Non-Philosophy and Speculative
Posthumanism: A Conversation with
David Roden
David Roden teaches philosophy at the Open University, UK. His published work has addressed the relationship between deconstruction and analytic philosophy, philosophical naturalism, the metaphysics of sound and
posthumanism. He contributed the essay “The Disconnection Thesis” to the Springer Frontiers volume The
Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. His book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the
Human (Routledge 2014) considers the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical implications of the existence
of posthumans: powerful nonhuman agents produced by human-instigated technological processes.
david.roden@open.ac.uk
Bogna Konior is the editor of Oraxiom.
Keywords: Non-philosophy, posthumanism, speculative posthumanism, aliens, transhumanism
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy
A
s David Roden writes, “a biomorphic
posthumanism is no longer about the
human relation to the future... It is the
insurgency of an Outside... We have no transcendental access to this ‘doll space’ prior to
making it.”1 Similarly, as Katerina Kolozova describes Laruelle’s position, “how something appears cannot be philosophically predetermined.
Reality dictates how we will think and develop
entirely new concepts and programmes about
what is going on.”2 In this conversation, David
Roden and Bogna Konior discuss the possible intersections between non-philosophy and
speculative posthumanism, tackling a variety of
topics, including transcendental computers, human agency in relation to modern technology,
the body, biomorphism, and pain, dark phenomenology, and how both non-philosophy and
Roden’s work diverge from other contemporary
approaches to posthumanism.
Bogna Konior: I want to start with a question
that is not central to your work but that drew
my attention. I find it very interesting that you
begin your book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the
Edge of the Human (hereafter PHL) with a discussion of pain. Through non-philosophy, Katerina
Kolozova has written extensively about pain as
the real, the lived, brutal experience par excellence, which, in her view, unbinds our humanity from philosophical and conceptual thinking.
In my article on the recent self-immolation of
Polish chemist Piotr Szczęsny, I use her work to
argue for a non-representational politics rooted in this relentless and equalising workings of
pain. Thinking through my pain syndrome, pain
is as much as the thing-in-itself as I’ve experienced; it is also a communication breakdown,
a fact that Eugene Thacker notices in Infinite
1
David Roden, “Posthumanism: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, ed.
Mads Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London: Bloomsbury,
2020), 81-94.
2
François Laruelle, “Non-Standard Marxism: A Quantum
Theory Approach,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and
Culture vol. 12, no. 1 - 2, (2015), 19.
Resignation: “Low-grade, chronic pain for weeks,
months, I’m trying to listen to my body but I
don’t know what language is it speaking.”3 While
for Kolozova the traumatic experience of pain
shatters signification and is the precondition for
interspecies politics, you write rather that it is a
fundamentally isolating experience: “Whatever
consolation we offer, it seems, the other’s pain
is theirs alone.”4 So, for you, pain reminds us of
our inability to experience the mental states of
others, a problem that can be alleviated technologically. I find the question of pain important
now, with all kinds of pain conditions, acute and
chronic, environmental and physical, emotional
and social on the rise across the globe in an unprecedented manner. What is the place of pain
in your take on posthumanism, especially at this
moment in history?
David Roden: This question cuts across a lot
of my current concerns, some that we will need
to take up in later question, I imagine. Like
Bertrand Russell, Kolozova and yourself, I am
struck by what you imply is pain’s apparent lack
of relation. Whatever its functional role in the
economy of our bodies, the experience of intense suffering or extreme pain seems detached
from any representation or purpose. For example, even if it informs us of tissue damage, this
information is often vitiated by our inability to
use it - because the pain is disabling, chronic,
untreatable, or terminal.
Of course, in the introduction to PHL I introduce this phenomenology to problematize it,
suggesting that pain may not be necessarily private but only contingently so, given the absence
of technologies for connecting the pain evaluation and discrimination areas in one’s brain to
the inputs flowing into analogous areas in others’ brains. But the excessive character of pain
Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism (London:
Repeater Books, 2018).
4
David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the
Human (London: Routledge, 2014), 1.
3
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A Conversation with David Roden
- its ‘blackness and luminosity’ as Kolozova puts
it - is something other than privacy.5 It is privation. Our capacity to express the experience is
precluded by that experience. Its phenomenology, as I say elsewhere, is “dark” or as Thomas
Metzinger says, ‘is online only.’ It does not allow
us a complete or adequate re-presentation.
