeds linguistic conventions contained in national boundaries and syntaxic rules. In this case, the obscure clarity of A Thousand Plateaus inspired many creators beyond the field of continental philosophy. References to Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be found in literary artworks, blockbuster movies, electronic music, and even in financial theory and military thinking. Massumi was both a translator and an interpreter of Deleuzian philosophy: his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia remains the most accessible and playful introduction to one of the major intellectual achievements of the late twentieth century. If, as Michel Foucault prophesied, the twenty-first century will be Deleuzian, it will be in no small part thanks to Brian Massumi and to his role as a translator and a go-between.

The Deleuzian Century

But the most important lies elsewhere. Brian Massumi was not only the faithful translator of a thought originating from France and the commentator who explained its meaning to a general audience. He is also an author in his own right, and now can claim the paternity of an œuvre. He was the first thinker to write French theory in English. And if it wasn’t confusing enough, he did it from a perch at McGill University in Montréal, in the French-speaking province of an English-speaking country. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first earned his living from copying musical scores, Massumi was first a copyist or a scribe, then an interpreter of others’ compositions, and then a composer of his own symphonies and sonatas. From his work as a passeur, a boatman taking cultural productions from one river bank to the next, he drew the resources to become a navigator in the rough waters of postmodern philosophy. Like Charon, the ferryman of the Ancient Greek underworld, he has to be paid with the silver coins put over the eyes of dead philosophers. In this case, Deleuze and Guattari provided him with the viaticum that allowed him to launch his ship into stormy seas. In a way, his work predates artificial intelligence: it is the text that an AI software system would have produced after having been fed with the complete works of Gilles Deleuze and other luminaries of postmodern thinking. One can also say that Massumi did to Deleuze what Deleuze claimed to have done to Spinoza and to Bergson: taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. Massumi invites us to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. 

Brian Massumi makes many references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Like Alice, the author identifies a rabbit hole as a point of entry to the Market in Wonderland. This entry point is called affect, and following the white rabbit of economic interest through it leads to a world where the rules keep changing, nothing is what it seems, and some people appear (like the Queen of Hearts) to be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast. When Alice was invited for tea, she naturally assumed that she would sit in one chair and enjoy her tea in the pleasant company of a collection of strange but interesting characters. Little did she know what would follow. At the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the time was always six o’clock and though Alice moved from chair to chair as she, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare moved places around the table, Alice never actually got any tea to eat or drink. Likewise, we assume we are invited to discuss economics and its limits whereas in fact we are summoned to a trial where language is put to the test and things are not what they seem. “Must a name mean something?” Alice asks Humpty Dumpty, only to get this answer: “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Similarly, Massumi’s book, like Deleuze and Guattari’s, can mean many things to different persons. It is a remix of concepts imported from French theory, abstract notions and models used in scientific disciplines such as economics or physics, and the author’s own idiosyncrasies, such as the literary reference to Alice in Wonderland. The language used by Massumi can be highly metaphorical: “We are all paying guests at the Tea Party of choice, spreading our favorite jam on our very own slice of the bread of life, served on the silver platter of efficiency by the invisible hand.”

The Market in Wonderland

The Power at the End of the Economy is the power of economics at its frontiers, where economists dispense with the hypothesis of rational choice and efficient markets and experiment with alternative ideas. The idea that economics only deals with rational agents maximizing expected utility no longer characterizes economic science in its most recent developments. New fields of research, from neuroeconomics to behavioral economics and theoretical finance, are modeling how economic choices are made without relying on flawed assumptions and erroneous hypotheses. Bounded rationality implicates the idea that humans take shortcuts that may lead to suboptimal decision-making, and that emotions, habits, biases, heuristics, and environmental factors also contribute to individual and societal preferences. Massumi’s book starts where the explaining power of economics ends and has to give way to alternative explanations starting from very different premises. We find affects, hence power, at the end of the economy. Specifically, emotions and affects bind subjects together into collectivities, taking on a life of their own through circulation and exchange. We do not live in a world peopled by economic actors, producers and consumers, buying and selling at an equilibrium price on well-designed markets. We live in an economy of affects, and we must learn to detach these affects from the level of the individual. Affects operate at the infra-individual level, through and beyond the human actor: the pertinent scale of analysis is at the level of the body, the organ, or the body without organs. Affects are relational entities: they are generated by relationships between people, things, and their environment. They are trans-individual: they form packets and bundles of tendencies that are routed and rerouted through feedback loops and short circuits, bypassing the conscience of the self-contained individual. 

