Notes on technology

In science studies, the classic critiques from Marcuse and Heidegger against the framing of persyns (Humyn and non) as passive so as to imbue them with a dependency apparatus (i.e., Domestication) is given short shrift, most notably by Don Ihde. Of course, Marcuse predicted Ihde's pragmatic response--Political Universals are just a little too structuralist in a postmodern world--and so, the Heideggerian rhetoric of Technology is quickly chopped down to size, managed, neutralized, if only because seeing Technology as destructive, as Agamben sees it, goes against our collectively manipulated (yet desired, alas) sense of beautiful living.   

Of course, both Heidegger and Marcuse in fact suggest that Technology/Domestication, that political universal, can be neutralized. In Heidegger, calculation (Gestell) opens Dasein to possibility, with attendant danger; for Marcuse, Technology can serve the needs of Necessity, a Marxist promise that has long passed for the obvious reason that Capitalism is egoistic in the passive nihilist sense. Of course, the obvious objection against Marcuse and Heidegger is that one is already modified under the repressive hypothesis; one is displaced, cut into (constituted as distinct from nature). Pace Marcuse, one is not really distinct about necessary natural desires and non-necessary natural desires; automation of Necessity can never be necessarily best. (This is the rupture that Agamben introduces in What is An Apparatus?, yet his move against the subject (as whatever being in resistance) might perhaps not be sufficiently post-left. That is to say, Agamben's position is ambiguous, although perhaps for strategic purposes).

In any event, Ihde's argument isn't very persuasive; obviously it points to the limits of the academy and reveals it as essentially invested in the Progress mantra, that is, passing privilege around, so long as its ultimate telos, mechanization, is not disclosed; and this is pricisely what Heidegger does when he calls to attention that which holds sway in this modern age: it is calculative logic and efficiency which essences.

This thinking about a tension concerning Technology as a Universal to be resisted and technology as a pragmatic issue that we can overcome generates the purported difference between tools and technology; or rather, such is kicking about in this discussion. Potentially any technology can become a tool provided that its use in no way depends on the Quantitative (the grid as an assemblage of structured cells, or 'enframed' substances--that is, beings ordered to work according to capitalism's telos--mechanized efficiency). Yet, if this statement is understood, it is apparent that is not the case that potentially any technology can become independent of the Quantitative; for many require background conditions; many require of necessity the ordering of other substances.

It is of course theoretically possible to build the entire technological apparatus from scratch provided one is a member of those privileged in the know. Then tools depend on tools; it would be tools all the way down, so to speak. Putting aside the intentional ambiguity here concerning ordering substances--what isn't a potentially ordered substance?--the re/sources in this constitution would be purchased, and the products would therefore be (re)constituted by the independent builder. In practise I can build primitive tools. For anything requiring background technologies, I consume what you produce; and the more intense the technology being built, the less the tool is independent; the more intense, the more reliant on ordering substances--which is to say nothing of ordering oneself to do anything at all.

This point can be further sketched out by noting a direct relation and self-reflexive relation. To run your car you have to buy gas, parts, et cetera. One can make all of these oneself, ideally, and this is the cash value of any technology potentially being a tool. The mode of desire calling us forth, responsible for our being as such towards its end is a shifting movement from non-autonomy to autonomy; from direct dependency to, ideally, a closed circuit of autonomy. Other technologies are less directly involved with the system. Consider the hammer. Once purchased, no specialists are necessary, even to the point that it might simply be a rock appended to a stick with some rope so that it only relied on acquiring objects from an original source independent of production by humyn and animal life. My point above recommends that unless one constitutes the tool, entirely from scratch, it is a Technology. Autonomy, its opposite Universal, is to go it alone, to contain the tools' relations to other tools without remainder, without Technology.

Given that this is a tall task, and assuming that we want to move from Technology to owning tools completely, putting them in a closed circuit of Autonomy, perhaps it will be suggested, in a syndicalist mode, that to get at the tool-user from any Technology is the collapsing of (humyn) hierarchy put in play via a massive expropriation. Together, collectively that is to say, we can make a mass expropriation so that we share in the production of making X a tool, whatever X. Then it would seem to follow that any technology could become a tool because I, personally, do not have to consult some specialist in its fixing; we learn how to do it ourselves; it's, at least potentially, even stevens all around. Still, even so, the issue that Heidegger brings forth is that I would thereby have to depend on you going to work, and worse, on myself becoming a socialist, and I try not to be cruel (especially towards myself). If we are to avoid Technology, in the sense of turning objects into grid constituted objects for use, we have to abolish hierarchy. Then, perhaps, dependence wouldn't be a matter of unfair conditions. Yet, work itself is brutal and you simply cannot depend on me showing up no matter how much violence you wish to do to yourself. Therefore it seems more plausible to suppose that only some tools do not depend on quantitative functioning of (other) working bodies for the duration of their functioning existence. Computers are tight in their possible trajectories and it is without a doubt that they require support. Even a typewriter requires ribbons, just as a tape player requires tapes.What of the hammer? The writing device?

The ultimate truth at play caught up in the rhetoric of Heidegger and undisclosed in the dismissal of his sense by Ihde's rhetoric, is that substances, humyn or otherwise, are always modified so long as these whatever-substances are not free to idle, so long as each is not let-be, whether at work, and even at work in the post-revolution. So Technology as a Universal to be negated is still relevant; after all, it is clear, rational and obvious, that only some technologies can be tools.

Death hath no fury; for we ne'er hath a future.

We fear because we are not sure of the consequences of some action that somehow involves us. We approach the feared thing, heart palpitating, perhaps shuddering as it approaches. Calming the soul so that one can carry out smooth action was the purpose of ancient schools of true philosophy that have been buried under centuries of boring philosophical analysis—to what end? In order to combat the anxiety and worry that attends the feared object, it is crucial to nurture a courageous spirit, or at least confidence, and this depends on action, not talk; proof, in the broadest sense of the word, not empty promises.

