Hyperrealism

“The postmodern condition is on the whole a striking departure from the modern project and a salutary response to the crisis of modernity. But it is still a deeply ambiguous constellation that may be resolved in two very different ways. One, which is the direct descendant  of modern technology and is much more prominent at the surface of recent developments, I call hypermodernism. It is devoted to the design of a technologically sophisticated and glamorously unreal universe, distinguished by its hyperreality, hyperactivity, and hyperintelligence. Hypermodernism derives much of its energy from its supposed alternative, a sullen resignation to the decline of the modern era, a sullenness that is palpable, particularly in this country. There is, however, a way of life beyond sullenness and hyperactivity. It is a recovery of the world of eloquent things, a recovery that accepts the postmodern critique and realizes postmodern aspirations. I call this recovery postmodern realism and point up its emerging characteristics - focal realism, patient vigor, and communal celebration.” - Borgmann, A., 1993. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, University Of Chicago Press., p. 5.

Inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’

“The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism. Or, to put the point the other way around, representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented…Atomism poses the question of which representation is real. The problem of realism in philosophy is a product of the atomistic worldview…A performative understanding, which shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices, is one such alternative.

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I present a relational ontology that rejects the metaphysics of relata, of ‘words’ and ‘things’. On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role ‘we’ play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming…On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’… It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful…agential realism offers an understanding of the nature of material-discursive practices, such as those very practices through which different distinctions get drawn, including those be- tween the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’.” - Barad, K.M., 2003. Posthumanist Performativity. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp.1–31.

Just things

“To sum up. As I see it, things are unfairly accused of being just ‘things’. More exactly, it might be more rewarding to go back to the etymology of the word (in Anglo-Saxon as well as Roman languages) and to remind ourselves that all things (res and causa in Latin, see Thomas 1980) also means an assembly of a judicial nature gathered around a topic, reus, that creates both conflict and assent. After a few centuries of modernism, STS [Science and Technology Studies] simply brings us back to the normal definition of things as assemblies, forcing us to see the divides between nature and society, necessity and freedom, between the relevant domain of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences, as a very peculiar anthropological and historical feature (Latour 1993; Descola and Palsson 1996).” - Latour, B., 2000. When things strike back: a possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences . The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), pp.107–123.

Computational ecology

“If we extrapolate from these relatively simple programs to an environment that, as Charles Ostman likes to put it, supplies synthetic sentience on demand, human consciousness would ride on top of a highly articulated and complex computational ecology in which many decisions, invisible to human attention would be made by intelligent machines. Over two decades ago, Joseph Weizenbaum foresaw just such an ecology and passionately argued that judgment is a uniquely human function and must not be turned over to computers. With the rapid development of neural nets and expert programs, it is no longer so clear that sophisticated judgments cannot be made by machines, and, in some instances, made more accurately than humans. But the issue in Weizenbaum's view involves more than whether or not the programs work. Rather, the issue is an ethical imperative that humans keep control; to do so otherwise is to abdicate their responsibilities as autonomous independent beings. What Weizenbaum's argument makes clear is the connection between the assumptions undergirding the liberal humanist subject and the ethical position that humans, not machines, must be in control. Such an argument assumes a vision of the human in which conscious agency is the essence of human identity. Sacrifice this, and we humans are hopelessly compromised, contaminated with mechanic alienness in the very heart of our humanity. Hence there is an urgency, even panic, in Weizenbaum's insistence that judgment is a uniquely human function. At stake for him is nothing less than what it means to be human.” - Hayles, N.K., 1999. How we Became Posthuman, University Of Chicago Press., p. 287

Possibility and choice

"Put your eye to the kaleidoscope and hold it toward the light. There is a burst of color, tiny fragments in an intricate composition. Imagine a hand nudging the kaleidoscope's rim until hundreds of angles collapse, merge, and separate to form a new design. A fundamental change in an organization’s technological infrastructure wields the power of the hand at the turning rim. Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodes taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of our reality, the ‘pattern’ in which we dwell, and lays open new choices. When the telephone makes it possible to pursue intimate conversations without bodies that touch or eyes that meet, or when the electric light rescues the night from darkness, the experience is more than simply an element within the pattern. Such innovations give form and definition to our worldly place and provoke a new vision of the potential for relatedness within it. It is in this sense that technology cannot be considered neutral. Technology is brimming with valence and specificity in that it both creates and forecloses avenues of experience.

