Dialogue hosted by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
Transcription
Marek Poliks:
I’m assuming everyone here knows what we do, which is not reasonable to do, but I do think that most people here do, so, we have the [Disintegrator] podcast. It's somewhat philosophy oriented. I would say that the ambient guiding force is AI. I'd like to think that we're one of the least annoying AI podcasts out there, but considering we're probably actually one of the most annoying ones out there.
But I feel like this would be a really good group to talk this stuff through with a little bit, but we don't have to talk about AI directly because that can kind of sting you. We can kind of start up at a couple layers of abstraction up higher.
Roberto Alonso Trillo:
Maybe a way to frame this, because there is a richness here, you know, we know your work and we could frame things from so many different perspectives. One of the questions that we've been trying to deal with as part of the podcast and talking to different people, and this seems like a lame ontological question, which is the question of the human that we don't really discuss anymore: the unhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman, the transhuman.
And one of the ideas that has emerged lately through our research over the past two years and so on, is that idea, which we think is still kind of relevant, of decentering humanness and removing the human from the center of all human discourse, and the question of what happens then. And that has been framed from different perspectives, I think, by different people during the different movements out there.
And we've come to identify three things that we believe maybe we can think differently by removing the human as the kind of starting point. And by that we mean that maybe these things have not been the result of human action. They have some kind of transcendental existence. They are, in a way, an otherness, not part of something we've generated, but something that we participate in, something that we engage with.
And those three things to us are in a way related, and lately we've been talking about a lot about computation and language. We just had a podcast with Leif Weatherby who published a book called [Language] Machines that is quite interesting, where he speaks about the divorce between language and cognition. LLMs tell us that language and cognition do not have to go together.
And the third one would be technology, in the sense of instead of thinking of technology as the result of human action or something that is embedded into capitalism or forms of exploitation, power and so on, which is true to some extent, is also something that transcends our own existence. We are technological beings, if you will, and maybe the question that we want to raise and we are just looking for reactions, I guess, is... And I don't know if you've thought about this, and you could react to it somehow:
The idea of these three entities i.e. computation, language and technology as transcendental entities that we discover, are part of, but are not the result of our actions.
Marek:
The most dangerous thing we could do is go directly to the psychoanalyst who is going to tell us that these things are not at all dissociable from the human. If you don't mind indulging us in a thought experiment of what possibility exists for this kind of separation?
Lucas Ferraço Nassif:
If I go from my background and what I've been working on towards unconscious, uses of technology and language and especially going with this possibility of language being a secretion of the body, where the anatomy of the body and the vibrations and contractions of the body are active producers of language.
So not language as this transcendental barred big Other as Lacan would propose but as an imminent thing that is part of the body, the fluids, cum and sweat. How can technology be elaborated as something that is attached to the body? So not in a transcendental way, but always in an imminent way.
So in a certain way I can really diverge from the hypothesis. Why do I diverge? I’m going to go with this Lacanian, Brazilian Lacanian, I would say, that pretty much goes on with Guattari, and that’s why Guattari is so important, even beyond Deleuze.
If we go with Multinaturalism, and the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: everything is human. The background and the ground of everything is this human possibility of everything being human and the differentiation is always on the natural. So it is Multinaturalist and not multicultural.
The barred Other would be left out in this elaboration. It is very much diverging from your hypothesis... How can we explore your hypothesis with this possibility of everything actually being human?
Marek:
I think the first question that I have would be: how does this kind of conclusion dilate or expand or otherwise kind of problematize or even totally smash the idea of the human as some kind of singular thing?
It feels like we all quickly get to a definitional conversation about what human is, which I'm happy to do, but that would be maybe point number one.
And then point number two, you know, I think about Quentin Meillassoux, for example, the famous book After Finitude, at the beginning of this century, and there’s this question of the arche-fossil where there is clear evidence in any kind of objective scheme of measurement that things do exist prior to the genesis of human as a thing that's recognizable to us.
What does it mean for you to confront something like a fossil record then in this particular case?