Unlike many critics, Massumi has understood that modern economics no longer posits a rational actor as the foundation of the discipline. In neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, or certain parts of empirical finance, decisions are influenced by psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors and may differ from those implied by classical economic theory. Economics may also dispense with the individual as the unit of analysis: not necessarily by taking collective units and aggregates, like in macroeconomics, but by focusing on factors at the infra-individual level: brain waves and neurotransmitters affecting the chemistry of the brain; rumors and pieces of information circulating in financial networks; discrete preferences and inclinations that may coexist in one same individual. Modern economics tends to consider goods as a set of functions: for example, replacing demand for cars with demand for mobility. Similarly, the individual in Massumi’s post-economics world is a bundle or an assemblage of tendencies and affects, wave packets and oscillatory processes. Nothing guarantees that these circuits and resonances will converge to an equilibrium or that they will conform to economic orthodoxy. We have moved beyond the mirror and through the looking-glass into a world of power and intensity. The telos or purpose of an economic system may not necessarily be described in terms of interest, utility, wealth, or happiness; it can also be characterized by intensities and forces, potencies and tendencies. For power is what lies at the end of the economy. Remember the dialogue between Alice and Dumpty Dumpty: “The question is,’ said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Mastering economics

Apart from economics, Brian Massumi takes his inspiration from other disciplines. I was surprised by the extent of his readings, which appear in the end notes and bibliographical references. He refers to a long list of popular management books to illustrate the notions of decison-without-deliberation and deliberation-without-attention: in the 1990s, managers were supposed to follow their intuition and “gut feelings” or practice Zen meditation in order to thrive on chaos and manage complexity. And indeed, experimental psychology has shown that intuitive reasoning leads to better choices than rational calculus or profit maximization. Giving too many reasons and considerations leads to bad decisions, whereas simple rules and heuristics generate the right course of action. The study of non-conscious decisions has become a thriving field, illustrated by concepts such as choice blindness, irrational exuberance, and strategic ignorance. In conditions of radical uncertainty, rational choice and intuition converge in a zone of indistinction where one approach can collapse into its opposite like in a Möbius strip. Footnotes include a reference to Elie Ayache’s book, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability, which applies ideas from modern philosophy and theoretical physics to the predictability of extreme events in a chaotic system. The same set of ideas were applied by Massumi in his subsequent book, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, which tackles the issue of preemption in international relations and modern warfare. Together with this volume, these two books form an ontology of the present, shedding light on the ways we formulate political agency as well as validate ethical and political decisions.

By unpacking the notion of affect, Brian Massumi proposes to bring an end to the linguistic turn—the idea that everything is composed of texts, discourse, written signs, signifiers and signified, layers upon layers of interpretations and rewritings. Intervening where interpretation and hermeneutics ran master, he attempts to replace deconstruction with schizoanalysis, and Derrida by his rival Deleuze. Rather than discrete language structures, he emphasizes the continuous flow of vital processes; rather than social construction and differed meanings, the immediate nature of perception and affects; emergence and immanence rather than transcendence and metaphysics; ontogenesis in place of ontology; variations in intensity rather than differences of degree; virtuality and potential rather than probability and risk. The key word in this Copernican revolution is affect. Massumi pioneered the affective turn by acknowledging the intertwining of the material, the social, and the cultural as well as their interrelational articulations. As Massumi puts it, affect is neither about the cognitive realm nor about the discursive domain, but rather is in excess of a conscious state of perception and of bodily responses. Affects refer to pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others. By linking affect to intensity or force, Massumi also sees affect as “body movement looked at from the point of view of its potential – its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do.” This notion of affect gives rise to an alternative conceptualisation of agency. Affective agency is about relations of affective circulation between material elements and the intensive affect that a particular body is capable of at various degrees of potentiality. In other words, the subject emerges as a collection of circuits immanent to both bodily matter and to all matter more generally.

