You
and Carol drove to Kenwood Centre where Carol spent about an hour in Macy's as
there was a sale. You read email and Quora. You had lunch at Cracker Barrel
because you wanted chicken pot pie, at Wednesday lunch special. Once home you
read the article below and have a symbiotic relationship with the concepts that
you would like to include in the Marsupials' home 'communal-like' systems.
1520 hours. I edited the article with bolds
and added paragraphs - the original paragraphs are too long for my mind to
better pick up specifics, i.e. this article is primarily useful for thinking on
how to show a better more natural less aggressive state of living. I like this
woman's thinking in a fiction. Perhaps if we survive another twenty-thousand
yearwe'll come up with something but our present basic nature is too ruthless
and untruthful. Many people don't give a damn if the truth is told or not or so
it seems to me.- rho
**
**
EDGE
A Common Sense
A Conversation With Caroline A. Jones [3.15.18]
We need to acknowledge our profound
ignorance and begin to craft a culture that will be based on some notion of
communalism and interspecies symbiosis rather than survival of the fittest. These
concepts are available and fully elaborated by, say, a biologist like Lynn
Margulis, but they're still not the central paradigm. They’re still not
organizing our research or driving our culture and our cultural evolution.
That’s what I’m frustrated with. There’s so much good intellectual work, so
much good philosophy, so much good biology—how can we make that more central to
what we do?
CAROLINE A.
JONES is professor of art history in the History, Theory, Criticism
section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Caroline A. Jones's Edge Bio
page38:02
A COMMON
SENSE
For most
Americans the question is, on what level can we act to participate in the
cultural evolution of our species? We have the obvious situation of a political
system that has failed to act and, in many respects, even failed to acknowledge
the questions that we’re all asking. Climate change is an enormous issue. We
have produced a situation in which we imperil our own existence, so how can we
confront that? We have had a profound impact on the planet. The average
lifespan of a given species is about three and a half million years, so maybe
we’ve just had our run.
Humans have
achieved this incredible thing called culture, called art, called literature;
it would be tragic if there were no one to carry it on, or participate in it,
understand it, or even care.
How do we
confront global warming? How do we even name it? There are so many interesting
sciences that are coming together around this problem. Johan Rockström has this
concept of planetary boundaries, which considers how one can examine the
situation from a rational economic point of view. For a culture worker, which
is what I consider myself, the question is, how do we change ourselves?
For me, the
question of the moment, philosophically and culturally, revolves around this
problem of the common sense. I’ve done some thinking about that on the page,
but it hasn’t been very satisfying to me.
We have this
understanding that we can come to a common sense, that we can use the apparatus
of our bodies to understand what’s going on in the universe. We can agree about
that. We call that agreement "truth" and proceed collectively as a
culture, on that basis.
We evolved
as small-group primates, so, unfortunately, we have this limit on the number of
bodies we can care about at any one time and a limit on the kind of time
that we can think about. Can we think about anything beyond the thirty years of
a human generation? Can we conceive of that time span? We have these real
hardwired limits. We’ve stretched a lot of our hardwired limits through culture
and through the cultural pressures on evolution.
As an art
historian a lot of my questions are about what kind of art we can make,
what kind of thought we can make, what kind of ideas we can make that could
stretch the human beyond what the Torah calls these “stiff-necked
humans”—beyond our stubborn, selfish, only concerned with our small-group
parameters.
The
philosophers and philosophies that I’m drawn to are those that question the
Western obsession with individualism. Those are coming from so many different
places, and they’re reviving so many different kinds of questions and problems
that were raised in the '60s.
The obvious
players include that whole domain of “left cybernetics,” as I’m calling it,
that I’m very interested in right now—Bateson and Fritjof Capra—all of these
guys who were trying to say, "Seriously, the cranium is not the limit of
consciousness. Our life spans are not the limit of our impact."
Our
consciousness has the capacity to expand collectively and to respond in a way
that Deleuze would call rhizomatic. We have the capacity to sense other minds
in an ongoing lively way. Maybe those other minds are partly produced by the
bacteria in our guts—there’s so much we don’t know. There’s more biomass in our
bodies coming from bacteria than from cells that are ostensibly our own.
