OBSOLETE CAPITALISM :: CONTROL, MODULATION AND ALGEBRA OF EVIL IN BURROUGHS AND DELEUZE :: RIZOSFERA :: THE STRONG OF THE FUTURE :: SF016 :: SEPTEMBER 2018

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John Protevi: Life, War, Earth (Deleuze and the Sciences) - University of Minnesota Press, July 2013

A deep exploration of the many possibilities inherent in linking Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to contemporary science, John Protevi’s Life, War, Earth demonstrates how Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual can enhance our understanding of important issues in cognitive science, biology, and geography. Protevi illustrates how a Deleuzian approach can illuminate a wide range of concerns and subjects, including ancient and contemporary warfare, human individuation processes, the “granularity problem” panpsychism, the E. coli bacterium, the assassination attempt on U.S. representative Gabrille Giffords, and the affective dimensions of the Occupy movement.

Frequently ambitious but always rooted in the empirical, Life, War, Earth shows how the social and the somatic are not opposed to each other but are interwoven on three time scales—the evolutionary, the developmental, and the behavioral—and on three political scales—the geopolitical, the bio-neuro-political, and the technopolitical.

Deeply attuned to the internalities of the thought of Deleuze, the book offers a unique reading of his corpus and a useful method for applying Deleuzian techniques to the natural sciences, the social sciences, political phenomena, and contemporary events.

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction I: Deleuze and the Sciences
Introduction II: Varela and Bodies Politic

Part I. Geophilosophy: Earth and War
1. Geo-Hydro-Solar-Bio-Techno-Politics
2. The Act of Killing in Contemporary Warfare
3. Music and Ancient Warfare

Part II. Cognitive Science: Brain and Body
4. Dynamic Interactionism
5. The Political Economy of Consciousness
6. The Granularity Problem
7. Adding Deleuze to the Mix

Part III. Biology: Life and Mind
8. Larval Subjects, Enaction, and E. coli Chemotaxis
9. Mind in Life, Mind in Process
10. The Virtual Status of “Unexpressed Genetic Variation”

John Protevi is Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009); Time and Exteriority;Political Physics; and coauthor of Deleuze and Geophilosophy. He is also the editor of A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy.

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Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences

Reviewed byTodd May, Clemson University @ Notre Dame Phi-Rev Read more

Philosophers often groan when philosophical ideas are pried loose from their immediate context and applied to fields other than philosophy. There is good reason for this. Often, those who have not taken the time to understand the philosophical ideas in the first place warp the original concepts and positions. Others may not have committed to study the fields with which these concepts and positions are engaged. Finally, there is the superfluous activity of showing how these philosophical ideas are a lot like those scientific or literary or political ideas, resulting in a similitude without enlightenment.

John Protevi's work avoids all of these pitfalls. He is a strict and rigorous reader of Deleuze's philosophical corpus, elusive as it is. As far as I can tell (his knowledge here certainly outstrips mine), he displays a deep familiarity with the extra-philosophical fields with which he is engaged. And one walks away from his engagements with a deeper sense of the issues and how to frame them than one walked in with. In his previous work Political Affect, Protevi not only argued for the relevance of Deleuze's work for contemporary developmental systems theory and philosophy of mind, but used it to understand how the political field is molded and oriented at the affective level, and along the way offered important insights in cases such as the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina and the controversy surrounding the Terri Schiavo case.

