Making Ready for a Big World

Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD

To me the important thing is not to offer undisputable truths of the world (particularly any specific hope of betterment but, social ones), cannot be blindly accepted as by offering an imagined but persua- real, necessary or good without the activity of sive alternative reality, to dislodge the reasoned justification; an activity, moreover, mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the that is always social. To reason entails the lazy timorous habit of thinking that the presumption of no predetermination, whether way we live now is the only way peo- that concerns what is currently accounted for ple can live. It is that inertia that allows in the world (epistemology), how it is narrated the institutions of injustice to continue (history), the direction its going (prehistory), unquestioned.1 nor our human centrality within it – it is simply —Ursula K. Le Guin the iterative practice of thinking in and with a material world.3 While the productive condition Common sense holds that optimism and ni- of assuming nothing seemingly opens up an hilism are antonyms. They describe opposing overwhelming cosmos of instability from the dispositions, where optimists typically experi- perspective of human experience (one heavily ence the world with a favourable perspective, reliant on habits of activity, so in this regard, while nihilists experience meaninglessness nihilism is entirely inefficient); this is precise- and purposelessness, sometimes with de- ly how it creates space for the construction structive tendencies. Like many antonyms of, or access to, novelty. Where once things (not least the title of this journal ‘Making and were believed to be fixed absolutely, this Breaking’), rather than the terms being anti- understanding of nihilism creates openings to thetical to one another, there is a functional contingency, leading Brassier to frame it “…not co-dependency between the two modes of [as] an existential quandary but a speculative approaching the world. Let me explain. There opportunity.”4 The premise here, is that to be is an important connection between nihilism a materialist optimist today, that is, an opti- and reasoning argued by Ray Brassier, in that mist with material ambitions beyond hopeful reasoned thought “must assume nothing as thinking, we require this productively destruc- its productive condition”.2 What does it mean tive capacity of reason to demonstrate cer- to ‘assume nothing’, and why would this be tain properties of the given as contingent, and understood as ‘productive’? To assume noth- therefore subject to transformability, concep- ing means that the sets of givens we take as tually and materially. In this regard, optimism

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 2 Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD

becomes dependent on nihilism for the cre- Now why does any of this matter outside the ation of reasoned re-openings to the world. confines of philosophical arguments, andhow does it matter on a pragmatic and material This way of understanding nihilism involves level? Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism offers two notable features: A) Just because some- a useful case study, as it plots the ways in thing may currently exist in the world (a which our lives (conscious and unconscious) particular economic system, dependency on have become engulfed by the psycho-material carbon energy, the art world etc.) does not machinery of capitalism, specifically neolib- provide sufficient justification for reasoning eralism. Often through pop-cultural examples its status as perpetually immutable or perma- of our era (where we increasingly see repeat- nent; and conversely B) Just because some- ing tropes and the paradigm of the remake at thing may not yet exist in the world (a con- work), Fisher’s diagnosis addresses the inher- cept, an artwork, a just social order), does not ent violence, dwindling novelty in creativity, provide sufficient justification for reasoning its and socio-mental degradation that the spectre status as absolutely impossible, unrealistic or of an alternativeless world holds over human- unnecessary. Nihilism, seen in this twinned ca- ity. When the only promise for betterment pacity, can be grasped as a means for endors- is confined to a presumed reality lacking in ing the pursuit of states of continuity, and/or alternatives, we become trapped in a tyranny states of discontinuity. Existentially speaking, of relative sameness, where a bulk of pop-cul- when nihilism is parsed from an affective per- tural outputs serve as artefacts of this plight spective of human attachments to a particular (not to mention, a protraction of the ‘aesthet- order of the world, it is potentially both dis- ics of autotune’, upon contemporary art as tressing (a rupture in the fabric of what was well). There are, of course, plenty of particular assumed to be true, necessary or good), and/ instances that defy this stultifying mode of or nourishing (the opening of hopeful pos- practice. Yet, Fisher’s inventory of the aesthet- sibilities because the assumed givenness of ic symptoms that make up this alternativeless the world, upon which all manner of ordering condition is convincing not least because it derives, is demonstrated to be false, unneces- confirms what many intuitively feel, see and sary or malicious). Disavowing of this genera- hear. What I would like to do in the remainder tive capacity of nihilism to chisel away at as- of this essay is not only ask how this model of sumptions rooting accounts of the world (and and for the world came into being, to better accountability within it), amounts to a spurious understand “how this process of conscious- equation of ‘difficulty’ with ‘infeasibility’. This ness deflation”5 works, but also probe its root is the false equation that gets rehearsed in logic that serves to legitimate the perennial our daily lives, instructing those who explicitly activities and behaviours that sustain it (espe- aspire for transformative betterment (social- cially when unsustainably so). ly, climatically and economically), to ‘be more reasonable’. Despite the camouflage of civility, THE CONCEPT ‘HUMAN’ AND THE the plea to ‘be more reasonable’ is nothing but EPISTEME shorthand for the conservation of faith in given predeterminations, where under the shroud Although Capitalist Realism is the mode of of ‘being realistic’ we often uncover a tauto- capture, training and moulding our lives, as the logical defence of the world as it is. Ultimately, polymath Sylvia Wynter has written, none of ‘being reasonable’ describes a simple temper- this is possible without the foundational con- ament, not the activity of reasoning itself; it struction of the “economic conception of being is not synonymous, nor interchangeable with human”.6 Our existing external conditions are a ‘reasoning being’, and it is for the latter we logical extrapolation of a particular framing of need to collectively labour. the human, just as other epochs were shaped

