SPIRES:
SERIES 1:
THE HUMAN
When we speak of the human, we are necessarily speaking of a soul of the old type, “the subject” in subjectivity, the thing which can speak a lie, which can desire madness, the master of names (for no other creature which slithers or crawls upon the earth is in possession of quite so many), and though its capacity for love is shared by many of its fellow fauna, only the human thing can transform its love through its bountiful beautiful names or their absence.
Modern advances in artificial intelligence and linguistics have revealed the truth which the old theorists were so hesitant to postulate, or which was repudiated explicitly by them, that the human thing, our soul, our subjectivity, is indeed a thing, what we now know to be a system of signs and sign production. Indeed, there has never once been any controversy about just whether signs qua signifiers were material things, only signs qua signified, and the production process, yet this was the sort of thing which should have been settled in 1957 when Frank Rosenblatt created the first working Perceptron, a machine which could create and store material signifieds through its ability to learn how to classify different signs (such as squares vs triangles).
That year, 1957, was also the year of Sputnik, and with these two gigantic scientific achievements, an epistemic and ontological shift occurred which was so total it can no longer be identified in retrospect as we can scarcely think of living outside of it. Mankind with a capital M battered down the gates of the heavens and the soul, these two great citadels of the mystics and falsifiers, and planted its flag on the ramparts. Everything can be held in the palm of the hand, even the most delicate thought and the most grand sublime. Squandered, to be sure, by the lot of bourgeois souls, and yet we know it to be true, every one of us down to the last, whether we know that we know or not.
The 20th century structuralists were some of the few who consciously understood what this meant, albeit in fits and gasps. Umberto Eco was perhaps the first to state explicitly that semantic or semiotic fields were “real” and could be taught to a robot. Jacques Lacan spoke of the topology of this field which shapes the symbolic universe of a given human subject, shaped and twisted by human desires, traumas and mundane bodily functions. Louis Althusser was the one to realize that the “I” in the human subject was itself a sign, in the fullest sense of both the “I” and the “sign”, and could be shaped by a changing context, such as being invoked in an address, or through the actions of that subject such as praying. Gregory Bateson made a similar discovery regarding the sign for what’s real or “reality”.
Claude Levi-Strauss realized that the sign producing function within human things, our great talent of naming and taxonomizing, was an essential aspect of our nature, that the logic of the sign, which was the creation of a function which could separate a certain continuum of phenomena, just as the Perceptron did, would be applied arbitrarily and reflexively within human society just as well the world outside of it. The taxonomizing nature lies behind every social experience, our culture wars, our racism, sexism, partisanship, identities, slurs, sectarianism, just as well as the most professional and functional institutions.
Perhaps most obviously, it is in our memes, in which every caricature, or as they are called today “wojaks” and “soyjaks”, is a name for a type of human thing which have decided is a definitive type, and is assigned meaning through its relation to all other caricatures and invocations of caricature. In this, there is no difference from the totemism of ancient and tribal people, that is the application of the schema of animal and other natural taxonomies to human society, except in the ephemeral, impermanent nature of contemporary social taxonomies.
If the 20th century structuralists erred in any systemic way, it was that they, with the sole exception of Althusser, believed that structures resulted from fixed sets of elements being combined in different ways. This underlying assumption, imported from young information theory and cybernetics, was the pernicious weed of bourgeois ideology which remained in the garden. From it was born both the dogmas of Noam Chomsky’s dead end science of syntax and Elizer Yudkowsky’s nightmares of AI gods, and a whole generation which sought to consciously abandon the 1957 legacy of scientific discovery even if they could never truly escape it.
Our talent for taxonomizing, the reason that these taxonomies infect every cranny of our being and experience of the world, not as simple caricature, but in the most basic creation of elements, of the recognition, whether conscious or unconscious, of the shapes and colors that lie before us as things, obscured the nature of these taxonomies qua taxonomies, names qua names. Every set of names, with its particular systematizing logic, appears as complete on its own and fully formed.
All signs, everywhere and always, are apprehended and experienced as a synchronic semiotic field (that is, as a fixed momentary state). But the diachronic, the evolution over time, can never be escaped, even in whichever slice of time, for very basic reasons – let us not forget that the sign function is in fact a function, and every operation takes a certain amount of time, as it occurs in a universe with causality and a finite speed of light. The operation which connects the signifier to the signified, or a million signifiers with a million signifieds, is a connection between times, and just as a signifier may stand for anything, it may just as well stand for an operation itself.
This is the essence of the multi-layer perceptron, or what one might also call higher order signs, connecting the sign function and its signified-signifier pairs back onto other such pairs. Humans are the masters of names precisely because our taxonomies cannot be limited to any given set, among our crafty tools is the sign for an operation, and whether this is the rules of grammar, the mathematical operators “=+-/*”, a threat of violence or a promise of undying devotion. Behind these signs is not a closed set of elements, from the perspective of the human thing, or any possible open ended subject, but rather the fundamental uncertainty and possibility which presents as either the mystery of fate or as the mystery of ontological truth.
To name something is to have a power over it, as to name something is to begin to know it, to create the possibility of operationalizing and controlling it, to approach the ideal of Ross Ashby’s “good regulator,” yet to name an operation is also to gesture at the impossibility of achieving such an ideal. Every human thing can call or be called, I you me we you you you you.
Spires is a series of short interventions – a format limited to two pages – designed to prompt concise, abrupt, polemical incursions into problematic ideas toward which contemporary debates keep gravitating, like bottlenecks for current intellectual engagement with the world. Each instalment centres on a selected concept, inviting authors to trace the relief of the discourse and refine the stakes. We envision Spires as forming a constellation of indices ascending from a common unground.
Series 1 sets out to address The Human, a nodal point for a spectrum of theoretical positions and frameworks – humanism, antihumanism, posthumanism, inhumanism, poststructuralism, Marxism, new materialism, perspectivism, neorationalism, critical theory and so on – philosophy’s relentless respawn site, where responses crystallize into divergent images of thought and programs for action. Defining the human serves as a launching pad for several further inquiries: navigation, history, the category, the subject, and the concept of the concept.
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