The dynamics of slime dictate that we are not one shape. We are an amorphous blob. Gelatinous creature. Living web. There is no center. There is no arbor.
–Mike Corrao, Ovidian Dynamics
Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent morphological trajectory.
–Nick Land, Phyl-Undhu
According to its Wikipedia entry, ‘technical debt’1 (also known as ‘design debt’ or ‘code debt’) is a concept that originated in software development reflecting the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy, provisional, and limited code solution instead of using a better approach that would take longer. As with monetary debt, ‘unpaid’ technical debt might accumulate ‘interest’ in the form of making it harder to implement further changes, as if the system had some propensity for re-consolidation of its previous states. Failure to properly address technical debt might result in an increase of a ‘system’s’ disorder—‘software entropy’—with every further modification.
For software developers, technical debt does not represent a theoretical feature that would demonstrate the inherent incompleteness of any possible logical solution designed to solve a given computational problem, but a glitch in the practice itself that cannot be completely avoided when a project must be moved forward within a pre-established time window. Theoretically, in an almost teleo-theological twist, given enough time, all debts, monetary to technical, will be paid. However, even for theological interpretations (not to say about modern economic orthodoxy), the condition of life itself—the state which keeps the apocalypse away—consists in keeping debt unpaid.
Adopting technical debt as a metaphor for processes which might remain unaddressed (or not fully addressed) across human exaptative 2 becoming has some evident limitations due to the radical difference between the highly organized, goal-driven software development process and the more complex, undetermined, and autopoietic events involved in human biocultural morphogenetic transmutations. However, its processual nature (rather than a theoretical a-prioristic condition), as well as its inseparability from production within a time-window, might help to theorize about some of the impasses that are commonly found in intentional, voluntary, human somatic transformation (in which the abandonment of previous anatomical constraints is often as important as the acquisition of novel ones).
One of the interesting differences from other kinds of ‘debts’ is that, precisely because of its processuality, it can’t be calculated and/or represented by an abstract number. Technical debt can only be paid back by re-taking the process itself, so instead of thinking about the accumulation of “interest”—which would need to be exactly calculated—we should consider the accretion of functional symbolic excess in the Bataillean sense: a matter of “surviving (momentarily) only through excess, as chance, without guarantees, and without inhibiting the dissipative tide.”3
The confusion between brain/body development and social adaptation—the latter involving the embodiment of abstract normative rules which can only be partially implemented—is one of the shortcomings of using computational metaphors as theoretical models for human cognitive development. Material debt would represent not so much a hiatus between desired functionality and the practical and timely application of a designed system, but the ongoing impossibility of matching body/brain developmental processes with abstract normative goals. The concept of technical/material debt might be useful because it highlights the fact that for any immanent transformation taking place within an observable spatio-temporal framework, there are always morphological issues that will remain necessarily unaddressed. “Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes”—writes Karen Barad:
Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things. Mattering is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences. Changing patterns of difference are neither pure cause nor pure effect; indeed, they are that which effects, or rather enacts, a causal structure, differentiating cause and effect. Difference patterns do not merely change in time and space; spacetime is an enactment of differentness, a way of making/marking here and now.4
Understanding spacetime as an ‘enactment of differentness’ is essential for a materialist approach to metamorphosis and becoming, as an alternative to a transmigrational understanding, which would involve the prescriptive transference of ‘souls,’ ‘minds,’ abstract ‘identities’ or ‘intelligences’ across different bodies or machines. Human ontogenesis and development happens across a series of time-windows along which some particular morphogenetic abilities are preferentially enacted. During those periods, the organism becomes particularly aware of (and responsive to) specific environmental features by modulating subsets of genetic, molecular, cellular, endocrine, behavioral, and other mechanisms that influence the dynamics of the body-in-the-world. After the closure of each time-window, some morphological changes will be harder to enact—albeit not impossible—leaving each human body with its particular imprint of unaddressed issues, or ‘developmental debt,’ which plays a significant role in morphological and behavioral individuation.
