Discussion about a Culturapology Historicized

    As I have noted elsewhere, my anthropology, my study of the human, asks questions about how a particular species is equipped to encounter singular social and political worlds.  Employing an existential-historical-libidinal materialism, these questions can be said to interrogate the historical as an object, without taking up the historical as a site.  Evolutionary trajectories of a species may be bounded in time, and may be enacted across temporalities, but any narrative accounting which may gloss (a term making explicit the double articulation inherent to a narratological trace) such rhizomic vectors are, in a Korzybskian sense (as contrasted with the Deleuzean), maps, not territories.  Thus, "the contemporary", from a position of applied evolutionary phenomenology, appears as a property attributed to particular encounters with social and political worlds, in the sense of Aristotle's conception of the past and the future as brought by the human to an encounter with movement in a physical world, for which theoretical work would offer explanatory tools (i.e., as to the material transmission of said attribution, and as to its situatedness within a topological space of possible attribution), but not a site to be entered into as a position of observation.  

    

    Thus, a Design for an Anthropology of the Contemporary largely leaves this reader unengaged, its discussants chewing over problems that simply do not resonate, so focused are they on a "peculiar burden" apparent from a stakeholder appeal for the continuity of a discipline conceived of, not so much as a study of the human, but rather as a study of the epistemological and behavioral properties of particular human-nonhuman assemblages, which we might term ethne (so as to differentiate the assemblage from its property set, culture, or its intra-relational set, society).  What we might call culturapology, or even colerepology, with its methodological attachment to ethnography, narratives derived from situated encounters in relation to particular ethne, is at best epiphenomenology in relation to a study of the human that interrogates the conditions of possibility for ethne configurations, as such, let alone the properties thereof.  Indeed, even the turn to questions of identity, for our discussants, devolves upon particularity of cultural properties.  

    The lack, even explicit disparaging, of theory, as compared to "concepts", simply does not offer much of interest.  The only point at which the discussion between Rabinow, Marcus, et al., would seem to provide purchase for an applied evolutionary phenomenology is in a brief consideration of a "triad", consisting of the emergent, and citing to Raymond Williams, the residual and the dominant.  It is perhaps no small coincidence that this appears in the passage on temporalities within the context of timing.  For it is upon the scaffolding of the emergent vis a vis the residual, whereby spandrels of evolution are occupied in the very occupation by a species of the niches opened upon by those spandrels, that an applied evolutionary phenomenology operates.  This double movement conditions ethne, and thereby dominant particular elements of the sets culture and society, and thereupon ethnographic accounts derived from such particulars, including those of any particular contemporary.  The historical (and too the prehistorical), in this conception, appears of the pendular ticking through Serresian intransitive spaces, the temporalities of particular ethne tracing singularly mutually inclusive scopes.  It is this very ahistoricity as conditioning history, this contemporaneous reciprocal movement of which all stories are determined, that is taken as a site of an applied evolutionary phenomenology.

    That said, there is little in these dialogues to suggest that an anthropology, a study of the human, that does not adhere to the concepts of contemporary culturapology would have any place in the design studio proposed.  One that finds the emergent and the residual not merely in culture, but as conditioning the possibilities of culture, of which the dominant appears as a determination of such conditioned possibilities, even less so.

Book Imagined: AEP in Abstract

Back of the Book Jacket:

    What does a dog's bark have in common with a human laugh, or both have to do with the ultrasonic emissions of a bat?  Dogs and monkeys, crows and cows, white tail deer and cellular automata, gods and corporations, Toxoplasma gondii and a cat named Searle:  just some of the cast of entities that accompany the reader on this nonlinear journey through the evolution of the queerest of psychologies, that attributed to an organism embodied through the very ambiguity of its body.  This foundational text in applied evolutionary phenomenology will have consequences not only for humanist philosophy, but for the very ways we communicate with our domestic animals, our love interests, our political opponents, and our own reflection in the mirror. 