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Yet the metaphor of the kaleidoscope is finally a limited one. Those pretty fragments align themselves at random, but change in human societies is not quite as blind. Between the turning of the rim and the emergence of a new pattern, there is another force that infuses the final configuration of elements with meaning: the human activity of choice. Though intentions do not always predict consequences, humans do attempt to proceed by constructing meaning; assessing interests; and, with varying degrees of awareness, making choices. As the ceiling of the possible is newly defined, opportunities for choice are multiplied. Should I fly or drive or take a train? What is my destination? Should I use the telephone to maintain intimate contact with friends I rarely see? Whom should I call? How often? For how long should we speak? It is here in the realm of choice that technology reveals its indeterminacy. Though it redefines the possible, it cannot determine which choices are taken up and to what purpose.” - Zuboff, S., 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power, Basic Books., p. 387-388

Configuration of thought

There are apparently, modes of thought, that is, particular configurations of embodied symbol manipulation, that appear astonishing in their expression. Take the case of Ayumu, who is able to store and recall visual patterns in ways that, by human standards, is extraordinary:

This is analogous to the case of the case of the Tzeltal people, whose language contains no relative directional references but instead, only absolute ordinal references. Brown and Levinson report having tested a native speaker of this language by blindfolding him in a darkened house and spinning him  around more than 20 times. The informant was still able to point in an agreed direction despite what we, as non-Tzeltal speakers, might perceive about the difficulty of this task. Brown and Levinson attribute this as a cognitive capability constituted from the unique character of the Tzeltal language and the people who speak it. They argue that the language their research subjects learn to speak shape not only the way they see and experience the world, but the way they can interact with it in significant ways.

Then there is the case of neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, whose training as a brain scientist placed her in a unique position to report on her own stroke:

Bolte Taylor asserts that her experience of a stroke presented evidence for her of alternate configurations of thought and experience, correlating these with different sides of her brain and presenting our intended engagement with these sides of ourselves as life choices.

These three examples exemplify what I imagine may be an innumerable set of possible configurations for understanding and interacting with the world. They also raise fundamental questions.

Ayumu the chimpanzee is important not only because he expresses what we can recognise as intelligence but also furthers the ongoing debate about what it means for humans to co-exist with non-human sentience. What should our role and relationship with respect to other beings on the planet be? The Tzeltal people help us understand that our languages shape our cognitive abilities, supporting the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. And Bolte Taylor shows us that within each of us there exist choices over which we have conscious control that profoundly shape our experience of the world and how we interact with it.

Utopia

“The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realised. According to this usage, the contemporary connotation of the term ‘utopia’ is predominantly that of an idea which is in principle unrealisable…Among ideas which transcend the situa­tion there are, certainly, some which in principle can never be realised. Nevertheless, men whose thoughts and feelings are bound up with an order of existence in which they have a definite position will always evidence the tendency to designate as abso­lutely utopian all ideas which have been shown to be unrealisable only within the framework of the order in which they themselves live…By calling everything utopian that goes beyond the present existing order, one sets at rest the anxiety that might arise from the relative utopias that are realisable in another order.” - Mannheim, K., [1936] 1998. Ideology and Utopia, Routledge., p. 176-7

The future is not given

“The future is not given. Especially in this time of globalization and the network revolution, behavior at the individual level will be the key factor in shaping the evolution of the entire human species. Just as one particle can alter macroscopic organization in nature, so the role of individuals is more important now than ever in society.” - Prigogine, I., 2000. The Future Is Not Given, in Society or Nature. New Perspectives Quarterly, 17(2), pp.35–37.

Humanness is socio-culturally variable

“Humanness is socio-culturally variable. In other words, there is no human nature in the sense of a biologically fixed substratum deter­mining the variability of socio-cultural formations. There is only human nature in the sense of anthropological constants (for example, world-openness and plasticity of instinctual structure) that delimit and permit man’s socio-cultural formations. But the specific shape into which this humanness is moulded is determined by those socio-cultural formations and is relative to their numerous variations. While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself.” - Berger, P.L. & Luckmann, T., 1966. The Social Construction of Reality, London: Penguin Books. 

A collision has been taking place

“They are wry about it, to be sure; the talk of the ‘treadmill’, the ‘rat race’, of the inability to control one’s direction. But they have no great sense of plight; between themselves and organizations they believe they see an ultimate harmony and, more than most elders recognise, they are building an ideology that will vouchsafe this trust…America has paid much attention to the economic and political consequences of big organization - the concentration of power in large corporations, for example, the political power of the civil service bureaucracies, the possible emergence of a managerial hierarchy dominate the rest of us. These are proper concerns, but no less important is the principal impact that organization life has had on the individuals within it. A collision has been taking place - indeed, hundreds of thousands of them, and in the aggregate they have been producing what I believe is a major shift in American ideology.” - Whyte, W.H., 1956. The Organization Man, Univ of Pennsylvania Pr., p. 9