Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education: Toward a Posthuman Pedagogy 3030994384, 9783030994389

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Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education Toward a Posthuman Pedagogy Kaustuv Roy

Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education

Kaustuv Roy

Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education Toward a Posthuman Pedagogy

Kaustuv Roy Humanities Department Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology Patiala, India

ISBN 978-3-030-99438-9    ISBN 978-3-030-99439-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

I read that astronomers have recently “discovered” water 12.8 billion light years away, and I see that it is heralded as a “very significant” discovery. Last week, another group discovered a planet in yet another far away galaxy—again, surely, a cause for celebration. Experts are making fine discoveries in impossibly faraway places, while a little protein has been doing disastrous things to us impossibly near to which the experts really have no answer, other than describing in complicated ways what anyone can see in simple fashion. One might be tempted to ask why we bother about things billions of light years away when we do not have answers to critical things at home. But as Foucault once pointed out very simply: everything cannot be said. We can only say what the discourses permit us to say. And the discourse, in this case, is constructed verily through expertise and is synonymous with it. But maybe, it occurred to me, we can give a name to the sum of these expert discourses and the accompanying attitudes that control our destiny today. I decided to call it technohumanism. We live in the age of the expert. They tell you why we yawn, how much water you should drink, whether we are having enough sex, whether eggs have good cholesterol or bad cholesterol, if coffee is good for you, how much exercise you should take, and whether there is going to be a third wave of the pandemic. Now why should this be remarkable? Is it not natural to turn to the experts for answers? The pandemic is an unfortunate case in point that teaches us to become wary of the expert. The widespread failure of expertise in the face of a ridiculous little protein has left the world in shambles. Standing in the midst of the greatest humanistic achievements, we must be able to simultaneously acknowledge our utter v

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failure in the face of crisis and the slow dissolving of all that was apparently solid. Must the expert take the blame for this? The answer to that question lies in the last century or so of expert discourse expansion that has constructed a certain empirical reality to the exclusion of others. It has led, in my view, to a one-sided reality and a perniciously dependent existence. From that standpoint, I strongly feel we must be able to take a fresh measure of ourselves without any expert reference points. We have to become bold, develop our instincts, and reach beyond the humanist picture developed through expert discourses and institutionalized positions. The main thrust of the present book is the urgent need for regaining our existential powers, the “heat of life” as it were, that have been occluded during the last two centuries of rampant expert posturing, disregarding the person who attempts a more direct equation with the real. Isn’t this too judgmental? Is it? Expert discourses have socialized us (implicitly and explicitly) into believing that all answers lie in the external and material processes and in the measurements of thought. While undoubtedly there is a great deal of usefulness in the expert view, such one-dimensional thinking, in my view, is illusory and ultimately ruinous. Of course, it is easy to critique, but far more difficult to know what to do. Why is it so difficult to reconceptualize toward a different action? The Jewish sacred text the Talmud says: “Paradise is a small change in the angle of vision.” This saying must not be taken lightly, but be revisited hermeneutically in order to unfold its depth and vastness. The difference between heaven and hell is truly a small change in the angle of vision and all the consequences that follow from it. When the vision that has been transfixed like deer caught in headlights is able to tear itself away, a new reality can be sensed. The difficulty of course is to tear oneself away from the glare of the headlights and again look into the darkness. Every age has its darkness. The problem is to understand the nature of this darkness, without attempting to cast light into the dark. That is the real difficulty. The answers to the problems of the age lie not in the lights but in the darkness … that which it keeps out of sight. If we try to bring that darkness into the light, we will only succeed in extending the darkness elsewhere, for there will always be darkness behind any source of light. So what is to be done? How can we reach “darkness” without lighting it up? These paths are not the pathways of enlightenment, but the paths of incarnation. They are far away from the lights of the expert and the public discourses that surround them. What is so special about them that merits

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our attention? Encountering a bug as an external entity, for example, only breeds fear and confusion, without any sense of what it means for the body composite, other than what we know through expert discourse. This is needlessly precarious living; it does not grant us the autonomy that a complex composite ought to be capable of. My purpose in doing philosophy is to put philosophy to work, rather like an agriculturist. But the work is to plow the ontological stuff, to open up the bio-geography of the organism, so that greater flows can course through us and we can effectively deal with “crises.” Obviously, there are many hurdles to be crossed and clearings to be made. Hence, I do not begin from the philosophical end, but rather from the existential end of things, and rope in the philosophy in my toolbox that I find most useful given the circumstances. I call this philosophical praxis. We have been witness to the great suffering of an age, and philosophical praxis seeks a path beyond it. That is the purpose of this book. Patiala, Punjab, India

Kaustuv Roy

Acknowledgments

In deeply troubled circumstances, many commonplace words come unmoored from their normal significance during quieter conditions, and the notion of acknowledgment might be counted as one of them. There are so many nameless faces and encounters, so many experiences of loss and suffering (as well as of stray wisdom) that have contributed implicitly and explicitly to my understanding of the situation, and therefore to this piece of writing, that I am at a loss for words as to how to “acknowledge” all. But to be more specific as I must, this book rests aplenty on the reports of many Covid reporters and writers, the first and foremost being Nicolas Wade, the highly regarded science writer writing in The Atomic Scientists. To say that I am grateful toward him and other dedicated researchers is to say nothing really. Theoretically, the book draws heavily on D. H. Lawrence’s little-known work on Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious; it offered me the language to go beyond the Freudian conception of the unconscious, which was absolutely necessary from the point of view of the book. I also thank Christ University, Bangalore, and the University of Toledo, USA, for inviting me to be keynote speaker in a jointly organized virtual conference during which I tested out a few of the ideas presented in the book. Finally, there are always other unnamed thinkers and writers without whose preceding efforts this book could hardly be written.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The State of the Species  1 2 Studying a Crisis 53 3 Lessons from a Chimera Virus 81 4 Psychoanalysis of Crises107 5 A Posthumanist Bio-Geography131 6 The Primitive Function155 7 Conclusion: A Dialogue173 Index189

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The State of the Species

Time and evolution have ground out an assemblage that has constructed an elaborate narrative around itself and reflexively calls itself human by virtue of the capacity for naming and projection. First recorded circa the thirteenth century as per its own way of marking time, the word “human” appears to be somewhat of ambiguous origin when we attempt to trace it beyond the Latin homo. A similar cloud of archaeological uncertainty shrouds the physical appearance of the species on the planet. Of course, on reflecting on it, the cause of the uncertainty becomes immediately clear— no composite system can discover the whole truth about itself by itself, for to do that one must stand outside and beyond the composite itself. Thus, there will always be an indeterminateness, an incompleteness attending upon any inquiry into the status of the species. This is a simple, important, and early realization that must be kept in mind from the point of view of this book. But there are things we can say about the species without pretending to know much about its beginnings. One of the most remarkable things about the species is the sharp contrast between the fragility of its psycho-biological constitution at the level of the individual organism and the power of its technical prowess at the level of its collective organization. Its combined institutionalized efforts have covered the planet and the neighboring space around it with uncountable “civilizational” projects. At the same time, psychologically it has remained just as unstable and insecure perhaps as the early human, not to speak of its biology that can come

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_1

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apart quickly even in encountering an invisible microbe. The second remarkable thing about this species is that its dominance of the planet has come at an enormous cost to itself and to planetary life in general. This cost, that has often been rather innocently rationalized as the “price of progress,” has led to major and minor scale loss of homeostasis and consequently to the destabilization of the conditions and forms of planetary life. Plenty has been discussed and written about the “ecological” effects of the adventurism of the species. Here the effort is different. It attends to the unique vulnerability mentioned above, that is, to the fragility of the psycho-biological constitution and to the possibility of a path beyond the humanist reality construct. The path beyond may be thought of as posthumanist practice—and decidedly it is practice, not stasis. And it is relentless, not something to be left to others or to institutions. Next, we must speak of crisis. Here, it implies a set of conditions that severely interferes with the current flow of life and becoming, and consequently demands a fresh response. Crises can be tectonic and geo-­ ontological, or they can be culturally triggered phenomena that appear as though of natural origin. Crises can be perceived as the piling on of existential woe, or they can be seen as invitation to change direction toward a more mature way of viewing and interacting with the world. The attitude of the present work leans toward the latter view. Descending quickly to the level of the specific, in the pages that follow, I argue that there is a close causal connection between global crisis production and the overarching paradigm of the contemporary that I call technohumanism—the paradigm under which present-day education is built. Taking up the crisis of the Covid pandemic as a case in point, I try to show how the basic assumptions of technohumanism encourage large-­ scale dependencies and a consequent loss of psycho-biological strength in the populace. Next, I argue that a road to recovery can be pedagogically constructed by means of a “psychoanalysis” of thought which releases it from the institutionalized limits placed on it. And finally, I introduce the notion of a living unconscious as distinct from the Freudian Unconscious and following D. H. Lawrence, argue that rather than being a chamber of repressive horrors, the living unconscious is an eternal source of creative dynamism. Thus, following the logic of the book, this living dynamism becomes the source and topoi of a posthuman bio-geography. Enroute to the broader argument, I wish to clarify that this book, at the initial stage of conception, did not have on its radar the pandemic that has since ravaged the world. The basic idea behind the book was in the making before the world was seized by the present crisis. The work was intended

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to address the wider relation between a mental consciousness shaped by humanist discourses and the generally crisis-ridden world of the species. In other words, it was meant to highlight the sense of an essential relation between planetary crisis, and what has come to be known as humanism, and the consequent necessity of radical rethinking in the context of education. Of course, and right away, we stumble against the word “humanism,” and although the notion is examined from multiple angles throughout the book, it would serve us well to pause on it momentarily in passing, even as we get a start on things. “Humanism” here refers to a reflexive state of the species that evaluates each thing exclusively within a mainstream empiricism that it has narratively developed by and of itself. In other words, it alludes to a self-referential standpoint that forms the basis of its evaluation of the world. Are there other more fruitful or inclusive ways of developing and acting out our being-in-the-world? It is a question that the book grapples with in its search for a dynamism that can take us beyond self-referentiality and empirically driven discourses. To get back to the principal direction of the book, the search was to be directed toward the question whether it was not possible to conceive of a manner of thinking, and hence a pedagogy, that went beyond humanistic affectations— one that would simultaneously address the perilous world-making that we have gotten used to and indicate a bio-geographical terrain beyond it. At the same time, the runaway gravity of the worldwide viral sickness made it clearly the case-at-hand that seemed to illustrate what the book was meant to discuss—crisis as the consequence of particular ways of constructing and treating reality. It pressed upon me that those of us who have, or will have, more or less survived the present crisis situation, physically and psychologically, have a special responsibility to reach into resources that can contribute to making sense of this chaos and struggle for a road beyond it. Toward that objective, I began to perceive the current catastrophe as an exemplary case-at-hand within a larger picture that helps to bring to the fore our collective assumptions regarding who or what we are, and have become, as a species. Crisis situations tend to expose the accretions and taken-for-granted civilizational attitudes like nothing else, thereby making themselves pedagogically suitable as analytical nodal points, apart from everything else. If we do not draw educational lessons from the dire situation in which we find ourselves today, then that would certainly be unspeakably unfortunate for ourselves and the lives to come. In constructing its case, the present work draws an illustrative thread from the worldwide governmental and social response to the rampaging (at the time of writing) pandemic. From the perspective of the book, the

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consequences that have been unleashed upon societies are not accidental, but in large part, the unfortunate by-products of a humanistic legacy. Again, humanism here refers to the exclusivist and techno-supremacist narrative humans use to construct and justify the world they have created for themselves. Obviously, this legacy is so large and all-pervasive that nothing is normally visible outside of it. In going forward, I will argue that the self-referentiality has systematically induced cultural blindness, played softball with the sensibilities, cut off critical consideration about the true status of the species vis-à-vis its environment, and given rise to a whole range of misguided responses to crises in general, including that of the present one. But the argument made here must not be confused with the by-now standard ecological one, including what is referred to as deep ecology. Having identified the problem, the present work takes us step-by-­ pedagogic-step into the dynamic unconscious wherein we can seek release from our current assumptions about ourselves and our relations with the world. It is from this point of view that the ongoing epidemic makes for a particularly visceral—albeit unfortunate—case study within a much larger analysis that seeks to contribute to a route map beyond humanism, specifically in education as it is both constituted by and constitutive of contemporaneity. If the stock image that individuals have of themselves dictates the boundary value for his or her own becoming, the collective-reflexive image at the heart of humanism is the greatest trap within which thought ricochets. The collective image is largely bounded by the belief in control, a notion that involves a ubiquitous social apparatus, including the epistemological, that coordinates different layers, levels, and facets of social action toward pre-specified ends. This predilection of modern societies toward control obsession is generally well-established from numerous studies of modernity including Max Weber’s investigations in the early part of the twentieth century. What makes the case study poignantly relevant in the present context is that the virus and its uncontrolled spread has become the biggest challenge to this very idea of control. It has thrown down the gauntlet at the establishment, at the experts, at contemporaneity, and at its parent humanism in general, all of which are essentially predicated upon the mantra of control. Everything imaginable has been flung at the situation—social isolation, economic lockdown, drug combinations, attempts at producing consistent vaccines, and other measures, but the virus has cocked a snook, as the saying goes, and remained a step beyond all attempts to eliminate or rein it in. New variants keep breaking out, each more dangerous than the ones before it. There is a lot of sophisticated

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epidemiological talk, all to obscure the fact that we are clueless before a little bug, never mind its origins. Then in all probability, one day, the bug will disappear of its own accord, having defied our will and rendered asunder uncountable lives. But the striking fact through the catastrophe is the manner in which people from across the ideological spectrum have been coopted through the illusion of control and forced to behave like party apparatchik when faced with the question of how to respond. The politico-medical constructions and projections are all that the media speaks about in relation to the crisis, which becomes the horizon of the public imagination. And if that is the visibility spectrum of the average person, even less flattering is the condition of the so-called expert who is visibly out of his depth, reduced to saying one thing one day and quite the opposite the next, turning with the tide, as it were, in the manner of the uninformed. Yet, the spectacle of a scientific management of the situation is maintained, undisturbed by contradictions.1 In actuality, the scenario perhaps is not very different than 1  A scientific study of May 2020 made the case that the virus kills through what has come to be known in the parlance as Cytokine Storm or overreaction of the immune system: “Coronavirus mostly kills through an overreaction of the immune system, whose function is precisely to fight infections, say scientists who have decoded the mechanisms, symptoms, and diagnosis of the disease caused by the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus. In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, the researchers explained step-by-step how the virus infects the airways, multiplies inside cells, and in severe cases causes the immune defenses to overshoot with a ‘cytokine storm’. This storm is an over-activation of white blood cells, which release too-great amounts of cytokines—inflammation-stimulating molecules—into the blood, they said. ‘Similar to what happens after infection with SARS and MERS, data show that patients with severe COVID-19 may have a cytokine storm syndrome,’ said study author Daishun Liu, Professor at Zunyi Medical University in China. ‘The rapidly increased cytokines attract an excess of immune cells such as lymphocytes and neutrophils, resulting in an infiltration of these cells into lung tissue and thus cause lung injury,’ Liu said. The researchers explained that the cytokine storm ultimately causes high fever, excessive leakiness of blood vessels, and blood clotting inside the body. It also causes extremely low blood pressure, lack of oxygen and excess acidity of the blood, and build-up of fluids in the lungs, they said. The researchers noted that white blood cells are misdirected to attack and inflame even healthy tissue, leading to failure of the lungs, heart, liver, intestines, kidneys, and genitals” PTI, May 13, 2020. Next note a different article that is diametrically opposite and directly contradicts the previous article. “Cytokine storm has been blamed for a large number of Covid-19 deaths. Cytokines are special particles that modulate immune and inflammation responses in the body. But when the body releases far too many cytokines, they can cause a severe inflammatory reaction, which can prove fatal. This is called a cytokine storm, which earlier studies blamed for the large number of deaths in Covid-19 cases. When some kind of agreement emerged among doctors and researchers over autoimmune responses such as cytokine storm,

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if it had belonged to an era when there was much less possibility of control. Now, in this zone of expanding loss of control, the terrain has been flattened to one of dumbfoundedness, reducing experts to novices on a landscape of secret frustrations, fear, and anxiety over this uncontrollable thing ravaging us. On wondering about the “why” of the above situation, the answer becomes fairly obvious—all have uncritically internalized the same underlying metaphor of control and progress, long having become bureaucratized and institutionalized in the process, with its “soft” complacency and taking-things-for-granted attitude. And when the template of a civilization breaks down in the face of serious challenge, it is perhaps time to critically examine that template in a no-holds-barred manner. The time is upon us to direct hard, even unpalatable, questions at words and things that have made smooth pebbles out of us, instead of sharply vigilant organisms. The task of analysis is to cut through the vector of the dominant metaphors and their associated linguistic network to grasp what is now being revealed or disclosed to us in the present situation. Language is damning if language is taken to be a mere correspondence with the thing—that is to say, confined to the signifier-signified relation. The latter relation reflects a certain agreed-upon degree of correctness, but not truthfulness in the sense that it is never the whole picture (e.g., framing something as it was suggested that anti-cytokine treatments—the ones that suppress the body’s immune response—could be beneficial in the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19. It was hoped that ‘targeting cytokines during the management of Covid-19 patients could improve survival rates and reduce mortality’. Doctors, though not 100 per cent certain, adopted this protocol in the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19 all over the world. Now, a study conducted in the Netherlands on Covid-19 patients has thrown up contrasting findings. The study, published recently in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network, found that Covid-19 is not directly associated with cytokine storms as was previously suggested. The researchers compared the levels of inflammatory cytokines in Covid-19 patients with a group of other patients. They found no evidence of cytokine storms in patients with Covid-19 compared to others. The researchers compared cytokine levels of seriously ill Covid-19 patients who were on mechanical ventilation. Their levels were compared with other seriously ill patients -- with comparable severity of illness -- with bacterial septic shock, cardiac arrest, and severe trauma. A total of 156 patients were in the two groups. The study found significantly lower levels of cytokines in people with Covid-19 compared to those having septic shock, which is a condition known to cause a sudden surge in cytokine levels.” In Prabhas Dutta, “New study questions cytokine storm theory of Covid-19 fatality,” India Today Sept 15, 2020. Scientific views can be divergent, especially at the initial stages of contacting a phenomenon, but what is of note here is the categorical contradiction between the two views.

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a disease may be accurate but partial). That is to say, one can be correct without being true—this distinction between the correct and the true being an important one that we shall visit again later. The very possibility of language is predicated upon a primitive and pre-linguistic reality that lies beyond the layers of cultural mystifications and the smokescreen of thought. For example, in speaking of the “virus,” we forget that it is only a manner of speaking and that language reciprocally conditions thought. In fact, the “virus” may not be a thing, but a relation. In other words, when we speak of something, anything, we can only do it by ignoring or suppressing other ways of thinking and speaking about it. It is the task of critique here to develop the intuition necessary to seek out the anterior side of the specifically conditioned word-thing. The language of humanism has retarded rather than extended our linguistic intuition and its capacity for ontological disclosure. Unable to transcend its assumptions in language or imagination, the humanistic underpinning of the present crisis has created a vortex that threatens to not only rip apart its own fabric but at the same time obstruct the possibility of looking in a fresh direction by the turbidity of its discursive spin. In the exposure to the current phenomenon, it has inadvertently exposed its moral, aesthetic, and existential impoverishment, revealing humanist culture to be a pious narrative that has formed a narcissistic patina over the collective psyche, despite certain historical attempts at deconstruction. Humans can will to act, but cannot will to will, as Schopenhauer had so cleverly observed—we do not know the source of our willing—and yet humanism makes the fundamental philosophical error of implicitly thinking that we do.2 In brief, humanism mistakes an evolutionary aggregate waypoint (the reflexively human) for something sovereign; it further represents a sum of attitudes that confuses existential meaning with control over the empirical world, thereby seeking what it imagines to be complete planetary dominance. It is not as though all of this has not been noticed before or been commented upon—Nietzsche noticed the piousness and the absurdities inherent in humanism before anyone else3—but its intricacies have rarely been worked out in educational thought in order to reach 2  “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills,” Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. Transl. Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 7. 3  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-too-Human, Transl. Helen Zimmern (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006).

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beyond the ensnarement of humanist bounds. In short, the mirage made up of projections and introjections that have for long become the source of narcissistic delusions and reflexive hallucinations need to be examined under a pedagogical lens so that we can attempt to cut ourselves adrift of it, if possible. This activity, among other things, is what I call posthumanism. Thus, posthumanism is not an existential state but an activity—a phenomenological activity that must engage us, and with which we must engage, in a ceaseless manner. But before we can get to that point, we have to fully comprehend that which we are up against. Ironically, in our attempt to establish control, we have released forces that are no longer in our control. These Mephistophelian forces secretly encourage an ever-widening inurement together with a blind belief in the techno-mechanistic attitude—this being an outlook whose roots are in the nineteenth century or perhaps earlier. The resultant hardening of the humanist posture can be read as a form of “technohumanism,” an extended outcrop of the humanist attitude that sees technology as the unquestionable path of human progress. This “progress” is in reality the anxiety of the unlived present abstracted, framed, and projected in the language of technological utopianism. It is anchored in the belief that humans are in control of, and able to direct, technological destiny toward fulfillment in some distant future. Technohumanism cannot be distinguished from the basic tenets and stance of humanism, and may be thought of as its natural extension. Humanism laid the ground for believing that we are in control of planetary destiny, and technohumanism was bred out of it as the principal tool of navigation. Further, once world discourses began to be framed and represented primarily within a technological rationale, thinking could only proceed along these hegemonic lines, blinding us to other ways of relating to the world, which, unsurprisingly, formed the essential danger in the contemporary attitude. It is not as though this direction of unfoldment has remained beyond contemporary philosophical scrutiny. A serious study of this problem was carried out by Martin Heidegger in his ground-breaking work The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik).4 Heidegger’s thesis consisted of three major assertions: (a) technology is not merely an instrument (as is often presented), but a veritable manner of grasping the world; (b) technology is not just one more human activity, but comes 4  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Transl. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

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from a source beyond the human, and soon begins to develop beyond human control; and (c) technology’s highest danger lies in making us see the world exclusively through technological thinking. Seen in this way, technology is not just an innocent means to an end, but appears ontologically to be much more than that. Its presencing through humans is from a source anterior to the latter, and its essence is not identical with its manifestation. All of this requires much careful uncovering, and for this purpose, I shall delve into Heidegger at some length here in order to offer a glimpse into the covert aspects of technohumanism. Later, we shall move back in time to Nietzsche, Heidegger’s predecessor, in order to sketch out the early challenges to humanist thinking. This hermeneutic effort will hopefully give us a sense of the vital necessity of nonhumanist thinking for a more viable picture of our relations with the world, and hence of the urgent need for educating differently. The leading portmanteau term involved in this book is “technohumanism,” and we shall visit the two parts in detail, respectively. So to “techne” first, and let us go to the depths in order to get the view-from-underneath of technology. We’ll begin our inquiry by asking: what is the essence of this thing called technology that so enthralls this species? Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that that which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.5

The dogginess of a dog or the felineness of a cat are not to be found in the particular dog or cat—the essence is something that is anterior to the specific dog or cat. In the same manner, the essence of technology is not to be encountered in anything technological. When we blindly feel extended by things technological and hi-tech discourses we fail to ask about, or critically examine, the nature of this thing called technology. 5

 Ibid., p. 4

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Modernity has never really left or made room for such a discussion. This is to neither accept nor reject technology, but to emphasize the responsibility to critically understand it from an appropriate viewing distance. However, we are so obsessed with its products that we never stop and ask about its effects on us. In our unbridled enthusiasm for technology, is it then not true that we become technological subjects or the subjects of technology? And is there a problem with such enframing? Such questions are hardly ever part of our educational discourse, but they ought to be, oughtn’t they, especially in extraordinary times, when everything that could go wrong, goes wrong? To assume that technology is something neutral that we can take off the table (of critical scrutiny), simply because it is ubiquitous and advantageous, is of course the greatest of errors. It also stymies the possibility of seriously educating ourselves in directions other than the techno-rational. But this much remains correct: modern technology too is a means to an end. That is why the instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology … But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it? Yet we said, did we not, that the instrumental definition of technology is correct? To be sure. The correct always fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us from out of its essence. Accordingly, the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology’s essence. In order that we may arrive at this, or at least come close to it, we must seek the true by way of the correct. We must ask: What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong?6

The instrumental conception of technology—which is the default attitude and which we are encouraged to hold—assumes that technology is something external to us and has a neutral or benign presence, being only a means to an end. A compressor or an engine or a computer carries out specific tasks, doing our bidding. This is correct. But the bigger question is: what is its actual relation to us, or what does it do to us even as it carries 6

 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

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out our command? Heidegger draws a very important philosophical distinction between the correct and the true. Correctness can be fixated on one “pertinent” aspect of a thing or a relation, and yet be untrue in that it gives an incomplete view of the total picture. The distinction between the correct and the true therefore is a very critical one, especially for educational thinking. It is also the peculiarity of the modern subject that he more frequently asks if something is correct rather than if it was true. And that is also perhaps why, ecologically speaking, we are often “correct” at one level, but not true to the larger scheme of things. We are able to “solve” problems technologically at one level, but these solutions come back to haunt us on a different existential plane. Technology is certainly the means to useful ends, but it also penetrates us in unknown ways, changing us, and making us conform to instrumental ways, within which the means and ends look perfectly logical, and do not brook any criticism. Technohumanism is thus a state of being wherein we are no longer able to differentiate between the correct and the true when it comes to instrumentalist reference points. We are no longer responsive to what is, but react from within that which is programmed in us technologically. The fundamental Greek experience of reality was … one in which men were immediately responsive to whatever was presencing to them. They openly received whatever spontaneously met them. For the Greeks the coming into the “present” out of the “not present” was poiesis. This “bringing forth” was manifest first of all in physis, that presencing wherein the bursting forth arose from within the thing itself. Techne was also a form of his bringing forth, but one in which the bursting-forth lay not in the thing itself but in another. In techne, through art and handcraft, man participated in conjunction with other contributing elements-with “matter,” “aspect,” and “circumscribing bounds”—in the bringing forth of a thing into being. Moreover, the arts of the mind were called techne also. Greek man openly received and made known that which offered itself to him.7

There were two sides to the Greek experience of reality. The first was an openness to the onrush of experience with no filtering and censoring of incoming sensory stimuli. This with-it-ness could be described as a full presence to whatever presented itself, without any attempt to fit it into a pre-meditated reality schema. Such open and limitless contact produced 7   William Lovitt, “Translator’s Introduction,” In Martin Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology, op. cit.