Pain may be fundamentally privative, divorcing us from the world, because it has no world.
There’s a phenomenological ‘cut’ of pain, something that, in removing the subject, divorces it,
perhaps temporarily, from notional positions
within it - whether as male, female, human, nonhuman, living, machine, etc.
I can go some of the way with Kolozova and
yourself. Perhaps the inhumanity of pain resides
in this power of detachment. This may partly
explain the pleasure of pain received or given
consensually in sadomasochistic practices, performance art or extreme sports. Although Stelarc correctly rejects accusations of masochism,
his body art is also a notional cut of this kind
– removing the body from its functional relation to a world, implying its absolute generality, its capacity for detachment. An art of pain,
cleaving and remaking the body image or imago,
allowing us new possibilities for pleasure or action: pain as offworld violence, or to cite your
reading of Kolozova, “a void that suspends all
meaning, all worldly affairs.”6
I admit I’m hesitant regarding the emancipatory nature of this cut, or rather towards the kind
of thought it prompts or enables. I agree that
there’s some kind of opening here. Maybe being deprived of subjective coherence or world
through the cut of pain can help us think out5
Katerina Kolozova, “A Post Scriptum: Post Mortem (To
my Father),” in Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist
Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
6
Bogna Konior, “Media intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/Political Act,”
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 15, no. 1 -2
(2018), 178.
side the limitations of our worlds. But this only
reiterates the problem of the posthuman as a
subtractive mode: it deprives thought of the
subject, leaving the void as its remainder; but
in so doing removes any source of or address
for normative claims. Maybe the multiple and
contested readings of Piotr Szczęsny’s [politically-motivated] self-immolation [in your article]
illustrate this dangerous ambivalence.7 This may
partly explain the violent rejection and victimization of immigrants that contemporary fascism exploits. As if their loss and victimhood
must be placed outside ‘our’ borders. It’s too
obscene or excessive, one should suffer only in
moderation.
I see the relation to this subtraction as so ‘beheaded,’ so open as to be without any determinate political or ethical content. It does not
imply, for example, a relation of inter-species
justice more than one of extirpatory violence. I
agree that the cut of pain opens a space for remaking bodies and subjects, for different forms
of affiliation, but one so wide that it preempts
any particular decision or form of ethics. For
this reason, also, I’m critical of those ‘critical
posthumanists’ who see deconstructing anthropocentrism as an ethical act portending a more
graceful or egalitarian relationship with nonhuman animals or with life as such. Rather, I regard
anti-anthropocentrism as implicit in the predicament of a late technological modernity already
acephalic, inhuman, ‘out of control’ without
being ‘in control’ in any way we can make sense
of (see PHL, Chapter 7). Anthropocentrism is
wizened and dying on its feet. It doesn’t work
anymore. But the forms of distributed agency
or non-agency (rather) that are replacing individual and collective agency - e.g. of deliberative
democracies, collectives, etc. - seem utterly indifferent to otherness or the distinctive life of
the other. I accept that pain may sometimes be
a gift; a phenomenological cut that - in disordering our body or world - opens us to thinking dif7
159
Ibid.
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy
ferent embodiments. Maybe Kolozova is right
that this is a necessary condition for some kind
of interspecies politics, but it isn’t sufficient, and
it is massively ambivalent.
BK: In PHL, you overview various strands of
post- and transhumanism. I have been drawn
to the idea now called transhumanism from a
young age because of its commitment to either
extreme bodily modification (to the level of disrupting species identity) or abandoning the body
altogether. I am often scolded for this commitment - arguing against the body is a general no-no
in all kinds of disciplines, with feminism leading
the way. In Kolozova’s work, it seems that ridding ourselves of this commitment to our bodies would foreclose our ability to have a morethan-human politics. Similarly, for a teacher of
mine [Jules Sturm] who initially trained me in
posthumanism, queer embodiment and posthumanism were synonymous. Paul di Fillipo’s novel A Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent Tropicanalia is a good example here and one I think you’d
like because it comes close to your insistence on
biomorphism as a key component of speculative
posthumanism - the body is not to be abandoned but morphed in ways as yet unforeseen.8
Di Filippo describes a fusion between a woman
and a “benthic,” a metamorphic, totipotent animal named after organisms that live in the lowest bodies of water. In the novel’s end-of-days,
climactic, cannibalistic orgy, the consumption of
quivering flesh is not the locus of objectification but of personalization. While he is paying
tribute to the radical Tropicália art movement in
Brazil in the 1960s, where the dominant principle was antropofagia, a cultural cannibalism, he
calls his own genre “ribofunk,” a rendering of
cyberpunk that takes biology and excretions like
slime, fluid, blood, and sperm as the field of the
technological revolution to come.9 But it seems
8
Paul di Filippo, A Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent Tropicanalia (Cabin John, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2002).
