Immediations, edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi

Open Humanities Press has launched a new book series: Immediations, edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi.

'Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains' – A.N. Whitehead

The aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires. It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational fabric. Co-composition.

“The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile” – A. N. Whitehead

Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be answered by the authors in the series. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory, movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture, philosophy … the range is free. We invite you to roam it.

Alongside single-author monographs, we are keen to encourage experiments in collective writing and new forms of co-composition. Co-composition is an intercession, not a mediation. Begin in the middle. Catch a thinking in the midst and compose with it. Curate thought in the thinking-doing. Reinvent the book.

For more about this new series, please visit:
http://openhumanitiespress.org/immediations.html

To contribute to the series, please contact Erin Manning or Brian Massumi

Managing Editors
    Ronald Rose-Antoinette
    Adam Szymanski

Advisory Board
    Pia Ednie-Brown (RMIT, Melbourne)
    Athina Karatzogiannion (University of Hull)
    Jondi Keane (Deakin University, Melbourne)
    Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster University)
    Erin Manning (Concordia University)
    Brian Massumi (Université de Montréal)
    Graham Meikle (University of Westminster)
    Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
    Timothy Murray (Cornell University)
    Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)
    Ned Rossiter (University of Western Sydney)
    John Scannell (Macquarie University, Sydney)
    Gregory Seigworth (Millersville University)
    Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (Aarhus University)

Zombie Materialism II: New Materialism

(The following is taken from a text called ‘What are the Digital Posthumanities?’. It forms the basis of a chapter of a book I am currently working on, the provisional title of which is Pirate Philosophy. Zombie Materialism I: Derrida vs Deleuze? is available here.)

To be fair, the kind of prejudice Braidotti displays in The Posthuman regarding theory has come to be accepted almost as a form of common sense in much of the humanities and social sciences. Thanks to a complacent adherence to this new orthodoxy, post-structuralism and deconstruction are regularly positioned by stands of critical thought associated with ‘new materialism’ as being precisely the kind of transcendent, language, writing and text-focused philosophies we need to move on from in order to concentrate on those aspects of material reality  our culture is increasingly regarded as being actually about (e.g. software, hardware, code, platforms, and of course their physical supports and material substrates: wires, chips, circuits, disks, drives, networks, airwaves, electrical charges, optical rays and so on).

Dennis Bruining relates such new materialist discourses to the way in which, in spite of both the poststructuralist critique of foundations, and their own awareness of the untenability of ideas of this kind (of biology-as-destiny, for example, in the case of theories of life, genetics and the body), ‘there still lingers the notion of, and a longing for, a present underlying foundation and/or truth in some political and theoretical movements and writings’. It is a longing for truth or foundation Bruining connects to the contemporary turn to science in the humanities. But as Clare Birchall and I demonstrated in our contribution to New Cultural Studies, attachments of this nature can also be linked to what Wendy Brown calls ‘anti-political moralism’. As we wrote there, this is a term Brown uses:

to refer to a certain ‘resistance’ to thinking through the conditions and assumptions of one’s own discipline; and, in particular, to the consequences for both leftists and liberals of not being able to give up their devotion to previously held notions of politics, progress, morality, sovereignty and so forth. Significantly, theory has been a regular target for moralists, Brown observes, frequently being chastised for its ‘failure’ to tell the left what to struggle for and how to act. Indeed, Brown asserts that 'moralism so loathes overt manifestations of power… that the moralist inevitably feels antipathy toward politics as a domain of open contestation for power and hegemony'; and that 'the identity of the moralist is', in fact, actually 'staked against intellectual questioning that might dismantle the foundations of its own premises; its survival is imperiled by the very practice of open-ended intellectual inquiry’.

Bruining likewise draws on Brown’s thinking on moralism (in his case under the influence of Joanna Zylinska’s chapter in New Cultural Studies on ethics). Bruining does so to show how, in the new materialist works he engages with (which include Susan Hekman's The Material of Knowledge, as well as the collections Material  Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, and New Materialisms edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost),  the emphasis on the concept of materiality, which in such discourses comes to represent ‘that universal and indisputable good that must be preserved’, and criticism of post-structuralism and those modes of thought associated with it for not theorizing the material, is actually a form of reactionary ‘material foundationalism’.

(Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard identify a similar afoundational-foundationalism with regard to the empirical-experimental biological evidence that is used to underpin the materialist approach to the theory of affect, such as when:

Teresa Brennan asserts that ‘experiments confirm that the maternal environment and olfactory factors... . shape human affect’, and Brian Massumi reassures us that ‘the time-loop of experience has been experimentally verified’. Even as affect theory shows how a biology of afoundational foundations can be imagined, the language through which the findings of neuroscience are invoked by cultural theorists  is, paradoxically, often the language of evidence and verification, a language offering legitimation through the experimental method. It is through the old foundational language, in other words, that the afoundational biology is appropriated.)

But just as interesting to my mind is the way such moralizing – also evident in the calls Braidotti associates with theory-fatigued neo-communist intellectuals such as Badiou and Zizek to ‘return to concrete political action, even violent antagonism if necessary, rather than indulge in more theoretical speculations’ - often takes the place of and in fact substitutes itself for genuine critical interrogation. In line with this, Brown argues that:

Despite its righteous insistence on knowing what is True, Valuable, or Important, moralism as a hegemonic form of political expression, a dominant political sensibility, actually marks both analytic impotence and political aimlessness - a misrecognition of the political logics now organizing the world, a concomitant failure to discern any direction for action, and the loss of a clear object of political desire. In particular, the moralizing injunction to act, the contemporary academic formulation of political action as an imperative, might be read as a symptom of political paralysis in the face of radical political disorientation and as a kind of hysterical mask for the despair that attends such paralysis…. Indeed, paralysis of this sort leads to far more than an experience of mere frustration: it paradoxically evinces precisely the nihilism, the antilife bearing, that it moralizes against in its nemisis – whether that nemesis is called conservatism, the forces of reaction, racism, postmodernism, or theory.

Along with the emphasis on creative affirmation rather than negative critique, the anti-intellectualism of such moralism goes a long way toward explaining why new materialists so often indulge in the unthinking repetition of reductive clichés about post-structuralist theory in general and deconstruction in particular:

a) without feeling the need to provide a careful, rigorous reading (let alone ‘(re)reading’ or  ‘“rewriting”’)  of specific thinkers and texts. As I say, Braidotti does not read Derrida’s works in any detail in The Posthuman: after all if you already know what they say, you don’t need to. Instead, the issue of what deconstruction is is both simultaneously decided in advance and excluded from the analysis;

b) when an actual rigorous and responsible engagement with his texts would reveal that writing, for Derrida, is nothing at all if it is not a material practice,  even in the most obvious, received sense of the term. This is because, for it to be capable of being understood, a written mark must have a sense of permanence. This in turns means it must be possible for it to be materially or empirically inscribed. In short, the condition of writing’s very possibility is the material. This explains why the transcendental is always impure, according to Derrida. Textuality and materiality, transcendence and immanence, even deconstruction and software code, as Federica Frabetti has shown in her work (see here and here), cannot be set up in a dualistic relation in this respect, as language and (theoretical) writing are already material.

We can thus see that deconstruction is much less a part of  any supposed ‘linguistic turn’, and much more concerned with the material, than it is portrayed as being in what might be called zombie theories of materialism.

Zombie materialism I: Derrida vs Deleuze?

(The following is taken from a text called ‘What are the Digital Posthumanities?’. It forms the basis of a chapter of a book I am currently working on, the provisional title of which is Pirate Philosophy. For reasons of time and word count, it was not possible to include this section on Zombie Materialism in the version of ‘What are the Digital Posthumanities?’ that was first given as a keynote lecture at the DigitalHumanities@Leuven conference, University of Leuven, September 18-20, 2013, and then published on Media Gifts (here). It is therefore being made available now in this supplementary form. In the longer book chapter version, Zombie Materialism appears immediately after the passage that discusses how, in her book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti pushes her work as close to the extremes of the humanities as she can without it actually becoming posthumanities; and how we therefore find ourselves once again being pulled back toward humanism.)

Significantly, Braidotti does not consider the contradiction between the humanities and the anti-humanism inherent to posthuman critical theory to be a fundamental problem in The Posthuman:

The best examples of the intrinsic contradictions generated by the anti-humanist stance is emancipation and progressive politics in general, which I consider to be one of the most valuable aspects of the humanistic tradition and its most enduring legacy. Across the political spectrum, Humanism has supported on the liberal side individualism, autonomy, responsibility and self-determination. On the more radical front, it has promoted solidarity, community-bonding, social justice and principles of equality... These principles are so deeply entrenched in our habits of thought that it is difficult to leave them behind altogether.
And why should we? Anti-humanism criticizes the implicit assumptions about the human subject that are upheld by the humanist image of Man, but this does not amount to a complete rejection.

