Category Archives: theory
2406 -Sci-Fi and the Politics of the Future: An Interview with Steven Shaviro featuring Acid Horizon (2024)
“Adam and Will are joined by Professor Steven Shaviro to discuss his work on the philosophy of science fiction, developing on themes from recent texts such as Extreme Fabulations and 2016’s Discognition out on Repeater Books. We asked Steven about the various techniques that writers such as Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and China Mieville to unearth possible futures in the present; and how they extrapolate from, speculate upon, and generate fables about dominant tendencies of our political and technological situation. We also touched upon philosophies of time and narrative such as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Darko Suvin.”
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2405 – SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION 1956 – 1974: A BIBLIOGRAPHY by Darko Suvin (article 1976)
Darko Suvin needs no introduction probably. Altough SF authors and writers in general (no intention of dissing them as a group) tend to ignore the theory of SF studies, Darko Suvin, an ex-Yugoslav who emigrated in 1967 has been probably the single most important person responsible for getting Science Fiction recognized in Academia. After he started teaching at McGill University in Canada – others like Frederic Jameson also started taking a vivid theoretical interest in a previously disdained and minor literature (in Deleuze’s sense), so much so that the entire academic field of Utopia Studies and SF was more or less shaped by these two important Marxist critics and theoreticians. I appreciate Professor Darko Suvin’s position since he is straddling both Western and Eastern Marxist traditions in a way and also because Yugoslavia was such a special case being actually open to various directions of thought. In a sense this valuable bibliography of Soviet SF, of cosmicity starting with the post-Stalinist era and ending with the onset of the long decline and disenchantment of the 1970s and 1980s is a twilight full of starry sky and extra-planetary possibilities. Maybe even the possibility that the most precious things such as communism or socialism might be temporary, exceptional moments and that all that was more fragile than its capitalist opponents presupposed, a transient system that in our part of the world gave way to today’s “contemporary political subject is plunged into a miserable combination of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism (not to say neofascism)” in the words of philosopher Max Penzin, and maybe “able to produce both a calming and an invigorating effect” like Evald Ilyenkov’s speculative cosmology. Some are probably not yet translated but I hope they will find a way to future readers.
There is a sense in which we are still catching up to the various deletions – schools of critical thinking and what used to be Eastern European Marxism (from the former East bloc, especially the particularly neglected array of SF authors from the former Soviet Union, that would help us explore other venues taken than the usual liberal Western canon (see the emergence of an alternative epistemology).
2396
2378 – Exploring Process Relations (UTOKing with Bonnitta Roy 2024)
Probably one of the most disconcerting things about Whitheadian process philosophy (or the philosophy of organism – as Whitehead called it) was its “theological” reception and transmission via American process theology (particularly Charles Hartshorne mentioned in this talk several times). It is a historically incontestable fact, that Whitheadian process philosophy survived in that milieu in mid XX century, although overall the chapter dedicated to God in ANWs magnum opus Process & Reality: An Essay in Cosmology is rather small. It almost feels like an afterthought.
I publish this here for anyone wanting to hear a contemporary discussion about inner and outer relations. This talk is a crash course of sorts through the difficulties (if completely unfamiliar with Whiteadhead’s metaphysics) but also a proof of the vivacity and constant evolution of process philosophy in today’s world. One could of course pick and choose favorite morsels about cells, agency, causality, and organizational levels – from this talk. To conclude with the conclusion of Bonnitta – the best of contemporary science and especially new contemporary scientific advances have to inform our metaphysics and philosophy – the same way the scientific advances of Whitehead’s time (quantum formalism and general relativity) were inspiring and reshaping those insights.
