Listening to the world.

I'm slowly engaging with notions of the eco-social, the social ecology movement and related discussions in ecology/human ecology. This is all very far removed from my old approach to questions of human ecology centered on perception/cognition/media - ecology at a kind of intra-(more-than)-personal scale @wall-smith2008. I'm speculating whether the latter might inform an approach to questions of eco-sociality that are activist in nature (as in an activist philosophy and as a mode of practice).

Some points of departure and some searching for the interesting question in all of this:

What does an eco-socialism look like? Who might we approach the eco-social from a principle of listening to the world as media. **What might a practice of listening to 'the world as media' look like? **Andrew Murphie developed this idea of 'World as Media' and it struck me that this is the way I always thought ecology, from the perspective of the body and perception, or rather ecologies as emergent systems of affect and perception. Ecologies as always interwined, overlapping, incorporating and incorporated according to their afforded modes of skin/ boundary/ differentiatiation/ conversation information evocation and communication ...sense. What is ecology without an emergent intimacy of relation....without a being affected by the world as media? Of course I'm paraphrasing his always excellent and always complicated work but I like its reframing of things and particularly media. As a 'media theorist' I've never been much interested in 'the media' and here I think we get a little closer (via Bateson and Peter Harries-Jones on Bateson see references) to something more fundamental about the world and the central part 'communication' (and the media that 'serves' that communication - the 'world as media') plays in the realisation and continuity of negentropic systems. I guess I'm maybe a cyberneticist more than a media theorist - but that terms is also odd and constrained in a way that doesn't quite fit.

I think this is the reference

In framing these questions I realised how little I knew about the field and theory of natural ecology. I'm in the process of recitifying that but it'll take some time and work.

I've done lots of research and writing in the distant past on Media Ecologies and the Ecology of Mind. My interest in ecology has always been from this perspective; how our bodies think/feel with the world? How information and affective flows afford emergent continuities? What is the nature of the human continuity - its relation to the 'world as media'? What is the position of technics/the social/the cultural within this emergent continuity?

In my unfinsished thesis @wall-smith2008 I found a resonance between Brain Massumi's thinking on affect and his model of perception as cognition @massumi2002 and Bernard Stielger's thinking of technics as the very possibilty of a future @stiegler1998. In the work of both (coming from very different theoretical roots and perspectives) the in-excess of a feeling becomes the basis for realising an extended continuity of becoming via anticipation. Anticipation and technics (technique/technology) are two sides of the same phenomena -an extension of perception and action into the world as the basis for a return to an autonomically recalled or engineered potential. For Stiegler this is the very possibilty of a future....there is no sense of a future without this modulation of the present with a recalled past. As Massumi makes clear it makes no sense to think the past or the future as anything but contemporaneous with the present.

In my intial thesis @wall-smith2008 Stiegler's theory of Technics and Time as a more fundamental version of the Derrida's 'everything becomes discourse' so that the Deriddean 'discourse' became an instance of a more general and encompassing 'everything becomes technics' - We are always becoming technical.

What this meant for a theory of the social (which wasn't a big part of that thesis @wall-smith2008) was that the social was largely an extension of this techncial becoming - i.e The social is a techncial becoming based on extending the network of thinking/feeling into the world as the basis for anticipation. The most interesting aspect of this was drawn from Massumi's notion of the biogram. Before we are even aware of our perception it has already been modulated, filtered and selected for, by the past that it autonomically recalls. The future is nothing more than this - the present modulated by the past it recalls. We are our biogrammatic continuity - this is our sense of self - of Being inhabiting space-time.

For those who know it (and there are few who know both works well) this notion of time as a function of the modulation of potential in the service of anticipation speaks strongly to Stiegler's Fault of Epimetheus @stiegler1998. For Stiegler a sense of a being in-excess or outside of one's self compels an (anxious) organisation of the world in the service reasserting a sense of unified interiority (a interiorly unified subject). In the end - I decided Stiegler's notion of a unified interiority was indeed allegorical. We don't need a lack or a forgetting in order to justify an anxious colonisation of the world in the service of its anticipation.

