Category: matter

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Thomas Lemke on the ‘new materialism’, bio-capital and biopolitics

A talk by Thomas Lemke bringing together his own, substantial, work on biopolitics (through Foucault) and what has been characterised as the ‘new materialism’, or the acknowledgement of ‘vibrant matter(s)’ in Jane Bennett’s words, as well as the growing study of the relations between ‘neoliberal capitalism and changing understandings of what constitutes life in the emerging biotechnical industries’. For Lemke these extend Foucault’s project by opening up new directions for the analysis of biopolitics in the guise of the modes of politics and the matters of life.

The talk was given at the Central European University and I came across it through the ANTHEM blog.

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Stiegler on “The Pre-individual Eye”

From a really interesting essay in which Stiegler offers an engagement with aesthetics:

[p. 231]V. The Pre-individual Eye

Manet, facing the rejection of his painting by the academicism of the Sec- ond Empire, said one day: “Their eye will yield” [se fera]. This phrase came back to me one day when I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid–in that great collection of Western painting wherein one of its major traits is brought to view: we see Spanish painting develop between Islamic culture and what would become Flemish painting. At the Prado, we see the eye yield through space and time; we see it open, constitute itself, and deploy itself: we realize that the eye is a milieu.

We see through a milieu. Aristotle called the milieu of vision the di- aphanous. But the diaphanous of the noetic eye is symbolic: over-saturated by history–by a History of the eye–it constitutes what Simondon calls a pre-individual milieu, the pre-individual foundation of vision, which is to say, of the eye that is not in the eye socket, but rather like that which consti- tutes the symbolic process of transindividuation giving us to see the visible as it has never been seen. This trans-formation of the eye–always already projected outside the eye socket just as the tongue in the mouth projects itself between the ears–is called the history of art. And this transformation occurs under organological conditions.

Symbolic milieus must be analyzed along three organological levels. What makes possible the transformation of the retinal eye into a noetic eye is the possibility for the body of the sensitive soul to organize itself and to reach noetic activity by assembling its organs (including its memory and therefore its brain) through inanimate beings such as carved flints, pigments of paint, earth, ash, which thus become organic (I have called this, else- where, the organized inorganic) and form the organs for the transindividuation of the eye as milieu, whose history is also that of art.

[p. 232]

How did the men of Lascaux paint? They transformed matter that they sublimated, and this sublimation is the transindividuation of the eye as the milieu of the visible, of which the history of art is the diachronic display of sediments. Every museum gives us to see this condition of seeing, and at the same time a genealogy of the eye that regards and is regarded–like its paleontology–even while it teaches the eye to see that to which it has yet to open.

This transformation, which is the enlargening of the body by non-living organs that form a noetic and associated milieu, produces organa, artifices, works as well as tools and things (which are all, always, tools in some man- ner).4 These artifices hold together bodies and put them in relation (the first among them is the transitional object discovered by Winnicott) and form along with them, as a linkage pervaded by the energy of the circuits of transindividuation, the symbolic milieu, the milieu wherein appear those symbols constitutive of the human that are works, traces of a passage to action in the noetic world. In this mesotès, which is a symbolic system– to once again appropriate and divert one of Aristotle’s terms–thus appear three organological levels:

the natural organs of the body,
the organs that are artifices (materials, tools, things, works),
the social organizations that give access, by forming social rules that enable the transmission and writing of the history of psychic and collective individuation and transindividuation.

Aesthetics is then the constitution of a milieu, or as James Ash has it an atmosphere, which Stiegler argues is constituted organologically, that is to say it is formulated in forms of technicity which are the mutually constituting ‘extensions’ of the human/technical, in three veins, described above. Furthermore, aesthetics is (per)formed in the actualisation of the potentials that are present in the eye (in combination with what the eye sees), as always already projected beyond the eye socket: the gaze of the artist is contemplative but that contemplation is enabled and nurtured by that which is contemplated and then shared in the medium of expression (oil on canvas and so on):

Our eye does not spontaneously see the noetic [ which is to say intellectual, spiritual, contemplative –sk] milieu it weaves when, seeing by that noetic act that is “to see” for, say, a painter, it brings to sight what it has seen, making visible the very motifs of seeing. [p. 228-229]

In this way, we can read Steigler as arguing that aesthetics fundamentally consists in our processes of being-with, of becoming together – of transindividuation.

Worth a read if you can get a copy”¦ (happy to help 😉

Full reference:

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”. trans. Arthur, T., in: Khalip, J., Mitchell, R. (Eds.) Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 222-236.