9
Paul di Filippo, “Ribofunk Manifesto” (1996), https://
www.wired.com/1996/05/ribofunk-manifesto/
to me that for many who think about the challenges that exist and that will come, bodies seem
a burden - our bodies do quite badly in outer
space, for example, which is why they have been
written out of various futurist narratives. Could
you talk a bit more about why retaining the body
is necessary in speculative posthumanism - is it
a question of philosophical rigor for you (we
cannot think ourselves without bodies) or also a
strategic choice to place yourself in a discourse
that discounts embodiment as a productive way
of thinking about posthumanism?
DR: Thanks for posing this question so well,
Bogna - I’ve just ordered Di Fillipo’s book! I admit that I am struggling with this question at the
moment.
Posthumanism seems to me a response to various overlapping predicaments in which bodies
find themselves. I’ve already referred to the way
the virulent power of technological modernity
seems to exceed agency, anything like a bounded,
political body. At the same time, we remain embodied creatures at a historical juncture where
we can imagine very radical changes to individual bodies, their minds, their interrelationships
and boundaries. For example, the introduction
of increasingly intimate technologies inside the
skin-bag, neural interfaces between bodies and
prosthetic devices, synthetic protein switches
to monitor and regulate cellular machinery, the
production of transgenic animals to service the
excess demand for transplantable organs, the
use of genome editing techniques like CRISPR to target or induce new mutations in both
human or nonhuman bodies... And, of course,
some transhumanists dream of transcending
the limitations of the body entirely - whether
through mind-uploading, the creation of nonhuman artificial intelligence or by escaping biological senescence. A future technopolitics
of space colonization - should this occur - will
radically explore the limits of bodies, the degree
to which they can be adapted for non-terrestrial
160
A Conversation with David Roden
environments and the extent to which this might
constitute a mechanism of posthuman ‘disconnection,’ a secession from terrestrial bodies and
forms of political affiliation.
On the other hand, we are facing a catastrophic
breakdown in the capacity of various environmental and technological systems to sustain human and nonhuman bodies. Lastly, the political
contestation over bodies, gender and race, over
territory, place and identity are becoming more
vehement and open. Maybe, as I suggested in
the case of migration, this bespeaks a kind of
terror reflex in the face of these other changes,
an attempt to shore up meaning by cementing
identity - a kind of retreat into the “peace and
safety of a new dark age” - I couldn’t resist citing
Lovecraft’s opening to The Call of Cthulhu here,
which opens a completely ‘other’ can of worms,
or tentacles...10
Even those who see biological bodies as instantiations of abstract cognitive functions contest
the place of the body. In fact, it is hard to conceptualize agency without the assumption of a
relatively stable body, fundamentally self-maintaining and bounded, however plastic and adaptable. The posthuman predicament is one that however acephalic and disembodied - challenges
our conception of what bodies are in ways almost too numerous to list here.
I’m not sure if posthumanism would be recognizable without this double affect of massive
fragility and almost unlimited potential. If the
body is, in some way, the essential horizon of
posthumanism, this generates a kind of aporia.
We need this contested, changeable flesh to articulate the posthuman condition or posthuman
predicament - our capture by these multiscale
technological, social and environmental processes. But given the possibility space that it opens
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in H. P. Lovecraft:
The Fiction. Complete and Unabridged (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 2008), 355 – 380.
up, there is no phenomenology of the body or
conception of agency adequate for conceptualizing what is being challenged or threatened.
The space of possibilities is too vast, whereas
the philosophical tools available for constraining
that space seem too epistemically fragile, or so
I’ve argued in PHL and elsewhere.
It’s as if posthuman philosophy is fated to subtract the body that made it intelligible as a historical predicament. I can put it another way:
This is one of many points where posthumanism outreaches philosophy, indicating its points
of contact with non-philosophy. The body that
is challenged has its ‘incept date,’ its pleasures,
pains, gender(s), ethnicity, racial marking. But
none of these seem transcendental or invariant.