We don't need all that Derridean psychological/structuralist complexity when Massumi @massumi2002 (via Libet, Varela, Merleau-Ponty and others) gives us an autonomic (rather than anxious) biological mechanism for the realisation and incorporation of excess. Massumi's biogrammatic continuity takes all the anxiety and questionable psychology out of the question of technics and time. I might add here, however, that even if we don't need all those poststructuralist mechanics those mechanics are nonetheless useful and do accurately describe the dynamic and model of always-becoming-technical as allegory. The forgetting of our always relational becoming and the anxiety it serves regarding the subject as a unified interiority is useful in describing the subject as an evolving network of techncial anticipation. For that reason Stielger's work remains powerful and has much to say of the relation between technics, affect and ecology.

In particular Stiegler's call for what I translate as a spirited technics, a technics thats serves rather than impoverishes the 'life of the mind/spirit', the industry of mind, is critical to the ecological challenges we face. The concern for a spirited technics asks how we might culture new connections with the world in the service of novel continuities and a vibrant and self sustaining eco-sociality would, at this point of history, be a novel emergence given the state of industrialisation and indivisualism to which we are currently subject (of/to). What perhaps isn't stated in Stiegler's @stiegler1998 theory (as far as I've read - there is a lot of Stielger to cover and I've mostly engaged with the first three books of Technics and Time) is that questions of the 'life of the mind/spirit' that revolve around the nature of our always technical becoming are indeed questions of critical and wider ecological importance.

For me this industry of mind is fundmantally tied to the possibilty of an eco-social emergence and vice versa. A spirited technics would be capable of culturing novel eco-social continuities and emergent-cies - a spirited technics might even be a set of techniques, eco-social practices for culturing eco-social intimacies. The 'overdetermination of the the life of the mind in the service of industrial need and utility' is, in my mind, at the root of a neglect for the 'world as media' @murphie2019.

I've lost the social here in describing the backstory. The most interesting aspect of Massumi's @massumi2002 notion of the subject or cognition as a biogrammatic continuity was that there is no easy access to the outside of this continuity - we are engaging with the world but always (well yes... always-already) 'finding ourselves' (running into ourselves - a nice image) in modulation with it. In a particularly resonant conclusion he asks 'what lies beyond the biogram?' - answering - 'other people's minds' @massumi2002. So while the social for me is indeed an extension of our techncial becoming it is also a technical becoming charcaterised by the radical and generative contingency of other people's minds. The social becomes key to our creative generativity.

For me there were all kinds of technical possibilties in this set of theories @wall-smith2008 - questions about how we might 'farm' the future for contingent potential. I was excited by practices and technics (technique and technology) that might work generatively with this dynamic of autonomic techncial becoming. I explored and imagined systems of improvisational composition capable of disrupting autonomic and habitual becoming in the service of realising new excess, new structures, new potential. At the begining of the networked society I imagined a generative network technics capable of augmenting and radicalising our collective intelligence. I pushed up against the limits of algorithmic and computational generativity and thought how best that generativity might feed into the thinking/feeling of a non-autonomous subjectivity @wall-smith2008.

In the end - well at this particular point in history - all that radical thinking about a generative network intelligence seems pretty naiive - but my theory of affect and technics derived from the intersection of the work of both Stielger and Massumi does do remarkably prescient job of describing the current state of the media ecology. Of course the algorithm has not been tuned to farm a radical indeterminant and generative futurity. Instead the algorithm has been tuned to play our autonomic modulation of perception against us in the service of total control over our perception as cognition - to farm our biogrammatic continuity in the service of making us intrumental to the further accumulation of social and financial capital - the extraction of a cognitive surplus. Social media gives us a constant feed of 'contingent' (of course its a purely instrumental contingency) potential carefully and personally customised to appeal to our individual desires anxieties while also providing the means therein to have them captured, contained, socially ratified - the social here becomes warped and instrumentalised as a weapon of cognitive containment.

When I was writing my old thesis the notion of the social as reducable to instrumentality/technics disturbed some readers. It seems a little mercenary I suppose - in the same mode as Dawkin's selfish gene. It seems clear to me given the development of cognitive/surveillance capital that thinking the social as instrumental is the first step in thinking what an alternative social technics might look like and for critiquing and diagnosing the dangerous state of contemporary sociality. Our perception as cognition has been instrumentalised in the service of cognitive/surveillance capital. If nothing else (before we get thinking about misinformation and distraction) this means we are far less capable of engaging our limited cognitve/affective bandwidth in the world as media beyond our digital interfaces and their modulations of perception. This 'world as media' includes the very thing that characterised the social as an essential outside of our biogrammatic continuity - 'other people's minds'. Both chance/indetermination of the world as media and the radical contingency of the other's biogrammatic difference have been systematically excluded from our contemporary network ecology.

