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.