Building confidence is done in small doses. As more feared objects are neutralized, one gains power over them. In general, we do not fear if we have power over the other. And this means rejecting the idea that all power is necessarily evil. On the contrary, power is wonderful if it works to an individual’s personal advantage.

Here there is a classic liberal position on the topic that must be addressed if only to forestall confusion. Nihilism about morality says nothing about trajectories; it merely says there are consequences. It is therefore not that there Ought to be a praised ethical judgment about power flowing from the ground up, from the dictatorship of the proletariat; it is therefore also not the case that there is anything bad (in itself) about the existence of power over us. We might not like it, sure, but nothing more than the spirit of revolt supports our judgment that it is ugly. And its existence over us is all the more glorious because it permits the possibility of a life worth living in glorious revenge.

I want to meander about the claim that nihilistic morality is more sensible than anarchist morality.

Consider this dilemma. If X should call pigs to take out Y, anarchists may say that this is akin to snitching. If we ask why? we seem bound to say that X falls into a privileged class, and that the very act perpetuates “systems of oppression”. On the other hand, if an other on the ascending ladder of privilege should do the same to gain power over an other above them on the ladder, we are less likely to call them snitches. In truth, no one should call cops, but there is something about being disempowered by the system that permits anarchist permissibility of using that system to your advantage (power-with “in opposition” to power-to). To clarify this view, we have three social-ontological relations at play. Power over, power-to, and power with. Privilege generates power over according to the rules of power to. Power-with corrects this imbalance and rejects power to. Ideally, power-with would negate the very idea of power-over; but in practise, it seems clear enough that power-with is just another form of power-over, in this case, power-over the individual.

In order to overcome a perpetrator of whatever we deem improper according to our rules, we permit the use of whatever methods. Of course, the absurd internal breakdown comes into play when we talk about the state itself as a perpetrator (power-with here excludes the use of the state); but for the most part, this issue is not on the table because the creation of empowered subjects is reformist and disables nothing. My point here is to call attention to the growth of power. Underprivileged persyns are permitted to assemble with leftist states (permissible power-with) to form power over coded (bourgeois) bodies that follow as such from the leftists’ defining attributes; privileged persyns, on the other hand, are not permitted to assemble power against the underprivileged, given that this is actually the repetition of power-to. The problem here is not power, clearly, but a particular form of power, power-to, against which one must* assemble according to leftist morality. Anarchist Morality then is merely a code of ethics whereby one assembles alongside the useless left to crush the power of consequences over our sociological lives.

In order to carve sense into this arbitrary negotiation of power over, “clarified” by power-with and power-to, we have to clarify the rules that generate the sorting procedure. Privilege helps to clarify the notion of the anti-aesthetic, and the dictatorship of the proletariat points the way to the politico-aesthetic. The nihilist idea of there being consequences gets all of this without precluding the possibility of rejecting even leftist power over the individual. It therefore rejects the aesthetic of thinking that power-over is good so long as it confirms liberal and sociological manipulation, and thereby avoids power-to. Any rational persyn would see that this obviously fails to address the fact that coded bodies in opposition do not necessarily conform to power-to. In other words, what is a manarchist? Merely a conversation stopper, to use Rorty’s term, a device that is meant to hide the fact that one is generating new wine for old wineskins. Power-with is another form of power-to against the individual. Such is also the existent for queer insurrection.

Having genuine power is a matter of capacity for oneself; it is a matter of genuine autonomy; it is a sign weakness to depend on others to generate power. Of course, your friends probably want to explore erotic desire in the act of revenge as well, and it would be all too selfish to suppose that their uniqueness undermines your own capacity to be free. Such is not the point that I want to address here. What I want to say is that power-with need not be a matter of acceptance of the sociological apparatus. On the contrary, power-with might not be repugnant with power-to. For this sociological apparatus is weak analysis in suggesting that the male individual in acting individually is perpetuating systems of domination. The question is: What does it mean to act with the system? Having the power to act in a manner that is free need not depend on privileges attributed by the system; these might have been gifted, but these can be used in free acts of negation. To transcend the system may be possible only for some sociological molar masses in the system; but transcending it, or downgoing, to call upon Nietzsche, is the key that is often ignored. The counterpoint that the system privileges some to transcend it is nonsense because the sociological apparatus doesn’t permit exclusions. One might say that the system generates the illusion of freedom for some, and this is more on point; but we nihilists have the difference between quality and quantity to demolish this bad argument: quantitative living is ugly (and boring) as fuck.

According to Spinoza, the rebel that wishes to revolt against the monarch should do so only if (s)he has the power to win; otherwise it is rational to wait until such power-with is brought forth—and all of this only if the king is corrupt. The king might (collectively) have all our interests at heart; such is the promise of enlightenment representation (leftism). But this all depends on what it means to live qualitatively. If such has nothing to do with quantitative calculation, if such is merely a living in ones’ own life, upon which one has decided to live and grow power, sacking the king is hardly necessary. To have freedom does not mean one is the king, or the delegate, or the socialist in a general assembly; to be free, one merely needs to assemble Unique power against consequences that we fear, which may or may not be individual.

In other words, not only must we overcome our own fears by building confidence, we must also overcome the fear of being perceived as a barbarian, that is, a coded body, caught up in the consequences of anarchist colonial morality. We will work through all of our external fears until they are nothing to us.

To sort out instances of permissible power-with strikes this reader as silly because when it comes down to it, there is only desire and consequences; nothing but revolt underpins the reality of consequences given that History will not redeem us.

