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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
My first reaction was that this demo was a fake, that two human beings had somehow strapped themselves into this apparatus and in tandem were emulating a single robot. Kind of looks like it could have been an old Monty Python sketch. My second reaction: fantastic! I used to work in AI; clearly robotic locomotion has come a long way since then.
As to our more empathic reactions to Big Dog, there’s been some child development research demonstrating that little kids spontaneously attribute sentience and intentionality to all manner of creatures and inanimate objects: you might find this article informative and provocative. I think it’s likely that this “transference effect” would be intensified to the extent that the object resembles humans. Though the front legs bend backward, the back knees function like humans. Maybe we’re more attuned to back legs as legs, whereas on humans front legs are analogous to arms which in effect do bend backward when crawling.
I had the same instinctive intuition that the video was somehow faked, but it was dispelled at that remarkable moment when the robot was kicked. The grace there was not human.
As for transference of affects, yes, I think the size of the robot, like a large mammal, does make a difference here.
That an individual human regards even another human as someone like himself is already pretty startling. As is true of other creatures, humans are instinctively drawn to their own kind for protection, procreation, nurturance, etc. But a human also regards another human in terms of shared intentionality. Other creatures might be capable of imitating one another, but they don’t see the point of doing so. They don’t seem to realize that the other’s behavior is motivated, and that the other’s motivations are similar to one’s own: finding food, shelter, warmth, safety, mating opportunities, etc. So when I watch another human I don’t just observe the behavioral sequences: I also attempt to infer the intentionality motivating the behavior. If the behavior proves successful in achieving the originator’s intent, then I’m motivated to imitate the other’s behavior because I share the other’s motivations. And so I learn to use tools and weapons not by trial and error discovery but by intention-driven mimesis. Language is doubly intentional, because the speaker intends for the listener to share his own intentionality (Davidson’s triangle). In this sense of recognizing “deep” similarity with the other, humans are more intrinsically social than any other creatures. Empathic identification with the other’s desires and motivations is one of the most crucial species-specific distinctives that enables humanity to thrive.
So it’s adaptive and instinctive for a human watching Big Dog to attain some kind of empathic identification with it. I watch its mobile persistence and I think: it must trying to get somewhere. I empathize with its ability to right itself after being (intentionally) shoved because I too find it difficult to keep my feet when assaulted. Big Dog doesn’t want to fall down: how does he avoid it? Can I emulate his technique in some way?
So how could some groups of humans regard other groups as incomparable with themselves? It seems unnatural, maladaptive. Certainly the slaveowners regarded slaves as capable of learning and performing work the owners otherwise would have to do. The men could breed with the slave women. The slaves could conceive of revolt and so must be guarded against. Etc. Incommensurability came into play mostly in matters of self-rule: slaves, like children and women and farm animals, need someone to tell them what to do. Did it then become necessary in maintaining the incommensurability deceit for the ruling classes never to acknowledge that they could learn anything useful from their subhuman subjects? That the other’s cumulative culture too was subhuman, of no value to the masters but perhaps useful to maintain among the slaves in order to perpetuate their presumed difference/inferiority in kind from the masters?
Ktismatics,
All wonderful observations. The one thought I have is to your fundamental qustion:
“So how could some groups of humans regard other groups as incomparable with themselves?”
I feel that Spinoza’s theory of the imitation of the affects [ “If we imagine a thing like us, toward which we have had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like affect (EIIIp27)”] goes a very long way to explain these things, at the epistemic level. This for him is the ground upon which all sociability is made, even antagonisms. We MUST see others to be like ourselves in order to then disagree with, or judge them. There is a core “What must I be like if I were like them (in their condition) in order to make sense of even the most shunned behavior. We stand in the shoes of another, in a kind of proto-rationality.
I think that because being able to read others involves a true affective transformation of the self, this transformation, the feeling of what the other must be feeling (the joy of murder, the eros of perversity, the morbidity of indigence, the thrill of ostricizing), there is a genuine sense of bodily invasion. The house keeping of oneself, one’s own affects, which involves reading others that might influence you, involves the very influence of others. So there are very real affective costs in reading others. That is why tracing out the libidnal investments (if we want to call it that) can make a penetrating overview of judgments. My own housekeeping perceptions involve the invasions of others imagined-to-be. And these projections becomes part of one’s personal (and a group’s own) economy of affects.
Spinoza’s point though is that the identification of the fundamental, affective similiarity is key to uncoding these affective knots, seeing how there ALREADY there must be agreement, in order for their to be disagreement at all.
This, combined with Davidson’s notion of triangulation and asssumed rationality provides the basis for a rather thorough-going Ethics that begins with the Body and perception itself.
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I agree – this is a beautiful example of the transference of affects. Thanks, kvond, for posting it. I also agree with ktismatics that our attribution of intentionality is central to our reading of it.
It’s clear that affect works directly via perception (seeing, imagining the feeling of being that dog, imagining ourselves as dog, etc.; I use the word ‘imagining’ in a bodily sense, not just in the sense of our generating a mental image or representation), and that this ultimately bypasses or short-circuits our intellectual reactions and suspicions (is it a faked video?, etc.).
The ant (next video in this series) is clearly controlled remotely, while the dog seems more internally motivated, or at least internally ‘programmed’ (which is another way of saying the same thing), in its responses because it is navigating an environment. In a Gibsonian sense (I’m referring to J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology), it has certain capacities or ‘effectivities’ with which it is interacting with the ‘affordances’ presented by its environment. Or in Maturana and Varela’s terms (which of course sound very Deleuzian), it is ‘structurally coupling’ with objects around it. I think that all of that adds to our sense of its being a vulnerable organism making its way through a world that it dimly perceives, is struggling with, etc. So our response is related to our response to children and to our own (experientially based) awareness of what a child’s world is like – all of which is something I don’t quite get with the ant.
AI,
I like your M & V and D & G references. I certainly do agree that the Big Dog video elicits a much more complex series of affectual perceptions, but, perhaps I am alone in this, the Ant gives me a different kind of affective projection: a kinesthetic reaction, a kind of “I know what it feels like to do THAT, to arch the back just so, or leverage oneself at that angle” and I feel it right there in my body in a kind of shadow image. The pure communicated jointedness of the ant (and I am not sure that it is not so much a case of coupling in the sense that the ballet of ant motions is clearly in relation to centers of gravity we can feel), presents a textured screen upon which I can perceive my own body in operation, potentially. It is a form of inhabitation.
Its interesting though. My wife when she watched the video immediately “percieved” the controls of the ant (she has known the gamer world), feeling just what is was like to animate it, whereas I, who have never played X-box and such, perceived not the control dimensions, but the ant itself. This difference in perception, the way that we trace causes out beyond their events and inhabit those causes, has I think deep consequence for the differences of even theoretical opinions about states of the world. In our bodies we literally feel the realities of our theories. It is for this reason that I suspect that intellectual disagreements are also bodily disagreements.