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spontaneous becoming of being—this was Aristotle’s physis or the presencing of an unmediated reality. On the other hand, there was techne which involved a separation from the natural world and mediation in the form of tools and material things including mental ones with which the now-­ reflexive human negotiated the world. The birth of culture lies in this eventual separation between raw presencing and its interpretation, collation, and codification for reflexive use in furthering cultural interests. Yet, nevertheless, [the Greek] tended, in the face of the onrush of the revealing of Being, in all that met him, to seek to master it. It is just this tendency toward mastery that shows itself in Greek philosophy. Philosophy sprang from the fundamental Greek experience of reality. The philosopher wondered at the presencing of things and, wondering, fixed upon them. The philosopher sought to grasp and consider reality, to discover whatever might be permanent within it, so as to know what it truly was. But precisely in so doing he distanced himself from Being, which was manifesting itself in the presencing of all particular beings. For in his seeking, he reached out not simply to receive with openness, but also to control. Here, to Heidegger’s thinking, lies the real origin of the modern technological age.8

There was the impulse, on the part of the Greeks to fixate, organize, and master phenomena—this was the birth of philosophy. The compulsion to order reality and put it into manipulable categories and symbolic representations was typical of the philosophical endeavor. We could say that this was also the beginning of humanism—precisely at the instant when we took our eyes off the onrush of presence, turning instead to organize, control, and master what we sensed or remembered afterward. After a point it became cultural habit, with our sensibilities suitably truncated, and presence becoming domesticated and humanized. From surprise and wonder we moved toward epistemic order. We have come a long way down the road in the practice of shaping and controlling presence. But organized presence is not truth; controlled truth is not truth; mastered truth is no longer truth, although these may be in line with something pertinent within phenomenal procession. Truth is a bursting forth, an unconcealment that comes about continually afresh through presencing, and its shape is not of any particular form in the gallery of the human imaginary. Of course, the frozen relation must have begun more innocently. Wondering at the continual revealment of things, of presencing, 8

 Ibid.

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the philosopher sought to put a brake on things in order to make sense of them, to discover in them something lasting, beyond the ephemeral and the transient. But in doing so, the thinker ended up distancing himself from the phenomenon, thus losing the direct sensation of being’s becoming. The openness was sacrificed to organization, psychic satisfaction, and the need to be secure in knowledge. The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.9

The process of unconcealment is elaborated upon in the above passage. There is a challenging or a will-to-truth that operates, incessantly pushing the human into unlocking the hidden stores of energy in nature. This released energy undergoes many cycles of transformation, storing, and redistribution, revealing more of itself in the process. Take the example of petroleum as a case in point. It began as a by-product of kerosene, of no great importance. But by the time of the Second World War, the mineral had become the difference between winning or losing the war: “Oil began to provide a critical advantage that changed how nations regarded this natural resource. Previously, oil was seen as a commodity brought to market by a few entrepreneurs; after WWI, it was regarded as a strategic mineral for which supplies had to be ensured. During the war, Britain had converted their ships from coal-burning to oil-powered to give them increased speed and mobility. During this same time, Germany’s submarine attacks in the Atlantic cut off Britain’s oil shipments and nearly brought defeat.”10 What also followed was the great plastics revolution. Long polymer chains were discovered that could be made from fossil fuels  Ibid., p. 16.  The Environmental Literacy Council, “Petroleum History,” https://enviroliteracy.org/ energy/fossil-fuels/petroleum-history. 9

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that changed everything in the manufacturing industry, as well as the world around us. Today, from computers to cars, from insulation to medical equipment, there is plastic everywhere, and modern man cannot do without it. Thus, one unconcealment leads to another, and yet another, and so on, in a never-ending process, and each stage seizes hold of our ways of doing things, transforming these irrevocably. Thus, it is, Heidegger writes, “when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.”11 The key phrase here is “standing-reserve” [Bestand]. Heidegger coins this term to indicate a situation in which, planet-wide, things and people are reduced to being resources to be drawn upon as and when necessary. Stripped of their specific ways of being and becoming, they are reduced to bare life, standing around waiting to be used within instrumental relations. But the double irony is in the fact that although humans ensnare nature in a manner of their own conception, they do not realize that in that particular mode of ensnarement, they have themselves been infiltrated and pushed into the all-consuming will-to-­ knowledge, fashioning the world after it. Pushed to the extreme, the reality of the object itself begins to disappear under the gaze of research apparatuses, including, for example, the electron microscope or the particle accelerator, till there is only a nameless standing-reserve of energies used to further a technohumanistic world. For instance, in atomic physics, the search for the ultimate building block of matter has led, step-by-step, to the Higgs-Boson and beyond. Heidegger calls this “challenging”: We are continually challenged to dig out newer and newer things from nature. “Modern technology as an ordering-revealing is, then, no merely human doing. Therefore, we must take that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-­ reserve in accordance with the way in which it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing-reserve.”12 We know from Schopenhauer that man cannot will to will. The will toward ordering-revealing that comes to the human in an obsessive form is not itself a product of the human will. The challenging itself constitutes the human in a certain way  Heidegger, op. cit., pp. 18–19.  Ibid.

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that can do no other but move more and more into revealing and ordering reality. This ordering in conformity with the instrumental vision that pre-­ conditions it Heidegger calls Enframing [Gestell], which turns out to be one of the key words in our attempt to understand the state of the species. The word stellen [to set upon] in the name Ge-stell [Enframing] not only means challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from which it stems, namely, that producing and presenting [Her- und Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into unconcealment. This producing that brings forth—e.g., the erecting of a statue in the temple precinct—and the challenging ordering now under consideration are indeed fundamentally different, and yet they remain related in their essence. Both are ways of revealing, of aletheia. In Enframing, that unconcealment comes to pass in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the real as standing-reserve. This work is therefore neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity. The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable. And it cannot be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious explanation that undergirds it.13

Enframing is a producing-revealing that brings forth, but in bringing forth it reorganizes reality as standing-reserve. When our gaze is fixed on the standing-reserve and the various energy hubs and vortices of activity that it renders possible, we are no longer aware of presencing or the unique manner in which things come to manifest themselves. We take their fixed allocation and framing for granted, and now get busy with a utilitarian perspective that allows us to build roads, bridges, reactors, armaments, and a million other things. Besides, poiesis is both—the bringing forth of the sacred as well as the profane—because at their root is the identical pressure of revealment. This is not conscious human activity or something that humans can any longer control. But we need to be able to pedagogically acknowledge this point and mull over it without evading the consideration of a runaway condition under a false assurance of benignness. The desire for control has unleashed in civilization something that is uncontrollable—the irrepressible urge to reveal or setting up the world as a mode of challenging to which humans must incessantly respond. Thus, no adequate humanistic explanation of technology is possible, for  Ibid., p. 21.

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technohumanism functions within the technological relation itself. In other words, technohumanism cannot give unbiased self-description; it must go by what it has reflexively generated within the relation. To put it in the language of systems theory, it is impossible for a sub-set of a system to give a full description of itself; the more intense the effort, the more the inconsistencies or aporias. Only if we make the singular effort and shift our gaze again to the mode of presencing of phenomena can we understand something of this relation. But why worry about this specifically here? The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve. “To start upon a way” means “to send” in our ordinary language. We shall call that sending-that-gathers [versammelde Schicken] which first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining [Geschick]. It is from out of this destining that the essence of all history [Geschichte] is determined. History is neither simply the object of written chronicle nor simply the fulfillment of human activity. That activity first becomes history as something destined. And it is only the destining into objectifying representation that makes the historical accessible as an object for historiography, i.e., for a science, and on this basis makes possible the current equating of the historical with that which is chronicled.14

Since it can no longer see itself from outside the enframing, technohumanism, once started on its way, remains caught up in the vortex of bringing forth as a kind of destiny. This “destining” then becomes responsible for creating history. The humanist history of which we are so proud is not simply a description of some objective unfolding that just happens. The belief within humanism is that we are interacting with the world, and this interaction brings about independent events of history. But in reality, it is a history created by activities within the enframing and the destining. By itself, presencing cannot be chronicled—it is too unbridled, random, and escapes representation. It is destining that makes it possible to create a historical narrative through objectification. This temporal eventalization is central to history. The art and science of historiography depends on the objectifying representation that makes itself accessible through a mode of ordering that appears as a temporal succession of events. It is this ordering that makes written history possible, a humanist selection out of the million things that are coming to be and disappearing.  Ibid., p. 24.

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When we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim. The essence of technology lies in Enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing. Placed between these possibilities, man is endangered from out of destining. The destining of revealing is as such, in every one of its modes, and therefore necessarily, danger.15

When we momentarily take our gaze away from history and the destining, and ask a question about the essence of technohumanism, we find ourselves in a strange place. We cannot comprehend humanism from within humanism. That much is already obvious. So, what is to be done? There is a freedom necessary from where to look, to observe. But this freedom is blocked because we draw our standards from the unquestioned, all-consuming pressure of revealing. Humans continually push toward finding the essence of things, but in the very act of this pursuit the essence moves further away, because we know of only one way, to the exclusion of all else. The more we move toward it from the compass of our own enframing, the more it withdraws from us. Technohumanism thus becomes a danger—we become desperate in our pursuit of unconcealment, but ordering only brings us to the brink of things, and nothing beyond— nothing of the order of essence is revealed. We need to belong to the unconcealment in some organic manner, but our efforts leave us alienated from its essence as well as from our own essence. The very process of our searching imposes an impossible limit. Just as people once had a hard time imagining why the heavenly bodies don’t fall on top of each other—for our planetary experience has ingrained in us the idea of “falling,” our average experience makes us believe that by disembowelling nature, or going from object to objectlessness (mass to energy, etc.), we are moving closer to the source of phenomena (fundamental particle, etc.). It never occurs to us to imagine that this could be an illusion, because our theories seem to fit and work at one level, but they never bring us any closer to the  Ibid., p. 26.

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source. Thus, the will-to-truth urges us ever onward within a particular destining, forcing upon society the consequences of this single-track thinking that merely generates new scenarios of object realization. When destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence … The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.16

Everywhere man looks, he finds the world transformed in his own image as though he were in a hall of mirrors—a thousand reflections reflecting human intentions, predilections, and proclivities. Buildings, towns, ports, cities, highways, airports, reactors, electronic communications, satellites, and countless other apparatuses covering the planet, all emanate such a peculiar all-absorbing humanness that we feel we are close to our essence. But nothing could be further from the truth. For this attitude had been leveraged by means of each accomplishment ever so thoroughly that whichever way one looked one saw a single dominant reality—the triumph of techne. Who could dare doubt it? And if you dared, you were seen as a naysayer. With each additional triumph, technohumanism becomes ever more the process of excluding all other ways of revealing and relating to the world except the instrumental. Within a destiny produced by endless material conquest, man begins to feel as though he were the king of this world. Everything he meets, seems to exist solely  Ibid., pp. 27–28.

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for his manipulation. This is the real danger. One must not misunderstand and think that it is being claimed that technology or technological things are dangerous. Who can deny that tools or travel is a good thing? What is dangerous is the manner in which humans forget their own essence and become overwhelmed by technological destining. The true danger does not lie in apparatuses or their use. The real danger is in the delusion produced by a dangerous mix-up between the momentum of technological reality and the species-being, precluding all debate. And as with all hubris, the extraordinary success spells its own doom, builds the walls of its own sarcophagus. Turning next to Nietzsche, whose ideas formed a major reference point for Heidegger, we find a position in which humans are not some sovereign finished product but an ongoing experiment in nature’s laboratory, and consequently humanism as nothing but a peculiar form of superstition. We find Nietzsche urging us to reject all accumulated narratives past and present about ourselves, inviting us to lead the experimental life. The experimental existence is aimed at recuperation of primal health rather than repeating tired old patterns, at sensing creative plenitude rather than the superfluity of homespun palliatives, and at producing abundant life rather than living within the narrowness of received opinion. In an extraordinary passage worth quoting at length, the philosopher lays out in detail the sudden lifting of a great burden of tradition at the core of which lies humanism and humanistic fallacies. The great liberation comes for those who are unfettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the soul is all at once convulsed, torn lose, it itself does not what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command, a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames in all its senses. … A sudden lightning bolt of contempt for all it had hitherto treasured, and a volcanically erupting desire for strange places, estrangements, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred of love, perhaps a desecrating blow at what it formerly worshipped perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it. … Solitude encircles and embraces him, ever more threatening, suffocating, heart-tightening, that terrible goddess mater saeva cupidinum. … From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of experiment, it is a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought—to that inner spaciousness

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which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally.17

In the last analysis, the human is nothing but a collage produced through history—and humanism nothing but a selective appropriation— and yet the power of that image has held us in thrall for centuries and now requires a will-to-health that might yet power us to a recovery and a recuperation. It is now time to disenthrall ourselves of this composite image. The waking up from the long night of humanism requires a sudden “lightning bolt,” and might involve a period of convalescence, which is where re-education or a posthumanist education comes in. It will require all our efforts to come out of the deceptions and contradictions that we have created and in which we have become entangled today. All that with which we had associated in the past now drops away, leaving us with no certitudes. We’ll begin by having to live experimentally, not in the sense of a superficial flirting with this or that, with this lifestyle or that, with this choice or that. Instead, experimental life requires a re-examination of fundamentals such as our distribution of energies, our construction of morals, our modes of languaging, our cognitive maps, our assembly of values, our ecological relations, our ontological beliefs, and so on, which then requires us to act upon those insights gained. We have to ultimately gain mastery over those very things that ruled us till now. Freedom is nothing but the gaining of “inner spaciousness” that affords us the possibility of living experimentally. Also, experimental living slowly demolishes habit and the false sense of constancy and complacency. All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, even certain political arrangements, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become. [It is absurd to think] that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cogni17  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, Transl. R.  J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7–8.

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tion. … The whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of man of the last four millennia as the eternal man. But everything has become, and there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. What is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.18

The lazy and immodest manner of humanism takes the current form of the species as perpetual, as though humankind had always been so and as though it were something sovereign and not an evolving composite (like everything else in the galaxy). Humanity thus becomes the measure of all things, as it is taken as the standard and a fixed point of reference amidst universal change. This is a great blunder from which even philosophers have not been able to escape. What happens as a result is quite evident. The whole world, temporally and spatially, is reduced to our scale, and things, events, and attainments are magnified or diminished accordingly. We begin to confuse our perception of the “world” with reality itself. This would not matter so much if humans did not possess powers of abstraction (e.g., language) and organization (e.g., institutions). Once codified and institutionalized, it becomes difficult to see and acknowledge that we are dealing largely with our own shadows. Humanity has cast its long shadow on the world and for long begun to believe that the cast shadow is the true picture of the world. For a while, the isolated picture coincides with the world leading to certain affirmations. But the difficulty with this view is that sooner or later the world comes out of the shadows and begins to behave very differently leaving us in tatters. The knowledge of the world remains intact, but the world itself emerges from a different aperture than the human knowledge which surrounds it. But long before that happens, and even more notably, the mistaken view breeds inner contradictions that whittle away at life and make us settle at lower and lower levels of existence. It bleeds us of passion and the possibility of a surge of life. A new education is needed that can think apart from knowing, a form of learning that is essentially free of the current forms of knowing. An education in thinking in the midst of the sciences is part of preparatory thinking and its fulfillment. To find the suitable form for this, so that such education in thinking does not fall victim to a confusion with research and erudition, is the hard thing. This objective is in danger, then, above all when thinking is simultaneously and continually under the obligation of first find-

 Ibid., p. 16.

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ing its own abode. To think in the midst of the sciences means to pass near them without disdaining them. We do not know what possibilities the destining of Western history holds in store for our people and the West. Moreover, the external shaping and ordering of those possibilities is not primarily what is needed. It is important only that learners in thinking should share in learning and, at the same time, sharing in teaching after their manner, should remain on the way and be there at the right moment.19

An education in thinking must not fall into the trap of conventional learnedness or become victim to existing forms of scholasticism: it is not about thinking of things or concepts and their relations. It is rather about thinking itself and what it means to think. What is this thinking that is not about things? Metathinking involves observing and understanding modes of contraction and expansion, speed and retardation, expression and silence, dullness and excitation, spatiality and temporality, rhythm and arrhythmia, tension and relaxation, difference and repetition, association and dissociation, in other words, everything inherent in the process of thinking. That is to say, here we are thinking about thinking itself and not thinking about something. A pedagogy of thinking does not deny knowledge, but takes a tangential path to it, being always in a state of preparedness to receive whatever is revealed to it in the movement of thought. As it is not concerned with the content of thinking, but rather with the immediacy of thinking itself, the teacher-learner ensemble must ever be present at the edge of thought and not be held behind by content. It must leave everything behind, in order to be fully present to whatever consequences are brought upon it by destiny. Humanist education, unfortunately, knows nothing of all this, as it is obsessed by its own objectivist projections that it takes to be an independent world, and studies it as some autonomous reality. This naïveté is a kind of unconscious nihilism, which makes the ontological recede from us. [If] the essence of nihilism lies in history, so that the truth of Being remains wanting in the appearing of whatever is as such, in its entirety, and if, ­accordingly, Nothing is befalling Being and its truth, then metaphysics as the history of the truth of what is as such, is, in its essence, nihilism. If, finally, metaphysics is the historical ground of the world history that is being determined by Europe and the West, then that world history is, in an entirely different sense, nihilistic. Thought from out of the destining of Being, the  Heidegger, op. cit., p. 56.

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nihil in “nihilism” means that Nothing is befalling Being. Being is not coming into the light of its own essence. In the appearing of whatever is as such, Being itself remains wanting. The truth of Being falls from memory. It remains forgotten. Thus nihilism would be in its essence a history that runs its course along with Being itself. It would lie in Being’s own essence, then, that Being remain unthought because it withdraws. Being itself withdraws into its truth.20

Within humanism, metaphysics is the history of metaphysics, and nothing else. What is meant by it is that the human is without a being—there is no reference to being within humanism, and hence metaphysics is emptied of anything real. It remains of historical interest and nothing else. The “darkness” of being is an essential anterior side to the “light” of mental consciousness of which no account is taken in our self-understanding. Emptied of being, humanism loses the key counter-narrative that could provide a check on its own reflexive account of the world. The un-­mediated being withdraws leaving humans with a second-order reality of memories, representations, interpretations, and projections. No further mention is made of an immediate (non-mediated) reality, or the sense of being, and it eventually drops away from cultural memory. What remains is a saturated blandness of the world-turned-into-image. The interweaving of two events, which for the modern age is decisive—the world transformed into picture and man into subjectum—throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history, an event that at first glance seems almost absurd. Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. It would have been just as impossible for a humanism to have gained currency in the great age of the Greeks as it would have been impossible to have had anything like a world picture in that age. Humanism, therefore, in the more strict historiographical sense, is nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The name “anthropology” as used here does not mean just some investigation of man by a natural science. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within Christian theology of man created, fallen, and redeemed. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man  Ibid., pp. 109–110.

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which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man.21

What does it mean for the world to be reduced to a picture? It means it is seen entirely in terms of the accumulated historical details and perceived as exclusively composed of the sensible. This mental schema or composition or representation is taken to be the world, and all further dealings with and in the world are determined by this picture. Once the world is turned into image or picture, this reciprocally determines the subject—the stronger the picture gets, the more entrenched becomes the subject. The latter is reflected in the disparate and myriad objects of the world—object and subject thus mutually determine each other. The point of becoming or of emergence is lost; the becoming of being is absent from this moment on. The ancients including the Egyptians or the Greeks did not have this attitude. They did not attempt to reduce the world to a picture, as this or that. The human-divine interchanges informed their world, and their skirmishes, wars, conquests, and defeats did not amount to “enframing” the world. In other words, they did not pretend to know all about the world or be able to create a totalizing mental picture of it. The oracular world was still available through which the Unknown spoke from time to time. There was still room for wisdom that was not knowledge-based or picture-­ based. But once we eliminate wisdom—the direct sense of being—from the scene, everything gets reduced to a kind of “anthropology” or the world interpreted from the standpoint of the human alone. Anthropology here does not signify the study of the human, but rather a purely humanistic way of evaluating the world. But what other way of evaluating the world could there be? It is not so much a question of other ways of evaluating the world; rather, it is a question of evaluation itself. An example comes to mind. In mainstream media there has been talk of the “God particle.” Of course, to confer on the Higgs boson particle that gaudy nomenclature is nothing short of sensationalism, and scientists know that. But there is more to it than just common luridness. The search-and-find model of the venture itself can perhaps be traced to childhood games of hide-and-seek. Essence apparently “hides” inside things—god knows why—and we have to drag it out apparently by bombarding it with whatever it takes, deep inside abandoned mines, etc. This is anthropology at its most colorful, and the  Ibid., p. 133.

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anthropological view of the world. In psychological parlance it is also called phantasy and projection. This is not to say that one must not to go after the Higgs boson, but to object to its characterization as ontological essence. In history, there is a point at which the doctrine of “man” emerges which explains and interprets whatever is, in its entirety, from the techno-­ poietic projections of its own doctrine. Michel Foucault has written so very picturesquely on this: [The] transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.22

The category called “man” was once found only in relation to that which was non-man, that is, other, often elevated, categories of beings, such as spirits, divinities, etc. Man as an objective, stand-alone category is of fairly recent invention. And just as it has come into being through certain arrangements of knowledge, it could just as easily disappear with a change in the arrangement of the same. What this essentially means is that “man” floats on his reflexive knowledge of himself and nothing more; the category would evaporate if the attendant concepts vanished. Further, although “post” often implies a temporal order of succession, we must not understand posthumanism as some kind of historical progression that somehow follows humanism in time. This is not some temporal or sequential phenomenon as understood here—Spinoza in the seventeenth century was a posthumanist thinker according to the view adopted here. So, this is not about “pre” or “post” in the usual sense, but rather, from the point of view of this book, posthumanism indicates a break in the way thought itself thinks. This is in line with the observation made by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism?  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Italics mine.

