Month: December 2019

Gregory Marks

Original posted on December 14, 2019 by thewastedworld

Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time. Changes to this economic organisation are therefore felt not only in the transformations they effect materially, but also in the order of temporality and the rhythms of life possible under a particular economic system. This fact that the passage of time, which is so often taken for a given, is in actuality conditioned by the material and economic conditions in which we live is nowhere more apparent than in our present moment of climate change and ecological catastrophe.

Two long centuries of industrial capitalism have left us with a perception of time which is no longer adequate to the material conditions now reshaping our lives. The ecological historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz typify this old order of time by its dependence on the extraction of fossil fuels: “The continuous time of industrial capitalism,” they write, was “projected onto cultural representations of the future, conceived as a continuous progress unfurling to the rhythm of productivity gains” (2016, 203). The shock of our present moment is that this steady and linear increase in productivity, conceptualised as the natural progress toward a tomorrow greater than today, was only ever the product of a temporary influx of energy from a diminishing resource. As Rob Nixon writes, “in this interregnum between energy regimes, we are living on borrowed time—borrowed from the past and from the future,” with the continuation of the status quo only accelerating us “toward an abbreviated collective future as fossils in the making” (2011, 69).

In the twilight years of fossil capitalism we see the emergence of a new organisation of time in which the present is no longer able to fuel itself at the expense of the future, and the accumulated destruction of the past returns at a planetary level. To address this disjunction between the time of capital and the temporalities of nature upon which it feeds, I will offer an account of the metabolic rift theory of contemporary ecosocialists and attempt to expand this metabolic account into more monstrous territory by way of Marx’s own characterisation of capital’s vampiric thirst. Consequently, I wish to suggest Walter Benjamin’s approach to history, nature, and capital as a potential bridge between the metabolic account of capital’s planetary depredation and the project of ideological critique required to lift the haze of our temporal stasis and dispel the vampire’s curse for good.

I: THIRST FOR ACCUMULATION

In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes that “labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. […] Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (1976, 283). Not merely an action taken upon nature, labour is the act of controlling the exchange between humanity and nature and the mutual transformation that result from that exchange. As has been remarked upon by the ecosocialists John Bellamy Foster (2000), Paul Burkett (2014), and Kohei Saito (2018), Marx’s conception of labour and the relation it establishes between humanity and nature hinges upon the concept of metabolism. Borrowed from the agronomist Justus von Liebig, Marx’s conception of metabolic exchange draws from its origins in chemistry, as “an incessant process of organic exchange of old and new compounds through combinations, assimilations, and excretions so that every organic action can continue,” and is applied “not just to organic bodies but also to various interactions in one or multiple ecosystems, even on a global scale, whether ‘industrial metabolism’ or ‘social metabolism’” (Saito 2018, 69-70).

In any material system, whether it involves bodies or machines, or if it occurs at the scale of an individual or a society, necessarily involves a metabolic exchange of chemicals and energy to keep that system in motion. Like the economy at large, metabolism is here characterised as a temporal relation, describing the rates of exchange between a given system and its natural foundations. What has emerged under capitalism, however, is a particular disjunction between natural and economic temporalities, tearing an ever widening metabolic rift between them. We now face a “contradiction of nature’s time versus capital’s”—as Paul Burkett writes:

“Capitalism’s accelerated throughput involves a conflict between the time nature requires to produce and absorb materials and energy versus the competitively enforced dynamic of maximum monetary accumulation in any given time period by all available material means” (2014, 112).

Under capitalism the metabolism between humanity and nature is pushed out of joint, not simply in a Malthusian trap of consumption outstripping production, but through the complex web of exchanges and processes by which capital trades short-term gains in profit for a long future of pernicious outcomes. McKenzie Wark remarks:

“Marx’s example of metabolic rift was the way nineteenth-century English farming extracted nutrients such as nitrates from the soil, which growing plants absorbed, which farmers harvested as crops, which workers in the cities ate to fuel their industrious labors, and who would then shit and piss the waste products out of their private metabolisms. Those waste products, including the nitrates, flow through run-off and sewers and pour out to sea. Whole industries for making artificial fertilizer would arise to address this rift—in turn causing further metabolic rifts elsewhere” (2015, xiv).

