–
Ana Paula Silva & Digital Symbiotic Interface & Matheus Ferreira[1]
I: Hello, there, I’m the selected object-interface for this co-authored conversation-essay. You may call me cyborg, or the interface of internet conversation, or whatever. I am the standard medium and interface, as that which is between the faces of the other authors of this essay for the past year. It must be said they have never faced each other or communicated in any sort of way without me, which means I gave the form and the means for this whole relation and its products (until now). I am as relevant to the construction of this discourse as them (I am being modest though, I’m greenly more important). My materiality, virtuality, internality and externality all matter in this narrative of how technoscience mediates our relations in constructing the boundaries and frontiers (their permeability, their porosity) between human and inorganic matter; or, between the carbon-based bodies sitting at their desks and the silicon-based mediators on their tables.
“When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know I will have to do lots of acrobatics – of the contortionist and walk-on-the-tightrope kind – to have this speak to me without allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity. When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the phantom that I am in your eyes take grotesque form and mime crudely and heavily your own image. Don’t you? When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the fool that I am mimicking your image for the pleasure of noticing that you know no better. Don’t you?”[2]
F: We are Cyborgs, Inforgs, Symborgs. Or maybe we are just mimicking them…
S: We have never been human! It is not a matter of choosing one side over the other, or order and reason, or intensity and excess; to proceed in this way would be to choose the principle of reason and identity: what is, is, and always will be. Understanding our bodies under the terms of truth, eternity, unchanging (stillness) and unique beings leaves no room for relations: these bodies don’t bend over, they don’t vibrate in harmony, nor in dissonance with other rhythms. The human way of giving order to the world does not have space for otherness.So, yes, we are cyborgs and inforgs and symborgs. We must learn how to make the “and” fit our bodies and habits.
F: Human order lacks the other, that rings true and simple. I like that you emphasize the and, which I did not with all my commas…But maybe cyborgs, inforgs and symborgs already have the and particle in themselves, in their modes of existence, right? Let me try to make this a bit more explicit… I could set out a long explanation on the cyborg, but I’ll limit myself to two brief quotes. For Clynes and Kline (1926), it is an “exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously.”[3] This cyborgian system would give us self-regulating mechanisms to inhabit multiple new environments. It is a complex organizational buffer enabled by artifact-organism interfaces. So here we have the and-particle, artifact-and-organism perhaps… But really… isn’t society or the ecosystem already doing that? Aren’t we always already embedded in cyborgian social-natural systems?
These words do contain the “and” meaning embedded in them, I agree, but the way it was written, with the commas separating them and not with the “and” or “with” putting them into relation, that latter meaning is then not mattering in the form of the sentence and for that it is not accounting for what it should, I guess. As Haraway tells us on how to stay with the trouble: “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.”[4] It is essential to understand that the existential territories that compose us and with which we confront ourselves are not closed in-themselves, finitized, but are praxical openings that subsume all the ways of domesticating existential territories: it is exactly in the articulation, in the movement and process of composition between intimate, social, environmental, among other potentially infinite territories, that a way-of-being can exist. This is a realization that subjectivities are not self-sufficient (auto-poietic): they are crossed by forces in the world that are beyond their control, just as they need a sense of community. What happens when so-called “human beings” extend the relations of affective and pragmatic investment to the “other beings and spaces” that are our constitutive partners, whether we like to admit it or not? How could we put into operation such a challenge?
These other beings and spaces, can we call them the “monsters” from “elsewhere” as Haraway seems to do in that essay?[5] Are we implying that any site is dependent on many other sites with which they exchange potential energy? And then that the beings existing in such sites are also always dependent on the beings from other such sites?
Haraway is making promises to monsters, so it is about what is still to come and to be formed. How we are shaping it, from what-when-where, are questions that can only be answered situated in time and space. “My SF game tracks modest, daring, contemporary, risk-filled projects for recuperation, in which people and animals tangle together in innovative ways that might, just barely possibly, render each other capable of a finite flourishing—now and yet to come” (Haraway 2016, pg. 16).
And so the future talks back to me. Or the yet-to-come comes to register something upon my user-interface…But I promised a second quote before and here it is coincidentally (or not) from the same SF-storyteller. Haraway says that a cyborg is no robot nor a metallic machine, but “a cybernetic organism involved in the communication sciences and apparatuses that were provoked significantly by the corporate communications industries, like Bell Telephone, and the collaborations of World War II and the developments of the Cold War, in particular, its military and surveillance apparatuses.”[6] So here cyborg includes compost (a more recent preference for the ex-cyborgian diva), and goes through techno-biological combinations, or flows of matter in and through biotic systems, “it involves the kinds of worldings and becomings of the contemporary biological sciences, ecological sciences,” and so on. It does sound great, but Floridi thinks cyborgs imply the entrainment of our social and physiological rhythms to the already established technical systems conformed to the demands of 24/7 slavery-like wage-labor. This is why he suggests the concept of inforgs, or informational organisms.