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What this means is that when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates (though that is where the conversation usually begins and, all too often, ends); rather, I will insist that we are also talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges. … But what is needed here, as Rutsky rightly points out, is the recognition that “any notion of the posthuman that is to be more than merely an extension of the human, that is to move beyond the dialectic of control and lack of control, superhuman and inhuman, must be premised upon a mutation that is ongoing and immanent,” and this means that to become posthuman means to participate in—and find a mode of thought adequate to—“processes which can never be entirely reduced to patterns or standards, codes or information.”23

Humanism begins with the concretization of the constituting subject— the so-called individual who is supposedly behind an action or perception. It is not enough to deconstruct this subject for that would merely be an advance on humanism itself. The protocols and methods of humanism must certainly be transcended, but posthumanism must do much more if it is truly to make a break with humanism. It must bring about a change in the very practice and language of thought. In other words, what is needed is an order of mutation that is immanent. Posthumanism cannot just be a trope or a discourse, for that would reduce it to protocols, standards, and codes. To become posthuman would require intense participation in a mutative function that can challenge and overthrow the cultural dispositions and thought-habits of humanism. Merely as a pedagogic exercise, let us think of the systems approach. The latter is a thought-practice that can help us overthrow conventional modes of thinking. To begin with, systems perspective does not engage with the universals and ideals with which the humanist worldview constructs itself. There are, for instance, no reference to actors, achievements, morality, justice, nor is there engagement with the usual hierarchies of values and standards, ways of characterizing social meaning or picturizing society, and other historical dross accumulated through the ages that have become sanctified by the piety of thought. Instead, systems theoretical perspective revolves around two basic elements—difference and 23  Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. xvi–xvii.

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communication, through which systems build up their complexity and distinguish themselves from their surroundings. Systems approach begins with difference—namely, the cornerstone postulate of the difference between system and environment, and the corollary assumption that the environment of any system is always already of overwhelmingly greater complexity than the system itself. Since it is obviously impossible for any system to establish point-for-point correspondences between itself and its environment, systems thus handle the problem of overwhelming environmental complexity by reducing it in terms of the selectivity made available by the system’s self-referential code; as Luhmann puts it, “The system’s inferiority in complexity must be counter-balanced by strategies of selection.” “Complexity, in this sense,” he continues, “means being forced to select,” and thus, in his winning formulation, “only complexity can reduce complexity.” Under pressure to adapt to a complex and changing environment, systems increase their selectivity—they make their environmental filters more finely woven, if you like—by building up their own internal complexity by means of self-referential closure and the reentry of the system/environment distinction within the system itself in a process of internal differentiation.24

What is a difference? Gregory Bateson, the biologist and systems theorist, once responded to this question by saying, difference is that which makes a difference. One perhaps cannot get closer than that to this fundamental notion. We speak all the time about differences, but when it comes to explaining the fundamental unit of difference, we are at a loss. We can tell when there is a difference, but where exactly does the difference reside? The basic unit of analysis in systems theoretical framework is this ubiquitous but slippery notion of difference. A system can be identified by a distinction (difference) between itself and the environment. When a difference breaks away from the totality of the environment—say a pulse of something enters another thing whatever that might be—it might trigger further differentiation. Eventually it develops a self-referential code for further selection and replication from the vastly complex environment. This is neither progress nor regress, neither evolution nor devolution, neither this nor that, but simply a change whose merits cannot be evaluated from any external viewpoint because there is no external viewpoint.

 Ibid., p. 14.

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This self-referential closure, however, does not indicate solipsism, idealism, or isolation but is instead crucial to understanding a fundamental principle I will return to throughout these pages, the principle of what I call “openness from closure.” It “does not contradict the system’s openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system.” And this is why, Luhmann writes, “self-reference is in itself nothing bad, forbidden, or to be avoided”; indeed, it “points directly to system formation” because systems “can become complex only if they succeed in solving this problem and thus in de-­ paradoxicalizing themselves.25

Thus a system is born—by means of self-enclosure or a gradual distinction from the surrounding and the development of codes for maintenance of that distinction. The latter must not be understood as some kind of isolating or cutting off from the surrounding. Without a self-referential code and self-enclosure there cannot be an identifiable entity—in order to be a tree, the latter must distinguish itself from the surrounding and maintain that complex distinction by further internal differentiation, for example, trunk, root, canopy, etc., within each of which further differentiation occurs, and so on. Systems must at the same time maintain their distinction from the environment and yet must be able to connect to the environment at various points in order to make selections. This is akin to a paradox, but a viable system must rise above this paradoxicality by continually adapting—the adaptive becoming in complexity is able to deal with the immense variability of the environment in order to draw from it the necessary energy to maintain itself (i.e., distinctions). The advantage of systems approach over humanist thinking is that there is no overt cultural baggage to interfere with fresh ways of looking. We can learn to look without the image. By erasing the picture of the implicit Kantian subject, systems thinking bypasses the unnecessary assumptions of the humanist project and narrative. It replaces the transcendental subject and its synthetic agenthood by the notion of communication. There is communication between communication, period. Only communication communicates, as Luhmann once put it. This communication is not the usual idea of communication between persons or individuals, but, for example, the systemic communication between cells, neurons, skins, organs, which are  Ibid., p. 15.

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themselves composed of communications, and so on, ever downward and upward. There is no necessity of assuming a sovereign agent behind communication. It brings us directly to our point of emergence, to the becoming of being without ado. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s position is well worth mentioning here. In his radical empiricism, Deleuze removed the subject from its transcendental position as the synthesizing, unifying agent of judgement who recognizes (identifies) and orders the world using a priori categories and concepts, thereby knowing it, producing it as an object of knowledge. Deleuze insisted that the empirical has to be taken into account in all its peculiarities not as it appears for-us but as it is for-itself in its difference, with no mediation by the human. Deleuze (1966/1991a) believed we must go beyond the human condition, which is the ‘meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves.’ His focus then is on the difference of the empirical. ‘Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse’ (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 28). In this way, Deleuze’s philosophy is a philosophy of difference. In his transcendental empiricism, the given is not the origin but that which must be actualized, made. Here, human consciousness is removed from the dominant position of intentionality which can recognize an always already pre-given essence.26

The reference above is to the Spinozist idea that humans (like anything else) are nothing but ill-understood composites or amalgamates. Traditional empiricism is premised on a conscious human subject who has access to reliable experience as the origin and justification of knowledge. But epistemology is not the concern of radical empiricism. Rather, it is a movement in the plane of immanence that is its subject. Posthumanism does not require the assumption of human consciousness or intentionality. Each composite or configuration of tensions, when prompted by its own alignments, excites or communicates with other composites in a field. Contrary to humanism, posthumanism is not primarily concerned with knowledge, its production, or justification. This is an exceedingly important distinction when it comes to education. But if not the production of 26  Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, “Rethinking the Empirical in the Posthuman,” In Carol A. Taylor & Christina Hughes (Eds.). Posthuman Research Practices in Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 30.

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knowledge, what then is the principal concern of posthumanism? It is concerned with ontological relations and phenomenological action of forces, energy, synergy, transfer, conservation, dissipation, difference, communication, intersection, speed, inflection, retardation, tension, emergence, and so on, in an immanent field that too is not presumed to preexist, but is in the process of becoming. It is concerned with the elasticity and plasticity of bodies and what they can do, rather than what the mind can recognize and remember. I believe there is much ‘old’ work to read (e.g., Spinoza, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, Pierce, Whitehead, James) and much prior material (especially about conventional empirical research methodologies) to distance ourselves from if we want to engage new material, new empirical, posthuman work after the ontological turn. My point here is that we will be unable to think the posthuman and to invent posthuman research practices as long as we continue to employ conventional empirical research methodologies grounded in the cogito whose purpose is knowledge production. I believe we will have to resist the idea of methodology itself, which will prevent us from producing the new that is everywhere, immanent and inexhaustible, that we might actualize. To move into a different image of thought, I repeat that I believe we need new concepts and new conceptual practices—not new methodologies and their knowledge practices—to do this new work that is not interested in recognizing conventional epistemic objects but in the ‘concrete richness of the sensible’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977/1987, p.  54) as well as in the encounters of events ‘in the context of the problem whose conditions they determine’ (Deleuze, 1969/1990, p. 54).27

It is clear that we need a different range of thought, a new conceptual practice that leads us directly to the inexhaustible phenomenological richness of the sensible, from which will arise new capabilities, novel awareness, and fresh discernments. Posthumanism is not historical or temporal succession; we have had great nonhumanist thinkers in Spinoza, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, and others who were untimely sages, injecting nonhumanist insights into the advancing era of humanism. It is important that an adequate hermeneutic effort be made to grasp these thinkers and the ground that they laid for us. It would be foolish not to take into account what has already been disclosed and instead rush ahead in search of the new.

 Ibid., pp. 33–34.

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Simultaneously, we have to come out of the web and delusion of present-­day liberal humanist ideas in research methodology as well as pedagogical approaches that for ages have held sway. In other words, we have to be prepared to throw away the baby with the bath water, and this will rattle many. We cannot, for instance, retain the idea of progressivism or of human rights, etc., all humanist inventions, and yet embrace posthumanism. This is a problem that has plagued posthumanist discourses throughout. “Facing this dilemma, Rosi Braidotti (2013, p. 29) concludes that, if it is to be ‘progressive’, posthumanism cannot escape the foundational goals of humanism entirely. In her view it remains committed to human needs and perceptual scales, social justice and a notion of human ‘becoming’. It therefore retains a notion of human advancement, at least in so far as it aligns to a ‘world with us’ direction of enquiry.”28 This is precisely the kind of intellectual doublespeak we must learn to avoid. We want to be identified as “progressive” and maintain human advancement—the core impulse of enlightenment thought at the base of which is the illusory subject and the delusory world-picture—and at the same time we want posthuman possibilities to arise in us. This is obviously impossible; we are merely attached to being pious and wish to be seen as embracing the right politics. The intellectual must not attempt to cover his or her rear by embracing contradictory ideas in order to avoid criticism. Posthumanism does not have to be progressive or regressive or anything like that. Ontology has its own cartography, its own immanent compass. So-called humans do not have to direct posthumanism; they merely have to be true to the diverse ways of configuring existence without positing the human at the center. Those who practice intellectual mélange are not able to see that new forms of thought may bring about superior forms of inter-livability without the reentry of bankrupt ideals of morality, equality, social justice, etc., however hard-won they might seem at this point. What we are saying is that although discourses such as postmodernism, post-structuralism, and feminisms have labored to dislocate and subvert some of the foundational myths of humanism, this theorizing has not sufficiently displaced the human as the agentive factor on whom emancipation rests. A ­perceptual change of this magnitude needs work at each existential level, and not just at the level of language. We know that there is no easy or single progressive or temporal line running from humanism to posthumanist thinking. Hence, the question  Luke Bennett, “Thinking Like a Brick,” In Carol Taylor et al. op. cit., p. 61.

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arises: how does one proceed to conceptualize about curriculum and construct pedagogical concept-practices based on completely different nonhumanist thinking? What can thought do to square up to this new challenge to create a point of departure? If we suspend our belief in a human being who should know what to do before [s/he] does it and if we can be ‘realistic about the new forces not already contained in our projects and programs and the ways of thinking that accompany them’ (Rajchman, 2000, p. 7), we might move towards the ‘new’ that is everywhere. In the posthuman, life is no longer personal. As we help each other think about that startling claim, we must trust that something will come out, the ‘nonthought within thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 59) that will enable new practices and new lives. Whether and how inquiry (not methodology) figures in that work is not, I believe, our primary concern at this time. ‘First, it is necessary to read’ (Lacan, as cited in Ulmer, 1985). I suspect it may take a great deal of reading to get a concept like transcendental empiricism—an empiricism adequate to the posthuman—in our bones so that we can think differently about the nature of being, the posthuman and people yet to come. Appropriate practices will follow as we do the next thing the concept enables.29

Four major pedagogic points emerge out of the above passage. First, there is the reference to the “new that is everywhere.” One does not have to search for the new. We only have to jettison our old habits of looking and thinking to discover that the new is always already staring at us in the face. The second point is that “life is no longer personal.” In posthumanism, we are the dividual rather than the individual. There are no individuals, only differences that generate further differences in a disjunctive continuum. There is a continuity of communication through apparent separation. In fact, the separation is itself an act of communication in a larger field with differences on both sides of the distinction. Hence, life is transpersonal rather than personal, and the personal is only a particular kind of superstition. Third, there is a reference to the unthought within thought. If the fundamental unit of analysis may be thought of as difference, then within what we know as thinking there must be an infinite potential for further differentiation (new thinking) at any moment. Finally, radical empiricism must enter deep into our bones by means of  Elizabeth Adams, op. cit., p. 34.

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hermeneutic preparation, and only then practices that are adequate to this framework can emerge. Merely paying lip-service to it will not change our thinking or intellectual practices to any significant extent. We have to make constant effort to retranslate our lives and practices in terms of a nonhumanist framework. What do I look like from an immanent perspective? That’s the question we need to be asking, and not “what does society make of me?” From within, what am I but a bundle of nerves and changing apprehensions? There is no inside picture of the subjectum, only a series of fluctuating states—only when the inconsistent bundle stands in front of a mirror does it all coalesce into a consistent image that becomes a humanist trap. We have to learn the art of getting out of this subjectum and forming a new immanent cartography. An example will serve us well here. Although not explicitly based in systems theoretical thinking, quite recently I drew up the cartographic underpinning of a curriculum approach in an axiomatic form for internal discussion by our faculty, which I reproduce below. It has the beginnings of a form of thought that breaks from conventional curriculum thinking that is mired in humanism, or the picture-and-subjectum projection and introjection of reality mentioned earlier. It also rejects the usual dichotomy between value-based ideas and science-based ideas of education. The presented artifact has an overt geometricity in order to rid it of this cultural baggage as far as possible.

curriculum cartograPhy Part I • Observable phenomena are discontinuous flashes in the natural laboratory (like lightning in a night sky). • No two flashes are identical (as phenomena, I’m not the same as yesterday or as in the last hour, to give an example). • Within this anarchy of non-identity, it is possible to describe useful patterns (by means of retardation of behavior, thought, observation, etc.). • These “patterns” become food for thought, and hence the foundations of formal curriculum (obviously, no superposition of pattern would imply no curriculum either). • The curriculum must not be so formulaic and structured as to lose all connection with the background phenomena; at the same time, it must not be so loose as to lose all patterning significance.

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• Thus, wholesome curriculum becomes a tight-rope walk between structure and creativity (or between order and surprise). • For the teacher as well as the student, curriculum is a dialectic between system and environment (we take things from the outside and make meaning for ourselves, and we take things from ourselves and test them against the outer). • The worth of curriculum lies in its use as a tool for releasing innate organizing powers of the individual (just as atmospheric gas or organic tissue in the path of photons make visible light manifest). • In other words, curriculum is a pre-meditated obstruction in the path of free-flowing energies. • Free-flowing energies generally move toward entropy (increased randomness as per the second law of thermodynamics) • Curriculum must help provide a surge in the opposite direction, that is, toward negentropy or complexity, or an inexplicable superior organization of energies that is the character of complex beings. • In pragmatic terms, it means curriculum must work incessantly toward self-recovery of the student as well as the teacher even as it does formal things. • To begin with, such a dual perspective must be evident in our attitudes and language, and generate an aesthetic aptitude for the above. • In the final analysis, the context is everything.

Part II In Part I, reference was made to the term “self-recovery.” In Part II this is elaborated upon. • The composite organism is a composite (everything in this world is made up of other things, which are made up of still other things, etc.). • When composites live in darkness about their composition, there is alienation (everything that denies its self-nature must live in disaffection). • Self-recovery means understanding one’s composition in relation to the world (the relationship between the system and the environment). • This composition cannot be understood without the mirror of the world (world relations act as mirrors for understanding composite natures).

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• Curriculum in its most humble form mediates between the organism and the world (it helps us understand the composed nature of the world as well as ourselves). • Curriculum at its best is an organic bridge between the self and the world. (the evolving dynamic between the self and the world is constitutive of the curriculum). • All reflexive organisms (higher composites) contain innate possibilities of reorganization (this is what we might call becoming sensitively educated). • Curriculum at its most intense allows the entity to creatively recompose itself (the greatest thing about a composite is the possibility of creative recomposition). • Dissipative structures must work reflexively toward overcoming dissipation (there is no resting point in the world, as its very nature is movement). • Overcoming dissipation means living at the edge of emerging life. (evolutionary life is never still but always emergent). • Curriculum, which literally means running the course (of life), takes us to this edge of becoming (understanding, insight, creative work, intuitive growth, all can help in this process).

Part III In Part III of this series of communications I shall focus on the word “composite” mentioned in Part II, which has such a vital role to play in curriculum thinking. • Composite means compounded of inferior or less complex elements (we can also use terms like aggregate for description). • Composites require a binding energy by means of which the elements adhere (even the so-called elements have their own binding energy). • The binding energy coincides with the fixed point around which the elements of the composite vibrate (for a mathematical representation, see Brouwer’s fixed point theorem: for each function f, there is a point x for which f(x)=x). • Composites cannot have direct access to their own binding energy (obviously, for it preexists them).

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• Higher composites or aggregates can intuit that there is a force field or binding energy holding them together (they can guess this from the reverse order, that is, from decomposition or death). • From this they sense that there is a superior order of things or systems that are worth investigating (and not just random occurrences). • From this investigation emerges patterns that connect (our cognitive apparatuses are highly tuned to patterns). • Curriculum establishes itself once there are sufficient number of interesting patterns to study. • The study of patterns leads back to the entity and the legitimate question “What am I?” (or, “what kind of a pattern am I?”) • Without spiritualizing this question, we can treat it as a systems-­ topological issue (it also provides the aesthetic dimension of curriculum). • The more the connections established with the environment (through patterns that connect), the more intense and patterned is the activity of the complex entity. • The more intense and rhythmic the activity, the more disciplined energy it generates (the less energy dissipated). • The less dissipation of energy, the greater the “luminosity” (meaningful clarity). • The ultimate purpose of curriculum is therefore intensifying patterns and rhythms in order to conserve energy. It is clear from the above that the entry point into education is different than the usual teacher-student-curriculum-assessment way of thinking. There is no mention of teacher and student, for example, not in the way of a deliberate act of suppression, but in a way in which there is a natural absence of those categories. There are only compositions and recompositions, from moment to moment, from day to day, and from situation to situation. A different narrative is being erected in which the composites and elements become differently aligned without the usual oppositions. Gardner’s argument that ‘bridging the gap’ between the neurosciences and education is impossible, since education is a value-based discipline and the neurosciences are not, seems only to confuse the discussion. Rather, what we can learn from this preliminary mapping exercise is that all disciplines and sciences are based on ontological underpinnings which are also cultural and value-based. And so are the views of a Cartesian dualism and an organic

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monism, as well as the claimed division between them (Colebrook, 2014). What the methodology of cartography mapping can help us do is to move away from seeking any kind of external justification. Instead, we should be engaged in the practice of what Colebrook (2008) talks about as an internal pragmatics, spotting lines that make an offshoot or experimenting by enacting queering ruptures that might make us think differently. What we need is, in fact, as Stengers puts it, with references to Haraway (2008), new or ‘other kinds of narratives, narratives that populate our worlds and imaginations in a different way’ (2007, p. 4).30

All disciplines are in the end mappings or cartographies of difference. These differences are differently clustered, producing very different maps of the world. But in the final analysis these are nothing other than communicable differences, and the higher the differentiation the greater the pragmatic reach of the communication. Our perspective in developing these alternate mappings must be an immanent one, or anchored in “internal pragmatics,” rather than rooted in the external picture. All the usual dichotomies and dualisms arising out of a pictorial representation of the world are thus dissolved. By such dissolution, we are brought to the edge of becoming where the becoming is not human becoming or nonhuman becoming but simply becoming. Once our thinking is unmoored from the humanist baggage that tries to preserve the old universals and protocols, we are in a fresh trajectory of becoming that does not have external reference points. In other words, we do not judge from some arbitrary observation perch whether “we” (what is this “we”?) are advancing or progressing, etc. There is no species-specific picture, or language of progressivism, or ideal of advancement attendant here. Differences and their combinations do not advance or progress in the humanist sense; they produce more differentiation and new evolutionary trajectories, nothing more and nothing less. It is from these new and uniquely evolving trajectories that we gain freedom from the “we.” Our sentiments are as deadly in keeping us from freedom as any tyrannical autocrat hell bent on keeping us chained to an ideology. There has been a tendency in discussion of posthumanism within educational research to figure posthumanism as optimistic—as aligned to a desire for human advancement (even though some such posthumanists, like Rosi 30   Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, “Deleuzo-Guattarian Rhizomatics,” In Carol A.  Taylor, op. cit., p. 52.

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Braidotti (2013), have felt the need to distinguish their progressivism from that encapsulated in the Enlightenment’s formulation of humanism, with its linear view of what progress and human subjectivity should look like). But there are other—more nihilistic—formulations of posthumanism that rarely get a mention within an educational context. … hovering sometimes within the outer fringes of an ecologically inspired posthumanism is a latent human self-loathing, one which at times appears to yearn for a ‘world without us’, an implicit desire to eradicate the human, which echoes the antihuman loathing of Friedrich Nietzsche’s aetiology: ‘The earth has a skin; and this skin has diseases and one of them is man’ (2003, p. 153). This is a bleak ‘disanthropy’ (Garrard, 2012), traceable in various intensities to the ‘apocalyptic affect’ Peter Gratton (2014, p. 52) finds in the work of philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier whose speculative realism is fuelled by visions of the insignificance of humanity. These works resonate with the post-apocalyptic work of writers such as Alan Weisman, whose 2008 book, The World without Us, gives us an account of how the world might fare if humankind were to suddenly disappear.31

There is nothing specifically optimistic or pessimistic about posthumanism; these attributions may be seen as inventions of humanistic thinking. Multi-sided ontological review of existence within posthumanist thought leads to a full facing-up-to-life with all its inconstancy and uncertainty, without inventing sentimental props or references to any external civilizational calculus. Humanist thought, on the other hand, revels in oppositions, hierarchies, and dualities—it sets up this-versus-that in an attempt to create artificial significance (progress, hedonism, etc.) in an apparently indifferent world. Once we understand the nature of our composites and learn to look from within our composite natures without the help of pictures and images, we no longer have any use for either self-glorification or self-loathing. The posthumanist, as envisioned in these pages, does not “yearn for a world without us,” nor craves for a world dominated by us. The posthumanist attempts to move with “what is.” There are no contradictions or oppositions or deceptions in what is. Questions such as whether there is a world without us or whether we should be eradicated, etc., simply do not come up. These are various types of mawkish petulance and ressentiment to use a Nietzschean term—a variety of peevish resentments arising from a wrong understanding of ourselves. Complex composites ought not to get carried away by their apparent complexity and begin  Luke Bennett, “Thinking Like a Brick,” Ibid., pp. 59–60.

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inventing presence/absence dichotomies. There is nothing sovereign in this world from the perspective of posthumanism, and the nature of the world shows very clearly that there is no room for a supplementary dimension to reality either. Instead, we must restrain and channelize our psycho-­ kinetic dividends from complexity toward resisting old impulses and habits. The continual identification and resistance is an art the posthumanist has to master. It brings the posthumanist composite to the edge of its own becoming, which is the door to power and creativity and the transcending of pettiness. This brings us to the point where I must say a word or two about approaches to posthumanist research. We have already seen that it is not some new methodology but a diverse non-subject-centered phenomenology that is at stake here: Posthumanism proposes different starting points for educational research and new ways of grasping educational experience than those afforded by humanism. Posthumanism calls into question the essentializing binary between human and nonhuman on which humanism relies; it throws anthropocentrism into doubt along with the categories and identities it underpins. These different starting points are located in a different set of epistemological presumptions about the forms of knowing that produce valuable knowledge about educational experiences, and in different ontological presumptions about the modes of being through which humans and nonhumans inhabit the world. More than that, posthumanist research practices offer a new ethics of engagement for education by including the nonhuman in questions about who matters and what counts in questioning the constitutive role played by humanist dominant paradigms, methodologies and methods … thereby offering a ‘theoretical rapprochement with material realism’ (Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 6) to find new ways to engage with the immanent vitality of matter.32

Some of the major themes of past and current educational research can, for the sake of argument, be put into the following categories, namely, interventionist, theoretic, pragmatic, psychometric, and existential. On the face of it these are very different entry points into educational research, nonetheless they share similar anthropocentric goals and assumptions. 32  Carol A Taylor, “Edu-crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education,” In Carol A. Taylor & Christina Hughes Eds., Posthuman Research Practices in Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 5–6.

