File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0307, message 14


Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 21:44:26 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: [fyi] Interview with Manuel De Landa - part 1


Hi Jan, all

I found this very interesting (if somewhat limited as social theory, 
underpinned as his position is by 'a flat ontotolgy of individuals'). 
Thanks. Do you have the CTHEORY reference for it please?

"Roy Bhaskar wants it all to be about self-organized criticality (his 
sand piles with fractal avalanches)"

I love this. But is it De Landa's gloss on Bhaskar on contradiction, 
emergence, process, rhythmics etc, or does Bhaskar write in these terms 
specifically somewhere?

Re 'self-organized criticality' cf DPF on emergence, p. 49 "There is a 
quantum leap, or nodal line, of (one feels like saying) the materialized 
imagination - or even, with Hegel, reason - akin to that occurring in 
the s or t  transforms of the epistemological dialectic. This is matter 
as creative, as autopoietic."

Mervyn

In message <l03130300bb2cd65ac910-AT-[195.86.123.47]>, Jan Straathof 
<janstr-AT-chan.nl> writes
>Dear All,
>
>below an interview with the philosopher Manuel De Landa,
>although his realism seems influenced most by Deleuze's, he
>speaks quite favorably of Bhaskar too. It's kinda longish so
>i send it in three parts.
>
>enjoy,
>Jan
>
>-----------------
>1000 Years of War:
>CTHEORY Interview with Manuel De Landa
>
>Manuel de Landa in conversation with: Don Ihde, Casper Bruun Jensen, Jari Friis
>Jorgensen, Srikanth Mallavarapu, Eduardo Mendieta, John Mix, John Protevi, and
>Evan Selinger.
>
>
>Manuel De Landa, distinguished philosopher and principal figure in the "new
>materialism" that has been emerging as a result of interest in Deleuze and
>Guattari, currently teaches at Columbia University. Because his research into
>"morphogenesis" -- the production of stable structures out of material flows --
>extends into the domains of architecture, biology, economics, history, geology,
>linguistics, physics, and technology, his outlook has been of great interest to
>theorists across the disciplines. His latest book on Deleuze's realist
>ontology, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), comes in the wake of
>best-sellers: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), where De Landa
>assumes the persona of the "robot historian" to bring the natural and social
>sciences into dialogue vis-a-vis using insights found in nonlinear dynamics
>to analyze the role of information technology in military history, and A
>Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (1997), where he carves out a space for
>geological, organic, and linguistic materials to "have their say" in narrating
>the different ways that a single matter-energy undergoes phase transitions of
>various kinds, resulting in the production of the semi-stable structures that
>are constitutive of the natural and social worlds. When Evan Selinger gathered
>together the participants for the following interview, his initial intention
>was to create an interdisciplinary dialogue about the latest book. In light of
>current world events -- which have brought about a renewed fascination with De
>Landa's thoughts on warfare -- and in light of the different participant
>interests, an unintended outcome came about. A synoptic and fruitful
>conversation occurred that traverses aspects of De Landa's oeuvre.
>
>
>
>
>I. War, Markets & Models
>CTHEORY (Mendieta): In these times of "a war against terrorism," and preparing
>against "bioterrorism" and "germ warfare," do you not find it interesting,
>telling, and ironic in a dark and cynical way that it is the Western,
>Industrialized nations that are waging a form of biological terrorism,
>sanctioned and masked by legal regulations imposed by the WTO and its legal
>codes, like Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Would you agree that the
>imposition of GMO -- genetically modified organism -- through WTO, NAFTA, and
>IMF, on the so-called developing world is a form of "legalized biotech and
>biological" terrorism? And then, as a corollary, what are the prospects for
>global justice and equity in light precisely of the yawing gap between
>developed and underdeveloped nations that is further deepened by the
>asymmetrical access to technologies like genetic engineering and genomic
>mapping?
>
>Manuel De Landa: Though I understand what you are getting at I do not think it
>is very useful to use this label (biological terrorism) for this phenomenon.
>The point, however, is well taken. The way in which corporations are
>encroaching around the most sensitive points of the food chain is dangerous:
>they direct the evolution of new crops from the processing end, disregarding
>nutritional properties if they conflict with industrial ones; the same
>corporations which own oil (and hence fertilizers and herbicides) also own seed
>companies and other key inputs to farming; and those same corporations are now
>transferring genes from one species to another in perverse ways (genes for
>herbicide resistance transferred from weeds to crops). When one couples these
>kind of facts with the old ones about the link between colonialism and the
>conversion of many world areas into food supply zones for Europe (from the
>creation of sugar plantations to the taking over of the photosynthetically most
>active areas of the world by Europe's ex-colonies) we can realize that this
>state of affairs does have consequences for equity and justice. The key point
>is not to oversimplify: the Green Revolution, for example, failed not because
>of the biological aspect, but because of the economic one: the very real