The current work, which originally appeared in the form of independent essays and conference papers, is less directly concerned with politics -- although it is never very far from Protevi's focus -- and more taken up with how a reading of Deleuze can help frame certain areas in contemporary science. The book is divided into three sections, preceded by two introductions. The first introduction offers an overview of the central Deleuzian concepts that will be put in play in the rest of the text. Readers of Deleuze will be familiar with these concepts -- virtual, actual, intensive, individuation, dramatization. Nevertheless, Protevi's explanation of them is clear and fresh. Roughly, the burden of this chapter is to show how these concepts allow us to think a holism (my term, not Protevi's) in which the terms do not pre-exist their relations but instead are defined by them. Moreover, those relationships are dynamic, leading to a dynamism of the terms themselves. The second introduction concerns the thought of Francisco Varela, a key figure in current biological and cognitive work, who introduced a holism into biology that more recent thinkers, for example Evan Thompson, have taken up. These two sections also familiarize the reader with Protevi's term body (or bodies) politic. The term stands for the way bodies -- individual, social, and even subindividual -- are molded and even created through a field of interaction with a variety of material factors that often work below the level of conscious awareness.

The first section is taken up with the question of war, and in particular how different aspects of war come together to create what might be called military subjects. The unwieldy but suggestive title of the first chapter allows a glimpse of the kind of holism Protevi is after: "Geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno-politics." (He apologizes for the "barbarous nature" (p. 41) of the title, apt thought it is. This is in keeping with his attempt to avoid unnecessary jargon and to ask forgiveness when jargon does appear.) In this chapter, which sets the tone for much of the rest of the book, he shows how geological, hydrological, solar, and biological formations and constraints interact to create specific political formations. For instance, he shows how "we can claim olive oil as a key factor in the genesis of Athenian democracy." (p. 55) The general idea here is that oil stores solar energy, which can be used for food and for lamps. When Solon outlawed Athenian exports, with the exception of olive oil, this fostered a class of people who would work as oil merchants. However, the viability of such exports required a naval activity in order for safe passage of the oil, which in turn led to the creation of Athenian naval power and eventually its empire. Things would have been very different, for instance, if Athens had been land-locked. Here we can see the holism of dynamic interacting factors at work.

If the first chapter works with a supra-individual dynamism, the second chapter, which takes up the question of how one can train a person to kill another, is oriented toward the sub-individual level. In such training, there is a dual difficulty to be overcome. On the one hand, most humans are not oriented toward killing one another directly, in face to face combat. On the other, although certain practices can train one to overcome this orientation, they generally provoke a rage response, which is difficult to control. So the challenge becomes one of how to turn the ability to kill on and off. Among contemporary methods of addressing this problem are the dehumanization of the enemy and simulation-training. But, as many have pointed out (including a student of mine who was in Iraq), and as PTSD has amply shown, this training is at best only partially successful, and often at a heavy psychological cost.

The third chapter takes up the role of music in military training. It is preceded by a long and important discussion of Deleuze's concept of affect. Affect, for Deleuze, is not a feeling, which is instead "the subjective appropriation of affect." (p. 74) Rather, it is the ability of a body to act and to be acted upon. This happens differently with different bodies. For instance, certain bacteria are acted upon by glucose, but this is only because glucose can be a form of food for them. Other bodies, for whom glucose has no meaning, are not affected by it -- they do not act and are not acted upon by it. This means, among other things, that what a body is and does is inseparable from its environment, which in turn is inseparable from that body. This does not mean, Protevi insists, that things are entirely plastic all the way down.

I think it is important to rescue a minimal notion of human nature from extreme social constructivism and to hold that rage episodes are individuations of a multiplicity encompassing variation in genetic inheritances, environmental input in the form of subjectification practices, and developmental plasticity. Even with all that variation, there is still remarkable similarity in what a full rage episode looks like. (p. 78)

Here we can see a theme to which Protevi will return. Even though, for Deleuze, the actual emerges from a dynamic virtual, this is not a one-way street. If it were, then Deleuze would, as Protevi later notes, be a sort of Platonist: an unchanging virtual issues out into the actual. The actual constrains and forms the virtual just as the virtual actualizes itself. The dynamic holism in which terms are a product of their relations does not entail that those terms, once formed, cannot in their turn affect (in the Deleuzian sense) the relations with which they are immersed.

