Category: Theory

In his fine new book Levinas Unhinged, Tom Sparrow writes about how Alphonso Lingis both radicalizes Levinas in the direction of materiality, and goes beyond the accpunt of perception elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. Lingis insists upon the radicality of sensation, something that orthodox phenomenology excludes. For Merleau-Ponty,Sparrow says, “our most elementary experiences are always already meaning-laden, figural, given to us as a thing that we can get our hands around.”

Now, as far as I can tell, Merleau-Ponty is basically saying the same thing that Wilfrid Sellars is saying, when he denounces the “myth of the Given” and insists that all our experiences are always already conceptualized or theory-laden. These two philosophers come from very different traditions, and their terminology is correspondingly different. (Thus Sellars denounces the idea of what he calls “givennnes,” but Merleau-Ponty uses this very same term to refer to the way that, for him just as for Sellars, what we experience is already conceptualized and meaningful).

The parallel between Merleau-Ponty and Sellars is that they both descend ultimately from Kant; they are both affirming the Kantian principle that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” And doubtless, Kant, Sellars, and Merleau-Ponty are all correct in rejecting what we might call the illusion of simple presence.

Nonetheless, as Sparrow points out, sensation for Lingis is a point at which the Kantian/phenomenologica/Sellarsian structures break down. Lingis, in contrast to all theseearlier figures, “reminds us that ‘to sense something is to be sensitive to something, to feel a contact with it, to be affected by it’.” (Sparrow quoting Lingis). Sparrow also (rightly, I think) aligns this affirmation of sensation with a moment in Levinas where Levinas is asserting the priority of the aesthetic, rather than (as he usually does) the ethical. It is true that we should beware (as Kant, Merleau-Ponty, & Sellars all tell us) to simply hypostasize non-conceptual (or non-categorical) aesthetic sensation as a higher or more pure form of presence. But it is equally true that we need to avoid the error of thinking that what does not fit into our conceptual categories does not exist at all. Sparrow finds this latter concern in Levinas and in Lingis. I find it, initially, in Kant himself, in the discussion of aesthetics in the Third Critique, where we have “intuitions” (sensory impressions) that cannot be contained within any concept. I find traces of this also in Deleuze (with his aesthetics of sensation), in Laruelle (with his insistence on the radical immanence of the photograph), and also in Erin Manning’s account of autistic thought.

The larger point is that both cognitivists and phenomenologists affirm the Kantian idea of subordinating sensation or affect to cognition, or conceptualization, or meaning; and yet both cognitivism and phenomenology offer us margins, or moments, where we still encounter a radical, non-categorizable aestheticism. (These margins can be found, for instance, in Metzinger’s discussions of “Raffman qualia”, and in some of Merleau-Ponty’s more speculative gestures, including those where he is writing under the influence of Whitehead — for which see this book). I think that David Roden’s recent discussion of “dark phenomenology” fits here too (although I don’t agree with Roden’s conclusion that this might be accessed via third-person naturalism).

Both in the book I am finishing now (on speculative realism) and in the two that I hope to write next (one on theories of mind in science fiction, and the other on post-continuity in contemporary film and video) I am pursuing these aesthetic margins.

I find that my position on speculative realism is close to that of Dylan Trigg, in his article in Speculations 4. Trigg seeks to expand phenomenology beyond the human — to devise an unhuman phenomenology, through recourse to early Levinas (Existence and Existents, and Time and the Other). There is something in experience that is not “mine,” and that extends beyond the limits of the body/world correlation in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

Trigg also suggests, rightly to my mind, a different take on Levinas’s “there is” (il y a) than the one offered by that other admirer of Levinas, Graham Harman. For Harman, in Levinas’ il y a “there is a single formless element from which the things of our lives emerge” — this is an “undermining” of objects to which Harman objects. Harman’s reading is not wrong, but for Trigg it only gives part of the story. In Trigg’s analysis of the il y a, “Levinas is assigning a reality to existence that is not dependent on there being a world in the first place. Rather, existence precedes the birth of the world, marking a constant presence that is at once immersed in the world of things but at the same resistant to being identified with those things.” This means that, “far from the mere disappearance of things, the Levinasian il y a retains a presence, which cannot be tied down to appearances despite having an indirect relation to those appearances.” In other words, any entity (not just a human being) can experience the il y a, and the il y a is precisely an experience of what Harman calls “withdrawal” — the withdrawal, not just of things from me, but even (or especially) of what I myself am from me. This is where my own experience of the world becomes, as Trigg says, “unhuman.” While I suspect that Harman will not accept this as a defense against the charge of undermining, I actually find that Trigg’s reading of Levinas makes it easier for me to accept, or come to terms with, what Harman means by withdrawal.