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Most of these, for example, assume that education proceeds from the teacher or the text and is more or less assessable by set parameters and procedures. They also share background assumptions of what is worth learning. In other words, “who matters and what counts” are intrinsic in these dominant paradigms of educational research. To give a counter-­ example, there is no reference in these paradigms to an expansion/contraction of the sensory-affective dimension that has no specific humanistic reference point. For instance, if I see a painting and it leaves a lasting impression on me, changing my perceptions, is that educationally significant? Is it measurable? Is it necessarily replicable? These and other questions cannot be typically asked or answered within the dominant paradigms of educational research. However, phenomenology of the senses is one of the important starting points of posthumanist research. Thus, say, the path of radical empiricism in educational research can find a way to engage with the existential élan vital by releasing us into the proximate vitality of matter and reconfiguring our composites away from fixed assumptions and categories. Posthumanism is perhaps best considered as a constellation of different theories, approaches, concepts and practices. It includes (in no particular order): animal studies; ‘new’ material feminism; affect theory; process philosophy; assemblage theory; queer theory; speculative realism; thing theory; actor network theory; the nonhuman; the new empiricism; posthuman disability studies; object-oriented ontology; alien phenomenology; ecological relationality; decolonial and indigenous theories, plus others I don’t know about. Posthumanism in its various incarnations is resolutely interdisciplinary, post-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary, which vastly expands the range and variety of conceptual resources available to educational research. In its current state as an unsettled and unsettling terrain—as an emergent field in flux that is continually concretizing, dispersing, flowing and mutating in unforeseen ways—posthumanism opens ways of researching that seek to undo tired binaries such as theory/practice, body/mind, body/brain, self/other, emotion/reason, human/nature, human/animal, producing instead multiple and heterogeneous knowledge pathways that are radically generative for educational research.33

The greatest thing about posthumanist approach to research is that it cannot be forced to settle down into domesticated conceptual contours  Ibid., p. 7.

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that everyone feels safe with. The neat division between research and life— adhering to one set of existential principles for research and dropping it for another on entering the living room—becomes harder due to the unsettling nature of the new paradigms of thought. To feel one’s way into the new paradigms of thought one has to live them and live with them, and only then they will yield their precious phenomenological knowledge. There is no clear separation here between thinker and thought or between experiencer and experience. All oppositions and dualities are called into question. The inner vitality of life has no intrinsic shape but takes forms of collaborative and performative intensity as the context demands. Let me give a variant of a grand old question: Am “I” primarily body or mind? It is obviously not a worthy question for the following reasons. “I” could never pose the question without the unifying system of a corpus. At the same time, the question could not have been organized without active mental processes. So the implicit duality in the question is the result of the assumptions in the framing of the question rather than anything ontological. Again, let me focus on another standard duality deliberately posed as a personal question: Am I man or animal? The distinction is reflexive or projection/introjection of an activity reflecting on itself, and hence it is ultimately of uncertain character as with all things that rely on self-­ reference. Let me elaborate on the taxonomical distinction involving beings that move. There are two possible image recoveries—one is proximate that I label “man,” and the other is less proximate that I call “animal.” The two orders of representation are only separated by a cognitive distance and nothing that is ontologically significant. All dualities and oppositions can be broken down in this manner to reveal autogenetic pathways for inquiry that do not rely on invented dichotomies. But the problem is more complex than that, and we cannot pretend that we are trying to get away from a homogeneous humanism—that would be too easy and false. There are multiple humanisms with assorted universals and worldviews that hugely complicate matters. [L]ike posthumanism, humanism is and always has been heterogeneous. As Braidotti (2013, pp.  50–51) notes, ‘there are in fact many humanisms’. There are romantic, revolutionary, liberal, secularist, antihumanist humanisms (Davies, 1997); there are intellectualist, spiritualist and metaphysical humanisms (Derrida, 1972); and there are Renaissance, academic, catholic or integral, subjective, naturalistic and religious humanisms (Lamont, 1997), as well as various versions of critical humanism (Plummer, 2012).

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The philosophical foundations of humanism are varied, and some humanisms do away with universalizations and recognize the material, concrete, pragmatic and partial basis of human experience. That humanism, like posthumanism, never was (or is) singular is, according to Braidotti, part of the problem: as soon as we express the desire to ‘overcome humanism’, we very quickly realize how utterly entwined we are within humanism’s affordances and problematics, as feminists and post-structuralists already know. Any dis-­ entangling, therefore, has to be a continuing and incisive critical practice, not one done easily or ‘once and for all’.34

I would even hesitate to call posthumanism a “critical practice,” a phrase continually associated with the humanisms of critical theory and other New Left ideologies. The thought of having to leave critical humanisms behind is a step that might be daunting for some. On what basis would we then condemn the vast cruelty machinery of, say, a Third Reich? But both the Third Reich itself and its various critiques were the products of humanism, were they not? The central appeal of the Third Reich was, ironically, the promise of a pure human race. And although it was the most acutely perverse end of the thing, its reference point was nonetheless rooted in humanism, which also illustrates how this reference point has been deployed to serve twisted and warped doctrines. Attempting to “overcome” humanism is like shadow-boxing. There is really nothing to overcome but our own shadows, which is why it appears so difficult. A sudden retraction of the conventional foggy notions of self and other led by humanist ideology will also make the shadows disappear. Through this retraction, the “I” that remains has different contours and is connected differently to the apparent not-I. The knowledge [that] this ‘I’ produces does not require succour from a system of logical, objective rationalism with its linear and root-based presumptions that the ‘right’ research methodology and methods will disclose the ‘truth’ of the subject under inquiry. Instead, it unpicks the Enlightenment package of teleology, progress and development, operating instead with an idea of knowledge as a network for [] knowing, replacing arborescent, lineage and root-based images of thought with rhizomic modes of knowing characterized by non-linearity, multiplicity, connectivity, dimensions (rather than a pivot), flatness (rather than depth) and ruptures which may (or may not) tie unforeseen things together so that they work. The rhizome as  Ibid., pp. 8–9.

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a-­centred image of thought shifts the focus from knowledge ‘about’, procedures for producing knowledge, and concerns about what knowing ‘is’, to questions about what knowledge does, how it works, and how its effectivity may generate more (not less) of life.35

Here the “I” is not in search of some epistemic truth realizable through “objective” means within a propositional calculus rooted in conventional research methodologies. To put it differently, we are not after cold knowledge, nor are we obsessed with method. Rather, the posthumanist researcher is in search of expanded spaces and networks of knowing that operate to enhance connectivity, mutuality, responsibility, and accountability. We are in search of an intensification of, and addition to, life that is not predicated on systems of exclusion and apriori enframings. Rather, the tumult of “methods” may be associated with shedding, molting, and emergence that push the limits of becoming in unforeseen ways and directions. If conventional methodologies push a question toward closure and conclusiveness, posthumanist approaches move toward an emergent open and an infinitude of possibilities of fresh couplings. Rather than knowledge about things and procedures, this mode of knowing tells us more about the effects of knowledge and what particular modes of knowing might (or might not) achieve. The value of this form of knowing lies not in its verifiability or replicability but in its application toward new becomings. For example, a knowledge about theater writing (playscript) can be the beginning of becoming someone other and seeing things from a completely new perspective. A deep research into such knowledge might release us from the tyranny of the inner psychological contour produced by the “mirror self.” Here the research is not about addition to the corpus of theater knowledge, but what knowledge of theater does to the sense of self in terms of its boundaries and powers of existence. Further, the point of effort is not about a subjectum knowing about an objectified world, but the interconnectivities and the exhumation of the submerged side of things. The ethics of posthumanist research is built into the process of weaving together, in multiple ways, that which was carelessly fragmented. Thinking posthuman ethics, therefore, begins by re-thinking interdependence, by including nonhumans in an ethics of care, by understanding the human always and only in-relation-to nonhumans who are no longer ‘oth Ibid., pp. 10–11.

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ers’ but are, intimately and always, ourselves as the body multiple. Embodying and enacting ethics-in-relation is anxiety-provoking to the extent that it dispenses with the privileged position of human separability and the fantasy of distance it installs. So Barad (2007, p.  394) writes: ‘Responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then’ in an emergent process that is, at one and the same time, the ongoing material co-constitution of the world and an instantiation of practices of mattering (i.e., agential cuts which mean that some bodies count for more than others). Posthuman ethics, from a ‘new’ material feminist perspective, is an ethic of ‘worlding’ and proceeds from the presumption that ethics is not about trying to see the world from inside someone else’s shoes—which presumes individuated bodies. Rather, it means recognizing skin not as a barrier-boundary but as a porous, permeable sensorium of connectivity with/in a universe of dynamic co-­constitutive and differential becomings.36

Humanism emerged by the systematic appropriation of the valued side of dichotomies produced by thought—reason was adopted and the affective was discarded; the mind was privileged, and the body was downplayed; the logical was embraced, and the extra-logical was rejected; the objective was aspired to, whereas the subjective was scorned; progress became god, and the primitive consciousness was abhorred; and so on. By a force of will, the disvalued side of each duality was suppressed and an untenable one-sided reality was constructed by stitching together the preferred sides that attempted the production of an unambiguous artificial homogeneity called the human. The elementary truth that if something presents an obverse side, it must also possess a reverse side, was eliminated from the conversation, which itself says a lot about the powers of mystification that this homogenized promise held. However, the eventuality that the submerged aspects will sooner or later rear their heads in unpredictable fashion is part of a fundamental reality. A deep acknowledgment of this fact makes posthumanism steer clear of the humanist fantasy and its peculiar exclusivist line, embracing instead the entanglements of an embodied reality. The mountains, the rivers, the waves, the cyclones, the earthquakes, as well as the viruses and the bacteria are part of the extended reality of entanglements which makes bodies appear and disappear, integrate and disintegrate, in random order that has no sense of preference. This randomization is the hardest part to accept and one that humanists typically  Ibid., p. 15.

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reject. They invest instead in technologies that will minimize randomness and bring about an artificial order in line with exclusivist principles. But it fails in the end, because the technology is turned on its head by the suppressed reality, and the disturbed ecology begins to close in at some point together with the unpredictable. The principle of control is made to look utterly unphilosophical in the face of tectonic changes. People have started to talk of leaving the planet for Mars in desperate attempts at escaping the inevitable, demonstrating the central terror of randomization that remains intact in the bosom of technohumanist civilization. Terror produces delusion, and meaninglessness takes turns with visions of technological grandeur. A pedagogy that cuts through both ends of civilizational bipolarity and returns us to ontological interconnectedness is the need of the hour. It is not something that can be spelt out in any easy manner, but we must slip toward it orthogonally. Coming back to the main drift of the present work, the book argues that technohumanism and its crippling projections/introjections have prevented us from taking adequate proactive stance in intelligently facing our circumstances from within. What we have seen in the case of the current epidemic is widespread moral cowardice and political faintheartedness that have spread confusion, fear, and helplessness in the face of a challenging situation. Much of this is owed to history, and our historical ways of encountering the world and ourselves, being the outcrop of humanistic ways of apprehending change, adversity, difference, death, and disaster. It is asserted here that the sop that has been fed to us as moral diet in the name of humanism has weakened our capacity to respond in fresh ways to new situations. The book begins by arguing that the core ideas of humanism were essentially “junk bonds”—quick yielding but ultimately defaulting and leading to bankruptcy. Developed for quick takeover of available evolutionary spaces through various kinds of cognitive-narrative maneuvers, the solipsistic navel-gazing merely consolidated narcissistic predilections. Second, posthumanistic analysis clearly shows that the reflexive label “human” creates at least two problems: the production of a petty morality (noted by Nietzsche) that suffocates creative life and the bonding of the epiphenomenal into a composite image (noted by Spinoza) that collectively prevent authentic becoming. Together they keep our eyes diverted from the nature of our existential truths. Within this larger theoretical arc, the book argues that, among other things, the Covid-19 crisis poignantly destabilizes the root narratives that we have for so long told ourselves. The shock that the world is currently experiencing is due to the unreality we

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have surrounded ourselves with rather than anything unique in the actual situation. Finally, the book suggests an educational path for a different kind of future away from technological hubris. To give a quick preview of the chapters in the book, and the manner in which they construct the basic argument of the book, I offer small extracts from the chapters. Chapter 2 begins by a case study of the present pandemic. We learn a few important things from the study and establish the general direction of our search. First, we see how the optical becomes visible through linguistic arrangements and expert discourses. Second, we discover the manner in which these newly “visible” elements become part of the ongoing spatialization of humanism through a fresh relation between words and things. Third, when a crisis strikes from an unexpected angle, we see how expert views contradict each other without the authority of expertise itself coming into question. And fourth, we learn to face the problem of the slippery slope of viability as a living composite in the face of a bug (even as we claim higher medical and health capabilities), so that even an insignificant piece of protein can destroy this complex composite. This is very important learning from the point of view of what we need to do pedagogically to be able to hold our own in situations of crisis. The case study of the pandemic teaches us to become bold, develop our instincts, and reach beyond the humanist picture developed through expert discourses and institutionalized positions. Standing in the midst of the greatest humanistic achievements, we must be able to simultaneously perceive the slow dissolving of all that is apparently solid. From that dissolution we must be able to take a fresh measure of ourselves without any humanistic reference points. This point is further developed in the subsequent chapters. The main thrust of the present volume is the regaining of existential powers, the “heat of life” as it were, that has been occluded during the last two centuries of rampant humanistic posturing, denying the person their direct equation with the real. Chapter 3 argues that organismic geography must prevail over history. That is what the activities of the chimera virus suggests and which is how it successfully creates innumerable variants. Viral mutation is geo-­ ontological disjuncture, not historical development. An effective response to that must be in terms of transformation geography at the corporeal level, not battling at the mental or representational level. The mental consciousness, being representational, is one level removed from where the viral chimera is located. The level gap makes it ineffective and reactive, rather than proactive. We have to come to the corporeal plane, to the level

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of the virus in the present case, and act from there. I have to be intimately enmeshed within my corpus and participate fully in the transformations that the corporeal intelligence demands. The path to it has been alluded to in the foregoing lines. Only then can I effectively respond to this or any other crisis. To rely on my geo-ontological or bio-geographical self and not on the experts requires a great deal of pedagogical work and at many levels. This is the task before us. It is not something we accomplish by reading about it, but by continuous practice of disjunction with the historical-­humanist thought processes. Reconstituting ourselves on the geographical plane does not mean it is some final destination where we can come to rest. The only resting place is the grave. Each day we have to wake up and find ourselves, that is, the resultant vector, anew. We are at a different place each day. The less I smell of yesterday the better, because otherwise I falsify my current state. Finally, we get to the point where the self can be considered as performativity under continuous mutation. It is not only the virus that can mutate; we assert that so can the organismic being. In fact, a mutating self can out-mutate any virus. The virus mutates through natural selection; we mutate through self-selection. It is the most shameful thing to cower at an invisible bug and not be able to out-­ maneuver it. But we cannot do it at the level of the social self; we have to descend to the level of the primitive. We have to descend to the level of the bug, its sheer physicality. For this we have to be extremely alert about all the forces at work, be sensitive to the body, and open it up to necessary changes. The historical self resists all of this, being essentially status-quo-­ ist. The historical self is nothing other than a group of images. These images need to be abandoned to be able to mutate away from the technohumanist cul-de-sac. Chapter 4 attempts a psychoanalysis of thinking. It is argued here that not merely the content but the form of thought needs critical examination. We must admit of a psycho-pathology, not of this person or that, nor of this group or that, but of the whole field of thought, its tendencies and operational patterns, its obsessions and pieties. We must shake ourselves out of the idea that thinking is merely a neutral medium for reflections on reality. Rather, thinking has evolved out of certain interactions with the extensionality that have led to yet other interactions, and so on, in a contingent chain that today is made to appear natural and neutral, that is able to comment on the whole of reality. What we need therefore is a critical examination—let us call it psychoanalysis—of thought itself. First, it should be clear that by “psychoanalysis” of thought we do not quite mean

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the classical Freudian process of unearthing the motivational structure of the Unconscious. Rather, the under-conscious or trans-conscious is the spume of emergent life and cannot be impacted by mental formations or interpreted by it. It certainly is nothing that the mind can grasp or modify. We can see it as the “spontaneous life-motive” or the élan-vital in every organism. This then has to be the starting line of our inquiry into thought—the point at which life bubbles up and later manifests as mental formations. The chapter also examines the manner in which crises throw us outside of ourselves into another orbit that does not resemble the humanist pretensions that we have for so long believed in and peddled without question. As teachers we have always known that there are odd zones to be ignored in our construction of a domesticated and sedate reality. The exploration into these forbidden odd zones, the only places that can yield answers to crises, cannot be done through knowledge alone. Most people appear to think that the task of the teacher in general is to strengthen the conscious self-preserving capacity of the student, and they are not entirely wrong in this assumption. However, the danger facing the strong and the stable is the very self-assuredness that eventually becomes a trap, not allowing the person to evolve out of her/his present state. In the words of Nietzsche, the problem is “that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow.” All stable strength eventually becomes its own victim for each thing in life is accompanied by its opposite. Artists, for instance, know that red objects have green shadows—green being the complimentary of red and opposite to it in the color wheel—and vice versa, and they use this knowledge to good effect. This does not mean we must not pursue strength. Rather, it points to a complex situation that demands more than a simple straight line path to a viable life. It indicates that weakness and uncertainty have their own value, although this may not be immediately apparent or may not have the visible currency like strength or stability. Nietzsche further observes, “It is the more unfettered, uncertain, and weaker individuals upon whom [true] progress depends.” This is a challenging statement that is explored in our effort to delve into the dark or anterior side of things. Chapter 5 brings us closer to the pedagogical vision of the book. Methods are bound up with their ultimate products. Education in the era of posthumanism cannot be the hackneyed and painful methods by which we were turning out pupils in the humanist era. Devoid of a ready-made goal typical of humanism, posthumanist education must turn the body-­ mind into an experimental theater in order to forge its own direction of

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becoming. Note that we are no longer talking of goals or aims or objectives (all of which are preplanned in the humanist scheme of things), but orientations and planes of becoming. The generalized picture of education as the stimulation of the mind by introducing new ideas is commonplace. But a moment’s sober reflection on this conventional practice will reveal that when we pump representational matter or sign systems into the mental consciousness of the young (in the name of education), we only succeed in restricting the fluid, autochthonous, and organic movements in their consciousness. Symbolic activity, especially in the pre-mature, is not emancipatory; it merely captures the transferred or sublimated dynamic energy and forces it into the fragmented immobility of the sign. The clash of symbols creates pandemonium in the consciousness rather than a harmonious flow. What must educators do then? Young beings must be encouraged to develop their senses to the fullest extent possible; they should be helped to intensify their instruments of knowing rather than dabble in knowledge. For the young, knowledge must not be fixed in formal structures, but be fluid and dynamic, and have a form that is a morphogenetic field rather than a strict form. One way of maintaining knowledge in a fluid form is mythology. The famous scholar of myth Joseph Campbell explains: “mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images.” Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be sensed but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Chapter 6 speaks of the primitive function. The derived function is civilization, with all its entropic trappings. The primitive function is the antiderivative; it is prior to civilization and counter-entropic. We have to return to the primitive function once we realize the limits of humanism, and from time to time, in order to shake off the accretions of civilization. The primitive function contains within it the generative-evolutionary powers that can shake off the attempted binding by a bug, for it must fulfill its destiny. That said, it would be appropriate to acknowledge also that if a bug, or something else, were meant to overwhelm in the direction of a general recomposition, there is nothing anyone could do about it. One cannot extend beyond the primitive; it is the existential limit of any composite, beyond which the composition loses its viability. And this is

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the essential problem with the civilizational or the derived function. It cannot deal with erasure—its basic assumption is continuity, which is contrary to the intrinsic and fundamental discontinuity built into existence. The picture or the image emphasizes continuity, whereas the reality is impermanence and effacement. The primitive encounter is a withdrawal into the core evolutionary project of the organism that has nothing to do with the various accumulations and accretions that we call civilization. One might even go so far as to say that the civilizational function is the enemy of the evolutionary project. It weakens the latter. The larger task of education is to bring before thought this tension between the evolutionary project and the civilizational project—the latter being an offshoot that has begun to look like the principal thing. How does the civilizational drive weaken the evolutionary project? Take, for example, the current pandemic. Among a hundred other things, the path of civilization makes us tilt toward the institutionalization of “health” and the consequent loss of responsibility and obligation for one’s physical well-being. In terms of our conceptual paradigm, we are further distanced from our primitive. The doctor and the hospital combine, that is, institutionalized disease care, breeds a false sense of complacency. And when an epidemic of this scale strikes, and the experts have no answer, the whole civilizational thing falls apart, as evident from the present crisis. The civilizational function searches for a solution in the wrong pocket. The answer lies in the primitive domain that is a pristine zone untouched by civilizational dross. Given today’s technological mesmerism, the foregoing sounds like bosh. Is not technology or technological medicine supposed to take care of everything? Well, not quite everything. There are fundamental things we can take care of by ourselves, which when strong enough can overcome crises. Chapter 7 is a dialogue between the author and an interlocutor. There are issues that can only be made clear through conversations, and this is attempted in the concluding chapter. Below I present a small extract from the conversation: Author:

The primitive is the organic consciousness that is the founding layer born of the evolutionary impetus. The superficial consciousness is an effect of it, and nothing more. Interlocutor: And the sciences? They are also surface effects? Author: Science is determined by the quantum of transfer from the background consciousness, or the living unconscious, to

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Interlocutor: Author:

Interlocutor: Author:

Interlocutor: Author:

Interlocutor: Author: Interlocutor: Author:

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the superficial layer. The greater the transfer, the more profound and interesting the results. But a particular science is the consequence of a specific level of being. So there is nothing objective about science? Objectivity, subjectivity, these are nothing but ideas and oppositions invented by the mind. There is nothing purely objective because our modes of perception already predetermine the object under study. It is not extrinsic to the relation. And this realization changes our stance in the world? We are not here to promote anything or oppose any view. That should be our universal attitude. We must be deeply watchful of ourselves and the world, skeptical of any grand view, whatever that might be. The moment we are stuck with a grand view, there is corruption. But surely you cannot deny the success of some of these views. What you call success is also our own invention and standard. How do we know what is success and what is not? Success cannot be measured by the amount of concrete poured on the world or the number of satellites sent out in space. All of that is humanist invention and part of a grand illusion. How would you measure success then? I wouldn’t. It’s one of the most misleading terms. It’s the first word we should get rid of from education. It prevents creative, experimental living and thinking. What are we left with then? We are left with the entire evolutionary potential which is not bound to success.

With that, I invite the reader to join in our exploration of the posthuman terrain and pedagogic action that it demands. The posthuman is not a given, but relentless practice.

