Author: @Baden

“The human is a technical being, and the technical system is pharmacological: both poison and cure.”

Bernard Stiegler [9].

Technoethics: Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines

This essay amounts to a critique of a consumerist culture that is driven by technology and rooted in capitalism. The proximate goal is not to suggest alternative political systems but to offer conceptual tools to help protect free subjectivity as a creative and self-creating force through presenting in a brief introductory way a theory concerning its cultural situatedness. This theory is grounded in a constructivist paradigm that sees subjects as both biologically and socially constituted, and it leverages the difference between the ontological freedom inherent to subjectivity and socially granted nominal freedoms to highlight the former’s precarity in our increasingly technosocial milieu.

Electronic technologies have become a dominant force in organizing our behaviours, and the boundary between us and the devices to which we outsource our needs, whether those needs be emotional, practical, or aesthetic is increasingly blurred, not just in terms of the proximity of these devices to us, but also in their integration into our mental faculties. The contemporary subject subsists somewhere in a cloud of internal neurological and external social and algorithmic processes that combine to produce culturally recognizable results, and this diluting field of subjectivity becomes problematic when we lack awareness of the processes that consitute it.

This issue of increasingly “fuzzy” subjectivity can be directly linked to globalization and its expansion of individual and cultural interconnectedness, which creates ever larger pools of subjects and Increasingly intense efforts to productively control them. This control is largely enacted through technological tools which attempt to transform subjects into culturally legibile and interculturally transferable units that can be integrated into global systems of economic exchange. While these tools can empower us, they also result in the dispersal of traditional groups based on physical proximity—e.g. the family and the local community—in favour of establishing new cross-cultural virtual proximities and a natural outcome of this is that what we traditionally understand as culture, the basis of historical communicative space, is being dissolved. And though a counterbalancing independence of association that can appear as an extension of individual freedom and power is fostered through this process, effects intrinsic to the medium problematize the idea that greater opportunity of association equates to greater freedom or that quantity of associative opportunities equates to quality of relationships.

It hardly seems an exaggeration to claim, for example, that globalized technocapitalism is engaged in a form of hyper-symbolization that is overwriting individual cultures and the values they inhere with a layer of simplified cross-cultural signifiers that manifest as common technologically mediated modes of communication and information transfer. From an economic and quantitative point of view, this enables growth by facilitating capitalism’s requirements for constant efficiency increases in the flow of information and goods. But from a psychic and qualitative point of view, the situation is not so straightforward. While disparate cultures conflict in their values, sometimes violently so, and homogenising them might therefore seem superficially desirable, values are the subject’s fulcrum of meaning and, beyond the dictats of pure survival, meaning is ultimately what lends quality to life.

Subject and System: Agency and Precarity

“Meaning is use.”

Wittgenstein [11].

“A being does not preexist its becoming; it is always in the process of being constituted.”

Simondon [8].

From a social constructivist perspective, subjects simultaneously imply and ground each other. The individual meaning of a subject in a system of culture can be analogized with the linguistic meaning of a word in a system of language. The meaning of a word can be observed in the behavioral manifestation of its linguistic intelligibility. Meaning is use [11] because use manifests this intelligibility, expressing in communicative acts the relation between an individual's neurological patternings of understandings of a concept and the social patternings of brains that share understandings of the concept. The behavioral expressions of this web of interwoven patterns, this web of webbed nodes, simultaneously express and define meaning because they represent social instantiations of this web and—in successful communication—reinforce its structure in accordance with those instantiations. This interdependence makes language both stable and mutable. Stable in that webs of linguistic meaning are self-reinforcing through communicative acts, but mutable in that the boundaries of what is considered successful communication are not absolutely fixed but depend on social and human contexts that are changeable. So, we cannot fully pin down or exhaust the meaning of a word, for example, through a dictionary defnition; there is always an excess to meaning that can expand or redirect itself. The fact that words change meaning over time, sometimes very quickly, is testament to this.