Built-in obscurity

What characterizes Massumi’s texts is their hermeticity and indecipherability. He laces his writings with obscurity just like manufacturers use built-in obsolescence in their products to sell more at faster rates. His thinking is only valid as to the extent that it goes beyond his own presuppositions and readers’ expectations. He doesn’t know at the start of a paragraph when it will end and where it will lead to. Like a crazy dancer, he is always ready to move one step beyond and be surprised by his own moves. Like the cartoon character, he is constantly running over a cliff and walking into midair until he gets caught by the gravitational pull. He knows that some of the sentences he is writing cannot possibly make sense, and that others, when translated into plain language, are trivial and commonsensical. But he doesn’t care: what matters is the flow, the rhythm, the scansion. What pleases him most is when he is able to write down things he didn’t think he could think. This is the definition of enjoyment according to Lacan: the jouissance of the thing as impossible, the excess or surplus of exultation which has no use value and which persists for the mere sake of pleasuring the self. Reading The Power at the End of the Economy made me remember a scene in the movie Lost in Translation, when the director of a TV commercial is talking to the actor Bill Murray and giving him detailed instructions in Japanese, only to be summed up by the English two words: “more intensity!” by the incompetent interpreter. Many pages and long sentences by Brian Massumi could be summed up as such: “more intensity!”

A Materialist Reading of New Materialisms

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A review of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010.

New MaterialismsIn everyday language, a materialist is defined as a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. According to Madonna’s famous song, “we are living in a material world.” Says the Material Girl: “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me / I think they’re okay / If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk away /…/ ‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right.” Madonna may not have had in mind the new materialisms referred to in the book edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Here materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications, as opposed to spiritualism that posits a dualism between subject and matter. But the material girl’s lyrics may provide a good entry point into this volume. After all, Madonna’s kissing and hugging addresses a strong message to the feminists who have been accused of routinely ignoring the matter of corporeal life. In exposing her body, Madonna draws our attention to what really matters (sex), while referring to non-bodily retributions (money) that also matter a great deal. So my materialist questions to the book will be: Do we still live in a material world according to these new versions of materialism? Do the authors give proper credit, and to whom? What does the reader get from his or her cold hard cash? And are the contributors always Mr (or Mrs) Right?

In bed with Madonna, reading philosophy

For the editors, a return to materialism, albeit in newer forms, is a turn away from approaches dominated by post-structuralist theories of language and discourse. The humanities and social sciences went through a long period sometimes referred to as the “cultural turn”, which privileged language, discourse, culture, and values. New disciplines developed, such as cultural studies, gender studies, new literary criticism, and various forms of linguistic analysis, taking as their core task the analysis of texts and the deconstruction of meanings. The cultural turn was also a political phenomenon: it gave rise to identity politics and culture wars, which took university campuses as their battleground and became estranged from broader social trends and political movements. For the editors of this volume, approaches associated with the so-called cultural turn are no longer adequate to understanding contemporary society. In particular, the radicalism associated with the cultural studies curriculum is now perceived as more or less exhausted. As they state in the introductory chapter, “it is political naïveté to believe that significant social change can be engendered solely by reconstructing subjectivities, discourse, ethics, and identities.” To find new forms of social critique, one needs to turn to advances in the life sciences, while revisiting certain tenets of political philosophy that still hold potential.

