Since Heidegger first raised the issue of an end to philosophy in light of the auto-completing feedback loops of cybernetics as the logic to ground all “appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it” (Heidegger, 1972), this exact problematic continues to shape the forefront of philosophical anticipation. As technological development unfolds in the long tail of cybernetics (particularly the various realizations of McCulloch and Pitts’ computational neuron and Rosenblatt’s Perceptron), futurological stances broadly concerned with ‘worlding’ the sites that may counteract the capitalo-normative stranglehold on our present and “future presents” (Esposito, 2011) are front and center. This much is trivial: we live in equally capitalist and technomorph conceptions of future worlds, those of climate change, network effects and financial derivatives. Against this background, and despite the skirmishes of epistemological veracity, tribal semantics or ontological purity that often appear to define academic discourse, ‘worlding’ seems to have arrived as a kind of transdisciplinary teleology: searching for local minima of the pertinent t/Truths and b/Beings of particular philosophical and syntactic engines deemed sufficient for the job (e.g., futurological anthropology, speculative design, etc.). The urgencies of such teleologies lie in identifying some site that will have been the result of overcoming “the path dependency [of modernity] which seems to make a system transition impossible” (Löffler, 2018). This essay attempts to sketch a few existential bounds to worlding as articulated in Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s recent chapter Site as Procedure as Interaction, and the rigorous computational-inferential project of worlding it constructs. I call this project rigorous because it operates from an understanding that any engine (whether as non-diegetic explanatory framework or as diegetic technology) can itself only operate against particular constraints that possibilize worldings—“an enclosure [which] maps space of intuitions (the conditioning of experience), as well as intuitions of space (the conditions for experience)” (Bawa-Cavia and Reed, 2020). In acknowledging this problematic, the authors not only transcend the rhetoric of other works of worlding (which they themselves indict by calling for “non-trivial possible worlds,” ibid.), but rather suggest that their own perception of the matter is invariably tinged. Though my argument is undertaken from the perspective of existential phenomenology, I position this essay, somewhat counterintuitively, to ultimately enrich Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s project as I seek to argue that specific technologies operate as horizonal machinery that tamper with conditions of objectivity, and that this allows for an anticipation of anterior sites of human-scale experience to non-anthropocentric (in the sense of leaving behind the human vantage point as it currently, and catastrophically, is) worlding. I hope to make some themes apparent for heterogeneous usage, and instead of denying this project rather shore up its limit conditions in order for it to more clearly know its realizability.
Bawa-Cavia and Reed situate worlding not only as a particular procedure of curious inquiry (into e.g. the heterogeneity of possible worlds), but rather as a problem that ought to be confronted in light of the increasing disjunction of human scales of experience and reasoning from the ‘planetary’ scope of worldwide computational infrastructures—which the path dependency of modernity in its guise of late techno-capitalism renders into existential threats. ‘Worlding the planetary,’ as a project, is concerned with the “turbulent incompatibility of our moment” (ibid.); the existential threat that develops from the “actual” world that we take for granted and its disjunction from a human-scale positionality from which alternative possibilities can be thought. This urgency of worlding as an actual project is summed up as follows: “The planetary has yet to be adequately spatialized, meaning it is an unsituated concept without a site for operational interaction. The planetary has yet to be worlded” (ibid.). In this, Bawa-Cavia and Reed outline the fundamental, what I call projective limits that worlding must suffer: it requires a world (frame of reference) from-which worlding can occur, but equally, and more problematically, it requires a site (locus) from-which a worlded world is intelligible through particular relational structures (topoi). Worlding “on the scale of the human operator” (Simondon in De Boever et al., 2013) is thus caught up in limits amply explored in the phenomenology of the late Husserl and early Heidegger, respectively. Specifically, the question of how worlding can be thought in light of the delimiting world from which such thought can be projected is precisely the problematic that Husserl had already explicated in light of the horizon-problematic (cf. Geniusas, 2012), and Heidegger in the “thrownness” of Dasein (Heidegger, 2010). The world-horizon, as the “field of fields,” complicates worlding as a figure that can only ever retain semantic-symbolic significance against the field of its orientation. Thrownness, more forcefully and more subtly at the same time, damns the procedure in its entirety—is the transdisciplinary teleology of worlding heterogeneous sites, with different practices of being, not precisely given in the diffractive-extractive logic of late capitalism? In other words, such a critique would see worlding as a kind of “being-toward possibilities” (cf. Heidegger, 2010) that is neither radical nor transgressive nor emancipatory, simply because it is already “grounded” as a projection that follows a logic superseding its procedure.
