University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 5-2015 After the Human: Theory and Sociology in the Age of Fractal Ambiguity, Dromology, and Emergent Epi-spaces Joel Michael Crombez University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons Recommended Citation Crombez, Joel Michael, "After the Human: Theory and Sociology in the Age of Fractal Ambiguity, Dromology, and Emergent Epi-spaces. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/3356 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Joel Michael Crombez entitled "After the Human: Theory and Sociology in the Age of Fractal Ambiguity, Dromology, and Emergent Epi-spaces." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in Sociology. Harry F. Dahms, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Michelle Brown, Allen Dunn Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) After the Human: Theory and Sociology in the Age of Fractal Ambiguity, Dromology, and Emergent Epi-spaces A Thesis Presented for the Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Joel Michael Crombez May 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Joel Michael Crombez All rights reserved. ii DEDICATION To Alice and Scribble, the forgotten and the unborn; they who first encountered the world-without-us. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their comments and guidance I am very thankful to my committee members Dr. Michelle Brown and Dr. Allen Dunn. For the many hours spent talking ‘theory’ I thank the Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Tennessee. I am also very grateful for the conversations I have had with Steve Panageotou over the course of writing this thesis and the lifelong conversation I have had with Andrew Long, I thank them both for their friendship because and in spite of our theory conversations. A very special thanks is due to Dr. Harry F. Dahms, the chair of my thesis committee and mentor. This thesis would surely have been poorer without his encouragement and involvement in my intellectual development. In the end, the responsibility for following (and at times disregarding) their advice is my own. iv ABSTRACT Modernity marks both a novel form of political and economic organization, and a transformation of reality through technological and spatial innovations. It marks a shift in the history of life on this planet, for the technological appendage—originally created by and for humans—has a cost that is shared by all life on the planet, whether it be ecological, biological, or mental. As a result, the weight of responsibility for the continuation of life itself can no longer be rationally displaced onto an omnipotent other. The knowledge that rational thought functions on fractal scales of space and time—which need not account for each other—crippled the power of the grand-narratives that prognosticated a future condition qualitatively superior than the historic human record. It was rather the dark side of modernity that came to hold a vice-like power over the human species and this knowledge rested its full weight on the conscience of the 20th century. In the 1960’s the fractal awareness of reality began to manifest itself in new spatial configurations, but the human narrative was no longer the driving force and decidedly anti- and post- humanist trajectories took hold of technologically advanced societies. This text is an attempt to construct a theory that operates according to the rhythm of these modern epi-spaces and the beings that inhabit them. These spaces by and large imagine and operate as if they existed in a world after the human, a world-without-us. To construct a narrative that gives explanatory power to these spaces and the adaptation of life itself to fill them, a view of the universe that is decentered not only in space, but also in being is needed. Sociology finds itself in a position reminiscent of Copernicus’ in the 1500s. In order for knowledge to advance, he had to rupture the reified view of the Earth as a central and sacred space, so that new models could push the boundaries of the knowable and the possible. In order for sociology to advance it must decenter the Human; for in this world of technological mediation, artificial modes of being dominate. v PREFACE: READING LEGEND Je vous aime tous. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. Note: In confronting the issues of this text, I start not from common grounds but from contested ones. Therefore, I follow the lead of those who came before me and present at the beginning an overview, like the legend on a map, for those who should enter a text with a prejudiced mind that has understandably in the course of building knowledge assigned particular meaning to general concepts. 1 Title2 For a text with a title that proclaims the epilogue of our species, and yet does not aspire to the fevered pavor nocturnus of prophets, Theorist (T.3) has chosen to include the For it is .”؟oft forgotten percontation (or irony) mark to punctuate “After the Human with a great sense of irony, not to be overshadowed by the more powerful sense of despair, that the social sciences – and sociology in particular – must acknowledge and reflect on the present state of the human in our shared social reality. A social reality that is no longer merely human; neither differentiated from other life forms in a past conception of a biologically pure natural species, nor in the yearning for a future ideal type of a species practicing an achieved humanism. One must read the title with the humorous irony of a statement at once patently absurd and gravely serious. It should 1 Specifically this is a format appropriated from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s “Reading Dossier” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute ([1983] 1988), p. xi-xvi. ,Theory and Sociology in the Age of Fractal Ambiguity :؟The complete title of this thesis is After the Human 2 Dromology, and Emergent Epi-spaces, however, due to character limitations, the percontation mark is missing on the title page in electronic versions of this text. 3 When asked at an event shortly before his death, “who are you?,” Jean Baudrillard responded with his typical jocular tone: “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself” (MacFarquhar 2005). This distancing, or projection, of the “I” to the Theorist serves the function of an authorial avatar on the page; the simulation of a fragmented self, scattered in the posthuman swarm. It follows not only the Author (A.) of Lyotard ([1983] 1988), but more closely a tradition established by the American writer David Markson, who before his death wrote four aphoristic novels narrated in turn by Reader, Writer, Author, and at the last, Novelist (1996, 2001, 2004, 2007). vi provoke a pataphysical laughter; defined by Rene Daumal: “pataphysical laughter is the keen awareness of a duality both absurd and undeniable” (2012:4). The subtitle of the text, Theory and sociology in the age of fractal ambiguity, dromology, and emergent epi-spaces, gives the clues as to the content and direction of the text. The fractal serves as the pataphor, that is, the simulacra of the metaphor, of an epistemological consequence of competing legitimacies, crumbled foundations, inaccessible referents, and the inability to situate the subject concretely in a universal context of collapsing and expanding scales. Here the image is of poor little Alice fallen down a rabbit’s hole. Eat me. Drink me. The commandments of consumption throw her altered reality one-step further in the expansion and contraction of the real; leading to the inevitable question: has the world changed, or have I? Moreover, if both change, how do we measure them against each other? Next is dromology; that Virilian science of speed, derived from the Greek δρόμος, or dromos, the race and the racetrack. The need for a dromology intensifies as space itself collapses in time and the freedom of an unknown frontier vanishes under the godlike thumb of Google Earth; that is, the fully surveilled space, doubled in a mirror that is of the same order, accessible everywhere in the simultaneity of the instant. It is through the modern pursuit of speed that space and the social relations entwined with its construction have morphed, opening the possibility of accessing spaces beyond those of the natural limitations imposed on the human scale. vii Finally the emergence of epispaces, those proliferating ‘inappropriate/d other’4 spaces which exist in addition to our own. These supplementary spaces are those that we are only just now being able to see and perhaps even touch, emergent only in the age of technologic ubiquity. As in the case of the virtual, they are conjoined spaces dependent on our own space for their existence. Nevertheless, so too are outer spaces opening up to us, with our lonesome mechanical scout, Voyager 1, challenging us to catch up. Here is the image of the damaged Scribble, the protagonist of Jeff Noon’s cyberpunk novel Vurt (1993), who searches the spaces of posthumans looking for the crack in the wall that will allow an exchange between the spaces to occur.