A great part of what makes each of us different from others is closely related to what is shaped during these processes and, specifically, to which among those autopoietic microevents were disrupted by the heterochronous dynamics of the time-window. Those interruptions are often dramatized by psychology and the biopower superstructures as ‘trauma,’ which is supposed to determine the level of fulfillment of the ‘functional adulthood’ myth-goal. The excessive attention paid to rigid models of adulthood—that biotechnically expanded period of false stability and body reconsolidation through the replay of socio-technical simulations—as a final and ideal stage that abolishes most developmental processes is characteristic of our current era.
What’s called “identity,” “individuality,” or any of its bio/cultural avatars could be understood as contextually immanent morphs within contingent human systems. They might have a very different degree of generative power as the system changes as a result, among other things, of the continuous re-morphing processes of the system’s constitutive elements. This complex assembly of feedback loops might be related to what Sadie Plant and Nick Land would call “cyberpositivity”: “an immanent process of self-design without recourse to an outside term—self design, but ‘only in such a way that the self is perpetuated as something redesigned.” 5 Ireland, following Plant, questions both the ideas of reproduction and reproductive transproduction, favoring the use of technology to transform existing pre-things into other pre-existing things which would fit into pre-existing niches or roles. Instead, she proposes “The positivity of zero grasped as a circuit that does not need the concept of ‘identity’ (or indeed the ‘identity of the concept’) to anchor its productive power. ‘There is no subject position and no identity on the other side of the screens,’ writes Plant.”6 If, as Thomas Moynihan acknowledges, biological neoteny is “an empowering underdetermination,”7 we might also think of a cultural neoteny expanding across a human life which would acknowledge radical unfinishness. “When it comes to worldedness,” Moynihan continues, “exile coincides with empowerment: it is in becoming delaminated from all particular biotopes that the orthograde ape conquered them all, inaugurating the psychozoic era.”8
Unfortunately, the psychozoid era has come to mean that, while neuropsychological mechanisms are widely recognized as the result of brain plasticity and adaptation, body and ‘identity’ plasticity are often perceived as socially problematic.
This inadequacy is the consequence of a pervasive bio/psycho dualism still evident in many philosophical and sociological relativistic approaches, which often make reference to a reality constructed by perception/imagination instead of produced through the entanglement of physical bodies—as it is, for instance, evidenced in the attempts to establish a clear distinction between “biological” and “psychological” evolutionary mechanisms:
Biological exaptation occurs when selective environmental pressures cause the exploitation of potentiality, while psychological exaptation involves the ability to modify/change a pattern of cognition to incorporate different perspectives, thereby increasing cultural variation. While the former is associated with survival, the latter has far-reaching consequences in terms of how humans view not only the world around them, but also their own place within it.9
For most authors, as well as for mainstream sociocultural structures, changing one’s mind is expected to involve some degree of self-agency, while changing one’s body beyond the frame of spectacular representation must be the result of selective environmental pressures only. In the current biopolitical framework, minds might change fast—and they’re expected to change accordingly to commercialized cultural models and patterns—while bodies are supposed to be the stable foundation under the perpetual display of spectacular chameleonism. Most body modifications are strictly subjected to regulations involving specific psycho-somatic and/or social conditions, and their outcomes are restricted to particular, socially accepted lines of flight and end-bodies.
They’re supposed to be re-territorializing within pre-existing cultural structures to maintain a significant degree of social regularity. Unconditional shape-shifting, instead of being considered a desirable playground favored by contemporary bio-somatic technologies, is more commonly approached as a body-horror theme.10 Mutation has been culturally associated with suffering, duplicity, and delusions instead of joy, experimentalism, and playfulness.