We need to
acknowledge our profound ignorance and begin to craft a culture that will be
based on some notion of communalism and interspecies symbiosis rather than
survival of the fittest. These concepts are available and fully elaborated by,
say, a biologist like Lynn Margulis, but they're still not the central
paradigm. They’re still not organizing our research or driving our culture and
our cultural evolution. That’s what I’m frustrated with. There’s so much good
intellectual work, so much good philosophy, so much good biology—how can we
make that more central to what we do?
I’ve
recently tried to grapple with the history of cybernetics. I’ve come up with an
inadequate division of left cybernetics and right cybernetics. What do I mean
by left cybernetics? In one sense, it’s a pun or a joke: the cybernetics that
was "left" behind. On another
level, it’s a very vague and mushy political grouping that connotes our left
coast: California, Esalen, Fritjof Capra on the beach, what Dave Kaiser calls
the "hippie physicist."
Politics is
a slippery business. What do left and right even mean anymore? What does it
mean when the left anarchists are making common cause with the Libertarians?
You tell me. The Libertarians tend to be Republican. The left anarchists maybe
were former Democrats. The point is that they might be meeting in the middle. I
don’t know. For me, the heuristic is we’re in a period of right politics, right
wing nationalism, white supremacism, and these left cyberneticians are
scholars who left us writings that were left behind, and it seems to support
what we can think of today as left politics. It’s not an adequate term, but
it’s a way of recognizing that there was a group beholden to the military
industrial complex, sometimes very unhappily, who gave us the tools to critique
it.
Norbert
Wiener had crises. He may have had a little breakdown when he realized his war
work was being put to things like the atomic bomb and Hiroshima. That was a
very difficult realization. He swore to the president of MIT he was never going
to do that kind of work again. But he was stuck there, versus people who
were left out, who were—again, Dave Kaiser’s hippie physicists—stuck doing
theory and pondering quantum mysteries, who did not have a giant lab to
create uranium derivatives to make the atom bombs for the future.
They were a
very different group, and to them became allied some of the biologically minded
cyberneticians who also didn’t have a place then in the military industrial
complex. Someone like Margaret Mead or Gregory Bateson, these are complicated
characters. On the one hand, they were complete cold warriors, working for
MoMA. They were figuring out how to make exhibitions that would lead Americans
away from communism. On the other hand, they were there as inspiring figures
for hippies and radicals, people who were trying to reconceive society in a
completely different way.
I’m struck
by these rhythms of our concern for the climate. I haven’t figured them out.
The rhythm of the early '70s, Earth Day, and the environmental movement in the
US—what happened to that? The '80s and '90s seemed to just have culture wars.
Of course, then we had 9/11 and it was all terrorism all the time. We seem
to be in another moment when we can discuss these concerns with the environment
again, partly because there’s simply a crisis. There’s a crisis of extreme
weather, there’s a crisis of bad distribution of income, income disparity. And
these are all coming together so that the people who are impoverished are
suffering the most from climate instability.
As I see it,
the problem is that with these dramatic crises and these dramatic catastrophes,
again, the human is limited. The human is not thinking that we have an opportunity
to rethink Florida, or to rethink Houston, which has no zoning laws and is run
completely on cowboy capitalism. No one is asking if we should rebuild the
same way. Well, maybe there’s someone saying it. No one in the news is
asking if we should rethink Houston, if we should rethink petroculture, if we
should rethink having an oil refinery on the side of the coast. No one is
prepared to ask this. According to our current government, it’s insensitive to
mention the problems of climate change in the midst of catastrophe.
Again, we’re
confronted with our human limits. What I’m trying to do from my tiny
position as an art historian, as sometimes curator and critic, is think about
forms of art that help us think in the longer term. Are there forms of culture
that help us think across the boundaries of the human individual?
I’m thinking
through artists who are working with biology, not in the sense of the
positivist, "Oh, I’m a scientist, too." That doesn’t interest me very
much. There are artists who are working with the frankly phantasmagorical
edge of bio-art, making what I’m calling "bio-fiction" to get us
thinking about species limits.
For example,
in a recent conversation I was having at the Guggenheim with a bio-artist and a
science fiction writer, I just playfully asked what each of us would have from
another species if we could splice it into our genes. Our cells turn over in
our body every seven years, so you’d start small by splicing in a few genes and
cells, and maybe after seven years they’d kick in all over your body and you
could genuinely be part of another kind of creature.