Trigg’s reading resonates with my own Blanchotian sense of Levinas (which I came to via Joseph Libertson’s Proximity). It it not the “undermining” of the object that is at stake here, but rather what I can only call a défaillance of the subject (I cannot think of a good enough English equivalent for the French word). The supposed “subject” doesn’t disappear into nothingness; there is no negativity at work here. And yet this subject finds itself unable to relate intentionally to the world or to objects in the world. This deficit of intentionality dissolves what Harman calls the “sensual” realm, without for all that allowing any access to “real” objects.

My difference from Trigg (and also from other SR thinkers interested in the horror of Lovecraft and Ligotti) is this. Where they see immersion in the il y a as a form of deprivation, a wound to the narcissistic ego — which is probably the only way a constituted human subject can feel about it (I myself find few things more dreadful than insomnia), I think that the same process can also be understood as what Whitehead would call a “constructive functioning” (Process and Reality 156). Rather than descend from full human intentional consciousness into the il y a, we should start from the “vagueness” (again, Whitehead’s term) that lies behind conscious perception, that is much broader than that perception, and out of which consciousness only fitfully emerges, if at all. From this point of view, we have a story of emergence instead of one of dissolution into horror. The vague sentience of the slime mold (my favorite biological organism) is not in the least horrific for the slime mold; it is a kind of thought, and also a kind of contact with the world that is devoid of phenomenological intentionality; in other words, a form of “contact” that is not a “relation” in the sense Harman criticizes, but rather the experience of what Trigg rightly describes as Levinas’ “non-relational account of existence.”

For me, this means the point is not to develop (as Trigg wishes) an “unhuman phenomenology’; nor what Ian Bogost calls an “alien phenomenology” or what Thomas Nagel calls an “objective phenomenology”; but rather what I would like to call (imitating Laruelle, perhaps?) a non-phenomenology.

Metzinger, Being No One, page 173:

Phenomenal representations are transparent, because their content seems to be fixed in all possible contexts: The book you now hold in your hands will always stay this very same book according to your subjective experience, no matter how much the external perceptual situation changes. What you are now experiencing is not an “active object emulator,” which has just been embedded in your global model of reality, but simply the content of the underlying representational dynamics: this book, as here (constraint 3) and now (constraint 2) effortlessly given to you (constraint 7). At this level it may, perhaps, be helpful to clarify the concept of transparency with regard to the current theoretical context by returning to more traditional conceptual tools, by once again differentiating between the vehicle and the content of a representation, between the representational carrier and its representational content.

The representational carrier of your phenomenal experience is a certain process in the brain. This process, which in no concrete way possesses anything “booklike,” is not consciously experienced by yourself; it is transparent in the sense of you looking through it. What you are looking onto is its representational content, the existence of a book, here and now, as given through your sensory organs. This content, therefore, is an abstract property of the concrete representational state in your brain. However, as we have already seen, there are at least two kinds of content. The intentional content of the relevant states in your head depends on the fact of this book actually existing, and of the relevant state being a reliable instrument for gaining knowledge in general. If this representational carrier is a good and reliably functioning instrument for generating knowledge about the external world, then, by its very transparency, it permits you to directly, as it were, look “through it” right onto the book. It makes the information carried by it globally available (constraint 1), without your having to care about how this little miracle is achieved. The phenomenal content of your currently active book representation is what stays the same, no matter if the book exists or not. It is solely determined by internal properties of the nervous system.

Now, I agree with Metzinger to a certain extent. When our experience (falsely) seems to be transparent, this is because we are looking through the brain process (just as we might look through a window), without being aware that the window is there, i.e. without being aware that this process is going on (that the window is an intervening medium), So-called “naive realism” is false (as Metzinger rightly insists), because our sense of transparency causes us to ignore the mental medium through which the thing is transmitted to us; and as we know, every medium involves a “translation” rather than an unchanged conveyance.

