Understanding human speciation in a broader sense

In response to my last post on human exceptionalism dmfant writes:

going back to our being creatures of habit why isn't the differences in our response-abilities (our place in the family-rhizome), from other beings as human-beings, just a matter of evolution and adaptation/socialization?

Perhaps it is but which adaptations, which socialisations, which habits?  Which ones are particularly important?  Which are particularly destructive?

We can accept that we are the product of unexceptional processes and still ask how we exceptionalise ourselves within all of that.  While all living things are subject to evolution not every living thing shares the same evolutionary pathways.  If humans are a species then we can ask what it is about their pathways, in the ways they persist in particular, that is exceptional relative to other pathways, each of which is exceptional in its own way (Stephen Jay Gould was good on this kind of point).

So, we must ask not 'what distinguishes humans from all the rest of existence?' but rather 'what marks human pathways off from all the other pathways that all have their own particular qualities?'.

To believe that human being is so exceptional that it makes all other existents homogenenous by comparison is as foolish as it is dualist.  To believe that human being has its own qualities, its own resonant frequencies and that all other natural kinds (in all their fuzzy-edged glory) have their own characteristic kinds of resonance too is a pluralist tenet - and an entirely sensible one, in my view.  The search for only one exception - the human exception and the human exception -, the dualist task, is barbaric, as I have argued before.

Of course, no amount of exceptionality can extract us from our complex worldly relations.  If the Gaia hypothesis is true then we are inextricably bound up in not only evolutionary processes on the biological level but on practically every level - chemical, geological, atmospherical.  If we recognise that every atom in our bodies was once part of a star then this realisation is taken even further.

So, I suppose what I'm saying is that understanding human speciation (in a non-biologically reductive sense) is an ontological and political imperative.  It's a political imperative simply because 'knowing oneself' is an intrinstic part of subjectivation.  Becoming more human (not more than human), amplifying the best parts of the human condition, becoming alter-human - this requires a grasp of human speciation in the broadest possible sense.

Metaphysics as equipping; Seeing every problem as a nail; Becoming more impressionable

In reply to my argument that we need to trace the networks that produce the human in order to produce a new humanism, an alter-humanism, dmf (now my most dedicated interlocutor!) writes:

my preference in terms of sorting out descriptions/techniques would be to take on case-studies and show (rather than abstractly say) what is gained and lost (to the degree that we can capture such things, obviously any view-point/lens by foregrounding certain things leaves others out of focus, and than many things just exceed our grasps) by the applications of the differing approaches/styles.

Case studies are indeed essential.  The central intuitions of ANT have to be maintained, one of which is: we can only learn through trials in which the researcher makes herself open to transformation by her participants; she makes herself plastic, quite literally impressionable.

However, we cannot go into a case study 'unequipped'; without 'tooling up,' so to speak, beforehand!  This brings me back to the modes project and the relationship between fieldwork and metaphysics in general.

Can't we take metaphysical arguments as 'wagers' that practically precede but do not empirically predetermine fieldwork?  We might never be sure when turning up for work whether we'll need a hammer or a scalpel but if we familiarise ourselves with both tools and bring them along with us then we will be both sensitive to and prepared to deal with the issues that arise.

Arriving with only one tool, one mode - that of networks - brings to my mind a joke: give a man a hammer and every problem starts to look like a nail...

Having a whole set of tools (not just one or two) requires us to make a decision, it requires us to think about the kind of problem we are facing.  It may even prompt us to realise that none of our tools fit and we have to go 'back to the drawing board' - that is, back to the space of abstraction, of planning, of architecture, of philosophy.

A plurality of metaphysics makes us more impressionable because it makes us more uncertain, more hesitant as to our next step.  It makes us a little bit more 'lost' in our moment but, at the same time, increases the number of routes open to us.