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VIDEO > Trevor Pinch discusses the ‘material turn’ in STS

In this video from Edinburgh, STS scholar Prof. Trevor Pinch wrinkles his nose at multi-species ethnography and then goes on to identify what he sees as some of the problematic ways in which materiality has been discussed in STS. In particular he problematises the use of the term ‘affordance’, thinking through the various forms of intentionality that asks us to assume about both the ‘object’ to which the affordance is said to belong and the human ‘subject’ for which, Pinch suggests, that affordance is intended. Don’t think I would agree necessarily but I think this is an interesting voice to add to the broader material turn conversation…

Found via ANTHEM.

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Mattering Press – a new STS publishing initiative

I was really pleased to see that ‘Mattering Press‘ has been formed as a new publishing initiative for STS, committed to the creation and publishing of widely accessible, carefully produced, and intellectually vibrant books in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first books are due to be published this year (2014). One of the core team leading the initiative is fellow (trans/inter-disciplinary) geographer Sebastian Abrahamsson (Amsterdam, working with Annemarie Mol).

I have copied below the post about this on the EASST website:

Mattering Press started in early 2010 as a publishing initiative of the Flows, Doings, Edges collective: a peer-support group of early career researchers interested in relational research. Sensitive to the relational and material politics of knowledge production, in early 2012 we began to explore the possibilities of alternative modes of engaging with works we find interesting and important. The term ‘mattering’ comes from Science and Technology Studies, and captures at least three important components of our thinking about Open Access publishing.

  1. The first is materiality, that is, the STS insight that all knowledge comes from particular places and its successful formulation strongly depends on the alignment of all kinds of entities, from buildings through laboratory equipment to physical bodies. Within academic life, texts are not only crucial parts of such alignments, but are also often considered to be their most important outcomes. We believe it is fascinating and increasingly necessary to consider their production as experimental interventions in research practice, rather than its afterlife.
  2. The second is that the way academic texts are produced matters – both analytically and politically. Dominant publishing practices work with assumptions about the conditions of academic knowledge production that rarely reflect what goes on in laboratories, field sites, university offices, libraries, and various workshops and conferences. They tend to deal with almost complete manuscripts and a small number of authors, who are greatly dependent on the politics of the publishing industry. This is particularly true in the social sciences and the humanities, where books have a great importance, not only in academic debates, but also in (early) career development.
  3. The third component is to consider publishing as an ongoing process: mattering suggests that working with authors and manuscripts is an activity that doesn’t necessarily start with almost complete manuscripts and hardly ever ends with the publishing of a book. What constitute book-like texts and how they circulate are questions just as important as those related to their commissioning and editing.

These are the concerns that we hope Mattering Press will be able to hold in focus as part of a growing and ever-changing STS community, and as part of an active initiative to reflect on and innovate around our own knowledge production practices. Informed by these points, Mattering Press is organised around the following three sets of practices, each of which in turn draws on our ongoing thinking about what new relations more careful modes of academic knowledge production might produce.

  1. We care about open access to academic work. This means that all our books will be accessible as digital texts and downloadable e-books for free on our website. We are committed to sharing both academic knowledge, and the very practical knowledge that we are acquiring over the course of setting up this project. In this vein, we are working on a number of collaborative initiatives that will hopefully benefit not just us, but more widely the Open Access community. We also care for printed academic books, and so will sell high quality, professionally designed copies of all Mattering books, partly as a way of generating revenue for the press, and partly because we value the material tactility of books.
  2. Like all academic presses, we care a lot about quality and academic standing of our publications. Unlike most presses, however, we believe that double blind peer review is not always the best way of ensuring academic excellence. Rather, we believe that academic work in the social sciences benefits from open, productive collaboration of authors and reviewers. We are therefore recommend that reviewers provide open, signed peer reviews where possible. We expect this will help to establish a relationship of care between reviewers, authors and editors, and will eventually also benefit the resulting texts. For some texts, we are also experimenting with more sustained collaborative relationships between reviewers and authors which we expect to be particularly beneficial for early career researchers.
  3. Last but not least, care in open access academic publishing means working towards the financial sustainability of the press and to try to pay those who do not have a stake themselves in academic knowledge production (such as typesetters, website programmers, proofreaders, text editors, and designers). This means trying to develop a financially viable model of open access book production in the difficult institutional and industry funding landscape of academic publishing. This also means engaging potential readers in the practical and financial challenges of open access book production, given that we suspect that many will have very little idea of the work that goes into the production of not simply a book, but a self-sustaining academic press. Getting the press up and running has already taken many hundreds of hours of unpaid labor not just from us, but a range of friends and supporters. We are therefore keen to experiment with ways of making this work visible on our website and possibly in our books, as a way of drawing potential readers into the debate about what it really means for academics to take responsibility for the outcomes of their own knowledge production practices.