In fact as far as Braidotti is concerned ‘one touches humanism at one’s own risk and peril’. Which is all very well, but it does rather beg the question:  how does this continued support for humanism and the values and practices of the (post-anthropocentric and posthuman) humanities relate to the importance she attaches to affirmative alternatives to dominant visions of the subject and self, to non-profit, collectivity, open source and so forth? If we accept that we live in posthuman times and do want to act according to the rules, guidelines and criteria she sets out for posthuman critical theory and posthuman ethics, does this not require us to ‘move beyond’ the ‘standard parameters and practices’ of the humanities, as Cary Wolfe’s Posthumanities’ suggests?

The very first reference Braidotti makes in The Posthuman is actually to this short (hard to find in its full version) text by Wolfe in which he argues that, instead of ‘reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge’, posthumanists need to ‘rethink what they do - theoretically, methodologically, and ethically’. Braidotti mentions it, however, not in relation to any discussion of the possibility of becoming posthumanities, but simply to draw on his description of what is meant by the human after the Enlightenment: ‘The Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings,” or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-holder, and so on’. Braidotti does not refer to Wolfe’s ‘Posthumanities’ again in her book. In fact, the only other time she mentions Wolfe (according to her index: actually, Wolfe is also cited on p.70) is in a discussion of the relation of the posthuman to the humanities that immediately follows the above passage about the intrinsic contradictions generated by the anti-humanist stance:

The difficulties inherent in trying to overcome Humanism as an intellectual tradition, a normative frame and institutionalized practice, lie at the core of the deconstructive approach to the posthuman. Derrida opened the discussion by pointing out the violence implicit in the assignation of meaning. His followers pressed the case further: ‘the assertion that Humanism can be decisively left behind ironically subscribes to a basic humanist assumption with regard to violition and agency, as if the ‘end’ of Humanism might be subjected to human control, as if we bear the capacity to erase the traces of Humanism from either the present or an imagined future’ (Peterson, 2011: 128). The emphasis falls therefore on the difficulty of erasing the trace of the epistemic violence by which a non-humanist position might be carved out of the institutions of Humanism. The acknowledgment of epistemic violence goes hand in hand with the recognition of the real-life violence which was and still is practised against non-human animals and the dehumanized social and political ‘others’ of the humanist norm. In this deconstructive tradition, Cary Wolfe (What is Posthumanism?) is especially interesting, as he attempts to strike a new position that combines sensitivity to epistemic and word-historical violence with a distinctly trans-humanist faith in the potential of the post-human condition as conducive to human enhancement.

Braidotti takes this as further support for her decision to argue for the development of a posthuman humanities studies, rather than a posthumanities, as a means of moving beyond the contradictions and tensions between humanism and anti-humanism.

It is interesting, then, that one place where the issue of the violence implicit in the assignation of meaning has been raised in relation to The Posthuman is precisely with regard to Braidotti’s reductionist and rather negative attitude toward philosophical theories associated with so-called ‘post-structuralism’ and deconstruction. (And this is in spite of what she says about wanting to avoid, indeed transcend, negativity, and support a ‘monistic philosophy which rejects dualism’ in order to ‘overcome dialectical oppositions’ and engender ‘non-dialectical understandings of materialism’.) Braidotti’s complaint about critical thought ‘after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s’, is that it was as if ‘we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition without difference'. Now I can understand why she might say this (although zombified does seem a rather a harsh word to use). Without doubt post-structuralism did in certain hands become yet another orthodoxy (the usual move is to castigate literature departments in the US as being the chief offenders). Still, if we are going to make statements about the zombified landscape of theory it’s probably best to try to avoid slipping into similar zombie repetitions ourselves as much as we can. Unfortunately, this is not something Braidotti manages to achieve, as her comments about the ‘limitations’ of deconstruction’s ‘linguistic frame of reference’ being the reason she prefers to take a more ‘materialist route’ when dealing with the posthuman bear witness.

