Filipe Felizardo posted: " Final Assignment for From Alienation from Above to Alienation from Below, a seminar instructed by Mattin at The New Centre for Research & Practice BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE EMULATORS Illustration by Richard Powers By this strange title we "
Final Assignment for From Alienation from Above to Alienation from Below, a seminar instructed by Mattin at The New Centre for Research & Practice
BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE EMULATORS
Illustration by Richard Powers
By this strange title we mean, admittedly not that simply, that it is in the mind or minds which emulate one another that new concepts and, concurrently, new self-conceptions come to meaning, if and maybe only if aided by a collective recognition of noise and of nurture as emancipatory pedagogies for bootstrapping alienation away from the natural and the capital, but into the orthogonal governance of transpersonal freedom of choice – that is, the collective or nemocentric governance of transpersonal autonomy.
It is our understanding that such a notion as the Self, before its puppetteering across the 20th century, and all the condemnatory melancholy judgments we may content ourselves with in regard to the machinations which capitalist society has perpetrated upon it, and all the identities which were destituted of it - before all the tragedy gets to consummate in 'that's how it is' and 'that's how we are', the self occurs primarily in the faculty of sensing. This faculty is present in various animal species, including ours.
Trusting, provisionally1, this naturalist reduction, we may proceed by claiming that, on top of sometimes being opaque even to itself2 sensing is a pre-conceptual activity – it bears no code, no précis, no intelligible users manual. Minimal behavioural accounts for pain or for pleasure are registered in the Homo sapiens genome, for it seems such a genome has favoured to remember such sensing behaviours as enhancers of survival – but here we must halt and impose upon this evolutionary story the burden of sociality in order to avoid any excesses of scientific realism. Such behavioural accounts may translate as minimal, externalized behaviour – a grimace, a cry, a recoiling from the flame. But what of their counterpart? That which most of us, now adults, consider our inner sensing, and which has made countless of us tumble into the myth of givenness, the story of the outer world somehow penetrating into our brain, as if every thing produced emanations, spores which would bizarrely unfold as origami holograms inside our skull? Although captivating, the screen of such a scene has no way to stand.
Wilfrid Sellars took great care in expanding Kant's problematization of the conditions of the possibility of (human) experience, by proposing that these positive constraints, if considering the sociality of language as pivotal for the structuration of a self which understands itself and knows its way as the ways of the world it made by conceiving it. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The point we wish to make for now is essentially the following: the faculty of sensing, when bracketed by its representation via the physical support of the self-to-be, must be understood as picturing – as we have described elsewhere3, choosing a visual metaphor, Stan Brakhage's cinema for the untutored eye, or of the untutored eye. Brakhage's choice of words is of great importance in the context is essay, for we are of the Sellarsian persuasion that only if tutored is our faculty picturing eligible to be estranged into the realm of intelligibility. It can only do so when subsumed into conceptual activity – socially acquired language, be it tactile, oral, visual, but principally, symbolic and as such, rule-governed.
At this point, we can repeat our claim that the self is the body, in that it is constituted primarily by the signals which emits or represents to itself in order to navigate the world it realizes under such conditions – but the issue with this is that not all human personal activity can be reduced to this closed system, and that the signal-to-noise ratio of such a system must not be held as the totalizing limit to experience. By this we mean that all which is not understood by this basic reduction cannot be brushed aside as redundant shrubbery, for otherwise, this would entail that a single human brain equipped with all the convenient neuro-transmitters to this effect, would be able to immediately 'get' the totality of the universe as a sort of cosmic-prey-as-gesamkunstwerk as soon as it opened its eyes after birth. That world is not the case.
This is precisely to not say that the body is the self – only that it emits a self which neither ought nor can be taken immediately as such. It cannot, until it learns how to conceive of itself – as what we are persuaded to call not a self understood as being completely isomorphic to its body, in order to avoid any biological essentialism, but as a person.
It is the task of pedagogy to affirm the dissonance of the self and what is held as the real in a positive, noisy, novel, even ludic, dialectic; to not blind it into natural necessity and the glorified unintelligibility of standpoint epistemological closure.
This stance allows for one growingly important concept to be part of our vision of pedagogy as the collective management of the embarrassment of conceptual riches our human cultures seem able to generate, in its two-faced activations: information and noise.
In the introduction to her 'An Epistemology of Noise', Cecile Malaspina posits as "[becoming apparent] the curious reversibility of information and noise: too much information,and also the repetition of the same information ad nauseam, becomes noise, whereas information that is radically new falls on deaf ears when context and criteria of pertinence are lacking to adequately distinguish information from noise."4 Following this, when commenting upon Claude Shannon's definition of information, she critically points out that "a piece of information informs us only if it is not redundant, in other words, if it contains a margin of unpredictability and hence uncertainty."5 We take the latter to be a gateway into semantic possibility and what Inigo Wilkins terms as the floating intentionality of noise, or as-yet-unintelligible sound.
