ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden General Editor: Wolfgang Schirmacher Editorial Board: Giorgio Agamben Pierre Alferi Hubertus von Amelunxen Alain Badiou Judith Balso Judith Butler Diane Davis Chris Fynsk Martin Hielscher Geert Lovink Larry Rickels Avital Ronell Michael Schmidt Fredrich Ulfers Victor Vitanza Siegfried Zielinski Slavoj Žižek © 2015 by John Calvelli Think Media EGS Series is supported by the European Graduate School Book designed by John Calvelli ATROPOS PRESS New York • Dresden 151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003 all rights reserved THE FUTURE IS AN IMAGE Unsustainability, Plasticity and the Design of Time John Calvelli For my partner Amery Contents Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION The Image in Plasticity 1 CHAPTER I Future History 21 CHAPTER II Unsustainability 43 CHAPTER III Designing Time 59 CHAPTER IV The Motor of Plasticity 79 CHAPTER V Plasticity and the Image 105 CHAPTER VI Designing Future 119 Afterword 141 References 143 vii Abbreviations AND And. Phenomenology of the End AOR Acts of religion ATF After the Future CPE For a Critique of a New Political Economy CPR Critique of Pure Reason CPJ Critique of the Power of Judgment CWA The Complete Works of Aristotle DTL Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life ECN The End of Cheap Nature FOH The Future of Hegel IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics MOP Margins of Philosophy NDP The Neuroplastic Dilemma ODC oxforddictionaries.com OED Online Etymology Dictionary PLH Pierre Loves Horranges Lévinas-Sartre-Nancy TMR Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift TT1 Time and Technics 1 TT2 Time and Technics 2 1 Introduction THE IMAGE IN PLASTICITY The Unsustainable Image WE LIVE IN AN UNSUSTAINABLE WORLD . We have been reminded of this in recent years due to the current and projected future effects of hu- man-induced climate change. Notwithstanding the widespread knowledge of the threat to human future, human patterns of unsustainable behaviour seem entrenched. One could be forgiven for assuming that this knowledge would lead to fundamental change in our ways of being and acting on all levels, from the workings of politics and economics to the structuring of academic disciplines and the practices of the professions. Instead, we find in general a stunned silence, pockets of denial, and occasional efforts at mitigation. Design is at the heart of the problem, as it was design that opened the way toward the artificial world it is our burden to sustain, and it was the de- sign of the machine that enabled the burden to grow vastly greater. It is the discipline of visual communication that most directly deals with the image; but within this discipline, the role of the image has mostly been ignored. This is unfortunate: we ignore the image at our peril. As we will see, it is the image—in the form of imago—that is the link between our artificial world and the neural networks forming our cognition. Relative to the power the image holds over us, we design and use images recklessly. If it were to be our goal to reshape our relation to the world in a way commensurate with the threats we face, we would need to rework our relation to the image. Humans live in a multiplicity of worlds concocted from images; these have a great, but often invisible effect upon the one world, Earth, that matters. Threatened with a condition of unsustainability—the increasing rate at which we speed toward the end of time—we must understand how we can 2 THE FUTURE IS AN IMAGE use the image to design time. This is not to suggest that we create an image of the future, but rather that we use the image to create future itself. For this, we must rely on the plasticity of the image, not simply in its aesthetic qualities but as an ontological phenomon as well. Plasticity arises out of ontological difference, as image supplement or phantasm. (Malabou 2010, 77) By con- necting the phantasm, in its most abstract sense, with the concrete image arti- fact placed squarely in the world, face-to-face with human bodies and brains, I will provide the beginnings of a discussion that can help shape the image disciplines and practices in ways that create future, not destroy it. As climate scientists have shown, entropy shadows us and the day is getting darker. It is time to make time. Artifact and Image It is the characteristically human behaviour of designing a world outside of ourselves that has designed us as a “successful,” and thus unsustainable spe- cies. Design is an ethological behaviour of the species homo sapiens, dependent upon a prior increase in the use of the hands with concomitant development of the neocortical area of the brain. At some point during this long process, lasting over two million years, the first tool was created; and with the tool, human consciousness. According to Bernard Stiegler, this happened in a mo- ment of rupture, dividing an undifferentiated present into past, present and future. The gesture of raising an arm with rock in hand, then lowering it in anticipation of a strike capable of splitting another rock into a blade and the rock’s remains, brought with it the consciousness of future. Once hit, what re- mained—the primitive tool—contains the memory in rock of its making. An image of the past has been recorded, with human consciousness becoming the first unintended consequence of the making of tools, beginning the work of design. (TT1 158) The tool is the memory of the next tool, in an iterative process of arti- factual production. It begins with a process of making-sensible, a cognitive process of making a “look” out of the object at hand. The look—what I call imago—is created in the embodied process of a grappling with the object-be- coming-artifact; it may also be created in an act of perception guided by memory. In the latter case, it is the image-schema (KPM 68–71) that provides for the possibility of transmission, as an ontological phenomenon that lives in the in-between space between the sensible object and materializing neural networks. The imago shimmers, and is fecund. It shimmers in the crossings it makes, from artifact to brain and from past to future. It shimmers in neural transience, as networks begin to form. It is fecund, as in its shimmering it may THE IMAGE IN PLASTICITY 3 be anything. It must be something or it will disappear. It will be recomposed as future, in artifactual production to come. Human conatus assures its prom- ulgation, as the human perseveres in its being only as imago. We use the artifact; we crave the imago. If we created artifacts as a beaver builds it dam, we would be as beavers, continuing to use these artifacts until they wore out or we felt an environmental pressure to change. Under the mediation of the imago however, passing fluidly between artifact and brain, atoms and neurons, a plasticity developed between our forming organ and the artifact it formed. Yet the living human brain is of a different order than that of the matter from which artifacts are made. It is this differential from which craving begins. To crave introduces a different intensity of conatus than that of the beaver. Our human drive no longer simply operates between organism and environ- ment. The organism has become a self, and the environment a world. The present bifurcates into past and future. The self, based on the past, imagines a world and a future. If, as Spinoza states, “each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being,” (Spinoza 1996, 75) the human being tries to achieve this in an imagined world, in a future to come. Human unsustain- ability is thus a structural condition. The image we have of the world always exceeds our present condition. To make up the difference we introduce new artifacts into the world, creating a new world-image which, once again, ex- ceeds our condition. Unsustainability thus exists both as an experience of lack, and as material consequence of the abundance of artifacts we have produced as compensation. It is an ontological condition of human being. It is also an expression of entropy. Negentropy As we know from the second law of thermodynamics, entropy in the uni- verse is always increasing. The universe, itself, is unsustainable. Nonetheless, as quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger articulated in 1944, life is a tempo- rary form of negative entropy, or negentropy, structures of complexity that, for a time, are able to resist entropic force. (Schrödinger 70-71) In our planetary ecosystem, plants metabolize photons received from the Sun as energy during the process of photosynthesis, thus manifesting a temporary negentropy. An- imals then feed on and metabolize plants, in order to maintain negentropy during the course of their lives. Humans not only feed on both plants and animals, but in addition metabolize inorganic matter, resulting not only in negentropic biological structures (including neural networks and the images they form) but in designed artifactual structures as well. 4 THE FUTURE IS AN IMAGE The Blue Marble from Apollo 17 (Astronaut photograph AS17-148-22727 ). December 7, 1972. Courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center Negentropy always leaves entropy in its wake, as Schrödinger remarked: “the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” (77) For a non-human animal, metabolism is always directly in service of the organism’s health and vitality, by securing itself in benevolent habitats, finding food to eat and in the use of energy to escape predators.