Book Proposal:

    Beginning from a historical praxiography uncovering a Leviathan populated by human-nonhuman assemblages and self-reflexive identities, tracing the conditions of nature that organize the mechanisms of society, we explore the uncanny spaces opened up through mimetic extension and surplus sociality.  Leaving behind mushroom men to visit the Middle East some 15,000 years ago, we imagine the early interactions of a pack of small wolves and a band of extroverted humans as a cybernetic symbiosis of food and sentry flows are augmented by a playful loosening of agency perception.  This move from codependence to codomestication, however, will have occurred following a transformation of human signaling from reflexive to reflective, from ecological to technological, which we shall explore with the help of white tail deer and common corvids, modern dogs and ancient Homo habilis.  A linguistic revolution, it will be argued, where instrumental signaling with tools coincides with instrumentalization of communication as tool, broadened the scope of human language beyond sociality, even as the scope of sociality was expanding beyond both the human and the living.  It was from this space, formed at the conjuncture of multicast social grooming and universal agency perception, that the first human-nonhuman hybrid societies would emerge.

    Stepping back into our theoretical present, we explore an architecture of spandrels, and the spaces cleared by these necessary byproducts of life.  Exploring the latest studies in emotion psychology and embodied philosophy, we ask how what we perceive may be conditioned by our repertoire of available responses.  We look to the architecture of social groups, to consider how spandrels of shared space come to be occupied by percepts of social affect, and how these coorganized spaces operate as public goods conferring fitness upon groups that condition genetic advantages to individuals and kin.  Prepared with this theoretical framework, we examine the mediation of contemporary, even virtual, human courtship display through lek formation, as a demonstration of evolved capacities that operate independently of procreative potential, as they operate indiscriminately across gender and gender preference.  

    With this approach of queer evolutionary psychology, we return to our now rapidly evolving Mesolithic assemblages, as the uncanny confluence of tool language and object sociality opens upon yet more spandrels, as, from agriculture to city-states, a neurophysiological ceiling on network capacity that bound primate social relationships having been obviated by inter- and non-specific meshwork identities, agents are increasingly encountered as organs without bodies, enacted in surplus spaces of mimetic prosthesis.  Yet even with the most "post"-modern of such augmentations, these configurations and constellations nonetheless trace historical-libidinal material existence, affective-perceptive flows that, however refracted, still originate with embodied organisms.  Picking up again with our spandrelist model of group selection, we examine the cosmological spaces opened onto by pre-Mesolithic affective-perceptive group processes, as scaffolds for ideological niches occupied within the environment of today's Leviathan, and consider the possibilities of nonviolent communication as a political strategy to turn the instrument of language toward the rearticulation of sociality with even the most nonhuman of agents: ourselves.

Media Orthogonal: Science and Religion, Experiment and Experience

    Langlitz, in an article/chapter concerning the "Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects" in pharmacological research, cites to observations by Anthony Wallace, in the 1950s, that the same hallucinogenic substance was observed to produce markedly different effects in population of whites under laboratory conditions as compared to native peoples in religious ceremonies.  Where Wallace attributes these effects to culture, which he argues needs to be taken into account as an independent variable in scientific experiments, Langlitz hints at another dimension, in providing an example of a trial run where two researchers, both presumptively of the same "culture", insofar as that term might be usefully used without reification, nonetheless experience wildly different reactions to the same test substance, in part, we are given to believe, as a function of their social (rather than "cultural") relationship to the substance, the experiment, their institutional setting, and to one another.  More on this in a moment.

    The characterization of this as a dimensional difference is important here, as like Latour's characterization of the religion and science as not being commensurable nor incommensurable, there being "no point of contact between the two, no more than nightingales and frogs have to enter into any sort of direct ecological competition", I would suggest that any idea of "culture" as interacting with, of being in any way commensurable or incommensurable with, the variables of scientific experiment is likewise, again in Latour's words, a "category mistake".   That said, unlike a nightingale or a frog, we cannot say that there is "no point of contact" between experimental variables and cultural conditions.  The very challenge of contextually mediated pharmacological effects is that cultural conditions and experimental variables make contact at every point.  When the very architecture of the space in which the experiment is conducted is a factor in the dependent experiential variables--the decorating of the walls in the lab by our two experimenters mirroring the introduction of wire mesh into rat cages in the experiments described by Gomart in his discussion of methadone substitution treatments for heroin addiction--makes evident that there is no point at which culture does not intersect with experiment.  This state of neither commensurable nor incommensurable is thus best described as orthogonal.  It is not simply the lack of opposition between nightingale and frog, but the lack of opposition between up and left.  Indeed, going back to Latour's discussion of icons in religion, and referencing Wallace's discussion of the architecture of religion, it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to claim that religion and science two, rather than being Gould's non-overlapping magisteria, the most uninteresting of Venn diagrams, religion and science hold an orthogonal relation congruent to that of culture and experiment, making contact at every point, without having to "enter into any sort of direct ecological competition".