Thinking about an alter-humanism internal to ANT; Policing translation in the borderlands

Nicholas replies to my last comment on his blog; an excerpt:

...Like the hard-won efforts to generate political agency, ours was a hard-won battle to generate technological agency but with a balance. Jan and I have always written that ANT has been used in so many and so many contradictory ways that it almost defies simple summary and has a much more malleable character these days, as it is collided with new theories born in disciplines with different traditions and orienting assumptions. 

So, a materialist answer that still provides something of political agency: I wonder what a discussion would look like if it were started like this: “what should we do with bodies when we de-center humans?” 

I think that in Jan and I’s chapter for that new book, we are walking as far away as we can from humanist theories of international relations precisely waiting for the moment for other to say “STOP, you’re too close to the edge!” Not because we have “materialist-blinders” on, but because I think the ultimate answer to your question will not have almost anything to do with theories or findings, and instead it will be a professional or (dare I say, but surely I do mean it) aesthetic decisions about what theories and models we will invite to populate our home disciplines. This will be something of a traditional “gate keeping” practice that nearly any discipline must encounter. Given the “migratory” (or predatory, depending on perspective) uses of ANT … perhaps its time for a few boundary policemen in IR to ask the hard question: now that they are in the gates, do we let them say and settle here?

I tend to cross post my longer comments on other blogs here. That much typing must deserve a post of its own! So here it is.

I think that kind of dialectical, agonistic discursive approach is a very valid one.  Take your line of argument as far as you can until someone stops you or until it breaks down!  It recognises that thought is a dialogical process and one where (polite) conflict can be productive.

I think that a kind of neo- or alter-humanism is possible from within ANT.  It simply has to take the form of: the more mediations, the more attachments the better (that's the ANT way).  What are the associations and assemblages that make us human?  Can we intensify them to make us even more human (note, not post-human but more human)?  The problem with classic humanism is the location of agency in the human body as if human beings were substances with essential properties.  It's an occult theory that always requires a 'context' to be appended to the individual body as if these things were somehow of different orders of reality.  Instant dualism, just add water.  The worst part of this bodily ontology is that we are locked in to our bodies, as if they are all we are, as if being born naked means we have to live naked.  If, on the contrary, humanity is the product of a broader network then that network can be extended.

I'm thinking of an essay of Latour's on 'qualculation' (what a horrible word!) where he says that e.g. in a supermarket the way that prices are laid out per unit and per weight, etc. turn the shopper into a calculating subject; the shopper 'downloads' that capacity through the network.  Likewise in extended cognition terms we can think of the expansion of calculative capacities that comes even from a simple abacus, for example.

What are the attachments that constitute human political subjectivity and how can they be extended, intensified?  I think part of answering that question might mean taking another look the word 'agency' itself.  If it really is as essential as the humanists say (and aren't we supposed to be ethnomethodologists and diplomats who 'respect our informants'?) then perhaps that's something that needs to be sacrificed, given up to the human inasmuch as it is taken to refer to those attachments that achieve a particular kind of agency, a particular kind of subjectivity instead of standing for all kinds of causal efficacy in general.  It is just a bit of terminology, after all, it is a replaceable part.  It's the spark plug of ANT - essential and yet replaceable.

As for the need for boundary policing, yes I think so.  I'd go so far as to say that ANT requires that kind of opposition.  After all, what produces translation?  A trial.  And if no one opposes ANT's adventurism with any force then there are no real trials and no translation of any significance.  In that sense ANT is an intrinsically agonistic, dialectical, dialogical form of discourse.  It needs to be told no.

I'm also thinking this issue through Latour's modes book that I'm about 2/3 of the way through.  That puts a whole other spin on things as it makes NET one mode among many (albeit a pivotal one).  The modes are pretty transformational for Latour's ANT but he still maintains the ontological policy of 'agency for all' so there's still a debate to be had on that, very much so.  Particularly as the politics mode is quite weak, I think (based on my reading so far at least).  Certainly weaker than some of the others.