CHAPTER 2

Studying a Crisis

The word “human” comes, in part, from PIE ghomon, meaning earthling. The earthling composite is (obviously) made up of the same things as the earth—air, water, fire etc., as well as the electrical and magnetic fields that surround the earth. Although the earthling, just like the earth, appears somewhat stable for a time (its life-time), it is really a highly dynamic composition within. When variously intersected by another composite—such as a virus—equilibrium may be disrupted due to binding with the new composite. This binding may be of temporary, semi-permanent, or permanent nature, like transformations in any composite. When the dynamic equilibrium appears again, it may not return to the older parameters and instead may continue to remain in uncertain passage. However, the understanding of composites is vital from the point of view of prevention of accidental bindings that could be needlessly problematic. Humanistic discourse, which tends to think of the human form as something sovereign, and not as transitory or evolving admixtures, chooses to focus on continuities rather than discontinuities, and mistakes contingency for ontological necessity. One consequence of such wrong understanding is the onto-­ medicalization of death and disease, placing on these a reflexive order of significance that would make sense only if humans were substantive and autonomous entities, and not passing amalgamates. But there is an ease that enters the picture once we are able to see contingency as the true

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_2

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necessity and don’t look away from what stares back at us. Perhaps adequate thinking starts from where we can face our true ontological status. This new way of looking challenges the old language and at the same time requires a determination to stay on guard and not go back to the old habits of thought. In fact, it entails what might be called a “psychoanalysis of thought”—meaning that we do not accept the form of thought as a given but see it as constituted by organized limits placed on it. But why would it be important to learn to look differently at thinking? Clarity is nothing but the absence of mystification, whereby things are simply what they are without humanist thinking acting as background, generating misapprehensions built out of unspecified terror. The social picture of the human being as an ever-complicating mass of images within an admixture of prevailing sentiments, bio-political projections, psychological introjections, and control obsessions is unfortunately not directed toward clarity. We have reflexively become, to borrow Spinoza’s phrase, “badly analyzed composites,” and have learnt to arrogantly defend these. When these badly analyzed composites further attempt reflexive analysis, they open up discursive spaces that are equally confused, but that gradually acquire an independent reality. For instance, in the medical field, this “independent reality” is the constitutive space in which newer and newer forms of pathologies are invented as noted by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. We come to encounter an increasingly acute medical gaze involved in the organization of the sensible—that is to say, we become involved in the production of new discursive spaces and volumetric expansion of terminology in an effort to mark the dis-eased body. Their inflationary emergence is a typical dimension of humanism at work with its obsession with putting one over nature and claiming a seemingly invincible power of the techno-secular world. Foucault writes: “Modern medicine has fixed its own date of birth as being in the last years of the eighteenth century. Reflecting on its situation, it identifies the origin of its positivity with a return—over and above all theory—to the modest but effecting level of the perceived.” Further, he goes on to observe: In fact, this supposed empiricism is not based on a rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible, nor on the predetermined rejection of systems and all their chimeras, but on a reorganization of that manifest and secret space that opened up when a millennial gaze paused over men’s sufferings. Nonetheless the rejuvenation of medical perception, the way colours and things came to life under the illuminating gaze of the first clinicians is no

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mere myth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and the expressible, but this did not mean that, after over-indulging in speculation, they had begun to perceive once again, or that they listened to reason rather than to imagination; it meant that the relation between the visible and invisible—which is necessary to all concrete knowledge—changed its structure, revealing through gaze and language what had previously been below and beyond their domain. A new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say. Sometimes, indeed, the discourse was so completely ‘naive’ that it seems to belong to a more archaic level of rationality, as if it involved a return to the clear, innocent gaze of some earlier, golden age.1

Not everything is given all at once—the bounds and limits of the visible seem to expand as the modes of recognition of what constitutes empirical data itself shift. When disease “x” establishes itself in the medical lexicon and clinical practice, it assumes a relationship with reality that was not to be found at an earlier phase. Once established, it is readily recognized and diagnosed, and becomes part of medical folklore. The relation between the visible and the invisible thus continually undergoes change. However, it is not the case that something new is dragged out of the erstwhile invisible and made visible. It is also not the case that the empirical signs or “symptoms” of disease x were not optically or sensorially available at an earlier period. It is rather the case that what is optically available is not necessarily visible—the becoming-visible or rising above the threshold of visibility requires the satisfaction of additional conditions. Our cognitive possibilities are controlled by existing ways of organizing sensory spaces. With a change in cognitive-spatial organization, we begin to “see” what was not visible earlier. And this is central to the reflexive organizing of the human composite as well. Language plays a key role here, and the emergent relation between words and things makes for new cognitive mappings. Strange diseases “appeared” by means of discursive shifts in which language framed and encompassed empirical fragments, making them into constellations of cognizable configurations. Take, for example, the so-­ called Attention Deficit Syndrome or ADHD in children that is today considered a mental health disorder. This is supposedly marked by “hyperactivity” and fidgety behavior. The question that needs to be asked is: At 1  Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Transl. A. M. Sheridan (New York: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1973), p. xii.

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what exact moment did a certain level of activity in children, which up to that point had not attracted any undue attention, suddenly begin to be labeled as hyperactivity? In the same manner, exactly how did the tendency of not sitting still for lengthy periods, which would be expected among children (especially when faced with routine tasks whose meaning is unfathomable), begin to appear pathological? In order to determine the moment at which the mutation in discourse takes place, we must look beyond its thematic content or its logical modalities to the region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where—at the most fundamental level of language—seeing and saying are still one. We must re-examine the original distribution of the visible and invisible insofar as it is linked with the division between what is stated and what remains unsaid: thus the articulation of medical language and its object will appear as a single figure. But if one poses no retrospective question, there can be no priority; only the spoken structure of the perceived—that full space in the hollow of which language assumes volume and size—may be brought up into the indifferent light of day. We must place ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological, where the loquacious gaze with which the doctor observes the poisonous heart of things is born and communes with itself.2

When and where is pathology born? In order to discover this, we have to look at the point where the word has yet not separated from the thing. In other words, we have to look at the pre-linguistic domain where descriptions have not yet detached from the described. Prior to the nineteenth century, no one had heard of hysteria as a pathological condition. From the Greek hystera “womb,” hysteria began to be defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. All of a sudden, we find elaborate descriptions of hysteria in the medical literature of the nineteenth century. The medical gaze had grouped certain impressions and found the words to designate it. We witness the birth of a new disease. Once this takes place, the daylight of normality swallows it, and it attains the sanctity of medical discourse. From this point on, it enters the canon and becomes undisputed as a pathological category. But in order to do what we are attempting, which is to locate the point of emergence of the sayable (of the pathological), we have to station 2

 Ibid.

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ourselves at a point where a sudden expansion occurs, and there appears room for novel verbalizations. This collection, codification, curation, and visibilization form an essential activity of humanism, and by understanding the disease form we can extrapolate to the larger activity. In the case of disease, Foucault writes: “Composed as they are of letters, diseases have no other reality than the order of their composition. In the final analysis, their varieties refer to those few simple individuals, and whatever may be built up with them and above them is merely Name. And name in a double sense: in the sense in which the Nominalists use it when they criticize the substantial reality of abstract, general beings; and in another sense, one closer to a philosophy of language, since the form of composition of the being of the disease is of a linguistic type.” In continuation of this reconceptualization of disease as a linguistic composition, Foucault further observes: In relation to the individual, concrete being, disease is merely a name; in relation to the isolated elements of which it is made up, it has all the rigorous architecture of a verbal designation. To ask what is the essence of a disease is like ‘asking what is the nature of the essence of a word’. A man coughs; he spits blood; he has difficulty in breathing; his pulse is rapid and hard; his temperature is rising; these are all so many immediate impressions, so many letters, as it were. Together, they form a disease, pleurisy: ‘But what, then, is pleurisy?… It is the concourse of the accidents that constitute it. The word pleurisy merely retraces them in a more abbreviated manner.’ ‘Pleurisy’ has no more being than the word itself; it ‘expresses an abstraction of the mind’; but, like the word, it is a well-defined structure, a multiple figure ‘in which all or almost all the accidents are combined. If one or more are lacking, it is no longer pleurisy, or at least not real pleurisy’. Disease, like the word, is deprived of being, but, like the word, it is endowed with a configuration. The nominalist reduction of existence frees a constant truth.3

Is the “plane of the ecliptic” real, or, similarly, are the “constellations” real, or are they nothing more than linguistic fragments associated with contingent sensory impressions? Obviously, there is no such plane as the ecliptic, or any such groups or assemblages as constellations beyond the linguistic arrangements that refer to them. These are convenient fictions; they have no more reality than the words that constitute them. Yet they

3

 Ibid, p. 119.

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form important reference points in astronomical observations.4 Certain immediate or contingent impressions are given names; and these, in turn, are arranged under still other names, and so on. To ask about the reality or otherwise of these arrangements is like asking about the reality of names. It is the same thing in the case of diseases. First, the “symptoms” are noted, followed by assigning them names—say, for example, conjunctiva or lesions from minor hemorrhages in the skin. Next, these linguistic ascriptions associated with the becoming-visible are grouped under an umbrella term that begins to define a specific pathological condition, say “petechiae.” Now we have a disease that can be chronicled and its becoming-­real can be mapped. The present Covid-19 situation is no different. Let us therefore use it as a case in point and proceed to examine it empirically from the angle of the visible and the invisible. But before we can do that, let us make a brief excursus to reflect on the nature of the case study as a methodological tool: “A case study is a research methodology that helps in exploration of a phenomenon within some particular context through various data sources, and it undertakes the exploration through variety of lenses in order to reveal multiple facets of the phenomenon. In case study, a real-­ time phenomenon is explored within its naturally occurring context, with the consideration that context will create a difference.”5 The phenomenon under consideration here is the SARS-Cov2 epidemic that is currently sweeping across the world. We are going to study it not for its own sake, but to disclose by means of analysis its ordering and “enframing” within the humanistic worldview, and the social consequences that follow from such an ordering. Whether contagious or not, an epidemic has a sort of historical individuality, hence the need to employ a complex method of observation when dealing with it. Being a collective phenomenon, it requires a multiple gaze; a unique process, it must be described in terms of its special, accidental, unexpected qualities. The event must be described in detail, but it must also be described 4  The plane of the ecliptic refers to the slice of the heavens that constitute the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. From the perspective of an observer on Earth, the Sun’s apparent annual movement traces out a path along the ecliptic against the background of the distant stars. Again, the constellations are nothing but arbitrary groupings of visible stars that constitute a pattern from the perspective of an observer on Earth. 5  Y.  Rashid et  al. “Case study Method,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919862424.

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in accordance with the coherence implied by multi-perception: being an imprecise form of knowledge, insecurely based while ever partial, incapable of acceding of itself to the essential or fundamental, it finds its own range only in the cross-checking of viewpoints, in repeated, corrected information, which finally circumscribes, where gazes meet, the individual, unique nucleus of these collective phenomena. At the end of the eighteenth century, this form of experience was being institutionalized. In each subdelegation a physician and several surgeons were appointed by the Intendant (provincial administrator) to study those epidemics that might break out in their canton; they were in constant correspondence with the chief physician of the généralité (treasury subdivision of old France) concerning ‘both the reigning disease and the medicinal topography of their canton’, and when four or five people succumbed to the same disease, the syndic had to notify the subdelegate, who sent the physician to prescribe the treatment to be administered daily by the surgeons.6

Whether the bug emerged from Wuhan or not is not the concern (it might very well have, but that is not of interest here). Our problematic is the manner in which the world has received it. We cannot control production; we can attempt to understand reception or how it is received. The immunological response of healthy bodies to any attempt at intersecting and binding is a highly conservative one—it is designed to resist almightily within the limits of its capacities. Only in the case where a body is already overwrought by other crossings and intersections, matters become complicated. Mild disturbances can occur in relatively healthy bodies as another body crosses its path, but nothing in the nature of systemic breakdown usually occurs. In fact, the unique recovery paths can lead to new discoveries and healthier compositions. But the smugness and complacency of humanist presumptions, on the one hand, and a generalized terror, on the other, can turn out to be the real enemy. Also there is a false hope generated in the jargon of techno-medicine that would leave the non-insider flabbergasted and to loss of initiative.7  Foucault, op. cit., p. 25.  ANI news agency has reported from India that the National Task Force on Covid-19 and joint monitoring group (JMG) of the Health Ministry will decide whether the plasma therapy should be continued in the treatment of coronavirus-infected patients in India. Professor (Dr.) Balram Bhargava, DG of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), informed in context of the ICMR findings that Convalescent Plasma (CP) therapy didn’t help in reducing death due to the coronavirus in India. “Plasma therapy has been used for more than 100 years now in some form or the other for various virus infections. It was used in ebola and 6 7

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Humanism might have been epiphenomenal but for the concatenation and psychotropic accretions around technoscience and its massive dividends for global elite. It has resulted in opening up the planet in an unprecedented manner. From this growing deployment of technoscience in every area of planetary life arose a culture that put the essence of technology at the center of the human (which, some might say, was akin to a Faustian deal). Technohumanism became an attitudinal and practical tool for turning everything, including the human organism, into resource and “standing reserve” as we saw in the previous chapter. This now being COVID-19. Whether it helps in coronavirus treatment or not, it is being studied. It is still undergoing peer review,” he said during a press conference here. “Once peer review happens and we get a full publication out, this data will be considered again by the National Task Force and joint monitoring group of Health Ministry, then a decision will be taken if we should continue with it,” he said when asked to comment upon the recent ICMR study stating Convalescent Plasma (CP) therapy did not help in reducing death due to the coronavirus. Presently, Convalescent Plasma is in the Off-label use in patients with moderate disease who are not improving (oxygen requirement is progressively increasing) despite the use of steroids. “India has also contributed internationally by randomized trials on 464 patients in 39 hospitals in 25 districts across 14 states and Union Territories. Trials have shown that it does not reduce mortality or prevent progression from moderate to severe disease,” Dr. Bhargava said. It may be noted that the apex medical research has made these revelations to investigate the effectiveness of plasma therapy for the treatment of Covid-19 after conducting a study in 39 hospitals across India. According to medical experts, bodies of people who recover from coronavirus produce an antibody/plasma in the blood to help the person fight against coronavirus. If a little bit of this antibody/plasma is given to a critical patient then the plasma helps in the latter person’s recovery. The ICMR researchers did an open-label, parallel-­arm, phase II, multicentre, and randomized controlled trial from April 22 to July 14. The trial was registered with the Clinical Trial Registry of India (CTRI) for the purpose, it said. The study was conducted between April 22 and July 14 in 464 participants who were hospitalized and moderately ill confirmed Covid-19 patients. About 464 patients were randomly enrolled. About 235 participants were put in the intervention arm while 229 subjects were in the control arm. According to the study, participants were randomized to either control or intervention arm. Two doses of 200 ml CP were transfused 24 hours apart in the intervention arm, the study noted. “Composite primary outcome was achieved in 44 (18.7 percent) participants in the intervention arm and 41 (17.9 percent) in the control arm. Mortality was documented in 34 (13.6 percent) and 31 (14.6 percent) participants in intervention and control arm, respectively,” study mentioned. “Convalescent plasma was not associated with a reduction in mortality or progression to severe COVID-19. This trial has high generalizability and approximates the real-life setting of convalescent plasma therapy in settings with limited laboratory capacity. A prior measurement of neutralizing antibody titres in donors and participants may further clarify the role of CP in the management of COVID-19.” All of this simply means that there was no difference whether plasma therapy was used or not. ANI, New Delhi [India] @http://aninews.in, September 15, 2020.

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techno-­immersion has led to a lulling of the senses in the general bodypolitic, wherein the assumption that technology can take care of anything becomes part of modern superstition. The task of the present chapter is to illustrate how a specific occurrence has dramatically unsettled this truth and made it come apart at the seams. The ongoing Covid pandemic offers itself as a poignant case study that shows, among other things, the general helplessness of societies long used to relying on technomedical interventions for maintaining life. It also reveals an unflattering picture of biologists, virologists, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, medical practitioners, in short, experts of all ilk falling over each other, making ad hoc pronouncements that are replaced by still other ad hoc pronouncements, even contradictory ones as theories overrun each other, in their effort to figure out the ravaging trajectory of a little bug.8 For instance, compare the two views below emerging at almost the same time from two different research laboratories:

8  For example, after championing extensive testing, we have this latest report from the experts: “Coronavirus tests could be detecting dead virus cells, leading to over-estimates of the current size of the pandemic, a new study suggests. The main test used to diagnose the illness in the UK is so sensitive it may be suggesting people have the bug when, in fact, their bodies have already fought it off, the research says. That would mean people are being asked to self-isolate despite no longer being infectious. More pertinently, it could also mean entire areas are put into lockdown on the back of exaggerated numbers. If proven correct, it would also at least a partial explanation why cases now appear to be rising in the UK, while hospital admissions are falling. The study—by Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and the University of the West of England—gathered its evidence by looking at 25 studies on the polymerase chain reaction test, the one most widely used in the UK. It showed that because such tests only offer a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether virus material is in the body, it can suggest someone is infected when in fact their body’s immune system has already dispatched the virus. That means such a person would be told they are positive, despite the bug now being both harmless and non-infectious. Professor Carl Heneghan, of the CEBM, said: ‘Evidence is mounting that a good proportion of “new” mild cases and people re-testing positives after quarantine or discharge from hospital are not infectious, but are simply clearing harmless virus particles which their immune system has efficiently dealt with.’ Writing in the Spectator, he warned of the ‘dangers of isolating non-infectious people or whole communities’ as a result of such potentially misleading data. He said that, while it was not logistically possible to check every positive test to see whether the virus was still active, there may be a way of reducing potential false readings. This is because each test swab goes through a number of cycles in a lab to see if virus material is there. The more cycles it takes to discover the virus, the less of it there probably is in the body.” Colin Drury, The Independent, September 5, 2020.

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Coronavirus mostly kills through an overreaction of the immune system, whose function is precisely to fight infections, say scientists who have decoded the mechanisms, symptoms, and diagnosis of the disease caused by the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus. In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, the researchers explained step-by-step how the virus infects the airways, multiplies inside cells, and in severe cases causes the immune defences to overshoot with a “cytokine storm”. This storm is an over-­ activation of white blood cells, which release too-great amounts of cytokines—inflammation-stimulating molecules—into the blood, they said. “Similar to what happens after infection with SARS and MERS, data show that patients with severe COVID-19 may have a cytokine storm syndrome,” said study author Daishun Liu, Professor at Zunyi Medical University in China. “The rapidly increased cytokines attract an excess of immune cells such as lymphocytes and neutrophils, resulting in an infiltration of these cells into lung tissue and thus cause lung injury,” Liu said. The researchers explained that the cytokine storm ultimately causes high fever, excessive leakiness of blood vessels, and blood clotting inside the body. It also causes extremely low blood pressure, lack of oxygen and excess acidity of the blood, and build-up of fluids in the lungs, they said. The researchers noted that white blood cells are misdirected to attack and inflame even healthy tissue, leading to failure of the lungs, heart, liver, intestines, kidneys, and genitals.9

And compare the above with the study conclusions below: Cytokine storm has been blamed for a large number of Covid-19 deaths. Cytokines are special particles that modulate immune and inflammation responses in the body. But when the body releases far too many cytokines, they can cause a severe inflammatory reaction, which can prove fatal. This is called a cytokine storm, which earlier studies blamed for the large number of deaths in Covid-19 cases. It was hoped that “targeting cytokines during the management of Covid-19 patients could improve survival rates and reduce mortality”. Doctors, though not 100 per cent certain, adopted this protocol in the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19 all over the world. Now, a study conducted in the Netherlands on Covid-19 patients has thrown up contrasting findings. The study, published recently in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network, found that Covid-19 is not directly associated with cytokine storms as was previously suggested. The researchers compared the levels of inflammatory cytokines in Covid-19 patients with a group of other patients. They found no evidence of cytokine storms in 9  Dina Ragab et al., “The COVID-19 Cytokine Storm; What We Know So Far,” Frontiers in Public Health, June 2020.

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patients with Covid-19 compared to others….In fact, the study found significantly lower levels of cytokines in people with Covid-19 compared to those having septic shock, which is a condition known to cause a sudden surge in cytokine levels.10

Apparently it all depends on what group of phenomena you choose to look at. The first study says that the Corona virus kills through cytokine storm or overreaction of the immune system. The second study flatly denies it and says cytokine levels are not higher in Covid-19 patients as compared to other diseases. But no one blinks—we take these contradictions in our stride. It discloses the extent to which our gaze upon the techno-scientific mythology remains uncritical despite daily inconsistencies. This is not to deny falsifiability—no doubt scientific theories and hypotheses are falsifiable. Here we are talking about completely opposite conclusions about the same phenomenon in the same time period. The other side of this faith in expert views is the pitiful picture of the average person looking to news anchors and talk show hosts for salvation—waiting impatiently for news of the elusive vaccine that will overcome the bug. But there too things are far from simple. Even among the scientific community there is no consensus on what constitutes an adequate defense against the bug, and even, what kind of antibodies are necessary and sufficient. The presence of antibodies indicates previous exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus but may not always translate into protection against the disease, say scientists, citing imponderables such as what kind of antibodies, how many and how long they last. scientists are grappling with the pivotal issue of antibodies and trying to understand how they impact on the progression of the disease. But the jury is still out there with several studies and hypotheses but no consensus yet. The only thing that can be said with any degree of certainty is that antibodies is a sign that the person has already been infected with the novel coronavirus, the scientists said. Antibody presence in itself tells us nothing about disease progression in individuals, said the scientist from New Delhi’s National Institute of Immunology (NII). There are neutralising antibodies (nAbs) and also “simple” antibodies. While nAbs produced against the novel coronavirus can block its entry into the host cell, other antibodies are also generated against many parts of the virus, added Vineeta Bal from Pune’s Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research

10  Prabhas Dutta, “New Study Questions Cytokine Storm Theory of Covid-19 Fatality,” India Today, September 15, 2020.

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(IISER)…. “Presence of nAbs in sufficient concentrations and for longer period is the most likely indicator of protection of the individual from next exposure leading to illness i.e. COVID-19,” she explained. Ms Bal also noted that there is no consensus on what levels of nAbs are “protective” from the public health perspective.11

So, nothing it seems is straightforward. Expertise is not able to reduce the situation to certain propositions, nor is it able to deduce from the data a consistent or reliable set of findings. Different studies continue to give different and often contradictory results. Does the presence of antibodies indicate immunity? Does being infected once give protection against further exposure? Do antibody tests give reliable results? No one apparently knows. But the admission of this cannot come directly; it is couched in ambiguity and the language of probability. There is nothing wrong in uncertainty or probabilistic assumptions. But technohumanism projects these as temporary unknowns and not as essential gaps in knowledge that ought to encourage other ways of interacting with the world. And the abject fact is that prevailing wisdom’s sights are set solely on technology to get us out of the woods. There seems to be nothing in our composition itself that by streamlining or awakening or recomposing could bring us into proper alignment with the current circumstances and get ahead. In other words, conventional and middle class world-picture condemns us to the path dependencies that have long confined us to the inherent limits of technohumanism, an exclusively gilded picture blocking other ways of perceiving and dealing with the world. I must quickly add that it is this exclusivity that is the problem and not medical knowledge-practice as such. In its overenthusiastic technological enframing of the world, humanism unwittingly crosses many lines. Among a thousand things that keep appearing in the news related to the present crisis, my attention was drawn to a fascinating report that appeared in the media with regard to the SARS-CoV microbe. The agency report went thus: “The experts, have … concluded that the Covid-19 virus may have ultimately figured out how to be more stable and not fall apart … ‘Over time, it has figured out how to hold on better and not fall apart until it needs to,’ co-author Michael Farzan, PhD, co-chairman of the Scripps Research Department of Immunology and Microbiology said. ‘The virus has, under selection 11  Press Trust of India, “Antibodies May Not Guarantee Protection From COVID-19,” PTI, September 20, 2020.

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pressure, made itself more stable,’ he added.”12 This is quite striking from several related angles. The claim from a top-notch microbial institute that the virus “has figured out …” immediately raises a host of interesting questions with regard to viral ontology and phenomenology. What does it mean to say, “the virus may have ultimately figured out …”? Are viruses able to figure out things? What does the attribution “how to hold on better” mean when we are talking of a microbe? Would not “hold on better” somehow imply a growing heuristic knowhow, something unheard of heretofore in connection with a microbe? Again, what is implied by “not fall apart until it needs to?” Does it not appear to suggest that the virus is reflective about its status and its survival needs? Further, how does a virus “make itself more stable”? Is there not here a suggestion of purpose and direction? These and other questions are intriguing, to say the least, and seem to be indicative of an anthropomorphic projection that is quite breathtaking in the context of a virus. To put it differently, there appears to be the implicit projection of a viral “consciousness,” parallel to the projection of human consciousness, together with a viral phenomenology that is seen as an adversary to the human. Alternatively, this could simply be a case of being carried away by the situation and losing the scientific temper in the face of large-scale anxiety for technohumanistic solutions. Whichever way it might be, it shows the manner in which the microbe has gripped the social imaginary, under the pressure of which science, it seems, has gotten mixed up with science fiction. No one can deny that the microbe has done, and can do, extensive damage, as the past year has shown across the globe, especially where there are underlying medical conditions, known in the parlance as co-­morbidities. It is also true that the virus has mutated rapidly, giving researchers a hard time trying to grasp its profile adequately, thus making it difficult to come up with an anti-dote. Nevertheless, the viral ontology currently doing the rounds, and the typical global politico-medical fix for it, has the world in deep trouble because it is proceeding from a wrong set of assumptions that breeds immature anthropogenic metaphors such as “fighting the virus,” etc. It does not take a great deal of thinking to realize that you cannot “fight” elements that are of an entirely different ontological and compositional type. So the metaphor is wrong and misleading. In order to maintain one’s composite-ness in the face of other composites, one has to realize the nature of the respective compositions. But before we can get  ANI, June 13, 2020.

