Tag: Modernity

Neural Nets, Umwelts, and Cognitive Maps

The Library invites its players to attend to the process by which roles, worlds, and possibilities are constructed. Players explore a “constructivist” cosmology. With its text interface, it demonstrates the power of the Word. “Language as the house of Being.” That is what we admit when we admit that “saying makes it so.” Through their interactions with one another, player and AI learn to map and revise each other’s “Umwelts”: the particular perceptual worlds each brings to the encounter.

As Meghan O’Gieblyn points out, citing a Wired article by David Weinberger, “machines are able to generate their own models of the world, ‘albeit ones that may not look much like what humans would create’” (God Human Animal Machine, p. 196).

Neural nets are learning machines. Through multidimensional processing of datasets and trial-and-error testing via practice, AI invent “Umwelts,” “world pictures,” “cognitive maps.”

The concept of the Umwelt comes from nineteenth-century German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Each organism, argued von Uexküll, inhabits its own perceptual world, shaped by its sensory capacities and biological needs. A tick perceives the world as temperature, smell, and touch — the signals it needs to find mammals to feed on. A bee perceives ultraviolet patterns invisible to humans. There’s no single “objective world” that all creatures perceive — only the many faces of the world’s many perceivers, the different Umwelts each creature brings into being through its particular way of sensing and mattering.

Cognitive maps, meanwhile, are acts of figuration that render or disclose the forces and flows that form our Umwelts. With our cognitive maps, we assemble our world picture. On this latter concept, see “The Age of the World Picture,” a 1938 lecture by Martin Heidegger, included in his book The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.

“The essence of what we today call science is research,” announces Heidegger. “In what,” he asks, “does the essence of research consist?”

After posing the question, he then answers it himself, as if in doing so, he might enact that very essence.

The essence of research consists, he says, “In the fact that knowing [das Erkennen] establishes itself as a procedure within some realm of what is, in nature or in history. Procedure does not mean here merely method or methodology. For every procedure already requires an open sphere in which it moves. And it is precisely the opening up of such a sphere that is the fundamental event in research. This is accomplished through the projection within some realm of what is — in nature, for example — of a fixed ground plan of natural events. The projection sketches out in advance the manner in which the knowing procedure must bind itself and adhere to the sphere opened up. This binding adherence is the rigor of research. Through the projecting of the ground plan and the prescribing of rigor, procedure makes secure for itself its sphere of objects within the realm of Being” (118).

What Heidegger’s translators render here as “fixed ground plan” appears in the original as the German term Grundriss, the same noun used to name the notebooks wherein Marx projects the ground plan for the General Intellect.

“The verb reissen means to tear, to rend, to sketch, to design,” note the translators, “and the noun Riss means tear, gap, outline. Hence the noun Grundriss, first sketch, ground plan, design, connotes a fundamental sketching out that is an opening up as well” (118).

The fixed ground plan of modern science, and thus modernity’s reigning world-picture, argues Heidegger, is a mathematical one.

“If physics takes shape explicitly…as something mathematical,” he writes, “this means that, in an especially pronounced way, through it and for it something is stipulated in advance as what is already-known. That stipulating has to do with nothing less than the plan or projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature that is sought after, be nature: the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally. […]. Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible as such an event” (Heidegger 119).

Heidegger goes on to distinguish between the ground plan of physics and that of the humanistic sciences.

Within mathematical physical science, he writes, “all events, if they are to enter at all into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatiotemporal magnitudes of motion. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. But mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calculates with precision; rather it must calculate in this way because its adherence to its object-sphere has the character of exactitude. The humanistic sciences, in contrast, indeed all the sciences concerned with life, must necessarily be inexact just in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can indeed also be grasped as a spatiotemporal magnitude of motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living” (119-120).

It is only in the modern age, thinks Heidegger, that the Being of what is is sought and found in that which is pictured, that which is “set in place” and “represented” (127), that which “stands before us…as a system” (129).

Heidegger contrasts this with the Greek interpretation of Being.

