Machine and Ecology (original) (raw)
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THE CELL, THE FIELD, AND THE TOWER: THE SPACES OF ECOLOGICAL CYBERNETICS
Ecology and cybernetics, in their everyday folk meanings at least, might seem to be completely dissociated fields: the first suggest- ing the study of living organisms in their environments, and the other conjuring images of automation, machines, and their con- trol and management. They share however a concern with under- standing systems, and as even the most cursory study shows, the histories of these concepts are intimately intertwined with each other. In fact, I argue that they have a common structure in a certain abstract spatial imaginary which determines think- ing about systems in modernity. This spatial abstraction itself emerges through a new division of labour which transformed our production and thinking about bodies, machines, and buildings. This is the story of three architectural typologies—the bounded cell, the networked field, and the observatory tower—, a story which raises questions about the nature of architecture and its relationship to other forms of technical and scientific knowledge, and to systems theory in general. This is published as a chapter in Andreas Rumpfhuber (Ed.), INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN (DPR Barcelona, 2017)
Conference Presentation Comparative & International Education Society 2021
We cannot adequately understand the present without adequately understanding the world making and destroying powers of modern technology, overlooked in modern Western philosophy (Heidegger, 1977a; Hui, 2016). Suggested in the titles of two recent books – The Sixth Extinction (Kolbert, 2014) and The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2017), the material and ideological conditions of existence are changing, rapidly and disruptively (Hamilton, 2017; Nancy & Barrau, 2014). Most of us do not really understand all that is happening now, and how all this is shaping the ways our worlds are being reordered, i.e., social media, algorithms, cybernetics, the anthropocene (Hamilton,2017; Haraway, 2015; Steigler, 2018; Stengers, 2015). The unsettling technological advancements and the disordering of worlds since at least the "great acceleration" in the 1950s are part of an historical conjuncture of forces and events that need to be explained together (Grossberg, 2016; McNeill & Engelke, 2014). We live in a planetary technological condition today, yet technology continues to be understood as instruments for accomplishing rational human purposes (Ellul, 1964). In the early 1950s, Martin Heidegger argued that the emergence of cybernetics meant the “end of philosophy” and the beginning of a planetary domestication based on Western techno-scientific thought (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 377). Since the 1950s, the process of cybernetization has concretized in world-wide systems of technological mediation that operate within sensory and intelligent environments in the form of ubiquitous computing and pervasive media (Horl, 2013a). Reflected in the diverse debates on humanism and posthumanism, interrelated with the ontological turn in the sciences and humanities, we are living through a crisis/transformation in the humanist, anthropocentric ways we learned to understand ourselves and the world (Blaser,2010; Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Braidotti, 2019; Escobar, 2017; Ferrando, 2019, de Castro, 2014; Mignolo, 2011). The modern humanist paradigm of technics as an extension of instrumental reason has been succeeded by a wide variety of post-humanist philosophies of the relations between nature and technics, evolving around the present form of “technoecological rationality” (Hayles, 1999; Horl, 2018a; Hui, 2019a). The distinctions between artificial and natural, inorganic and organic, no longer hold as cybernetic machines acquire a kind of organicity (Hui, 2019; Pierce, 2013). The technique/nature opposition, constitutive of Enlightenment thought, has given way to a generalized techno-nature, exemplified in global warming and biotechnology (Lindberg, 2018, p. 95). Nature and technology and human beings are not separate entities, but ontologically intertwined in the production of particular modes of existence. We seem to be living in a homeless, disorienting technologically mediated world order that is changing who we are and how we live, evident in the COVID-19 pandemic -- an unchecked environmental consequence of modern urban development. The planetarization of media technology are subjugating populations in ways that are both environmental and technological -- techno-ecological. This sense of existence as environmentally mediated contributes to the proliferation of a generalized semantics of ecology and renewed analysis of the relations between individuals and their milieus (Simondon, 2012). The technoecological condition is the result of the technocapitalist form of power (Horl, 2013a, 2015; Peters, 2017). The Social Credit System in China for example, portends a future of political subjugation of populations within totalizing cyber-capitalist systems of surveillance. The nature of existence and our understanding of existence have changed, yet education largely continues to reproduce the modern cosmology (Olsen & Gershmam, 1989) The ontological turn represents the proliferation of post-disciplinary thinking reconceptualizing the nature of existence with post-dualist assumptions outside the individual subject-object-world metaphysics of modernity. There are many contradictory currents comprising this turn, but all of them can be divided between those oriented towards expanding powers of control (i.e., eco-modernism, transhumanism, technological singularity), and those recognizing the universal limits and geopolitics of conceptions and knowledges of reality (Asafy-Adjaye, 2015; Bostrom, 2008; Kurzweil, 2005; Pellizzoni, 2015; Reiter, 2018; Santos, 2018; Savransky, 2017). Along with post-dualist technosciences for mastering a singular, universal world reality, a post-dualist ontological pluralism has emerged in the modern knowledge disciplines, particularly in philosophical anthropology, post-phenomenology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 1991; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; de Castro, 2014). As the decolonial critique has argued, modernity is a political-ontological imposition of a singular world ontology, upon which modern techno-industrial-colonial worlds have been built (Escobar, 2017; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; Mignolo, 2012). Drawing on this pluriversal ontological turn, I adopt the concept of ontological politics to refer to how different ways of knowing and being participate in the cosmo-politics of world formations (Blaser, 2008; Escobar, 2017; Savransky, 2014; Skafish, 2020; Pellizzoni, 2015). I propose we consider the present as a contradictory and uncertain crisis and transformation of the modern cosmology and ask how education might be redesigned to critically address the technoecological conditions of existence (Hamilton, 2020). I am interpreting the end and transformation of the modern worldview and project from new materialist philosophies of technics and media ecologies (Guattari, 2000; Horl, 2013a; Hui, 2019a). From the philosophy of technology and media, I describe both Erich Horl and Yuk Hui’s interpretations of the technoecological conditions of the present (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2019a). I focus on Horl and Hui’s proposals for critically understanding, assessing, and intervening in the present conditions of existence -- “general ecology of thought” and “cosmotechnics” (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016b). In the present technoecological condition, general ecology names a new field for critical analysis while cosmotechnics names a renewed relation between technics and humans and technics and nature (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016a). Cosmotechnics unifies the moral order and the cosmic order through technical activities (Dunker, 2020). There are varied twentieth century sources underlying this recent ontological turn in the philosophy of technology and media, including philosophical cosmology, connecting cosmology with metaphysics (An, 2019; Deleuze, 1968; Jonas, 1966; Simondon, 2016; Spengler, 1932; Whitehead, 1929). I see all this thought first, as ways of renewing critical theory for the present technoecological condition and second, as pedagogical contributions to a critical post-human humanities (Braidotti, 2016; The Institute of Speculative & Critical Inquiry). I conclude by asking how a general ecology of thought might prepare education for the task of thinking beyond neo-cybernetic systems of control (Beniger, 1989)?