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there, we have to examine the current responses and why they are unsuitable. In order to understand some aspect of the global response to the virus systematically, we have to go into what is sometimes called the “prevention paradox.” The latter describes a situation that arises when a policy is implemented that ostensibly brings public good but affects individual lives adversely. Such a thing has happened with “lockdown”—a widely practiced governmental response to the epidemic that disrupts public contact, forcing people indoors in the hope of stemming contagion. Lockdown is neither any kind of medical diagnostics that indicates therapeutic pathway for Covid-19, nor is it an immunological shield that prevents a person from getting infected by the virus. It is a kind of society-wide house-arrest in which people’s movements and activities are severely restricted by government diktat—a kind of political voodoo-ism that allows extreme use of authoritarian power under a state of exception. At best, lockdown merely helps to slow down or contain the rate of spread of the viral contagion by limiting social contact. However, even this is debatable, for it is possible for many to develop immunity through contact rather than developing symptoms. While at the public level, such exercise of power ostensibly helps authorities to limit the spread-velocity of the virus, at the individual level, it destroys livelihoods, relations, supply chains, and established ways of doing things that can bring physical and psychological ruin to lives. Hence, to the affected individuals, the action appears as an overkill by authorities that destroys careers and businesses, causing widespread havoc in people’s lives. In the present case, protests have occurred in Europe, America, and Australia. In India, tens of thousands of migrant workers have attempted to walk back to their villages hundreds of miles away, many collapsing and dying or being run-over by vehicles on the way. Ultimately, it is entirely possible that the social cost, in terms of both lives and livelihoods, of our response to the epidemic will turn out to be much higher than the direct effect of the epidemic itself. But there is pressure on the establishment from both sides—the coronavirus pandemic on the one hand and the political economy on the other—to quickly find a solution. This is the essential problem of the prevention paradox related to epidemics, one that involves policy which has contrary effects at different levels—it optically succeeds to some extent at the public level, but has severe economic and psychological consequences at the individual level. The potential benefit is seemingly large at one level, but illusory at the other level.

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With respect to the situation in poorer countries, there are alternate perceptions of the lockdown policy. Speaking of the problem in the subcontinent of India, one prominent journalist writes: Since half of the country’s population is either below the poverty line or slightly above that, there is no way they can cope with an extended period of no economic activity. Nearly 80 percent of the workers are part of the unorganised sector, with no regular income and no job guarantee, and a prolonged lockdown can seriously impair their budget. European-style welfarism, that could protect the people from economic shocks, is missing here. There is no way we can augment the public health infrastructure in a short period of time. Prolonged lockdown will also lead to higher (than normal) rates of morbidity and death (especially among the poorest half of the population) as the loss of incomes and reduced consumption of nutrients and other essentials render people vulnerable to a wide array of disease vectors. … An extended lockdown can have a long-term impact on the ability of a large section of the population to earn and therefore sustain themselves to fight against so many other diseases.13

The unintended consequences of lockdown can be as pernicious as of that against which it is supposedly guarding the population. In the absence of a wide variety of social safety networks such as assurance of basic nutrition, the daily wage-earner and their dependents are virtually thrown to the wolves. It is now a choice between dying of infection and dying of starvation. Further, the loss of minimum sustenance also opens the door to a wide variety of diseases that are more debilitating and long-lasting than the current epidemic. The writer further states: Let us not forget that [hundreds] die of acute respiratory infection and pneumonia every day. Nearly 9 percent of the country’s adult population is diabetic, and we lose nearly 2,150 precious lives every day due to cancer. A crippled economy due to a prolonged lockdown will do precisely that, and make us more vulnerable to all such illnesses—and push many of us to the scourge called poverty, that is the root of many more ailments. And there can be no estimation of the kind of mental trauma one will have to go through following the apprehension of job losses (or actual job loss), falling income, or the scary thought of seeing one’s loved ones without food.14

 Mayank Mishra, The Quint, 12/04/2020.  Ibid.

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Worldwide, serious diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, and coronary heart disease have high rates of mortality. What keeps them away from the general public’s gaze is that these are seen mostly as “private” diseases, with no spectacular public component. Nevertheless, such a distinction may be just fanciful. Most diseases are the product of a distortion of life, and the social and political response to these result in a further distortion. Are there alternate possibilities in the situation? To the question about the efficacy of the lockdown policy and any viable alternatives, one of the country’s leading epidemiologists explained: The principle of [a different] strategy is based on an important recognition, that is by searching cases and isolating them alone, we will not be able to contain it. So the question of containing the virus is out. What is the next course? The next strategy is to say, ok, infections will continue and we need to take care of people who fall ill and require medical help. However, there is something uncomfortable about this line of thinking because the spread of virus is going up in an exponential fashion, so we will not be able to take care of people who need health care as the system will be overwhelmed by the number of severely sick who will land up in hospitals. Now we have to ask, given the circumstances, what do we do? We have to ask: Is there any other way to contain this problem? In 2009, there was an epidemic of H1N1 influenza. What happened to it? It came in and stayed for two-three months and spontaneously disappeared. Nothing that we did at the point of time was of help. It went away. Why? It is because of a certain level of herd immunity that was produced by the infection.15

A part of the current vocabulary hanging on many lips is “testing.” Even the WHO has exhorted, “Test…test…test” as the way forward. What does this mean? It means the epidemic is to be controlled by testing ever larger groups and isolating or quarantining them. But the most amusing thing is, in the case of the epidemic, the more you test the more you find. And you end up amassing ever larger numbers and the problem of isolating them. This problem is even more acute in the case of countries with crowded homes and scant public health facilities. So, our only hope is that this virus heads that way. Unfortunately, we are not sure what percentage of the population would be infected before we reach 15  Interview between Dr. Jayaprakash Muliyil and Somesh Jha, Business Standard, April 4, 2020.

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that so-called protective level. From then, it will all come down magically. But then the problem would be to determine what should be the right ratio. It means roughly 87.5 per cent are people whom I call young. So if you take care of the elderly and allow the transmission in younger population, but not too fast, just slow down a bit, it can work. Let it happen. Don’t do overcrowding, try to keep distance from each other. Work has to go on, industry has to be restarted, agricultural activities have to start and at the same time, young people will recover from the infection. When the immunity level is attained to the so-called protective level, or herd immunity, we can say that the epidemic has been seized.16

The line of response discussed above pointedly brings to fore the central contradiction within modern civilizations—the unresolved tension between the individual and society. This contradiction remains simmering underground and appears in myriad forms every now and then in surface reality. The viral problem is yet another instance of this never-ending incongruity, revealing how fragile our solutions are, and how easily they fall apart. In general, it is not overstating the case to say that the microbial hysteria has led to intellectual, moral, and political failure, revealing once again the shaky foundations of our social geometry. Why do I say that? To any critical observer familiar with the specific motivations and compulsions of our age, it must be quite apparent that modernity reacts very badly to anything that appears to contradict the one-track narrative of progressivism. For the same reasons, it denies that any viable alternatives exist to its own direction and constructed preferences. Further, there is a jitteriness and anxiety about the prevailing consensus of general welfare that reveals an inherent fragility about the narrative. Born within this narrative, few of us have, or can work up, the nerve to speak against it, other than raise piecemeal objections to one or other aspect of it in terms of its own framework such as injustice or inequality, or in terms of a particular whim. We are afraid, not unduly, of being shouted down and being branded as naysayers or even nihilists. Implicit in this single-track narrative is a general claim of victory over nature and especially over disease. During the previous centuries, the germ theory of disease and its appropriation by the medical community generated in the popular mind a belief that relief comes in the form of a medicine or vaccine for every emergent situation. And yet, as Ivan Illich points  Ibid.

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out, this was largely an illusion promoted by the general climate of the times. The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines. Discussion of the future of health care might usefully begin with the recognition of this fact. The infections that prevailed at the outset of the industrial age illustrate how medicine came by its reputation. Tuberculosis, for instance, reached a peak over two generations. In New York in 1812, the death rate was estimated to be higher than 700 per 10,000; by 1882, when Koch first isolated and cultured the bacillus, it had already declined to 370 per 10,000. The rate was down to 180 when the first sanatorium was opened in 1910, even though “consumption” still held second place in the mortality tables. After World War II, but before antibiotics became routine, it had slipped into eleventh place with a rate of 48. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid similarly peaked and dwindled outside the physician’s control. By the time their etiology was understood and their therapy had become specific, these diseases had lost much of their virulence and hence their social importance.17

Close analysis of available data shows that there was no direct correlation between declining morbidity rates and growth of pharmaceutical medicine. The latter usually followed the former and was not the effective cause. The viruses responsible for epidemics tended to die out or become dormant on their own. What was changing was the underlying conditions of social existence, together with factors not fully understood about periodic appearance and disappearance of microbial activity. Conditions emerged, escalated, and declined according to their internal logic and largely outside anyone’s control. Nevertheless, credit for decline was appropriated by the modern humanist narrative that claimed to be progressively “winning the war” against contagious diseases. Without a critical perspective or an alternative vantage point, this expropriation went unchallenged till it became part of the modern mythology of progress. By far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition. In poor countries today, diarrhea and upper-respiratory-tract 17  Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Random House Inc., 1976), pp. 5–6.

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infections occur more frequently, last longer, and lead to higher mortality where nutrition is poor, no matter how much or how little medical care is available. In England, by the middle of the nineteenth century, infectious epidemics had been replaced by major malnutrition syndromes, such as rickets and pellagra. These in turn peaked and vanished, to be replaced by the diseases of early childhood and, somewhat later, by an increase in duodenal ulcers in young men. When these declined, the modern epidemics took over: coronary heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, obesity, hypertension, cancer (especially of the lungs), arthritis, diabetes, and so-called mental disorders. Despite intensive research, we have no complete explanation for the genesis of these changes. But two things are certain: the professional practice of physicians cannot be credited with the elimination of old forms of mortality or morbidity, nor should it be blamed for the increased expectancy of life spent in suffering from the new diseases. For more than a century, analysis of disease trends has shown that the environment is the primary determinant of the state of general health of any population.18

Sociology of medicine, medical anthropology, and history tell a different story than the humanist narrative of progress. Disease clusters arrived and then were replaced by newer clusters, staying for different lengths of time. But one thing is indisputable—lower nutrition and hygiene resulted in higher morbidity and mortality from the same set of diseases, and in general, the reverse was also true. In other words, the general social environment was the most important single factor in the determination of immunity and resistance to disease, as also in determining well-being. In the present case, in the rush to contain the face of the contagion, the most important factor is being overlooked—the possibility of moving toward herd immunity at the earliest. Herd immunity is not produced through medical intervention or vaccine or anything else. It is a natural process by which once infection reaches a certain level of the population, there is an automatic immunity produced in the populace. It is seen in animal species as well as in vegetation. This is a slow and difficult process that may look like one is sitting around doing nothing. But in actuality, in order to cooperate with the herd immunity process, one requires the highest level of alertness and intelligence. There must be adequate awareness about the process, and all manner of precautions including proper hygiene must be maintained. One must also be psychologically prepared for the loss of life due to existing underlying medical conditions, known as co-morbidities,  Ibid, p. 6.

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that aggravate the situation due to infection. But we look the other way when we scream for vaccines or other wonder drugs that will beat back the epidemic. However, no epidemic has ever been contained in this manner, no matter how high the rhetoric and how dazzling the technology. Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian rhetoric to create the impression that contemporary medicine is highly effective. Undoubtedly, during the last generation, a limited number of specific procedures have become extremely useful. But where they are not monopolized by professionals as tools of their trade, those which are applicable to widespread diseases are usually very inexpensive and require a minimum of personal skills, materials, and custodial services from hospitals. In contrast, most of today’s skyrocketing medical expenditures are destined for the kind of diagnosis and treatment whose effectiveness at best is doubtful…. vaccines have certainly contributed to the decline of whooping cough and measles, thus seeming to confirm the popular belief in “medical progress.” But for most other infections, medicine can show no comparable results. Drug treatment has helped to reduce mortality from tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, but in the total decline of mortality or morbidity from these diseases, chemotherapy played a minor and possibly insignificant role.19

The rhetoric coupled with the equipment has captured the public imagination to the extent that we have forgotten that we might have powers to heal ourselves from many diseases, if not all. This amnesia has proved to be socially very costly. It has made us wholly dependent on bureaucratic apparatuses and governmental agencies and also put us at the mercy of disease care (euphemistically called “health-care”) systems that are unaffordable for many. We have become used to asking the medical establishment for vaccines after each outbreak. But existential vigilance that minimizes damage is always before and not after a situation begins to dominate. The post facto mentality is paralyzing because the steps to be taken in order to develop general immunity must be taken long in advance of any emergency that might emerge and cannot be concurrent with the disease. However, the widespread complacency that disregards responsibility for personal health makes what has happened in the present case almost inevitable. We are caught off-guard and scream for socio-politico-­ medical help. Illich summarizes the problem in the following words:  Ibid, pp. 7–8.

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The so-called health professions have an even deeper, culturally health-­ denying effect insofar as they destroy the potential of people to deal with their human weakness, vulnerability, and uniqueness in a personal and autonomous way. The patient in the grip of contemporary medicine is but one instance of mankind in the grip of its pernicious techniques. This cultural iatrogenesis is the ultimate backlash of hygienic progress and consists in the paralysis of healthy responses to suffering, impairment, and death. It occurs when people accept health management designed on the engineering model, when they conspire in an attempt to produce, as if it w ere a commodity, something called “better health.” This inevitably results in the managed maintenance of life on high levels of sublethal illness. This ultimate evil of medical “progress” must be clearly distinguished from both clinical and social iatrogenesis.20

The most pernicious thing that emerges in the modern conception of disease care is the commodification of health, which discursively appears as a commodity to be engineered and managed by means of contemporary medicine, techniques, and infrastructure. This aggregate story of “humanist triumph” effectively destroys the potential of people to face physical adversity and death distinctively, encourages them to forget folk remedies, and develops evil habits of dependence. In plain words, we are allowed to become existentially lazy, non-vigilant, and irresponsible, and imagine that someone else is responsible for our being healthy. From this arises what Illich calls iatrogenesis or doctor-caused illnesses. Too much and intemperate medical intervention irreparably harms the body’s immunological responses impairing its natural ability to defend itself against invasion. Too much medication chokes the body’s sensitivity to its own inner balance, damaging recuperative ability. Further, when the possibility of self-care is taken away or discounted or forgotten, then there occurs the conditions or prospect of microbial take-down of an entire social system. This is painfully evidenced in the current situation. The paradigm of “managed maintenance of life” can hide “high levels of sublethal illness” or disguise large-scale sickness in a population by means of the medical suppression of symptoms. This gives the illusion of health. But when an epidemic of this nature comes along, experts begin to talk about “co-morbidity,” with the underlying sub-lethal conditions now turning lethal. In the present scenario, it can be seen from the published data that the more affluent and medically advanced countries have  Ibid, p. 11.

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suffered relatively many more deaths due to the CoV-2 outbreak than the economically poorer countries with scant medical facilities.21 It is a puzzle over which a lot of pundits have been breaking their heads. But the answer to the conundrum is obvious from the above analysis. Poorer countries with paltry managed-care have less chance of artificially maintaining life and hence a relatively lower co-morbid pool. In other words, the existing populations of poor countries turn out to be relatively more resistant in actual terms than the apparently healthy populations in richer countries, a significant proportion of whose health has been maintained by costly medicines and advanced medical equipment. This must not be construed to mean that poorer countries have healthier populations in absolute terms. That is simply not true, for there exists no easy measure of health or of comparative health. The point is that economically and medically advanced countries have a relatively larger pool of populations with sub-lethal conditions that can become lethal under adverse circumstances. Modern medicalization of health and the humanist rhetoric have spun a web over the actuality, giving rise to the illusion that we are progressing systematically toward healthful conditions through more sophisticated hospitalization.22 21  According to statistics provided by Worldometer, deaths per million of population as on June 22, 2020, stood thus with respect to a group of relatively affluent countries: UK (628), Italy (573), Sweden (500), Belgium (837), United States (369), Ireland (347), and Switzerland (226). In comparison, in a group of economically less affluent countries, deaths per million of the population appeared thus on the same date: India (10), Pakistan (16), Bangladesh (9), Egypt (21), Indonesia (9), Afghanistan (15), and Nigeria (3). Although the grouping is informal and merely illustrative, the difference between the two groups is stark and worthy of attention. 22  “People think that hospitalization will reduce their pain or that they will probably live longer in the hospital. Neither is likely to be true. Of those admitted with a fatal condition to the average British clinic, 10 percent died on the day of arrival, 30 percent within a week, 75 percent within a month, and 97 percent within three months. In homes for terminal care, 56 percent were dead within a week of admission. In terminal cancer, there is no difference in life expectancy between those who end in the home and those who die in the hospital. Only a quarter of terminal cancer patients need special nursing at home, and then only during their last weeks. For more than half, suffering will be limited to feeling feeble and uncomfortable, and what pain there is can usually be relieved. But by staying at home they avoid the exile, loneliness, and indignities which, in all but exceptional hospitals, await them.” Illich further observes the growing relation between death and hospitalization during the last century or so: “Hospital death is now endemic. In the last twenty-five years the percentage of Americans who die in a hospital has grown by a third. The percentage of hospital deaths in other countries has grown even faster. Death without medical presence becomes synonymous with romantic pigheadedness, privilege, or disaster. The cost of a citizen’s last days has increased by an estimated 1,200  percent, much faster than that of over-all health care.

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Health within humanism has been sold to us as something that can be purchased, and not something that has to be individually and collectively practiced and struggled towards, activating negentropic potentiality. Here we are attacking this grand illusion built on commodified health, showing such thinking to be largely responsible for the consequences of the present epidemic. It has reduced us to a petty mass of cowering individuals driven inside in fear of a microbe. Around the world, there is a slogan ricocheting: “Stay in, Stay safe.” It is laughable and pitiable at the same time. It has revealed the fragility, egocentricity, and essential futility of our idea and practice of health. It has exposed the moral cowardice and ontological misunderstanding that lies hidden within acts of hubris. And more than anything else, it has revealed the bankruptcy of the political establishment in terms of leadership in times of crisis. From America to China, from Europe to India, the message has been the same: Run from the virus. Humans must hide from the virus. What has gotten exposed are not merely humans, but humanism and its self-referential representations. In strict evolutionary terms, running from danger is good adaptive behavior. However, in the case of “health” mere adaptive behavior focused on surviving sub-lethal conditions may be contrary to ecological good sense. Health care as environmental hygienic engineering works within categories different from those of the clinical scientist. Its focus is survival rather than health in its opposition to disease; the impact of stress on populations and individuals rather than the performance of specific persons; the relationship of a niche in the cosmos to the human species with which it has evolved rather than the relationship between the aims of actual people and their ability to achieve them. In general, people are more the product of their environment than of their genetic endowment. Although man has so far shown an extraordinary capacity for adaptation, he has survived with very high levels of sublethal breakdown. Dubos fears that mankind will be able to adapt to the stresses of the second industrial revolution and overpopulation just as it survived famines, plagues, and wars in the past. He speaks of this kind of survival with fear because adaptability, which is an asset for survival, Simultaneously, at least in the United States, funeral costs have stabilized; their growth rate has come in line with the rise of the general consumer-price index. The most elaborate phase of the terminal ceremonies now surrounds the dying patient and has been separated, under medical control, from the removal exequies and the burial of what remains. In a switch of lavish expenditure from tomb to ward, reflecting the horror of dying without medical assistance, the insured pay for participation in their own funeral rites.” Illich, op. cit., pp. 34–35.

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is also a heavy handicap: the most common causes of disease are exacting adaptive demands. The health-care system, without any concern for the feelings of people and for their health, simply concentrates on the engineering of systems that minimize breakdowns.23

Adaptation and the capability to adjust to largely self-initiated changes and conditions can, after a point, actually work against the ecological viability of the species. Environmental stresses introduced at great pace have changed the eco-biological landscape, and adaptation on this terrain is not necessarily a sign of health. It engenders a positive bio-feedback that merely accelerates the pace toward more reckless change leading to runaway conditions. Today, the most common cause of disease is the civilizational culture and process itself that produces the conditions for them. Endless adaptation merely allows for ceaseless degradation of the environment; we succeed in overcoming the degradation in order to produce more degradation. This is the effect of humanistic enframing. In order to reverse the trap of this illusion, we must reject the paradigm of managed maintenance of life and somehow struggle to recover our will to self-care. This is where education comes in: it is possible to claim that the essence of education is to break out of existing narratives that camouflage hegemonic drives and elitist interests. Humanism is not humanitarianism. It is the preservation of elite perceptions of what we are about, including egalitarianism, secularism, rationalism, welfarism, and so on, all apparently benign attitudes. But it is also the management of perceptions and weakening of the will that keep us bogged down within the well-settled path dependencies of prior ages. Within these path dependencies, the factual knowledge that our ways of thinking and managing have failed, do not seem to deter us from moving along the same track toward further crises, never doubting our ways. Listen to these reports that tell of more alarming scenarios. There is no end to the coronavirus pandemic in sight yet and the world is already staring at another health crisis: the Covid-19 aftermath. They call it the “post-Covid syndrome”. Post-Covid-19 analysis by top American scientific bodies the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have found that many patients who recovered from the coronavirus infection are facing milder to life-threatening symptoms. Hospitals across the world are witnessing deadly health issues like heart damage, stroke, neurological problems, lung damage  Ibid, p. 98.

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or pulmonary fibrosis, chronic fatigue syndrome and multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children. Many countries are already preparing for an emerging health crisis. They are scientifically recording the post-Covid syndrome cases to know further about SARS-CoV-2, a totally unknown virus just eight months ago. A sample study by the Journal of American Medical Association conducted in Frankfurt, Germany found 78% of the recovered Covid-19 respondents developed heart-related problems. These were healthy individuals, aged 40 to 50 before the novel coronavirus infection. A study by the UK’s Edinburgh University, in 69 countries across six continents, found heart abnormality in 55% patients while 15% patients showed severe abnormalities. All such recovered cases never had had related issues in the past. Many recovered Covid-19 patients are also being re-hospitalised for pulmonary fibrosis, with damaged lung tissues. They may need oxygen support from time to time for the rest of their lives.24

While it may be unfair to say that humanism has pushed the world to the brink of greater uncertainty, it is not an overstatement to say that humanist politics has misrepresented the case and lulled us into dependencies for which the average person must pay heavily—the cost of humanism is not spread evenly. The key point here is that humanism subsidizes its propinquities and drives through those who lead the most compromised lives and are therefore the least able to resist its seductive narratives and deployments. By means of a vast network of apparatuses, discourses, and practices, humanist socio-politics secures transfers to the privileged while seeming to be committed to universal goals such as equality and justice. The promise of great progress has made it easy to justify the pouring of concrete on the lives of the so-called under-privileged (a more appropriate name for whom would be “most-exploited”), and if there is a second wave of complications following the epidemic, one can be sure that it will not be borne evenly across economic classes. One can say with a degree of certainty that maximum planetary resources will go in seeking relief for those with means for long-term care, and others with lesser means will be left to fend for themselves in an organic pile-up on a scale rarely witnessed. Indications of this are already showing. According to a research paper posted by America’s National Institute of Health and similar papers published by other health-science entities, 24  Santosh Chaubey, “Yet Another Health Crisis Awaits the World,” News18, September 1, 2020.