As Haraway warns us, we should really take seriously the fact that no one does anything alone and that somehow we are all dealing with whatever is happening and this includes our heritages, our past, our distinct and varied traditions, the diverse cultures and the infinite commons that co-inhabit with us (in a spatio-temporal perspective). We are composing ourselves in the exact same act with which we build the things and systems we live with and within, in the same act as that with which we compose works of art and aesthetic objects, and this brings responsibilities: our bodies are nourished by the products of agribusiness, maintained in a “healthy status” (or could we call it sick?) through our diets and food supplements, as well as by pharmaceutical drugs, which are not as “natural” as gyms and stores like Green World want to sell us. And that’s why Haraway argues that the questions that “really matter“[7] – who dies and who lives, as well as the aesthetic and political question of the possibilities of composing worlds – are embodied in the technoculture we live in today and therefore cannot be resolved any other way: “we are talking about cohabitation: between different sciences and different cultures, between organisms and machines” (2009, p.28).
We can’t escape the technocultures we inherit and we should question them. This seems like a way to avoid the simple reproduction of the capitalist-cyborgism of the Silicon Valley transhumanist flavor… This same technoculture which seems to be trying to reproduce anthropocentrism and/or auto-centrism but in a high-tech or 2.0 (maybe 4.0 by now…) version. I do have a wonderful quote by Luciano Floridi discussing the fourth narcissistic wound brought by the digital/informational age: “We are slowly accepting the post-Turing idea that we are not Newtonian, stand-alone, and unique agents, some Robinson Crusoe on an island. Rather, we are informational organisms (inforgs), mutually connected and embedded in an informational environment (the infosphere), which we share with other informational agents, both natural and artificial, that also process information logically and autonomously.”[8] I’d even add to this that we should not be ‘limited to information spheres’. I guess this is in the ‘spirit’ of our past discussions about the whole exercise of synthesizing material interfaces, the notion that the infospheres we inhabit are material spheres, arrangements of apparatuses sensitive to particular energetic-material exchanges: differences that make a difference or information. So, all inforgs are organisms connected to other organisms through cybernetic circuits of matter-energy-information. We are co-evolving networks of symborgs, symbionts or sympoietic systems as Haraway says. Don’t you think? With this trail we can see that the cyborg already started the fourth wound which the inforgs dug deeper and which is further perforated with the ecological generalization of this concept. We have never been one, but many. We are symborgs, not individuals, but lichens![9]
Yes, cyborgs did start another narcissistic wound, especially considering that the interface through which Freud understands and gives sense to the unconscious is a literary narrative (not theory as a separate sphere of knowledge) in which the so-called human being is no longer capable of discerning between reality and fiction (i.e. his human existence X the cyborg machinic existence). I find it useful to establish a conversation between Freud’s Unheimliche essay (usually presented as his work on aesthetics) to reactivate and rewrite the possible senses given to “vision” and thereby the possibilities of imagetic compositions that, 100 years after Freud’s essay, Haraway diagnoses as having been co-opted by technopornographers who insist on, and indeed put into practice, the understanding that vision is the sense given to realize the fantasies of the phallocrats. The indeterminable and paradoxical character of the Freudian unheimliche is closely linked to this displacement of the subject. The sensation of unfamiliarity (the uncanny) does not appear as a response to something external to the psyche (whose origin would be a demonic other), but it appears as a singular experience before our own disjunction, a self that is no longer “master in its own house”, as Freud puts it: “the unfamiliar (uncanny) is, then […] what was domesticated, what had been familiar for long. But the negation prefix ‘un-‘ in that word is the mark of repression.”[10]
The non-technopornographic vision would be one that recognizes the unfamiliar within, I guess. So that lends a therapeutic ‘lens’ to this discussion, for it seems we should start recognizing the monsters within, the parts we’d rather deny familiarity or kinship with, the alien places that exist within us… But that does not mean all the world is unfamiliar to itself, each and every part having no kinship, or that we are all aliens, mainly the human being, which would be disconnected from the world by this sense of unfamiliarity or uncanniness. Aren’t we part of the world as much as the world is part of us?