In the case of war and music, there are interactions between the evolution of affections of which humans are capable, the type of war that is being fought, and the music that is associated with that type of war. Around 1200 B.C.E, when barbarian peoples conquered more sedentary groups in the ancient Near East,

we can speculate that through an evolutionary process with success in warfare as a selection pressure, the barbarian hill peoples . . . experimented with war dances and songs to hit on critical points in provoking neural firing patterns that triggered evolutionarily embedded rage circuits. (p. 95)

The second part of the book focuses on the interaction between a Deleuzian framework and what has come to be called the embodied mind or "4EA approach (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, affective)" to cognitive science. This approach, whose roots lie in Continental thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, has been taken up recently by Susan Hurley, Andy Clark, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. It treats the mind not as internal to a person, but rather as an emergence from a set of "internal" and "external" factors. The scare quotes around these latter terms indicate that, in keeping with Deleuze's thought, we should not consider these factors as pre-existing their relationship.

One of the virtues of this section of the book is to bring together the phenomenological tradition from which the 4EA theorists borrow and Deleuze's thought, which is often considered (even by Deleuze himself) as a rejection of that tradition. As Protevi argues, a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it. Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought. Here Protevi provides an important corrective to many received views of the recent history of French philosophy.

The four chapters of the second section take up not only the general compatibility of Deleuze's thought with the 4EA approach, but consider specific examples like that of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and gendering practices that lead to greater rates of depression among women. In the latter case, he argues,

We need to think in terms of a range of gendering practices that are distributed in a society at various sites (family, school, church, media, playground, sports field) with variable goals, intensities, and efficacies. These multiply situated gendering practices resonate or clash with each other and with myriad other practices (racializing, classing, religionizing, nationalizing, neighborhoodizing ["that's the way we roll"]). (p. 135)

Seen this way, there are no particular elements of gendering (and their intersecting) practices that are unaffected by others. Moreover, the relations among these practices are characterized by particular tensions (intensities) and what Deleuze calls singularities -- points at which the normal run of things alters and something new breaks out. This something new could be the proliferation of depression among women (say, when pressure to work and simultaneously raise a family become embedded in the larger culture), or, opposed to this, a new feminist movement that rejects those cultural pressures. Which way things will turn at a singularity is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. In fact, given the complexity of the 4EA/Deleuzian approach Protevi articulates, it may be impossible to tell when one has reached a singularity except retrospectively.

The final chapters of the book approach biology and evolution from a Deleuzian perspective. Among the arguments Protevi makes is to propose a Deleuzian "panpsychism," the idea that, in some sense, mind pervades everything. This mind is not, of course, an organic mind, but rather a process of interaction and emergence for which the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is less important ontologically than it has often seemed. In defending this view, whose roots we can see in earlier essays, Protevi throws out this challenge:

When cognitive capacities are at stake, a panpsychist would say that mind gets more complex as we find life, but it doesn't radically emerge with life. A Cartesian radical emergentist would say that there is dead unmindful matter that when properly arranged becomes living and minded. But is that really less strange than the panpsychist position? (p. 194)

In fact, if we think of mind as no longer the internal property of a person, but rather as an interactive emergence, we have set the stage for such a view and such a challenge.

There is more to this book than I have indicated here, both theoretically and in concrete analyses: E. coli, RNA, and the Occupy Movement all make appearances. Throughout, however, Protevi offers careful and rigorous discussion rather than glossing either the philosophical or (as far as I can tell) biological, political, or musicological issues. He is also careful to recognize when he is taking up a controversial perspective among the latter. The book could serve both those who are new to Deleuze as a way of understanding his thought and those who are familiar with his thought as a way of seeing how he can enlighten us on a variety of contemporary scientific issues. In addition, it runs another in a series of recent bridges across the "analytic/Continental divide."