They are not philosophical material for limiting
the scope of posthuman possibility. As soon as
we insist on one dimension of this body as invariant - I don’t know, its capacity for duration
or joy, for rational action - we limit the scope
of the posthuman challenge. We need a way of
addressing our bodies as the subjects of this experiment that isn’t tied to invariants.
The idea of the biomorph - I think - is that of
a kind of placeholder or ‘stand in’ for the body
invariants that the posthuman condition precludes. The biomorph isn’t personal and it isn’t
the body itself. Perhaps - to reference Nancy - it
touches the body at its limit, modifying and machining it, offering it up to experimentation and
fantasy. Di Filippo’s fiction of xenoerotic fusion
with a trans-species entity or cannibalism is thus
biomorphic in this sense, as are Bellmer’s highly
sexualized dolls, Ballard’s Crashes, Cronenberg’s
visceral bodies and machines.11 It’s not a conceptual representation of possibilities so much
as an organon for intervening in or transgressing bodies, affecting them in precisely the way
that pain or violence affects us, cutting us offworld, perhaps not unpleasurably. In this case,
10
11
David Roden, “Xenoerotics,” (2020), https://enemyindustry.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/xenoerotics/
161
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy
I suspect, this is to conjure ‘pleasures’ or dissociations from unexpected quarters, potentiating
action and connection, however discreetly. What
possibilities does the thought - the pleasurable
thought - of being food for a lover or alien God,
a gift for another (human or non) open up?
Could that generate a politics? Once again, I’m
not proposing this as a lifestyle (laughs).
BK: Despite the importance of embodiment for
your project, one of the most obvious intersections between speculative posthumanism and
non-philosophy is that both discount human
experience as a ground for thought. Non-philosophy, in my view, is akin to an anti-phenomenology (although Laruelle might scold me here
for using the word ‘anti,’ which does not allow
the same movement of mutation as ‘non’ does).
Non-philosophy’s use of ‘man’ interchangeably
with ‘the real’ could give the opposite impression
yet Man-in-person is not a subject nor a mode
of consciousness, experience or being. In fact,
if the real is experienceable it is only through its
practice or through its effects. This seems connected to the types of experiences that you call
dark: “having them does not confer much or any
understanding of them” and that “our capacity
for self-reflection exposes us to the simulation
of a subject whose utterly non-subjective nature
is entirely inaccessible to it.”12 For you, this is
important - acknowledging these dark phenomena means that we abdicate the desire to decide
how our experiences can apply to “non-human,
non-terrestrial or posthuman life” or decide on
what makes someone a person.13 This vocabulary of “broken thought” and “disconnection”
not only relates to non-philosophical practice
but is very powerful in the times when, despites
its goal to do the exact opposite, posthumanist
thinking is dominated by affects, connections,
networks, relations, affirmations and the lexicon
of neoliberal subjectivity. The commitment to
12
David Roden, “Disconnection at the Limit: Posthumanism, Deconstruction and Non-Philosophy,” Symposia
Melitensia 14 (2018), 24.
13
Roden, “Posthumanism: Critical. Speculative Biomorphic”
dark experiences is contrary, you say, to new materialist posthumanism that reduces nonhumans
to life, relations, affect or, in the case of Rosi
Braidotti, ‘endurance, passion, pain.’14 Could you
elaborate on this difference, especially in relation
to what kind of politics and ethics they necessitate? It seems to me that new materialist posthumanism wants to look for common ground with
nonhumans and sees in that a precondition of
ethics, which is why the relations, connections
and networks are so important. But could there
be an empathy without understanding, an ethics without perception, and with no common
ground? Some would argue that this is something that non-philosophy forces us to consider.
DR: To begin with, I think we need to be clear
about what the dark phenomenology thesis implies for phenomenology. It isn’t intended as
an eliminativist thesis about first person experience. It is consistent with eliminativist or deflationist theses about phenomenal consciousness
such as those developed by Dan Dennett (multiple drafts theory) and Keith Frankish (illusionism) but does not entail them. The idea, rather,
is that having experience does not provide a
secure warrant for claims about the nature of
that experience because its structure need not be
disclosed by the mere having it.