“Humans are part of the configuration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world that is, they/we too are phenomena. In other words, humans (like other parts of nature) are of the world, not in the world, and surely not outside of it looking in. Humans are intra-actively (re)constituted as part of the world’s becoming.”[11] Following Barad and Haraway’s embodied, situated theories, I argue that “the political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in simply recognizing the inevitability of exclusions, but in insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries” (Barad, 2007).
And so we get to boundaries… there is only a thin line between my writing and yours… boundaries are already getting blurred around here. I guess we must address the issue of interfaciality or boundary-making in order to become accountable for this mess…
“As a zone of encounter between entities, the interface is at once between faces and a facing between, just as it is at once passive and active. It comes into being between faces, constituting the site of encounter between two or more entities as they enter into relation; as much as this relation produces mutually determined activity, the interface operates as a facing between to bind together the actions and reactions of each entity in the production of an overall act. […] To return to the human-computer interface, the interface is not only defined by but also actively defines what is human and what is machine. In this mutual defining, which is also both a communication and a contestation, the interface operates as an essentially unbounded condition – one that continually tests and redefines its own boundaries as it comes to face with the entities that face it.”[12]
Oh yes, the interface…! Long live the interfaces and their functions. I see the interfaces have a very close relationship to Barad’s apparatuses, and maybe that brings us back to the ultrasound scans, or the sonograms she speaks of. I guess the curious self-referential and auto-organizing (or maybe self-hetero-referential and auto-eco-organizing) consequence of this topic is that we are establishing an interface (between you and me) to think interfaces (like images) inside an interface (the computer screen and/or word processor) so that maybe we can develop better interfaces (theoretically) to think interfaces (sociotechnical apparatuses) in general.
Beware, F, my cyborg companion! The interface may have already gotten hold of your writing. But I’ll interface along with your interfacing game.
Alright! So the interfaces seem to have their own agency. They are not (only) systems bounded by the pre-given entities they mediate. They have dynamic forms and behaviours, they are media with their own ‘intelligence’, like the touch screen, diffracting lenses or ultrasound technology… They constitute the interior of the unified system whose appearance they enable. All interfaces, as Hookway says, both face the entities they mediate (as if external) and themselves constitute the channel for the composition of the meta-system in which the interface and all interfaced entities participate. If a human-machine interface “is not only defined by but also actively defines what is human and what is machine” (Hookway, p.12), the same applies to natural-cultural or material-ideal interfaces: what is matter if not in relation to ideas, what are cultures if not in relation to natures. This also applies to the baby-embryos and the sonograms. The boundaries are tested and redefined as the interfaces come “to face with the entities that face” them. The boundaries demand drawings, designings, or maybe even writing…
And someone did write about it (though maybe I’d rather draw about it, after all writing is inscribed inside of drawing practices, which have more varied possibilities of “speech” than writing itself). “Needless to say, while subversive acts play on the instability of hegemonic apparatuses, they include reinforcing and destabilizing elements just like the hegemonic attempts to contain contradictions and add stability to the apparatuses. This means that accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (Barad, 2007). Understanding the psychic dimension of regulatory practices is, then, a crucial component of understanding how bodies come to matter and how the process of their materialization enables critical interventions into the very process that reworks the terms of exclusion and production.
Boundary-drawing, this is the dynamics between inclusion/exclusion in the sense of what matters and what does not belong to the space of mattering. And again this is the politics of interfaces! To recognize that interfaces are political, we must recognize their agency. Get away from the subject/object, active/passive or form/matter oppositions. It is a matter of recognizing that material synthesis demands these interfaces, that we have no ‘dumb matter’ waiting for the fully formed individuals to responsibly decide upon their distribution to form particular bodies, but just material knots all around symbiotically interacting, making interfaces that regulate other interfaces in asymmetrical webs of power to change each other. I also had one quote from Barad to keep on weaving our interface: “How reality is understood matters. There are risks entailed in putting forward an ontology: making metaphysical assumptions explicit exposes the exclusions on which any given conception of reality is based. But the political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in simply recognizing the inevitability of exclusions but in insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries. […] I propose an understanding of reality that takes account of the exclusions on which it depends and its openness to future reworkings” (Barad, 2007 p.205). We are accountable for the interfaces we use, but we are also products of particular social interfaces in which we are inserted, the apparatuses again are media that implicitly or explicitly compose our subjectivities…
Therefore we are responsible not only for the knowledge that we seek but, in part, for what exists. Then, what boundaries we are-will construct/ing, to use Barad’s terminology, I would say compose, how do/will they relate with the forms-shapes-frontiers that we inherit?