    Let us, however, come back to the example of two experimenters subjecting their experimental setup to a trial run, acting themselves as test subjects.  If we hold that culture and experiment are in orthogonal relation, that they intersect at all points, what are we to make of the very different reactions of the two experimenters in the position of experimental subject?  If both are permeated by the same cultural and experimental axes, what is different?  Here, Gomart provides insight, when he describes the interaction between clinic, professionals, patients, methadone, and the jointly enacted "performance" of substitution treatment.  Drawing on Foucault's conception of capillary power, we find a mode of control, given and received, prepared for and depended upon, a bidirectional flow of control, in every way reminiscent of the flow invoked by Latour in his attempt not to speak about religion, but to speak religiously, to perform religion, just as one performs an experiment, in some other dimension.  In the story related by Langlitz, it is the experimenter who "wanted to keep everything under control", yet "was losing control", who "got all worked up" and thereby had deeply troubling hallucinations during the course of the experiment.

    Here, we are not talking about culture, nor experiment, but relation.  The experimenter in his dual role of experimental subject and experimental lead "tried to stay in charge supervising how Anna was looking after me", all the while trying to act both as observer of the experimental setup of which he was the subject.  These relationships play upon the field of which culture and experiment are dimensions, but are not dimensional themselves.  Rather, these relationships, the possibilities for flow, like the agape relationships explored by Latour in mundane love language, (de/in)form the topological geometry of the points at which culture and experiment orthogonally intersect.  Just as with love language, there is a movement, close or distant, the dimensions warping as points play in relationship.

    What then, of Langlitz's hope that "second-order observation should inspire the invention of new practices of first-order observation"?  If the first-order observer must always contend with a shifting field of orthogonal dimensions, where the weft of the scientific method of the experiment and the weave of culture (including religion) of the self-reporting subject describe a non-reproducible fabric of experience, how then can any practice relate meaningfully to these dimensions?  Experimental controls fail insofar as they fail to control culture.  Geertzian thick description meanwhile strand us in second-order observations, an unwefted weave of how out of relation to what.  Langlitz places methods "based on reductionism" in antagonism with "the complexity of life itself", yet perhaps the issue is not reduction, so much as reduction along a single dimension in ignorance of orthogonal relations.  I would suggest that the practice Langlitz seeks might be found by turning an orthogonal corner, to examine what elements of substantive experience might be found configured to play coincidently with the configuration of chemical elements that perform a pharmaceutical substance.

Cybernetic Difference

    In a discussion of Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, it has been argued that the author narrates the subsumption of difference by the war machine.  Whatever else Kittler may be doing in his text, I would suggest that he cannot successfully demonstrate the eliding of difference by technology, as a brief consideration of early microcomputer architectures can elucidate.

    Let us consider the machine instruction sets of two early personal computers, both of which I had the opportunity to become quite acquainted with as a child.  The first, we might note, was designed with a decidedly spare command set, emulating a Turing machine without a marked degree of redundancy. We find, for instance, an operator that might be translated as "if the accumulator contains zero, jump to the address of my operand".  In this particular architecture, the complementary operator for not equal to zero is absent.  

    This places the operator subsequent to the conditional operation in a position of privilege with respect to the distal operator targeted by the same conditional, a privilege necessitated by the inarticulability of the condition of the subsequent.  Unable to speak "not equal to zero", the processor must seek the operator of that unspeakable condition immediately proximate, where the distal operator reached by the spoken conditional may be positioned anywhere--except in the position of the subsequent.

    In this privilege, difference is evident.  The subsequent operator does not merely perform difference, is occupies difference, determines its own position through an uncanny difference from that which may be spoken.

    Such architectures did not last long, however.  We find in latter computers a much denser command set.  Not simply an "equal to zero" conditional but also its complement, "not equal to zero".  With this, the privileged position of the subsequent is vacated, as the position of subsequent and distal may be arbitrarily interchanged through an inversion of the conditional with its complement.  