For example, if some phenomenological accounts of the continuity of temporal experience
are on the right tracks it is hard to see how we
could have first person evidence for those accounts (experience would be just too dense and
rich for finite beings to grasp). By the same token there can be no epistemic warrant for claiming that experience consists of a special class
of introspectable phenomenal properties which
cannot be accounted for naturalistically in terms
of the functional role of conscious states. The
problem - as Keith Frankish and Metzinger have
argued - is to explain why humans have such intuitions of specialness. That also involves a kind
of phenomenology but it’s entirely naturalistic
14
See Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity
Press 2019).
162
A Conversation with David Roden
and continuous with (say) cognitive theories of
the architecture of mind. Dark phenomenology makes room for naturalism without entailing naturalism. It implies that our first-person
knowledge of consciousness experience is narrower than we think, but it doesn’t entail any
particular thesis about its susceptibility to scientific (third person) methods. That something for
the scientists to work out, or fail to work out.
So, yes, I agree with Laruelle about the opacity of experience and practice. It’s not merely
that we act without having unmediated access
to action, but that the very space of that mediation (interpretation) isn’t given either, and quite
possibly alien. For example, should we subscribe
to the neo-Hegelian view that mind and agency
are constituted by the space of reasons within
historically evolving social games? I don’t think
there’s a convincing argument for this claim to
be had - certainly within phenomenology or interpretation-based account of meaning.
I think this implies a more austere, dark but
also (I hope) epistemologically rigorous kind of
posthumanism. I don’t deny that there are affects, ecologies, relations, especially transversal
ones, where organisms or species bleed into one
another, acquire new functioning and power.
However, for reasons that ought to be clear by
now, we need to be cautious about reading an
ethical itinerary into this metaphysics. The most
‘teleology’ we can derive from this ontology is
that function and purpose (insofar as they are
to be found) are diachronic and indeterminate.
There’s nothing that life wants. There’s nothing
inherently joyful or graceful about becoming.
Nor is there anything egalitarian about the transversal. To use Braidotti’s terminology, “zoe”
(this generalized, differential life opposed to the
cultivated, individuated life or “bios”) doesn’t
want to save us affirm anything at all.15
This doesn’t mean there isn’t a scope for affirmation here, only that this isn’t any longer
15
See Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (New York: Polity Press,
2013).
bounded. I want to quote Claire Colebrook
(who I’ve admired hugely since seeing her incendiary talks at a couple of Society for European
Philosophy – Forum for European Philosophy
events) writing in an almost Darwinian vein in
her essay How Queer Can You Go: Theory, Normality and Normativity:
This question of fitness is, I would argue, a politic-metaphysical question of
the utmost urgency for our time. What
modes of life, what forces or selections
can be affirmed? This is not the question
of a decision – of how we might make
or recreate ourselves – but the problem
of encounters that are queer (not determined according to recognition and reproduction).16
Theory/philosophy can’t preempt ethics because
ethics is made rather than recognized (hence the
compound ‘politic-metaphysical’). Theory can’t
affirm anything - especially posthumanist theory
since the epistemological unbinding principles at
its core (dark phenomenology/ performativity)
are fundamentally subtractive. Admittedly, we
might want to say that posthumanist theory is
a subject - an operation of subtraction - but, if
so, it’s a perverse and deracinating one that - like
Vaughan, the ideologist and sexual totem of Ballard’s Crash - is engaged in a suicide run whose
effect is to detach politics/bodies/technology
from the space of philosophical adjudication.
BK: I would add that there are other dangers
in this philosophical pre-emption of posthuman
ethics. Fetishizing animals and plants, othered
as tokenistic ‘ethical models’ and aspired to as
our salvation from ‘humanism’ might serve us
well in rituals of poetic self-purification and performances of self-erasure. But because we need
16
Claire Colebrook, “How Queer Can You Go? Theory,
Normality and Normativity” in Queering the Non/Human, ed.
Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Publishing, 2008), 30.
163
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy
to keep them fixed through a specific ethical
definition so that we can erase our humanism
‘through them,’ we actively reduce them to historically specific, limited goals of social ‘progress’ in our times, say, socialism or feminism in
Europe in 2019. This also erases the possibility
of nonhumans being something else, or indifferent, or just resistant to any ontological colonialism of the ‘noble nonhuman’ we perform
for the purpose of our contemporary politics.