Our presentation at the CRESC conference reception marks the moment when Mattering Press announced itself to some of its potential publics. Next year, we look forward to an official launch of the Press. Our first batch of books will include a collection of essays provisionally titled Practising Comparison: Revitalising the Comparative Act, edited by Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zuzana Hrdlickova, a collection of essays provisionally titled The Empirical Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert, and an English translation of a book by a major STS scholar, which we hope to be able to announce soon. It is expected that our second batch of books, to be released in 2015, will include several texts by promising early career researchers. In the meantime, you can find us at: www.matteringpress.org

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Parikka’s forthcoming ‘geology of media’

Jussi Parikka has written an interesting post on his blog offering a glimpse at his new writing project, with the tentative title ‘A Geology of Media’. He suggests that this is the third in his series of books theorising media ecology, with the other two being Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007) and continued with Insect Media (2010).

Here’s an excerpt:

This book on the geophysics and the non-organic ground of media complements the earlier takes by offering a media materialism from the point of view of geological resources, electronic waste and media arts. Through engaging with several contemporary art and technology projects it provides a media theoretical argument: to think of materiality of media beyond the focus on machines and technologies by focusing on what they consist of: the chemistry and geological materials of media, from metals to dust.

In short, I am interested to see if what pejoratively sometimes is called “hardware fetishism” is not hard enough, and even media and cultural theorists need to focus on the rocks and crust that make technical media possible. Earth history of deep times mixes with media history, which becomes a matter of not only thousands, but millions of years of non-linear history (to modify Manuel Delanda’s original idea). This way media materialism becomes a way to entangle media technologies, environmental issues and themes of global labour. Perhaps instead of the Anthropocene, we should just refer to the Anthropobscene.

Read the whole thing here.

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Beware the internet of things”¦ it’s coming to get you

Shawn Sobers linked to a funny comment piece by Stewart Heritage on the Grauniad riffing on the idea of the ‘Internet of Things‘, with the main schtick being that there is such a lack of imagination behind the implementation of such ‘things’ that if we extrapolate then surely the interlinked ‘things’ will do us a mischief”¦ Now, this is humorous, of course, but humour is also a good way to get us to think about why on earth we’re letting ourselves in for a vision of such ‘things’. I am not ‘anti-‘ technological innovation, I am merely arguing that we need to be critically reflective of the motivation behind the development of some of these systems and devices. The same kind of critical reflection we have seen in relation to the ‘MOOC revolution‘…

Here’s one of the funny bits from the article, extrapolating from actually existing technologies into the more ridiculous:

The Internet of Things has already produced some cool-sounding devices. There is the tennis racket kitted out with motion sensors to help you improve your game. There’s the parking sensor that directs your satnav to an empty spot. The basketball that, when bounced on the floor, automatically tells your home entertainment setup to start playing basketball-related content. The bridge that tells people when it’s about to collapse. The smoke alarm that switches itself off and works in conjunction with your electrical outlets to burn you to death in your sleep because it has become jealous of your capacity for love. The remote cave that fills itself with bears and poisonous snakes whenever it detects that someone has started sleeping in it because they’ve convinced themselves that their entire house has grown sentient and suddenly turned against them. All sorts, really. It’ll be fun.

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Reblog > Being and Space

Over on the technophilia blog, my former colleague and friend Patrick Crogan has written a really insightful piece in response to the general reading of Stiegler I offer in my recent paper The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies. Following on from my rather quick explanation of Stiegler’s use of the concept of technicity, Patrick brings a nuanced gloss on Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger in Technics and Time 1 – please read on below.

I would like to note, as I did in the acknowledgements of the article, that my own engagement with Stiegler’s work and the broader (post)phenomenological understandings of the human-technology relation comes from sustained, very rewarding, discussions with Patrick, whose own insightful work, expertise and translations have been invaluable.

Being and Space

Sam Kinsley, former colleague and technophilia, now at Exeter Uni, recently published ‘The Matter of “Virtual” Geography’ in Progress in Human Geography. It gives a comprehensive overview of the history of formulations of virtual spaces and realities since the heady days of the 1990s articulations of cyberspace, up to recent approaches to ideas of coded and networked spatialities. Sam perceptively mobilises Stiegler’s work including his use of Simondon and Heidegger to propose a way of describing and analysing digitally enabled spatial and temporal refigurations of contemporary existence and sociality.