Hybrids, etc.,

The nature of no nature--one of Haraway's terms--is an important figure because it carries the point that in this realm, when this realm is constituting our being, indeed, in this extreme demand upon us that forces some social to contain transuranic-being so that life may be bearable, we have no idea what will happen. Yet the same can be said of so many things. Indeed, the same can be said of technology, civilization, economies, or any new drug. The trouble with using this category to shed light on GMO's is that so many of these are not really so bad because our bodies can handle them, in a way very much unlike being able to handle radioactivity. But don't worry; it is not impossible that we could put up with even these radical experiments in bodily manipulation. What is required is cyborg-beings; the more machine-like the merrier for machine-civilization; the more feral, the more capacity required to cope with/adapt to civilization's "privileges".

Splicing genes is often distinguished from hybridity. Hybrids are cultivated selections; certain qualities of a being are selected and repeated; but every successor is contained potentially within the actual original gene set. A hybrid accordingly is a weakened successor of a stronger ancestor. But we have to ask: Stronger in what sense? Given certain conditions, a hybrid would be stronger than a more robust example. And with Nature abutting to Culture, it seems that what is required is a certain selection of being. Other conditions provide living of a kind. Oncomouse does live, in fact, she performs brilliantly (she produces breast cancer predicatively) given the conditions much more than a more robust example would: a house mouse would fail to meet the conditions of this terrible necessary-for-humyns context.

We have to be hybrids to live in civilization; and accordingly, we are weak outside the city walls. Yet those that are wild do not have the capacity to survive in civilization without changes to their fundamental ontology; it is not that they would over-perform; it is that they do not know how to live because they are configured to a different (and more reliable, ceteris paribus) apparatus. But we are also weak in civilization; indeed, so weak that a more robust capacity is required to live. Our extended being, being-in-technology, is necessary for living; and all take on technologies of the self in domestication. We are filtered and drawn out hybrids.

The most robust beings, capable of surviving all of this, would be “wild” dogs, racoons, rats and pigeons, the scavengers that are clearly many-functional; these live at the limits and can have it both ways; because they have the capacity to survive the conditions that have been generated in the union of nature and culture, they do not get wiped out; and as patriarchal humyns continue to wipe out every last wild space, these grow strong unlike homo faber.

We say that mice and vegetables should not mix; but is this any different than saying living beings and robotic devices should never be joined? How can we talk here about natural flows of adaptability? To say that the capacity to operate heavy machinery, to work for another, is built into our wild selves strikes this reader as akin to the experimentalism that is being-GMO. Both work to varying degrees.

GMO's like Oncomouse and FLAVR SAVR are considered to be unnatural precisely because there is nothing normal about the flows of natural adaptivity present in the splicing of genes. In artificial environments these beings are structured to beat out manifestations of nature that would wipe out these “problems”. Oncomouse has been used as an instrument to find a cure for breast cancer; her mouse-breasts riven with cancerous cells. FLAVR SAVR, and other frankenfoods, are designed to fit into the artificiality of agriculture. But how different is it to say that we are being designed to fit into economies? It is not that the strong and bio-diverse survive; rather, it is that the weakest with the most capacity to adapt to the artificial container-technology that is civilization survive. Similarly, only those beings with the capacity to survive alongside civilization can adapt; and there is no reason to suppose that those native species and biodiverse objects that are forced to flourish in nature preserves have the most capacity to survive near cyborg-civilization.

I would think that it is precisely those that are the most used to civilization, the rats, the racoons, the pigeons, the urban dirt, that can truck it. Indeed, we wonder if nature is not producing "abominations" (viruses, mutations, etc.,) herself precisely because science himself has upped the anti and changed the stakes. Isn’t it romantic to think that Nature is making an effort for life to win through, adapting to our mess; and isn’t it ironic to think that we are failing miserably; that only our technologies can help us with this process!?

If then, we can link civilization and plutonium as unnatural because we have no idea where they are going, that is to say, what is next, and similar issues are present in GMO's, the real question is what it means to take issue with the labeled GMO over there. What's the big deal? It's not natural? What about eating agricultural products is natural anyways? Whence Nature? 

What am I trying to say? To say that biotechnology is over there, labeled in the supermarket, is to fail to address that we are already biological-technologies; that our biologies are already caught up in the realm of no nature. Our psychologies are dependent; we cannot live without our shelters and agriculture; we cannot live without the grid. As it is impossible to escape the potential doomsday scenario courtesy of nazi scientists, to live eden, it is practically inexpedient to forage and live outside of the logic of work. In other words, the logic of domestication is a form of manipulation, ripping natural bodies from robust nature capable of withstanding the elements (whatever-nature), and thrusting them ultimately into hyper-culture. Only modified organisms can survive in the desert that is living here. Therefore, the difference between being-cyborg and GMO's is one of scale. Splicing a gene from one with one from an other, that in no way would have come about through slow adaptation, is only a hyper manifestation of a process that we are undergoing. Looking at the GMO to us is like the feral looking at civilization. Liberals against GMO's would hypocritically have us believe that modified life is permissible while Monsatan is the most terrible. But diversity in nature (or even at the edges of the city--those racoons are tough as fuck! and even more so than the weaker beings structured and contained for our sublimations in the preserves--) in general stands in stark contrast to the lack thereof in the everyday "Bloom”. Unlike my favorite beings, the strong at the edge, we weak humyns do not have what it takes to live with our mess; so we need our technologies to cope.

My own domestication makes me sick, which is tantamount to critiquing the "privilege" of "living" in civilization. GMO's are only an extreme of being caught under the apparatus that is container-civilization; but everything of this shitty quality of life is an extreme; therefore, nothing of the sort ought to remain.