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­ ost-­Covid syndrome can cause patients even to have nervous, immune, and p metabolic system abnormalities, all affecting the body in sync, similar to a health illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)/myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), that was identified 70 years ago. ME is a long-term-effect health problem that deteriorates our strength and body. Hospitals and doctors say many recovered patients are complaining about and being re-­ hospitalised for severe fatigue, brain fog, body ache and pain and immune aberrations, all ME symptoms. In severe cases, ME can also disable the whole body. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, top American infectious disease expert, countries need to consider seriously that what many patients are facing is strikingly similar to ME. “This is not a virus to take lightly, even with young people,” Fauci said in an interview with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Oved Amitay, CEO of the non-profit Solve ME/CFS Initiative, says 80% of ME cases are due to infections, mostly viral. And with Covid cases now touching the 25  million mark, we are looking at an absolutely dark possibility.25

So it appears that overt recuperation is nowhere near enough or complete, and the initial trajectories toward recovery are all off when it comes to what awaits the already weakened. The first condition merely leads to a second condition, and so on, when treated as per the existing paradigm. This chain must be broken, and it won’t be broken by those who are invested thoroughly in the technomedical myth of the humanist paradigm. The real breakthrough comes not by sticking to the old paradigm and the conventional picture of the human as an individual patient, but by understanding the nature of the composite—its elements and fields of composition, and thus reach beyond the limits set by the existing enframing. At least in education we have the possibility of starting off with those who do not yet have a stake in the hardened conception of ourselves as sovereign or autonomous beings. We learn a few important things from the case study and establish the general direction of our search. • First, we see how the optical becomes visible through linguistic arrangements and expert discourses. • Second, we discover the manner in which these newly “visible” elements become part of the ongoing spatialization of humanism through a fresh relation between words and things.  Ibid.

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• Third, when a crisis strikes from an unexpected angle, we see how expert views contradict each other without the authority of expertise itself coming into question. • And fourth, we learn to face the problem of the slippery slope of viability as a living composite in the face of a bug (even as we claim higher medical and health capabilities), so that even an insignificant piece of protein can destroy this complex composite. This is very important learning from the point of view of what we need to do pedagogically to be able to hold our own in situations of crisis. The case study of the pandemic teaches us to become bold, develop our instincts, and reach beyond the humanist picture developed through expert discourses and institutionalized positions. Standing in the midst of the greatest humanistic achievements, we must be able to simultaneously perceive the slow dissolving of all that is apparently solid. From that dissolution we must be able to take a fresh measure of ourselves without any humanistic reference points. This point is further developed in the subsequent chapters. The main thrust of the present volume is the regaining of existential powers, the “heat of life” as it were, that have been occluded during the last two centuries of rampant humanistic posturing, denying the person their direct equation with the real. On what basis do I say this? Technohumanism has socialized us (implicitly and explicitly) into believing that all answers lie in the external and material technological processes and in the measurements of thought. While undoubtedly there is a great deal of usefulness in the said processes, such one-dimensional thinking is illusory and ultimately ruinous. Just as there is an empirical side to the organism in which external factors play a leading role, there is an innate and immanent aspect that is just as vital in keeping us healthy and viable. It is this complementarity that we seek to revive in our effort to counter crises and that which we hope to convincingly portray in the present work. The evolutionary organismic power and potential of the organism lies hidden underneath a lot of secular-humanist dust, and our pedagogical responsibility is to remove this layer and help us to rediscover the fundamental dynamic forces underlying the composite. The freeing of the energies is the only way to get out of the pathetic bind in which we find ourselves today, with our strengths whittled down and

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our capabilities framed by an army of benign institutions. We have to be wary of the benign and the welfare-minded. They make us weak and dependent, and unable to develop our own internal resources to deal with trouble. In fact, we possibly have even forgotten that we might have our own resources to deal with eventualities. This book is in search of those internal and independent resources and the pedagogic effort to revive them.

CHAPTER 3

Lessons from a Chimera Virus

What do civilizations fear the most? It is uncertainty, without a doubt. And how and why is that the case? Because it is their very anti-thesis. Anti-thesis in terms of what? In terms of their assumed perpetuity.

Civilization is nothing other than a relentless drive toward certainty—the idea being the guarantor of a seeming permanence. All the technology in the world has primarily been in service of this permanence-seeking. All the nuclear arsenals, the bio-chemical weapons, the preparations for electronic warfare, all are, in the end, the seeking of certainty and permanence (the “we shall prevail” syndrome). And technohumanism has been the key ideological and instrumental vehicle of this immense historical effort. Unfortunately, the basic nature of the universe stands in its way. Things are nothing but transient processes, always transmuting into other things, without any permanence. And that is true for civilizations as well—they come and go like everything else including stellar systems, only the time scales might differ (which is also an illusion because phenomenological time is the time actually granted to the particular organism). But what about change itself, is it not subject to the same principle? We cannot speak of the meta-level within the changeable. It belongs to a different and higher logical order. In other words, change as a metaphysical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_3

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principle cannot be discussed in the same breath as the changeable, if it can be discussed at all. Coming back to mutability, we have carefully ignored all the theoretical and dialectical knowledge that we have when it comes to ourselves, preferring to believe in the myth of humanism instead—that somehow our collectivities will survive change. This is obviously irrational and against all known phenomenal behavior, which is the root irrationality that lies at the heart of humanist culture. We might even say that the repression of uncertainty is the prerequisite of culture, and we have unleashed extraordinary energies upon the planet and ourselves in our unconscious effort to repress uncertainty. The result has been an extraordinarily violent and unhappy planetary existence, because the political and social cost of dressing up anything based on entirely false premises is immense. The promise of permanence, although perfectly illusory, has held the public imagination in eternal sway, because it has helped us forget our own brief sojourn and transient lives. Technological vision and its ubiquitous outputs make it appear as though these will provide a continuity to our lives. The smooth continuities of technological societies with their ordered public domains are clearly at odds with the phenomenology of individual lives as lived in the shadow of impermanence. But individuals draw from the projected public continuities in order to deny impermanence. So if it is not permanence, then what must culture struggle for, because in the answer to that question might lie an adequate response to crisis. But before we can answer that question, we must digress into the current scenario once more. When the hypothesis first emerged that the Covid virus that has killed (and continues to kill at the time of writing) tens of millions around the planet and has destroyed half the world’s economies, had accidentally escaped from a virological laboratory, scientists and virologists all over the world were quick to condemn it as yet another conspiracy theory despite the fact that there was no suggestion of conspiracy in the narrative. The point of interest here is not the location from which the bug made its escape but the manner of the response to the question as to whether it did so. Those who responded by dismissing it as a conspiracy theory never bothered to see that what was being suggested was not a conspiracy at all but an accident—in the same manner that Chernobyl was not a conspiracy but an accident. But this vehement reaction did suggest a conspiracy of a different kind. When we place the strenuous dismissal of the lab theory against the fact that a certain lab that was the leading center for research on coronaviruses also became the locus of the first apparent cases (of a pneumonia like illness that is typical of Covid among its researchers), then it seemed more and more that there was indeed a conspiracy to silence, a

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conspiracy on the part of those who wished to suppress the truth and replace it with a convenient (zoonotic) theory. And why anyone would want to do that is not difficult to guess. Plenty was at stake—reputations, funding, belief in scientific experiments, doubts in the public mind—the stakes, in fact, couldn’t be higher. And the problem was not pitched toward an open assessment of which of the two hypothesis (lab leak or zoonotic development) was true, but which one had to be silenced before it could do damage. In other words, the uncertainty in the public mind had to be put to rest quickly. In order to follow the sequence of events, I’ll rely heavily on the article that appeared in the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” of May 2021. The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence. I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.1

Nicholas Wade, the author of the above lines, is a highly accomplished science writer and the report he has written is extraordinarily detailed, scrupulously honest, and compelling. Wade’s purpose is to get closer to the truth of what set off the pandemic without jumping to conclusions that are not merited by the available evidence. But my purpose in using this article here is somewhat different. The intent is not to examine the relative merits of the two hypotheses, but to show that it does not matter in the end which of the two hypotheses is true from the point of posthumanism, because in either case the consequence reduced human societies and their experts into a trembling and confused mass looking for answers. Unlike Wade who thinks that “it matters a great deal … if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence,” the endless search for world dominance and the technohumanist itch will always create the circumstances for another occurrence—only, it will occur differently the next 1  Nicholas Wade, “The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 23, 2021.

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time, for the root of the problem remains the same, although its manifestations are different. Technohumanism has let loose a blind impulse that cannot be controlled by merely establishing the locus of a specific occurrence. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the present work, we will need to follow the events closely, and Wade’s description is meticulous, as he goes about the business of recreating the chain of events. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market—a place selling wild animals for meat—in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels. The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as betacoronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. [However], the wet market connection, the major point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected.2

Technohumanist knowledge proceeds by isolation and identification, and makes cause-effect the keystone of its project of rational management. The expert is trained to look for causes and perhaps even force a dubious or uncertain “cause” to cover for activities. Once we are convinced that the experts have found the apparent cause of a phenomenon, we are made to feel safe. This is cultural habit. But the fact of the matter is that it does not really matter whether the efficient cause, that is, intermediary animal, is civet or camel or something else in this case. It is in the nature of the beta-coronavirus to keep mutating, and what occurred the previous time may have little bearing on what will happen the next time. Knowledge is always in the past—a record of what has happened. It can never fully prepare us for the emergent. To isolate single strands of facts does little to understand the nature of the whole, because the whole is not the sum of the parts. This becomes abundantly clear when we are dealing with any kind of crisis such as climate change or epidemic. Each slice of phenomena gives a glimpse of something, but leaves us clueless about its underlying 2

 Ibid.

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connections with everything else. We begin to guess and anticipate the next stage of the phenomenon in question, but then it takes us down from an entirely unanticipated direction. But let us proceed with the historical progression of events and carefully pick our way through the wretchedness of the conflicts of interest within technohumanism. Wuhan is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table. From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease. Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.3

The above lines illustrate how desperate the “experts” are to banish upfront any suspicion about the zoonotic origin of the virus, lest it somehow take root in the public mind. They begin by refusing to examine the alternate hypothesis, and thereby condemning theories that are at variance with their own fixations. In other words, they abandon science just when it is most necessary to be scientific. This should not be surprising because over the centuries, science has grown into a new religion, and the zealots cannot afford the heretic. No matter how hard we try, the instinctive hegemonic theme of humanism begins to come to the fore even in science. We thought we had overcome the dogmatism of religion through science, but the root instincts have remained undisturbed; these were once 3

 Ibid.

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expressed in religion, and now these are revisited in science. And so anything is fair game in the name of doing science. Whether the genie escaped from the Wuhan bottle is beside the point. For decades, virologists have been playing the reckless game of creating viruses that are more infectious and dangerous than the natural ones. The excuse was that by getting ahead of “nature” researchers could study in advance what might happen. This is of course the purest of twaddle. The most fundamental fact about “nature” is its unpredictability; it never repeats itself. By taking something from nature and incrementally making it more lethal, we don’t learn anything about what nature will do next. It is doubtful whether nature itself “knows” what will come out of it next, leave alone humans anticipating and improving on it. So if that could not be the real reason, what might it be? The only plausible motive is career advancement and interest from military and other sources. The justification for this perilous game of creating extremely dangerous viruses was again another promise of certainty.4 4  DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Teams Investigating Covid-19) is a group of independent researchers, correspondents, and investigators from different countries who are collaborating and coordinating online over the past one year to solve the mystery of Covid-19 origins. The evidence assembled by DRASTIC amounts to what prosecutors call probable cause—a strong, evidence-based case for a full investigation. DRASTIC investigators have now unearthed a joint proposal by United States Non-Governmental Organisation EcoHealth Alliance led by Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology that intended to do dangerous research on bat coronaviruses in China. The DRASTIC team has perhaps done more than anyone to bring evidence in the open to bust the narrative that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing Covid-19 has only natural origins. It’s due to this team’s exhaustive work that enabled a significant majority of scientists to propose the theory that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab as well. Even the leading lights of believers of natural origins theory are now reluctantly accepting that both the theories are equally plausible. The latest find of the DRASTIC team is documents received via a whistleblower that show how EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology “attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF).” The documents are a part of grant proposal submitted by EHA and WIV to the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018. The idea was to inject deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the WIV into humanized and “batified”’ mice. The proposal termed “DEFUSE” was “ultimately rejected for full funding (but leaving open the door for partial funding), in part because it mis-interpreted the Gain of Function guidelines.” Despite the research being rejected by one US agency, Department of Health and Human services (HHS) approved similar work without Potential Pandemic Pathogens (P3CO) review in 2018 and 2019. The part of grant proposal which has never been made public until now proposes “vaccinating wild bats using aerosolized viruses and further work on published and unpublished strains that could have directly produced SARS-CoV-2.” “This is literally the most crazy jaw dropping thing I’ve read in the last

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By endangering the whole world, a certain group earns plaudits in the name of doing science. Technohumanism assures that they will not be questioned because they are doing science. In fact, there are all kinds of internal understandings in place that guarantees indemnity and even obvious conflict of interest is often ignored. It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.5

The game of creating chimera viruses that are much more lethal and infectious than naturally found ones has been going on for a long time, resulting in a great deal of dangerous knowledge about such manipulation. It includes the possibility of large-scale intentional destruction such year. Just utterly damning,” The Seeker, one of the team members of DRASTIC, tweeted about the leaked proposal. “They are very clear in what they intended: bat sampling, virus characterization, high-risk experiments, captive trials on bats, and large scale inoculation of bats in Yunnan … We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for… proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential Furin cleavage sites. … [W]e will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and HAE cultures,” reads the proposal at one place. When an Internet user asked Richard H. Elbright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, to translate the above paragraph for laymen, he tweeted that it “Translates” as “We will artificially insert furin cleavage sites at the spike-gene S1-S2 border of bat SARS-related coronaviruses, and we will ask whether this increases their ability to infect human cells.” Staff, Swarajya, https:// swarajyamag.com/ Sep 21, 2021. 5  Wade, op.cit.

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as to be found in bioweapons. This kind of activity brings to mind the “death drive” or Thanatos in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, a principle that brings up the dark anterior side of Eros. It suggests that the death drive, consisting of inward-driven destruction or outward-driven aggression, tends to equalize the tensions raised by Eros, its dual, or the life principle. Understandably, this theory has made a lot of intellectual notables uncomfortable. But the question remains: Does technohumanism contain within it an automatically arising destructive seed as suggested by Freud? And could it be connected to the root of the present crisis in a broad way? It is not an easy question to answer empirically; for, who is to bell the proverbial cat, as it were, and conduct the investigations or trace the larger psychological processes that might throw light on the case? It is presumably the experts themselves, which makes it a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop, as the saying goes. The USFDA chief has gone on record saying, “The side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come out of a lab has continued to expand, and the side of the ledger that suggests this has come from of a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn’t budged, and if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted.”6 And yet there is no urgent intent on behalf of the authorities or open investigation into the real reasons behind the worldwide havoc. But there is another side to this unbelievable scenario. And that concerns how the so-called free world practically deals with things that it knows to be problematic: farm it out to countries with authoritarian regimes, and banana republics with no accountability. In the present case, even before the world could wake up to frame questions about what had actually occurred, all China had to do was to erase the virus records overnight, sanitize the Wuhan lab, make the workers disappear, and deny all responsibility. The rest is history. When a country is run by despotic rule that has no transparency or visible measure of public accountability, it is hard to see how its institutions could be entrusted with dangerous games that compromise the security of the whole world. But the curious fact of the case is that they were made partners in this venture. So the entire thing is mala-fide from the beginning, and all the posturing is of no use. However, there will, in all probability, never be an unambiguous official answer to what happened, because it is not in the interest of technohumanism to admit what happened. To admit what happened is to admit the flaw 6  The New  York Post quoted Scott Gottlieb, chief of United States Food and Drug Administration as saying on CBS program “Face the Nation.”

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in the larger manner in which interests are interconnected, and that is not admissible. The analysis of the available facts and the more-than-­reasonable inferences that are being presented here are only to show the extent to which technohumanism is capable of deluding itself and the corresponding loss of accountability. A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter. Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not possibly know… The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive. First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore, the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation. If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained.7

Technohumanism’s worst face is on display when it turns duplicitous, that is, when it uses its own logic to create arguments to deceive itself and the public. We know that science’s best face has lain in the falsifiability doctrine. But when technoscience begins to behave in a manner that is complicit with common human failings, falsifiability goes for a toss. It is replaced by bigotry, and it’s no use saying that it is not science but its users who are at fault—science is its practitioners. Within the technohumanist plane, there can be no difference between doctrine and the practices underwritten by the doctrine, since it is the former that has provided the constructive platform for the evolution of the latter. Further, the practices 7

 Ibid.

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profoundly create and recreate the practitioner. In other words, what we have before us is this admixture of idea and biology that has created the technohuman. But this is also precisely the genesis of the virus. And while it might seem like an astonishing claim, the above observations inexorably make us come to the conclusion that the technohuman itself is not very different from the lab-created virus. The former is an ideological-biological product and the latter too is an ideational-biological creation. And the present pandemic is a face-off between two essentially similar creatures, both basically “lab” created. The escape from this pandemic, and all future pandemics, is therefore to find a way out of this lab/culture created self-­ sameness to a different ontological and phenomenological understanding. The search for certainty has paradoxically brought perilous uncertainty, and the path beyond it now is difficult because we have lost that way of looking. The creation of the technohuman is the greatest liability, far more dangerous than any virus, because it is the source-pathogen for all present and future misery. This is by no means overstating the case—all available evidence bears it out. Ironically, the Wuhan lab was trying to make a best fit between human cell susceptibilities and the coronavirus, and it succeeded, and now the practitioners of virology are trying hard to prove to the contrary in order to get away from collective responsibility. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated. But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage … natural selection does all the heavy lifting after the manipulation. Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for ­stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared

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view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.8

The lines above are breathtaking, to say the least, and confirm our hypothesis about the technohuman, and its composition through ideas, biology, and grant-driven research. Although the primary argument in the above lines is not important from our point of view, what it gives us is a precious insider’s account of what goes on in the name of virological research. With infinite care a deadly—the deadlier the better—pathogen is built, blending manipulation and natural selection, so that it can infect human cells in the most efficient manner. But what has become most important in the controversy? It surrounds the factuality or otherwise of lab-escape, and not the destructive madness of allowing such things in the first place. Secondly, it demonstrates that the price of truth can be the destruction of careers: this also is numbing in its implications, and to use a metaphor from another ongoing crisis, a form of Talibanization of science. Weren’t we taught that people came into science to seek the truth of phenomena? If the idea is to fall in line with the “declared view” as is clearly stated above by one of the leading writers of science, then we come round a full circle. After centuries of struggle against dogma, the latter again turns up grinning at the back door—the true winner in this deadly controversy. What it also shows is that the perception that science is equivalent to certainty, and that certainty is to be valued over every other way of viewing the world, has become doctrine. Nothing can be more ruinous to science itself than this mix-up with belief. As a teacher, what am I supposed to tell my students aspiring for a career in science: Beware of the “Papal Bulls” and the “fatwas” of science? The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged. Doubts about natural emergence. Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until ­ 8

 Ibid, my emphasis.

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around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.9

Viruses don’t evolve overnight in order to be able to jump from one species to another unrelated species. They need to go through many adaptive changes as intermediate steps in order to be able to come close to making that leap. Other than loud claims, no information has been forthcoming till date about such an evolutionary path or any intermediate host species that backs the natural emergence theory. And yet, despite the obvious inconsistencies, a small group of vested interests is able to put a lid on proper investigations and stymie the public imagination. Why? Obviously because we have our institutionalized heads in the sand and are ready to believe the experts even when they push our understanding in an absurd direction. We prefer the certainty of perfidy to existential uncertainty that is the natural condition. Science started off as curiosity. But as organized truth it becomes a great danger to the planetary life. Science’s belief that there is no real or viable counter-belief to science, as well as the arrogance born out of this belief, is part of the danger. Each pole must have a counter polarity, each view a (perhaps invisible) counter view, and every existential position a counter position. Dialectical reason or rationality itself tells us this much. This is in fact the escape from becoming frozen in any attitude, which is a kind of death. Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted. With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and ­introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus. These enhancements of viral 9

 Ibid.

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capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic.10

The logic of the so-called gain-of-function experiments is loosely akin to arguing that we must make weapons of mass destruction in order to anticipate all the possible pathways any country might adopt that is on the road to such weapons—that is, a catastrophic attempt to be in advance of catastrophe. Such thinking is painfully absurd, to say the least, and in the past has actually led to protracted calamity. In the present case, such thinking has killed and continues to kill millions and millions worldwide, and apart from destroying economies and livelihoods, it has cast upon the world a pallid helplessness. In her epic work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt had prophetically warned about the increasing gap between the expert and the lay person and its serious consequences. Technohumanism is another name for the esoteric inventions of “truth” in this gap that promises returns if the laity kept silent about which s/he was not supposed to know anything significant anyway. And if you knew something significant, then you were already perhaps part of the expert group, in which case you couldn’t open your mouth anyway. Everything done under the auspices of technohumanism must automatically be assumed to be in the interests of common advancement and therefore in the interests of “truth.” In other words, and this is very significant, technohumanism creates its own understanding of truth and rationality, which is at sharp variance with their classical meanings. As Paul Grenier11 has observed, this has been in the making for quite some time.  Ibid.  “During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Washington told the world that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Although the Bush administration had no real evidence to back up this claim, this presented no impediment to pursuing the desired course of action. The necessary evidence was invented, and contradictory evidence was firmly suppressed. The following example is instructive. José Bustani, founding director of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (opcw), was at the time making persistent efforts to get Iraq accepted as a member of the opcw, as this would have allowed thorough inspections, and Bustani fully expected that such inspections would confirm what his own chemical weapons experts had already told him—that all of Iraq’s chemical weapons had already been destroyed in the 1990s after the Persian Gulf War. The Bush 10 11

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Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Baric had developed, and taught Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. By a strange twist in the story, Shi’s work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money: “Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.” “We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in  vitro and in  vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.” What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. She would insert the spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”).12

Note that the US National Institutes of Health and NIAID, top national bodies, are involved in the funding of this research. Is it any surprise that US authorities are not too keen to pursue the matter of the viral emergence path too seriously? Technohumanism and its projects are a vast global enterprise that spans entire nations. If we investigate China too administration’s response to Bustani was swift: then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton gave him twenty-four hours to resign or face the consequences. For the Bush administration, overthrowing Iraq was far too important a matter to let the truth get in the way. Page Smith, in his eight-volume history of the United States, repeatedly returns to the competition, throughout most of American history, between what he terms a Classical Christian consciousness and a Democratic Secular consciousness. A secular consciousness, present from the very beginning, had undergone a transformation; or, perhaps it is better to say, had come to fruition as the technocracy always already implicit in the secular idea. Under technocracy, reason, even rationality, are no longer recognized as having an intrinsic value. They no longer oblige our agreement. To the contrary, they are now themselves subservient to our autonomous will. Nature is like putty in the hands of technological man: indeed, it is no longer possible to speak of ‘man.’ The actors who act within technological society reject any such imposition. They themselves will henceforth technologically decide what and who we ‘are,’ right down to the very core of our biological existence.” Paul Grenier, “Technology and Truth,” The National Interest, August, 2021. 12  Ibid, italics mine.

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closely, it will likely turn up a lot of terribly embarrassing linen for others as well. Therefore, the best thing is to keep the public attention focused on the management of the pandemic and as it rolls down as all viral vectors eventually do, hope that the whole controversy would simply die down to odd questions of academic interest. With the blessings of the top institutes then, step by diabolic step, a method was created and funds sought to put together one of the deadliest viruses known to humans. The rationale for such activity had already been invented as truth of the necessity for such experiments. Reason now was subservient to the will-to-power and no longer possessed a transcendent value. Anything could be justified that techno-rationality needed to justify, and reason could no longer stand in the way. One just had to find the right technical language for it. Further, combining two or more pathogenic viruses, called chimera viruses, greatly increases the lethality of the resultant virus, and hence their value also as a bioweapon. It is not far-fetched to assume that behind the elaborate subterfuge of gain-of-function, there might exist a much deeper diabolical intent covered in layers of techno-rationality. The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from. The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses. But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place. The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. [Of all things] why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because no other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.13

 Ibid.