To counter the cultural turn’s law of diminishing returns, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost propose a “material turn” that builds on bodies, affects, ecologies, living organisms, and life itself. The focus here is less on matter per se than on processes of materialization: “for materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationally, or difference that renders matters active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.” Their new materialism exposes the fragility of things, the vibrancy of matter, the agency of nonhuman actors, the affective claims of nonhuman animals, the social life of artifacts, the materiality of experience, and the generative power of life. The editors believe “it is now timely to reopen the issue of matter and once again to give material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects.” Their founding gesture aims at establishing identity through differentiation from past approaches and by constituting a genealogy of ancestors who can sustain their materialist credentials on firm philosophical ground. Most importantly, they claim that the return to materialism can lead to more active forms of engagement with our contemporary predicament, attuned to ongoing changes in global economic structures and emerging scientific knowledge. Their approach takes the tone of a manifesto: “to succeed, a reprisal of materialism must be truly radical.”

A turn back to French postwar philosophy

Revisiting materialism takes the form of a random walk through Western philosophy. Three kinds of philosophers are brought to bear: classical philosophers, with a chapter on Hobbes and several references to Spinoza and to Leibniz; the “philosophy of suspicion” formed by the holy trinity of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, to which one could add Bergson and the vitalist school; and postwar French philosophers—the first cohort represented by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the post-Mai 1968 generation by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, and Louis Althusser, who themselves revisited the previous traditions. Indeed, the book seems to hark back to the French intellectual scene of the seventies, when philosophers had to steer a course between the two major intellectual currents of structuralism and phenomenology while all the while being sensitive to the legacy of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. The authors of New Materialisms replay a gesture already performed by Judith Butler, who wrote her PhD thesis on the reception of Hegel in twentieth century France and the appropriation of German philosophy by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Why this French primal scene is seen as so productive is left to the imagination of the reader. One suspects it has more to do with intellectual fads and academic conformism than by the urge to develop concepts and advance ideas attuned to our times and modern understanding of the world.

Marxism in postwar France was the “unsurpassable horizon of our time,” and it is only natural that the authors of New Materialisms turn to Marx as the godfather of materialism. For Marxists, the material conditions of a society’s way of producing and reproducing the means of human existence fundamentally determine its organization and development. Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head by substituting historical materialism to the dialectical idealism of the phenomenology of spirit. In Hegel, the abstract/ideal is realized in the concrete, whereas to Marx the concrete/material is realized, even when obscured, in the abstract domain of conscious thought. Vintage Marx is represented in this volume by Jason Edwards’ essay on “The Materialism of Historical Materialism”. Against economicist readings of Marx that focus solely on the sphere of production, he argues that Marx’s social philosophy took into account “the totality of the material practices that are required to reproduce the relations of production over time.” Here Marx is read through the lenses of Henri Lefebvre, who recognized the diversity of the forms of practices that are necessary for sustaining economic and political life. Nonproductive practices, such as theoretical work but also the everyday life of consumption and leisure, play a fundamental role in the reproduction of capitalism. For Edwards, Lefebvre’s work on the critique of everyday life and the production of social space should be extended beyond the strictures of the nation-state: the modern reproduction of capitalism has to take into account global processes under conditions of neoliberalism.

Orientation matters

The reference to Marx is also present in Simone de Beauvoir’s work, which develops a phenomenology of lived experience through which, as she famously put it, “one is not born but becomes a woman.” Unlike structuralism, in which subjectivity and the inner self arise as the result of outside forces, going as it were “from the outside in”, phenomenology tends to proceed “from the inside out”, starting from our experience of the world and going back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct from that experience. The question of orientation—outside in, inside out—is also addressed in Sara Ahmed’s chapter, taking “the table” as her primary object for thinking about how orientations matter. Philosophers usually sit at a table when they write, and often take this piece of furniture as the starting point from which the world unfolds. But Husserl’s or Heidegger’s writing table is part of a domestic space that excludes as much as it summons. Women writers have a different orientation towards tables, which may provide the support for writing, but also for cooking, eating, attending children, and doing domestic work. As Virginia Woolf claims in A Room of One’s Own, for women to claim a space to write is a political act. The table is not simply what she faces but is the site upon which she makes her feminist point. The politics of the table also involves racial and class-based divisions of labor, as middle-class women could access the writing table by relying on the domestic labor of black and working-class women.