Whereas previous societies met natural limits at local levels, in the forms of soil exhaustion and resource depletion, capitalism constantly moves further and further afield to expand the scope of its markets, seize resources from abroad, and dispossess its periphery of labour and lands. Each limit which manifests on a local level is transcended and passed over to seek new sources of accumulation. Yet, as Marx makes clear, “from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it” (1973, 410).

Although able to escape or even feed upon the market fluctuations of natural crises by exploiting the elasticity of material limits, capital cannot overcome these limits entirely, and instead searches widely for means of delaying the inevitable. In Kohei Saito’s words: “Capital always tries to overcome its limitations through the development of productive forces, new technologies, and international commerce, but, precisely as a result of such continuous attempts to expand its scale, it reinforces its tendency to exploit natural forces (including human labor power) in search of cheaper raw and auxiliary materials, foods, and energies on a global scale” (2018, 96). Each temporary crisis overcome only offsets systemic collapse in the present by increasing the scope of the next crisis, so that eventually the entire earth is caught in the metabolic rift and a real global limit is reached.

II: UNDER THE VAMPIRE’S SPELL

With “its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour,” coupled with its relentless feeding upon both present and future life, it is no wonder that Marx gestures toward the vampire to characterise capital (1976, 375). In a now famous passage from Capital’s first volume, Marx describes capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” and elsewhere as driven by a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour”  (1976, 342; 367). The vampire emerges here not only as a figure out of time, the dead which will not die, but as a conspicuously metabolic monster, which is driven not by malice or moral failure, but by a primal drive to sustain itself on the vital processes of the living. The vampire as metabolic monstrosity is not original to Marx, and may be found in Liebig’s own writings on agronomy, in which he remarks—on the topic of the imperial seizure of guano and other fertilisers from around the world—that “Great Britain seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility… Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say of the whole world, sucking its best blood” (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, 186-7).

Beyond its polemical flourish, the evocation of the vampire plays the fundamental role of revealing in a single image the hidden mechanisms of capital’s bloodied feast. As Foster and Burkett remark: “Marx’s use of metabolism was not ‘analogical’, but was meant to promote the basis for a materialist and dialectical understanding of the human productive relation to nature” (2016 35-6). Similarly, I wish to argue that capital is not merely like a vampire, but literally exercises a vampiric relation with the living both in its parasitic thirst for accumulation and in the psychic bondage it exercises over its victims. In addition to characterising capital as predominated by metabolic processes, the vampiric metaphor brings with it the connotations of bewitchment, invisibility, and the thraldom of the victim to the vampire. In effect, the conjunction of vampire-capital merges the logic of metabolism with the ideological apparatus that conceals it. As David McNally writes in Monsters of the Market:

“Capital’s great powers of illusion lie in the way it invisibilises its own monstrous formation. In endeavouring to pull off the magic-cap of modernity, Marx sought a confrontation with monstrosity. He set out to reveal the legions of vampires and werewolves that inhere in capital so that they might be banished” (2011, 114).

Just as the time of capitalist production instils in those caught within it the rhythms of industry and the progressive increase of productive forces, the occlusion of its metabolic imbalance exercises its own temporal logic. Capital doesn’t only drain the living of their lifeblood, but does so at times and intervals which, at least for the time being, evade direct perception. Counter to the theories of Max Weber, for whom modernity was the triumph of reason over myth, we may refer Walter Benjamin’s proposition that: “Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces” (1999, K1a,8). The identification of capital’s metabolic relation to humanity and nature as vampiric goes some way in piercing through the new myths of capitalism’s dream-filled sleep. Firstly, it dispels the ideological haze that disguises the slow desiccation of labour and nature under capitalism as just or necessary. As McNally remarks:

“If there is a Marxist Gothic, then, it is one that insists, amongst other things, on journeying through the night spaces of the capitalist underworld, on visiting the secret dungeons that harbour labouring bodies in pain” (2011, 138).