So, instead, you propose ‘unbinding,’ an idea
that I see as close to the intention of non-philosophy. You take it from Drucilla Cornell’s
“philosophy of the limit,” which you describe
as such: “strip away the artificial constraints
that make the world in our image, layer by layer, concept by concept. What remains, as in deconstruction, is something other than a world,
and perhaps something more or less than philosophy, but an encounter with a remainder or
non- meaning that philosophy cannot recognize
or conceptualize.”17 And elsewhere you speak
of the “self-imposed conceptual poverty of
Unbound Posthumanism,”18 recalling non-philosophy’s intention to think without concepts,
what John Ó Maoilearca unpacks so well.19 You
argue we should perform unbinding with regards to our humanity. You then want to make
this more indeterminate, towards a post-humanity
that we cannot yet imagine or recognize: “If we
unbind the posthuman we cannot deliberate on
becoming posthuman without pre-empting our
deliberation.”20 Has encountering non-philosophy after completing the book changed how you
think about what speculative posthumanism and
unbinding could be? You write that “speculative posthumanism is committed to a minimal,
non-transcendental and nonanthropocentric humanism and will help up put bones on its realist
17
Roden, “Disconnection at the Limit,” 26.
Roden, “Posthumanism: Speculative, Critical, Biomorphic.”
19
John Ó Maoilearca, All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and
Nonhuman Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2015).
20
Roden, “Disconnection at the Limit,” 27.
18
commitments,”21 which sounds completely like
non-philosophy to me!
DR: I sometimes feel like I’m converging with
Laruelle from a different starting point. While
I appreciate that his use of ‘Real’ is axiomatic
- to be grasped through its performative consequences - I’m not sure we need to make that
opening game to solicit such a space of indetermination. As you imply with your remark
on Cornell, I guess my approach owes more to
deconstruction, in that regard; scratching at the
blind spots or aporia in systems, slackening their
constraints, etc.
I’ve read a bit of Laruelle, talked to him briefly (in my fractured French) at an event in the
Liverpool Tate, and obviously read those he
has influenced, Katerina [Kolozova], yourself,
John [Ó Maoilearca], Rocco Gangle, Emma E.
Wilson and, of course, Ray Brassier. I think the
effect of these various encounters has been to
confirm my sense that posthumanism requires
a shift via epistemology and ontology towards
a kind of operation or practice - whether or
not this should be viewed as ‘affirmative’ in
the sense that Braidotti and others urge. I don’t
feel that I need to use Laruellian terminology
(the Real, vision-in-one, determination in the
last instance, etc.) to do this. But I don’t think
I can claim any special originality or independence here. You and the others on this list are
remarkably independent in the way you develop
Laruelle’s thought. There’s nothing here like the
cloying scholasticism that one sometimes found
in some of the reception of Derrida and Foucault within anglophone continental philosophy.
If there’s a sense of struggle and perhaps concern here, it’s that this indetermination is, as I’ve
suggested, hard to like. It’s a kind of ‘for-itself ’
that is also for nothing. I don’t know, or have any
reason to believe, for example, that it will help us
save the planet.
21
164
Roden, Posthuman Life, 36.
A Conversation with David Roden
BK: Speaking of our theme, ‘the end times,’
you write about a different, posthuman reality
emerging through technological alteration, “human-made future that doesn’t include us.”22 Advancement requires withdrawal, disconnection;
or, in non-philosophical terms, both synthesis
and mutation require negation. It must start from
the negative. In the academy, transhumanism,
which you also criticize, is generally condemned
because of its association with the military-industrial complex and capitalism, both of which
are often disavowed in the academic humanities
in Europe. Transhumanism has an obviously futurist ambition. Critical posthumanism (and its
extension in the new materialism), on the other
hand, developed in self-proclaimed parallel to
feminist and postcolonial thought - the narrative
here tends to be that ‘we are already posthuman
therefore attempts at posthumanism are power
relations in decoy.’ They are more interested in
mapping existing relations of power through
deconstructing what the category of the human
means. Attempts to cut across this division - as
some members of Laboria Cuboniks, for example, try to do - often hit a nerve. Apart from
a short essay Homo ex Machina, Laruelle tackles
this subject in The Transcendental Computer, where
he entertains the possibility of “a unified theory of thought and computing… a machine that
would have a transcendental relation to philosophy in its entirety and therefore would be able
to compute-think the blendings of thought and
computing” akin to a “transcendental arithmetic like Platonism.”23 In this arrangement, the
real (or human-in-person) is both “a legible figure in a space of transcendence [and] precisely
what defies every transcendence and every inert
22
Roden, “Disconnection at the Limit,” 19.