What I reject from Metzinger, however, is the idea that what we see through the “window” of mental process is itself another mental product. (In Metzinger’s terms: what we see through the representational vehicle is the representational contents). No, I want to claim rather that this doubling is unnecessary. What we see through the brain process (or through the window) is not a “representational content”, but is actually the thing itself on the other side of the window (in Metzinger’s example, the book). The “content” that we see through the vehicle of brain processes (of which we are unaware) is not a representation, but the actual thing that we are looking at.  Metzinger’s representationalism causes him to double the process of transmission.

Metzinger posits this doubling because, he argues, we could be hallucinating, i.e. there might not really be a book there at all. But I don’t think this is a sufficient reason to argue that what we are seeing is a mental simulation or representational contents, rather than an actual thing. Just a few pages earlier, Metzinger speaks of hallucinations generated by drugs like LSD: in such cases, he says, phenomenal transparency is interrupted because “what the subject becomes aware of are earlier processing stages in his visual system: the moving patterns [seen by someone hallucinating as a result of LSD] simply are these stages.” So when we are hallucinating, we are still perceiving something actual; it is just that what we are perceiving is our own (usually inaccessible) brain process, as opposed to things that we see with that brain process. This would also be the case if we hallucinate an object that isn’t there, and that our brain might generate via memory traces (there is no book there now, but I have seen books before, so the appearance of the book is part of my perception of my own process of perception).

In short, Metzinger argues from the possibility of hallucination that “your phenomenal life does not unfold in a world, but only in a world-model”; and that when we realize that what we are perceiving is in fact a hallucination, this means that the process of our mental activity (the process of “modeling”, or representing or simulating) itself “becomes globally available.” But I want to argue that this brain process itself is part of the world, and unfolds in the world; and that when we become aware of this, we are perceiving an additional part of what is going on in the world, rather than a second-order representation at a distance from the world.

This also leads back to what Whitehead calls “nonsensuous perception.” Metzinger distinguishes between intentional and phenomenal contents of perceptual experience. What Metzinger calls “intentional” is what happens when the perception is cognized. But, as Whitehead suggests, cognition is only a very belated and complex result of integrating many prehensions: i.e. it is only a derivative (which only happens in certain especially complex cases) of the far more basic pre-cognitive “prehension” of the thing. And this nonsensuous and precognitive sort of perception corresponds, more or less, to what Metzinger calls the “phenomenal” level of experience. Metzinger’s phenomenality (the most basic sort of “consciousness”) is the noncognitive (or precognitive) and affective basis of perception. This is what I think of as the nonphenomenological and nonintentional — or “autistic” — level of primordial experience. Because it preceides cognition, it is singular and not susceptible to representation: it is, in a Kantian sense, “aesthetic” rather than a matter of “understanding.” Metzinger mentions many sorts of noncognitive perceptions or experiences in his book; think, for instance, of “Raffman qualia,” or shades of color that can be phenomenally experienced by not identified, recognized, recalled, or remembered. Such basic or noncognitive perceptions are in a certain sense, as Metzinger suggests, “internal,” and capable of taking place as hallucination, even in the absence of an actual outside object. But even in the case of hallucination, “experience” on this level is, I insist, a process of prehension, and not a “representation.”

A few pages later Metzinger adds that “it is interesting to note how cognitive availability alone is not sufficient to break through the realism characterizing phenomenal experience. You cannot simply “think yourself out” of the phenomenal model of reality by changing your beliefs about this model. The transparency of phenomenal representations is cognitively impenetrable; phenomenal knowledge is not identical to conceptual or propositional knowledge.”

Now, I think that this is entirely right. My only disagreement is that think Metzinger gives too small a role to nonconceptual experience. Such experience precisely isn’t “knowledge”; but  in order to deal with it, we need to break free from the prejudice that only the cognitively functional aspects of mentality matter.

Here are the notes that formed the raw material for my presentation at SLSA on Muriel Combes' book on Gilbert Simondon (newly translated by Thomas Lamarre, and to be published by MIT Press in October). I guess I don't have the time & energy to write them into more finished form; but hopefully they will give some sort of indication of what I found to be valuable in the book, and how it relates to current discussions about speculative realism, systems theory, ontology, etc.