I wanted to add a gloss on this mobilisation of Stiegler’s notion of technicity, as a point that seemed to me to touch on an important element in Stiegler’s critical adoption of Heidegger’s Being and Time – hence the ‘Being and Space’ title. Sam has this to say about Stiegler’s positioning of humans as always already preceded by technics in a way:

“Culture”, he writes, “can accordingly be thought of as metastable systems of retention, of exteriorized thought: ‘A new born child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [data, images, writing and so on] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely, constitutes the world as world’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 9, original emphasis). The ongoing creation of shared knowledge, and thus a shared memory and history, is in large part mediated by technology (with the notable exceptions of practices of oral history and storytelling).”

Absolutely, and here Stiegler’s take on and taking from Heidegger’ notion of Dasein’s ‘throwness’ is evident. Dasein, the being for whom its being is a question, ‘falls’ into time, and encounters a facticity already there. This paradoxical futurity of what precedes Dasein in a sense programmes (though this word is evocative much more of Stiegler’s Heidegger than Heidegger) the questioning of being that characterises Dasein, along with the tension between an intratemporal business with everyday things seeking to avoid the question and an authentic encounter with it via (in Heidegger) an assuming of the heritage of the collective past as pro-genitor and horizon of Dasein’s future possibilities.

In the latter part of Technics and Time 1 Stiegler ‘deals with’ Heidegger, identifying this notion of a throwness into an already existent facticity as his major insight, while also identifying quite precisely the point in Being and Time  (at a certain moment in the famous chapter on historicality and temporality) where Heidegger turns away from the implications of this constitutive factical technicity of Dasein and towards the more problematic notion of a history of being as expressed in the community of the volk  – the community – thought separately as a spiritual continuity, somehow transcendent from a facticity now relegated to the status of intratemporal covering over of the former. For Stiegler, as Sam’s account indicates, technics is an irreducible dimension of individual and collective being and any ‘authentic’ reflection or encounter with the question of one’s being, or of being in general (in philosophy, religion, politics etc) develops on the basis of and out of conditions that are factical, that pre-exist s/he reflecting, and that also make possible the transmission and communication of that reflecting to others to come after.

One more note: the oral history and storytelling that is part of the the “ongoing creation of shared knowledge” Sam describes is also mediated technically, if not ‘technologically’ (but perhaps today few instances of mediation passes completely to one side of the pervasive electronic media milieu). Oral transmission is always part of a linguistic technicity; it is always undertaken in conjunction with certain rituals and gestures associated with the cultural event of story recital; and often these will include the production of graphics of various kinds, rupestral, sand-painting, bodily inscription and so forth. That minds retain these forms and conventions and rites testifies to the profound interdependence of organic and non-organic spatial memory supports in the maintenance and evolution of individual and cultural identity.

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The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies

I have been meaning to write a quick post about this for a while, so this is a ‘late’ announcement”¦

A few months ago I wrote about having two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available online on the Progress web pages. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However,  I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.

“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies” revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.

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Close up at a distance, Laura Kurgan

There are a number of people engaging in really thoughtful and thought-provoking artistic, activist and political engagements/interventions with geographical (topographical) technologies, which are very much worth paying attention to. Work by Jordan Crandall, Laura Kurgan, Lisa Price and Trevor Paglen, amongst others, I think offers some really interesting ways of critically thinking about, and engaging with, the various kinds of mappings we (as socieities) are variously undertaking for sometimes not-so-benevolent causes.

Laura Kurgan’s recent Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics has attracted some deserved attention by geographers and, in a similar vein to Patrick Crogan’s excellent Gameplay Mode, offers an interesting critical engagement with the military origins of satellite mapping and imaging technologies. Kurgan argues that we cannot stand at a ‘critical distance’ to evaluate these technologies but rather –  we are “addressed by and embedded within them”. Thus – “Only through a certain intimacy with these technologies–an encounter with their opacities, their assumptions, their intended aims–can we begin to assess their full ethical and political stakes” (page 14).

Columba Peoples, from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, has written a good review of Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance for the open access book reviews section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, which is online here and well worth a read.

Also, Laura Kurgan and Trevor Paglen engaged in a fascinating conversation about their practice at Columbia University earlier this year, which was recorded and is available on YouTube:

Note: Trevor’s mic doesn’t work very well and he’s muffled for a bit at the beginning but it gets fixed so stick with it!