Whiteheadian Marxists like Steven Shaviro have taken another route entirely than the usual process theologians (check the pdf God, or the Body Without Organs from which I will quote heavily) and bringing forth Whitehead’s own criticism of both Leibniz’s and Spinosa’s notion of God, even if their positions are closer to him than anyone else. But like all thinkers of the last 2000 years (to quote Shaviro) they allow “ethical and religious interests. . . to influence metaphysical conclusions” (173). This Kantian Whitehead or critique of religion is indeed a different beast that we have become acquainted with (through let’s say essential immanentist readings like Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking with Whitehead). His criticism of religious belief is from a transcendental position rather than an immanent, Spinozian one. Rather than eliminating God (Shaviro underlines) like Nietzsche he seeks to accomplish a “the secularization of God’s functions in the world” (1929/1978, 207). This startling attempt is part of the Enlightenment project, but with a twist, because it does not seek to eliminate religion, only diminish its importance. Whitehead seeks to establish a God without religion as he wants to respect the findings of physical science without supporting “science’s reductionist positivism or tendentious separation of facts from values.” This secularized God is God as the Principle of Concretion. Coherence is here the most important thing and Shaviro continues to explain why in a passage from 2008 that is both memorable and crystal clear (coherence- a notion that is not so much logical as ecological):
The principle of coherence stipulates that “no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe” (3). In order to exist, a given entity presupposes, and requires, the existence of certain other entities, even though (or rather, precisely because) it cannot be logically derived from those other entities, or otherwise explained in their terms. Coherence means, finally, that “all actual entities are in the solidarity of one world” (67).
God, or the Body without Organs, ~Steven Shaviro
2282 – #26 Philip Goff PHD – THE RISE OF PANPSYCHISM (chasing consciousness podcast)
“In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.”
I will restrain from commenting in depth – since I am neither a philosopher of mind nor able to summarize or disentangle all the various positions presented in this talk by Philip Goff.
So here are some small and very inconsequential personal observations about panpsychism. Talking about or even debating panpsychism was a no-no for a long time and scientific materialism (matter and material electromagnetic processes is all there is) is till the dominant view. Speculative philosophers lying outside the major traditions of philosophy (analytical and continental) such as Alfred North Whitehead and his “philosophy of the organism”- you might say occupy a lateral or transversal position in the history of philosophy since his process philosophy rhymes with a panpsychist or panexperientialist (everything has or is some form of experience) view of fundamental reality. It is also interesting that he did not espouse such a view early on, but gradually after his (and Bertrand Russell’s) groundbreaking work on Principia Mathematica lead him into trouble (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), he gradually arrived at panpsychism as a way out of the bifurcation of nature that had split reality in separate realms, each endowmed with different degrees of reality. Isabelle Stengers in her opus – Thinking with WhiteheadA Free and Wild Creation of Concepts begs to differ – she’s more interested in how ANW dodges the psyche – and the de-psychologizing – noting that like William James je didn’t affirm that electrons “think like we do”, nor did attribute to the actual occasion a “psychology”, a “subjectivity” or “emotions”. Thus he avoids making human intelligence or psychic powers inevitable privileging human experience, something that happens in the case of a tract ny Russian cosmist Tsiolkovsky “Panpsychism, or Everything feels”.
Caught as we were between the dry certitudes of scientific materialism (matter is all there is) and dualism (separation of questions relating to mind from matter or mind stuff being different from mind/brain stuff), we never even got to entertain a third possibility that seemed too outlandish or too quixotic. This third possibility arose at a specific juncture – with William James being familiar with both new advances in physiology as well as the new (at the time) theory of natural selection and evolutionary descent with modification opened up new and extincting venues that reshaped philosophical questions. Closer to us science came to re-cognize (there is that word again) that there are other minds, and that a mind is not so exotic or such an unique appendage and a privilege. Minds arouse not out of non minds but gradual process. Rudimentary fuzzy, mind-like characteristics abound. This contrasted strongly with a view usually supported by X-Risk thinking circles, one betting on the rarity of human minds and consciousness. Reflexive thinking is according to such a view is an island in a desert of cosmic mindlessness. Panpsychism is a view of plenty – of minding and mindful abundance. This was the weakness of that line of argument.
Do not expect a light-bulb Aha! moment of conscious experience. A more gradualistic explanation derived from biology, especially natural history paleontology and ethology makes us see quorum sensing not very different from nervous cells communicating between themselves. So there’s Emergentist Panpsychism, but also Rusellian Monism (of which Goff might be a proponent if I got that right – not what matter does but what matter is) and panprotopsychist, or say Cosmopsychist or Micropsychist varieties. Let a hundred panpsychisms bloom!
Some sort of agency maybe subtends any form of sentience or responsiveness. In order for minds to be natural we have to adopt an evolutionary, gradual (without gaps or sudden jumps) appearance of consciousness. Clearly this chips at our privileged developed reflexive consciousness. It even leads to even a few apparent paradoxes, such as life as a phenomenon being not primary but ulterior. So mind first and life second. In this frame mind is being a question of degree not of kind! To make it clear, this is a bit more radical than just saying that plants or so-called lower organisms (such as crustaceans to bees) exhibit sentience, this is about even particles exhibiting some form of rudimentary experiential quantum. A lot of this feels a question of language, of finding the proper descriptive level of talking about quantitative (mass, speed, etc) and qualitative qualities (the notorious qualia).