On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene
Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2017
This article aims to bring forward a critical reflection on a renewed relation between nature and technology in the Anthropocene, by contextualizing the question around the recent debates on the " ontological turn " in Anthropology, which attempts to go beyond the nature and culture dualism analysed as the crisis of modernity. The " politics of ontologies " associated with this movement in anthropology opens up the question of participation of non-humans. This article contrasts this anthropological attempt with the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who wants to overcome the antagonism between culture and technics. According to Simondon, this antagonism results from the technological rupture of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century. This paper analyses the differences of the oppositions presenting their work: culture vs. nature, culture vs. technics, to show that a dialogue between anthropology of nature (illustrated through the work of Philippe Descola) and philosophy of technology (illustrated through the work of Simondon) will be fruitful to conceptualize a renewed relation between nature and technology. One way to initiate such a conversation as well as to think about the reconciliation between nature and technology, this article tries to show, is to develop the concept of cosmotechnics as the denominator of these two trends of thinking.
Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction
2024
Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew – and yet we hardly know – and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics. With texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, Katherine Hayles, Yuk Hui, Dylan Levi King, Michał Krzykawski, David Maulen de los Reyes, Andrew Pickering, Dorion Sagan and Mathieu Triclot.
“Ecospirituality and the Blurred Boundaries of Humans, Animals and Machines"
Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, ed by Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press), 2007
To resort to an embrace of the overlap with animals, creatures and the biosphere while maintaining a hostility against the encroachment of developing capacities of machines is a new kind of romanticism that seeks to keep intact the culture and nature divide. Currently, however, certain parts of cultural production are seen to further some teleology inherent in nature and are “still natural” despite their technological overlay, while other advances that call for a shifting in how humans define themselves are labeled “artificial” or violating to some prior sense of “nature” and humanity that shouldn’t be disturbed. Currently, it seems easier to grant that animals may have souls, be kin, and can be included in the divinity of the planet as direct participants of a larger community, but machines are infernal. These paradoxes have emerged into political discourse and the “culture wars:” one side can claim that to use technology to keep an catastrophically ill person alive is “natural,” in keeping with a sacrality of a creation which has natural rhythms humans may not disturb; and the other side can claim to not use any technological intervention for the terminally ill is the way to allow human choice in self-determination to achieve a dignity beyond nature and the Darwinian impulse for sheer survival. Obviously, at this point the terms used to consider humanity’s relationship to animals and “the natural world” as well as to machines and the built environment are often ambiguous to the point of being unhelpful. These divisions between human and machine are asserted at the same moment in which more and more of our physiology, brain chemistry, sensory apparatus, neurological development, and genetic makeup are understood as machines in some senses, and yet not as compromising to our humanity. Our relationship with animals is more embracing than in centuries past when the animal in us and around us was often reviled and violated, but this unease with the animal and abuse of myriad animal lives in objectifying and destructive ways is far from past. This essay will assert that to make a simple division between humans and machines in regard to their sacrality is unwarranted, and overlooks new dimensions in machines’ evolution, misunderstands dimensions of our relationship to what we build, and fails to fathom the overlap among human, animals and machines has a potential spiritual significance that can be as expansive and liberating as the earlier acknowledgment of the inclusion of animals and the biosphere into sacrality. It is also the contention of this essay that any discussion of any of these three dimensions requires the inclusion of the other two to be fully fathomed and to understand that way in which all three are inseparably interwoven in a spirituality that would embrace the depths of meaning in materiality.
In the modern world an individual deals with different technologies and products of scientific and technological progress and becomes more and more dependent on them, spending considerable time to understand changes and to keep up with progress. In general, the entire human history especially in the last few centuries is the history of victories and triumph of science, technology, and information technologies. Moreover, the humankind being a father of technology at the same time became more and more dependent on it. Today technologies penetrate almost every aspect of our life: private, family and intimate, as well as our mentality. But even more serious transformations are awaiting us in the future when devices and technologies are introduced into the human body and consciousness thus putting strain on all our biological (nervous, physical, and intellectual) adaptive capacities. Today they give a serious thought to seemingly strange ideas about whether mobile phones, computers, and organizers can become a part of our body and brain. In fact, technology has become one of the most powerful forces of development.