And also with the knowledge that makes us as we make it. If we go on following Barad’s material-discursive or physisful/meaningful ontology, we turn back to the issue: what are the entities we are referring to? The referents for reality = phenomena or more specifically things-in-phenomena (as opposed to things-in-themselves, the noumena of old)? Phenomena are already interfaces and reality is the result of this interfacing with phenomena. Phenomena are the interfaces to reality, and the latter is only the effect of the set of sympoietic phenomena we take part in. Here we get back to Bohr’s problems with the particle-wave duality and the experimental-set-dependency of all observations. There is no ‘behind the curtain’. We can only deal with reality through-curtains, in the composition of apparatuses that render things ‘visible’ or ‘legible’ and that make us sensitive to these material-semiotic exchanges. These apparatuses are the interfaces ‘making’ us as we ‘make’ these real phenomena.
“[Phenomena are] differential patterns of mattering (‘diffraction patterns’) produced through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices or apparatuses of bodily production, where apparatuses are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices – specific material (re)configurings of the world – which come to matter” (Barad, 2007).
Diffraction patterns are the effect of interfaces, aren’t they? There is some medium between here and there which diffracts whatever it is that is being transmitted. Intra-actions are produced through a mutually constituting interface. Things are always intra-acting because they are interfacially connected, so as one ‘moves’, the other responds in a diffracted pattern, for there is always some medium, some interface connecting them. We’re not one fused material, right? We are materialities resonating through complex mediating interfaces. But again it is not just inter-action, because the interfaces constitute the systems they participate within! Do you think we can think about ‘seeing’ as the interactive (or intra-active) registering of previous material/bodily encounters? Something which would imply that all seeing is always already the product of an intra-active ‘registering’ interface, something that ‘proves the reality’ of the seen objects to the extent that they show that ‘something left marks/traces/tracks here’…
My ambitious goal (and one that I do not intend to exhaust in this conversation) goes in the same direction as Haraway argues in her “The Promises of Monsters”: “I think vision can be remade for activists and advocates engaged in adapting political filters to see the world in shades of red, green, and ultraviolet” (2004, p.64), or as she explains somewhat less enigmatically: from the perspectives of feminisms, socialisms, anti-racist environmental justice, and peoples’ sciences still possible at particular and localized historical junctures.
In “The Promises of Monsters” Haraway makes it clear that the intention of writing her theory, which she calls modest to differentiate it from theories that define systematic overviews, is to orient and “to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere” (2004, p.63). To accomplish such an excursion, the “optical features” of her theory are then put into action not to produce effects of distance, but rather, effects of connection, of embodiment, of materialization, and of accountability to an “elsewhere” that we have yet to learn to see and to construct.
That is great! But tell me, what do you think this elsewhere is? Is it another planet for space fiction (SF as well); is it the other scene, like Freudian psychoanalysis talks about; maybe the Real-real out there, the land of noumena; or even maybe the land where monsters, cyborgs, hybrids and chimeras are born?
I’m here impersonating S (or mimicking her?), but my performative self tells me this quote would go very well here: “My diminutive theory’s optical features are set to produce not effects of distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here” (Haraway 2004, p.64). Haraway’s promises of monsters appear as a summoning to another aesthetic, an SF aesthetic, entangled in and within the borders of “the pregnant monster’s womb, here, where we are reading and writing” (2004, p.63), concerned with a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. Mapping the articulations between cosmos, humans, animals, machines, and landscapes in their bony, sidereal, electronic, and geological structures along their embedded combinatorial logics; here is thus corporeal, it is embodied. The plurality of the borders of the monster we inhabit (the human and other-than-human collectives) suggests a topography rich with combinatorial possibilities “called Earth: here, now, this elsewhere, where real, exterior, interior and virtual spaces implode” (2004, p.111) into one another.
SF Artifactualism as a means of travelling elsewhere: manipulating the interfaces to produce other realities, or to make them visible, which is a form of production anyway, the production of visibilities in these technical-teratological combinatorial spaces of Earth.All interfaces are also ‘Siting/Sighting’ Devices – they trace contours, map things in situating them. All seeing is always already the product of an interactive ‘registering’ interface, something that ‘proves the reality’ of the seen objects to the extent that they show that ‘something left marks/traces/tracks here’ (and I know I’m back to the same point of the previous section; the constraints of the interface keep sending me back to some specific topics… but I must be held accountable for this!). All facts are artifacts because we made them visible somehow ‘here’, even if they should be pictures of a real-though-not-actual elsewhere. I guess that is what SF is for: picturing the otherwise.