I was always wondering how panpsychism stands in regard to historical materialism or Marxism, and if – General Intellect – can be made to fit with explanations of a more pervasive kind, that puts sapience in perspective and encourage us towards more-than-human intellectual adventures or even seeing our own social being as part of the world, not just an add-on. In fact in the former East Bloc context where scientific materialism was the rule, particularly in Socialist Romania in my own case, the ‘intelligence of matter’ briefly made headlines as psychologist and neurologist Dumitru Constantin Dulcan published his book of essays Inteligenta Materiei (Intelligence of Matter, Editura Militara 1981). Even now it is really interesting to read the responses from various corners (including well-known mathematician Solomon Marcus). Still I wonder if there isn’t also a residue of mystical materialism a la Tsiolkovsky here.
Nuff said – panspychism (as Goff will prove!) has become again salonfähig as the Germans say it. You can talk about panpsychism not only at history of consciousness humanities departments, but also at laboratories and in a scientific context and I swear nobody will call you a nutcase, plain gaga or a fringy lunatic slightly sickish new-age or animist type. That odor that Nagel was calling “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”s is apparently gone. Perfect Proof to that is a considerable number of new videos, talks, debates, podcasts on YT and TW. What to choose? Well, I would go for the most passionate and ardent supporters – such as Philip Goff from the University of Durham. Important to add that there is also non-cognitivist position or rather a discognitivist position that try to decenter the brain or the central nervous system in order to get panpsyschism right and not try to priviledge (again) conscious experience or human cognition (for this check Steven Shaviro’s extraordinary book of essays). I think that such fine distinguishing lines (was what separates sentience from sapience? or what have substrate independence and simulation theory have to do with each other?). Another way to see this is by reading Science Fiction – and acknowledging that some of the most incredible ideas about sapient aliens and shipminds help us to think about consciousness too. The ‘Tentacle of Empathy’ seems to be everywhere these days. It also might be that ALL explanations of consciousness might sound crazy one way or another – this is the crazyist position of philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.
Maybe this is the moment to observe that in the case of Tsiolkovsky, a ln avowed panpsychist akd pioneer of space travel. For me though, he’s basically a kind of militant ‘pansapientist’ monism – using a theory of the psyche (rational, intentional, reflexive, etc) that depreciates or dismisses other modes of thought as inferior. Recognizing that the world feels might not mean automatically that we’re more responsive or tuned to it. Stengers in her inspiring book Thinking with Whitehead from 2002 – in particular Entrée en Métaphysique Chapter explains why this is not the path taken by Whitehead (Tsiolkovsky is not mentioned but contrasting the two helps a lot). Tsiolkovsky recognizes that the universe is alive and feeling, but this not an opening for other ways of becoming or opening up the question to what os it like to he an atom, a body, a tissue etc. It leaves not much room for other modes of thought. We might call this a psychic or cognitive terraforming of the universe, something very close to the X Risk incentive to protect & spread human intelligence in the Cosmos and make sure it will use and unmake every other mind that doesn’t conform to the maximal potential for joyfulness. This gives rise to a sort of ultra-sapient chain of being with atomic adventures inside various organismic (a body, tissues, stones etc see below), and in each one (except if it inside the human) the full potential gets never achieved. Locked up in the unconsciousness and deep unthinking sleep of other lesser modes, they just await the consciousness light-bulb to raise them up to the level of human experience so that their limited notion of past and future can expand. This is what i understand from this fragment:
“In terms of mathematics, the entire universe is alive, but the power of its sensitivity is manifested in all its brilliance only among the higher animals. All atoms of matter feel in keeping with the environment. Finding itself in highly organized beings, atoms life their life and feel their pleasure and pain. If they find themselves in the inorganic world, they sleep, as it were, immersed in a deep state of unconsciousness, in nothingness.Even in a single animal, as they wander around its body, the atoms live the life now of the brain, now of the bones, hair, nails, epithelium, and so on. Meaning that atoms now think, now live like atoms imprisoned in stone, water, or air. Now they sleep, with no awareness of time; now they live for the moment, like the lower beings; now they are aware of the past and paint a picture of the future. The more organized the being, the farther this notion of future and past extends.”― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Panpsychism
2276 – The Age of Uncertainty with JK Galbraith (BBC series 1977)
What better counterpart to a decade where the rich won (2020s) and quantitative easting (short QE) seems to rule them all than to watch a documentary on how it all began. And also to understand what bugged free market libertarians like Milton Friedman’s than to watch the documentary that ‘triggered’ his response. Today we speak of ‘triggering’ in terms of what right wing is good at (Fox News etc) – and how easy it is to push their critics into ridiculous postures and very predictable behaviors, basically in what became a Pavlovian show. Who is going to make his opponent react in a knee-jerk way? And even better, who will make the other adopt one’s own tactics and meme first?