The artist
Anicka Yi wanted tentacles. She wanted a kind of octopoid capacity. The science
fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer wanted echolocation, bat capacities. I want the
temporal sensibility of the sequoia. I want to know what it would be like to
have all of your offspring be clones, to potentially live a thousand or more
years. There’s some spruce in the Northern Hemisphere that has lived 10,000
years or something. What would that be like? What kind of consciousness
would you have of the planet as something you were part of?
The plant
family fascinates me because plants were the first terraforming force.
Maybe not the first, but when the first oxygenation happened and the entire
planet cascaded from what we selfishly call anaerobic—there was some kind of
air, but it had no oxygen in it—when it cascaded through photosynthesis into
this oxygen-rich environment, it poisoned a lot of bacteria, but it made
possible our own evolution.
That kind of
consciousness would that allow those species? I don’t think of consciousness in
an Anglo-American analytic philosophical tradition. I don’t think of it as the
trolley problem. I think of consciousness as a much more diffuse
participation in the energies of the universe, as some kind of sensing of the
energies of the universe.
When I speak
to a biologist and they say, "You’re interested in interspecies stuff?
There are papers on that, you know, theories of mind in chimpanzees."
Yeah, but those theories of mind are incredibly limited.
For example,
they don’t take into account the intelligence of smell, what it’s like to get
information from smell. Humans get information from smell, but we’re not
conscious of it. We acknowledge it, but we don’t have a vocabulary for it. We
don’t even have a word for it. We have a noun and a verb, smell and smell. We
can’t even distinguish between the active smelling for something
and the passive smelling of something. We have no language for
that. So, we’re limited. I’m hoping that somehow culture can help us, that
somehow visionary artists can help us.
The
extraordinary artists of our day, like Pierre Huyghe, and Anicka Yi, who is
just starting out but has great potential—these are profoundly interesting thinkers
who help us on so many different levels of intelligence and cognitive
processing think about our place in the universe. That’s what has to happen. Art is a laboratory of consciousness, and
these are artists who are helping us to get there.
Thinking about
the artists who have begun to generate this type of thinking that interests me,
a lot of it connects with cybernetics and systems. The art of Hans Haacke in
the early to mid-'60s, before he became the father of institutional critique,
interests me very much. First of all, he was coming out of post-war Germany. He
was very suspicious of humanism, thinking that it had been corrupted. This is
my intuition. My intuition was that he felt, in Germany, humanism had taken a
horrible path and had been used as an excuse for Nazi terror and degenerate
art. For him, humanism was a bankrupt ideology.
He was not
explicit about his position on humanism, meaning, he didn't write a statement
saying that he rejected humanism. My work as a scholar has been to try and
understand where he was in the early '60s when he came on a boat from Germany
to the New York Harbor, arriving with a Fulbright and then getting a job and
staying. He’s coming from a place where his entire education as a boy in
Germany is steeped in German humanism and romanticism and the greatness of the
German language. It’s inside a fascist regime that is making a horror of that
commitment.
It’s toxic
to him at that moment . . . .
Later, he
makes this amazing site-specific installation at the German Parliament, where
the newly unified Germany commissioned him to do a piece. The piece was
called Der Bevölkerung ("The Population") in
critique of the earlier, late 19th-century slogan "Dem Deutschen
Volk" ("To the German People"). He wants it to be to the
population—immigrants, anyone, rather than the “folk.” And then the
members of Parliament had to come and bring their soil and dump it in there and
see what would grow. And when a blue flower grew, he couldn’t help thinking of
Novalis and poetry from the medieval era and German Romanticism. It’s in him,
but he fights it with what I think in 1961 felt like the rigor of science, the
rigor of a secular understanding of natural systems.
He had a
very interesting exchange with Jack Burnham, a brilliant theorist of systems
art, whom I think you probably knew. Burnham was in colloquy with Hans. He gave
him a very important early show and he said, "I’m thinking of Thoreau and
nature …" and Haacke responded, "No. We’re not thinking of Thoreau. I
won’t have anything to do with that 19th-century naturalist stuff. I’m
thinking about plastics," or something like that. He wanted to say,
"I’m thinking about the new technologies and I just don’t want anything to
do with that."
