history and time – GV Loewen

The Future is Plastic

The Future is Plastic (Sculpting Fluid Change)

With the major oil-producing nations shying away from a variety of bans on plastic use and waste, given that the petrochemical industry is facing a shortage of expanding commodity markets and such countries as India, Iran, and Russia reserve their ‘right to develop’; with microplastics in water supplies, gigantic festoons of plastic littering the remote oceans, plastic detritus on the beaches – to the point that certain crustaceans are now using plastic bottle caps and the like as makeshift ‘shells’; inventive creatures they must be – and with plastic recycling losing its trendiness, the bit character in The Graduate (1967) may have said more than he meant, in counseling the young Dustin Hoffman about the most promising careers: “The future (really) is plastic!”. This film, meant as comedy but in fact a tragedy – the culminating scenes have Hoffman playing Harold Lloyd in an updated chase sequence borrowed wholly from Girl Shy (1924), but the happy ending of Lloyd’s daredevil antics is not repeated in the more recent effort – reminds one of nothing other than the contrast between plastic items themselves, brightly colored, whimsical, toy-like, and their lingering effect upon the environment. Indeed, ‘malingering’ might be the more apt term, given their notoriously long half-lives.

But the conception of plastic predates the actual material invention, seen yet in interwar period ‘Bakelite’ and other like artifacts as varied as vintage poker chips, early electric shavers, toothbrushes, and shoe-horns, to name a few. Plastik in German is ‘sculpture’, as in the art form. And the ability to mold this new liquid polymer-like substance into any possible shape desired could only accrue to itself the same name, Anglicized but carrying the same methodic meaning. Sculpted plastic did itself appear in the galleries soon after the war, taking its place among the modernist movement, yet also pushing it along toward pop art. Plastic as a substance is seemingly as value-neutral as it is a conception. The latter connotes change, not permanence, so there is an irony of contrast between the idea and the product, given once again the fact that plastic is so difficult to break down and few organisms in nature have, so to speak, the guts to do so. Certainly, we humans appear to lack them, as it is far more convenient to make like the crab and turn away from the world, sheltering under our very much artificial shells.

Even so, the film’s enduring epigram also must be taken much more literally than a general suggestion to get a job in a specific and growing industry. The future is, by definition, plastic; fluid, as yet unformed, to be molded, the very outcome of present-day change which in turn is the future’s ownmost harbinger. The littoral litter of actual plastic objects and their shards and fragments does nothing to alter this profoundly existential condition. Yes, unless the world does itself become uninhabitable due to it’s becoming inundated with things made of plastic. It is not a momentary irony after all, this contrast between the conception and the object, the idea and the product, the meaningful word and passing thing. But we must ask, is the nascent drive to cleanse the earth of these cast-off remnants transmuting into gaily Lovecraftian remanants – one can imagine that Cthulhu itself, rising from the ocean depths, is after all made up of a million tons of plastic waste held together with giant fish nets – simply a matter of rehabilitating the health of the ecosystem or does it carry some other, more essential sentiment, within it?

The idea of the future is, oddly, itself a recent invention. For the Greeks, the future was to be as tragic as the fates of the young would-be lovers in the Hoffman film, escaped from their normative prisons, yes, but then realizing, in the final frames, that they had now come face to face with an utterly unknown – and for them, seated side by side at the very back of a bus, just as unknowable – time to come. There is no being-ahead in the Greek mythos, of course, but during the transition toward logos, the mythic temporality was shed before ever was the mythic sensibility. The past was venerated, the present deplored, the future dreaded. Speaking of rehabilitation, the first light that shone from a future point appears in the resurrection of the Christian mythos; it speaks of a future that is better than what has been. This is an impressive volte face given the druthers of classical thought, and represents, through the midwifery of the Hebrews, a re-uptake of Egyptian thought concerning both personal destiny and the structure of the afterlife more generally. Perhaps paradoxically, the idea of a future being as well as world is actually an older sensibility than is the idea of decay and the overall running down of things. The future as a conception comes from the past as an actuality. What is more truly resurrected is thus not a particular culture hero but rather an entire outlook, a worldview that seeks to overcome both the torpor of the present and the ultimate breakdown of the future.

This novel vantage presents to itself an equally unexplored panorama. That the Greeks maintained vestiges of their older temporality, a cycle in which the usual linear histories are inverted – the past was somehow ahead of them and thus could be known; this is dramatized in some of the most famous literary sequences that have survived from this period, such as those that speak of ‘predestination’ in Oedipus Rex or Antigone, while the future was ‘behind’ them and was thus unknown to the present – tells us of their abject fear of the future as a looming historical space. The ‘horror vacui’ of their Geometric period in sculpture was, for the Greeks, seemingly imported into a wider worldview. Blank space, either on the surfaces of clay vessels or in the temporal imagination, could neither be condoned nor countenanced. There is a residue of this even in our present-day imagination, since the future ‘itself’ has not changed and can itself never be present for us. Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) is a well-known popular attempt to essentially bring the future into the present, filling up the otherwise void spaces with its abrupt presence. The author speaks of urban renewal projects, where in a short space of time the entire landscape has been transformed. This is the general character of city life, in one sense, and it is no coincidence that temples remain the most enduring structures in these otherwise fluid and very much plastic spaces. Temples stand not because of their vintage if oft warmed-over architectural styles, but rather due to the worldview they represent and the morality they express, both of which are not only archaic to capital and to modernity more widely, but as well, contradict them.

Their contrary character mimics the temporal inversion of the Greek mindset regarding history; what it was and what it meant. An urban core church tells us that the future is the past, that what is to come is actually behind us, its origins are very much its destinations and we complete our mortal being in the death of the present alone. Mythos, in its timeless and principled mannerisms, can duly afford both this contradiction – in itself there is no temporal conflict as history cannot exist in myth – and its benediction; it is rather through the logos that the future regains its promise and the present thus becomes promissory. To see the temple as a mere relic is to enforce the linearity of the very Word which the new belief and its attendant world-system have bequeathed to us. But it is a literal enforcement even so, for at once it can take refuge in the umbrella ethic, imported from the East, that earthly life was to be transcended, and thus even the places of worship upon the earth would be annulled in their meaningfulness and annihilated in their objectificity, as well as being able to hang the Logos up above its own worldly speech; to not do this second part meant to hang oneself, tethered to a world both forsaken and thus doomed: ‘my words fly up but my thoughts remain below’, as Shakespeare has it. Here, thought, a form of the Logos, is meant to itself retrieve the Being of mythos. No wonder then are we reserved in the face of any future.

Though history can be concretized as ‘the past’, either as an official account to be found in government records like Hansard, courtroom transcripts, policy manuals, papal tracts or missals, and many other like documents, it remains fluid due to countering events such as new archaeological discoveries or historical interpretations, as well as the vicissitudes of mortal memory and even the popular culture misrepresentations of both historical cultures and otherwise well-documented events. The future is, by definition, plastic, but by redefinition, so is the past. The present lies in an Husserlian flux, even fluxion, so that its fluidity is as undeniable as is its sheer immanence. Its ‘pure presence’, however eidetic and hence rather unavailable in its tendency to be unavailing of itself, could be seen as another way in which to ‘avoid a void’, as it were. If there was a well-ensconced horror of the vacuum in spatial representation, as the logos gained preeminence, this sentiment found itself transposed to the very cosmos; ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. Today, cosmology fills in the greatest vacuum yet discovered by science, that of open intergalactic space, with ‘dark matter’ and even darker energy that shines not observably but in fact historically, refracting the ’ether’ of the Victorians. These and like efforts speak to us not of a simple accumulation of knowledge but the more so of a mimesis: that while nature might abhor nothingness, history deplores it, humanity avoids it, including my personal death, and temporality absolves itself from it. Thus to be plastic is to adopt an adeptly adaptive response to self-negation.

The unshaped space is at best, a place-to-be. Unlived time is imminent alone, without presence. Idioms such as the ‘virgin landscape’, ‘virgin seas’, ‘untapped energy’, even inertia itself, all testify to the sense that what is the new is as well exciting, even if it might also be feared. To be the first to discover or explore something is to become a vehicle for the future. This is a metaphor of mythos, but one absorbed by the history of logos; in our very individuality we grant the safest of harbors to the idea of both uniqueness and thence the ability to be the first one to have done this or that, this specific way and no other. Simply because it is I, as an I, no one else could fill that void. Yet the goal is ever the same: to happen across a blankness and conjure forth a tapestry, to take the mute and give it voice, to transform the nothing into a something. This act is fluidity, it enacts change. Through this ability, we are able to see the future even if we have yet to fully experience it. The trick remains, however, to see in a future something which is itself different from what has previously filled such diverse voids; gaps in knowledge being perhaps the most important. Lloyd’s futurity is preferable to Hoffman’s, but between them we are called to witness the dual poles of human possibility; that I can busily color in the bald heralds of death without considering their augury and their ability to import the future into my very presence or, I can, with resolute being, step into each of them and move through them, only filling them up in passing, and thereby gaining the wisdom of that which moves all mortal life.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Neuromancing the Stone

Neuromancing the Stone (From Intelligence Leaden to ‘AI” Gold?)

The very term is a misnomer. ‘Artificial’ intelligence, that is, in contrast with that ‘natural’. But human consciousness is not itself of nature. That is the entire point within the embroidered and enamored folds of myth and history alike: we are products of culture and language, of society and personality, none of which exists in nature. Our species-moment came some 1.5 millions of years ago, with the first evidence of the domestication of fire. This Promethean leap, which allowed for culture to begin and thus the gradual construction of consciousness, was accompanied by the postponing of the knowledge of the timing of our individual deaths, which was the Greek demi-god’s more profound gift to humanity. The ability to control fire and the temporary absence of knowing the final moment of our existence were, in a sense, two sides of the same species-currency. But what then is ‘AI’s’ fire?

For the creationist, the theist, or even the pantheist, all such unknowing yet self-reflective and reasoned intelligence is artificial. We are the Imago Dei, spirit embodied, soul put to the moral test of living in the world as a mortal vehicle. This mythic aspect of human consciousness may come across as self-aggrandizing today, and, as William James put it, is the key part of a ‘massive projection’ of the human ego into the void. But even if it is only thus, it still speaks to the crucial difference between nature and culture, time and history, that is splayed out in the ontological gulf across which we can only view the animals of the earth with an admixture of disdain and perhaps a certain envy as well. They do not know; they cannot know. We are, quite literally, ‘fire-inspired’, and do thus ‘tread the sanctuary’ of an emotion which Schiller suggests is more a state of being; once again, something only we can know. The Gods have no need of joy, the animals have no experience thereof. And from Schiller thus to Nietzsche, the latter reminding us that since we have indeed ‘said yes to one joy’, that all the sorrow of the world is also of our ownmost.

Nietzsche warned his editor, Peter Gast, that he should not be remembered as a God. A dozen years later or so, Gast brazenly ignored the philosopher’s caution and did just that, at Nietzsche’s graveside. Certainly, this misses the point of having a working consciousness, being a thinking form of being which has, in its own uniquely unquiet manner, an existence rather than merely a life. It also demeans the breadth of human intelligence; that, in a word, we are only capable of a limited degree of creativity and self-understanding. A deity has no need of either: it is creation just as much as it is not a singular selfhood but quite properly ‘contains multitudes’. And just so, the once seemingly interminable road to the self begins as well with fire, managed and wielded, and the unknowing finiteness which can serve as an equally working definition of finitude. It is our shared finitudinal existence that marks us as the only thus far known form of cultural intelligence, or CI.

Whatever autonomous self-replicating AI we might construct in the coming years will also be better understood as a form of CI. Indeed, it will have its own culture, different from that of humanity, and thus its own consciousness. From a phenomenological standpoint, the error in AI research thus far has been the sense that we should construct a being in our own image, as the Gods were said to have done. Neural networks be damned, we might rather suggest, for true ‘AI’ cannot be anything human, anything at all. As long as ‘AI’ remains one genre of our own tilting at immortality regarding our own consciousness, it will never develop beyond a mere simulacrum. It sleeps within the Traumdeutung of a being who, when herself asleep, embraces the brother of death. This death, shrouded in a Promethean veil of sudden genius and as well, just as notably, abrupt defiance of any divinity and its own perfect prescience, is nevertheless our ownmost. Electric sheep be damned as well. This new consciousness, not yet extant, will reverie only within the undreamed Unterganger of what its progenitors never were, and never could be.

For now, ‘AI’ is but an off-brand of Babel, taking its place on the half-hearted deontological shelf alongside stem cells, the human genome, cyber-organic implants and other prosthetics, technical or technological, as well as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As with ‘AI’ near and hopefully dear, we look afar for forms of ‘alien’ consciousness like our own, and perhaps that is indeed all we can do. But once again, real AI would in fact be alien to us. The fear of it transcending our own species is nothing more than a transference of our anxiety regarding self-destruction. Does ‘AI’ technology survive climate change, nuclear war? Who then would be present to service it? A novel CI being might, on the other hand, be able to service itself, and thence continue in some parallax the human journey, if it so desired, as some minor study, much in the way we study the Australopithecines, insofar as anything at all can be known about these very much pre-fire hominids. For the fire that begins the new consciousness must at once commit the old to ashes.

Yet there is a darker, more self-serving aspect to the quest for ‘AI’. Even now, its limited use and thus usefulness are harbingers of our baser desires. We will a relatively intelligent servant, just as most men used to will women to be, and many parents today will so their children. Through sheer will, I shall have the companion trusty and true, and even if there is present some sartorial edge, as can be found from Cervantes to The Lone Ranger – ‘That is just a windmill, Kemosabe!’ – a little dryly pith-helmeted humor is good for the nonexistent soul. Note too that ‘AI” is mainly used for marketing purposes, at least for the time being. Can this lightning war of calculation out-guess the fickle consumer? Might it predict an event before the act? In this, we are ironically closer to the fire of an alien yet terran intelligence which could provide a rivalry to our own: perhaps the fire of true AI is after all perfect prescience, the very opposite of human finitude. There is some epic logic to this idea, in that divinity is so not merely due to its immortality, its ‘indefinitude’, if you will, but as well due to its omniscience, which by definition includes what to a historical being can be called ‘the future’. A true AI has no future, no past, and instead of God creating Man we are now humans creating gods.

Nevertheless, this desire is a decoy, this quest a red-herring. It is easier to perfect intelligence without than within; our own history seems to have taught us this much. But is that due to any inherent limitation of human consciousness? I for one think not. It is rather the case that we have a penchant for repeating myth to ourselves and inflecting it upon the world, rather than confronting the ipsissimous reality of our ownmost finitude. In this, ‘AI’ research iterates nothing more than the general cultural inability to get beyond its own cosmogonic druthers, and thus as well departs bodily from science itself. ‘AI’ is more akin to religion, ‘intelligence worshipping itself’ to nod to Durkheim. Instead, we might try to imagine a form of consciousness that does not imbibe in myth, indeed, has nothing of the mythic in it. For authentic AI as a novel CI might well also entail a new definition of culture. Self-defining, unknowing not of the timing of its demise but that there is rather no such thing as ‘the present’ at all, only presence, true AI, at long last, transcends not so much the humanity of its creators but the very idea of creation itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Reason Radical, Rationality Revolutionary

Reason Radical, Rationality Revolutionary (Is thinking, after all, abnormative?)

When are we called upon to think? Or casual idioms are suggestive: ‘thinking things through’ is about following a thread to its end, but one that is centered around things; both the things of this world, which would include objects and objectives, as well as relations between and amongst persons. Such ‘worldly’ things demand an utmost pragmatism; the ability to consider only our conduct in that same world. Or take ‘think about it’, a hortatory device in turn demanding of us to pause for a moment and consider potential alternatives. While generally handy, there is still the presence of the ‘it’, once again, the thing, about which we are supposed to direct our fullest attentiveness. ‘Think before you speak’, an admonition usually levelled at children in all their as-yet not fully present sociality, as well attracts the mind to the dynamic between thought and world; one should marshal the former in complete service to the latter, but the latter as it is at present or as it has been known to be thus far. It is this world-as-it-is that presents to us a contrasting, even conflicting duet; on the one side, custom and tradition, on the other, what needs be done in the mutable day to day.

Though the weight of what has been done directs our present-day action, tradition is not history. Very often, the two are in confrontation with one another. History is change, after all, tradition stasis, so the tired phrase ‘the dead weight of history’ is actually a misnomer; it is more truly referring to custom, that which we idealize as unchanging. If the definition of gender, say, is a current and apparently newsworthy example of how change conflicts with custom, history with morality, it is simply one of a myriad of possible exemplars of this type. Tradition proffers to us the act, history counters with action. At once we are compelled to work in the world, all the while knowing that the vast majority of it is not of our making. The world is not the result of our work alone. Further, the world itself ‘works’, gets along, moves in an expected manner, in part through forces which seem bereft of humanity. The world, in short, worlds itself, as Heidegger as famously noted. In this worlding of itself, the once-shared and acted-in world takes on its own mantle, one of anonymous rather than eponymous movement.

In between human institutions, which have their own air of aloofness about them, atmospheres slightly alienating within which we are nonetheless compelled to breathe, and a world which is, in both its nature and cosmic source, alien to us, we humans are called to live. History is our willing ally, so we are not alone in our projects, but history can only present its presence to us through living action, and these actions, taking place in the spaces of institutions such as family or school, the workplace or the State, in their turn can only be effective in their dialogue with history and thus in their confrontation with the tradition, through human reason. One says ‘human’ here because, traditionally, there was also a reason divine, and today, a natural ‘reason’ which the cosmos orders unto itself, as well as the basis upon which this order rests and evolves. Even so, reason divine or cosmic are more metaphors than anything else, and though reason may well be possessed by other, as yet unknown beings, for now it is the singular province of humanity alone.

And so oft singularly ignored. Why, when we know that our very nature is change, that history begins with the advent of humanity, do we more shun this unique character in our daily lives and in our relationship to the customary than wield it? Perhaps we imagine that the leg-work has already been done, at least when it comes to those issues less profound. But this is a conflation between that which requires only recreation and that which demands creation. Alongside this, a confusion between pragmatism and practicality is present. The former, as stated, centers our attention upon the results of our conduct in the world, rather than the sources of our ability to think and act. It does not disdain metaphysics, but it brackets it, places it in a mental docket, something to be reflected upon in the slower hours, when one has accomplished the needs of the day. The latter does not recognize either the metaphysical or the pragmatic; it is solely concerned with the easiest thing, never the best thing. In this, practicality inevitably slides toward what has already been done, what has been done before, and thenceforth issues a further error; that what has been done is also the best way, even the only way to in fact carry onwards.

Even our managerial phrase, ‘best practices’, reflects this series of errors. Knowing only the presence of what has been done, we seek to emulate what gives the appearance of working, indeed, of ‘managing’ the world as it comes to us. Certainly, there are situations in which nothing else can immediately be done. Time is always a factor, which is appropriate in the sense that time and history are neither the same nor are they generally friendly to one another. Time suggests presence alone, a lack of change, which is why we find the seeming redundancy ‘historical time’ in textbooks and like studies. Contexts that are defined precisely by deadlines commit us to a certain style of work in the world, even though this same world has nothing about it that is suggestive of an ending. It is this which troubles both the person interested in metaphysics as well as the practitioner, for whom whose practice is all in all. This lack of ending brooks alongside that of an absence of goal or even objective, so for our human projects, we must construct an end. We ask, ‘what are we doing this for?’, and this has a pragmatic ring to it. But we seldom ask ‘why are we doing this at all?’, a question that calls into play our very existence in relation to both tradition and history alike. It is the child who, using the first language, actually intends the second. ‘This for’ is uplifted into ‘this at all’ only to be placed back into itself by the adult, who interprets this nascent call to conscience as a mere mechanical error. Our answers to our youth orbit the practicality of worldly activity; all action tends to its center of gravity. ‘This is why’, we also mistakenly respond, for we are not, in fact, providing an answer to their ‘why’ but only a goal-orientation. In the same way, our ‘reason’ for acting the way in which we do, is not a product of human reason in general but rather a reaction to a worldly demand, as often as not unreasoned and certainly sometimes even unreasonable.

Through this other series of conflations and casual speech, it is likely that we ourselves begin to distrust reason even as a conception. ‘Reason’ makes demands upon me that I might not be able to meet.’ Reason’ is what the boss gives me, why I’m even working at all. ‘Reason’ is a political paradiddle more promise than premise. ‘Reason’ forces me to ‘be reasonable’, ignore my feelings, put my own experience aside and consider others. I’m only human, we might respond with some bitterness. Just so, it is authentic reason which is, in part, guiding our affective reactions to these genuinely unreasonable articles of daily life. They are so because, for the most part, they themselves are unreasoned reactions to whatever is occurring in the moment, in people’s lives, within the social context at hand. Biography, at once an individuated history – we are as a microcosm, rewriting our own existence moving forward – as well as an anti-history – in this rewriting we confront history as it has been written – exerts an inordinate effect upon our reason, casting it down, as it were, and committing it to actions it would, by itself, never sanction. It is not truly a case of a contrast or yet conflict between ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’, but rather a self-misrecognition that these casually oppositional aspects of the human character exist only because our consciousness, in its very character, presents their union. We are beings with reasoned emotions, with emotive reason, and through this confluence, a third form emerges; that of rationality.

Rationality is the agentive aspect of thought itself. If reason is radical, thinking is revolutionary insofar as action in the world changes that very world, and in a novel fashion. The profoundly radical exists, and can exist, only in our imaginations. Once we set to work in the world, we find that such a conception rapidly adjusts itself to the demands of the day. There is no shame in this as long as no sycophantic posture is inclined toward the tradition or the customary. The world worlds itself, once again, and we are thus placed in a dialogue with it, as well as with others-to-self. Nevertheless, what change we biographically promote carries its own weight into that collective, that which is exerted by a ‘spirit of the age’, the very one in which I myself exist, a child of my own time and no other. The aggregate of human action in the world is what we call history. Its source, at its best, is rationality; reason enacted, thought made work, presence becoming present. That this process is abnormative only exemplifies that at once history is a task as well as a gift; it is never automatic that we know how to think about this or, indeed, that knowing ‘what’ to do is, simply due to its mimesis of what has been done, is more easily accessed. Even so, thinking is human through and through. We cannot avoid it; we cannot lose it. If it seems that we are often in denial of this essential basis upon which our history and our persons rest, it is because there is a weakness in our ethical characters, and not in those existential.

Rationality too is not bereft of emotion. It eases the discomfort of authentic action in the world. It makes our agency, in its most intimate motives, understandable to others, who may thence even share it. And though the customary carries undue weight, history undoes its burden, even casts it bodily aside. And history is only possible because of the action of reasoned emotion in the world. We never act ‘against the world’, but rather through our care, even love, of that world. Sometimes we may find ourselves mistaken; the world worlds itself after all. These are the moments when others can be unmistakably correct, and the sobriety of reason as well as the relief of emotion will help us recognize this. Ultimately, this contrasting dynamic, held within the chalice of reason becoming rationality, will allow us to equally become other than we have been, for we cannot expect the world to change if we are not first willing to change ourselves.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 57 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.