The In Infinitum and the Ad Infinitum

Continuous addition to some quantifiable thing constitutes the meaning of ad infinitum; one is called upon by this term to add to infinity (which is impossible to disclose). Given this meaning (numerable) it has been argued that there are no existing actual infinities, only potential ones; but this argument depends on supposing that mind constitutes world, which is false. A quick and easy way to see the fallacy in this thinking is to think about "all" the real numbers on a continuous line. Counting the whole numbers is not sufficient to account for these, and even if we were to do so, per impossible, we would still have to count between these, and between those, etc., in infinitum. This thought experiment is the key to understanding the paradox that summarizes Zeno. If we consider two members of a race and see that if the first is to get a head start, pure mathematics demonstrates with sound reasoning, that it is impossible for the second to catch up, even if the first is a turtle and the second a hare. Also, paradoxically, it is impossible to start; for if we are to start to move, we must pass through an abnumerable infinity; for we must pass through half before we take the first step, and half of that distance, etc., in infinitum.

The reason that I am bringing up these concepts is that in order to understand the difference between the qualitative and the quantitative, it is important to have these terms at the ready. In psychoanalytic theory, one is coded to function according to formed desires, with queer bodies exemplifying the transgressed limits of the code. Consider the garbage that is becoming a man. According to Klein, patriarchy encourages us, by virtue of the power of the phallus, to give up our desires to identify with our mothers (to see ourselves as having wombs and breasts) and to accept our roles in patriarchal society. Hence, prior to becoming men, we have queer desires: we perhaps see breasts as penises; but definitely, without doubt, our masculine bodies are attached in queer assemblages. The queer child learns to pass; and thankfully many unlearn this ridiculous apparatus of the organ that is building-civilization. According to Klein, these masculine desires (to be mother) are then sublimated in permissible forms of behavior, the most interesting example being the idea of a brain-child, which is all too masculine and totally an appropriation of the feminine rite to reproducing the conditions for life. So long as this form of creativity doesn't go against patriarchy, desires are permissible. So then what could it mean to follow desires that do go against patriarchy?

I want to say that to explore one's (un)bridled desires is to open oneself to the in infinitum; it is to reject the operation of ad infinitum--to acquire more of the same quantitative reality. It is to give the existing (truly unquantifiable) realities, a difference that makes a difference to practice, a qualitative difference because one's purpose is emergent and not top-down. It is to follow one's right to be whatever; to be uncoded, or at least to go against predictability in a way that follows one's affinities, which are never given and only hopefully solid. To add more in every possible direction in infinitum is to eclipse patriarchy's Son; for here we are (perhaps) in the production of the good--or at least, it cannot be said that such isn't healthy for us.

Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) imagines Art(desire) to be (not necessarily heterosexual) fucking in a field; yet he also pictures only a temporary unleashing of desire, even though his fear-relief comes out as a hope that one will grow tired if one is permitted to explore repressed desires. But why should we grow tired? Why should we grow up? Why should we not explode as a fire that never tires, like a forest fire, fueled by our own potential desires?  

Kant didn't have a term for the summation of the in infinitum, or possibility, because Kant used the Quanta as his countable infinity to account for space as a series of experiences. Here, the quantitative is clearly present; yet, the unquantifiable is always forever murky, precisely because we are not dealing with quantifiable realities. Possibility is good security culture for the obvious reason that one can thereby protect oneself from being let down, and even laugh joyously in the possibility of letting one's own self down.

The Qualitative and the Quantitative

1. Affirming that more for less is better is the difference between the qualitative and the quantitative strikes this reader as reductive of the Qualitative. The Qualitative cannot be reduced to the Quantitative; for such is already also Quantitative. Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology admits as much in that for him there is always the danger (Gestell) in altering the ends of technology. If technology is indeed calculative thinking and production, and such is required to permit being to bring forth, the truth of one's being to come forth, one's art to be produced, then the Quantitative is necessary. I think this proposition is too strong. I think the tension is ongoing because one is trying to master the clamour that is one's being or existence.  But one can lay fallow, and not even know.

Marcuse suggests that the Quantitative merely adopt new ends, much like the position of the syndicalist which is not very far off from the marxist. But is this the Qualitative? Importantly for Marcuse, the individual ought to socialize technology so that it would meet basic needs. Here one is affirming the appropriation of technology so that it would set up the conditions for personalized (tame) insurrection. (Eros and Civilization) Here one is permitted to go on to explore what Epicurus would term natural non-necessities. In all, some life ends are automated, or would be, if technology were appropriated for the same individual end through an equivalency about every output of surplus production; and with this logic or calculation in place (gestell), the individual is permitted to follow or create other life ends that suit their own willed purpose.

Here there is a dash in play; gestell has become a real filter for being, so that one might follow unbridled desire--even if only for a time until one grows out (this being the word of Marcuse's Freud). But how do we construct this life? What is being lost?
This is the question that Epicurus poses about the unnecessary.

2. It is not clear whether Bonnano would be satisfied with the above definition of the Qualitative (The Anarchist tension); therefore, if Marcuse and Heidegger are right, they wouldn't necessarily be in disagreement with Bonanno.

It is not my question whether Heidegger can be rescued from this admittedly hard reading of Marcuse; it is only my desire to open up the question that the Qualitative poses. For Bonanno, the Qualitative is certainly (also) individual resistance. But this may not be the one found in Marcuse, which is a structuring of the possibility for individual insurrection, and so a reliance on the quantitative.
There is a tension then here too. And we can read Heidegger about it.

3. In order to have the possibility of insurrection, one has to produce the conditions.
Marcuse has produced his anarcho-syndicalist version. Heidegger has suggested that calculative thinking operates as  a negative form of life. We might say that these are necessary in the production of art. Why? Because they are negative in that that contain that which one is not so that one might become. Perhaps now one can see why Marcuse and Heidegger go together. For Marcuse is here a coming as well; but its bringing forth is of a kind that depends on the quantitative, in an even more deep way. Hence we have a tension about the construction of desire. But from whence does it come?

To say that this tension is (already) the Qualitative fails to address the adjacent challenge. In this case, as in all, it would be to idle like the passive nihilist. Hence we have Zerzan's active nihilist as a difference that makes a difference (Nihilist Dictionary). We can also refer to this as bad faith, Sartre's term, as in the false presumption that one is already thus.