Secondly, it reveals that the cyclical crises and disasters of capitalism are not abnormalities or irregularities in the upward arch of progress, but are rather the throes of pain of myriad metabolisms caught between the vampire’s fangs. As Benjamin writes:

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. […] Hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now” (1999, N9a,1).

III: WAKE IN FRIGHT

Benjamin’s project of uncovering the dark, magical underbelly of capitalist modernity—what Margaret Cohen (1993) has called a form of “Gothic Marxism”—puts him in welcome company among the vampires and werewolves of Marx’s imaginary. But for all Benjamin’s success as a critic of culture, ideology, and history, his relevance to an ecologically-conscious Marxism is less clear. Writing in Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster sets himself apart from the Western Marxists for their failure to take the materialist account of nature seriously. “The Frankfurt School,” Foster writes, “developed an ‘ecological’ critique which was almost entirely culturalist in form, lacking any […] analysis of the real, material alienation of nature, for example, Marx’s theory of metabolic rift” (2000, 245).

By way of a conclusion, I’d like to put this claim under pressure on two fronts: Firstly, with the claim that in Benjamin—if not in other Frankfurt thinkers—we do in fact find a thoroughly materialist account of nature, which both refuses any account of history separate from its natural conditions and any theorisation of nature impervious to historical alteration. Secondly, I wish to argue that within Benjamin’s philosophy of nature we also discover hints of a metabolic relation between humanity and nature which will allow us to bridge the gap between a Gothic Marxist critique of ideology and the ecological thought necessary for a twenty-first century Marxism.

From his early works through to his last, Benjamin’s thought returned not only to the question of nature and its place within the course of history, but also the moment when the “antithesis of history and nature” is undone, and “history passes into the setting” as another component of a purely material world (2019, 81). This entry of history into nature—and nature into history—preoccupies Benjamin’s thought in his final unfinished work, The Arcades Project, in which the history of the nineteenth century is conceived in naturalistic terms as composed of fossils from a vanished age. From out of the rubble of this earlier stage of capitalism, Benjamin pieces together a genealogy of late capitalism to reveal the ideological effects that emerge when history and nature are conceptually divorced. As Susan Buck-Morss writes:

“Whenever theory posited ‘nature’ or ‘history’ as an ontological first principle, this double character of the concepts was lost, and with it the potential for critical negativity: either social conditions were affirmed as ‘natural’ without regard for their historical becoming, or the actual historical process was affirmed as essential” (1977, 54).

In Benjamin’s own terms, so long as the modern environments of “architecture, fashion,” and “even the weather” are left unconsidered as products of human intention, “they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like. They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges” (1999, K1,5). What we take to be merely “natural,” whether it is the drive for profit or a change in the weather, exists for us only unconsciously until we recognise the mutually constitutive relationship between these seemingly natural facts and the history which we collectively create. Without this moment of awakening to our own natural history, the course of historical events seem inevitable and beyond our grasp. “To the dreaming collective,” writes Benjamin, “the decline of an economic era seems like the end of the world itself” (1999, R2,3). In our own era of apocalyptic foreboding we are in dire need of a politics able to pierce through this myth of inevitable catastrophe to confront the ecological and economic disjunction at its heart.

Despite its seeming inevitability as a fact of nature, the “ecological rift is, at bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being” (Foster et al. 2010, 47). “Accordingly,” writes Kohei Saito, “Marx’s socialist project demands the rehabilitation of the humans-nature relationship through the restriction and finally the transcendence of the alien force of reification (2018, 133). Or, as Benjamin put it many years prior, the vital task of our technical knowledge “is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man” (1979, 104). Here we see clearest the metabolic potential of Benjamin’s natural philosophy: To master not nature itself but the relation between humanity and nature is to understand the metabolic exchanges which conjoin earthly processes and human affairs. But what Benjamin’s writing also makes clear is that an understanding of our metabolic relation to the earth is not sufficient in itself. To be politically effective an ecologically-conscious Marxism must be coupled with an insight into the ideological structures that obscure our metabolic relations and instil in us a faith in temporalities of infinite progress or inevitable disaster. The vampiric grip of capital, which obscures the means of its mastery even as it deploys them upon humanity and nature alike, can only be cast off by a conscious and collective mastery of our relations to nature and the initiation a new metabolism with the earth.