In his 1978 introduction to the English translation of his mentor Georges Canguilhem’s On the Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault proposed a famous line of distinction between two strands of philosophy in postwar France. As he wrote, “it is the line that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. One the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of Cavailles, Bachelard and Canguilhem.” Similarly, we see two brands of materialism developed in this volume: one one side, a philosophy of life; on th other, a philosophy of the concept. In Bergson, modern readers find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change. This orientation would persist throughout the twentieth century, up to and including Deleuze, who once remarked that “everything I write is vitalist, at least I hope it is.” On the other side, we find a philosophy of the mathematically-based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, and Badiou. The choice here is between conceiving of thought as fundamentally arising from within the depths of animated matter (vitalism), or of conceiving of thought as a cut that interrupts or breaks with vital flux in favor of the strict assemblage of concepts (formalism). This debate between life and concept echoes throughout this book, with some contributions predicated upon the inertia of matter and others on the generativity of flesh.

Finding love and pleasure in the material world

Reading New Materialisms can be a frustrating experience. The chapters are designed as interventions in a debate that has stakes extending way beyond the covers of this volume. The opposition between “old” and “new” feminism, the epistemological challenge of the life sciences, the posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency: these broader themes are only alluded to in oblique fashion. It is to be noted that many contributors have authored books in which they develop their ideas in a fuller form that certainly needs to be addressed. I may come back on this blog to the works of Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Rey Chow, and Elizabeth Grosz (all of which are published by Duke University Press), who certainly deserve better treatment than what one can infer from the dozen pages in which they had to constrain their entry. In particular, the empirical aspect of their research is reduced to a minimum: there is no reference to fieldwork or to systematically collected observations of social realities. The authors limit themselves to the work of theory. Although they comment the texts of (mostly French) philosophers, none of them belong to a philosophy department, and they all come from American or British academic institutions. They all work in political science departments, women and gender studies or cultural studies faculties, or in programs focusing on the humanities. They dabble in theory and practice philosophy without proper qualifications, while pointing to practical implications that are forever deferred.

Despite their intentions, new materialisms remain deeply rooted in cultural theory. They inherit from cultural critics the same political militancy and strident advocacy that sustain their claim to be “truly radical”. In a poorly argumented shortcut, Jane Bennett draws a parallelism between vitalist philosophy exemplified by Hans Driesch (a contemporary of Henri Bergson) and the “culture of life” that opposes abortion, artificial life support, and embryonic stem cell research, but that supports preemptive war, state-sponsored torture, and civilizational imperialism. William Connolly moves from Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception to a denunciation of ubiquitous surveillance, cynical realism, and self-depoliticization that characterizes the national security state after 9/11. Pheng Cheah confesses that “it is difficult to elaborate on the political implications of Deleuze’s understanding of materiality as the power of inorganic life,” but nonetheless endorses a creative appropriation of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude as a new agent of social change. Jason Edwards offers a return to Marx’s historical materialism as a solution “to the major problems of climate change, global inequality, and warfare that face the world today.” There are, however, different political conclusions to infer from a return to materialism. We can use the increased salience of materialist philosophies to develop a healthy connection to things material. Like it or not, we are living in a material world, and liking ‘stuff’ is OK, healthy even—we can learn to love and find pleasure in the material world. This is the lesson that seems to me implied in the lyrics and rhythm of Madonna’s songs.

There Is More to Philosophy for Anthropologists Than Just Foucault

Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, Edited by Veena Das, Michael D. Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Bhrigupati Singh. Duke University Press, 2014.

The Ground Between.jpgMy strong belief is that this book will prove as important as the volume Writing Culture, published in 1986, which marked a turning point in the orientation of anthropological writing. This is not to say that anthropologists didn’t engage philosophy before Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, or that they will with renewed strength thereafter. Many classical anthropologists were trained as philosophers, especially in the French tradition where disciplinary borders are more porous. Pierre Bourdieu described his work in anthropology and sociology as “fieldwork in philosophy.” Nowadays “theory”, which samples a limited set of authors from contemporary philosophy, is part of the toolbox that every graduate student learns to master, and that they often repeat devotedly as a shibboleth that will grant them their PhD. What is striking in The Ground Between is the variety of authors that the contributors discuss, as well as the depth of their engagement, which goes beyond scholarly debates and is often set out in existential terms. For many anthropologists, philosophers are a life’s companion, helping them to navigate through the pitfalls of scholarship and the vicissitudes of life.