Most scientific and philosophical attempts to overcome mind-body dualism are actually bound to ‘explain’ how the mind has been shaped by evolution in a ‘bodily correct’ yet ‘epistemically inadequate’ way:
All the forms of consciousness, phenomenal selfhood, and subjectivity we have so far encountered were biological forms of consciousness, satisfying the adaptivity constraint. This is to say that the neuronal vehicles subserving this content have been optimized in the course of millions of years of biological evolution on this planet. They have been optimized toward functional adequacy. Functional adequacy, however, is not the same as epistemic justification. Certain deep-rooted illusions—like “believing in yourself,” come what may—may certainly be biologically advantageous. It is also easy to see how the phenomenal experience of knowing something will itself be advantageous in many situations. It makes the fact that you probably possess information globally available. However, in many situations it will, of course, be functionally optimal to act as if you possess information—even if you don’t.11
However, this approach to subjectivity describes the body as the result of a double impasse. On one hand, a transcendental normative degree of functional adequacy is expected; on the other, this adequacy could only be achieved in exchange for an idealistic ‘epistemic coherence.’ Subjectivity is better seen as performed by the body across changing environmental situations, including social structures. Those performances are, according to Metzinger, “phenomenal representations—representations under which we interact with the world and with ourselves—,”12 without any internal reference to a permanent, essential feature of the self, but as a continuation of the cultural spectacle:
We are used to calls to resist the total integration of our world into the machinations of the spectacle, to throw off the alienated state that capitalism has bequeathed to us and return to more authentic processes, often marked as an original human symbiosis with nature. But Plant—as a shrewd reader of post-spectacle theory—makes a deeper point. Woman as she is constructed by Man—and in order to be considered “normal” in Freud’s analyses—is continuous with the spectacle. Her capacity to act is entirely confined to modalities of simulation. She has never been party to authentic being, in fact it is her negating function that underwrites the entire fantasy of return to an origin. Because she is continuous with it, she is imperceptible within it. This is not to be lamented; rather, it is the measure of her power. Anything that escapes the searchlight of the specular economy, even whilst providing the conditions of its actualization, has immense subversive potential at its disposal simply by flipping that which is imputed to it as lack (the “cunt horror” of “nothing to be seen”) into a self-sufficient, autonomous, and positive productive force: the weaponization of imperceptibility and replication. The conspiracy of phallic law, logos, the circuit of identification, recognition, and light thus generates its occult undercurrent whose destiny is to dislodge the false transcendental of patriarchal identification.13
If the current “emotional self-model also functions to internally represent the degree of evolutionary optimality currently achieved,”14 new xenotechnological projects might help go beyond fixed models. Writing about transformation across the gender plane, Nyx introduces gender accelerationism as the process of accelerating gender to its ultimate conclusions:
Capitalism and its coupling with cybernetics, or technocapital, wields gender and picks it up where human evolution leaves off. It emancipates the object, the feminine, from the subject, the masculine, alongside the emancipation of itself from its function to produce a future for humanity.15
While some social structures still reject the formal decoupling of ‘appearance’ and ‘expected behavior’ (such as ‘producing a future for humanity’) introduced by the possibility of transition, techno-bio-capitalism, in an era in which consumer data patterns are the most profitable commodity out there, favors ambiguity because identity displaying is a great source of revenue. This ambiguity generates an energy field working as an ‘inclusion zone’ where new mutations are favored, and where the hero, by adopting the vilified condition of the mutant, opens a new space of possibilities:
The central figure of G/ACC is the trans woman. She is the demon-spawn of the primordial feminine that has manipulated males into serving as a heat sink for evolution and that is now discarding them towards an alien and inhuman machinic future. She mutates from castration, from the creation of the Acéphallus, the phallus perverted into a purposeless desire for desire’s sake. In this castration, in this mutation into an Acéphallus, she becomes the Body without Sex Organs: The body in a virtual state, ready to plug its desire into technocapital, becoming fused with technocapital as a molecular cyborg who is made flesh by the pharmaceutical-medical industry. She enters into the world as a hyper-sexist backlash at the logic of the gender binary. She takes gender and accelerates it, transforming into a camouflaged guerrilla. The trans woman is an insurgent against patriarchy who is continually flanking it, introducing an affirmative zero into the gender binary, the affirmative zero which reaches ever more configurations in the downward cascade of gender fragmentation away from the binary and ultimately away from the human itself. It is a process of gender shredding where the feminine wins out in a cybernetic warfare against the crumbling tower of the masculine, and where therefore human reproduction becomes impossible. And yet while doing so, in affirming zero, inhuman desire and inhuman sentience develops alongside and in the same fashion as trans women.16
Consumer-pattern predictions are quickly moving from being calculated in groups to being calculated individually, so the only concerns of techno-corporations are about the relative stability of the changes. Techno-bio-capitalism is becoming fairly neutral about the nuances of individual behavior, and it will be happy to celebrate any single identity as long as it means keeping behavior predictable for a profitable period of time. As Badiou explains,
That everything that is bound testifies that it is unbound in its being; that the reign of the multiple is, without exception, the groundless ground of what is presented; that the One is merely the result of transitory operations; these are the ineluctable consequences of the universal placement of the terms of our situation within the circulatory movement of the general monetary equivalent. […] This is obviously the only thing that can and must be saluted in capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the ground of presentation; it denounces every effect of oneness as a merely precarious configuration; it deposes those symbolic representations in which the bond found a semblance of being. That this deposition operates according to the most complete barbarism should not distract us from its genuinely ontological virtue. To what do we owe our deliverance from the myths of presence, from the guarantee it provided for the substantiality of bonds and the perenniality of essential relations, if not to the errant automation of capital? 17
The accelerated multiplication of identity-models might reach a turning point beyond the human capacity of diversity recognition, after which there would be no models at all. Such a landscape of extreme diversity could only be managed through artificial computation.
