ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE THEORY SERIES

Conflicting Humanities, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl with James Burton POST HUMAN GLOSSARY

Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC ;2 0 / 8 LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD • NEW DELI-II • SYDNEY 74 75 BODY WITHOUT ORGANS soDY ",,' lîHOUT ORGANS This regulation of group system dynamics 28 November 1947, Antonin Artaud . s against the stratifying regimes of without organs a posthuman concept ateg1e . . can be seen as construction of a virtual declared war on the organs, introducin str ·ally accepted body, startmg with a (Pisters 2014). e soct . . repertoire, modelled as the production of the idea of a body without organg th ~ doses of caution: the anorectic More specifically, based on these an attractor layout, and affectively experi• that would be free from the capturin s call orhe masochist body, the addicted transversal extensions, the body without enced as the background affect or mood of confinements of automatic reactions an~ bo:Y, ~e paranoid body - they are all organs can also be productive in the the group. A second-order body politic can habitual patterns. In their co-autho bo '.' ·thout organs that demonstrate context of the technosphere. In her book red dies WI also be studied psychologically, as it regu• philosophy books Anti-Oedipus (19 ) b 0 ch resisting strategies are not How We Became Posthuman, Hayles 72 that SU lates inter-somatic affective cognition, the and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles ·thout danger and can turn out to be discusses how the model of the human emotional and meaningful interchanges Deleuze and Félix Guattari propo WI dl But there are no preset rules, except since the Enlightenment has been subjec• (1) among its members, and (2) between Artaud's body without organs as a co nee se dea Y· chful and wise, ac kn ow 1 e d gm· g at ted to alienation by cybernetic machines to be wa t their collective affective cognition and that to cri. ti. que western E n 1·1 g h tenment formP t e time our fragility and need for and artificial intelligence. Hayles brings of other bodies politic, at either personal, of autonomous subjectivity. While Deleu s the sam and the creation o f new possi"b il - together both scientific theories and free d o m group or civic compositional scales. In and Guattari never explicitly relate fictional narratives ofliterature that equally t: ities for life. . other words, groups have characteristic body without organs to the posthumane 1he body without organs 1s the sub- construct ideas about the posthuman in ways - a limited virtual repertoire - of the concept may be relevant to understand ot-yet-organized level of affect- the computer age. She discovers two person al , n . making sense of what happens, on the basis why N. Katherine Hayles in How We ities that allows new perceptions, tendencies. On the one hand, there is an ive qu al of which decisions take place as actualiza• Became Posthuman can conclude that 'we ections and new affects. Because apocalyptic narrative that indicates the fear newc Onn tions or selections from that repertoire. have always been posthuman' (Hayles it dives below the categories and codes, the of the loss of humanity, loss of control and These decisions can be seen as channelling 1999: 291). body without organs can make cross• the dissolution of the human self. These are toward an end state, modelled as the For Deleuze and Guattari the body cutting connections between the human the stories where technology is conceived approach to an attractor in the group's state without organs is an evolving concept. In and the non-human: materially on the as separate from the human body: 'Only space, and experienced as a spontaneous Anti-Oedipus it is introduced in relation to level of the combination of human and if one thinks of the subject as an autonom• agreement in which the collective subject the body of 'the schizo' that resists the animal DNA, or on the affective level of ous self, independent of the environment, makes up its mind: 'all of a sudden it habitual organization of the body. Hence the proximity in movement (speed and is one likely to experience the panic dawned on all of us that this is what we had the reference to Artaud, who in all his slowness) in processes of becoming• performed by Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics to do: In terms of its temporal scales, a delirious and artistic expression points out animal (e.g. prowling as in a becoming• and Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (Hayles 1999: short-term event for a second-order body that underneath the traditionally coded cat). So a second way of understanding the 290). On the other hand, Hayles emphas• politic is an encounter of first-order bodies body with an assigned place and role in body without organs goes beyond the izes ( scientific and imaginary) stories that politic. In the mid-term, we see repeated society, underneath the organs, there is a concept of the human body altogether, propose a contrasting vision of the human patterns of such encounters or subjectifica• chaotic, messy world full of intensive when transversal relations between species in relation to the contemporary techno• tion practices, and in the long term, we see potentiality. Men, women, children; all emerge. Thirdly, even further, the non• world: 'When the human is seen as part of the becoming-custom of such practices, have their place in a social hierarchy. organic itself can be considered a body a distributed system. . . it is not a question their deep social embedding. Physical labour, bearing children, sitting without organs. The earth is a body without of leaving the body behind but rather of up straight in class; all have an orderly organs, full of vibrant matter (Bennett extending embodied awareness in highly See also Alienation; Body Without place for their organs. The (schizoid) 2010). Most fundamentally, metal is a body specific, local and material ways that would Organs; Geopolitics; Posthuman Rights; body without organs defies the social code without organs. Metal elements can be be impossible without electronic pros• Posthuman Disability and DisHuman and deliberately 'scrambles all the codes' found in all human, animal and inorganic thesis' (290-1). Studies; Trans-corporeality. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 15). In A matter. In its primordial and transformat• Hayles' conception of the posthuman is John Protevi Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari ive quality, metal is even the prime explicitly related to the articulation of the invite us to 'make a body without organs', conductor of all matter, indicating an human with intelligent machines. However, to experiment ( artistically, socially and immanent power of corporeality in all by disentangling certain assumptions philosophically) and find new ways of matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 411). about the human conceived as an inde• BODY WITHOUT ORGANS relating to the body: 'Why not walk on These in-human and inhuman extensions pendent entity, she opens up possibilities your head, sing with your sinuses, see of the body, beneath the organs and for the posthuman to survive in close In 'To Have Done with the Judgement through your skin, breath with your belly?' beyond human corporeality and into the circuits with other life forms, human, of God', a radio play broadcast on (1980: 151) They elaborate the liberating geology of the earth, make the body otherwise embodied and inorganic, that 76 we depend on. The body without organs to all other entities on the earth, the b suggests that we did not have to wait for without organs proposes indeed thatdy prosthetic machines, extensions of men by have always been posthuman. we technology, to understand that the 'scram• See also Alienation; AI (Artifi . bling of the codes' is first and for all Intelligence); Earth; In-Human the· ~al. connected to a desire and fundamental Human; Contemporary, the; Othe;Wi 1 need to deliver our automatic reactions Embodied Others. se and habitual self-contained forms of subjectivity. In acknowledging our deep and ever-changing transversal connections Patricia Pisters CAMP 'Jhe not some r distinct unperati ship be jnhum world or accordin (OED) ( first defi fight, ba of battle precise! critique, end,co The defining and tr

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bringing scientific knowledge about t~e tes feelings, attach• registered as sensation by bodies that pass experiment involved th ernon, brain to a larger and more popular audi• en- ed to rn value, politics, profes- from one state to another. 689,003 Facebook use -·•<1 ence. Neuroscientific knowledge left the rs, and 011etarY . ill tions. Explorations As Jodi Dean (2010, 2015) argues, the some three million post · g tit a . lab and has travelled into the world and . d s cons· . f[eeti.11 the fuel for action uses of social media are driven by a search m ill10n wor s, without th d .a-eet as into the domain of aesthetics, a field with riced au h w online platforms, for affective intensity that orients and informed consent (Kram e Users' . gout o 11 strong humanist roots. 'Neuroaesthetics' apPi.11 . matter as we as provokes the interest and curiosity of users Hancock 2014). Toe rese erh, G · d devices ' is not uncontested but should neverthe• . arc te all affect _ the purposes they as they move across platforms, click on the algonthms selecting th clllJ. less be connected to the posthuman. A . ' econ ·eb theY d the outcomes that links, share and comment, searching for a neuronal approach of aesthetics enfolds a m users news feeds and man. essed to an any clear binary shiver of interest, amusement, anger or to show more or less po ·t· Ip I{ere, ff double danger of alienation. In the first si Ive or j}itate. t·onal and the a eet- disgust. Intensity, or what Dean discusses posts. Th e overall aim was t the ra 1 place there is a risk of too rigorous a reduc• o assess betweellan d the non-human or the as 'the drive', is that which drives the move• a flie cted the users' emotional tionism of aesthetic experience to bundles bUlllan ment used are guaran• ments across sites and applications. What hypothesis - and findin d the ïnstru of axons and dendrites, and of forgetting the users encounter on social media plat• ' . al g - e.m otion . states can be tran s1,e rred brea1' down. an entire humanities tradition of sophist• forms, however, are not only other people via emotional contagion, leadin rn· Algorithm; Body icated reflection on aesthetics (and other ffective Tu ' but equally image and video files, animated experience the same emotions p.. . Post Internet; Non- branches of philosophy). As Oliver Sacks Jth Organs, GIFs, emojis, comments, algorithms, awareness' (Kramer et al. : acknowledges in Musicophilia, 'There_ is 2014 8788 p..gency,. Political Affect. information architecture and routines of Without further unpackin now an enormous and rapidly growmg . g the ) data mining. Although their parameters tions or conceptual nuances of thi Susanna Paasonen body of work on the neuronal u~derpin• are of human design, these non-human study_ here, it points to the