XG Reading Group 3.4: The Sensing Layer

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We’re back after a brief hiatus — at least the recordings are. We had a great session a few weeks back that I unfortunately lost when my laptop died mid-render. Then I went on holiday and then the last session was a quiet one and there weren’t enough of us to really sustain a discussion.

Thankfully, we’re back this week, and we’ll hopefully be accelerating things a bit so as to get to the end of this very short book, which is nonetheless taking us months. Then we’ll be moving onto something a bit more involved and we’ll be doing an 8-week course based around Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire, which I’ve had planned for a long, long time and which is finally ready to shared.

In the meantime, here’s this week’s chat. We discussed four chapters from Ben Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real — “What 5G Stands For”, “The Problem Is Individuation Itself”, “Touchlessness” and “Quarantine Urbanism”.

We talked about individuation and subjectivation, Bruno Latour, Achille Mbembe, computational planetarity, Insulate Britain, beekeeping, and more.Below are some notes and quotes I pulled out of the chapters, and below that are some links to things discussed over the course of the session.

Notes

“Reminiscent of fears about photography absorbing the souls of its subjects, the general brooding sense that our identities are being ‘stolen’ through the acceleration of ‘the system’ links 5G’s yet faster bandwidth for ego-corrosive social media to the de-subjectifying demands of pandemic public policy”. The fear of vaccines similarly leads some to believe that unknown compounds or technologies, created by the government, are designed to “invade and colonize one’s biological person, dissolving its fragile integrity into an intolerable agglomerated capture.” [62]

Ultimately, Bratton argues “we need to stop making people crazy with the demand for total individual autonomy, and stop conflating individuality with subjectivity, subjectivity with identity, and identity with agency so thoroughly that a challenge to one is a challenge to all.” [62] This “intense conflation of identity, subjectivity, agency, and individuality is enforced by the Pavlovian economics of social media”. [64] The irony is that our reliance on what Jodi Dean has called “communicative capitalism” and its associated technologies has made our entangled societies, in Bratton’s words, “both more complex and less willing and able to deliberately comprehend themselves.” [65]

Taking issue with the processes of (over-)individuation that our social media networks not only encourage but enforce, Bratton notes how critical theory has long dealt with these issues of subjective formation. “Foucault’s account of the history of Western subjectivity, identity, and individuation is also a history of liberal individualism,” he writes, as “a set of presumptions deep within diverse philosophical and popular political commitments” [67] — something we have explored repeatedly ourselves.

“The remedy of post-pandemic politics is not to ‘free’ individuals so their individual private wants can be better met, faster and more transparently, but to organize society’s capacity for self-modelling and self-composition around a different axis than individuals and their wants.” [68] Instead, we are “frozen in place by the impossibly contradictory demands of being _both_ embedded inside a planetary society that mediates itself through vast physical connections of information, energy, and matter, _and_ simultaneously asked to realize [our] potential as a self-sovereign autonomous agent with all the associated identities that Western liberalism demands as the precondition of personal actualization. No wonder people think the 5G cell towers are melting the boundaries of their egos.” [69]

Mbembe: “We’re led to believe that sensibility, emotions, affect, sentiments and feelings are all the real stuff of subjectivity, and therefore, of radical agency. Paradoxically, in the paranoid tenor of our epoch, this is very much in tune with the dominant strictures of neoliberal individualism.” [73]

“[A] privatized subjectivity and the attendant hyper-interiorized individuation hinge on a commitment to the authenticity and efficacy of affect. This embraces the notion that a preferred personal narrativisation of the world can, and in fact should, take priority over the cold reality of the planet and its indifferent biochemistries. It is the ‘culture’ in ‘culture war.'” [73]

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  1. Pingback: Blogger’s Digest #14 (01/11/2021) – xenogothic

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