4. To be Qualitative is to not know whether one is so, because such is already a presumption and a construction.

This is the tension. The Qualitative only makes sense against the Quantitative; Heidegger's gestell is inescapable. So how does it all look? Heidegger is not repugnant in terms of coherence with Marcuse; but we cannot say that Marcuse's vision follows from Heidegger. Heidegger seems to challenge us to make art, but doesn't say that the automation of basic necessity is practically possible. He only says that uniqueness is possible only if one brackets that which one is not.

To automate desire is to admit that the aesthetic state is to be made possible by the dominance of reason in a certain orbit of desires. It is not the free dancing soul, the playful spirit. So the question is upon what does one depend? Or, in other words, how much Quantitative is necessary to make the Qualitative possible?

This seems to me to be well rounded in The Coming Community. Agamben's 'whatever being' seems to suggest that what is potential is a starting from where one is; that all will be only slightly altered; as if everything (Quantitative) were already thus, but only require a specific addition. But it seems that being must be repaired. Indeed, whatever being is already a repairing; a repairing of the empty desire for natural non-necessities; a coming into one's own that one may never know.

---

I am reminded that we always ought to destroy that which destroys us; to kill our false desires before a thickening ontological crust kills our ability to create our own desires. Is it necessary that we calculate our ways of being, that we make plans; or is the aesthetic state also possibly a trajectory of meaning towards a life outside of the realm of automation?

Keep your Friends Closer.

In the latest issue of the Peak—an excellent publication courtesy of an even more excellent group of humyn persyns—there is a rather boring, yet seemingly ironic text by Alex Balch titled: ‘With friends like these: Anarchism and the left.’ I say ironic because I often wonder about the distinction (is it real?) between various syndicalisms and the very idea of the authoritarian left. Platformist positions, whatever one’s “striving”, are ruled by ideology, a consensus based determining but a determining no less that shows forth indifferently to differences. Perhaps the trouble is caught up in their Marx-fetish; perhaps all of this has everything to do with the rather bizarre notion of History, as if revolution were not a process but a final state, as if one already knows what this must be like because.... How I be(come) is mine to make.

I have one point of critique that I want to argue; a reading about the point of the article; and my final point will be to stress the latter. First is the dismissive ‘leaving alone’ of the term post-left by way of a rhetorical strategy (18). The term ‘post-left’ is a hybrid between left (which yields content) and a prefix ‘post’ which signifies ‘after’ or ‘subsequent to’. So then when does it mean to be "after the left"? This is the question of post-left; and with this correction it would seem that we post-leftists are beyond the left; it no longer matters perhaps. Only a moron would suppose that this makes us rightwing; for the content (left) indicates what is being modified. So modified how? I want to say that it isn't clear; that all that is clear is that we are after/subsequent/beyond the left, not after the left, as in looking for it, trying to find the corpse to yield "life" again, like Dr. Frankenstein. The term (left) is caught up, it is prefixed; so it is not compatible with the right; so it is not a pure negation. Its negative is also modified by it. Perhaps we want to gesture at the in infinitum as opposed-to the pure ad infinitum here. In the least, to reduce this important resonating difference, which is not fixed, that is, which functions as negation in/ad infinitum, to a “semantic quibble” is to fail to grasp its import (which is ongoing). In other words it is already (also) a critique of Balch’s (striving) platformism. The rhetorical move: ‘merely semantics’ conflates the negative modifier for its closest approximation to the left. The irony is here, caught up in this revelation of position: Balch says post-left has to do with “a critique of classical anarchism and its historical relationship to other leftists groups.” Hence, it would seem that what Balch is doing is post-left work, given that he means to prescind “the left” from classical anarchism.

This brings me to my other point. Balch is not beyond the left. He refers to the other leftists that have and so will likely throw anarchists under the bus as “at best, fair-weather friends” (21). Here, he would seem to suggest that sometimes it is OK to work with Maoists (the other leftists, still within the leftist milieu along with anarcho-syndicalists), but that these friends are really enemies. With friends like these who needs enemies? One rejoinder is that we already have so many enemies, including Maoists, why not make real friends. And with this thinking, one is going to have to experiment with what one can accept. It is telling that a platformist would be OK with a Maoist but finds a green anarchist problematic; for it is presumed that anarchy and culture go hand in hand, despite the obvious blunder in this reformist thinking. But green anarchists are also addicted to insurrection. And so: long live green anarchy (and fuck the left!)!

A Revolting Becoming.

The opposing, disjunctive terms, “technophilia” and “technophobia” are rhetorical terms; they signal the characterization of the other in a rhetorical debate. Romantics are typically labeled “technophobes” and “want to recapture tradition”. There are good reasons to be afraid of Technology. If Technology has taken over a technique, automating or displacing workers, what’s to stop the ongoing lottery? Is it ongoing? Are certain routines exempt from displacement? Are some jobs not routines? It doesn’t seem impossible that the logic of capital, our being in space that we control minimally, if at all, could always dissolve our livelihood, automated or not, forcing one to learn new techniques. I want to define <technique> as a way of doing something, as in “You sure have the technique down pat!”, and Technology as a system of Enframing Oppression in which techniques are rendered automated. The difference that I mean to gesture at here is that there is a felt difference between a technique that is a form of Art, and a technique that has become routine. When one says 'you sure have the technique down pat' I want to insist that one doesn't mean one has nailed repetition, but rather that one has produced the good. Hence, going against Technology, the automated Totality—Technology as a system—could mean gaining autonomy concerning techniques. But I want to qualify this political-aesthetic stance by noting that I do not wish to suggest that only machines are automated, and, furthermore, that Heidegger’s distinction between technology and modern technology, (techniques and automated techniques) is useful to see that machines aren’t essentially automated.

Now while privileging autonomy is presumably a reasonable way to go about finding support in Romantic circles, given that affirming autonomy implies that full-automation is ultimately dystopic and therefore worse than some level of autonomy, still, there is no way to settle on the best form. And it seems to me that this result is perfectly consistent with the meaning of the term <autonomy>, for how can one speak about how autonomous another should be? Doesn’t that necessarily undermine the right for one to be autonomous, to make decisions for oneself? One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous depends on labor saving automated techniques. One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous depends on communing with others.

Now, it seems plausible that full autonomy is as impossible as full automation. Therefore, what ‘full automation’ means in the context of saying that one is like a machine is that the machine-like is under the sway of seeing “the better” in civilizing oneself and falling in line, obeying final causes designed for oneself. In this context it seems possible to say that X has chosen to use privilege to their advantage. And while this may be a minimal form of autonomy, it would seem that in this instance one has merely affirmed final causes set in play by the system, rather than made an effort to design techniques for oneself.

However, settling on any level of autonomy, so long as it is not ‘full automation’, is not sufficient to forestall general anxiety concerning automation. Consider the problem of maintaining nuclear reactors. If these get out of control—which is to say, break down or break free from their designed final causes—it may be impossible to regain control, and it may become impossible to live. Don Ihde argues that just as there is an intentional fallacy in thinking that the meaning of a text can be reduced to the authors’ intent, there is a designer fallacy in thinking that technologies, in terms of use, function and effect can be reduced to designed intent.[1] So if we rely on automated techniques to co-constitute our sense of becoming-identity, it is possible that the final causes that we fix for them may not function according to the desired identity. Tying the designer fallacy in with the intentional fallacy is precisely to the point in gesturing at the difficulty in forming a unique identity given ongoing governmentality all around us; however, importantly, the fallacy also entails the view that one cannot be given a fixed identity as a system of automated techniques.

In getting clear on this point, it is helpful to draw on a distinction made by Giorgio Agamben in his recent What is an Apparatus[2]. According to Agamben, the Judeo-Christian theological problem of God’s unity and trinity was negotiated by noting that God’s substance is one, while God’s administration, or oikonomia of the world, was divided into distinct hierarchical roles (9-10). Just as God’s administration through oikonomia produces Christian subjects, the State is interested in producing civilized subjects. For Agamben, “apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, must produce their subject” (11). But if this follows, if there is a process of subjectification, there is a prior mode of being distinct from those forms of oikonomia “that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings” (Agamben, 12). Therefore, following a theological formula, the same living substance can be “the place of multiple processes of subjectification” (Agamben, 14). But for Agamben, the process of subjectification, is a process of desubjectification; for this ‘natural’ place, where multiple subjects arise, is a process of “separate[ing] the living being from itself and its immediate relationship with its environment” (16). The example that Agamben uses is Foucault’s docile subject, and the example of coming to see oneself as a sinner requiring confession (20).

For Agamben, being a subject is not just a matter of mere relation to apparatuses; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a process of resistance to these forms of governmentality (14). What Ihde’s designer fallacy coupled with technophobia can be taken to point out is that one cannot be sure that resistance isn’t already automated, an anticipated feature of governmentality out of our control.

The question that Agamben opens, therefore, is whether it is possible to see an apparatus as true subject affirming, that is to say, whether it is possible to see any apparatus functioning outside of a process of desubjectification. If it is possible, might we then open the way to recapturing ourselves within apparatuses of our own desires?

            Since we are arguing for autonomy over the design process of ourselves, we are not arguing for full-automation. So we can avoid the Romantic’s charge of having a dystopic view. I said above that there are good reasons to be technophobic; but I want to insist that it is possible to creatively resist. The subjectivities that are produced in us are also ready to hand; we can exemplify them or we can idle; they are not fully independent and already co-opted. Therefore, under our control, these designed ways of being-citizen can be readily swerved. We can push back “indeterminately” against the automated techniques that Enframe “us”.[3] It seems to me that the difference between necessary and sufficient causes helps shed light on the difference between automation and autonomy. To be autonomous is to be able to take responsibility for what one has become, saying that one’s decision and design is a necessary cause alongside other necessary causes. Only if we supposed that one were fully autonomous, which is impossible, could we say that our choice is sufficient for what is produced. Why is this impossible? To be able to say, “thus, I willed it”, is to be able to show that nothing else was a necessary cause. Take an example of reaching for a glass of water. Simple enough. But surely the desire to drink water coming from my body cannot be ruled out as contributing to the choice to grab water in the first place. Thus, Hayles claims that there is no a priori way of discerning that one’s choice was sufficient for X. Anything a posteriori here would be a matter of negotiation.

What someone else makes of our artful lives is not peculiar to the machine-apparatuses that might be enlisted for this cause; such is a general problem with interpretations proper to structuralist imposition and the attempt to be unique. If we are automated, and we are, Agamben’s question is whether we are autonomous with the automatons (the apparatuses) or whether we too are automatons. In answering this question I want to trouble the dichotomy by pointing out that machines that may be used to fashion a sense of self, need not be challenged as standing reserve. I want to hold out for the possibility of romantic machines that co-produce a becoming self. This is because a moving target is far more Uncontrollable, the more its parts are Uncontrollable. In other words, the metaphysics of becoming and emergence—what bubbles up in processes of resistance marked by Agamben—is far more liberating than fixed, boring and repeated identities; and if machines can be let be in the register of becoming rather than being-enframed, ones’ actual self is that much more free. If we enframe techniques from the Enframing[4]—an ongoing process without end—perhaps we can break free from the automation of self to be part of the ongoing and resulting romantic picture of autonomous relations with “romantic machines”.

In order to come to this point I want to closely read Minsoo Kang in order to develop the concept of Nature as Machine historically and show its Sentimentalist and Romantic reaction from 1741 onwards. Following that, I want to segue into John Tresch’s text as developing a provocative middle ground captured in his notion of <the romantic machine>. This reading will compound multiple senses of Romanticism in order to undermine the standard association of Romanticism with technophobia, without trivializing this view. With a synthesis between “mechanization” and Romanticism shown in Romanticism’s historical traces, more particularly, between technology in Heidegger’s sense and “the” decentralized subject, I mean to come full circle, gesturing at “subject”-affirming apparatuses as an answer to Agamben’s question.

2. Minsoo Kang notes that a feeling of uneasiness and chaos generated by the Thirty Years War and the civil war in England precipitated the desire for a mechanistic worldview, an ordered polis maintained by the mechanic-sovereign, perhaps reflective of a perfect engineer God who, as first cause, ordered the cosmos (bodies included) according to rational laws.[5] More generally, Kang notes three features characteristic of mainstream mechanistic physiology from 1637-1748 (131; 144). First, metaphysically, humans were dualistic, with an immaterial soul and a material body; second, mechanistic descriptions were limited to bodies; and finally, when they were so analogously described, such was seen as positive given that Nature was created by God. By the middle of the eighteenth century and onwards, however, the automaton lost its ability to be compared to anything autonomous; it took on a derogatory sense in describing the mentally handicapped, the peasant toiling in the field, the conformist and the Absolute tyrant (Kang, 148). These characters were imaged as mere automatons because they lacked the principle of autonomy. But Kang exemplifies careful scholarship in showing that that this shift is not a clean break. Rather, from 1740, there was increasing tension between the positivity and negativity of imaging a human substance as automaton (Kang, 158).

Kang outlines three reasons that contribute to this shift. The first is that imaging the body as a machine, with discrete interworking parts, was beginning to give way to a new holistic picture of the body that presupposed something similar to Aquinas’ principle of activation, or Scotus’ principle of individuation. Buffon, for instance, argued that mechanistic methodology was useless and inappropriate for “the study of the living world” (Kang, 150). The tension mentioned above translates into a questioning about this methodology. Is it totally useless to see human bodies as machines or does the picture simply require supplementation? For if one wanted to replace dualism with hylomorphism, viz., that the body and the mind are not ‘really distinct’ substances, that they are connected harmoniously, if, that is, the mind just is the principle of vitalism in a mechanized body, it is contentious to simply suppose that vitalism is anathema to mechanization (Kang, 152).

So far we have been talking about the mechanization of the body; but it is not impossible to talk about the mechanization of the mind; for within the Cartesian lineage there is a sense of training one’s mind to avoid bodily passions. If the analogy between the soul governing the body and the Monarch governing subjects holds, then in naming the sovereign an automaton-man, one is taking issue with the way the centralized state, and by analogy, the governed humyn substance, is ordered. In the sentimental age, character traits of moderation and order, or centralized authority, started to lose their privilege, opening the way to “passionate and sensitive” nonconformity, intuition and imagination, which made possible the desire for the decentralization of the state (Kang 153-4). Kang explains this general, and increasing tension in Western Europe by pointing to the failures of the centralized sovereigns in the 1740’s, 50’s and 60’s to provide freedom from strife (his second reason) (148; 154-5), and the concomitant growing tendency to accept radical enlightenment ideas (his third) (155-6; 158).

Kang wants us to see that the classical and late enlightenment tension concerning humans as automatons, from this being a permissible characterization to it being a debasement of proper humynity, in the emotional response to automatons. In the classical period, there was a general sense of awe in the presence of Vaucanson’s duck because such mechanical devices signified God’s laws through their creators. Kempelen’s chess player, however, did not generate a feeling of awe because, generally speaking, it could no longer be taken as animate and humyn-like. By the late enlightenment period, as the mechanistic metaphor was continuing to wane, inanimate reason was automatically taken up as an artifact with humyn efficient causality (Kang, 182).

We saw above that the centralized rigidity of the state, once desired for security, gave way to ideas of organic harmony and decentralization in the sentimentalist period. Reason needed to be used holistically. But the hope for sentimental reason, reason embodied in the French Revolution, gave way to “the murderous monstrosity of the Terror”, and finally Napoleon (Kang, 190; 195). In order to explain this tension, that is, that sentimental reason was not the end of history, the German Romantics developed a comforting teleological Metaphysical narrative based upon rupture and dialectical union between Spirit and Matter, set in motion at the birth of the cosmos. The explanation for the Terror, then, was that Spirit and Matter will become One only at the end of Cosmic history. But this way of conceptualizing Matter generated a more extensive picture of redemption than was permissible in sentimentalist late enlightenment. According to the above Metaphysical picture, all things, animate and inanimate were the site (or potential site) of this rupturing and union (Kang, 193).

To be sure, the relationship between Romanticism and sentimentalism was not mutually exclusive; in Romanticism, while the automaton-man was still perceived as debased humynity, a consequence of its metaphysics entailed that an inanimate automaton figure could be an “instrument of the supernatural”, fully alive, uncontrollable (Kang 211). Perhaps fear of this possibility explains the disdain that privileged people have towards revolutionary subjects, perceived as machine-like beings with genuine potential to revolt by way of bodily knowledge. According to Kang, Romanticism included these beings, metaphorical and otherwise, in its eschatological vision.

So the need to find comfort in a Transcendent metaphysics coupled with agreement with the Sentimentalists against mechanization precipitated anxiety and technophobia about automatons because of their possible use in Cosmic History. This Romantic tension about automatons, between the worry of seeing oneself as one and yet at the same time seeing machines as worthy of Spirit, can be given flesh with John Tresch’s concept of the Romantic Machine.[6] Tresch’s narrative, stretching from the 1820’s to the 1850’s in Paris can be taken to be about Romantic thinkers that see the problem with Enframing, just as the sentimentalist turn rejected the outright mechanization of Nature, but without opposing Machines to Nature. According to Tresch’s narrative, the thinkers he discusses wanted to draw closer to Final Cosmic Unity, “a more just, free and harmonious society” and did so by joining themselves with romantic machines (xvi-xvii; 10).

The mechanization of nature as an (En)framing hypothesis, with component primitive parts under the sign of a division of labor, in this period, is replaced by an epistemology that doesn’t start with phenomenal fragmentation, but speculates and ultimately aims to discover through enframing intervention, a unified “noumenal” theory, an approximation towards what could be named Schelling’s world-soul. (Tresch, 31; 45; 53). Unlike research that stipulates theories in advance, “as detached, calculating reason” (Enframing), “this is research that does not seek to confirm or reject hypotheses, but simply to become familiar with a phenomena and its extensions” (Tresch, 57; 39). In this <aesthetic state>, “everything—even the tool which serves…—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest” (Tresch, 75). That is to say, “the observer had to gain the instrument’s assent by entering into a dialog, “playing” with it, becoming familiar with its limits and habits” (emphasis added, Tresch, 80). In this way, instruments became autonomous organs of sense, “autonomous” in the sense that “they were disciplined and interconnected but at the same time, spontaneous, active and free” (Tresch, 111).

Clearly instruments were rendered to serve a purpose, but not in a deterministic way; rather, they were rendered on their own terms to signify Nature, a dynamic, awe-inspiring, unfolding process. The Romantic Scientist enters into the open with the instrument, letting it be in order to exemplify Beauty and Order. But where does this (the aesthetic state) come from? Who designed it? If we are trying to exemplify the end of history, where Mind infuses Matter, why should it correspond to what We, collectively, take it to be? If this has anything to do with Kant’s noumenal realm—if Nature is Noumena—surely the fact that noumena by definition entails the impossibility of knowing it implies an impossibility of saying some theory signifies it.

But obviously it is better to take a stab here, designing a harmonious frame that captures what is good for all, than to presume that All is Well when it clearly never has been; but what seems to me to be much more interesting is not collective Harmony, designed by the priests of Order, but distributed harmonies modified by autonomous desires. In Humboldt’s orchestra, the machines, non-human and human alike, must abide by the rule that they are disciplined to follow; the “law was only a law of freedom if it adjusted to the living particularity of the individual” (Tresch, 80). But what if adjustment here makes the law no longer identical with itself? What are the limits of disciplined-freedom? Conformity? Consumerism? Is that a wild and free Noumenal-Nature, set loose in the dynamics of becoming, or a domesticated Phenomenal-Form to which we must submit? Must our imaginations fit the form, or are we free to imagine forms that we want? The promise of Romanticism, in Kang’s sense, seems to entail the promise of possibility, which cannot be contained by the straightjacket of Spinoza’s Enlightenment Reason.

In other words, what Ought to be can never be reduced to what Is; and even Spinoza’s view of what Ought to be must therefore be insufficient. What is this picture? Spinoza, like Hobbes, takes the city and the sovereign to be sources (and therefore limits) of freedom, outside the gnashing of Nature, in an all too typical view of Enlightenment reason; yet, Marcuse's idea of a qualitative difference strikes me as obviously open to its own negation, even if 'practicality' would go by the boards. Decentralization coupled with imagination (sentimentality) produces a picture that I want to disclose below.

3. Decentralization: The story that we have been unraveling can be put in terms of awe and fear. In the ‘classical enlightenment’ machines were awe-inspiring signifiers of God’s design. But this way of viewing the humyn gave way to Sentimental feelings of fear and confinement, which generated desires to imagine different forms of decentralized government, forms proper to humyns. With the failure of this promise in the actuality of the Terror, we saw Romanticism generate a story about Unfolding Spirit that in turn generated the horrific possibility of automatons coming alive, which, in turn, was tempered by seeing machines as awe-inspiring actants in the realization of Cosmic History, a picture that I want to re-characterize in sentimentalist-autonomist terms as horrific and confining, if not completely boring. We might be able to explain the reason that automated techniques can be simultaneously awe-inspiring and horrific by way of Don Ihde’s designer fallacy, which points automated techniques out of their final causes, permanently destabilizing them, and shoring up the possibility of fixed regiments of bringing-forth. This permits the fearful—because unhinged—and awe-inspiring—because not fixed—figure of Possibility, a figure properly named Imagination, placed within the intersection of Romanticism and Sentimentalism. But the fallacy doesn’t inspire hope, not in the least, because there may only be Imagination and Desire—there may only be Becoming; there may be Nothing to save us.

It seems to me that this does not provide a way of thinking about un-Enframed techniques in the network that is ones’ life without technophobia; but the worry that one can control what one is, strikes me as misplaced, even if one minimizes the number of techniques “utilized” to this end. The best that we can do is swerve the apparatuses we are caught under to the imaginative creation of our autonomous desires. Tresch’s narrative strikes me as complementing Kang’s in that it sketches a way in which we might properly open automated techniques according to our desires, in a way that permits them to live too; but in this living—whatever that may become—we are left in the Open of Possibility, a place truly in opposition to automation, and so, truly in an ongoing ‘place’ of opposition to Technology.

What seems clearest here is that automation can become unhinged from its final causality, not in a way that permits it to be whatever we might make it, but simply not only what it was made to be. Given that one's own final causality is therefore not written, to say that one has automated oneself in this unfolding strikes me as misplaced. What better way to smash the machines.  

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[1] Don Ihde. Bodies in Technology. (Minneapolis; Minnesota University Press, 2002), p. 106.

[2] Giorgio Agamben. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2009).

[3] Don Ihde. Ironic Technics. (USA: Automatic Press/VIP, 2008), p. 29.

[4] Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1977), p. 31-2.

[5] Minsoo Kang. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Pps. 112-3.

[6] John Tresch. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2012).