There are, of course, many questions one might ask here in reflecting on Protevi's view. I will close with one. Deleuze offers us a general ontology that is rooted in a conception of difference rather than identity. It seems to me right to say that the relationality Protevi discusses is central in the emergence of mind, politics, biology, etc. However, should this fact point us in the direction of a robust ontological framework of the kind Deleuze provides, or instead in the opposite direction, toward an ontological austerity? The latter position would not deny any of the phenomena to which Protevi has called our attention, but would take the lesson of this to be, not that there is a virtual realm of difference, intensities, and singularities, but rather that we don't know what there is beyond what we currently understand (and, of course, even that is fallible). This position would allow for relationality in the phenomena discovered. It would also allow for the possibility that there can be more or less stable identities. It would recognize the complexity Protevi has analyzed but infer from that complexity that we should abjure rather than posit a deeper explanatory ontology.

Among the many merits of Life,War, Earth is that it allows us to approach such an important question more rigorously than we would have otherwise, as well as offering us a rigorous defense of one way to answer it.

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Life, War, Earth is an important and nuanced book that works in a number of different registers. It creates new ways to think about, and with, Deleuze and generates novel connections for those working in the particular sciences. Most especially, in the multiplicity of geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno-politics it explores the complex interrelations of politics, lives, and geographies, a way of thinking biopolitics and geopolitics together.

—

Stuart Elden, Durham University

John Protevi is one of the chief proponents of a worldly philosophy which attempts to marry philosophy to what might be called earthly themes like science and politics, scouting the frontier zones between many different areas of study in order to obtain a philosophy with grip. In this collection of essays, he uses Deleuze as a cardinal with which to produce new and productive syntheses of war, cognitive science, and biology. The result is like watching one of the best landscape painters hard at work producing works in which the broadest of brushstrokes are accompanied by the most minute details. And the result is just as satisfying—and sometimes sublime.

—

Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick 

Nick Land: Phylosophy of War @ Dissolution

Nick Land: 
Phylosophy of War 
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“War is deception” – Sunzi
“War is the father of all things” -- Heraclitus
“War is god” -- Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian)
“You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.” – Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Camouflage
In a reality at war, things hide. The alternative is to become a target, a casualty, and thus – in the course of events – to cease to be. When war reigns, ontology and occultation converge. The oldest of all alliances binds survival to the shadows.
Absent a sovereign peace, of the kind an all-powerful and benevolent God -- or its political proxy -- could ensure, existence is a jungle of lies. Within such an environment truth, or unconcealment, is a way to get things killed.
To see is to eliminate, actually or virtually, and with virtual elimination comes dominion. This is to return to pacific sovereignty on a darker (but illuminated) path. If no God is found already at work, announced unambiguously through a manifest peace, then a substitute has to be made from the suspension of war -- and that presupposes a war. A God who hides blesses only battlefields, because his stand-in will be a state.
In a war there can be no philosophical innocence (and there has never been philosophical innocence).
Even when epistemology pretends to concern itself with things that we just happen not to know, its objects infect it with dissimulation, camouflage and secrecy, making it complicit in the transmission of the lie. It plays out war games of concealment and exposure, disinformation, distraction, and feint, entangled in the complex skein of signal manipulation and evaluation known to all militaries as ‘intelligence’.
To know, or not to know – these matters are too important to be ignored by the war. It is through such discrimination that the difference between life and death is decided, and distributed. This is how the administrators of war, at their most confidently articulate, speak:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. Who are we? (‘We’ don’t know ...)