een: nings of musical perception and imagery factors curate the shapes that our sociabil• affective modulation in and for th ... but there is always a certain danger that ity may take, what we can see and in what ing principles of much co e the simple art of observation may be lost, kinds of constellations on these platforms network media - from social n that clinical description may become - and, perhaps to a degree, how we may sites to online newspapers and di perfunctory. And the richness ~~ t?e . . g of the twentieth century feel about these interactions. Sarah Kember other words, affective modulation human context ignored' (2007: xm-xiv) y Cajal's Nobel Prize• and Joanna Zylinska therefore argue that'It built in, and central to, the produ bera::n Moreover, the neuroturn cannot be o discovery of the structure _of is not simply the case that "we" - that is, value as 'dependent on a socialised uncoupled from the digital turn, which has autonomously existing humans - live in a power organised in assemblages ofh ~ as separate cells which commumc- extended the idea of human knowledge tic connections counts as one complex technological environment that and machines exceeding the spa synap . and experience in significant ways bey~nd ~ ding moments in neuroscience we can manage, control, and use. Rather, times designated as "work" (Te 10\lfl d" the borders of the autonomous subject ón y Cajal 1906); the 1950s we are - physically and ontologically- part 2006: 28). As forms of affective labo iscoverv into a networked man-machine sphere. DNA and molecular biology was of the technological environment, and it value production involves the m · Neuronal aesthetics therefore symptomat• e nd step in the establishment of makes no more sense to talk of us using it, tion of affects, social networks, and ically carries the double dangers of, on the neuroscience (Shepherd 2010), but than it does of it using us' (2012: 13). of community alike (Hardt and one hand, reductionism of the human e posthuman era knowledge about Tero Karppi (2015: 225) points out how 2000: 293; also Coté and Pybus 2007). experience to the microbiology of_ our consciousness of the brain has taken Facebook, the currently dominant social is an issue of'the corporeal and intell neurons, and on the other hand the dissol• entirely new dimension. As Rose and networking site, aims to cater for 'happy aspects of the new forms prod ution of human agency into computated Rached have demonstrated in their accidents' through its algorithms that are set where 'labor engages at once with rati networks. But there are also opportumt• Neuro, a 'neuromolecular style of to render visible things that users may not intelligence and with the passio ies for multi-layered and netw~rked t' has modified many basic and expect or actively search for. Similarly to the feeling' (Hardt 2007: xi). Not only do approaches to aesthetics ~d e_xpenence ioural sciences by the prefix 'neuro-' 'like' buttons, such designed serendipity media 'produce and circulate affect that may offer insights into important neurochemistry, neuropathology, aims at affective modulation, or amplifica• binding technique' (Dean 2015: 90) aspects of the posthuman condition as physiology, neurobiology, neuropsy• tion (Massumi 2015a: 31) in the positive attract returning and loyal users, but embodied, extended and networked forms ,etc. (2013: 41-3). register. The controversial Facebook ive stickiness is also intimately tied to -Pierre Changeux's book The of agency. . emotional manipulation study of 2012, production of monetary value. The term 'neuroaesthetics' is o~ fa1rl~ al Man, published in France in conducted by a team of psychologists from Network media involves both pe recent date and was coined by Samir Zeki , contributed in important ways to Cornell, encapsulates much of this. The and collective affective economies (

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(2002; Chatterjee 2010). Neuroaesthetics (Changeux 1983). So once data flows across the electromag- --~re\ess . h . NOISE as an emerging field of interest in neuros• aesthetics is defined from thes neuro ,.v. s ectrum, the cognisp ere gives a cience aimed at finding the neural basis of perspectives and multiple disc] \llluJ.tip 11et1C ~d shape to the globally intercon- The contemporary understanding of noise the creation and perception of art works. each keep their own method a~ct'11es that 11aJ!le; ognitive systems in which humans straddles two worlds: on one side is qualit• As such it is entirely defined by scientific investigation, we can get a more ~e\rel Of 11ecte c asingly embedded' (Hayles 2006: ative sensation and subjective judgement; incre experiments discovering laws of beauty perspective on the various levels tnte~ are fiurnans are no longer the only ones on the other is the quantitative calculation and aesthetic perception in the brain. ial and immaterial aspects of of lllater. 161tthat think; our machines are smarter of objective probabilities. The former is expe · Principles of amplification (peak shift), that can neither be reduced to th ~tence tha re cognitive than ever before. They highly context-dependent and may symmetry, isolation, grouping and contrast ateness of neuronal organizar e tnttic. ..,,n.d JJIO many thin k'm g an d perce1.v.m g concern unwanted sound or information ion no 1._ are among the perceptual principles of the completely cut away from the r ve perfor'.11ns for us, and thus the incorpora- extraneous to a certain end; the latter is erat10 brain that distinguish normal perception d. · f 1.