Well, before all that, we can place these two documentary series. Both very personal, with two key players. Big influencers supr in terms of statal policies and ideas. Do not get me wrong, these documentaries are about one of the most hated subjects around: economics (prove eme wrong!). Who does not hate the history of economics or the principal ideas deriving from that? A majority seems to suffer and endure under economicsl hardships even if money amd investment or financial system seem tok haunt us. What os a recession, what causes it, what are the class politics behind austerity measures? Who gets tok pay for inflation?
Maybe this will also answer some of the curiosities and questions regarding the 1970s when the great Golden Age of Capitalism in the West came to an end after a series of shocks. Several counter-measures culminating with the switch from liberal democracies where Big Government Keynesianism (both left or later on right-wing brands of Keysianism) finally gave way to the Austro-libertarian school of Economics represented by Friedman and the Chicago boys. While some may feel emboldened to say that today in the midst of the polycrisis we have a Keynesian moment coming around and neoliberalism is on the wane, I would rather say (with Quinn Slobodian and others in mind) that neoliberalism has mutated itself in the time of decoupling, de-risking and ethnopolitics. Maybe it is capitalism as usual – an upside down world that cannot get the right side up and will only get more lopsided.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was perhaps one of the most interesting characters and appreciated social scientists of his time. There are echoes of Galbraith everywhere today, even in his admonishment of militaristic Keynesianism where the military-industrial-entertainment complex simplex in Washington begins to use all the levers of power to transform its Big Tech into a national asset amd industrial policy. Frmerly free-trade radicals feeding on nationalism start to recast themselves as anti-Chinese US stalwarts. All this is put into stark contrast by a new generation of Keynesian economists (Gabriela Gabor and Isabella Weber come to mind). Forgotten lessons seems valid again. To prevent inflation after WWII JK Galbraith was recommending strategic price controls (anathema to the free market radicals!)
John Kenneth Galbraith is a representative of classical liberalism that also enjoyed tremendous influence & honed his skills & experience being active at the center of the US establishment. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also had relations to the Global South – being an ambassador to India (the biggest democracy on Earth) during the JFK administration. At the same time, he was red-baited by his opponents and considered by conservative think tanks the man who “made socialism mainstream“. So when he is saying that the powerful US Farmer lobby is still hailing back to the physiocrat thinkers in France, he knows what he is saying from direct experience. He pokes fun at everybody, especially at the privileged members of the ‘leisure class’. He does not miss an opportunity to constantly question the very thinkers he mentions according to their own principles or tax them when they employ theories or easy justifications in their own favor.
Yeah it looks oldskool and peak boomer in a way, at the same time all episode 1 The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism is a tremendous effort to stage the history or economic ideas, the larger background, or the assumptionsof behind it all, including all the major thinkers. The stage is set by unsettling the stage – in a Brechtian manner, all the illusionist art, all the stagecraft, and the scaffolding of history is shown to be a BBC studio. He quotes John Maynard Keynes (Galbraith himself is regarded as a post-Keynesian) at the very beginning:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
What can be blander than pretending to be free of any influence or any previous antecedent thinker or just acting according to practical reason, bootstrapping yourself? Then we risk like Kant’s dove to think that we can fly faster and more frictionless if we would prefer a vacuum instead. Yet this vacuum strikes back. Many intellectuals prefer to ignore schools of thought that have spawned the economics and politics that they prefer to think is the result of practical decisions & spontaneity. On the other end, you have professional economists being absolutely adamant that you have to stick with what works. They are eminently disinterested and ignorant of the history of their trade. Well, then maybe that is why we need historians of the economy.