These are
the kinds of fragments we have of this anti-humanist compunction. And it was
very brief. By 1968, 1969, he was there in New York with the Art Workers’
Coalition, he was marching against Vietnam, he was deep into institutional
critique, he was studying the social as a system, he was meeting Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu was writing about his work. Everything then shifted towards the
social.
You can’t
very well be anti-humanist if you’re thinking about the social. Although, he
still brought to it this stringent sense of the system and secular rational
critique of the system. Part of my effort as a scholar has been to disambiguate
these two phases of his career, because he wants the early to be seen as a kind
of pre-history of institutional critique, and I think it’s actually quite
distinct. It has interesting lessons for us today.
Haacke was
interested in systems because he felt they could redirect our attention away
from the human, toward this profoundly beautiful cyclical time-based event that
was happening without us. The classic instance of this is his Condensation
Cube. When we did a reinstallation of an exhibition that he had at MIT
in 1967, I discovered that he called it Weather Cube, which is
super interesting. There's a difference between condensation, which is a kind
of thermodynamic category of matter, and weather, which is something we all
experience. This is a plexiglass cube, very beautifully fabricated, with about
an inch of water in it. Essentially, what is on display is the water cycle
between droplets of condensation on the side, a little rain that comes down on
the side, maybe a little fog. And if you stand in the right place in the
gallery, you can see a rainbow through the drops that are condensed on the
side.
This modest
gesture in 1963 to ’65 generated a tremendous amount of thought and continues
to generate a tremendous amount of thought. Consider the artist Trevor Paglen,
who has done Autonomy Cube, which is another interesting
piece.
Haacke was
reading Wiener, he was reading Bertalanffy, and he was interested in nature as
an isolated system. He hadn’t gotten us to the point at all where the human was
part of that system. Literally, the fact that if I brought my sweaty body up
next to the Condensation Cube, I could change the thermodynamics of
that closed system simply by temperature which is communicating across the
plexi. He hadn’t gotten to that point, but it was a tremendous advance in the
thought of how art could direct our attention to a durational process, a system
that was going on without us, an autonomous cycling through energies. That was
huge.
A few years
later, when he was given the chance to have an exhibition in Krefeld, Germany,
he did the Rhinewater Purification Plant, which was literally
bringing into the gallery a bunch of carboys of disgusting, polluted water. You
could see them in the edge of the gallery. They were going through carbon
filters, scrubbing things, and coming into a big tank on the floor of the
gallery that had a lot of fish in it. The fish were living, they were eating
little plants, they were excreting, and they were oxygenating themselves; they
seemed to be doing quite well. This purified water was then coming out of the
bottom of the tank and going out of the gallery and into the garden behind the
art museum in Krefeld.
It’s not
often discussed, but accompanying that was a full-scale catalog with a map of
the Rhine with all of the untreated sewage plants that were jettisoning human
waste into the Rhine along the course of the river. That was the first instance
in which he brought the human directly into the system.
That was the
first instance in which he said the human is changing this natural ecosystem. Here is
a system made by humans to deal with that human role in the system. That,
too, was a very interesting innovation. It was around 1972 I want to say. It
has inspired a range of artists, from Helen and Newton Harrison to others like
Mel Chin, who use their art to beta test a reparative or reclamation of a
certain environmental system. That was an interesting development.
The artists
of today certainly are indebted to that systems mentality. Our times now have
become so desperate. We’ve almost left an enlightenment model where "the
truth will set you free" for this much more agonistic and contested model
where we hear things like "Scientists are still debating whether
tobacco causes cancer.” Or, “This isn't climate change; these are 'extreme
weather events'"—this idea that truth is a silly putty that gets mangled
around by politicians. It’s a much more desperate time. In addition to this
systems mentality, this very rational data-driven analysis of the situation,
artists are turning to surrealism.
What you’re
finding are these eerie installations and sculptures that put you, the viewer,
into a very peculiar relationship with the art object.