Escalation
Before beginning over, from the end, there are some things to be said about ends. What modernity finds thinkable in war is owed, above all, to Carl von Clausewitz, and his great synthesis of organized bellicosity with rational statecra,, under the principle that war is politics by other means . Politics supplies the end, and thus the war aim, to which all strategy and tactics is subordinated, in accordance with a rigorous teleological scheme. Military purposes have their final cause in the rational self-interest of the state.
Within the Clausewitzean philosophical system, the military apparatus is essentially technological. The entirety of its social and technical composition is comprehensible as teleological machinery, integrated in accordance with a command-control hierarchy of cascading purposes, connected to a transcendent political will. From the boots and bullets that constitute its simplest pieces of equipment, through tactical drills and maneuvers, to large scale strategic plans and operations, it can always meaningfully be asked: What is this for? Furthermore, this question is necessarily strictly equivalent to asking: How does this serve the ultimate war aim? War in-itself, however, is an emergent phenomenon, arising between states – rather than in subordination to them – and thus eluding the political meaning that corresponds to finalistic intelligibility. A war, as such, is not for anything (not even ‘for oil’), unless it is misleadingly identified with the highest level strategy of one or other antagonist. Within the war no less than two ultimate aims, or political wills, collide, so that -- of necessity -- it can have no unambiguous purpose. Consequently, we cannot ask: Who is the war? Or: What does it want? (that would, or course, be insane.)
Nevertheless, Clausewitzean war has an inherent gradient, which simulates purpose to an arbitrary level of approximation.  In accordance with its own nature, to which the antagonistic agents are pressed into compliance, war tends to an extreme. In other words, any restricted form of warfare is conceived as fragile political artifice, stubbornly subverted by a trend to escalation that expresses the nature of war in-itself, and which thus counts – within any specific war -- as the primary axis of real discovery.  A crypto-teleology proper to war itself is demonstrated by the inclination of violent, politically-uncircumscribed conflict to escape all limitation.
From the perspective of the state and its serious games – which, as we shall see, can be transferred beyond the state onto trans-political confrontations of an even more radical nature – it is not di cult to understand how escalation (the autonomization of war) takes over. Insofar as the state approaches its historical essence, as a sovereign or ultimate entity, military defeat is a catastrophe that cannot in principle be transcended. From the intrinsic character of the state, it follows that no measure required to avoid defeat can be excessive. The epoch of nuclear confrontation, which – contrary to superficial appearance – has scarcely begun, has facilitated the rigorous formalization of this macro-political incentive to the abandonment of limitation, all the way to Mutually Assured Destruction.
Conceived concretely as a relationship between antagonists, rather than abstractly as a gradient of war in-itself, escalation is a zig-zag of reciprocal incitement, or a cybernetic circuit without negative (dampening) links. The structural predisposition of each party to escalation is carried forwards, or advanced in time, as an efficient virtuality, reinforcing the positive trend with a supplementary motive for pre-emption. The probability that the enemy will at some point escalate becomes a prompt for anticipatory counter-escalation, creating a wave of intensified war effort with reversed time signature. The model war is maximally-accelerated escalation provoked by the future: Time pressure.

Threat Matrix
Respond now to what the enemy might do, and science fiction has become a component of military strategy (operating as an escalator). Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in the work of Hugo de Garis, where a reverse cascade of threat anticipation embeds war in-itself within contemporary information technology. First implemented in military cryptography machines, and later distributed across robust networks designed to survive nuclear attack, military imperatives have been hard-coded into computational infrastructure from the start. Advanced technology conducts political teleology by adapting C4 systems (command, control, communications, and computation) to the Clausewitzean conditions of intensified war – whether actual or virtual – characterized by extreme escalation, ‘fog’ and ‘friction’. The emergent abstract factor is resilient intelligence, the most flexible (general-purpose) principle of competitive advantage. The crypto-teleology of war (in-itself) becomes increasingly identified with artificial intelligence production.
As a high-level technical theoretician practically promoting the development of artificial brains, Hugo de Garis is implicitly connected to this lineage, despite his avoidance of formal links to military research programs. This distance from overt defense work – which might have lured a less scrupulous intelligence into fantasies of philosophical innocence – prompted de Garis into a conceptual escalation beyond the Clausewitzean framework. Rather than envisaging technology as the conductor of the state war aim, he began to suspect that it was itself an unsubordinated teleological element, displacing the state as final cause.
Against the limited conception of a war waged through technology, escalated by disciplined science fiction speculations intrinsic to the military apparatus, de Garis turned (through an escalated science fiction) to the model of an unlimited or ‘gigadeath’ war waged over and about (while also still through) technology. The fate of technology would no longer be decided by the wars among states, but would itself become a polarizing cause, determining a trans-political war, with states as teleologically-subordinated components (or large-scale technological parts). The point of contention: Will super-human artificial intellects (or ‘artilects’) be permitted to happen?
The coming Artilect War – “almost inevitable before the end of the 21st century” . – subsumes everything into the axis of escalation, pitting ‘Cosmist’ proponents of technological extrapolation without limit against the ‘Terran’ resistors who oppose it. The retro-chronic dynamics of escalation are driven to an ultimate limit by fundamental game-theoretic dissymmetry. The Terrans cannot possibly escalate too hard, too fast, because the Cosmists are aligned with escalation, and therefore win automatically if the war is prolonged to its intrinsic extreme. The Terrans cannot allow the war to take its time, knowing that anything other than a ‘prematurely’ concluded war is a Cosmist success. Time pressure reaches its maximum, through the condensation of an absolute threat that is intricately entangled with the means required to counter it.