However, as has already been noted above, Bawa-Cavia and Reed are aware of this limit. In fact, they seem to be more specifically concerned about the second ‘projective’ limit, the relation between the locus of thinking worlds and the topoi of intelligibility. The primary focus of the author’s project lies in leveraging various computational theories (the details of which are beyond the scope of this essay), which is justified through the critical preoccupation with realizability in a computational sense. Indeed, Bawa-Cavia and Reed are not concerned with the specific constraints to worlding in a human-scale philosophical sense, but rather with the practical question how the planetary can be worlded on its own proper scales; whether as a seedbed for human-scale relations to its site(s) or as a technologically engendered opportunity. This project of ‘worlding the planetary’ thereby is of a more specific character than Heidegger’s call for transcending the “technological scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn” (Heidegger, 1972). Bawa-Cavia and Reed pointedly refer to technologies operating on scales removed from phenomenal experience—neural networks in particular as technologies that “labour in a continuum across dimensions, in a bidirectional manner” (Bawa-Cavia and Reed, 2020). Bidirectional, in this sense, means that technologies such as neural networks trade in “the curse of dimensionality,” or the computational consequence of the scarcity of correlatory patterns in the world (cf. Bishop, 2006), through “abstraction” (i.e., inductively embedding spaces wherein correlations become possible) and “synthesis” (i.e. deductively encoding correlations towards realizability as output) (Bawa-Cavia and Reed, 2020). Does the abstraction-synthesis continuum that such technologies traverse and encode, then, hint at possibilities for worlding unencumbered by the projective limits of human-scale sites? I will attempt an answer through the problematization of “site” from the perspective of phenomenology, in line with the isomorphism of the horizon-problematic and thrownness with Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s first projective limit described above. My hypothesis is that such a problematization is productive of limit conditions that can not only offer an alternative vocabulary, but rather clarify the relationship between human scales of experiencing and thinking non-anthropocentric worlding.
First, we can assume with Hansen that assemblages generative of worlds (of e.g. finance or the everyday minutiae of social media) operate no longer exclusively human-scale, and thereby we can think of their sites as endowed with a “human-implicating materialism;” with human experience an equally non-optional and non-exclusive component (cf. Hansen, 2015). Non-exclusive, as the micro- and macro-scales of planetary computation neither conform to nor necessitate human involvement; but non-optional as human experience is inevitably involved in discerning the qualities of particular sites. As Bawa-Cavia and Reed state with reference to Badiou, topoi of experience are indeed always relational and localized. The question would then be what exactly the role of human experience and action are in the localization of non-anthropocentric worlding. The answer is not exhausted by arguments like Floridi’s, who argues that humans function as “semantic engines” (Floridi, 2014) for the perpetual worlding of contemporary information technologies; because it would misconstrue the point of Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s project: If humans are semantic engines, then what can be the syntax that realizes non-anthropocentric worlding? Differently put, just as the authors argue for the need of positioning worlding of the planetary as the exploration of non-anthropocentric relational structures, or topoi; I suggest that the human need not be only a caveat to this project but can be positioned productively.
Therefore, second, we need to grasp the disjunction of worlding scales, with the availability of the human-scale site as a critical limit, more productively, in way that aligns with Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s critical question of “ how to become witness to a world that is not yet concrete; a world that does appear within existing frames of reference that configure the perceptibility of concreteness” (Bawa-Cavia and Reed, 2020). Initially, this enforces a need to consider “world” more robustly and phenomenologically: World, as Husserl would remind us, cannot be neatly apportioned into a human or machine context. As the “field of fields,” world is not an ontic, or innerworldly, stage that can be separated for various acts and actors; but the horizon which “delimits [and] allows phenomena to manifest themselves to us” (Geniusas, 2012). If, when all is said and done, the site is “to us” (even if in-/deductive encoding and embedding moves operate at different scales), then we ought to operationalize the limit of the human as both necessary and productive in line with Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s argument. My proposal is that we need to grasp the topoi of “discorrelation” (Denson, 2020) which bridge human-scale localization and abstractive-synthetic technological realization as specific kinds of relational structures themselves. The articulation of such topoi, then, is a procedure of anticipating anterior sites to possible worlds.