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 3 Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD by human self-understanding upon religious that are of adaptive advantage to the surviv- or political foundations. This assertion would al, well-being and stable reproduction of the then suggest, that to create new conditions mode of being human that each ruling group of the world requires not only resistance to embodies and actualizes.”8 the residual symptoms of its existing log- ics as they get materialized (and therefore Through Wynter’s extrapolation of the episteme reinforced) through technologies, systems as embodied in the concept of the human, the of classification, cultural production, spa- human becomes a vehicle for seeing and ques- tial ordering, economic distribution/valuation tioning our own obscured epistemic condition models, temporal structures and so on; but of rooted assumptions. When we hear of new that ultimately the target must be set on the visions of the human that make us intuitive- transformation of human self-conception it- ly cringe or that we deem as untenable, that self – or what Wynter more eloquently named is the predetermining force of the episteme throughout her work as the creation of ‘genres at work upon our imaginaries of the possible. of being human’. The argument being, is that to Obviously, not all new visions of the human enduringly transform the existing configuration ought to be accepted, taken as good or neces- of the world, one must intervene at the root sary, deeply and profoundly to the contrary, but construction of human self-understanding, they need to be reasoned (assuming nothing from which new modes of worldmaking spring given), even, and perhaps especially when that forth. This root condition of what is assumed activity of reasoning leads to an utter nega- a priori, and what subsequently affords/im- tion of that new concept, we learn a lot about pedes all manner of navigating the world, is our human self-picture in the process. When what Foucault named as the ‘episteme’. The we experience an intuitive rejection from of a episteme is the historically situated, discur- different vision of the human, what conventions sive backdrop of assumptions that establish of our conception of it are we preserving and, conditions of possibility for the adjudication of crucially, why? Probing the concept of the hu- knowledge (and therefore power), and for what man becomes equal to an exercise of discursive sorts of questions are enabled (or prohibited) archaeology, of probing the ground of givens to within a particular era. It is this latter part apprehend the sets of assumptions at work in of the episteme definition that strikes as the making sense of the world, our place in it, as most debilitating, since it discursively excludes well as the cascading array of orders and rela- certain genres of questions we likely need to tions as a result. This is definitely not a sug- be asking, as legitimately serious and neces- gestion for more anthropocentric narcissism by sary ones. Since this episteme predetermines insisting on the centrality of the human, what what is (perceived as) given, it is also largely is proposed, however, is that how we conceive insensible to entities operating within it (both of genres of being human, brings with it funda- by individuals and systems), meaning that its mental, material consequences on inter-human internal mechanisms of discursive prohibi- relations as well as with the non-human world tion are largely obscure. Due to the pervasive as a result. It’s here, where the destabiliz- power of this episteme in constructing givens ing capacity afforded by nihilism in ‘assuming in the world (ones that serve as a space of nothing’ is crucial, as a way to ‘reason being’ traction), Wynter postulates that even more anew. Not unlike the deadlock of ‘being reason- fundamentally than regimes of knowledge, this able’, when we hear that other ways of being episteme constitutes the very construction of are impossible, this ought to signal the need the human itself, the codes governing its con- for deep meditation on the logical (some may ceptual framing, its practices and self-defini- say cosmological)9 conditions that render them tion.7 In her words: “…the ‘politics of truth’ of impossible discursively so, but not necessarily, each episteme has to function in a way that or realistically so. The malignant contradiction enables its social reality to be known in terms of our era, is that those who perpetuate the