Similarly, there is a sense that an individual's meaning, just as a word’s meaning, can only be discovered in the context of that of other individuals, so that the meaning of a subject can be observed in the behavioural manifestation of its cultural intelligibility. We are what we do culturally, so to speak. The subject is a node in the culture’s system of inter-subjectivity just as a word is a node in a language. But for a subject to play a role in culture or for there to be such roles, it must also be in itself something, that is (following Vygotsky [10]) the something that exteriorizes the web of roles from the symbolic interiorization that marks it as subject and one of those nodes. Again, there is an implied interdependence and inter-reliance here; subjects reproduce the culture that produces them and culture reproduces itself through the actions of its subjects. But culture does not replicate itself with full fidelity because its subjects are not entirely defined culturally. And because of this, it can mutate quickly, especially when under stress

So, just as the logical base condition for meaningful words in language is a systemically conditioned flexibility that always implies an “excess” of meaning, so is the logical base condition for free subjectivity in culture a systemically conditioned flexibility that implies that the subject as a carrier of cultural meaning is also meaningful to itself. And this meaningfulness to itself, this semantic self-flexibility, forms the basis of agency and freedom. Subjects are subject to culture but not absolutely. They are generally stable units but also mutable in a way culture cannot entirely predict or control. And this appears necessary to allow culture to quickly adapt and change according to changing circumstances in a way that simple socialities of unfree units, e.g. ant colonies, can never do.

“Social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. The elements of the system are produced and reproduced by the system itself.”

Luhmann [6].

“Living systems are cognitive systems, and living is a process of cognition”

Maturana and Varela [7].

However, while it may be granted that the meaningfulness of the subject to itself, and the basic freedom that implies, is inseparable from the adaptability of culture, there is no reason to think culture or social systems in general “value” this freedom. It may be that it is, operationally speaking, epiphenomenal. German theorist Niklas Luhmann, for example, presents a picture of society not as operating on the basis of individual agents, but on the recursively self-producing communications of those agents, with the degree to which those communications are free as not directly relevant [6]. That is, though social systems operate on the basis of “structural couplings” with agentic subjects, they can be considered semantically operative without minds or agency [ibid]. In this scaling up of the subject to the interoperative group, freedom, even if we grant it as implied by what we know as culture, is secondary to the functioning of communicative code and not something that society seeks to protect. It may offer adaptability advantages and that may be what has preserved it up until now, but that does not mean culture cannot theoretically leave freedom behind to a large or even total degree even if that ultimately means culture becoming so rigid it destroys itself as recognizably cultural and reverts to something more akin to insect sociality along the lines of Star Trek's “Borg”.

Under Luhmann's theory, social systems are characterized as independently self-reproducing or “autopoietic”, a term he borrowed from Humberto Maturana and Frenciso Varela who applied it originally (and exclusively) to biological systems [7]. And following Maturana and Varela “downwards” from subjects to other biological systems rather than “upwards” to culture, a theory of autopoiesis presents us too with systems that are semantically operative, that inhere a form of meaning, without agency. Though meaning is preserved at all levels, freedom in both directions from the subject is decoupled from meaning-making with the operation of communicative code instead enacting it.

Other theorists (e.g. Seth Lloyd [5]) have extended this “code primacy” further down through biology into physics to position communication as fundamental to reality. They posit a code-based metaphysics whereby the transfer, overlap, reconfiguring and layering of code is at the root of what manifests as physical, mental and social reality. Everything becomes reducible, in theory, to code-based systems which, while they ultimately manifest a form of human agency, again can’t be said to “need” it.

In this pan-semiotic ontology whereby matter in its observable form emerges from code and reality consists of layers of autopoietic coding systems, free subjectivity is just another layer that emerges when technics (in Simondon and Stiegler’s sense of symbolic affordances, especially language) appears in humans. But whether or not code goes “all the way down”, if human subjectivity is nested between code-based biological and social systems, which potentialize meaning without freedom, then agency is always contingent and precarious and should be recognized as such rather than accepted as humanity's biological and social given.

“A system is not an ensemble of relations, but a process of subjectivation.”

Deleuze and Guattari. [1]

Cultures then, under an autopoietic systems view, while offering clear opportunities for personal development primarily aims to enable and utilise human communication as a means to complexify themselves. They are, in Stieglers sense, “pharmacological” in nature; both a curative and a toxin [9]. As a curative, they offer us knowledge and contexts in which to creatively utilize them, marking us as unique individuals in so doing. This is what Stiegler, following Simondon, refers to as “individuation” [8][9]. But as a toxin, they “consume” subjectivity as a substrate and dissolve it, making us passive, conforming, and reliant (“disindividuation”) [ibid].