Other than most Galbraith recovers those very fragments from the texts cherished economists that are not usually quoted or followed. This makes us see how fragmentary and prejudiced our reading of them is. The ideas and abstractions he visits are constantly pulled from their pedestal – with historical examples that seem to show the way they were misused. If he gets us to visit Adam Smith and the writing of the Wealth of Nations, at the same time notices that Smith in his self-interest and critique of tenured academics have also chosen private tutoring as a more profitable income over his university career. Eps 1 is a journey through the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s friendship with philosopher David Hume who woke Kant fromhis dogmatic slumber! Galbraith stops at French markets to talk about the theories of the French physiocrats or observe that not even Smith’s disdain could make us dismiss the Tableau économique of Quesnay sonde the input-output analysis later developed by Russian economist Wassily Leontieff (1905-1999) or the planned economy of the Soviet Union is a direct descendent of that very table. Principles such as laissez-faire and free trade are paraded, while the importance of the division of labor gets exemplified with the help of a pin-making process.
David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) advanced a Labor Theory of Value that was also going to have a long history ahead. In this climate of the British Empire, you had the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the experiments in social responsibility at New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland established by industrialist David Dale. Capitalist charity (which was not charity at all), since children and women became the first recruits and disciplined workers of the new era, worked just 1h less than in the other mills. Socialist Utopian experiments in collective living such as New Harmony, Indiana established by Robert Owen also get mentioned – an episode that rests in my heart because of Marguerite Young’s magnificent literary rendition of that in An Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945).
Early eviction and land-grabbing in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’ also get staged under the Highlander Clearances, where Scottish tenants were pushed out of homes to make room for more profitable (and aesthetically pleasing) sheep. The Irish Famine – and its Malthusian instrumentalization by the British State, as well as the migratory working class trails across the Atlantic, are important references. For Galbraith, it is also an example of how easy it is to abstract from the misery of others and decide to ignore their plight when one life and calculates remotely at a safe distance from their troubles. Or ordering bombs to drop on unknown others from above. The Irish had to pay with their lives and with their wheat to the landlords while the Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn. The Hamlet of Marie Antoinette that somehow modeled pastoral life of the education of princely offspring also gets mentioned.
Eps 2 Manner and Morals of High Capitalism – makes pretty obvious how Social Darwinism became the secular religion of the rich industrialists and robber barons (today’s oligarchs and Big Tech billionaires) of the Gilded Age. Put simply Social Darwinists embraced both racism and laissez-faire capitalism. The survival of the fittest dogma fitted their own socially privileged positions and even if they were not biologists, they used a biological language and twisted Darwin’s idea of natural selection to position themselves as the finest and most adaptable representatives of the species. The popularity of Herbert Spencer in the US is proportionate with the amount of capital accumulation and ruthlessness of the American ruling class. Carnegie and Rockefeller become thus prime representatives of this ideological thinking. Galbraith presents a bizarre series of such US apostles of Darwinism that were sometimes even predecessors of the pro-capitalist Prosperity Gospel. One of them is laissez-faire advocate and clergyman William Graham Sumner. Galbraith also illustrates the thin line separating the capitalist from the criminal, the hoodlum and rascal in the 19th century by recounting in detail the Eerie War – a bloody conflict between US financiers to control the Eerie Railway Company in an effort to corner the market. This is not very far from the current crypto kings. Galbraith also remarks something interesting – that the poor have always been a preferred subject of sociological research, with investigators going to the slums to study their existence, mores and sexual life, while the rich have not attracted this selfsame attention at the time. That was to be the task of Thorstein Veblen -that did exactly some reverse safari on them, depicting the rich as no more than Big Man, and explaining their luxurious living and excess in terms that are still familiar to us today: conspicuous consumption (think Trump, think Berlusconi, space billionaires and basically every other fat cat). There’s one of the most sympathetic views of Marx and that chapter also makes it even more clear than the internecine wars of western liberalism would make neoliberalism or even current secessionist anarcho-capitalists completly at odds with what went on for much of the post war period in the western world. There’s a lot to be desired in the series perhaps none more than the chapter on colonialism – and the anti colonial, transatlantic slavery trade, and all the current struggles and long shadow of colonialism that still ontinues to this day.
TimeSpace Warps 