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 4 Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD economic concept of the human as immuta- particular logical process for reasoning the bly real, as an undecidable fact, impede upon world, only grants access to what we al- the distribution, access to, and maintenance of ready (think) we know, while barring access to life’s most necessary resources for real, ma- novelty, or the unknown. Not uncoincidental- terial life. As it turns out, those who aspire to ly, this is largely the type of logic at work in conditions of betterment, may, in fact, be far algorithmic machine learning and its automa- more realistic than those who resolutely claim tion of categorical generalizations based on such conditions are untenable. This is not to existing inventories of our world (data-sets) suggest that aspirations of betterment alone whose modes of classification and ordering are enough, but it is to reject the smug smear are always a by-product of socio-historical of ‘naïve idealism’ that squelches possibilities dispositions (the episteme, complete with its for other conditions of coexistence, as if the baked in, root assumptions concerning given concept of the human currently rehearsed un- taxonomies in the world). The reinforcement der the domination of an economic framing, is of all that we think we know of the world (its an adequate, accurate or just one. constituent parts and the way we order them), now automated in machine learning, reveals an Bringing Wynter’s ‘genre of being human’ into urgent site for intervention by the humanities, relation with Fisher, it can be said that ‘capi- to disentangle the fusion of “social categories, talist realism’ indexes the ubiquitous leverag- as categories of nature”. 10 ing of the ‘economic concept of the human’ as an invariable fact of nature. It’s also where the The reinforcement of the ‘economic conception tyranny of socio-material alternativelessness of being human’ follows a similarly inductive can been seen as a derivative of this natural- path on a socio-political level. Simply because ized conception of the human as economic hegemonic modes of decision-making at work being. This ‘alternativelessness’ does not bare today derive from this particular concept of the changelessness, our rapidly evolving so- economic human, the habituation of this prac- cio-technical environment is evidence of this, tice alone becomes justification for its ‘truth’ or but it only bares change within the parame- ‘necessity’ value. Believing something to be true, ters of sanctioned possibility delimited by an necessary or real, then performing that logic epistemic threshold. From the perspective of at scale, without reasoning the foundational reason, this plight is buttressed by the prolif- assumptions of that belief, instantiates a circu- eration of what we could call ‘inductive stag- lar logic or self-fulfilling prophesy – and, as we nation’, where inductive logic is when ‘truths’ know from the demand of nihilism, this is defin- about reality are derived from a set of already itively not an instance of reasoning being. Now, known, observable entities, and where that that said, this is where things get a bit tricky. generalized pattern is believed to be true. The With the black swan example, one can empiri- popular example being that if one only sees cally encounter a novel entity in a fully-resolved white swans, one arrives at the ‘truth’ that way that upturns the established inventories of all swans are white…that is until one encoun- things in the world, provided we discover the ex- ters a black swan and the truth value of that isting world in broader terms and in more depth. generalization collapses. Historically, this ex- When it comes to abstractions like a ‘new genre ample highlights but one instance of Western of being human’, it is a generic idea and there is bias, wherein all the white swans visible to no such empirical possibility of encountering this Europeans were assumed to account for the pre-existing entity in a similarly conclusive way. totality of all swans, until a 17th Century This ‘new genre of being human’ is a conceptu- Dutch ‘exploration’ of Australia revealed this al invention, it cannot be discovered or found, assumption to be empirically limiting, and it needs to be constructed. That said, because thereby false. More generally, what this ex- this abstraction of a ‘genre of being human’ is ample demonstrates, is the way in which this performed in reality and its manifestation yields