The latter, toxic, mode of action of social life seems more and more apparent in contemporary technologically driven cultures occurring through, for example:

1. The bureaucratization of cognition (the capturing of cognitive capacity for uncreative calculative labour limited to reproducing systemic functionality)
2. (Negative) exteriorization / algorithmic outsourcing (the general stultifying of mental development through the replacement of cognitive tasks by algorithmic processes)
3. Semantic flattening (the dulling and standardization of language use towards reflexive repetition of codes of systemic reproduction)
4. Behavioural conditioning (the limiting of imaginative capacity and creative potential by the channeling of behaviour into operationally defined grooves)

When these processes dominate society, we fall into what Stiegler refers to as a “proletarianization” of mind, a general mindset unaware and / or unwilling to potentialize itself except as a function of the system in which it partakes, a society of individuals who cannot see themselves beyond how society sees them and define themselves limitedly as such [9]. Part of addressing that problem, of course, is promoting knowledge of the problem as a means to stimulate thought and action, and in a society that seems to be becoming ever more reflexive, encouraging reflection seems crucial. Of course, the weapon of the theorist in this effort is the theory itself, an idea through which we will now take a detour.

Enzymatic Knowledge Machines

“A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function.”

Deleuze and Guattari [2].

This theory of the precarious contemporary position of subjectivity is intended as a symbolically textured tool, an “enzymatic knowledge machine” (EKM), aimed to enhance and intensify that subjectivity through alerting it to its precarity. EKMs can be defined as abstract machinic assemblages of functional conceptual elements that are designed to be “plugged in” to psychic systems with the explicit goal of transformative catalyses that are reproduced outwards from subjects to culture. The enzymatic knowledge machine aims to borrow the stimulative operatonality of technocapitalism to turn it against itself.

Of course, EKMs are not intended to be dogmatic statements of truth, an orientation that would undermine their spirit. They are rather modes of knowledge catalysis that may help to provide a means to resist degradative manipulation by abstract social machines of conditioning that encourage us to outsource our cognitive capacities, bureaucratize our mental states, and degrade our semantic salience.

“Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.”

Foucault [4].

A theory as EKM then is an epistemic protective that aims to catalyze active reflection against passive reflexivity. In doing so, it offers resistance to subsumption by higher level systemic processes through the establishment of thought and behaviors that enhance and intensify contextual understanding and creative activity on the autopoietic level of subjectivity. This creative activity, or ethic, amounts to subjectivity taking a stand as a system in the hierarchy of systems by consciously situating itself as a locus around which other systems ought revolve rather than submitting fully to their pull. Here, freedom is leveraged to protect against its instrumentalization at the level of hierarchy in which it sits as system. It resists hijacking by technocapitalist consumerism to maintain its ontological force in its refusal to be defined by “freedoms” whose exchange-based forms merely stage us as players in a game that is not played for our benefit and that we can never win.

“The individual is not a being but an operation.”

Simondon [8].

This ethic, it should be emphasised is both self-directed and self-emergent. It is inherent to autopoietic systems to self-intensify and self-reproduce. Though human subjects are the first level of system that can realize that they are a system nested hierarchically in other systems, they are as subject to this fundamental rule of self-reproduction as any other level and this may be self-directed to varying degrees depending on the nature of their will and that of the social will (as manifested in the mechanisms of cultural autopoiesis in which they are embedded).This underlines again the point that freedom has never been at the core of social organization, but has only ever been epiphenomenal. There has been freedom through organization but not freedom-based organization. Only an exceptional minority of individuals have ever acted as perturbations in systems and helped to reconfigure them through thinking against their sociocultural milieux. The norm has always been conformity whether or not socially recognized as such. That is, there has yet to be a society that directly arranges itself around the development of free subjectivity, its spectrum of affordances and capacities, and, above all, its essential creativity.

