Latour and Risk

From Pandora's Hope::

Speech implies by definition the risk of misunderstanding across the huge gaps between different species. If scientists want to bridge the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to a lot of noise, and, yes, more then a little bit of nonsense. (17)

And, for a nice parallel, D. Diane Davis' opposition to philosophic logocentrism from Breaking Up [at] Totality:

An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificed for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position. A post-humanist ethics ought not be about shutting down the flow but about opening it up, pulling back the stops. (19)

Risk and nonsense, nonsense and risk.

Very Large Finitude and Ecological Irony

Figure/Ground is featuring an interview with Timothy Morton, professor of ecology, theory, and literature. Morton was first brought to my attention last fall by a grad student in my Contemporary Rhetorics class. This snippet from the interview grabbed my attention, especially given my interest in Levinas' concept of (metaphysical) infinity and posthumanism (something fairly anti-thetical to Levinas' own thought).

No, what is ironic enough is ecological awareness. Why? Because we have a situation in which we have enormously increased knowledge of the nonhuman—global warming, evolution, extinction, on and on. Yet we are also overwhelmed by these nonhumans, and, to top it off, for precisely the same reasons. The ecological age is what I call the age of asymmetry. We have a huge amount of knowledge and there is a huge amount of objects, and those things are like giant asymmetrically related spheres. The more we know, the more we realize how embedded we are in radiation, pollution, the biosphere, risks of all kinds on huge inhuman time scales. Like the half-life of Plutonium is 24.1 thousand years. One hundred thousand years from now seven percent of global warming effects will still be happening as the carbon is slowly absorbed by igneous rocks. Infinity, inner space, Kantian stuff is so much easier on the ego than this, which I call very large finitude.

Ecological irony is realizing how caught in your reality you are. It’s like finding out that you’re frozen inside some gigantic Perspex paperweight. You can see everything—I can Google Earth the fish in my mum’s pond in London for heaven’s sake. Yet for this very reason, you just can’t peel yourself out of the Perspex.

[...]

Ecological irony doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means doing something and feeling something very intense, yet open and weird. “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their army anymore” (Apocalypse Now).

Toward Kair-erotically Thinking Techno-Determinism

I spent the morning today doing some reading/writing on my Computers and Writing presentation, which will deal explicitly with how social media played a role in diagnosing and dealing with my daughter's cancer. One article that I read today was John Potts' "Who's Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory." I like this article for its compact summary of Marshall McLuhan, and for its guilt-free recognition that technologies can have intrinsic properties and structuring effects on consciousness. Summarizing the woks of Havelock, McLuhan, Goddy, Watt, Ong, Eisenstein, Kittler, and Meyrowitz, Potts identifies one constant proposition: "as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole. The effects may be observed in the long historical span of inventions from literacy to interactive multimedia."

Human thinking of thought comes to resemble the media we use to capture, express and exchange that thinking on thought. At one point in time, humans created television; I might call this thinking "being-chronoslogically." But let's recognize that, at this moment, it is equally true that television creates humans, which would be thinking "becoming-kairoserotically. Chronological and Kairotic. History and Phenomenology. Logos and Eros. Kairos, phenomenology, and eros are the web (presented colloquially as transience, interactivity, plurality respectively in my dissertation). This is precisely why rhetoric, and more particularly Levinas, are central to my understanding of what the web could help us be-come.

Whether the relation between technology and subjectivity/sociality is a good thing is another discussion altogether. My reading today consisted of a number of cultural studies / neo-marxist / critical / materialist objections to the "social" media dominating today's communicative and cultural landscape. In short: the Web 2.0 honeymoon is over. Its a bit depressing, but requires our attention. I won't give it that attention right here, right now (but I will try to in the coming days). I will argue in a few weeks at C&W, these important analyses of the Internet's relation to capitalism and hegemonic power fail to account for the affective dimensions of the social web. Nor do they take into account the possibility that such affective and ethical relations could come to challenge their ontological-materialist-technological grounds. These critical theorists read "the medium is the message" quite literally--they track who owns and economically benefits from the medium at hand. I have Levinasian objections to this, but I will save those too for another post.

For this post, I'll follow Potts' suggestion that a little technodeterminism might not be such a bad thing if we want to reveal "the most profound and long-term cultural effects of those media." I say so provided we attempt to balance the "inherent properties of technologies" against economic, political, and social [and I wish I could here explicate this as Levinasian] considerations of media. We have to be responsible for the whole bag. Of course, I will recognize that the precise "inherent" properties of any medium are indeterminate--and we are talking in a speculative hermeneutic riddled with desire. This complexity does not make it a futile, irrelevant or dangerous task. Well, perhaps a dangerous one. But given that things so often become within the realm of possibility we imagine for them, it makes it all the more important a task. An essential task. Heidegger critiqued of Marx: "before a change in the world comes a conception of change in the world." Let's use technological determinacy as a vehicle for initiating-continuing-popularizing the construction of such a change.