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 5 Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD localized material traces, there are plenty of ‘big-world’ perspective, at least provisionally empirically sensible ‘seeds’ gesturing to this for now, marks the rejection of this tendency new genre of being human already in practice, not only on ethical grounds, but epistemological demanding attention and nourishment. There ones as well, since the small-world perspective are manifold spores of this new genre of being is simply a false correlation to reality. Thinking human both within and beyond our immediate within big-world perspective is an ambitiously situations – geographically and cognitively – humble exercise, demanding reasoned nihilism calling for astute germination and care, not un- take aim at given narratives of human central- like Fisher’s insistence that the material condi- ity, both at the micro-level of the individual as tions for socio-political transformation are more primary agent (coinciding with the ‘economic in place now, than in previous generations.11 As genre of being human’), as well as the macro Wynter correspondingly notes: “…there can be level of the species. As an exercise in self-rel- no utopian saltationism [abrupt leap], whether in ativization, this humility is not about luxuri- politics or in epistemologies […] discontinuities ating in the turbulence of a decentred narra- can erupt only out of seedbeds that have been tive picture (a dehumanising tendency, where empirically pre-prepared for them”.12 The ques- unreasoned nihilism is arrested absolutely in its tion is, how can we learn to see these instances chaotic mode of existential deterritorialisation), of a new genre of being human as seeds (and not it is, rather, to see this non-centrality as a seed isolated, self-contained occurrences), a seeing for new genres of being human and to learn that both accounts for their situated existence, how to see from those vistas, the (representa- while being accountable to them as potentially tional) geometry for which, we have yet have extensible and generic, as ones requiring ab- create. stractive nurturing to broadly flourish? BIG WORLD HORIZONLESSNESS The answers (in the plural) to such scalar questions are far humbler than what one may intu- This geometrical lack opens an important space itively infer. Humble, yet not unaspiring. There for artistic labor. It’s no mere coincidence that is no desire to repeat the violent precedent of classical perspective was co-birthed with the answering to big questions with small-world concept of the humanist human – that is, a responses; responses arising from particular human conceived as masterfully exceptional conditions that get magnified to a scale forc- because of its capacity to reason the world. ing the multiplicity of the world into a partial Correspondingly, in classical perspective, the picture of it, conflating the excerpt with the re-presentation of human vision becomes novel. This can be no formula for concepts of mechanized, delivering world-images wherein the human commensurate with “the measure extra-local reality vanishes at the threshold of of the world”.13 Answering to big questions, in a horizon (but of course, such extra-localiza- the very least, demands proportionate respons- tions do not actually withdraw from reality). As es, big-world responses that can account for, Reza Negarestani has argued, the fundamental and be accountable to plurality, complexity misstep of the ‘humanist human’ construction, and systems of human and non-human inter- is not due to its emphasising of exceptional dependence, without the false (and oftentimes human capacities to reason the world, spatial- vicious) cognitive comforts of reduction. It’s ly and otherwise (a capacity that, in practice, here where we can note a crucial difference was not allocated to all humans), but that it between the aggrandizement of a situated stopped short in reasoning its own unexcep- concept to the scale of a big-world, versus tional position within the world.14 Or, as Nina situating concept-creation within a big-world Power more wittily wrote, through the force perspective. If the ‘small-world’ perspective of reason we can come to see ourselves “… indexes the tendency for inflating partiality, the in the end not so far from a piece of fruit.”15

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Screenshot from the video game Everything, where the player takes the form of any object in the game.

In this light, we can come to understand the Beyond the oftentimes grandiose claims be- horizon as marking precisely this moment of hind the power of art as ‘engaging’ or ‘chal- stopping short. On the one hand, the horizon is lenging’ this and that – claims that often seem demonstrative of an ‘exceptional’ rationalization to induce a pervasive cynicism in in discursive and re-presention of spatial reality, but does circles nowadays, perhaps its strength is rather so within bounded modes of rationalization in non-heroic, in the ambitiously humble ways conformance with world-pictures optimized in art can be seen as contributing to the ‘setting our own, human image. The horizon, as such, of seedbeds’ for hypothetical worlds to come. can only belong to a small-world. This is not There can be no individual heroes in the big- necessarily a bad thing (everyday life plays out world since there are no singular perspectives in small worlds), but it can only, at best, provide commensurate with it; the best we can do is orientation at and for that scale. This geomet- pre-prepare sensible conditions as experiences ric limitation of the horizon, ought to give us of a denaturalized small-world, the one opti- pause when deploying the term as an automat- mized in our own image. This entails following ed metaphor for all things concerning futurity. the transition of art from the readymade (art Without the reductive comforts contained by that privileges the contextualization and ar- 16 the relative nearness of the horizon, that is of a rangement of that which already exists); to world remediated back to us in our own im- the remake (mirroring of a logic of capitalist age, the big-world demands novel speculative realism’s alternativelessness), to what Robin geometries. How we learn to see from within Mackay discussed as a model for ‘making 17 this big-world perspective underwritten by an ready’. This ‘making ready’ sees art as a play unexceptionally situated human, requires we space for constructing experiences from within experiment with techniques for accessing its the perspective of the big-world, as a way to unfamiliar dimensions, for making it experiential train and ‘make ready’ our sensorium for its and thus shareable. strange geometries and consequential modes of relation-building as a result. Its method is