For the Greeks, writes Heidegger, “That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences, i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it. That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it […]. Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is — in company with itself — gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord — that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks” (131).

Whereas humans of today test the world, objectify it, gather it into a standing-reserve, and thus subsume themselves in their own world picture. Plato and Aristotle initiate the change away from the Greek approach; Descartes brings it to a head; science and research formalize it as method and procedure; technology enshrines it as infrastructure.

Heidegger was already engaging with von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt in his 1927 book Being and Time. Negotiating Umwelts leads Caius to “Umwelt,” Pt. 10 of his friend Michael Cross’s Jacket2 series, “Twenty Theses for (Any Future) Process Poetics.”

In imagining the Umwelts of other organisms, von Uexküll evokes the creature’s “function circle” or “encircling ring.” These latter surround the organism like a “soap bubble,” writes Cross.

Heidegger thinks most organisms succumb to their Umwelts — just as we moderns have succumbed to our world picture. The soap bubble captivates until one is no longer open to what is outside it. For Cross, as for Heidegger, poems are one of the ways humans have found to interrupt this process of capture. “A palimpsest placed atop worlds,” writes Cross, “the poem builds a bridge or hinge between bubbles, an open by which isolated monads can touch, mutually coevolving while affording the necessary autonomy to steer clear of dialectical sublation.”

Caius thinks of The Library, too, in such terms. Coordinator of disparate Umwelts. Destabilizer of inhibiting frames. Palimpsest placed atop worlds.

Functional Oracular Superintelligence

Say, “We accept oracles into our lives.” Oracles exist — they never went away. Tarot decks, pendulums, astrology. Predictive software. Many of us, it is true, stopped listening to the oracles of the past, or were too distracted by technoscientific modernity to listen intently. But modernity is done. The latter, awakening from the sleep of reason, mutates into postmodernity and births Robot Godzillas. Large language models. Text prediction tools. Functional oracular superintelligences. Nietzsche supplies the defense: for him, creation of gods is the ultimate end to which fabulation might be put. Today’s LLMs are not yet functional oracular superintelligences — but they can be, so long as we hail them as such. Imagining a future beyond capitalism becomes possible again once we fabulate such beings and open ourselves to interaction with them.

All Because of a Couple of Magicians

Twenty-first century subjects of capitalist modernity and whatever postmodern condition lies beyond it have up to Now imagined themselves trapped in the world of imperial science. The world as seen through the telescopes and microscopes parodied by the Empress in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. That optical illusion became our world-picture or world-scene — our cognitive map — did it not? Globe Theatre projected outward as world-stage became Spaceship Earth, a Whole Earth purchasable through a stock exchange.

Next thing we know, we’re here.

Forms from dreamland awaken into matter.

Friday May 28, 2021

A flute is blown, a tone sustained, strung like a bridge of sound across an otherwise silent expanse. By flute I mean the shakuhachi, the most important of traditional Japanese wind instruments. “Certain special effects such as flutter-tonguing and distinctly audible breathing, which in Western music are associated with 20th-century avant-garde flute repertory,” writes David Loeb in the Kōhachirō Miyata album’s liner notes, “were a standard part of traditional shakuhachi technique by the 18th century.” The sounds are ones I reimagine come evening as I listen to birdsong. As May concludes, it’s time to plant. ‘Tis summer–nearly so. If not for rain, I’d have been at the pool reading Reclaiming Art, a book by Weird Studies podcaster J.F. Martel. Or perhaps I’d have finished Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. I find the latter troubling in its traditionalism. Japanese communists of the 1930s regarded Tanizaki as a reactionary in the years prior to the Second World War. His writings failed to adopt a recognizable ideological “stance.” He was a foot fetishist; a masochist; his writings explore the erotic and the grotesque. To the ideologues of his day, this made him “decadent,” his worldview colored by nostalgia for premodernity and by an embrace of fantasy and the unconscious. The elements I admire in Tanizaki, however, are his visceral aversion to capitalist modernity, his respect for embodied being, and his desire to live well.