Let’s take
Anicka Yi, for example, who uses scent. In her most recent 2017 exhibition at
the Guggenheim, she tells you that she’s made a scent that includes the
pheromones from the carpenter ant and the scent of an Asian-American female in
lower Manhattan. You get into the gallery and the smell enters your body. The
squeamish among us may be thinking, "Are these ant pheromones doing
something to me? Am I going to turn into The Fly, like Jeff Goldblum?"
There’s that
uncanny penetration of your own boundaries as you think about this biological
material. In her vitrines and installations, she has ants in one of them and
bacteria in the other. Part of the interesting process of doing these
installations was dealing with the museum, which staged a lot of hysteria
around putting bacteria into the gallery, which you can imagine. I’m totally
grateful to them for taking precautions and isolating this bacteria in the
vitrine of the exhibition. While they were hassling her about that, the next
gallery was being spray painted with some incredibly toxic paint and nobody was
doing anything about it going into the ventilation system, going into
everybody’s body. It’s her way of forcing us to contemplate our separations and
our boundaries and whether they need to be renegotiated or rethought. That’s an
interesting recent artwork.
Pierre
Huyghe is an artist from France who’s doing extraordinary things with the same
combination of squeamish, creepy, frightening surrealism, combining aspects of
the undoubtedly real. For instance, you'll see a real dog walking around, or a
real beehive with bees buzzing around, but they’re combined with strange notes
and tones that you have to recalibrate. They’re extremely mysterious.
A recent
installation that I wish I had seen but did not—I’ve seen the photographic
documentation—was a series of fish tanks in which are suspended volcanic rocks
that are lighter than water. You have this enormous boulder that’s floating in
the tank, and then there’s an artwork that he’s crafted, which looks a lot like
Brancusi, that he has offered to a hermit crab in the tank, and the hermit crab
is choosing the Brancusi sculpture to become its home. Aside from echoing
classic surrealism, like Magritte with the floating rock in the middle of the
sky, aside from that classic art historical reference, this tableau inevitably
leads us to think about the post human. Our Brancusis will tumble into the sea,
the hermit crabs will find them very useful, and we’ll have no concept
whatsoever of their cultural significance. They will be attractive and
available homes.
This calls
up the recent revival, myself included, of Jakob von Uexküll, a great
theoretical biologist of the '20s and '30s who was thinking about systems, who
viewed species as inhabiting incommensurate life worlds. He called them Umwelt,
the surround world of the individual species. While we’re fascinated by
that, we’re also frustrated with it. I’m frustrated with it, because it
implies incommensurability—where I’m interested in symbiosis and
interpenetration.
There is
also a frustration because as humans we want the capacity to penetrate those
alternative worlds and to understand them. Frankly,
now is the time when we want the capacity for those worlds to penetrate us,
too, give us more of their consciousness. How can we sense the intelligence of
the ant hive? How can we know the language of the honeybees so that we can
begin to speak it instead of just carting them around hundreds of miles to be
industrial workers for our farms? How can we begin to be more conscious of this
humming life scrum on the outside of our planet that is so important to our
survival? How can we sense that?
Jakob von
Uexküll virtually founded theoretical biology by hypothesizing that each
species, each individual creature, lived in its own Umwelt, its own
surround world, that was largely incommensurate with any other creature. And
this is because he looked at it in terms of biosemiosis; he looked at it in
terms of communication spheres. The tick, which is his classic example, has a
communications sphere that the human cannot understand. The human triggers the
communication, but completely unconsciously. Our bodies exude butyric acid, and
as we move through the forest, the tick, who might have been sitting on that
stick for eighteen years, reacts: "Oh my god, butyric acid, I’m
jumping." It’s a signal that the tick receives, jumps on to the warm body,
finds the warmest, nakedest spot, digs in, has the one meal of its life, goes,
breeds, and lays eggs.
This idea of
the separateness of the Umwelt is what contemporary, I would say,
post-Margulis, post-Varela, post-Maturana post-poiesis biologists are trying to
get away from. Are we really so separate? It’s only recently, like in the last
two years, that scientists are beginning to study how bacteria, for example,
contribute to consciousness. The NIH just approved a major study of gut
bacteria and its relationship to mental illness, to depression, to sense of
well-being.
Gut bacteria
are participating in consciousness. We are just at the cusp of beginning an
entire new realm of science, and culture is pointing the way in an interesting
sense. How does the hermit crab inform our thinking about this poorly named
Anthropocene? The Anthropocene brings up a whole other set of questions because,
of course, it’s named after man, which we can't seem to get away
from.