Lucas:
Like a fossil record?
Marek:
Yeah.
Lucas:
Okay. That wouldn't be human?
Marek:
I guess in the de Castrian sense you could consider it human, but it's still evidence of something that existed before us, right?
Lucas:
If we think that it's always human, it was human even beyond our possibility of elaboration of what human is.
Marek:
So then we're lapsing into point one?
Lucas:
Maybe that’s the aporia of the possibility of thought. It's because it should be produced on this Thalassian beginning of everything, so it is this big soup of possibility of life, which is already a human possibility. It's not that the human is going to be there to make evolution of this soup of life, but this is the implication. And then, maybe, that's the Guattarian Unconscious there.
You are always keeping this constant evolution of the species inside of your human body. And also Zora, my dog, and everything, and also stones, organic and inorganic... So this potentiality of human, it was always there.
Roberto: There's a question there to me taking this Deleuzian approach, if you will, where everything is human is also a way of decentering the human. An equal statement would be nothing is human.
Marek:
Yeah. Exactly.
Roberto:
Once you get to that, then we are agree in essence on what's going on. It’s a different approach but makes a similar point. But then, I guess, the question has to do more with how would you envision then that relationship with the technological as human or the computational as human? Looking at, you know, the more standard approach that people take and establish more binary opposition between these terms.
Alessandro Sbordoni:
I would like to intervene here. This made me think about a film, I don’t know if you know it, it’s quite a low budget film, but it's very, very interesting called The Stone Tape and it's a film that is commented upon by Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie. And it was a film made in the 70s for the BBC, and it's a very interesting film. The plot is about a team of researchers who moves into a Victorian house to develop a new recording device.
And this team of researchers very quickly discovers that one of the rooms of this Victorian house, in which they were supposed to store part of their equipment is haunted.
And in this room, which seems to have been left bare since the building was erected in the Victorian era, on the stone, they repeatedly see a ghost appearing and they hypothesize that it's literally the stone in the building which is projecting this apparition. And so they move all their equipment to this room, and they start to try to detect the haunting. And it's very interesting because little by little they discover that while the building was erected in the Victorian era, there was an exorcism a few years before the building was erected, and the foundation of the building is Saxon. Then they discover that the material, the limestone of the room was Roman, and they're all these different strata inside the building.
And so, I need to spoiler a bit the film. So, they see the ghost of a Victorian woman appearing, but then as this ghost appears, as if on a stone tape, so it appears again and again and again on a loop, and it seems that they are continuing to appear. This apparition gets erased, and what was on the stone tape before this woman, appears. And that's something that was before the Victorian era, before the Saxons, before the Romans, almost at the beginning of mankind. And it's a very beautiful scene towards the end with formless, colorful, almost inhuman features.
So this is a very beautiful film, but I'm talking about it because I think that stone as the medium of digital technology, so, silicon, which is the material of which microchips are made, also has this inhuman, inorganic element to it. And I like to think about computers as bringing these inhuman, transcendental, element to our culture, which is very different from our familiar, organic vegetal memory of paper and so on.
And I find it interesting because also there are certain technical aspects of how our digital culture has evolved, which seem to correspond more to how these mineral inhuman materials react and respond, which means that time is very different. For a long time we've been considering stone and minerals as if they were non-living, but certainly with computers, we realized that we created literally this mineral, rhizomatic structure, which even though is inorganic, has a life of its own almost.
But to give a bigger example, the earth itself is a mineral structure that has a life of its own with tectonic plates and so on. It just works on a different timescale. And I think the internet has allowed us to peek into this different timescale. And this different timescale is not human. And I find it very interesting that, the most recent development of technology, to a certain extent even artificial intelligence, open up the way to this different timescale, which maybe we don't even want to confront and we just repress it.
Marek:
Yeah, that's great. I think certainly that's something that Meillassoux would love and we're going back to a rock and certainly we also hear a lot—and this is very much in line with, I know a lot of people are writing about de Castro, for example, referencing, Silicon Intelligence, the voice of the rocks and things like that. That makes a lot of sense.