End Game
Even in an extreme formulation of the de Garis Artilect War, the Cosmists are still a ‘side’. While aligned exactly with the inherent trend of war in-itself, they supply it with a recognizable ideological subjectivity, preserving a residue of dialectical intelligibility. Artilects are double counted, at the bottom and top of the teleological order – as mere weapons, and as final causes. Simply tracking the tangled circuitry of this model would eventually describe complexities beyond pursuit. What can already be comprehended of the Terran perspective is enough to demonstrate that – for the human resistance – it cannot begin quickly enough. If tomorrow is too late, and yesterday none too soon, it crashes through the present to embed itself deeply within the (apparent) epoch of Clausewitzean war. With no Cosmists to represent the cause of escalation, war’s crypto-teleology – the ultimate enemy – hides itself among the cross-currents of state-political antagonism.
The question then arises: is Stuxnet a soft-weapon fragment from the future war? When its crypto-teleological significance is finally understood, will this be confined to the limited purpose assigned to it by US-Israeli hostility to the Iranian nuclear program? Does Stuxnet serve only to wreck centrifuges? Or does it mark a stage on the way of the worm, whose final purpose is still worm? Are Cosmists even needed to tell this story?
The answer depends upon the limitation of war, which can be represented by the proxy of anti-proliferation. If state-political objectives are able to subordinate – or indefinitely master – the crypto-teleology of escalation, then Stuxnet will have ‘always been’ an instrument of policy, or never significantly more than a weapon.  Despite the ‘fog’ of war, the ‘friction’ of unpredictable events, and the tendency to techno-military escalation it demonstrates, there would be no reason to think a more-or-less exhaustive explanation for its existence were not already available in principle, however deeply encrypted. Then we could know, even if (befogged and disinformed) we concretely do not, that it was designed to prevent escalation – in the guise of Iranian nuclear capability – from escaping the politically-circumscribed order of the world.
If, on the contrary, war is going to escape, then nothing we think we know, or can know, about its history will remain unchanged. State-politics will have been the terrain in which it hid, military apparatuses the hosts in which it incubated its components, antagonistic purposes the pretexts through which – radically camouflaged – it advanced. Its surreptitious assembly sequences would be found scattered backwards, lodged, deeply concealed, within the disinformational megastructure of Clausewitzean history.
“War is god” asserts Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. It has its own order of providence and its own laws. It is the ultimate meaning of things.
We are under no compulsion to believe a self-declared fiction, or to listen uncritically to a character within it. We have only to think about the ways things hide, or – less demandingly still – to accept that thoughtlessness loses wars.
Does the war think? We don’t know (but the idea sounds insane).

On War, by General Carl von Clausewitz, translated by Colonel J.J. Graham, http://www.gutenberg.org/)les/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm
. Hugo de Garis (2005). The Artilect War: Cosmists Vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications. ISBN 0-88280-154-6.