• lllateri~1 op f rtificial intelligence and augmen- also relative to the analytic framework. con itions o 11e. Neuronal aesthe . ·"" . no a . . from aesthetically organized perception that sense would be a new hes in uo intelligence into our daily lives There are a number of different quantita• lllateriaJi (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). Also approach of aesthetics that call st ted . ns the classical sense of human tive conceptions of noise relating to uestto phenomena such as abstraction (parsi• revival of the salons of the early t s fo_r a q t·Vl·ty and the autonomy of randomness, including low-resolution . Wentieth bjeC I ' mony), synaesthesia and the emotional century w h ere artists, writers h . su . usness that seem to be absorbed in transmission, information theoretic and . t d' d , p ys1olo ,onsc10 . response to art are areas of neuroscientific gis s, me res an philosophers c • . xtended cognisphere. As 1f the world psychoacoustic models, the analysis of thtS e . investigation (Hasson et al. 2008; Changeux together to discuss their findin anie es one giant computated bram. noise into various colours corresponding . t· . . h gs and becom . 2012). These insights are important but mves igations mto t e interiors f A Hayles points out, computation as a to generic spectral densities in frequency . 0 cannot tell the entire story of art and h uman body, bram and mind such the _s nal process that can run in the brain distribution, chaos theoretic conceptions , as the re I at!O aesthetics. It has to be said that certainly Zuckerkandl salons in Vienna s in other media is more than a of nonlinearity, perturbations below the around as we Il a not all neuroscientists make this claim. or Or rather, the computational threshold of measurement, stochastic 1900, recalled by Eric Kandel in his boo met ap h · . Following an experimental methodology, The Age of Insight (2012). k metaphor is so powerful because 1f the resonance and turbulence. they point out some of the material under• The second danger connected to 'neu-, technology for fast networked processing In information theory noise is pinnings of aesthetic experience. However, onal aesthetics' has to do with the close did not exist there would be no metaphor. conceived as the level of interference in given the overwhelming emphasis on the connection between the brain, the And so 'means and metaphor are dynami~• the communication of a message, or the brain sciences, it is important to emphasize computer and cybernetics. Very concrete! ally interacting' (ibid.: 163). What _is amount of information available at the that art cannot be reduced to the neurobi• the rise of contemporary neuroscience c! important again is to see that the prevail• receiver that did not come from the sender. ological laws that guide them, and to keep evolved with the rise of digital technolo• ing knowledge of the brain and the Though transmission noise cannot be in mind that art is also a form of investiga• gies that allow visualizations of the brain computer are supported by data provided entirely eliminated, Shannon's innovation tion itself. As Alva Noë has argued, art is a via non-invasive scanning techniques by the empirical evidences of the sciences was to show that a certain degree of 'strange tool', an engagement with the such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging but just as much by cultural and artistic redundancy allows the receiver to discrim• world and our technologies, and ultimately (MRI) and Computational Tomography models that propose the organization and inate between information and noise. The a way to understand the way we organize (CT). On another level, the co-development re-organization of our transforming cybernetic conception of noise is defined and re-organize ourselves. (2015: xiii). Art of knowledge about the brain and compu• conditions on another level, on the level of as the forces that disrupt the organiza• therefore proposes its own manner of tation has rapidly transformed into experience and understanding organized tional coherence of the system or hinder investigation and its own legitimate source networks of human and non-human in aesthetic forms (narratives, images, the attainment of its goal state. The confu• of knowledge that goes beyond under• actors which interrogate many traditional music, performance). Again, we have to sion between these various uses of the standing the neuronal laws of beauty. assumptions of the autonomous human understand neuronal aesthetics as a multi• term noise is compounded by three differ• Just as importantly, art and culture are being. In My Mother was a Computer layered, embodied and embedded form of ent specifications of the technical term in constant communication with the brain. Katherine Hayles (2015) argues that the aesthetics of the posthuman condition as a entropy in thermodynamics, information The brain is not a fixed and completely posthuman has entered the 'Regime of computated brain. theory and cybernetics. genetically determined entity. Precisely Computation: whose brain is extended in We are thus presented with several because of the now largely acknowledged a 'global cognisphere': 'Expanded to See also Alienation; Plasticity; Neo/New conceptions of, or formulas for, the relation plasticity of the brain, there is a very include not only the Internet but also Materialism; AI (Artificial Intelligence). between noise and information that are large role for 'epigenetics' determined by networked and programmable systems highly divergent. In popular usage, noise is the environment, culture and education that feed into it, including wired and Patricia Pisters deemed meaningless by choice - its