We could say that noise remains noise unless it is brought into the playground, or even that information remains noise until we take the pedagogical path of the negation of the negation of meaning. It is through this intentional ascent, this abstraction as inclusion in a model instead of exclusion from it, that we may emulate new and richer ways of understanding what is socially held as a world. Wilkins emphasizes that it is this "this protoconceptual capacity for negation", our ability to accompany what is, or what or senses take to be the case, by what it is not, "which allows for the structuring of sociality beyond immediate presence", by being "presupposed by the emergence of logico-conceptual thought proper."6. To put it rather simply, what this entails in connection to what we exposed previously, is that the faculty of picturing, functioning as an escape from the biological alienation from below, is at odds with itself from the moment a picture is subsumed under a socially acquired concept, thus enabling a person to continually parse through what is a mixture of what falls under that concept, and what does not. What does not, becomes noise - or information, if transpersonal activities take the former into account as what, being not understood and not susceptible to allow the infant mind to partake of alienated rational activity, may come to be so. If our sociality forecloses this possibility by reifying noise as unintelligible, it forecloses a conceptually richer world as impossible, and as such, condemns alienation as from above, deeming intelligence and the algorithms of personality as mere hubris.
Relieving the task of pointing out how this amputating failure of the imagination has been present throughout our culture to the capable methods of sociology, we would like to consider the predicaments described above as possibility, and thus invite our proposal as a preventive measure, if only to suggest that it is such openness to contingency which may be more productive than ideological necessity. With this in mind, we want to suggest Rudolf Carnap's ideal of explication as constitutive of pedagogy and orthogonal alienation, hand in hand with Malaspina's proposal of noise as constitutive of knowledge.
It is a fortunate coincidence that Carnap's understanding of explication is featured in his volume on probability, and thus, on the measure of uncertainty, which is dear to our worries as to what is to be deemed as intelligible or not. Intelligibility and certainty are not synonyms, but they hover both in what we structure as the space of reasons, and we give and take both to be normative valuations for governance and transpersonal autonomy.
We will follow Carnap in taking explication as "the transformation of an inexact, prescientific concept, the explicandum, into an exact concept, the explicatum. The explicatum must fulfil the requirements of similarity to the explicandum, exactness, fruitfulness, and simplicity."7
This hopefully allows us to circumvent in any fears of bloating the semantic possibilities of noise into their place - as unjustified fears. Carnap's concept shows us that by fulfilling those requirements via pedagogical triangulation between intelligences8, an explicatum may be taken to be the decanted result of branching out a pre-scientific concept into its 'information' and 'noise' aspects, securing the latter as a new concept, ready to be fed back into what we co-picture and theorize as being the world we conceive of. A pedagogy of nurture and noise is not a free-for-all where individual creativity is merely allowed to subsume the real into its identitarian caprice – on the contrary, by nurturing responses which are fresh attempts at understanding, explicating, constituting the world by virtue of parsing noise with the larger conceptual leaps necessarily taken by smaller/younger conceptual libraries, the pedagogical task of explication posits itself as collectively held and constitutive of transpersonal autonomy, by activating the possibility of error as the motor of both enlightenment and self-correction.
Against alienation from above, that which estranges intelligence from the personal and imprisons it in a slow death waiting for meagre concepts to be fed to it in order to allay its growling, hungry, self-loathing and disillusioned fears, we take this pluralist approach via the bootstrapping of a transpersonal 'mental state of noise'9 as bracketing alienation into orthogonality, bringing positive dissonance, more than well-meaning but insufficient resonance, into a playground of the commons.
In order to specify what we mean by orthogonal alienation, we will try to posit what is held as being alienation from below – a naturalistic purview of the real and its explanation through reductionist scientific models – as informing us of our constitution and the world's by negating the possibility of entropy, that is, by reification of an idealized finely granular explaining into, totalizing the universe in Nature; and alienation from above – the obstruction of meaning-mongering and personal autonomy and creativity by ideologies of capitalist value extraction and legitimation of colonizing practices – as the affirmation of entropy, that is, the explaining away of the possibilities of constituting the real through its historical cancellation in ideology as a semblance of order which forecloses any other reconfiguration, as what has been described by Mark Fisher as an unsurmountable capitalist realism.
Orthogonal alienation subsumes the natural and the ideological, both posited as scientific and justified forms of alienation, into a bracketing of their ambiguity as described by two understandings of entropy. As Malaspina has succeeded in enabling the ambiguity between information and noise into the dialectics of epistemological purchase, we hope to be able to enable the ambiguity of entropy into the dialectic of pedagogy. We trust that contrarily to what both naturalism and capitalist realism may desire, "the ideal of explication places the burden of proof not on the pluralist who wishes to envisage new possibilities, but on the anti-pluralist to demonstrate that some envisaged alternative is not possible."10
As we've tried to show, we can only not dismiss noise if we commit ourselves to reflect upon it. This is the crucial folding of picturing into intentionality - and vice versa, for we propose intentionality as the hook reason should extend into the picturing realm in the shape of a question: if this is not about what I (the I which speaks) know, then what is it about? As such, this is the question which gives double-acting hinges to the saloon door between the self and Geist, the timeless we that thinks in the I which speaks – which explicates noises into concepts, and into possible reasons.
By way of a simple, but hopefully effective example, we can take as pivotal the notion that what a person may perceive as noise in their picturing faculty ought and should be registered as possibly intelligible and never dismissed as if that were not the case, in order to be further presented as a reason for justifying their autonomy; violations of one's material and psychological person are countless times dismissed as mere noise, glitches in perception, meaningless infantile complaints of a yet 'unhardened' or 'toughened-up' person – thus obviating one's autonomy into a screechingly compressed feedback of ideologies of subjection and abuse. It is, thus, a matter of intellectual sincerity and freedom, a duty and a right, to bring noise into the space of reasons.
Given the last example, and by way of commentary on the fatalist un-cognizing anhedonia of trans-historical dissonance, and the negative solidarity with regard to the tackling of profound social discontents such as oppression by class, gender, race, and the limits of individual freedom with regard to health and climate governance, we will conclude by tentatively considering the issue of intergenerational noise as a large-scale example of the productive realization of pedagogies of nurture and noise.
We consider that pedagogy, as a multi-scalable tool of non-linear history, can break us out of our unimaginative survival modes of alienation from above and from below. A 'catastrophic reaction'11 towards noise is a clear illustration of one's positioning towards unquestioned authority – thus, ideology, reification, or theophanous naturalism. The drive for sameness hidden under the catastrophic rejection of noise, of novelty, of the dialectic, is either governance or idiocy. Sameness of the older is not the sameness of the younger. The Previous, if ablated or turned into ablative, is not even conserving, but eroding meaning back into a drive which is indeed, impossible, for nothing can be naturalized as such – it can only be artificialized in the provisional normativity of language, it can only be instituted via pedagogy. The Previous becomes catastrophic at the personal and collective scales, for it tries to totalize itself into a shell which simply cannot hold, for it is porous, leaky – the catastrophe comes from the continuous reopening of the self into Geist, left open by whatever minimal positive constraints of sociality were acquired in their infancy. The younger, or the Possible, is Geist's recognition of the Previous's errors and thus, the transcendental noise of reason informing the system of its need for regulation. The ambiguity of sameness here is unveiled as transpersonal and trans-historical governance.
In order to further elaborate on our modelling of ambivalent entropy as the dialectic of pedagogy, we must pick up the problem of sameness, if only in an even more poetic vein. This ambiguity of sameness has some similarities to Ilya Prigogine12's description of entropy as a paradoxically disordered order. The heat-dead universe of the end times, stretched to its most rarefied, features every particle at its most solitary and disengaged. What disorder is there when and where no thing is in relation to another? Such dumb stillness appears to appeal to a sense of plenitude, to total order, of fixed, thus intelligible meaning, and anodyne silent quietude. Still, what order is there when nothing is made intelligible, no smoke signals reach anywhere, nor does anyone feel the need to emit them, contented in their selfsameness?
The Previous bear the right to be made intelligible and the duty to necessitate intelligibility – that is, to make possible the occasion that new meanings parse history into its errors and thus, the possibility of their unmaking. Intergenerational transpersonal semantic agency is the labor of what we and they can unmake and make the world about.
Against the negative solidarity of the Previous, which we have seen as legitimizing 'trauma-based indoctrination rituals'13, and consider a catastrophic reaction to disorientation in novelty by attempts at naturalizing the artificial, pedagogies of noise and nurture do away with imperative programming and must be structured by subsuming both the ideological and the natural into strategies of explication and positive reinforcement, necessitating feedback loops which will translate as conceptualized behaviours or options archived to possibly be re-cognized when called upon by contingency.
We must host noise in its constitutive capacity of explication, as tool for generation of intelligibility, transcending the brutality of selfhood. By virtue of the sincere uncertainty put forth by a pedagogue, participants in learning processes can contribute to testing further declinations of conceptual possibility. Mixture, then, is ever at work in linguistic sociality, where concepts are not exclusively subordinated to identitarian objectivity, subjective contrarianism, permutations of these, but productively eligible for structuration of the space of reasons. Instead of prohibiting themselves in totalized selves, both the Previous and the Younger learn together by emulating their trees of errors upon a forest of possibilities.
1By the end of this essay we expect to have transported the impression we partake of the preference of understanding scientific claims as models, emulations of reality and not as reality itself – for there is no such thing as the latter, but in the constitution and destitution of models for it.
2See Metzinger, T. and his phenomenal self-model which presents the self as a neuro-computational evolutionary adaptive solution, which is almost totally transparent – that is, imperceptible - to the individual which holds it. Metzinger's use of 'transparency' is not ambiguous in the context of his systematic approach, but we chose opacity as an alternative to illustrate, synaesthetically, the thickness or unsurmountability of the phenomenal self model by the person which it helps to constitute. - Metzinger, T. - "Being No One – The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity", MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004.
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