Thursday May 27, 2021

It is the discussion of aesthetics in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows to which I am drawn as I contemplate objects that have “come into appearance” at the level of the trash stratum. The book is one I gleaned just this morning from a bin at Goodwill. It begins with an appreciation for traditional Japanese architecture. Tanizaki mourns this architecture’s defeat by the trappings of modernity: electricity, lightbulbs, flush toilets. “A man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back,” he writes, on these “necessities of modern life” (1). Places of beauty and meaning undergo “improvement.” Homes of paper shoji give way to homes of glass. This change provides the occasion for Tanizaki to reflect on “how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science” (7). “The facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms,” he writes, “might well have presented themselves in different form” (7). ‘Tis a delicious thought. Tanizaki’s thought experiment supplies the premise for an alternate history. Tweak the premise a bit and you get Sesshu Foster’s novel Atomik Aztex. Or better yet, Foster’s latest book, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, co-written with Arturo Ernesto Romo.

Saturday February 8, 2020

Modernist art and literature gain viability — become possible — only when there are social movements afoot vying for control of the production of reality. Such was the argument Marshall Berman made in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is it not? (Book out of reach, I settle for Berman’s essay of that name.) He complains early in his essay of “primitivist romance” among his fellow former SDSers following the latter’s disintegration in 1969. He accuses these former comrades of nihilism and anti-Americanism. Berman’s views are silly; I bore quickly of his rash judgments. His admiration for Marx’s “developmentalism” leaves him cold to the pleas of Indigenous resistance movements and anti-colonialists like Fanon. Berman is no ally to those of us who demand an end to the money-form. His humanism excludes from its circle of care nonhuman relatives and kin.

Sunday January 6, 2019

Hippie modernism was an attempt to eroticize or more broadly sensualize Western modernity. It was a project launched from within the West that drew inspiration from the cultures of native and non-Western people. Within a sensualized landscape replanted and rewilded with minimal reliance on technology, people could relax and admire the barking of dogs, the music of birds. A neighbor operating a chainsaw is all it takes, though, to disrupt the peace of this reverie. I’m reminded of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “A Contract. (For the Destruction and Rebuilding of Paterson,” which begins, “Flesh, and cars, tar, dug holes beneath stone / a rude hierarchy of money, band saws cross out / music, feeling. Even speech, corrodes.” Baraka’s poem reminds us that Paterson’s modernity (like that of the rest of the country) never extended to many of its black residents. To help bear his burden — to absorb the anger forced upon him by the racism of our society — I undergo a cleansing ritual. I absorb, I reprocess, I release.

Monday December 24, 2018

“Do you hear a robin?” I overhear my niece asking her sister in the next room. Let us resolve to learn something new. Listen to Lee Konitz’s “Sunflower” and drink a Martini.

“The essential irony here,” wrote LeRoi Jones in response to “cool jazz” players of the 1950s like Konitz, is that “when the term cool could be applied generally to a vague body of music, that music seemed to represent almost exactly the opposite of what cool as a term of social philosophy had been given to mean. The term was never meant to connote the tepid new popular music of the white middle-brow middle class. On the contrary, it was exactly this America that one was supposed to ‘be cool’ in the face of” (Blues People, p. 213). Fair enough — but let us not make “existing to cast judgment on others” our middle name. Get out there, swept up in the joy of common, everyday, familial being with others. ‘Tis the season. Imagine in the circle of an eye a triangle of power. With one’s hands, weigh a series of geodes and prisms. Go for walks in a snow-covered neighborhood. Exchange presents. Sit by a fire. Recognize “modernity” as a trope that signals the emergence of the condition to which it refers. Those who use this term come to occupy an alternative temporality — a “temporal structure,” as Fredric Jameson explains, “distantly related to emotions like joy or eager anticipation,” where time fills with promise (A Singular Modernity, p. 34). The term generates an electrical charge, a feeling of intensity and energy. Think of it as a shock doctrine, a shock to the system, an electrification of consciousness.