After having been killed by Writing Culture, Clifford Geertz is back in favor

If Writing Culture was a gesture aimed at dismissing Clifford Geertz, killing the father as it were, several authors from The Ground Between move back to him as a revered father figure, or maybe as a grumpy uncle who may provide an unending collection of quips and aphorisms. Geertz indeed offers wonderful quotes as to how anthropology and philosophy stand in relation to each other, to the world, and to the self. He observed that anthropology and philosophy share “an ambition to connect just about everything with everything else,” and remarked that “one of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly enterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows exactly what it is.” Asked by João Biehl what was his main contribution to theory, Geertz replied succinctly: “substraction”. While being generous and open to dialogue, Geertz could also strike back viciously at personal attacks such as the ones perpetrated by the authors of Writing Culture. “There is very little in what the partisans of an anthropology in which fieldwork plays a much reduced or transformed role… have so far done that would suggest they represent the way of the future,” he wrote, somewhat presciently.

Another move that many contributors enact is, although with much caution and the remains of a certain reverence, a distancing from Foucault. At the very least, they demonstrate that there is more to philosophy for anthropologists than just Foucault. Reproducing poorly rehashed quotes and concepts from Foucault will not automatically grant you access to graduate school. Didier Fassin exposes a research proposal submitted by a prospective student that reads as complete gobbledygook. Simply borrowing the lexicon of Foucault (biopolitics, power/knowledge, governmentality) or of his direct heir Agamben (the state of exception, bare life, thanatopolitics) will not get you very far. Similarly, Arthur Kleinman points out that scholars often engage in the “cultivation of the recondite, the otiose, the irresponsibly transgressive, and the merely clever,” with the effect of estranging the learned public from their discipline and turning scholarly debates into irrelevant wordplays. For João Biehl as well, “insular academic language and debates and impenetrable prose should not be allowed to strip people’s lives, knowledge, and struggles of their vitality–analytical, political, and ethical.”

Keeping Foucault at a distance

Didier Fassin writes his essay “in abusive fidelity to Foucault”, and prefers “a free translation rather than mere importation” of his concepts. Although he recognizes the heuristic fecundity of the master, he points out that many formulas borrowed by his heirs and epigones are just that: formulaic. As he soon realized in his research on humanitarian interventions, “I was indeed exploring something that Foucault had paradoxically ignored in spite of what the etymology of his concept of biopolitics seems to imply–life.” This led him to substitute the term “biopolitics” with the expression “the politics of life”, and to pay attention to the tension between the affirmation of the sacredness of life (as defined by Canguilhem) and the disparities in the treatment of particular lives (exemplified by Hannah Arendt’s work). Life is indeed a theme and even a word that is alien to Foucault’s writing. Attending to life as it is lived features prominently in several essays in the volume: “taking life back in” could be an apt description of the whole enterprise. Another common move is to go back to the source of Foucault’s inspiration, by rereading the scholars who had the most formative influence on his thinking: Georges Canguilhem in the case of Didier Fassin, and Georges Dumezil for Bhigupati Singh (who hints at a homosexual relationship between the master and the student). If Foucault is spared by those authors, they find in Agamben an avatar of “a negative dialectical lineage” (Singh) and reject his “apocalyptic take on the contemporary human condition” (Biehl).