I think the question then that I have is for both of you, what does it mean that computation can be done on anything, right? You don't need to do computation on silicon. You can do computation on slime molds. You can print chips on essentially any material. You're limited by, of course, the optimization that silicon affords us if you want to do things at lightning speed, but we think that this is going to change completely in the next ten years. So I wonder...
For us, the idea that computation can be done on anything means that, while at the same time I worship the spirit of the rock in a lot of senses, I’m like: but it seems like it's actually not even the rock, like it's something a little bit different from that. Maybe it's electricity...
Lucas:
I think that at least when I try to operate with this concept of, for instance, Adjustment or how do we assemble things, if we start thinking from a point that we are operating in a realm of Animism. It pretty much changes the way that we deal with that. Alessandro is converging with, a little bit, my point. How can we deal with technology, maybe computation from the animistic?
And that, for instance, my idea, every time when I work with Japanese animation, or even Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s films, like Pulse, for instance, there is something there that is operating in an animistic way that maybe we are not able to dominate as we think that we can dominate when we do with transcendence.
Because I think the problem with transcendence, most of the times, is that I think we kind of know how to do it because we abstract it, but when we are facing a radical other form of life, it would be considered lifeless. Which other future is this technology going to bring to us?
Roberto:
One of the most interesting interviews that we have was with...
Marek:
Gordon White, who I think is the most famous chaos magician in the world, as far as I understand, that's how he was described to me.
Roberto:
He has a deep insight into, you know, aspects of some of the discussions that we have with, you know, computer scientists, philosophers and so on.
Marek:
Yeah, he brought us into our tech and animism game, for sure.
Roberto:
Going back to what you were saying before, I think one of the issues that is, to us, relevant here has to do with the idea of scale. And this is something we discussed a lot and I think it relates to some of the aspects that you're trying to touch upon here.
Scale is something that can be discussed at length, in a way scale is, for us as humans, we think, it's a way for us to be able to engage with the complexity of reality. We have to bring everything back into the human scale so that it can become countable and relatable, and transmutable and communicated.
Roberto:
And that's, in a way, a limitation, because there are scales that we cannot understand, but we still compress into our experience of reality and necessary in space. I think, Parikka says, that we hallucinate scales as humans, we keep coming up with new scales because we have to be able to communicate, but by doing so, we simplify phenomena that are much more complicated.
And in a way maybe what is happening now with some aspects of AI, LLMs and so on, where you have a model of intelligence, a model of the basics of linguistics from a kind of a structuralist point of view that reveals from a kind of a structuralist point of view that reveals something that wasn't built into the model, and it becomes complex to understand why. So, in a way, that reflection is telling us that there's something there, that we try to simplify, that goes beyond simplification itself.
Marek:
Claire, can we bring you in? What do you think about all of these?
Claire Elise:
On a sort of more simple level, on a less kind of philosophical level, it's very trendy right now to talk about the Anthropocene and to complain about the Anthropocene.
So I think there is an emerging dissatisfaction with a, let's say human centric, world, that we feel like we built this entire world for ourselves and somehow flattened and compressed everything down. This is not a sort of philosophical elaboration by any means.
Do you feel like you're a part of this kind of anti-Anthropocene sort of discourse or?
Roberto:
No.
Marek:
We are pretty morally ambiguous, I think.
Claire:
What do you think is the difference there? Because if I was to have people in my mind that are often talking about the question of the Anthropocene, what is the difference in your approach to this?
Marek:
In the Anthropocene, there’s just the strong principle and position that we're currently living within an entirely human derived scale. Right? That actually everything that's happening around us is principally the result of human intervention.
I think we take a kind of hard alternative position there that that's not entirely the case and actually there’s some real uncanny collaboration, maybe with demonic or Ahrimanic entities or animistic entities who are perhaps driving us in the direction that we are being driven.