The book is very short and very dense and concise. I am less interested in asking whether it is an accurate account of Simondon — though it has certainly played a great role in my understanding of Simondon — than in asking what it can do for us, where it can bring us.

The crucial point: Initial non-identity of being. Being is not one. The important question to ask in such circumstances is: Excess or deficiency? In Combes' account, being is always in excess, it is always more-than-one. "Being is constitutively, immediately, a power of mutation… because being contains potential, and because all that is exists with a reserve of becoming, the non-self-identity of being should be called more-than-identity. In this sense, being is in excess over itself." (3) Contrast this excess to deficit or negation in the dialectic. What are the implications of seeing excess, or unfulfilled potentiality, rather than deficit?

STIEGLER, CAPITALISM, MARXISM

This formulation in the opening chapter relates to Combes' critique of Stiegler towards the end of the book. Stiegler sees technics as a prosthetic for an originary deficit. Combes rejects this, since she says that, for Simondon, alienation is the result of excess unrealized potential rather than of a deficit or lack.

Against Stiegler's theory of the prosthetic. This is because each individual's incompleteness is itself something positive, the continuing existence of a reservoir of potentialities. (49-50 & 67ff). "Stiegler does not seem to countenance the possibility that humans share more than default or lack… If human individuals should not be conceived on the basis of fixed bioanthropological nature, I do not see why they should be conceived on the basis of original defect that we then take pains to call originary in entirely metaphysical nostalgia for foundations." (69)

Both Stiegler and Simondon are problematic from a Marxist point of view. One might criticize Stiegler for turning a particular historical situation (that of alienation under capitalism) into an originary characteristic of the human species in general. While much in Stiegler's critique of capitalism is spot-on, he turns cultural symptoms into to basic existential situations, while omitting to consider capital accumulation & exploitation as the motors of capitalism. This is what's weak (although not false) about his saying that capitalism short-circuits vital processes of individuation. In terms of Combes' analysis, Stiegler fails to articulate the way in which all new individuations, and especially group and collective ones, work by undoing or going before previously accomplished individuations. "Any collective individuation wherein a subject is constructed begins with disindividuation" (69).

Of course, Simondon himself (according to Combes' account) criticizes Marxism. He thinks that Marxism is too economistic, and too wedded to Labor, to be able to grasp the transversal relations between human beings and machines, or to understand the real source of alienation (which comes from human beings seeing themselves as either superior or inferior to machines, instead of existing in equality alongside machines). However, Combes adds that "at the very moment he critiques Marx, Simondon is far closer to him than he thinks." (72-73)."

For me, if this is the case it is because Simondon expresses a utopian vision in which "technical activity" becomes a "model of collective relation" (77), in a process of reticularity against hylomorphism (69). A transindividuation involving both human beings and machines, in equality: this to me matches Fourier as a vision of a "socialism" that would be radically different from our capitalist present. — But also, Simondon's vision is only thinkable in a situation of the real instead of merely formal subsumption of labor (and everything else) under capital, together with the sort of machine embodiment of general intellect envisioned in Marx's fragment on machines — in other words, Simondon-via-Combes makes thinkable what I otherwise haven't found convincing: Hardt & Negri's claim that real subsumption & general intellect make a reversal into communism possible. — The point being that this has to be, not the old dialectical reversal, but one that has to do with reservoirs of potential. In this respect Simondon is further away from Hegelianism, and less in danger of reverting to it, than are Hardt and Negri.

BEING & BECOMING; OBJECTS & OOO; INDIVIDUATION & AUTOPOIESIS

Combes' account of Simondon also gives us a different perspective on the arguments about substance and relation which have come up in connection with OOO, and about the functioning of systems in connection with theories of autopoiesis.

Harman would undoubtably say (& I think he does in fact say someplace) that Simondon "undermines" objects by reverting to the primordial undifferentiated flux out of which objects would emerge, and back into which they would revert. — But I think that this is too simple. Simondon complexifies Harman's binaries.

For one thing, I think that Simondon's basic question of where individuals come from, how they come to be, is an unavoidable one. I don't think that OOO answers this adequately (though the best OOO answer would be to say things emerge from Lucretian clinamens — does Bryant maintain this?). Simondon presents an account of emergence that actually works in detail, as opposed to the usual hand-waving invocation of emergence to explain anything that can't be explained otherwise. Becoming, for Simondon, is not a characterless flux (as Bergson's becoming is sometimes accused of being, e.g. by Bloch as well as by OOO people); it is rather a particular and well-defined OPERATION (or series of operations). "Being only is in becoming, that is, by its structuring in diverse domains of individuation (physical, biological, psychosocial, and also, in a certain sense, technological) through the work of operations." (4).