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Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1979.

——. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999.

——. The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso, 2016.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origins of Negative Dialectics. New York: The Free Press, 1977.

Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014.

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Foster, John Bellamy, and Paul Burkett. Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books, 1973.

——. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976.

McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Saito, Kohei. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New Delhi: Dev Publishers, 2018.

Tombazos, Stavros. Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital. Translated by Christakis Georgiou. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014.

Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015.

DAVID LEVENTE PALATINUS

In Television of the Anthropocene Part I (that I wrote exactly a year ago), I introduced the idea of the Television of the Anthropocene, and I suggested that ‘the re-emergence of sci-fi, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic genres and generic hybrids on television that address questions about human and non-human futures was unsurprising and was in line with the social and cultural status of the television as the dominant medium of storytelling’ (Palatinus 2017). I suggested thinking about television through the ‘AnthropoScreen’, denoting both a temporal/epochal positioning of the medium as well as a political ecology of the screen where we’re dealing with a ‘plethora of images’ relegated to the Anthropocene – narratives, figurations, cultural ideas produced and disseminated via the converging media of literary fiction and television, that engage with the beginning and the end of human future as we know it’ in programmes like The 100 (CW, 2014-), Incorporated (Syfy, 2016), Into the Badlands (AMC, 2015-), The Expanse (Syfy, 2015-), Zoo (CBS, 2015-), Helix (Syfy, 2014-2015), Extant (CBS, 2014-2015) and of course The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-).

In that text, my focus was primarily on post-apocalyptic scenarios because of their figurations of catastrophe through climate change, nuclear endgames or pandemic outbreaks, resulting in an ecosystem where human existence is relativised to an extreme and where humans learn to adapt to a radically changed environment. To negotiate the nexus between the epochal and conceptual implications of the AnthropoScreen, it will be essential at one point that we rethink the role of ‘television-as-medium’, and consequently, the role of media, similarly to that of humans, in a changed ecosystem, with special attention to the ways media themselves have become an ecological factor and a framework through which we negotiate post-Anthropocene existence (Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Parikka, 2015). Still, I would like to continue now with considerations of television’s role in the circulation of posthuman sensibilities and of cultural imaginaries of a post-singularity world.

Over the past years, there’s been an emergence of film and television texts (Ex Machina Garland, 2014), Automata (Ibanez, 2014), Lucy (Besson, 2014), Transcendence (Pfister, 2014), Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) or on TV Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016), Humans (Channel4/AMC, 2015-, based on the Swedish original Real Humans, SVT, 2012-2014), Extant (CBS, 2014-2015), Almost Human (Fox, 2013-2014), Westworld (HBO, 2016-), etc.) revolving around the advent of intelligent machines and humanoid robots that not only interact with humans and facilitate their everyday living by becoming their prosthetic supplements, but also gain consciousness and sentience, and are able to emulate human behavior to such an extent that the thin line between human and machine becomes penetrable. Such non-organic organisms are then frequently depicted not only as humans’ Other, as projections of our fears and anxieties about our own improved (cognitively and physiologically enhanced) selves predicated purely on objective-driven logic, efficiency and objective-focused operations, but, on the other hand, also as those that indirectly highlight the ineffable, unnamable qualities (or at least the challenges the explication of these qualities entail) that make us ‘human’.

These narratives habitually mobilise post-Anthropocene scenarios that entail the repositioning of the human in a changed ecosystem. As it was argued before, the Anthropocene denotes an epoch characterized by the ‘human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth’ (Crutzen and Schwagerl, 2011). If the Anthropocene implies human becoming a force shaping both organic and inorganic matter, post-Anthropocene would refer to a subsequent near-future time when the existing societal hierarchies come under question through narratives that repurpose the ‘classic tropes of technophobia, post-colonial and post-capitalist discourses, social polarisation and totalitarianism, bio-power, genetic engineering and environmentalism, in the context of perpetual war and a culture of paranoia’ (Palatinus 2017).