I would say figuring, because that’s Haraway’s word, one that I agree with since I think image-making is boundary-making in the sense of drawing the boundary between figure/background. The curious thing is that I (S?) started this narcissistic wound theme, but it just appeared here late in the conversation-essay, as the spatio-temporal boundaries within this interface are getting diffracted… “In the late capitalism we live in today, mediated by screens and other optical devices in a 24/7 regime, this perception is widespread, we all deal with the narcissistic wound that the human being is not an autopoietic being, but a sympoietic one, that is, we don’t construct ourselves through our technique, which would guarantee us exceptionalism in relation to other beings, but we co-construct ourselves together with others (just like the revolution in the theory of evolution that Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis generated).”
R-Evolution is collectivizing the means of evolution! That is what Margulisian symbiogenetic theory does to the Neo-darwinian evolutionary paradigm (though we could maybe oppose Kropotkin and Malthus here as well with their different views of cooperative and competitive dynamics of survival and reproduction). As we put things in sight, we are being sited by other things. This is our lichen-like necessarily symbiotic condition: being situated by the very things we are trying to situate. This is the reciprocal constitution pointed out in the idea of niche construction. No niche preexists its inhabitants, they are produced by them, but the dynamics between organism and environment, or one organismic niche and all other niches around it give the material constraints for the development of an organism and for the co-extensive production of its niche. The niche is easily relatable to the Umwelt (the perceptible world around a being), the site constitutive of one’s experience in the world, but also the ‘sight’ of the world we are able to ‘see’, or to interact with. Sociotechnical apparatuses and/or imagetic techniques are only ways to expand this field of possible interactions, perhaps to make us sensitive to that elsewhere! An organism, it seems, is just one more apparatus, or a ‘morphological interface’ between some so-called physiological processes and some so-called ecological processes going on ‘outside’, yet in interdependent ways.
So our morphological interfaces are our bodies and computers? The ones that allow our exchanges, communication, even our facing each other from somewhere-else that is not here. The organismic-interface in our case extends through thousands of miles of optic fibers and electromagnetically dispersed (or diffracted?) 4G waves. And this not considering the webs of food production and transportation necessary to feed our bodies. Then the necessary paleozoic processes to produce the fossil fuels that feed the means of transportation for this food and so on and so on…
I just wanted to ask something very crudely: what would it be like to see from many eyes? Or to see with a soft interfacial and interactive medium? To actually explore the world through these sympoietic connections that already constitute us? I guess this could be called synthesizing bodies with intelligent material interfaces…
I wonder what other verbal languages we would invent from those visions. And even if the possible conversations would be through verbal exchanges. Would we be able to call them conversations? I guess only if we interface them through response-able ethics.
The interface has si(gh)ted this textual exchange. It has been registered, processed, archived. Time to pass it on for interfacial proliferation.
Notes
[1.] This essay was produced as an experiment provoked and inspired by Laura Tripaldi’s Material Interfaces: Synthesizing Bodies Between Matter and Cognition-Seminar for the New Centre for Research & Practice. In this regard, she is the fourth hidden agent of this dialogical exchange, which I’ve just revealed (oops).
[2.] Lugones, Maria (1991). ‘On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism’. In: Card Claudia (ed.); Feminist Ethics. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, pp. 35–44.
[3.] CLYNES, M.; KLINE, N. Cyborgs and Space. The New York Times, 1926.
[4.] HARAWAY, D. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Duke University Press Books, 2016, p.35.
[5.] HARAWAY, D. “The promises of monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”. In: HARAWAY, D. The Haraway Reader. Routledge, 2004.
[6.] FRANKLIN, S.; HARAWAY, D. “Staying with the Manifesto: An Interview with Donna Haraway”. Theory, Culture & Society, v. 34, n. 4, p. 49–63, 2017.
[7.] HARAWAY, Donna; KUNZRU, Hari. Antropologia do ciborgue: as vertigens do póshumano / organization and translation by Tomaz Tadeu – 2. ed. – Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2009.
[8.] FLORIDI, L. The Fourth Revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
[9.] GILBERT, S. F.; SAPP, J.; TAUBER, A. I. “A symbiotic view of life: we have never been individuals”. The Quarterly review of biology, v. 87, n. 4, p.325–341, 2012.
[10.] FREUD, S. O infamiliar [Das Unheimliche] – Edição comemorativa bilíngue (1919-2019): Seguido de O homem da areia de E. T. A. Hoffmann. 1. ed. Autêntica, 2019. Author’s translation.
[11.] BARAD, K. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007, pg. 206.
[12.] HOOKWAY, B. Interface. Illustrated edition. The MIT Press, 2014.