Since Merleau-Ponty, the body is seen phenomenologically as the locus of being geared into the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Myself as an enactive, extended, encultured, and embodied kind of being is geared insofar as that I rely on specific semantic-symbolical practices (ethoi), which, like the things I can perceive both ideal and material, are entirely horizonal: specific figures and gestures that operate against grounds (such as the horizon of arithmetic; cf. Geniusas, 2012) which are themselves situated within a ground (the world-horizon). I am, to recall Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s argument, embedded with a propensity to relate to specific encodings in specific ways; and this propensity is not arbitrary but given by way of my thrownness into a particular horizon of world. Understanding the site of world-intelligibility as a site of gearing into a particular horizon, however, offers a way forward rather then a fatal caveat. Horizons, just as the subjectivities that articulate figures and gestures within them, are also technomorph as Löffler’s philosophical-anthropological study of patterns of civilisational shifts evidences: the ontologies of time, the metaphysics of a particular era (whether derided as such or ‘lived’) are co-constituted through the ways that technologies “render” objectivities that can be subsumed in e.g. economics, art, science, power structures etc. (cf. Löffler, 2018, 2019). In Löffler’s existential take on Heidegger’s Gestell, the latter does not appear as an essence of Technology, but rather as a cumulative enframing with a particular historical-ontological genesis. As Löffler illustrates using examples from cognitive archaeology: in the advance from spears to bow-and-arrow hunting, specific hit-zones on prey animals (shooting through the shoulder of a deer, or “Blattschuss,” cf. Löffler, 2019) become abstracted from the world, and thereby referenceable as objectivities—and enter the horizons of validity and reference (cf. Geniusas, 2012) from which further advances may take place. Differently put, technologies in this combined existential-phenomenological and philosophical-anthropological sense are horizonal structures which both stabilize as well as “ratchet up” plateaus of objectivity: the structures conditioning limit conditions for phenomena to be “bound up” in concrete manifestations (Waldenfels, 2011).
The above positioning of technologies as horizonal structures, I argue, is the key problematization of a human-scale site to non-anthropocentric worlds. In the qualitative advance of information technologies to the point where e.g. neural networks traverse dimensions of abstraction and synthesis irreducible to human-scale localization, the horizonal structures of technology as the “anthropotechnical interface” (Denson, 2020) that is our gearing into the world, evidence equal qualitative changes. Thinking non-anthropocentric worlding as a necessary move against anthropogenic catastrophe, and as a critical rupture between phenomenological causality and intentionality (cf. Waldenfels, 2011) at the same time, yields an understanding of the human site as productive. The discorrelation of human experiential scales from structures co-constitutive of experience, then, points to technologies such as neural nets as horizonal machinery—horizonal structures that not only commensurate a given site-world-codependency; but rather are generative of potential “access points” (Löffler, 2018), or anterior sites, to non-anthropocentric worlding. This understanding of horizonal structures of gearing, and of technologies such as neural nets as horizonal machinery which modulate the topoi of that gearing, I argue, complements Bawa-Cavia and Reed’s project, as it joins the indubitable horizonality of human-scale witnessing with the technological articulation of realizable scales of objectivity. In this way, aligning the horizon-problematic of phenomenology with the project of worlding ultimately allows us to not only think the human scale as non-optional and non-exclusive in Hansen’s sense, but rather as a locus in which the non-anthropocentric renderings of horizonal machineries trouble “our” horizons of validity and reference, and thereby beg the question whether our witnessing of the “actual world” (of e.g. late capitalism) has any primordial claim in the first place. Whether as a non-diegetic explanatory framework or diegetic program for realization, seeing the worlding of the planetary as a probe-like tampering with the horizons of objectivity is, I argue, a step forward in utilizing existential limit conditions for articulating the mandatory possible.
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References
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