AI and humanoid machines have been populating science-fiction both on paper and on the screen for a long time. While acknowledging the historical legacies of classical narratives that have by now attained a cult status (from 2001 A Space Odyssey (Kubrik, 1968) to the Star Trek franchise (NBC, 1966-), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), the Terminator franchise and Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009, Sci-Fi Channel), films and television from the past decade are also set apart from that legacy: Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049, Westworld, Almost Human, Extant and Humans not only negotiate ways for the coexistence of human and nonhuman species in a post-singularity ecosystem, they call attention to the a peculiar from of ‘extimity’ (cf. Miller, 2008) – the displacement and de-humanisation of human otherness via machine. Extimity in this regard would refer to a constant bouncing between the assertion and disavowal/revocation of human(like) intimacy between humans and the ‘things’. Given the versatility of both the symbolisations and conceptualisations of AI, these programme texts also ask – what exactly do we mean by it? And aren’t we expanding its notion a bit too broad to include just about everything, from androids to machine learning to the very set of algorithms that make the positing of AI possible in the first place? And what is the correlation between ‘AI a la fiction’, and real-life applications?

Fig. 1: Humans (Channel4/AMC, 2015-, based on the Swedish original Real Humans, SVT, 2012-2014)

The past decade has seen a proliferation of cultural ideas depicting intersections between human and non-human (machine and / or animal) species. Among these, accounts of the accelerating capabilities of intelligent machines (and of machine-intelligence), their purpose, the range of their possible applications, and opinions about the ways these imminent changes will have impacted human life in the near-future have been rather divisive. On television, Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016), Extant, Humans and Westworld exemplify stipulations of the changes technological acceleration and the arrival of machines with human-like intelligence will have brought about. These ideas tap into current discourses on post- and trans-human futures as well as into the cultural legacies that representations of the future draw on (Jameson, 2005, Roden 2014). Ray Kurzweil offers a celebratory approach to the techno-utopian and techno-deterministic transformation of humans into ‘spiritual machines’ (Kurzweil, 1999), and anticipates that technological singularity, the merger of human technology with human intelligence, will eventually result in our ability to transcend the limitations of our biology and our physical bodies. The synths of humans offer a vision of just that, especially through the lead character of Leo Elster (Colin Morgan), a part synth (and the son of David Elster, the creator of conscious synths) who features significant prosthetic supplementation to his brain, which he needed after an accident.

Glen Mazis suggests we think of the human and the nonhuman in terms of a ‘relation-ship’ (2008), acknowledging, however, that recognising machines as ‘having a personhood’ would mean calling into question ‘another absolute divide to which we cling – the absolute difference between the animate and inanimate’ (242). This becomes a recurring trope on TV, with the anthropomorphic characters of the Machine in Person of Interest, and in Almost Human through John Kennex’s (Karl Urban) initial reluctance to accept his own prosthetic limb, and to trust and bond with Dorian, a synthetic police robot assigned to him as a partner.

Rosi Braidotti contemplates the possibility of that when she calls for the repositioning of the foundation of critical posthumanism (2013) and assumes ‘the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter (2018). Her agenda here is less about a radical suspension of obvious binaries (body-mind, organic-inorganic, embodiment-embrainment, nature-culture), but rather an attempt to highlight their continuity. She explains that the posthuman ‘is normatively neutral and it does not automatically point to the end of the species’, but rather, as a figuration, it is ‘both situated and partial – it does not define the new human condition, but offers a spectrum through which we can capture the complexity of ongoing processes of subject-formation’ (2018).