The preindividual out of which an individual emerges is itself a particular energetic state (or metastable equilibrium of states). Because it is metastable, it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions (in this way Simondon prefigures theories of chaos and complexity).

There is an initial nonindividuated state. But I want to argue that this is a situation in which Harman's opposition between distinct entities vs total undermining indistinction doesn't really apply. One can see this even, or especially, in Simondon's explicit treatment of Anaximander's apeiron. This is because, as Combes says, "apeiron, nature indetermined because still nonstructured, is charged with potentials: indetermined is thus not synonymous with undifferentiated" (49). Individuation is a process of DEPHASING (4). This involves the playing out of incompatibilities that are not oppositions, but that unfold in the process of crystallization.

RELATION: "relation would no longer be conceived of as something that "springs up between two terms that are already individuated": in effect, within the theory of individuation, relation is redefined as "an aspect of the internal resonance of a system of individuation" (IG, 27; IL, 29). In this respect, it has a "rank of being" and cannot be considered as an entirely logical reality" (16). — So, for Simondon, being is always relational, but this relationality is not absolute & cannot be pejoratively defined as OOO tries to do (nor can we simply make a division between internal and external relations). Indeed: "Already at the level of physical beings, that relation is constituting means that interiority and exteriority are not substantially different; there are not two domains, but a relative distinction; because, insofar as any individual is capable of growth, what was exterior to it can become interior. We may say then that relation, insofar as it is constituting, exists as a limit. As a function of this constituting power of the limit, the individual appears not as a finite being but as a limited being, that is, as a being in which "the dynamism of growth never stops" (IG, 91; IL, 93)." (20) — so, relations actually constitute the separation of interior from exterior, and guarantee that this border is itself never fixed.

The radical temporality of relations is why Harman's & Bryant's critiques of determining relations does not apply here. Relational processes determine the interior as separate from the exterior, i.e. these relations determine the individual as that which is not pre-defined by its relations.

Against predicates or qualities: "the characteristics of individuation that appear when we study the formation of crystalline forms of a same type (here: sulfur) are not "qualities" insofar as "such characteristics are prior to any idea of substance (since we are dealing with the same body)" (IG, 75; IL, 77). Transparency and opacity in particular can characterize the same form (sulfur crystal) in succession as a function of the temperature imposed on the metastable system at the moment of crystallization. Transparency and opacity thus cannot be thought of as qualities of a substance, but as characteristics appearing in a system undergoing a change of state. We must cease to apprehend being as a substance or a compound of substances if we are to cease understanding relation as that which links, within thought, elements separated within being." (16-17) — Thus relations are real, rather than being mental impositions upon objectively separate mental impressions.
"Being itself now appears as that which becomes by linking together." (17)

Simondon "takes great care to distinguish the notions of adaptation and equilibrium, which he rejects, from notions of evolution and invention" (62); this is why individuation must be opposed to autopoiesis. The linking of individual and milieu in Simondon is reminiscent of, but actually different from, the structural coupling of system and milieu in Luhmann-via-Bryant. Because potential transductively crosses the membrane or boundary, so that there is no question of operational closure. Difference between individuation and either conatus or autopoiesis. (This is a hesitation or ambiguity in Deleuze).

PERCEPTION, AFFECTIVITY, COGNITION

"To perceive is not primarily to grasp a form; rather it is the act taking place within an ensemble constituted by the relation between subject and world, through which a subject invents a form and thereby modifies its own structure and that of the object at the same time: we see only within a system in tension, of which we are a subensemble." (27) — Perception defined in system terms, instead of in phenomenological terms. But this system is quite different from those of the structuralists or from that of Derrida or Luhmann.

"The reality of psyche is transductive, that of a relation connecting two liaisons. This relation, as we have seen, operates in the individual as individualization; and it is operated through affectivity and emotivity, which define the "relational layer constituting the center of individuality" (IPC, 99; IL, 248). By situating the center of individuality in affectivity and emotivity, Simondon distances himself from the majority of conceptualizations of psychic individuality, which rely on a theory of consciousness or on the hypothesis of the unconscious." (30). — The psyche is a double process of (inner & outer) individuation, driven noncognitively by "affectivity & emotivity".