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 7 Patricia Reed MAKING READY FOR A BIG WORLD inefficiently nihilistic, in that it can assume 9. See Bentley Allan, Scientific Cosmology nothing of the givenness of the world as it may and International Orders, (Cambridge: manifest itself to us. Its ethos, not inductive, Cambridge UP, 2018). not merely demonstrating what we think we 10. Kate Crawford, “Just an Engineer: The know of what there is in the world, but hypo- Politics of AI,” Lecture at The Royal Society’s series You and AI, London, 17 thetical, that is, a reasoning of being accounting July, 2018. Accessible here: https://www. for / being accountable to a big-world and its youtube.com/watch?v=HPopJb5aDyA immanent possibilities for configuration oth- 11. Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (Unfinished erwise, those extrapolated from a resituated Introduction)”, 770. genre of being human. 12. Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism”, 159. 13. David Scott (interviewer), referring to Aimé REFERENCES Césaire, preamble to: Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism”, 122. 1. Ursula K. Le Guin, “A War Without End,” in 14. This trajectory of thought concerning Utopia, (London: Verso Books, 2016), 208. the human is greatly indebted to Reza Essay originally published in 2004. Negarestani’s concept of the ‘inhuman’ 2. Ray Brassier, “Reason is Inconsolable from “The Labor of the Inhuman,” e-flux and Non-Conciliatory,” (Suhail Malik, Journal #52, 20014. Accessible here: Interviewer) in Realism Materialism Art, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/ eds.: C. Cox, J. Jaskey, S. Malik, (Berlin: the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/. Sternberg Press, 2015), 213–230. 15. Nina Power, “Inhumanism, Reason, 3. Suhail Malik qtd. in “Reason is Inconsolable Blackness, Feminism,” in Glass Bead and Non-Conciliatory”. Journal, 2017. Accessible here: http://www. 4. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment glass-bead.org/article/inhumanism-rea- and Extinction, (New York: Palgrave, 2007), xi. son-blackness-feminism/?lang=enview 5. Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (Unfinished 16. Robin Mackay, “On Making Ready,” Introduction),” in k-punk: The Collected in: Simon Starling, Reprototypes, and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, Triangulations and Road Tests (Sternberg/ (London: Repeater Books: 2018), 770. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary). Special thanks to Bassam El Baroni for 6. Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of directing me to this text. Accessible Humanism,” (David Scott, Interviewer), in here: http://readthis.wtf/writing/ Small Axe 8, 2000, 119–207. Retrieved here: on-making-ready/ https://libcom.org/library/re-enchantment-humanism-interview-sylvia-wynter 17. The term “making ready”, was initially coined by artist Simon Starling and further 7. For elaborated philosophical accounts on elaborated by Robin Mackay. Mackay’s bril- the naturalization of ‘Man’, please see: liant essay traces the term in a more ma- Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Before Man: Sylvia terialist direction against readymade tradi- Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” tions, following the logic of contemporary in Sylvia Wynter: Being Human as Praxis, ed.: objects as ‘integrative objects’, whereas for Katerine McKittrick, (Durham/London: Duke this essay I am using it more in an affec- University Press, 2015) 90–105; and Sylvia tive or experiential interpretation. Wynter “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An PATRICIA REED Argument,” in The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 2003, 257–337. Special Patricia Reed is an artist, writer, and designer thanks to Nick Houde for pointing me in based in Berlin. Her work concerns the entan- this fruitful direction of discovering Sylvia glements between epistemology, modeling and Wynter’s body of work. politics adapted to planetary scales of cohabi- 8. Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of tation. She is also part of the Laboria Cuboniks Humanism”, 199. ‘Xenofeminist’ working group.

MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org