While Nick Bostrom’s techno-skeptical embrace of humanity through transhumanism reinscribes human(istic) hierarchies via maintaining belief in the perfectability of human through technological enhancement (2014),[1] Katherine Hayles’ reminds us that the cultural imaginaries of nonhuman otherness also constitute a political agenda that moves beyond binary oppositions (1999). Opening up further dimensions and configurations of animate and inanimate materialities in contemporary art, Barbara Stafford explores of the move from communicable matter to the (re-)emergence of ‘ineffable’ entities encompassing ‘living technology’, ‘technologies of the extended mind’, ‘bio-fictions’ and ‘multispecies intra-actions’ (2016). This ineffability is what underlies the question of sentience, suffering and the ability to create memories and snap in and out of ‘being awake’ or ‘being in a dream’ in the case of the hosts of Westworld, and we see the same ineffability being played out (and its significance being played down) in the scene where Niska (Emily Berrington) in Humans appears before a tribunal to determine whether she’s conscious, and whether as a conscious being (not a thing!) she (notice the female pronoun used interchangeably with the neuter pronoun throughout the series) is entitled to a human trial for a murder she committed in self-defense.

Niska’s outburst (that results in her killing a human) is triggered by her being ‘forced’ to work as a sexbot and literally experiencing those encounters as rape. The accumulated pain and repressed memories of humiliation and direct objectification in the hands of (male) humans – who in fact think of Niska as an object, a sex toy that ‘functions’ and ‘performs’ algorithmically, according to scripted response loops, without having the ability to know and do anything else (that is, to have an awareness and comprehension of alternatives outside of the perceived reality of her programming). She is denied the ability to ‘feel’, and as a consequence to experience real pain and suffering. Her exclusive place is that of submission, without the possibility of even having the concept of preference for what registers as pleasurable, arousing or tender, and consequently without the ability to take initiative. For the visitors of the brothel, Niska is an ‘it’ rather than a ‘she’.  Abuse, for Niska, therefore does not simply amount to the physical and psychological trauma of the forced intercourse. But rather, by being reduced to mere instrumentality, the abuse is the refusal to acknowledge her as a life-form. from her reduction to mere instrumentality, the refusal to acknowledge her as a life-form. Laura (Kathrine Parkinson) and her family are some of the few humans who advocate the acknowledgement of synth sentience and try to emancipate them via forms of familial intimacy (their house synth Mia/Anita (Gemma Chan) becoming more like a family member). But even within this context, the initial intimacy is turned extimate, when we witness a bracketing-out of the human-like qualities of the synths when Laura’s husband has sex with Anita and then orders her to delete all memories of the intercourse.

We see similar displays of abuse in Westworld: the bracketing-out of agency on the part of the hosts, and the suspension of responsibility on the part of the guests is one of the principles on which the theme park operates, a feature that also becomes its key selling point. The memories of the hosts are deleted every time they reach the end of their scripted narratives so they can go back and relive the same experiences without having memories of them. As one of the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the hosts remarks, “Can you imagine what would happen if the hosts remembered what the guests do to them? (…) We give them the concept of a dream, mostly nightmares.”

Fig. 2: Westworld (HBO, 2016-)

As we have seen, television’s concern is not so much (or no longer) the mechanisation – more particularly the ‘machinisation’ of the human, but quite the contrary, the ‘humanisation’ of machinic entities. This, of course, also necessitates the recognition of the fact that such forms of humanisation or ‘anthropomorphisation’ are as old as any form of symbolisation, and clearly have to do with psychological imperatives that lie at the core of (human) subjectivity, and the affective dimension which television has always been prone to enhance. But what happens if we? suggest that what ‘articulations of the human via machines’ really entails is not so much, or not only, a merger of machine and human in a continuity that dismantles demarcations via disembodied and re-embodied forms of subjectivity, but rather an abstraction and algorithmisation of the human, and its replication and emulation via machine?

