Tag: cyborgs

On muteness:

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“The differend demands a rigorous listening-not because of some a priori rule which says I must do the other’s bidding, but precisely due to the absence of a priori rules, to the sui generis nature of the encounter Every differend has never happened before-it is always happening for the first time, and thus requires an openness to every possible way of linking onto the phrases produced. “Phrase” here does not necessarily mean linguistic phrases, but it does mean “utterance” produced by a semiotic agent or whatever is taken to be a semiotic agent by the rules of the language game. In other words, in some contexts a lighting bolt might be a phrase (as when a mystic believes herself to be peaking to God, who then sends down a lightning bolt in response), whereas in others it won’t be (as in a meteorological di course). Silence is a phrase when someone chooses to withhold or not speak. Thu , for our purposes, everything depends upon showing that nonhumans can be, and are, semiotic agents and maintaining a context in which what they produce counts as utterances in spite of the fact that these utterance will ncesarily be, for lack of a better term, different. In other words, this model of democratic being-with requires that we figure the other as capable of meaningful utterances even as we are unable to understand these utterances.

Cary Wolfe’s critique of Lyotard’s notion of the differend centers precisely on the notion of agency and its humanistic entanglements. Because the differend takes place between agents of phrases, it is not the best model for understanding our differences from animals when animals are “mute” as a matter of course, not agentially. The animal’s silence is not a phrase and so not a proper silence, “it is not a withholding, and thus does not express the ethical imperative of dissensus and the diflerend” (Wolfe 2003:59). Because the animal cannot be said to be the agent of its utterances in the same way as the human, Wolfe argues, this fundamentally undermines the effectiveness of the differend schema for a multispecies theory of justice. Lyotard’s humanist commitments sneak in “in the taken-for-granted muteness of the animal, which, crucially, can never be a withholding” (Wolfe 2003:62). However, apart from what Lyotard may or may not have written about the animal, it is important to examine what role agency could possibly play in a philosophy that begins from the condition of a relation of not-understanding the other. What does it mean to identify a being as a semiotic agent-or not-in conditions of not-understanding?”

From, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway 

 

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: “My Roomba Has Achieved Enlightenment”

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Robots are typically seen as having no consciousness. But potentially they have the highest kind: equanimity. This is the emotion Buddhism counts as among the most sublime. The Buddha evidently described the equanimous mind as “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility, and without ill will.” My Roomba is certainly without hostility and ill will. Going about her daily rounds, she’s something like blithe—both self-contained and indifferent to human value systems. As for abundant, exalted, and immeasurable, I can’t be sure. How to measure these things, or is that what “immeasurable” means?

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BookTuber Tuesday – »Critical Zones« Discussion of the Film »Storytelling for Earthly Survival« ZKM | Karlsruhe

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See also: Gods in our Machines

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk’ by KELSEY D. ATHERTON

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The 2020s are, in a real, tangible sense, the conclusion of The Long 1980s. Writing in the 1980s, foundational cyberpunk authors were watching as leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursued a set of political reforms collectively known as neoliberalism. Prioritizing competition in the market above all else, these reforms were fundamentally a political project, aimed at shrinking the public sphere and undoing many of the commitments to social welfare that had been made in the wake of the chaos, upheaval, and deprivation of the first half of the 20th century. The neoliberal turn was a project of unmaking the state for individuals and communities and remaking it for capital.

Cyberpunk conjured a world at this end state of neoliberal reorganization. Islands in the Net features drone warfare launched against data havens at the behest of corporations. In Blade Runner, the profit considerations of multinational companies determine worker personhood. There is more than a little of the Tyrell Corporation’s prudent life expectancy design in how Amazon responds to worker protest over a lack of personal protective equipment. Today, cyberpunk’s anticipated neoliberal end state is nothing more fanciful than life as we know it.

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Donna Haraway: Story Telling For Earthly Survival’

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Armen Avanessian, Peter Frase, Daniel Rourke, Ytasha Womack, Laurie Penny and, Fabrizio Terranova’s documentary on Donna Haraway frame and reframe our thinking about our possible future by telling different stories. In the present light of fake news and alternative facts, Haraway urges: “Thinking is what we are about, and is a materialistic practice with other thinkers and some of the best thinking is done as story telling.”

Writers and critics of science fiction and fantasy have used the term ‘speculative fiction’, referring to stories that about imaginary futures, since the late 19th century. Its emphasis is less on the ‘science’ in fiction and more on the social changes that result from the advances in science and technology, extrapolated into the future. Speculative fiction is a reflection of the now. It breaks open ideas we have about our current world and how we want it to be.

…

Fabrizio Terranova portraits the scholar Donna Haraway in the documentary: Donna Haraway, Story Telling For Earthly Survival. In it, Haraway says that the story of the planet is at stake, there is work to be done to bring attention to positive proposals of how things could be different. We need to “make the weak stories stronger and the strong stories weaker,” she says. She is infectiously positive, both in her interview as well as her nuanced writings about possible futures.

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