Its not going to be clear why this is important in ecological terms - except that I also theorised a model of sustainability - of negentropic continuity - that placed this human mode of becoming within the wider context of the ecological dynamic out of which it emerged, upon which it was defined and dependent @wall-smith2008. The human short circuit of perception-as-cognition via a closed loop between affect and technics shuts us off to the 'world as media'. This marks a failure of communication (see @harries-jones1995 on Bateson and Bateson himself) that threatens that the entire ecology

None of this Ecology of Mind extrapolated to the social as intra-personal technics has anything to do with what people would identify with as social ecology. I've not read or had much to exposure to the work of Murray Bookchin who seems to 'own' the term. Maybe I don't need that term at all. Perhaps the approach my inital theory took on ecology of mind and media can provide a slightly different way of theorising and developing an eco-social practice.

Over the last 10 years I've become more deeply enaged with my own immediate local environment - defending it in the face of advances from extractive industries and encouraging my communnity to engage with it in ways that extend beyond the recreational or conservational modes that seem to ordinarily apply - or which are useful but limited entry points. I've also been engaged in the development of a community that has nothing to do with academia - is indeed purely social and local - concerned primarily with recreation in local wilderness and environmentally threatened areas. These activities hint at for a different approach to social ecology - or rather an eco-social practice. This hinted-at-potenital is what I am most interested in extending and exploring now as part of my return to questions of ecology.

The dynamic of this recreational community and its relations to its local environment directs me to the possibilty of a different kind of eco-social enagement. Different, that is, to Bookchin's expressly political aims where a revolution in the conditions of our social ecology is the necessary first step in realising a shift in our engagment with the wider natural ecology and different in approach if not intent from many of the the descriptions of an eco-socialism that I have read which seem to me the expression of a idealistic redrafting of socialistic values in the age of environmental crisis.

I am interested (of course) in both these things - in progressive socio-political and a different relation with/to our environment - and I think both are questions concerning and best approached from an ecological perspective. Our future depends on stopping the pathological drive of contemporary consumer/industrial/cognitve capital. I'm not so convinced that proposing completely new political architectures based on the abstract ideals of a theorised social ecology are going to get us there though. The same old disasters seem to loom down that path; five year plans and so on. Neither am I convinved that a state based regulatory approach to the environmental crisis will get us there. That approach is too slow and too conservative. In such a divided community there will never be a consensus. We have to transcend that social division before we can transcend the political. This applies to the environmental sphere as much as it does to the social sphere. We have to find ways (practices) of culturing a transcendence of the division that sees the environmental cut off from questions of human sociality - we need to culture a more-than-human sociality.

Perhaps this requires new forms of of eco-social intimacy. We need to work on practices that culture eco-social becomings in our local environments - this would require communicative eco-seedings, practices of eco-listening and acting locally that foster a sense of belonging with and to our local environment. One thing that interests me in my inital engagements with Bookchin's social ecology is its emphasis on communalism - In Bookchin it seems oddly and uselessly abstracted away from an eco-social initmacy and into speculative political structures far too quickly. Well before we go the postulation of new bureacracies and well before we try and organise politically - I want to think through what it might mean to develop and eco-social practice that gives organic rise to an emergent (ecosocial) communalism. My experience with my own community seems to suggest that even in a white, upper middle class, neo-liberal society, characterised by rampant individualism such a practice might be a way of transcending the impasses and echo-chambers into which we've wandered.

This thinking comes out of asking what it would actually mean to realise a more-than-human socialism. What does it mean to think-feel with the more-than-human world - to think/feel a connection to that world so that it becomes more tangibly incorporated as part of you and as part of your immediate community. By 'immediate' here I also mean unmediated, intimate, pre-rational and therefore indeterminate and experimental. To that end my old thesis comes knocking again - and I'm encouraged back to Bateson and communication - back to thinking the world as media seriously as the basis for an eco-social practice or practices that is/are foremost local and emergent -that is- open to emergent-cies. An emergent eco-social communalism depends upon a listening to the world as media. That seems like something worth working on.