This of course is just one avenue of the many: humanoid machines have been around on television for a very long time. What’s more interesting, and more pressing today, is the postulation of intelligent / sentient machines that don’t simply emulate human qualities but take on a consciousness, intelligence, cognitive and perhaps even emotional traits akin to subjectivity and, consequently, agency that is comparable to those of humans. These programme texts ask: what if the ‘post’ in post-human refers not only to an irreversible temporality (what comes after humans, as a further evolutionary step, as the marker of end of human history as Kurzweil defines singularity)? What if the post in post-human refers to a ‘beyond’ – to an ontological form that human reason cannot yet fathom or stipulate? What if the post-human, the non-human, the machinic has always figured as the articulation par excellence of the human – by way of a negative dialectic? A true (re-)embodiment of that which the human is not (but hopes to be)? A sense of becoming – always-already en-route to its own transcendence? There seems to be a disconnect between the techno-scientific optimism of transhumanist philosophies (and the transhuman ethos in general), and popular renditions and projections of the same perceived futures in various forms of media. From dystopian novels to film and television to video games – and even to social media, there’s multiple visual renditions circulating (both generating and challenging ideologies) about post-human and/or transhuman ecologies. They call attention to the demise of our natural environment and depict said demise as being a necessary and inevitable result (by way of both environmental exploitation as well as the enhancing and broadening of social polarisation via exploitative labour and the increasing corporatisation of structures like healthcare, agriculture, communications technologies, education, etc.) of the very technological acceleration that (is supposed to) make a transhuman future possible.

In actuality the prominence of accelerationism (the ideology-turned-myth of steady and sustainable progress towards a self-perfecting network of systems that gradually suspend the necessity of human intervention, thus eventually disengaging /disabling human agency in the management of interconnected ecosystems) appears to be the drive dictating the tempo of research and development, using various types of media to promote their agenda and to bring the public to their sides, with soaring funding opportunities embedded in the self-serving mechanisms of the system. Film, television and video games offer a significantly different take on the question of accelerationism: the scenarios about the ways our techno-deterministic futures might play out vary, of course, but the one sentiment most of these cultural narratives have in common is the underlying skepticism, or even downright apocalypticism, about the advent of singularity.

As a consequence, the above examples inscribe themselves into a history of similarly-themed sci-fi narratives, but are set apart from them in peculiar ways: on the one hand, just like their intertextual predecessors, these narratives mobilise the old trope of technology as a threat to human life, they subvert utopistic techno-positivism and the absolutisation of big data that have become trend-setting after the algorithmic turn (Uricchio, 2011). On the other hand, they highlight a number of urgencies that have become paramount in critical discourses on technology, AI, disembodied and re-embodied intelligence, the technological mediation of cognitive processes and data. Are we to subscribe to post-apocalyptic warnings about sentient machines wiping humanity out, or are we to embrace a (Kurzweilian) utopia where humans morph into machine-enhanced cyborgic posthumans that live forever? What we witness, rather, is television’s commentary on the gradual move through the reification of Darwinian evolutionary logic, from par excellence manifestations of the Deleuzean bodies without organs, of disembodied consciousness, to the inexplicable evolution of self-replicating, self-organizing humanoid machines.

An earlier version of this blog first appeared in CSTonline on 23 November 2018

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David Levente Palatinus is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies and founder of the Anthropocene Media Lab at the University of Ruzomberok. His research moves between and across visual studies, digital media, and cultural theory. He has worked and written on violence in serial culture, medicine and autopsy, autoimmunity and war, and digital subjectivity in the Anthropocene. He is co-editor of the ECREA section of Critical Studies in Television Online, and sits on the editorial board of Americana – E-Journal of American Studies (Hungary) and Rewind: British and American Studies Series of Aras Edizioni (Fano, Italy). He is co-editor of the volume Crime and Detection in the Age of Electronic Reproduction (forthcoming, Americana Ebooks). His book Spectres of Medicine: The Ethos of Contemporary Medical Dramas will be published next year by Aras Edizioni (Italy).

WORKS CITED:

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014.

Braidotti, Rosi: The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture & Society, May 2018, doi:10.1177/0263276418771486.

Crutzen, Paul and Christian Schwagerl. ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos.’ Yale Environment 360, 2011.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jameson, Fredric: Archeologies of the Future. Verso, 2005.

Kurzweil, Ray: The Age of Spiritual Machines. Viking Press, 1999.

Maxwell, R. and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Mazis, Glen A. Humans, Animals Machines. Bluring Boundaries. State University of New York Press, 2008.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Palatinus, L.D. Television of the Anthropocene Part I. https://cstonline.net/television-of-the-anthropocene-part-i-by-david-levente-palatinus/.