~ ~ ~ ~
How does the non-scientist contribute to these
discussions? I will never pretend to be a scientist. I’m a fascinated consumer
of science. I am the public, in some sense, for science. I am attempting to be
informed about what scientific theories and studies are motivating the artists
that I study. This is my position. My terms of understanding for science are
deeply value-laden, because in my work and in my understanding of culture,
there is no culture without ideology. There is no culture without politics. And
I don’t mean politics like whether Andy Warhol was a registered Democrat when
he put Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview. I don’t mean
politics in that way. I mean politics as in the polis. I mean politics as in
how is whatever we’re talking about embedded in culture and in a political
reality that it finds itself in.
Today, we
cannot imagine science as being ignorant of that reality when scientists are
being asked to change words in their abstract, when they are being asked to
redescribe their experiments. We are in a deeply political moment. My love of
Uexküll is simply an affection. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not there to use it
as a tool. I’m there to appreciate it as a cultural manifestation. My love for
Uexküll is tempered by this frustration with this concept of the Umwelt,
which is plural and incommensurate. So, there’s the Umwelt of the tick,
the Umwelt of the human going by, the Umwelt of the mollusk buried
under the sand, the Umwelt of the seagull going by overhead; they don’t
intersect.
I’m that
child of the '60s that’s asking whether we can find another set of concepts
that shows how each of these are almost gears in a larger machine. I’m not
allergic to the machinic or the systematic; I’m deeply attracted to them. I
want them to encompass more and to admit more of what we don’t know. Part of
what frustrates me about systems theory is the black box. It’s rarely
addressed, like where you’ve put the box on your system.
What you see
in Shannon’s beautiful early diagrams is: box, box, circle, message, message,
noise. It’s rarely discussed how that box gets drawn around the message. Is the
person receiving the message the same kind of person that’s sending the message?
Is it noise if the word doesn’t mean the same thing?
Haacke's Condensation
Cube is a perfect metaphor for me of the interesting problematics of
systems theory. For him, the plexiglass formed a perfect box around a system
that was autonomous. But he had to drill a tiny little hole in the top so that
the humidity and temperature could equalize. The box has a little hole because
it’s part of a larger environment and it needs to communicate with that larger
environment or it won’t do the weather cycle. The box will not hold; the black
box will not hold. And I don’t mind that. That’s a heuristic. You have to black
box things to get any kind of answer. What I mind is the arrogance that the
black box describes the universe.
~ ~ ~ ~
The most
interesting aspect of the cluster of ideas that are circulating around this
book is the question of intelligence. As a cultural worker, I feel restrained
by contemporary models of intelligence as AI is defining them. Howard Gardner’s
work on multiple intelligences was a beginning. But questions of sensing
outside the cranium, we’ve barely touched. We’re obsessed with our neocortex.
And it’s just part of the human vanity. We need to not make machines that would
express the id. I don’t think that’s the point. The point is to think more
thoughtfully about what goes into decision making, for example, besides
Bayesian networks or "rational economic judgments."
As an educator, there’s also an interesting
response to all this work. Learning is not about binary decisions or facts that
can be written into algorithms. Learning is a collective enterprise by which we
determine how to be better creatures on earth. This idea of intelligence as
something in a box driving a car, that’s just not intelligence to me.
Intelligence is something that is utterly dependent on our engagement with each
other in coming to a common sense.
We have to make a commons. That’s what’s such a
challenge. We have to make a commons or recognize a commons, agree upon a
commons, protect a commons. Kant took it for granted. For Kant, it was simply sensus
communis. It was just out there and we all knew what it was, so we didn’t
have to discuss it.
Now we know
how fragile it is, how much of a collective enterprise it is, who we will
include in it, and even what creatures we will include in it, which is an
important question for right now.
** **
This is a very important new concept for
you. - Amorella
1649 hours. It has to do with a possible humanized
or humanizing system for individual easement into a more species oriented
common culture. Oddly enough, I think on the natural systematics involved
within an artist and her or his muse -- a deeper reality within the natural
silence of heartansoulanminds -- an unthought but realized communication.
No comments:
Post a Comment