But to name an aeon after ourselves feels, or an epoch I guess, I don't know which one it is, but to name an epoch out after ourselves is a tremendous act of hubris. And I think ultimately, yeah, it's an excuse to make goopy art, which I don't think we're into, right? It’s about, you know, kind of thinking that which we had wrought, right?
And yeah, I'd like to think about who else is a part of this particular story, not as a way to relinquish responsibility for it, but rather as a way for us to imagine any kind of alternative next step, or possibility.
Claire:
And then now I can think about it in terms of... Let's bring it to the concept of Lifting. I don't know where I've picked up this idea from, I think it's somewhere between the writings of Achim Szepanski and Émilie Carrière, which is a really bizarre dichotomy. They were kind of processing this idea that Immanuel Kant was just capital thinking about itself through Kant.
So, then we get to the problem of Lifting, where if capital itself is lifting away from the human, then is our discussion of the decentering of the human also a natural part of capital lifting away from us? And then we get to this point, the question of what comes next. We're all anti-capitalist in some sort of broad sense, but it feels like there's a kind of exorcism where we're losing some sort of spirit of ourselves. And as the human is decentered, it seems almost as if it's a natural part of the process of capital lifting away from the human.
Alessandro:
I think regarding this point, I would say that we reached a certain scale, which I think is the scale at which information now travels, which is light, which seems to work really well with the mineral memory we developed with computers and at this scale, on the one hand we are able to create all sort of content and information and compress it at this scale, in a way that before was not possible.
But I would think about even Lifting as almost like an infra-scalar activity. There is something about jumping from one scale to the other. We can also think of the Anthropocene as an infra-scalar moment in history, in which it’s no longer only on the level of the planet, but it's on the level of interaction of its inhabitants with the planet. And so it's an infra-scalar moment.
And just to add a small thing, the interlocking of information and capital is literally working in an infra-scalar way from the point of the transportation of goods to the economy itself, which requires these passages, which I think we have enabled literally with digital communication.
Roberto:
I think the discussion of Lift as we try to frame it, I think, we Drag, we are performing as if it wasn't happening. I think there's an unawareness when we articulate as Lift in this idea of Exocapitalism. So the decentering of the human to me is a way of bringing back the human. The way we frame it, I think, is that in that attempt to decenter, the human remains the center, because you're just having something before it and then building a whole kind of reactive structure against something and reactiveness in general tends to be affirmative in a way. When you become anti something, you're actually at the same time establishing the centrality of that as something that defines who you want to be. So it's a tricky one, I think.
Claire:
‘Cause you're reasserting the human in it, not as a way of centering the human, but as a way of reminding us that we have this kind of implicit bias.
Roberto:
It becomes a performance of removing the human, but we still discuss the human at the same time. It's not a true move away from the centerness of the human discourse.
Claire:
I’m glad that you problematized the centering aspect of this discourse because I have, again, a sort of line that sticks in my head from Achim Szepanski that the center does not exist. There's no center. Zero is the center of a number line and it's a kind of concept. It came up yesterday that zero is a kind of abstract concept that is not so easy to find in nature. And yet the whole idea of computation is built upon the idea that there is a one and there is a zero. So there's this kind of abstract center that everything is kind of revolving around but it's not really there, and yet we completely live as though zero is a thing.
Alessandro:
Would you be able to consider the movement of Lifting and Dragging in almost human terms, almost in psychological terms because it seems you have some affinity towards almost this bias towards the anthropocentric, this bias towards the human, must have some kind of almost psychoanalytic existentialist ground. The kind of capital structure we're making and that the resistance may be almost psychological. Because we tend to think about it as a rational choice but...
Roberto:
To me the issue, terminologically and philosophically, with the human is that it is a project. It's not what we are, it's what we are told that we are and is a project that is historical, it's westernized in a number of ways, the way we're talking about it now, we're speaking about it and we take it for granted. We know what it is, but not really. And that has been historically given to us as something that we don't need to discuss anymore. And I think that we find that itchy, we feel the need to say what if this project may not be the right way to frame things.