"The liaison between relation to self and relation to the world" takes place in "the affectivo-emotive layer, the domain of intensities" (30). Combes links Simondon's affectivity to Spinoza's "capacity to affect and to be affected" (30-31). This implies "an understanding of the subject wherein relation to the outside is not something coming to an already constituted subject from without, but something without which the subject would not be able to be constituted" (31). The individual needs an outside in order to be constituted at all. It doesn't encounter an outside in contrast to its own constituted insideness.

"Simondon opens a perspective in which "psychic reality is not closed upon itself. The psychic problematic cannot be resolved in intraindividual terms"." (31)

"Affectivity, the relational layer constituting the center of individuality, arises in us as a liaison between the relation of the individual to itself and its relation to the world. As such, it is primarily in the form of a tension that this relation to self is effectuated: affectivity, in effect, puts the individual in relation with something that it brings with it, but that it feels quite justifiably as exterior to itself as individual. Affectivity includes a relation between the individuated being and a share of not-yet-individuated preindividual reality that any individual carries with it: affective life, as "relation to self," is thus a relation to what, in the self, is not of the order of the individual. Affective life thus shows us that we are not only individuals, that our being is not reducible to our individuated being." (31).

"The elaboration of psychic individuality is transindividual… individual cannot psychically consist in itself." (40) "It is not relation to self that comes first and makes the collective possible, but relation to what, in the self, surpasses the individual, communicating without mediation with a nonindividual share in the other" (41). The social "is neither a substance, that is, one term of a relation, nor a sum of individual substances, but a "system of relations" (IPC, 179; IL, 295)." (43)

For this reason, neither psychologism nor (Durkheimian) sociology is valid — neither individuals nor society are preconstituted & self-contained. "In sum, if psychology and sociology misunderstand the reality of the collective, it is because, when they apprehend it from the angle of the individual or that of society, which are but two polar extremes, both of them forget that this reality consists principally of "relational activity between inside group and outside group" (IPC, 179; IL, 295)." (43) — & note that "relational activity" = processes of individuation.

How does this relate to Latour's Tarde-against-Durkheim?

Emotion: "Properly speaking, emotion coincides so entirely with the very movement of constitution of the collective that we may say, "there is a collective to the extent that an emotion is structured" (IPC, 211; IL, 314; emphasis added). The collective, as Simondon understands it, is born at the same time as emotion is structured across many subjects, as structuration of such emotion" (51). — "This reversibility of individuation of the collective and structuration of emotion makes clear that the most intimate of ourselves, what we always experience in terms of inalienable singularity, does not belong to us individually; intimacy arises less from a private sphere than from an impersonal affective life, which is held immediately in common." (51) — Hence an idea of the common (again cf Hardt & Negri)

How Simondon undermines the rigid distinction between life & nonlife (Lamarre). (Cf Hayles' praise of OOO for doing this).

I will be at this conference in Rio de Janeiro later this week. 

Here’s the abstract for my talk:

THINKING BLIND

Sentience beyond the human: what might it mean? Maureen McHugh’s science fiction short story, “The Kingdom of the Blind,” adresses this dilemma. The story concerns a computer programmer who comes to suspect that the software system for which she helps provide technical support just might be “aware.” The story is something of a speculative realist fable, as it moves from the epistemological question of how we might know that a piece of software is sentient, to the ontological one of what such sentience might be, in and for itself, apart from any correlation with our own thought, or our own ability to understand it and communicate with it. The story does not provide any definitive answers, but it suggests the possibility of a different (nonhuman) model of thought: one that is non-cognitive, non-intentional, non-phenomenological, and “autistic” (taking this latter word without the usual pejorative connotations).

In her science fiction novel The Highest Frontier (2011), Joan Slonczewski poses the question of what it would mean for plants to have a sense of humor. A biologist “clones a set of genes” into an Arabidopsis plant, in order to make the plant grow neurons. This allows the plants to develop neural networks attuned to various mental states. One group of plants “has a laughter network. It detects a stimulus and finds it funny.” The plant “laughs” by shaking its leaves back and forth. The question then arises, what might a plant find funny? The answer turns out to be an inverted light spectrum. The plants laugh at this, because “it contradicts a established norm, that of the solar spectrum,” to which the plants are generally accustomed.