Oversimplified position statements of this nature are not confined to Braidotti’s book of course. In fact, if there isn’t one already, someone should set up a blog to record them all. They could do worse than begin with examples of the repetitive rhetoric that is often used to divide the history of critical theory into movements, moments, trends or turns (the cultural turn, linguistic turn, affective turn, visual turn, computational turn, materialist turn and so on). And from there the associated attempts to replace one mode, orientation or attitude of thought with another (e.g. textualism with realism and materialism, negative critique with constructive and creative affirmation, representational with non-representational theory, and the emphasis on lack of post-structuralist psychoanalysis with the ‘desiring theory’ of much ‘Deleuzianism’), by declaring that we ‘no longer’ live in one era and  now belong to another (be it that represented by the shift from hegemony to post-hegemony, social constructivism to monism, or indeed the ‘speculative turn’ away from the previous ‘deconstructionist era’ and the subsequent ‘period dominated by Deleuze’).  

Another reason I am interested in Braidotti’s book in addition to those I have already provided, however, is because I can’t help wondering if her uncritical repetition of certain reductive refrains regarding critical theory – despite the respect she professes to have for it and for her post-1968 teachers, who included not only Deleuze but Foucault and Irigaray too - is connected to the (non-)decisions she makes over non-profit, open source, and collective ways of acting, working and thinking as a philosopher and theorist, and about not pushing further toward becoming posthumanities. Take Braidotti’s claim that:

The posthuman subject is not… poststructuralist, because it does not function within the linguistic turn or other forms of deconstruction. Not being framed by the ineluctable powers of signification, it is consequently not condemned to seek adequate representation of its existence within a system that is constitutionally incapable of granting due recognition….
The posthuman nomadic subject is materialist and vitalist.

What is being given yet another outing here, as Stefan Herbrechter points out, is the by now all too familiar antagonism over ‘affirmation and negativity, action and decision’, the material and language, between those approaches inspired by Gilles Deleuze and those more influenced by Jacques Derrida. Given the emphasis placed in The Posthuman on being both critical and creative, the issue here is ‘where and at what level the “critical” would “bite”’, or 'cut' as Karen Barad would have it. For those steeped in a rigorous engagement with the philosophy of Derrida - with whose name deconstruction is most closely associated, but with whose texts Braidotti does not engage in any detail in The Posthuman, often relying on commentaries instead - ‘this would at least also have to occur at the level of language (or discourse)’, as Herbrechter rightly emphasizes.  This would in turn render problematic Braidotti’s attempt to distance her theory of the posthuman subject from modes of critical thought concerned with representation, signification and the linguistic:

Not only does Braidotti here somewhat betray her own intellectual ‘cartography’ but she is also arguably ridding the future humanities of their most important methodology on which, precisely, the critical potential of posthumanism will depend: namely making sure everyone remembers that the argument about the posthuman is fought precisely at the level of representation, symbolic meaning and thus (amongst other ‘media’) in language.

Essays on Extinction: Vol.1, Death of the PostHuman, and Vol.2, Sex After Life

OHP announces the publication of two more  open access books: a double volume set, Essays on Extinction by Claire Colebrook: Vol 1, Death of the PostHuman, and Vol. 2, Sex After Life.

Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human - despite its normative intensity - can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.

Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of survival.

Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy

OHP is delighted to announce a new open access book in OHP's Critical Climate Change series: Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, edited by Etienne Turpin.

Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy brings together a provocative series of essays, conversations, and design proposals that attempt to intensify the potential of the multidisciplinary discourse developing in response to the Anthropocene thesis for contemporary architecture scholarship and practice. Contributors include Nabil Ahmed, Meghan Archer, Adam Bobbette, Emily Cheng, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Seth Denizen, Mark Dorrian, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Hirmer, Jane Hutton, Eleanor Kaufman, Amy Catania Kulper, Clinton Langevin, Michael C.C. Lin, Amy Norris, John Palmesino, Chester Rennie, François Roche, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Isabelle Stengers, Paulo Tavares, Etienne Turpin, Eyal Weizman, Jane Wolff, Guy Zimmerman.

Downloadable PDF and paperbacks available now from http://openhumanitiespress.org/architecture-in-the-anthropocene.html
Browsable HTML version to follow in the following weeks.

Book launch:

14:00—17:00, Friday 6 December 2013
Centre for Research Architecture
Room 312RHB
Goldsmiths University of London

More details: http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1575