François Laruelle, “Homo ex Machina,” trans. Taylor Adkins (2018), https://fractalontology.wordpress.
com/2018/02/08/new-translation-of-francois-laruelles-homo-ex-machina-1980/; “The Transcendental Computer:
A Non-Philosophical Utopia,” trans. Taylor Adkins and
Chris Eby (2013), https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.
com/2013/08/26/translation-of-f-laruelles-the-transcendental-computer-a-non-philosophical-utopia/
23
structure composed of terms and relations.” He
states that “AI prejudges intelligence, what intelligence can do by setting for it limits or goals
(determined and finite in the measurable sense)
in order to compare it to the machine,” which
recalls your own commitment to underdetermined thinking about posthumans and what
their intelligence might be like. But philosophers
are not the ones who decide. Nevertheless, over
the decades and in unpredictable ways, many of
philosophy’s ideas have made it to the cultural
mainstream, to the extent that popular op-ed
culture seems like a parody of academic cultural studies, with the same discursive wars waged
on a larger scale. Could you comment on these
underdetermined ideas of intelligence? Is it possible to speculate on what that would mean for
“us” (humans)?
DR: The dominant images of intelligence in the
AI community have been in flux for some time:
e.g. intelligence as the ability to derive theorems
within formal systems, intelligence as the codification of expert knowledge, intelligence as skillful embodied coping (in situated robotics). The
current interest in the powers of deep learning
neural networks raises particular problems for
received philosophical conceptions of intelligence. For example, DeepMind’s Alpha Go
Zero (AG.0) the successor to the deep neural
network Alpha Go (which defeated a three-time
European Go champion) learned to play in an
entirely unsupervised way, by playing successive
iteration of itself.
A related issue which has bedeviled neural network research for some time, is that a trained
up neural network may accomplish a particular
pattern recognition task but its creators may
only have access to the learning algorithm or
classical data structures that produce this fluency. It doesn’t follow that they understand how
the trained up neural network achieves this:
that knowledge is encoded in the weights of a
multidimensional neuronal state space, which
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humans can’t intuitively comprehend in the way
one can, for example, comprehend a piece of
code that implements some algorithm. There
are dimensionality reduction approaches in statistics which can tackle this problem by finding
the significant subspace and trajectories relevant
to a particular task, but (and here I’m talking
way outside my expertise!) this may become increasingly problematic with the very large neural
networks (hundreds of layers) exploited in deep
learning. In her keynote at Tuning Speculation
7, Beatrice Fazi argued that this leads to a kind
of opacity in machine thought - in that the algorithmic models produced by deep neural networks are opaque but also treat the domain that
they work in as yet another black box, generating
prediction engines rather than theories that delineate the structure or composition of reality.
It should be stated that this approach is, with
qualifications, reflected in current cognitive science in the vogue for predictive coding models
of learning and cognitive function.
So, it is possible, regardless of the philosophical prescriptions of transhumanism, that progress in AI and CogSci will generate images of
thought by virtue of the brute success of certain
paradigms over others. One way this might go
is tipping us towards Scott Bakker’s “Semantic
Apocalypse” - a final shredding of humanistic
assumptions about a special preserve where
meaning, intentionality or normativity held
sway. If things go this way, nothing we’re doing
in the academic humanities or posthumanities
is going to stem the backwash or help us cope
with it. The end of meaning is the end of the
human, the end of ethics, any kind of political
prospectus we can grasp. Alternatively - and this
is reflected in the work of neorationalists like
Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier - there are
plenty of folk who argue that we need to reinstate a commitment to intelligence as the reflexive employment of concepts in social-inferential
practices.
To be intelligent - in this sense - is not just to
be nifty at generating optimal outcomes but of
having the language-bound capacities for the
production of transcendental apperception. I
have the greatest admiration for Brassier, Negarestani et al. and Reza’s latest book elaborates this
prospectus in vivid and massively fascinating detail.24 However, I’ve argued that this approach inherits the philosophical blind spots of the Pittsburgh Pragmatism (Sellars, Brandom, etc.) that
informs it. The worry goes something like this:
the Pittsburgh-style approach needs a model of
agency as the capacity to undertake and ascribe
normative (deontic) commitments. But since
such approaches deny that we can simply read
off normative practices from non-intentionally
described behavior or regularities, normativism
reduces to something like interpretationism.