The scenario of plants with a sense of humor is an extrapolation, of course; but it isn’t as farfetched as it might seem. Anthony Trewavas, Daniel Chamovitz, and other biologists have established that plants are in fact sentient: they may not be conscious, but they think and feel. Plants actively sense what is happening in the world around them, and respond flexibly to the conditions they encounter. Although they do not have brains or neurons, their cells communicate with one another, employing the same neurotransmitters as animal and human nervous systems do. In other words, the chemical basis for feeling and cognition is already there in plants, just as it is in animals. When Slonczewski’s fictional scientist adds genes for the production of neural cells, she doesn’t endow the plants in question with entirely new capacities, so much as she allows for the enhanced outward expression, in visual, tactile, and “semiochemical” forms, of processes that are already taking place. The interposed neurons allow the plant’s feelings to be translated into a form that we can comprehend.

Wittgenstein wrote that “if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” The issue here is also one of translation. Wittgenstein doesn’t say that the lion is mindless, or that it lacks the sort of interiority that human being possess. The point is rather that the lives of lions (as of Arabidopsis plants) are quite different from those of human beings. It is hard for us to imagine what a lion would care about, just as it is hard for us to imagine what plants would find funny. And since “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life,” we cannot expect to comprehend a lion’s or a plant’s speech, unless we can bridge the gap between its “form of life” and our own.

What does Wittgenstein mean by “forms of life”? The difficulty is that these are both collective and singular. On the one hand, forms of life are always shared. No entity can subsist in isolation. All life, all existence, takes place in complexly organized societies. And these societies — as Latour shows us, and as Whitehead’s use of the term already implies — are never simply or exclusively human. Rather, they always involve a complex assemblage of all sorts of human and nonhuman actors.

My body, for instance, is a “society” that includes innumerable bacteria in addition to my own cells, which themselves are differentiated into many forms. And this body-assemblage in turn cannot subsist without the nourishment and protection it receives from the societies, of various sorts and sizes, that exist all around it: from the air I breathe and the food I eat to the unjust economic system in which I am forced to function, and on up to the worldwide ecological network that includes the Earth’s crust and the atmosphere, and that ultimately binds me to lions and to Arabidopsis plants.

Thus, multiple forms of life are intertwined in my very existence; I am always engaged in many of them at the same time. Forms of life, and languages, cross all sorts of boundaries. They have fuzzy outlines, and resist precise definition. And they are promiscuous, generating what Latour calls a “proliferation of hybrids.” Forms of life stretch out everywhere; they do not respect the borders between entities, between types, or between species.

At the same time, however, forms of life are never holistic or total. They are always particular, always restricted in focus. They overlap, but they do not coincide. Preparing and consuming food is one form of life; writing philosophical essays is another; working in a factory is yet another. Atheists have different forms of life than do religious believers; well-to-do Americans have different forms of life than do shantytown dwellers in the global South. Human beings in general have different forms of life than do lions or Arabidopsis plants. Often these different forms of life are even antagonistic to one another. The forms of life of Anopheles mosquitoes and of investment bankers, for instance, are directly deleterious to my own survival and flourishing.

These disparate forms of life all inhere in a common world. “We find ourselves,” as Whitehead says, “amid a democracy of fellow creatures.” Forms of life involve multiple forces and practices, continually jostling up against one another in what Whitehead calls a “disjunctive diversity.” I cannot “withdraw,” or close myself off from all these encroaching entities; I cannot simply walk away from the bankers and the mosquitoes. For as Whitehead puts it, “we seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive” (emphasis added). This means that we cannot break the world down according to an opposition between observing subjects on the one hand, and objects of perception on the other. We cannot count on the givenness or manifestation of the world, with ourselves as the privileged recipients of this gift. Whitehead is an anti-correlationist avant la lettre: the world does not “depend on us,” he says, precisely because we do not have any special place within it. We exist in the “same sense” as do all other entities.