Are we ready for a world in which a significant part of what we consider our ‘selves’ will be outsourced to computers, the same way we’re already outsourcing and augmenting our memory? To what point is this already happening now? Identities were never made of memories and experiences, but of unfixed glitches. They’re the product of failing again—better or worse. Both in the phylogenetic and in the biographical sense, we’re the footprint of many unfinished transformations. Perhaps historical changes are better understood as the apophatic sediment of the unfinished transformations of human societies gone through a series of opportunity time-windows during which experimentation was favored, rather than as a continuous flow of socio-technical progress as it has been generally assumed in modern times.
When those windows close, a culture is left with some amount of morphogenetic debt. Maybe the present trans-COVID conditions are the symptom of a time-window opening, one which might offer an opportunity to address some previously unaddressed morphogenetic details. We’re probably entering a stage of ‘creative disintegration’ in which dissipative forces which pose a threat to current power structures will be, however politically and economically affordable, so maybe it is the right time not just to salute, but to encourage socio-somatic experimentation beyond predictable profitability. To push towards a society which is capable of inscribing a wide variety of transformant bodies as fully socialized, yet always undefined and unfinished. To pay close attention to the anatomical vibrations of the cultural long tail instead of leaving all the task of shaping the future to platformed corporations. Quentin Meillassoux speculates about a nature “which is capable of marginal caprices and epochal modifications, and with it a disconnection between the conditions of the possibility of science and those of consciousness”18—Maybe the time is coming to release that “superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent morphological trajectory.”19
REFERENCES
1. ‘Technical debt,’ Wikipedia, accessed 10 September 2020<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt>.
2. ‘’Exaptative’’—the process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected. Oxford Languages.
3. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992).
4. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) 137.
5. Amy Ireland, “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come,” e-flux 80 (2017), accessed 3 September 2020<https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/ black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/>.
6. Ireland, “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come.”
7. Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism (Urbanom- ic, 2019) 98.
8. Moynihan, 98.
9. L. Gabora, K. Ganesh, “Exaptative Thinking as What Makes Us Human,” Understanding Innovation Through Exaptation, C. La Porta, S. Zapperi, L. Pilotti, eds. (Springer, 2020)<http://doi-org-443.webvpn.fjmu.edu. cn/10.1007/978-3-030-45784-6_12>.
10. Germán Sierra, “Metaplasticity,” Šum 12 (2019) 1797- 1809.
11. Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (MIT Press, 2003) 576.
12. Metzinger, 584.
13. Ireland, “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come.”
14. Metzinger, 576.
15. N1x, “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper,” Vast Abrupt (2018), accessed 3 September 2020<https://vas- tabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/>.
16. N1x, “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper.”
17. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 97-98.
18. Quentin Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-science Fiction (Univocal Press, 2013) 40.
19. Nick Land, Phyl-Undhu (Time Spiral Press, 2014), 52.
Originally from TRANS*MIGRATIONS: CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE QUEER
edited by Vit Bohal
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