Roden, David. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, London: Routledge, 2014.

Stafford, Barbara. “From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable ‘Stuff’: Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability,” in Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, ed. By Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson [Springer International Publishing AG, Cham, 2016]. PP

Uricchio, William. “The Algorithmic Turn. Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image.” Visual Studies, Vol 26, No.1, March 2011, 25-35.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014.

• BY JOHN S. DRYZEK AND JONATHAN PICKERING
• A version of this article was originally published on the OUPblog

Young people have become increasingly vocal in castigating older generations for their failure to act on climate change. University students are at the forefront of campaigns to divest from fossil fuels. A group of 21 young Americans launched a high-profile court case against the US government to pursue a legal right to a stable climate. And the School Strike for Climate initiative launched by fifteen-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg has attracted worldwide attention.

At the UN climate change conference in December 2018, Thunberg delivered a scathing message: “we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.”

What has got the world into this predicament, what kind of change is needed, and how can it be achieved?

Humanity now exerts such a pervasive influence over the Earth’s life-support systems that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. A Great Acceleration in global production and consumption since the mid-20th century has brought human-induced climate change, large-scale deforestation and plummeting biodiversity.

The Anthropocene brings renewed instability to the Earth system—in contrast to the unusually stable Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years. Without radical changes to the ways in which we produce energy, feed ourselves, and meet other basic needs, the Earth could reach dangerous tipping points including multi-metre sea-level rise and the collapse of globally significant ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest.

The scale of the change required to reduce these risks poses unprecedented political challenges. Many of our core institutions—from nation-states to capitalist markets—emerged years ago, enabling them to ignore the ecological degradation they were causing.

Some of these institutions have helped to achieve remarkable progress. Nevertheless, these institutions—from markets that ignore environmental impacts to governments that rely on unsustainable economic activity to maintain their authority—remain stuck in what we call “pathological path dependencies.” These path dependencies decouple human institutions from the Earth system by systematically repressing information about ecological conditions and prioritizing narrow economic concerns.

How can pathological path dependencies be broken? Institutions must develop ecological reflexivity: a capacity to question their own core commitments, and if necessary change themselves, while listening and responding effectively to signals from the Earth system.

To cultivate ecological reflexivity we must confront a core paradox for institutional design in an ever-changing Earth system, no fixed model of governance is appropriate for all time. Institutions must be flexible enough to respond to changing environmental and social conditions, while stable enough to provide a framework for long-term protection of shared interests.

We call this kind of institution a “living framework.” The term calls to mind the idea of a living document that is updated over time. It also suggests the idea of a framework for living, that is, for flourishing under unstable conditions.

Achieving the reflexivity that is necessary also requires dismantling barriers to reflexive governance, including government subsidies for unsustainable practices and the ability of vested interests to undermine progressive reform. And it requires empowering agents to rethink what core societal values—such as justice, democracy, and sustainability—should mean under Anthropocene conditions.

Given that dominant agents such as states, international organizations, and corporations are often stuck in pathological path dependencies, more promising agents might include cities and sub-national governments, scientists and other experts, and those most vulnerable to a damaged Earth system.

Each of these agents has an important role to play, whether shifting dominant discourses in a more ecological direction or cultivating local experiments in sustainable living. But each kind of agent also has important limitations when working in isolation.

To overcome these limitations, societies need to cultivate interactions among agents. The best way of doing so is through democratic practices. Democracy opens up essential spaces for those most affected by environmental change—whether peasants’ movements for climate justice, citizens of small island states, or youth advocates on biodiversity or climate change—to hold decision-makers accountable.

Overcoming the pathological path dependencies that drive ecological degradation will not be easy. But, given that we cannot turn the clock back on the advent of the Anthropocene but must learn how to live with it, finding an antidote to those path dependencies is essential. The antidote, we believe, can be found in cultivating an ecologically reflexive democratic politics.

Feature image credit: “Cave, rock, water and cavern” by Ademir Alves. Public domain via Unsplash.

John S. Dryzek is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Centenary Professor in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra.

Jonathan Pickering is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra.