Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

Heating up: the transmutations of media-beings: Part 1

October 28, 2009

energy-bulb-615Graham Harman’s fourfold is very different to the tetrad of McLuhan, but there is a firm link between the two: each has fours poles intersected by two dualisms; the poles interrelate and transform each other; each part exists together simultaneously; they could be universal. Thus, Harman’s fourfold, which is largely inspired by Heidegger’s fourfold [das geviert] needs supplementing with McLuhan’s tetrad. As he explains, “All that is lacking is a detailed account of the mechanics of how the four poles [gods, mortals, earth, sky] interact with one another. Such an account is found only in ‘Laws of Media’. I believe that Harman will cross-pollinate these two fourfolds in his upcoming ‘The Quadruple Object’ and which is already hinted at in his articles ‘The McLuhans and Metaphysics’ and ‘The Tetrad and Phenomenology’.

First of all I will review Harman’s fourfold and then look to see how this intersects with McLuhan’s tetrad. Harman’s fourfold consists of these interlinking features: time, space, essence, eidos.

    Essence is that which ontologically withdraws from view (in Heideggerese, the ready-to-hand, RTH). It is the absence at the heart of the object which cannot be reduced to a relation. It is that part of the object which stays the same from one moment to the next (the persistence of a unity of multiple parts). It is the Real object. It cannot be exhausted by any number of ‘notes’ (to use Zibiri’s terms): complete description is impossible.

    The eidos is that which presents itself in ontic relations (the present-a-hand, PAH). It is that which is made manifest to us and other objects. It is the relational usefulness of an object.

    Time and space are not a continuum (i.e. two structuring principles that support all beings in them and beyond), but a by product of the tension between the essence and the eidos of objects. The changes in relations give the impression of movement in time. Objects are not in time, they are through time. Objects are time-space. But it is only because objects have both related and withdrawn sides (one could say light and dark, or chiaroscuro), that time is possible at all. Thus because all objects (semiotic, non-semiotic, material or imaginary) have both relating and non-relating parts, we cannot ontologically prioritize one over they other. Each object is a real event which unfolds as time.

The tetrad of McLuhan relies on a similar dualism of relational/withdrawn objects via his well known maxim of ‘the medium is the message’. This means that the medium not its content is the vehicle for the message of the object. The real object and its essence is the medium which is withdrawn from view. The content of the medium is the relational eidos, the RTH which engages vicariously with other objects. However, the McLuhan’s remain staunch correlationists who insist that their tetrad is only applicable to human related media. To support their anthropocentricism they bring in Fritjof Capra and quote from his ‘The Tao of Physics’, which explains that ‘all things and events we perceive are creations of the mind’ (cited in McLuhans and Metaphysics, p.107). Harman shuns this modest claim seeing the tetrad as having implications beyond the idealism of the internal world of the human mind and a powerful axis within a robust realism. How then does the tetrad account for object-object relations?

I’ll try to experiment here using pollen as my medium:

tetrad pollen

Primitive plants reproduce using flagellated sperm which must swim through water to find and then fertilize ova [obsolese]. This obviously puts great limitations on where a plant might live and still reproduce. The solution is the development of a desiccation-resistant capsule that is capable of transporting sperm through the air [enhance]. This innovation we call pollen. Pollen consists of the male gametophyte and the haploid mitotic product of that gametophyte: sperm nuclei [retrieve]. Mcrospores develop into pollen grains, which mature to become the male gametophytes of seed plants. The pollen grains can be carried away by wind or animals after their release from the microsporangium. In seed plants, the use of resistant, far-traveling, airborne pollen to bring gametes together is a terrestrial adaptation that led to even greater success and diversity of plants on land [reverse] (p. 600, in Biology by Campbell & Reece, 2008).

I’m not sure if this is a correct analysis, but it is the best I can do as of now.

The point, I think, for Harman in the quadruple object is not to merely bring these together but show how change occurs. With Levi Bryant’s onticology, object’s have endo-relations:  the aspect of an object eld in reserve in order to give the object consistency. It’s endo-relations give the conditions for the possibility of ex0-relations, thus endo-relations consist of affects, i.e. the capacity to act and be acted upon.  Exo-realtions are relations between objects. Exo-relations can, however, affect the endo-relations of objects. He calls his brand of speculative realism ‘onticology’ or object-oriented ontology. He wants to focus upon how the withdrawn (or barred, as he calls it, mimicking Lacan) ontological endo-relations of objectile’s form and entropy within networks (exo-relations) and to examine the process of their ‘genesis’. Whereas Harman is focused upon the ontico-ontological dif-ferance. This ontico-ontological moment requires an engine of change, to propel ‘vicarious causation’ into linking and translation between object assemblages. I think we will see Harman use the McLuhan’s concept of ‘heating’ for his own metaphysics.

Heating, for the McLuhan’s allows for change. ‘All change in the world occurs through some transmutation of an existing figure/ground relationship’ (McLuhans and Met, p.116). Media are now defined by a thermodynamic scale between hot and cold. A hot medium does not allows the relating object room for interpretive maneuver, whereas a cold medium does. In the last couple of years the TV has been reinvented. From the small black boxes that were fuzzy and blurry with analogue static, we now how large plasma screen HD TV’s with digital receivers and blu-ray DVD hyper-detailed movies. Thus what was once a cool medium (compared to the cinema which was a hot medium), has heated into the hot medium of the cinema (or ‘home cinema’, as we now call it). Although due to the possibilities opened up by digital broadcasting, there is now more scope for interaction, thus it becomes a cooler medium. The cinema which was previously hot, now gets even hotter with the introduction of hyper-immersion 3D movies and iMax mega-screen cinema complexes. In contrast to this, Ye Olde Shakespearian theatre (such as The Globe) is a cold medium, as it leaves a lot up to the imagiglobe4nation of the relating object: the viewing public (where the antiquated authenticity of the ‘experience’ becomes its main selling point – could this be an aspect of the reversal of both cinema and theatre?).

When a medium thrusts upon another object an over-abundance of information, the relating object cannot decipher all this info and thus abstracts it into a pattern: ‘data overload equals pattern recognition’ (p.117). The figure becomes the ground; the message becomes the medium. The hot hyper-details of ‘figures’ (message) in our day to day lives, over time, are cooled into a narrative ‘ground’ (medium) of phases and moments we remember with fondness or embarrassment. Using the TV and cinema example, the medium overheats when the demands on cinemas to get newer technology, equipment and regulations to keep up with the logic of consumer desire: more detail equals greater immersion and a better ‘experience’, so the advertising tag line exclaims. This ‘detail’ is another word for ‘information’. As the information levels get ramped up, the medium starts to heat up until it exposes the limitations of the medium itself and reverses into a new medium.

For cinema’s, Disney’s ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!’ ride in Disney Land takes this immersion to a farcical level of ‘realism’ (water squirted in your face, air blasted at the back of your legs and giant 3D snakes leaping out from the screen). The heating of any medium takes work. To make and maintain this Disney Land ride takes a lot of work. So much work that very few places and people can replicate its model. It’s selling point is its unique ability to sustain its essence and eidos over time in a very few instances. If we look at this tedradically, then the logic of the cinema should reverse into a new medium which exploits the high definition immersion, but without the crippling limitation of the cost, size and work required to sustain these qualities. There may even be interactive elements.

I will try and expand upon this in the next few weeks with a new post which details further this flowering of ideas between McLhuan and Harman.

‘Awakenings’ and Disinhibitors: Thoughts on the human-animal distiction

October 1, 2009

image127In his book, ‘The Open’, Georgio Agamben unfogged another area of his intellectual terrain which has cross-pollinating implications to his work on biopower, law and humanity. Through a reading of Baron Jacodb Uexkull, a zoologist who aimed to abandon anthropocentric perspectives of life-sciences and understand the life-world of insects and animals, Agamben seeks to follow and go beyond Heidegger in an attempt at uncovering the unthought between the animal and the human. Like Heidegger, Agamben’s focus is on the notion of ‘world’. By defining ‘world’ we define the human. For Uexkull, a life-world (Umwelt) is the environment-world dictated by ‘carriers of significance’, ‘marks’ or as Heidegger puts it ‘disinhibitors’. These disinhibitors are things of interest. More importantly, they are the only things of interest for an animal or insect. Using this observation as a starting point, this article aims to use the film ‘Awakenings’ and Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy to tease out a more appropriate definition of world which is big enough for humans and animals.


In one fascinating investigation of the Ixodes ricinus, which is commonly known as a ‘tick’, Uexkull discovers that a tick responds exclusively to three disinhibitors: 1) the odour of the butyric acid contained in the sweat of all mammals; 2) the correct blood/bodily temperature of 37 degrees; 3) the skin’s typology (if it has blood vessels). If these disinhibitors are never encountered, the tick will lie dormant, in a ‘period of waiting’. Once the criteria has been met, the tick acts indiscriminately on any substance or creature defined only by the presentation of these qualities. The animal, Heidegger notes, is fully closed in the circle of its disinhibitors. Beings are not revealed to the animal, but they are not closed off. It is never revealed to itself as being, neither is its environment. How does the animal relate to the world and to being? For Heidegger, the animal never relates to being as being. They are always “suspended.. between itself and its environment” (H in A, 54). “If [animal] behaviour is not a relation to beings, does this mean that it is a relation to the nothing? No!” writes Heidegger, yet “it must be a relation to something, which must itself be?”. By conclusion, animals must be open (offen) but not disconcealled/openable (offenbar). What this means for the animal is that it has something, but does not have a world, it has only disinhibitors.

The problem I see with this is Heidegger’s necessity to keep the human mode of access to being superior via his concept of ‘the open’. It is through ‘the open’ that Heidegger wants to counter the ‘monstrous anthropomorphization of.. the animal and a corresponding animalization of man’ he sees in the work of Nietzsche which is ‘the oblivion of being’ squarely at work (H in A, 58). For Heidegger, it is fundamentally this fleeing from what is uniquely Dasein’s being that equates to nihilism. It is only through ‘the gaze of authentic thought’, Dasein’s being-towards-death whose being is of concern for it, ‘can see the open which names the unconcealdness of being’ (H in A, 58). The whole of Heidegger argument rests on his notion of the open (or the clearing, as it is better known), who has access to the open, who is in the open, which is reserved elusively for Dasein.

It is here that I hear an interjection from Graham Harman: “there is no free transcendent clearing, in human Dasein or elsewhere” (Tool-being, p. 288). The possibilities-to-be that are presented to Dasein by it’s openness to being are not purely futural, as Heidegger states in Being and Time, they are conditions of the actual relations of objects as they unfold as events. But, as Heidegger says, “the animal is excluded from the essential domain of the conflict between unconcealdness and concealedness. The sign of such an exclusion is that no animal or plant “has the word”’ (H in A, p. 58). [For a rejection of this, see my last post HERE] The word does not bring us any closer to being and does not mean Dasein has a world any more or less than an animal. To make his point, Heidegger refers to the experience of profound boredom as something unique to Dasein which proves that Dasein has a entirely different relation to the as-structure of being than animals. Profound boredom is the feeling of being ‘abandoned in emptiness’ to objects that ‘have nothing to offer us’. They have nothing: no-thing; no specific being that seeks to captivate us. There are no disinhibitors which can engage us in a task or project, nothing to be taken with, there is no captivation, yet we are held to it. If I wait in a super market queue I become bored because I am not captivated by anything, my range of disinhibitors doesn’t include the glossy magazine full of useful calorie counting tips that stares at me from the display which includes tooth rotting temptations and a range of insurance products. In this nothingness, I am handed over to a proximity to being equiprimordial to the captivation of animals towards abstract disinhibitors.

In the film ‘Awakenings’ Malcolm Sayer , the doctor played by Robin Williams, brings a set of catatonic patience ‘back to life’ through the administration of a new drug called ‘L-DOPA’. There are many wonderful themes throughout this film that I won’t cover here (I might write a post about it), but for our purposes it is enough to look at how the film (and I’m sure, a lot of actual medical case history to go with it) gives credibility to Harman’s object-oriented philosophy (OOP) against Heidegger using Heidegger’s own notion of disinhibitors. Such is the simplicity and power of the film ‘Awakenings’ it was quite clear how these issues overlap. The patients in the film do not respond by themselves but require a push start or some kind of sensual provocation. Although there are many examples, the clearest example I like the most is when Lucy (played by Alice Drummond) tries to walk over to the water fountain but stops. Dr Sayer believes he understands the problem based upon his ‘borrowing of will’ theory. Lucy stops before she reaches the window because her field of vision is broken. The chequered pattern of black and white squares under her feet come to an end. There is nothing to ‘will’ her onwards. Dr Sayer and nurse Eleanor colour the floor to match the chequered pattern. When they watch Lucy this time, she doesn’t stop at the edge but continues forward but not to the water fountain as Dr Sayer thought, but to a fan. The floor acts as a visual disinhibitor, in the same way my boredom in the supermarket is only broken by my turn at the checkout.



The difference between me and Lucy is that the disinhibitors have been reduced for Lucy. Although I may suffer profound boredom at the supermarket, the number of disinhibitors are still greater than Lucy’s although my orientation towards beings is one of ‘inactive possibilization’, the refusal and indifference towards beings as being something in particular. Scientifically, boredom is said to be related to a lack of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is formed by the decarboxylation of L-DOPA (according to Wikipedia). The massive doses of L-DOPA administered to the patients in the film were enough to create enough dopamine to expand their range of disinhibitors. I would like to define disinhibitors as ‘paths of abstraction’. For instance, I look at the lamp in front of me. I intend the lamp. Before it was there it was not there. Silent and invisible yet being. I knew it was there but I haven’t thought about it since I last turned it off, about 12 hours ago. What do I think of when looking the lamp: 1) it is something 2) It’s a lamp 3) it’s a pink lamp 4) it head droops down like a wilted flower. I could go on, but I won’t. My first line of abstraction was the ‘isness’ of the lamp, my next line of abstraction was its species identification as a lamp. Next was the abstraction of an identified colour relation. And finally, a metaphorical abstraction. Notice that even the first indicator, ‘isness’, is an abstraction. One way of looking at the difference between human beings and animals is down to the control of disinhibitors. I see human disinhibitors in a spectrum. The activation and deactivation of disinhibitors is caused by any number of environmental stimulae (i.e. a change in object-object relations) which form and break ‘lines of abstraction’ within sets of object assemblages.

As Harman explains, “abstraction is not a feature of the human mind, but of any relation whatsoever, since two events are so utterly concrete that they make contact at all only at the price of abstracting from one another, dealing with a small portion of each other rather than the totality” (Prince of Networks, p. 55). I abstract the world by a different set of disinhibitors than Lucy, just as a tick abstracts the world by a limited number of disinhibitors which given the correct conditions are activated without discrimination. For a tick, these disinhibitors are easily identifiable through testing those conditions to gage a response. I disagree with Heidegger on the ontological implications of my refusal of beings during profound boredom, as he states “the refusal is a calling, it is that which makes authentically possible the Dasein in me” (H in A, p. 67). For Lucy, the refusal of being is the absence of any disinhibitor, the ultimate disinhibitor being dopamine, which brings with it a whole set of new disinhibitors.

The tick examined by Uexkull was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, in absolute isolation from its environment. He concludes that ‘without a living subject, time cannot exist’, the world of the tick lies in suspension. For the catatonic patients of the hospital a similar fate has befallen them. When they wake from their catatonia, time has not mentally passed. Their mental disinhibitors that allow for self-reflexivity were not activated. They awoke to a new world which mixed two new sets of disinhibitors: their psychophysical condition and the concrete world of actual relations. The difference between their condition and that of the tick in isolation can now be explained. The tick’s body is not engaged enough in a world of relations to cause tissue degeneration. For the patents, their bodies are still heavily engaged in relations with the environment, hence the effects of ageing are more than apparent. The psychophysical body cannot avoid the environmental abstractions between itself and its world. In profound boredom we find the experience that link the catatonic patients to the isolated tick and to my experience in a supermarket. Thus the difference between human Dasein and animals is not an ontological difference but a difference in the ‘lines of abstraction’ which disinhibits reactions under actual conditions of any object’s thrown facticity.

NB – ‘H in A’ means: Heidegger quotes from Agamben’s ‘The Open’