Marek:
Well, it's not psychological, I guess, I mean, we wrote the book for humans, I could put it that way. Well, I mean, truly and that, like, the book is definitely designed to be read by humans, as I understand the human to be and hopefully help them kind of navigate what I consider to be more or less objective circumstances, right? And I think the book, in that sense, is not journalistic, but it's definitely attempting to be descriptive in a way that theoretically allows a human to better understand, better cope and better maneuver through a space of hardened impossibility in all respects. I think that that's what we're trying to do. And I think that has to do with both, the foreclosure that certain courses of action might be impossible. And therefore the understanding that one should not do impossible things, but then also the acknowledgment that some things are impossible and that it is important to do impossible things, right? I think that's what we're trying to do. I'm not incredibly capable with psychological language or psychoanalytical language although certainly Lacan has an influence obviously in the book in some way. But, to me, the book is about trying to remove psychology from the equation. Right? In that there is maybe, I mean, it may be in a Deleuzian sense there are some other psychologies at play. And we want to try and show you what they look like that.
Lucas:
Something that interested me in something that Roberto said, and my question would be where is the place of hallucination there? Because when we talk not from psychoanalysis, but when you talk about psychology, the problem with psychology is that psychology is full of representation. Emotions are representation. And I think psychoanalysis as Lacan would say we always think of maybe pre-representation, before any representation is produced, as a feeling, for instance, as an emotion. My question is where is the place of hallucination? What does hallucination have to do with being a human or what does hallucination have to do with Lifting or not Lifting?
Roberto:
The reference that I made before to hallucination had to do more with the idea of scale. And the idea there is that hallucination is meant as the creation of something that does not correspond to reality, but becomes established as such. And the idea that we relate to the complex of a sensorial mechanism by hallucinating in a kind of, maybe not in a psychoanalytical way, but maybe this is just, you know, using the language that is badly used now for AIs and so on. Scales that allow us to engage with reality. And I think the idea of using that word, which Parikka uses, is to point out that we believe that scales in some way offer us this objective scientific representation of reality, that we're able to establish through use of tools and establish scientific knowledge that establishes that this is 50cm wide. Not really. There is a metre in Paris that we claim is this distance and we divide everything accordingly. So the idea of scale as something that we have to hallucinate because it's not something that is out there, but something that we have to impose to our kind of mechanisms into reality and then becomes a shared agreement to engage with.
Lucas:
Even if we think with Kant and all the production of concepts through Kant. If we go to Lacan, and there’s a very important lecture that he gives in the Seminar on Ethics, that is the seventh seminar, he's going to propose that Kant is a sadist because there's a sadic, perverse mode of existence that you need to hallucinate somehow so you can produce concepts like chaos. In a way, it's a constant production of hallucinations that we have to territorialise in scales so we can understand the world as it is. But is it that way?
Lain Iwakura:
I think it brings me a little bit to where you started with this animistic human that’s everywhere and just decentering. And I think that in both assumptions you have this ontological core somehow but you place it as if it is real. And maybe it might make sense if you think of this angle of non philosophy and say like, you know, there's this real out there and it's the unilateral determination of this. And those are two forms of expression that actually are just world buildings that, our hallucinatory assumptions about what the real might be, but in the end that's the thing that's producing our perception. And so it brings those two different kind of to the same perspective somehow. And it might open up to us for maybe that thing with the human you're looking for is what in non philosophy is then termed the human-in-human.
Alessandro:
What comes to mind is a very interesting article by Jussi Parikka, and it's an article which is about scale, but he also makes this interesting connection with simulation. And, I guess hallucination could be a way to express it, but simulation has these very interesting elements to it, the twist in the Baudrillardian sense in which obviously any scale that is not directly accessible can be simulated or represented. And then it is as if we are groping in the dark, but we can still operate with it. And just to connect it with another very simple concept, we can assume that these mechanisms, work even though we, we know that like a black box, we know that we cannot directly access it, but we can access some of it. And going back to the inhuman part, at least the component that we, let’s say, remove from human understanding.
