Making Difference, Part I

I recently read and reread Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (Continuum 2008, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton). I chose this book specifically to assist me in developing a radically engaged and embedded art practice. Before I can begin to outline such a practice (Part II), I would like to give the following book overview to bring curious people up to speed and to allow me to organize concepts and ideas.

Guattari begins the essay by illustrating a broad range of problems occurring on a global scale, implicating all countries, nations, peoples. These problems include but are not limited to the warming of the climate, the oppression of women, children, and minorities, the deterioration of social life and general human relations, overpopulation and food shortages, the complacency of disempowered people and classes, fundamentalist religious sects, labor struggles, all in the context of exponential techno-scientific and economic growth.

A very bleak outlook indeed! While all the problems above are seemingly unrelated, Guattari presents them as the emergent outcomes of a global capitalism that performs several different actions:

Homogenizing systems of value (material, cultural, social, aesthetic, etc.) into essentially one univocal system of value (money, currency) is to essentially abstract very real and diverse entities such that they can be considered on some field of sameness: How much is that pair of sunglasses? How much does it cost to maintain that wildlife preserve? How many sunglasses is that wildlife worth? The danger with this logic is that it allows one to make very simple evaluations such that an ecosystem can be weighed by cost/profit margins against some other object (shopping mall, highway, housing development, lumber or paper pulp) as well as enabling complex trades dealing in sex, slavery, marriage, etc. The ecosystem, as a monetary value, will always lose, as will cultures, liberal arts, disempowered peoples, bodies, ethics…

Restricting and codifying flows of movement, matter, and energy (essential to life at all levels) into concrete systems inhibits evolution or change. This can be as simple as the flows of waste in the sewer system of a city (not all codifications are bad—in fact, some are necessary) but can also manifest as the oppressive hierarchical structure of the government or nuclear family that inhibits any radical change of policies, parties, or individuals.

Our subjectivities are worked over and made complacent not only by a homogenous mass media steeped in capitalistic and normative propaganda, but also by the specter of Freud still haunting psychology, psychiatry and popular everyday views of the mind and human behavior. This codified concept of the mind is a stabilizing factor in the worst way possible: it is now difficult to imagine subjectivities that could be anything other than a correspondence to Freud’s ‘mythical frame of reference’—the mind is envisioned a normative, disempowered faculty instead of an autonomous, self-exceeding capacity.

It is also the culture of mass consumption that has silenced otherwise diverse social groups and movements. For example, Guattari gives the example of old class antagonisms giving way to passivity by allowing the working classes to feel ‘a vague sense of belonging’ (21), ‘offering them a ‘psuedo-participation’ in the political debate as ‘consumers’ (84). It is mass media ‘serialism’ along with the acceptance of capitalistic values that is propagating a normative standard for living, thinking, consuming, and being across borders. We are speaking of a certain homogenization of culture that is an exceptional outcome of world capitalism. This is not to say we are mindless robots; rather we are just embedded and embodied within our environments.

The way forward and out of this mess, is ‘an ethico-political articulation—which [Guattari calls] ecosophy—between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity)’ (19). One unfamiliar with Guattari’s work with Deleuze will wonder at the odd conjoining of cultural terms with natural ones (mental-ecology, social-ecology). ‘Ecology’ here is not metaphor; he means quite literally that ideas, behaviors, social groups, etc. all have ecologies (flows of matter and energy and the constant negotiations that go along with those processes), just as the outside environments have ecologies. That Guattari doesn’t take the nature/culture distinction for granted is of the upmost importance. It is at once to say that the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ worlds are not opposed (that the interior is generated as a process of folding-in of the exterior) such that an environmental concept is appropriate to apply to a concept of the mind. It is also to say that the distinction between nature and culture is not a given character of reality; it is an outcome of particular human practices. Ecologies are domains of life; and indeed Guattari conceives of life in a very broad sense, beyond the organic/inorganic distinction, perhaps similar to Whitehead who defines it as a universal tendency toward novelty (for Guattari toward difference).

Guattari poses these three ecologies as domains of flows and movement in relation to each other. None of these ecologies are taken as absolute (as they tend to be conceived conventionally; ecology/culture/mind), but are posed as tentative starting points, specific to the cultural paradigm we find ourselves in. These are by no means solutions in themselves to the problems posed above—it is only by exploring each of these areas in relation to each of the others that true ecological problems can begin to be articulated outside of the typical value system of capitalism, and from different reference points.

This is a call to action, but differs from any before in that there’s no unifying principle or view. It is a call to action to produce difference, in as many different ways as possible. Inherent to these processes are the possible lines of flight that will contradict each other, will be destructive, that will crash and burn. This is evolution. There might also be lines of flight that will go far enough such that it’s passengers will no longer be recognized as human. To get out of this mess, we must invent vehicles that will transport us. It is as simple to say that the best solution Guattari is positing is to develop new modes of living and being of the world, to develop new ways of thinking about ourselves in relationship to each other and to the larger world of organic and inorganic life, to develop new systems of value that are diverse and dynamic, not flat and equivalent.