Forms of life may be inimical to one another (what Hegel calls contradiction), or even entirely incommensurable with one another (what Leibniz calls incompossibility). And yet they all inhere in the world together. “Bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discords belong to the same motley world,” as Deleuze says in his commentary on Whitehead. This is why translation is such an urgent problem. As Latour puts it, “there are no equivalents, only translations… the best that can be done between actants is to translate the one into the other.” There is no pre-established harmony among “incommensurable and irreducible forces.”

Translation is then inherently problematic, because it is not just a matter of moving from one code, or one language, to another. Rather, translation involves the violence of codifying, or putting into language, a reality that stands outside of all languages and codes. Translation endeavors to make an equivalent for that which has no equivalent. It forces an exchange between incommensurables. “If there are exchanges,” Latour says, “these are always unequal and cost a fortune both to establish and to maintain.”

This means that the problem of translation is really one of aesthetics. Kant established the basic antinomy of modern aesthetics in his Third Critique. On the one hand, every “judgment of taste” is entirely singular: it is non-cognitive, it has no concept behind it, and it cannot be generalized. On the other hand, every “judgment of taste” aspires to — or even demands — the assent of others. It makes a claim, Kant says, to be “universally communicable without mediation by a concept.” We may understand translation, therefore, as the endeavor to capture singularity within some universal medium of exchange, in order thereby to compel acceptance by everyone. For Kant, this takes the form of a sensus communis as the non-cognitive basis for the very possibility of cognition.

Kant’s antinomy of aesthetic taste is central to modern thought. What happens when incommensurables are measured together, or captured in the same universal code? Can disparate singularities be brought into contact, without being effaced? This question haunts — among others — Marx, Wittgenstein, and Whitehead. For Marx, Kant’s sensus communis is materialized in money as a “universal equivalent.” Wittgenstein’s critique of the notion of “private language” is rooted in Kant’s questions about “the communicability of sensation.” And Whitehead answers Kant’s antinomy with the founding principle of his own aesthetics: the injunction to convert exclusions and oppositions into contrasts.

In his near-future short story “Deodand,” the science fiction writer Karl Schroeder also addresses this dilemma. A computer company is having trouble with its autonomous robots. They refuse orders to kill animals and to chop down trees. The robots have “several categories for objects: person, tool, property, and standing reserve.” The problem, from the company’s point of view, is that the robots regard cats and trees as “persons,” instead of relegating them to the (Heideggerian) status of mere “standing reserve,” disposable at will.

It turns out that this situation is a result of ubiquitous computing, or of what Bruce Sterling calls “the Internet of Things.” Everything in the environment is tagged with sensors, which collect “fantastic amounts of data” and upload them to the Internet. Every object broadcasts information about its location, its activities, and its state of being. For the robots, all this activity indicates personhood:

the trees were people; so were the cats. The hillside itself had a vast icon hovering over it, as if some heavy, slumbering spirit lay under it. And the icons merged and split, identities shifting according to relationships and patterns whose roots lay hidden in the networks that gave rise to them… Your team thought [the robot] was mistaking things for people. But it’s the things themselves that are telling him they’re human.

Where Sterling assumes that all these trackable data are just “for us,” human Internet endusers, Schroeder’s story proposes that the data given off by things are reflexively available to the things themselves. An object attains personhood when it is rich enough in data. Digitization is a kind of abstraction: it translates the singularity of things into a universal, inter-exchangeable code.

Gennady, the human protagonist of Schroeder’s story, is ambivalent about this; he tires of the accumulation — and the sameness — of virtual data, and treasures his moments of direct bodily contact in the outdoors, when he can walk around “without augmented senses.” But at the same time, Gennady is forced to admit that, thanks to ubiquitous data collection, “the whole physical world is waking up.” We tend to believe “that there’s only two kinds of thing, people, and objects.” But actually, things are always “a little bit of both.” And thanks to data translation, “we can’t ignore that fact anymore.”

Just as the neural networks added to plants in Slonczewski’s novel allow the plants’ experiences to be translated into humanly-apprehensible terms, so the digital data generated by sensors in Schroeder’s story work more generally, to translate objects and subjects — or things and persons — into a medium where they can more fully apprehend one another, and interact on close-to-even terms. The traditional dualisms are effaced: for we all inhere, in the same sense, in a common world. And exclusions and oppositions are converted into aesthetic contrasts; they are rescued from their isolation, without being subsumed into an overarching Totality or Whole.