There is a very similar analogy that I was thinking about that was made by Italian theorist called Furio Jesi, who is an anthropologist, and he talks about this paradox of making anthropology because when I'm a Western anthropologist studying a non-Western civilization in order to report this non-Western form of life in Western terms, how is this not leading to a contradiction or a paradox? And what he developed is a concept called the mythological machine, which is a paradigm in which, yes, it's impossible, but it's also possible. And he kind of takes in the contradiction and that makes it work anyway, which has a lot of speculative various elements to it. So I would say that this inhuman component of computation or even the black box could be considered as a computational machine in the sense that there is an absurdity of projecting ourselves at that scale, becoming a machine to a full extent, and I think it's an interesting way. And simulation and then the mythological machine of Furio Jesi have a very interesting similarity, I think, which would be useful to think about.
Maks Valenčič:
Maybe I can connect to what Lain said and to the first question that you posed, because, human within human could be psychotic because psychotic is precisely the one who lives outside of reality because of the foreclosure of the Other and so forth. So normally when we are talking about the human, we are talking about neurotic subjectivity and neurotic subjectivity comes to repression, that is basically a way to manage the unbearable real. And this is how the humanist project comes about. And then the psychotic is someone who tries to endure this unbearable real on their own, and the problem is to endure it. And through science we are reminded that the real without mediation, can be endured. We don't need extra structure for the real to be structured. So this is the psychotic point and why the human can actually be fully decentered or fully left to dust because we already have a proof that existence without this extra layer of mediation is possible. And Exocapitalism as a theory is basically a theory of capitalism that confirms that on the level of the economy, computation and the transcendental itself, because it's the first fully consistent theory of how unconstrained capitalism can be consistent. So this is basically my answer, because the problem with the real is how to make it consistent. Consistent that it doesn't overwhelm us, that it doesn't produce hallucination, it doesn't spiral into dust.
Lucas:
Can we deal with technology without the myth, without the necessity of producing mythological or myth driven machines? Is there a possibility for that?
Roberto:
Humans are apophatic cognizants. I guess that's my answer.
Marek:
Well, no matter what, at the end of the day it is happening I promise.
Lucas:
Without the myth?
Marek:
Yeah, absolutely, it's happening in a very technical sense you could say. But thank you so much. This was so great. This was great.
Claire:
There’s going to be some extra space in the podcast and I’d like to really encourage people to record some voice notes.
Rhea:
Hi everyone. The question of the human, around which we have been rotating throughout the whole recording, is something that is still extremely relevant. And, despite the shifts, at least the apparent shifts, in every field of culture, in academia as well as in the arts, away from the question of the human, I feel like in this shifting away from it, it, maybe paradoxically, plays still an extremely important role in the sense that: what we can gather from this attempt to shift away from this question is maybe, I would say, self driven, self conditioned tendency of the discourse to actualize a desire for a new narrative. In general, this shift towards a new narrative, or at the very least, advance the current narrative to a completely different point, which is hard to call new because we maybe have lost track of what novelty means, but… I feel like this drive is definitely what has brought this project of minor publishing and this group of people together today and this series of events that occurred this week in Venice, to actuality. And, I want to add to what Maks said, in the sense that I completely agree with his perspective that Exocapitalism as a project definitely brings forth this advancement of the narrative in a way that we maybe haven't seen in the last, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15 years. Inexperienced readers, maybe somebody like me honestly, or people who are unfamiliar with the project and with Becoming Press and what they have been doing for the past 2 to 3 years would be quick to ascribe this text as an accelerationist piece, but as said by Charles Mudede is something that is much more than that. The question of the human, to move away from the human doesn’t necessarily mean to do away with the human and to decenter the human, or rather to desert the human, as the main point of discourse, I feel like it would open possibilities for radical, actually radical novelty, to emerge, or at least to contribute to steer the narrative in a direction that is, more sanitized or less dependent on capital per se, because, as Claire said, to be anti-capitalist in a sense it still means to position yourself in relation to capital. Thank you so much to everybody for letting my voice circulate in this virtual space as a sort of ghost.