Whitehead and Creativity

In reading Sawyer’s Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2006), I grew frustrated with his unwillingness to explore the very term ‘creativity’ around which his whole text was structured. It just so happened that the copy of Sawyer’s text I was reading was cut off at the right margin of one of the pages. This allowed me to make a transversal intervention into the text, to insert my own critiques/complaints in between his lines. I used one particular sentence of his (in red, below) that was broken up in order to write a couple paragraphs. My hopes were to transform an ultimately humanist and narrow scope into an open-ended one:

Any s…

Erious discussion of creativity must be speculative, ongoing, transformative. Creativity is that capacity by which things change. Why scientifically study it? Science (or pseudoscience) is that by which things are categorized, defined, stabilized. Creativity is always looking at the possible and unknown, the domain called future. It’s always finding a way out, ways to exceed what its already begun.

To claim creativity as a human capacity (let alone a psychological one) is to misunderstand it entirely. Whitehead was the one to coin the term in the early 20^th century (yes, it’s less than 100 years old). His project differed from recent scholarship in that the

…study of creativity in the early years of the 21^st century must explain th…

eoretically: creativity in connection with human disciplines and concerns, such as artistic creations or technological developments. I believe that in this context its application to/inclusion of scientific practice was perceived as a liberal and progressive development. However, creativity was originally formulated as a metaphysical principle to explain the mechanisms by which novelty enters the Universe and was hardly limited to concerns of our species. It this sense, Whitehead was a posthumanist scholar. He used creativity as a method of affording ‘things’ (in a general sense including objects, ideas, values, etc.) an agency and life of their own--as ‘things’ oriented toward an openness to process and evolution. We must not forget this capacity of the term ‘creativity’ when it’s so commonly and narrowly applied to the comparatively tiny

…range of human innovation.

The following diagram helped me to formulate a notion of what creativity is, how it operates:

 

Finite and Infinite Games

I was recently required to read Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse.

Carse begins by describing two types of ‘games,’ a word that he uses literally, as in sports events, board games, etc., and figuratively, as an engagement; life, in this sense, could be viewed as a type of game. Carse operates by setting up dualistic oppositions and aphorisms: a finite game is a game played with a certain end in mind, an infinite game played ‘for the purpose of continuing play’ (section 1). This certainly doesn’t seem a dangerous opposition in and of itself, but his methodology continues to utilize dualisms in order to argue his points. This leads him into confused and murky territory, I feel, especially when he tries to explain enormously complex concepts such as sexuality, art, nature, wealth, and culture.
 

Ultimately, Carse is attempting to get at what I would call an open practice: He's attempting to situate himself (or the individual) in the productive territory of things, processes and flows, a node embedded within a network. Carse is trying to suggest a life that is inspired, affected, affecting, worlding, world-producing, congruous with a radical sense of reality. He simply lacks the tools needed for such a transition.

His first problem is his adherence to humanism and the devotion to the human as the ultimate center of activity, opposed to nature which he defines as ‘the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture’ (section 70). Furthermore, Carse goes on, this ‘unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language’ (section 72). What Carse is doing is placing us outside of and separate from nature and the world at large. He takes the categories of culture/nature for granted, establishing them as opposites as is Western convention. It is from this point that Carse can begin his argument of finite and infinite games: Nature is always infinite, an open system, but we as humans have the unique capability of being finite, opposed to nature, living within a closed-world. Carse is trying to establish an open practice, but is unwilling to let it wander past established dichotomy. As such, we can live according to nature, imitating it (for he claims it is only available to us through metaphor), but never really in it. I disagree with this method: Nature is not a domain of reality, but an enacted distinction which comes about and is stabilized through iterative practices; the way we talk about it, for example, or the way we exhibit it in natural history museums, zoos, etc. What I believe to be true is that we are embedded and embodied entities; we are very much within the same world that consists of what Carse terms ‘Nature.’ We are always creative and 'infinite' in the same way that the rest of the world is creative. We, as humans, have no unique standing within this world as 'players' or agents or willed beings; we are agents among agents standing in-relation-to-x, not apart-from-x. Carse's project is to create new culture, new practice: in order to do so he mustn’t close it off from the world, or narrow its scope to purely human activity.

'Things’ embody and participate in open practice just as humans do; including finite games. To illustrate this point, let’s take for example a soccer game. Carse would have us believe that a soccer game is a finite game, that the outcome is already determined, that it’s a game for winners and losers. What he’s neglecting to notice is that the soccer game is surrounded by sets of practices within a world; it has its own agency; it is a system, and an open one.

A wikiological dig (with implied approximate accurateness which is suitable for our purposes here) finds there is evidence that many countries have played games that involve ‘kicking a ball’ for more than 4000 years: China, Japan, Egypt, Greece, and Rome are among these. It is likely that there were many different origins and false starts. Tsu Chu / Cuju is an ancient Chinese sport, similar to soccer in that a ball may be struck with any part of the body save the hands into the opposing team’s goal. This game may have evolved as early as 2600 BCE in the age of the Yellow Emperor. It was certainly prevalent by 475 BCE, during the Warring States Period, and was used as a type of military drill to train enlisted soldiers. It was then culturally appropriated and popularized by the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). Players of the royal court were very much like contemporary professional athletes: revered, commemorated, and well-paid. The sport then fell out of favor during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644 CE) and finally ceased to be regular cultural engagement.