While keeping Foucault at a distance, most authors remain firmly committed to French theory, and engage in a productive dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari, Bourdieu, as well as older figures such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre or Bergson. Deleuze in particular is mobilized by many authors, to the point one could speak of a “deleuzian moment” in anthropology. Bhigupati Singh finds in Deleuze “an opening, a way into non-dialectical thought” that he uses in his analysis of life in a destitute Indian community. João Biehl read Deleuze while documenting the fate of Catarina, a poignant character in a place of abandonment, until his editor commented: “I don’t care what Deleuze thinks. I want to know what Catarina thinks!” Ghassan Hage wrote the “auto-ethnography” of his deafness and capacity to hear again in close dialogue with Bourdieu, seeing exemplifications of his key concepts but also the limits in the way Bourdieu conceived of being in a world characterized by inequalities in the “accumulation of homeliness”. To be deprived of raisons d’être is not to be deprived of being: as João Biehl puts it, “language and desire continue meaningfully even in circumstances of profound abjection.” “If Sartre became for me a “natural” conversation partner in my anthropological work,” confesses Michael Jackson, “it was because his focus on the conditions under which a human life becomes viable and enjoyable implied a critique of metaphysical and systematizing philosophies.” As Geertz put it succinctly: “I don’t do systems.”

A return to the American liberal tradition

A cadre of young French philosophers such as Jocelyn Benoist, Sandra Laugier and Claude Imbert also find their way into the bibliography. But other philosophical voices are also making themselves heard. For some, it is a return to the American tradition, with prominent contemporary figures such as Stanley Cavell or Nelson Goodman and older ones such as Henry James and John Austin or Hannah Arendt. Arthur Kleinman finds in Henri James the life lessons that accompany him while giving care to his wife suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, making him “feel less alone”. He considers James’s Varieties of Religious Experience the best source for teaching a course on “Religion and Medicine”. Reading Hannah Arendt in Teheran, Michael Fischer notes that Iranian intellectuals were “no longer interested in revolutionary political philosophy but rather in liberalism. Habermas, Rorty, Rawls, and Arendt were all objects of much interest.” Veena Das finds in Cavell’s philosophy the kind of attention to “the low, the ordinary, and the humble” that helps her answer to the pressures from her ethnography by “making the everyday count”.

The anthropologists are careful to point out what philosophers owe to anthropology. João Biehl underscores that Deleuze and Guattari owe their notion of “plateau” to Gregory Bateson’s work on Bali, and that their key insights on nomadism, the encoding of fluxes, the war machine, or indeed schizophrenia, all come from Pierre Clastres’s attempt to theorize “primitive society” as a social form constantly at war against the emergence of the state. The habit of “writing against” that defines a large strand of contemporary philosophy is also central in the conceptual schemes of the founding fathers of anthropology, from Bronislav Malinowski to Margaret Mead. Bhigupati Singh reminds us that “Deleuze deeply admired Levi-Strauss” and may have found in his brand of structuralism a few nondialectic terms that he finds “helpful for thinking about power, ethics, and life.” Following his provocative advice to “take an author from behind,” he imagines the offsprings that may have been produced by an anthropologically-oriented Deleuze. Michael Puett invites us to use indigenous theories to break down our own assumptions about how theory operates: “the goal should not be just to deconstruct twentieth-century theoretical categories but to utilize indigenous visions to rethink our categories and the nature of categories altogether.”

Who’s in and who’s out in the philosophical market

But this book is not a popular chart of “who is in and who is out”, whose ratings go down and whose go up in the philosophical market where anthropologists do their shopping. The authors are careful to distance themselves from “anthropologists who look to philosophy as providing the theory and to anthropology to give evidence from empirical work to say how things really are.” Ethnography is not just proto-philosophy, and anthropologists do not need authorization or patronage in their pronouncements. The idea is to “work from ethnography to theory, not the other way around.” If philosophy can be defined as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,” then perhaps anthropology constitutes “a mode of heightened attentiveness to life” that builds on “experience-near concepts” in order to show “how ordinary life itself gives rise to puzzles we might call philosophical.” The Ground Between therefore doesn’t herald an “ontological turn” or a “philosophical moment” in modern anthropology, in the way that Writing Culture was perceived as a turning point affixed with various labels (“postmodern”, “reflexive”, “deconstructionist”). But it is an attempt to step back, take stock, and reflect on what anthropologists are doing, in order to make their contribution to social science, to knowledge, and to human life more meaningful.