    Yet in this evacuation of privilege, difference is not eliminated, but relocated.  Where before the inarticulable possessed a position determinative of the structure of the program, now structure hinges on, is articulated by, the arbitrary occupancy of the conditional position.  The difference between conditional and its complement is the difference between the performance of functionally isomorphic but structurally distinct programs.

    Here, we move from the realm of what has been called "spaghetti code" to the regime of subroutine.  The structure of programs no longer dictated by the poetics of inarticulability, the linear sequence of code may be strategically segmented and segregated, just as the hierarchical strata of corps are segmented and segregated in a modern military structure.  And just as with war machine subdivisions, for war machine subroutines difference in position is determinative:  as any German general speaking "eastern" or "westward" would know.

    In the circuit, position makes all the difference.

Abstract Imaginary: Potential Projects for an AEP

Abstract 1: 

Leviathan Multiple: Ontology in Social Contract Theory

    Two central concerns of applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") are the excorporation of an experiential body through emgroupment, and the encounter of non-cospecific social entities as enabled by a tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception.  Where the former approaches identity as a process of reterritorialization of sedimented agentic singularities onto a body map, the latter uncovers the capacity for uncanny percepts emergent of deterritorialized deployment of sociality heuristics among coevolved codomesticates.  Hobbes, in the ontological girding of his Leviathan, anticipates an AEP both of excorporate identity, articulated through the actor-author structure, and uncanny encounters with a non-cospecific, multitudinous other.  Unfortunately, these insights are obscured in contemporary readings which conflate a "Mortall God", multitude in mediated relation to itself, with the actor upon which this identity relation hinges, nominally "sovereign", which unmoored of this fundamental structure, is reified as a heliophallic power over.  This work of historical praxiography begins an excavation of the corpuscular objects by which Leviathan was enacted within the mechanistic philosophy of its day, and the very different objects enacted as Leviathan today.  A reading that disentangles a "condition of nature" from post-Boylesian "states of nature" (ascendant in subsequent social theory) presents Leviathan as a foundational text of AEP.

Abstract 2:  

Just So Queer:  Group Selection for Human Courtship Mediation

    

    Research conceived of as evolutionary psychology tends towards a caricature of evolutionary theory as reducible to adaptations within a species as linear correlates to problems of biological reproduction and survival encountered by ancestral individuals.  Seeking legitimacy by grounding its hypotheses and results in implicit narratives of genetic fitness, such research more often than not founders on its own production of quasi-teleological explanations for patriarchal, heteronormative social behaviors witnessed among some human populations.  Adopting instead a spandrelist approach to uncover common phenotypes as necessary byproducts of scaffold architectures of sociality, an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") examines predictions of group selection theory with regards to the reproduction of public goods upon which genetic transmission of particular individuals is contingent but not determinative.  Drawing upon micro-political feminist theory and queer theory critiques of identity consolidation, this research situates leks, and specifically, human leks, as emergent of natural selection upon social groups, such that the mechanisms of lek formation and courtship mediation therein can be shown to operate in human social groups irrespective of the sexed bodies or gender identities of which such leks may be constituted.  Potential paths of further application of group selection and feminist-queer theories within AEP going forward are outlined.

Abstract 3:  

Deep Description:  Approaching an Empathetic Practice of Ethnography

    A methodology of thick description, as taken up within anthropology, rests on two corollary epistemological commitments:  (i) that inherent in any observed act is a meaning that can only be determined through interpretation within its cultural context; and (ii) that given enough cultural contextual description, a rational observer can accurately arrive at the singular meaning of said observed act.  Within an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP"), by contrast, meanings are understood not to inhere in acts, but rather in the diagnoses, or analyses, that attach to such acts as objects enacted by situated observers.  Acts, here, as the constituting elements of practices, are not possessed of meaning given by context, but rather are appropriated by an interpretation (also, notably, an act) according to which meaning is attributed.  Drawing on the practice of nonviolent communication, an AEP seeks not to describe the particularity of context en route to a hermeneutics of specific meaning, but rather to hypothesize singularities of affect pointing to activations of general needs, and then to seek falsification (and/or elaboration) of those hypotheses through joint inquiry with informants.  Such a "deep description" is explored as an ethnographic method for tracing common conditions of human acts, including interpretive acts.