In technocapitalism, we have nominal freedoms and many would claim we are freer than ever, but the dominant mode of organization centres around economic growth, and this is the socio-evolutionary backdrop against which cultures unquestioningly compete. Ostensible freedoms are ideologically shepherded towards freedom of consumer choice, with the unspoken proviso that one must continue to consume. A form of freedom is encouraged in so far as it serves an advantage, but it is clearly and forcefully directed towards participative conformity in economic growth. The freedom to say “no” to economic imperatives is concomitantly marginalized along with anyone who dares exercise it. Further, while the full spectrum of human agency seems to offer the mutative and creative perturbations in societies that may allow for advance, there is no ironclad reason to think technocapitalism cannot as previously mentioned, evolve towards an increasingly limited form of freedom and, by extension, subjectivity. That is, qualitative freedom, in its scope and depth, may become a limitation for the system and so operationally acted against, particularly in a flattening globalized form of operation that is eliminating external cultural stressors through a technologically driven monopolization of the symbolic sphere. and therefore relies less on the mutative advantages self-meaningful subjects offer.

Furthermore, this drive towards a cultural monopoly should certainly not be taken in its material advance through economic growth even as a means to equitably serve basic human needs. In our most developed states, problems such as falling living standards, the reduction of life expectancy and poorer health outcomes, both mental and physical, increasingly unsustainable jumps in inequality, continued environmental degradation point to potential regression on all human levels. Quantitative growth continues and seems destined to continue, but qualitative growth, like freedom itself, is much more precarious. Not only are we as far as ever from a society where subjectivity comes first, where economic growth is the incidental outcome of the fostering of free and healthy subjectivities rather than vice versa, we seem to be intent on destroying the social and environmental grounds of subjectivity’s ongoing development in a blind effort at eternal expansion. In this respect, society itself seems to be suffering from the same irrational self-defeating compulsivity it inflicts on its members.

“The philosopher is not wise, but an “idiot”, since he does not possess wisdom as a given but rather seeks it as something that does not pre-exist”

Deleuze and Guattari [3].

Whether or not we can turn this situation around and create social structures based around the fostering of subjectivity is open to debate. And, as mentioned, any theory espousing this, even as a potential, must stand against self-dogmatisation in order to present itself seriously as a path towards self and social transformation. This necessitates a form of ironic self-awareness whereby the theory acknowledges its transient symbolic situatedness in and dependence on the very structures it seeks to change. Theory must preach but also mock itself as an “idiot” in the church of the sacred—never a denizen but always a refugee. And so enzymatic knowledge machines must always inhere a note of self-deprecation, a nod towards their discardability in contexts that are always in the process of change and retransfigure theory in accordance with circumstance. This particular theory of freedom as precarity—with the modest aim of presenting a grounds on which to catalyse knowledge of the dangers of taking human values, meaning, and creativity for granted in a technocapitalist cultures—is one such refugee of the sacred that requests only the provisional respect of reflection on its claims.

Conclusion

What we have outlined above is a warning that situates human subjects in a diachronic hierarchy between biological and social reality and a synchronic relationship with other subjects that both potentializes and creates their status as free agents. However, we claim that the nested system that is the human, self-aware, subject is sandwiched between other self-reproducing (“autopoietic”) systems which can be semantically operative without agency. This amounts to positing our agency as a contingent and precarious epiphenomenon of operations alien in their telos to our well-being. We have also claimed that the rapid advance of technocapitalism make an awareness of this all the more salient and urgent. The overall implication of our claims is that technocapitalism is a global cultural machine for producing nominally free subjectivities while eroding ontological freedom. It creates and processes subjectivity as a product to be sold (e.g. to advertisers) and converted into more capital. In fact, we claim capital, in its operation through autopoietic social systems for which freedom is epiphenomenal, essentially expands through monetizing the conversion of ontological to nominal freedom. The ultimate result of this, we have cautioned, may be an irreversible decline of both culture and the subjects that form it.

Further, we have characterised theory as useful only in so far as it catalyses action in accordance with the logic of its claims, and we have expressed the hope that this brief introductory analysis may help combat the positive feedback loop of consumer capture and production with a contrary positive feedback loop of knowledge capture and production. Finally, in doing all this, we encourage the reader to subject our theory to as careful a reflective scrutiny as we suggest the cultural environment in which we live ought be subjected to and to do this in the spirit of improving us all.

Bibliography

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