>biological benefits (plants bred to have more edible biomass) could only be
>realized under economies of scale and these have many hidden costs (power
>concentration, deskilling of workforce) which can offset the purely technical
>benefits.
>
>The question of Intellectual Property rights is also complex. We should be very
>careful how we deal with this, particularly considering many of us bring old
>moral clichs ("private property is theft") into the debate without being
>aware of it. I believe this issue needs to be handled case by case (to solve
>the inherent conflict between lack of accessibility and incentive to create).
>For example, I am completely opposed to the patenting of genes but not of gene
>products, like proteins.
>
>CTHEORY (Mix): In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines you discuss the German
>Blitzkrieg of WWII in relation to a synergistic tactic that unified air and
>ground troops. If we return to this time period, it becomes noteworthy to
>highlight that the synergy fell apart when the machinery, specifically the
>ground forces (i.e. tanks, jeeps, personnel transports, etc.) broke down and
>the soldiers manning them could not get them operational, and were forced to
>get mechanics to do the repairs, or else hope that the supply lines were kept
>open to bring in replacement vehicles. By contrast, many of the American G.I.s
>were "grease monkeys" and could easily repair their own vehicles. Since many of
>the components of the ground vehicles were interchangeable, they could scavenge
>usable pieces from damaged equipment, therein being able to fix problems on the
>spot and remain operationally mechanized. My question is: Because contemporary
>military technology is built on principles that the average G.I. is not
>familiar with (i.e. the compatibility between the standard engine and military
>ground vehicles no longer exists), do you think that the benefits of the war
>machine will be outstripped by the lack of serviceability that probably will
>arise in the field under combat conditions? Do you think that we should be
>training our soldiers differently or do you think that we should modify the
>technologies they use?
>
>De Landa: One of the themes of the War book was the tendency of military
>organizations to get "humans out of the loop." Throughout the book (and in my
>only live lecture to the military) I have very strongly criticized this, urging
>for the lowering of decision-making thresholds so that soldiers in the field
>with access to real time information have more power to make decisions than
>their superiors at the Pentagon. (This theme, of course, goes beyond the
>military to any kind of centralized decision-making situation, including
>economic planning.) The problem you raise is, I believe, related to this. If
>all technological decisions are made centrally without thinking of issues of
>maintenance in the field, and if there is no incentive for field soldiers to
>become "grease monkeys" or "hackers," the army that results is all the more
>brittle for that. Flexibility implies that knowledge and know-how are not
>monopolized by central planners but exist in a more decentralized form.
>
>CTHEORY (Protevi): War in the Age of Intelligent Machines came out in 1991,
>just at the time of Operation Desert Storm. Do you see any noteworthy
>developments in the integration of information technology and artificial
>intelligence into US security / military operations from the time of Desert
>Storm, through Afghanistan and the Second Gulf War? I have two particular areas
>I would ask you to comment on: (1) developments in what you call the
>Panspectron in surveillance; and (2) the use of the robot drone plane to kill 6
>suspected al-Qaida members in Yemen: is this a decisive step forward in your
>history of the development of autonomous killer machines, or is it just more of
>the same, that is, AI as an adjunct, without true executive capabilities?
>Finally, do you see any utility to the claim (a variation on the old
>"technological imperative" idea) that, among many other factors in the Bush
>Administration, certain elements of the Pentagon support the war campaign as
>providing a testing ground for their new weapons systems?
>
>De Landa: I do not see the threshold I warned against (the emergence of
>predatory machines) as having been crossed yet. The drone plane was being
>remotely guided, wasn't it? At the level of surveillance I also fail to see any
>dramatic development other than a quantitative increase in computing power.
>What has changed is the direction that the migration of "intelligence" into
>weapons has taken, from the creation of very expensive smart bombs to the use
>of GPS-based cheap equipment that can be added to existing dumb bombs.
>
>I am not sure the Pentagon has a hidden agenda for testing their new weapons
>but I do think that it has been itching for a war against Iraq for years before
>9-11, in a similar way they were itching for one during the Cuban missile
>crisis in the 60's. It was tough for Kennedy to resist them then, and so Bush
>had very little chance to do it particularly because he has his own family
>scores to settle.
>
>CTHEORY (Mix): Medieval archers occupied the lowest rung of the military
>hierarchy. They were looked down upon and thought of as completely expendable,
>not only because the archers were mostly untrained peasants, but also in part
>because the equipment they used was quite ineffectual. At the level of military
>ethos, one could say that the archer lacked the romantic stature of the knight
>because their style of combat was predicated on spatial distance -- shooting
>from far away seemed cowardly, whereas face-to-face sword combat had an aura of
>honor to it. The situation changed for the English, however, due to the
>introduction of the long bow (a development that was materially dependent on
>the availability of the wood in the region, the yew trees). Years of training
>were invested in teaching the English archers to use this weapon with deadly
>effectiveness. Consequently, their stature increased, and for the first time,
>pride could be taken in being an archer. Today, some critics charge that using
>unmanned drones is cowardly because it involves striking at a distance. We can
>thus see the situation as somewhat analogous to the arrow let loose by the
>Medieval archer. My question is: Will the drones let loose by servicemen ever
>lose their stigma in the same way as the English archers did? Clearly, the
>drones like the English archers proved to be successful in battle. And yet, the
>image of the drone controlled by a serviceman does not evoke the same humanity
>as the embodied Englishman.
>
>De Landa: I agree that in military history questions of "honor" have always
>influenced decisions to adopt a particular weapon. And distance per se was not
>always the main reason: early rifles were not particularly liked due to their
>increased precision, and the practices this led to (the emergence of snipers)
>were seen as dishonorable. Yet, once Napoleon had changed the paradigm from
>battles of attrition to battles of annihilation harassing the enemy via snipers
>became quite acceptable. Even more problematic was the effect of the rifle and
>the conoidal bullet in changing traditional hierarchies as infantry could now
>defeat artillery, forcing the latter to hide behind defensive positions (a
>hiding which must have carried a bit of stigma at first but that went away
>fast). I think the use of drones will only be seen as problematic from the
>"honor" point of view for a very short time.
>
>CTHEORY (Mallavarapu): In your work you challenge anthropomorphic and
>anthropocentric versions of history. What implications does this have for
>politics in an increasingly militarized world? More specifically, is there a
>danger of the idea of self-organizing systems being used to justify and
>celebrate increasing militarization and the growth of so-called "free market"
>economies?
>
>De Landa: I'll begin with the latter. Theories of self-organization are in fact
>being used to explain what Adam Smith left unexplained: how the invisible hand
>is supposed to work. From a mere assumption of optimality at equilibrium we now
>have a better description of what markets do: they take advantage of
>decentralized dynamics to make use of local information (the information
>possessed by buyers and sellers). These markets are not optimizing since
>self-organizing dynamics may go through cycles of boom and bust. Only under the
>assumption of optimality and equilibrium can we say "the State should not
>interfere with the Market." The other assumption (of contingent
>self-organization) has plenty of room for governments to intervene. And more
>importantly, the local information version (due to Hayek and Simon) does not
>apply to large corporations, where strategic thinking (as modeled by game
>theory) is the key. So, far from justifying liberal assumptions the new view
>problematizes markets. (Let's also remember that enemies of markets, such as
>Marx, bought the equilibrium assumption completely: in his book Capital he can
>figure out the "socially necessary labor time," and hence calculate the rate of
>exploitation, only if profits are at equilibrium). Now, the new view of markets
>stresses their decentralization (hence corporations do not belong there), and
>this can hardly justify globalization which is mostly a result of corporations.
>And similarly for warfare, the danger begins when the people who do not go to
>war (the central planners) get to make the decisions. The soldiers who do the
>actual killing and dying are never as careless as that.
>
>CTHEORY (Selinger): On a number of occasions, we have discussed different
>aspects of computer modeling. In fact, you just brought up the topic of
>modeling in connection with war-games. I remain unclear on the following. To
>what extent should we use evidence from computer modeling in artificial
>societies to get us to rethink traditional notions about human behavior? For
>example, the standard metaphor that used is to think about mass violence is
>contagion; this is because the violence seems to spread so quickly from person
>to person and neighborhood to neighborhood. Yet, Joshua Epstein's simulation of
>artificial genocide suggests that the view that a collective mind (or some sort
>of infectious hysteria) underlies mass violence is illusory, perhaps even folk
>psychological. Specifically, his work suggests that the origin of genocide
>might be a series of individual decisions whereby people turn violent as a
>result of their responses to local conditions. Thoughts?
>
>De Landa: All models, by definition, simplify things. Contagion models can be
>very useful to study certain propagation effects, whether these are fads,
>fashions or ideas. Can they also be useful to study the propagation of affect?
>We can't tell in advance. What is important to see is that even if they turn
>out to be useless to study violence that does not affect their usefulness in
>other areas. Also, contagion models differ in the detail with which they
>portray agency, from completely mechanical models with no agency at all (a
>homogeneously socialized population) to models in which some form of virtual
>agent is included. But the key problem is that no one agrees what agency is:
>must it include some form of rational choice, and if so optimizing or
>satisfying rationality? Should all psychological effects be eliminated and only
>inter-subjective effects taken into account? How socialized and obedient should
>we assume agents to be, and should these qualities be modeled as homogeneously
>or heterogeneously distributed? Most of these issues have nothing to do with
>computers and will haunt any modeling effort however informal.
>
>CTHEORY (Selinger): You have often questioned what is at stake, socially,
>politically, and conceptually, when intellectuals engage in criticism. Simply
>put, you are all too aware of the ease by which putatively "Critical Theorists"
>are easily swayed by dogmatic convictions and too readily cognitively stymied
>by uncritical presuppositions. One might even say that in so far as you
>characterize yourself as a philosopher -- even if in the qualified sense of a
>"street philosopher" who lacks official credentials -- you believe that it is
>the duty of a philosopher to be critical. By contrast, some of the more
>avant-garde STS theorists seem -- albeit perhaps only polemically and
>rhetorically -- to eschew criticism. For example, Bruno Latour's latest
>writings center on his rejection of criticism as an outdated mode of thought
>that he associates with iconoclasm. He clearly sets the tone for this position
>in We Have Never Been Modern in connection with acknowledging his intellectual
>debt to Michel Serres, and he emphasizes it in Pandora's Hope, War of the
>Worlds, and Iconoclash. Succinctly put, Latour claims that for six reasons
>ideology critique (which he implicitly associates with normative critique as
>such) is a faulty and patronizing form of analysis: (1) ideology critique fails
>to accurately capture how, why, and when power is abused, (2) ideology critique
>distorts how authority comes to be overly esteemed, (3) ideology critique
>imputes "extravagant beliefs" onto whatever group is taken to be oppressed, (4)
>ideology critique leaves the group that is perceived to be oppressed without
>adequate grounds for liberation, (5) ideology critique distorts the relation
>between critic and the object of criticism, and (6) ideology critique
>accusatively "destroys a way of arguing." What do you think of this position?
>
>De Landa: First of all, I agree that the labels "critical" and "radical" have
>been overused. In the last analysis one should never apply these labels to
>oneself and wait for history to decide just how critical or radical one's work
>really was (once its consequences have been played out). Latour's problem seems
>to be more with the concept of "ideology" than that of "critique," and in that
>I completely agree: to reduce the effects of power to those of creating a false
>consciousness is wrong. But here is where the real problem is, since one cannot
>just critique the concept of "ideology," the real test of one's radicality is
>what one puts in its place. Or, to put it differently, how one
>re-conceptualizes power. And here one's ontological commitments make all the
>difference in the world. Can a realist like myself trust a theory of power
>proposed by a non-realist, for example? Can a realist ever believe in a theory
>of power developed, for example, by an ethnomethodologist, when one is aware
>that for that person everything is reducible to phenomenological experience?
>The same point applies to normativity: if one is a realist defending a
>particular stance will depend on developing a new ethics, not just critiquing
>old moralities. Here a Spinozian ethics of assemblages that may be mutually
>enhancing versus those that are degrading may be the solution, but developing
>this idea will also imply certain ontological commitments (to the
>mind-independent reality of food and poison, for example).
>
>CTHEORY (Jensen): A similar question could be raised in relation to your work
>on markets and anti-markets. In contrast to Empire by Hardt and Negri, which
>explicitly hopes to have a political impact, your position is much less
>straightforwardly normative. If, in a realist vein, you take your analysis to
>be descriptive, how then do you think people might act to reap the benefits of
>your description?
>
>De Landa: No, not at all. Remember first of all that a realist never settles
>for a mere description. It is explanation that is the key and the latter
>involves thinking about real mechanisms which may not be directly observable
>(or describable). The disagreement with Empire is over the mechanisms one
>postulates and the details of their workings. I do not accept the Marxist
>version of these mechanisms (neither those through which markets are supposed
>to operate nor those for the State) and believe the Marxist version leads to
>practical dead ends regardless of how ready to be used in social interventions
>the analysis seems to be. (To be blunt, any idea for social intervention based
>on Marxism will be a failure). I do take normative positions in my books (such
>that decentralization is more desirable than centralization for many reasons)
>but I also realize than in an ethics of nourishing versus degrading assemblages
>real-life experimentation (not a priori theorization) is the key. To use an
>obvious example from environmental ethics: a little phosphorous feeds the soil;
>too much poisons it. Where exactly the threshold is varies with type of soil so
>it cannot be known a priori. But the normative statement "do not poison the
>soil" is there nevertheless. Similarly for society: too much centralization
>poisons (by concentrating power and privilege; by allowing corruption; by
>taking away skills from routinized command-followers etc) but exactly how much
>is to be decided by social experiments, how else?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---




     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005