In Japan, Kerami was the first sport to be ‘highly developed,’ from 644 CE during the Asuka period. It was influenced by Cuju, and even shares the same calligraphic characters. The point of the game differs from Cuju in that the point is to keep the ball suspended in the air, much like hackeysack, with all players cooperating toward this endeavor. Still, this difference didn’t keep Chinese and Japanese players from playing the first known international game of 'proto-soccer' that we know of in the 7th century.

Since (possibly) 2600 BCE innovation happened, things were affected: what arrived as a military innovation then moved horizontally to create a new cultural event; most probably a new culture entirely. Fur and feather-filled balls were eventually replaced with double-skinned air-filled balls. In turn, this technological modification that allowed for a higher degree of ‘bounciness’ surely affected the way the game was played, the way the players responded and behaved. There was a bifurcation in the way the goal posts were set up--some posts were strung with a net in between them, or in other games there was only a single post in the middle of the field. Cuju brought with it a new economy in which amateur players paid professionals to train them that they might get initiated into the league; the wealthy would show off their Cuju fields on their property and host games; memorabilia and physical objects commemorating games or players were bought and sold; the athletes could be inducted into the royal league and be paid for by the emperor. Indeed, to the extent that the game was folded into the royal court it was politicized. Not only did it change the face of politics, or rather that of the emperor who made a pastime of the sport, but it was itself made regulated and codified with sets of standards and rules. It even involved itself in international affairs and relations between the Chinese and Japanese.

If Kerami was indeed derived from Cuju, that means the game underwent bifurcation and evolution of its own. In Carse’s own terms, a ‘finite’ game with winners and losers changed into an ‘infinite’ game that attempted to keep play going as long as possible, cooperatively. The game stumbled through 4000 years of history, continuously affected but also affecting everything it bumped into along the way. The fact that it ‘died out’ makes no difference or justifies the ‘finite game’ label; we still may be living out the consequences of the culture that was created via the emergent events that unfolded because of Cuju every time we turn the TV on to see a soccer game on the screen or hear about the latest fatalities due to soccer riots in Egypt.

I argue that soccer isn’t only played; it is playing and continuing to play an ‘infinite game’ in the sense that it is a practice of the world, making the world, opened up to the world. Whether one engages this practice on the field or some other entry point is not limiting; our worldview about our place within the wider context might be. It is the case that there are no player/played relationships: just player/player interactions. In other words, the sets of rules and physical constraints and characters that determine what a game is are not passive or inert or limiting. They are continuously changing and playing us as we play them. This is always the case. We are ‘infinite’ in Carse’s sense of the word whether or not we want we want to be, and also much more radically then he ever meant to suggest.
 

The second part of the quote I included above is part of a larger one: 

 

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself. 

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language (section 72).

This conception of reality has classical roots in Plato's The Cave, in which reality is only available to us as shadows on a wall, not in true form. The best we can do is to recognize this illusion as such. This metaphysics serves to further Carse's case of the world-as-separate by establishing a structuralist conception of reality that is knowable only through correlation and metaphor, a 'word-world' dualism, otherwise known as representationalism. Language is not representational but performative, and to borrow from Karen Barad, 'a direct material engagement with the world' (Meeting the Universe Halfway). The world, as a material engagement, is directly accessible to us, even as it exceeds us in its beauty and incomprehensibility. Indeed, this incomprehensibility only possible precisely because we are inside of it and directly engaged. Perspective from within is often difficult. It is from this point that we begin to be able to talk about beauty and aesthetics, as engaged and reality-producing, yet astoundingly exceeded entities. But to do so is to wander from the matter at hand.

Language is not even an exclusively human capacity: as material arrangements that 'define what counts as meaningful statements,' discursive practices are dispersed throughout reality and tightly coupled to it such that material phenomena cannot be without discursive practices, and discursive practices cannot be without material phenomena. Barad explains eloquently that materiality and discursivity are emergent and mutually inclusive from within a system of inter-acting agencies.

Matter(ing) is a dynamic articulation/configuration of the world. In other words, materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseperable from the apparatuses of [human and nonhuman] bodily production; matter emerges out of, and includes as part of its being, the ongoing reconfiguration of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material [re]configurings of the world) (151-152).

Agencies themselves are emergent from relational practices, such that the human cannot even be defined prior to its material/discursive engagement with another agent (i.e. idea, thing, word, force, etc). Humanness is practiced and enacted, humans are 'humaned'; we emerge out the other side of being-in-and-of-the-world in a particular way.

This is how radically open the world is, this is how strange it gets, and this is what we can never escape from; that is, that we enact our worldview, reality is never just a given but a practice, and that we are producing it and produced by it in the most embodied way possible. This isn't to say that the world is constructed, and endeavors such as science and objectivity are failed attempts at escaping our subjectivity: it is to say that subjectivity itself is a certain historical practice, and not a very interesting one at this point; it's but one option out of infinite possibilities to imagine ourselves engaging the world.