When asked what makes a particular stretch of
behavior meaningful or norm-governed the interpretationist says something like: ‘it could be
so interpreted by an interpreter under idealized
conditions…’ (for example, where the interpreter is a field anthropologist who wants to devise
a semantic theory of an entirely unknown language).
The problem here is just who is this Interpreter?
It’s not the apperceptive subject - or better not
be because then the account is viciously circular and collapses. But then - with a nod to the
worries about dark phenomenology mentioned
above - we don’t seem to have an independent
account of what this second-order transcendental hermeneut is. Is it even human? At the risk
of being a little unfair, Donald Davidson in his
work on Radical Interpretation pretty much assumes a pith-helmeted fellow with a notebook,
recording his interactions with natives throwing
spears at rabbits. But viewed through the lens of
posthumanism there are no obvious constraints
that can independently limit the capacity of the
interpreter. Alluding to the theory-fiction [that I
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018).
24
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A Conversation with David Roden
read recently at Tuning Speculation 7], The Sound
Artist, we might imagine ‘it’ as the cowled auditor in Becket’s Not I, Nyarlathotep herself, or
Laruelle’s transcendental computer.
That is, once we strip away the filters afforded
by phenomenology or anthropology, the worry
is that the Pittsburghers and their neorationalist
acolytes can’t regiment the space of interpretation. It follows that seeing the future of intelligence as the social production of transcendental
apperception just won’t cut it: the ‘space of reasons’ it entertains is massively underdetermined.
It cannot - for example - preclude Bakker’s Semantic Apocalypse as a resting state along its
itinerary.
BK: Last question. You write about humans as
“feral technological entities”25 and I am just riffing on a word here but would it be interesting to
reflect on the place of speculative posthumanism in the Sixth Extinction of species, or what
has been called the anthropocene? And more so,
is this a question of ethics or of something else,
maybe of possibilities of techno-biological adaptation? You make a commitment to an underdetermined ethics; in fact, you condemn mainstream transhumanism, represented by the likes
of Nick Bostrom, for its moralizing attitude the transhuman is better, faster, stronger. The
same criticism goes, however, for Braidotti and
her condemnation of capitalism, for example,
as “unnatural,” a diversion from some kind of
good, non-capitalist essence of life. Both affirm
the existence of the natural, they just valuate it
differently. Looking for a third way - no ‘natural’
way of things and no moral hype of technological advancement, what is then the speculative
posthumanist stance regarding environmental
change (if any)?
DR: You summarize my criticisms of transhumanism and critical posthumanism beautifully
but I fear that my response won’t live up to the
same standards. Personally, of course, I worry
25
about the prospect of radical climate change
because it threatens to strip away the nature on
which I minimally depend, from which I draw
enjoyment, aesthetic pleasure while foraging for
cherries, apples, petting cats, and so on. The position I developed in PHL implies that maximizing functional autonomy (the capacity to enlist
values and generate functions in an environment) is the way to go in a planetary technological culture generating an increasingly noisy, uncertain future. This is because wider functional
autonomy is an existential necessity. In an uncertain world you want to maximize your options
even if this generates a positive feedback loop
requiring the cultivation of even wider functional autonomy …
But this isn’t a moral prescription and it presupposes something like a stable, embodied agent
(or population of such) as the subject of these
interactions. That position was self-evidently
perverse, but an unbounded posthumanism simply embraces its essential perversity. To quote
from a forthcoming piece of mine: “A rigorous posthumanism is ... perverse in principle. It
makes no philosophical decisions, including or
especially ethical ones; although, as in Braidotti’s
posthumanist ontology, it indicates a field where
ethical relations between variously living and
non-living entities may emerge.” I’m not sure I
can do much better. To look for posthumanism
for ethical guidance or political critique is just
wrong-headed. It can, however, cue us to the
junctures, the spaces or interstices where new
bodies or ethical relationships emerge. For example, and with a nod to my anti-natalist friends,
it can allow us to consider a gentle path to the
extinction of humans or sentients on a dead
planet finally devoid of suffering as an ethical
path or trajectory. It doesn’t prescribe this however, because that is not the game of posthumanism.
Roden, “Disconnection and the Limit,” 20.
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