Returning to my initial quote from Potts, perspective and scopes are the keys here ("the long historical span of inventions"). Materialist critiques focus on interpreting a now with a (linear) eye to the future. As one such theorist, David Golumbia offers in response to posthuman notions of transcendental change: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." His pessimism is routed in a narrow view of recent history (say 200 years) that documents how corporate and capitalist interests continually usurp individual choice into hegemonic, centralized institutions of power. From such a perspective, individuals are currently contributing (via free content) to their own subjugation, and the forms of power subjugating them are becoming increasingly invisible. Such a history becomes linear in the sense that there is little chance to break free (except, perhaps, for unplugging all our computers and reading all the Right [and by that, of course, I mean Left] books--sorry, couldn't help one cynical jab).

Against this pessimism, media theory would project a future from meager traces of the now and an interpretation of then. Its optimism is grounded in a long-look at human history documenting how media technology transforms social, political, and economic life. Most of those transformations are, in the long run, for the better for everyone involved. These transformations, however, did not take five, ten, or even twenty years. They took centuries. I would like to argue that this is thinking history (chronos) kairotically--to think of history as producing a present that generates the past, rather than thinking how the past caused the present. Either case, I would argue, is within view of infinite spectral futures that incessantly haunt us (that is, whether we are functions of the past or its originators, we are always, already haunted from the future, from the judge beyond the horizon of the time that unfolds).

And I would conclude by stressing that the future is as indeterminate as the absolute inherent properties of technologies. We will have to fight for any future we wish to come to be. The kairos for a potential chronos always begins now, in the stories we tell ourselves we are to Be-come.

This is Much Better than a Flying Car

Remember Geordi Laforge from Star Trek?

Well there's an article in the Guardian.uk on a device that translates impulses on the tongue into visual data, effectively allowing blind people to see. Seriously, sometimes science rocks.

Obligatory Post from a Sophistic Baseball Fan

[A little context: last week I used a series of ESPN articles in a workshop on direct quoting, hence the sometimes forced references. I think the workshop was successful, however.]

Dear Commissioner Selig,

I understand in the wake of recent news the desire to punish Alex Rodriguez and to strike his name from the records. I understand the desire to cleanse baseball.

I understand writers such as Mark Fainaru-Wada and T.J. Quinn discrediting Alex's testimony on the grounds that he had to know what he was taking. Perhaps they, along with Gene Wojciechowski and Rob Neyer and countless others, are right: Alex is still holding back on us. He hasn't told us the whole truth. Perhaps he is even still lying to us.

But, in terms of records and punishment, please understand you do not have to punish Alex. The baseball media will do that for you. I am sure Hall of Fame Voter Pedro Gomez is not alone in his stance that "As a hall of fame voter... I know I have made up my mind that I will never vote for anyone I believe to have used PEDs." Furthermore, as Gomez reports in "It's only just begun for A-Rod," he can expect harsh treatment on the road and at home, in front of suspicious, rough, and scorned Yankee fans. A suspension might be merciful on Alex at this point.

In the end, the desire to punish Alex extends from our own guilt, and an unspeakable desire to reprimand ourselves. All of us, baseball owners, executives, fans, and players are to blame for the willful ignorance necessary to produce the culture that Alex describes. As many commentators have argued, we will never know the extent to which performance enhancing drugs permeated the game. Let us not engage in a witchhunt. Let us not engage in revisionist history. Let us take responsibility for our own culpability, let us deal with a stained record-book, marked only by our guilt and disappointment. Let us allow this past to serve as a reminder that we need to work vigilantly to preserve baseball's future. Let Alex return to the field to pursue those once hallowed records; let us all remember what we sanctioned.

Marc C. Santos

Future of Sports

For the past few years I've been arguing that the steroids controversy in baseball is about much more that the purity of sport- it touches the incredible transformations medical science will bring to biology. It is about our relationship to our bodies. We might go as far as to call it the next great imperialization, as we move "in."

Sports Illustrated has a story this week on Dr. Se-Jin Lee- a professor of molecular biology and genetics- who has isolated the genes regulating muscle generation. The slant of the story, of course, is how such procedures could further exacerbate problems with performance enhancement in professional sports; but this misses the larger point. From the article:

Lee is pushing the frontier of genetic research into muscle building because the same breakthroughs that could boost performance in sports might also bring about a medical revolution. Advances could not only mitigate the effects of diseases like muscular dystrophy but also give senior citizens back their strength--which, often, would amount to giving them back their lives.

And:

Thanks to the Human Genome Project, someday all of us could carry our entire genetic blueprint on a microchip, which we'd present to doctors during medical treatments.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this article and the broader issue. Though I try to take care of my body (working out, Edy's slow-churned, etc.), I've never considered my body sanctimoniously. If it didn't work, and I could "replace" it, no problem. I've also always been sympathetic to Cipher from the Matrix- I'll take a nice, virtual existence over a shitty "real" world everyday of the week. No hesitation. Hey, its all virtual anyway.

I think what this story touches upon, the reason I felt compelled to post something, is that is signals the approach of the debate that will frame the early 21st century in terms of science, ethics, and humanity. If the atomic bomb was the symbol of the 20th century, then, perhaps, the microscopic gene will be the symbol of the 21st. We will have to articulate, and in that articulation limit, what a human should, and perhaps, will be (or be able to become). I sit somewhere in between the silent poles of the article: between an idealistic appreciation (and, as I approach 32, expectation) for the future and an apocalyptic sense of foreboding - a feeling that we tread in areas we are not ready to go. Throughout history, humans haven't always been the most responsible explorers.