13

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According to Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2, as far back as 1992, the virology community has known that “the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory.” And that means the “smoking gun” was there, and obvious to anyone who knows about the state of viral research in this vector. The reader may wonder as to the necessity of so much detail about the pathogen in a book on education. The pandemic is a dramatic case study for the one interested in studying techno-­rationality and technohumanism. To understand how our thinking is hegemonized and pushed onto a certain track, it was deemed necessary to gain a basic knowledge of what we are up against and that demanded that we go into a bit about the virus. A little bit of background detective work shows that at no stage was there any form of the SARS2 virus with furin cleavage site in circulation, whether in bats or among humans. It appeared suddenly and magically on the scene without any predecessor, fully ready to attack human cells. In all of the vast hinterland of China, the pandemic had to break out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute which was working precisely on that class of organisms which is the pathogen responsible for the pandemic. It seems too much of a coincidence to any fair-minded observer. “There is no alternative explanation as to why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons.”14 The virus was already well adapted to humans, as is to be expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual augmentation, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could anyone want, aside from the direct lab records (which are unobtainable) documenting SARS2’s creation? Proponents of the natural emergence theory, on the other hand, have a much more difficult story that stretches the imagination beyond the breaking point. Their case rests on a single presumption—the assumed analogous relation between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But we have no evidence whatsoever of this assumed analogy. Till date, after extensive search, no one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, neither has any  Ibid.

14

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intermediate host been found, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of thousands of animals. Further, there is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from any intermediate host to people, as in the cases of the SARS1 and MERS viruses. Hospital records do not show the incremental increase of the disease as the virus evolved. What does this tell us about techno-rationality? In order to protect itself, it would go to any lengths to mask what we have known as the rational truth, which is, as facts present themselves to the unbiased consciousness. Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with gain-of-­ function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014, and it was raised in 2017. The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2. Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world have been playing with fire. Their behavior has long alarmed other biologists. In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a SARS2-like virus. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” they wrote. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”15

And finally, what could be the reason for the media’s disinterest in the laboratory creation theory, the only theory that appears to be plausible given the mountain of circumstantial evidence? As Wade points out, the virologists’ code of omertà (code of silence and mutual honor) is one reason. “Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses.” The “great unwashed” or the ignorant masses are not in any position to question their helplessness  Ibid.

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in the face of the expert. Technohumanism is after all an age of the expert. They tell you why we yawn, how much water you should drink, whether we are having enough sex, whether eggs have good cholesterol or bad cholesterol, if coffee is good for you, how much exercise you should take, and whether there is going to be a third wave of the pandemic. We are used to being surrounded by expert advice, which is also a dangerous form of loss of autonomy, as well as destructive of the capability to think creatively. We leave it to the expert to figure out everything for us, which is a sign of perilous immaturity and pitiful indolence. We are told to mind our little business as the experts are taking care of the bigger business of running the world for us. In time we find a cult of the expert has grown around us that is in charge of thinking itself, and this is normalized as we remain unaware of what has happened. This is not to say that we must reject all experts and expert advice, but to recognize the problem of expert cultism. And as with all cults, expertism develops its own vested interests. That is inevitable and intrinsic to the process in the absence of existential vigilance. We cannot simply blame the expert; we have to look at ourselves. And when we look carefully again what do we find? A sociological nightmare that we have created through historical self-deception and will-­ to-­power. A nightmare is nothing other than twisted bits of distorted history mixed with fear and anxiety. A historically constituted humanism and humanist rationality is a product of time—a temporal product. It is a history constituted of memories beginning in the early rise of humanism and continuing thereafter till we reach the present-day cult of the expert. As the species began to dominate the earth, its mode of generalizing its becoming-in-action began to become systematized. Out of this emerged, albeit gradually at first, a mode of thinking that, through the experts who spoke on behalf of us, justified and rationalized any action that promoted itself and furthered its own goals. The great thinker Max Weber was the first to notice it—he even called it the irrationality of rationality. Out of this emerged the modern subject or the techno-rational individual who could pretty much be made to believe in anything that had the stamp of scientificity on it. Science, and its protégé techno-rationality, began to be perceived not as a historical process coming out of the same brain that had hunted women as witches and burnt people at the stakes as heretics not so long ago, but as an autonomous and transcendental force of intelligence. This externalization and autonomization was the big trick, and once achieved, it paved the way for techno-rationalism to attain god-like status.

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The heretic was the naysayer or the doubter who was ridiculed and ostracized as the reactionary. All of this was obviously not possible but for a cumulative process that is collectively known as recorded history or the reflexive-humanistic narrative. Human achievements are incremental and carefully built up structures, which eventually forget the process of their own genesis, just as the historical self cannot recall its own diachronic process but sees itself all at once with a synchronicity. Our principal enemy here is the historical narrative that has carved out the human as something different and special. We have fallen prey to our own achievements, not realizing that our so-­ called greatness is by the standards we ourselves have invented, and no one else. And although anyone who judges himself to be great with reference to himself is branded a narcissist to be viewed with suspicion, this bare fact seems to have escaped us while reviewing humanism. This peculiar blindness that has indefinitely expanded the techno-rationalist balloon has also created a humanocentric self that sees man as the measure of all things. The humanocentric self is all agog with its own constructions and achievements and can tolerate no criticism. And although history itself tells us of our larger failures and depredations, we take no real lessons from it. The Wuhan experiments and others like it are the direct consequences of such historical failure. The next big question therefore is: where do we turn for our cues if not toward history? Is there an escape from techno-rationalist accumulation? Can we shake ourselves loose from the technohumanist construction of ourselves? Could we perhaps discover a posthumanist plane that is uniquely different? To find out about this we have to turn away from temporality to spatiality and eventually toward a geography of our species-becoming. History relies on memory, whereas geospatiality is elemental and corpuscular. What we have to struggle to create is a geography of the self, or rather, a movement away from historical reflexivity to a geo-sensitivity and topology. What could be its possible elements? We can think of the bio-­ physical, the neuro-electrical, the psycho-affective, the erotic-carnal, and the genetic-vibrational as some of the axes of the geo-ontological plane. There are productions on these axes, release of forces that interact and produce consequences that constitute our micro-realities. Here we will encounter force vectors that might be experienced and described in terms of tensors, integrals, differentials, velocities, accelerations, retardations, charges, and discharges. These are not available to the mind as representation, but must be revealed to oneself through phenomenological training.

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We might refer to their combinations as the primitive self, as a mode of being and becoming that is different from history. Why or how is this primitive self superior from the point of view of the nonhumanist plane? The primitive self is neither superior nor inferior. It simply is the resultant vector of the available forces and therefore what is (not what we imagine is). The resultant vector is always in the present; present to itself. It is not an aid to practice. It is practice itself. This self as practice cannot do Wuhan-like things simply because it is a practice on itself: the practice or play of forces that is not idealist. We cannot do any better than this. Besides, the resultant vector is always in the present and therefore we dispense with history. It is the path to the recovery of Eros or the elan vital. So we have the temporal self and the geo-ontological self. We have to practice crossing over from one to the other. We will go into the process of crossover from the socio-temporal self to the geological self or the entanglement of forces. What separates the temporal self from the geo-ontological self? The image of a historically privileged center. Whereas all other images are changing from the point of view of a particular image/ body, the one image that remains stable or invariant to it is none other than itself. From this illusory experience of stability or invariance arises the sense of a privileged center. It becomes the source of distortion. Time and history cannot give us the truth about ourselves even though we learn to invent or project an imaginary future. Because the present is all there is—an interminable present with the potency of forces that keep interacting and overwhelming each other and emerging in new ways. Once the resultant vector is there, and we are that vector, there is a new quality, a new vitality—a poiesis that is free of the archaeological determinations. Right now, what am I, not who am I, is the question: The move from who to what: the “who” is historically produced, whereas the “what” is geo-ontologically constructed. Becoming open to the production of this vectoral dimension is the work of the teacher. In the middle of the rough and tumble of school work, the active solitude remains ever silent and watchful. Active solitude has its own inner rhythm from which it responds to the outer and then retreats to its inner qualitative flow. We must teach ourselves this retreat from the expert world view. The process of getting out of the temporalizing habit, that is, manufacturing the who through temporal synthesis, is a process of disadjustment, which is the first, but by no means an easy, step. We begin by questioning and de-valorizing clock time. This does not mean that we stop living by clock time—that is absurd and obviously impossible. Rather it means that

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we become critical of it through a process of careful observation in which the immediate data of our consciousness begins to surface. It is the immediate data of consciousness that learns to resist chronic time and not some mental decision to do so. But what is immediate data of consciousness? Behind the uniformity of social chatter and cultural pulls and pushes that organize the mental plane, there is a continual upsurge of pre-­ representational flow that has no name or image. Once past convention and entrenched habit we become intuitively attuned to this flow of forces. Our task is to learn to pay attention to this flow unmanaged and unmediated by our historical self. History breaks up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another; it further the interests of language and social life. This may be useful for social and conventional purposes, but it gives us nothing of the life and movement of reality which is a moving mosaic of forces and tensions. Let us stop here and take a breather. What is it that we are trying to do? We are trying to liberate the forces in us that have been working in us since birth by bringing ourselves face-to-face with those forces. Why does all of this sound so complicated? Because we are trained to “solve” problems, that is, to focus on the solution rather than on the nature of the problem itself. Instead, we need to examine the problem to see if it is a false problem. The experts often set themselves false problems and pursue their solution. “The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden, and so to speak, covered up: The only thing left to do is to uncover it.”16 The habit of solving artificial problems goes back all the way to school where the teacher or the textbook poses the problem and the student is made to seek the solution according to some pre-established algorithm or formula. This way we do not develop any intuition about the reality in which we participate because the problem and its solution are ready-mades that do not allow us the freedom to formulate an authentic query about our actual contact with reality. As a result, we grow dependent on expert-constructed problems and their solutions. In art, poetry, music, or even mathematics, the effort of invention consists in generating the very terms in which the problem will be formulated. In painting, for example, the problem and its solution are identical—the  Henri Bergson, op. cit., p. 57.

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very raising of the aesthetic problem through a medium is simultaneously its solution. This allows for the creative emergence of a direct, pre-rational grasp of forces and tensions that comes out of the totality of the compositional relations running through the soma. The root of each genuine problem and its solution thus lies in the élan vital or life essence which is nothing other than the resultant vector of forces that traverses the organism. When challenged in the classroom, our identity as teacher, that is, history tries to speak for us. But if memory or reflexivity is kept in check, we must respond with what is. “What is” does not have to be cooked up; it has to be allowed to perform. Senses liberated from history/past take full advantage of organic energy, a surge of power that is phenomenological. Therefore, pedagogy must learn to distinguish between the logical and the phenomenological. The logical consists of empirical and rational knowledge about an objectified world, that is, concerning the ontology of objects, and the phenomenological dimension consists of knowledge of an ontology of relations, especially inner relations. We have to be conscious of this distinction and honor both sides—each is equally important after its own manner. But modern education has refused to consider the phenomenological side, the anterior side of the objectivized world, thereby ending up with a shriveled process that we call learning. Learning about objects, that is, traditional knowledge, is important and even vital, but learning about the processes of the self and its relation to the world is equally important. An objectified world is a practical world that is necessary for survival, whereas the relational world is important to come to terms with the limits and possibilities of the self that is being educated. Here we open up the other dimension and speak more fully about the sources and resources of the ontological self. Who or what could be our allies as we study our phenomenological potential or the depth of experience-ability that determines what kind of world comes into view? On the geo-ontological plane, there has to be a meditation on the elements. First, we consider air: the necessity of proper breathing. It might sound trivial, but it isn’t. Very few of us know how to take in air adequately. This was evident in the recent pandemic where lack of oxygen became a very big issue. Shallow, careless breathing, when further compromised by an invading bug, can quickly become serious. Instead, if we take breathing seriously as a matter of daily rigor, we discover many things about ourselves and cannot be compromised so easily by a passing infection. One might be surprised to find out how much of the present crisis was due to our poor breathing habits. Apart from

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adequate breathing habits, we realize also that the steady chatter of the brain interferes with the breath. But it is not about breathing per se, rather it is about merging psychologically with the breath. Without the chatter, I realize I am nothing other than the breath: no breath, no me. It is a lesson in phenomenological merger, bypassing the incessant clamor of the ego. Here we have a strengthening of the organism. Next is a meditation on water or infinite flexibility. Watch the fluidity and shapelessness of that which we call consciousness. The self is fluid; it has no shape. It shapes itself according to contingency, but then gradually calcifies into a settled state. The meditation on water is to bring us back into that mutable and changeable state, from where we can respond adequately to challenge. Third is a meditation on the sky, that is, on nothingness or aloneness. I am nothing, that is, not-a-thing. And hence, in a sense, by virtue of that fact, I am a part of everything. The sky is, and is not, at the same time, making us aware of the ambiguity of existence. This is the first step in getting rid of fear, something that haunts us and ruins our capacity to face things. Fourth is a meditation on the fire element. The body heat, maintained by a homeostatic miracle, separates life from the intense cold of space. We have to focus on this heat throughout the body, including the gut, creating phenomenological awareness that is beyond mental consciousness. It is also incumbent upon us to be careful of what we feed the body, which means appropriate use of heat, because the gut represents the heat element. And finally there is the meditation on the earth, this beautiful planet, and its sensory objects. One can do this in a multitude of ways, including sharpening of the senses and cultivating existential vigilance, and increasing the capacity to feel deeply, especially for nature. Beginning with these exercises, we are led toward a gradual autonomy from social control and dependence, and hence toward a greater freedom to experiment and experience further. Posthumanism depends on this inner autonomy in order to move toward more intense states. I have presented to the reader the fundamentals of a geo-biological process that yields a continually changing geography of the organism with which the self is engaged. At any given moment, the emergent geography may present whichever aspect is most relevant to the situation. The most important thing is not to let history interfere. When you reach this level of transparency to the elements, the denseness of history begins to leave you. We cannot be without the historical self, that is clear. All we need are those gaps and clearings in which the geo-ontological self can emerge and function. The great theorist Walter Benjamin had observed that the true

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purpose of history is to shrug it off and move on. Preparing a new generation to be what they have the potential for, we have to do precisely this— shrug off the historical and move ahead with the geo-ontological. This does not mean we ignore history. At the public level, the historical remains pre-eminent. At the individual level, the historical must give way to the phenomenological. And it is here at the level of the phenomenological that theory and practice become indistinct. What theory finally aims at is to find ways to increase our capacities and actualize creative potential. Practice on the geo-ontological plane is always emergent, meaning at the cutting edge of potentiality and hence always creative. Like an elastic band, the ego-self limits the sensibilities, does not allow us to grow beyond a point. To cut this elastic band is not easy. We cannot directly approach it or cut it. It has to be done surreptitiously by attacking one bond-image at a time—physical, emotional, sentimental, doctrinal, and so on. Little by little we have to undermine the ego-self, taking the necessary risks, as gradually we become unrecognizable to ourselves, by testing the limits. Thus, we move away from “who am I” to “what am I.” Our lives must become our laboratories for experimentation, in order to make periodic visits to the space beyond the circumscribed circle. On the phenomenological plane, there is no distinction between teacher and student. Both are discovering the geo-ontological dimension of their being. We tell our students to be critical, imaginative, while we ourselves remain pathetically without either. To be critical does not simply mean to be critical of social attitudes and beliefs; it means to be critical of one’s own practices and perceptions. And to be imaginative does not simply mean imagining new ways to manipulate things. To be imaginative means understanding the thinker in new ways away from the old baggage. Reconstituting ourselves on the geographical plane does not mean it is some final destination where we can come to rest. The only resting place is the grave. Each day we have to wake up and find ourselves, that is, the resultant vector, anew. We are at a different place each day. The less I smell of yesterday the better, because otherwise I falsify my current state. Finally, we get to the point where the self can be considered as performativity under continuous mutation. It is not only the virus that can mutate; we assert that so can the organismic being. In fact, a mutating self can out-­ mutate any virus. The virus mutates through natural selection; we mutate through self-selection. It is the most shameful thing to cower at an invisible bug and not be able to out-maneuver it. But we cannot do it at the level of the social self; we have to descend to the level of the primitive. We

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have to descend to the level of the bug, its sheer physicality. For this we have to be extremely alert about all the forces at work, be sensitive to the body, and open it up to necessary changes. The historical self resists all of this, being essentially status-quo-ist. The historical self is nothing other than a group of images. These images need to be abandoned to be able to mutate away from the technohumanist cul-de-sac. As we push against our existential limits the images are left behind, gradually to become irrelevant background noise. The self now becomes compressed into a razor’s edge enabling it to enter into new configurations. It is completely present at the leading edge and hence able to meet reality fully. A few things are necessary in order to shake off the shadow of history tailing us. First, we have to shut down the indulgence of memory. Do not look back, or you are turned to stone. Second, keep extending yourself into territory never visited. Third, nullify (empty out) the image you have of yourself. Fourth, intensify physical engagement with the elements mentioned earlier. Finally, stay away from stock situations that tend to affirm your historical identity. These are some steps in an elementary phase construction of the geo-ontological plane, or a geography of the self. It has nothing to do with the politics of identity (history) with which the world is obsessed today. Organismic geography must prevail over history. That is what the activities of the chimera virus suggest, and which is how it successfully creates innumerable variants. Viral mutation is geo-ontological disjuncture, not historical development. An effective response to that must be in terms of transformation geography at the corporeal level, not battling at the mental or representational level. The mental consciousness, being representational, is one level removed from where the viral chimera is located. The level gap makes it ineffective and reactive rather than proactive. We have to come to the corporeal plane, to the level of the virus in the present case, and act from there. I have to be intimately enmeshed within my corpus and participate fully in the transformations that the corporeal intelligence demands. The path to it has been alluded to in the foregoing lines. Only then can I effectively respond to this or any other crisis. To rely on my geo-ontological or bio-geographical self and not on the experts requires a great deal of pedagogical work, and at many levels. This is the task before us. It is not something we accomplish by reading about it, but by continuous practice of disjunction with the historical-humanist thought processes. Posthumanism is not yet another hypostasis, but an emergent becoming.

CHAPTER 4

Psychoanalysis of Crises

Psychoanalysis of crises and not of individuals indicates the posthumanist perspective and the radically altered terrain. More than anything else, what we have in the world today is a crisis in thought, which then manifests itself in various external crises. Whatever recordings we have made of ourselves, our reflexive assessments, and our brush with the external world have produced encodings that are image-centric. And the collective images are constitutive of the problems of the magnitude we have been speaking about in the preceding pages, which pile up incessantly because thought gets into a runnel. Today, the very mode of thinking, and not merely its contents, can no longer be trusted or accepted as a given. We have to examine the runnel which is humanism and humanist memory. This memory has produced a unified narrative that is a collective delusion being a mosaic of preferred moments without examining the in-between. It is argued here that not merely the content but the form of thought needs critical examination. We must admit of a psycho-pathology, not of this person or that, nor of this group or that, but of the whole field of thought, its tendencies and operational patterns, its obsessions and pieties. We must shake ourselves out of the idea that thinking is merely a neutral medium for reflections on reality. Rather, thinking has evolved out of certain interactions with the extensionality that have led to yet other interactions, and so on, in a contingent chain that today is made to appear natural and neutral, that is able to comment on the whole of reality. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_4

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What we need therefore is a critical examination—let us call it psychoanalysis—of thought itself. First, of course, I must say what it means to speak of “psychoanalysis” of thought in the present context and why it may be arguably alright to use the term here. In revealing that rationale, I must make it clear that by “psychoanalysis” of thought I do not quite mean the classical Freudian process of unearthing the motivational structure of the Unconscious.1 Of course, saying this immediately makes it incumbent to state reasons for the different connotation in our use of the term and the point of departure from the original. To begin with, in classical psychoanalysis the conscious mind attempts to guess the structure of what is not available to it. In other words, the conscious mind is speculating about something it knows nothing about. It is reasonable to say that when the mental sphere attempts to structurally characterize, and intervene in, the passional sphere, it is bound to create irresolvable problems. In attempting to highlight the repressional problem of civilizations, Freudian psychoanalysis could not avoid giving a mechanism for the Unconscious, which, in turn, became its own basic trap. We need to dwell on this in order to understand the problem facing us. A brief excursus here takes us to the critical and incisive view of famed littérateur D. H. Lawrence who has an enlightening perspective on the psychoanalytic process that is very different from the conventional or classical view. This unconventional view will be of enormous benefit to us as we seek to analyze thinking from within thought and avoiding the error that classical psychoanalysis committed. The motivizing of the passional sphere from the [perspective of the] ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, 1  As for the usual connotation of the term Unconscious, we will go by the understanding D. H. Lawrence provides in his comments on the Freudian term: “The word unconscious itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning. Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects subconscious and preconscious, because both these would imply a sort of nascent consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental realization. And by his unconscious he intends no such thing. He wishes rather to convey, we imagine, that which recoils from consciousness, that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which, though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our unconscious.” D.  H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p 13.

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creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle. It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical principle, if it be applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but the god in the machine —the little, fixed, machine principle which works the human psyche automatically…For of course there is a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little mechanic inside the works.2

How can the mental world of ideas give us a motivational structure for the submerged world of passions? Can we honestly say what is going to be our emotional condition a minute from now, when, for example, an unexpected letter arrives, as also when an expected one does not? Nothing is more absurd than for the mind to imagine that it can second guess a passional field that is essentially occult to it. And yet this is what classical psychoanalysis claims to do. To want to rule the passional field by means of a machinic principle (repressional structure of the Unconscious) results in shutting off the creative impulses that arise from deep within the occult psychic field, reducing it to the purely materialistic domain. It happens because we lose trust in that part of ourselves and rely increasingly on the ideal-mechanical. An extraordinary truth arises before us—the ideal and the material that are supposedly at very different ends of reality, turn out to be analogous. Let us proceed carefully and examine this assertion by means of an unrelated example. Historical materialism finds “class” to be the key factor in societal formations, and yet nothing is more of an idealization than the notion of “class,” to construct which we have to submerge and sacrifice an immense diversity. Thus, the mechanism of class is at once material and ideal, and the enforced idealization becomes the Achilles heel of Marxian theory. On the face of it, the focus on forbidden love, which lies at the core of the Freudian problematic, appears to speak on behalf of Eros. But on closer examination it emerges as an idealization and reductive 2

 D. H. Lawrence, pp. 14–15.

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mechanical principle which is offered as the essential turnpike of the Unconscious. In other words, Freudian psychoanalysis finally comes to rest on a fixed motive decided by thought as the unattainable pis aller, resulting in a gloomy paradoxicality. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, thought makes a picture of an immanent process and proceeds to fixate it in consciousness in an idealized form. From that point on there is an equivalence between picture and reality. The incest taboo is no doubt an important constituent of the civilizational base plate, but when desire is isolated from the passional nature, universalized and idealized, it becomes the distorting factor. The mechanism becomes the ghost in the machine resulting in the purging of the pre-mental, primal nature of things. We lose the possibility of an active Unconscious that is creative and contributive to our growth and well-being. Rational thought perhaps cannot deal with the possibility of something that is neither mechanical nor ideational and yet perfectly resourceful. This dismissal is, I’ll claim, the first link in the syntax of crises, for it shuts off our connection with the primitive part of ourselves. [W]e do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live. What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it begin?3

The mental map is a secondary manifestation of the primary living ferment. Doubtless, the former has its uses, but any attempt to push it beyond a point is counterproductive. We must not begin to imagine that the mental map or representation is the reality. The map, in other words, is not the territory. We cannot go back to the “ground,” or the so-called Unconscious—I would prefer to call it “under-conscious”—in this case, through the map, which is at a different organismic level. No amount of idealizations or intellectual analysis will allow us to descend into the true Unconscious—the background of consciousness from where “life bubbles 3

 Ibid., p. 15.

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up.” The under-conscious or trans-conscious is nothing but the spume of emergent life and cannot be impacted by mental formations or interpreted by it. It certainly is nothing that the mind can grasp or modify. We can see it as the “spontaneous life-motive” or the élan-vital in every organism. This then has to be the starting line of our inquiry into thought—the point at which life bubbles up and later manifests as mental formations. What follows is world-making that involves a separation between the organism and phenomena in general, and we begin to regard ourselves reflexively. And this reflexive separation initiates humanism in general, and over time, its variants. What connection does this have with our present problem? It is partly a problem of a partial truth masquerading as the whole. In the Freudian problematic, at the root of the psyche is the sexual drive (pleasure principle) which is mangled by societal constraints (reality principle). While this is no doubt an important aspect of things, it is not everything. I do not, for instance, write and paint necessarily because I could not sleep with my mother. Repressed sexuality and sublimation can do notable things to and for individuals, but these by no means cover the range of human impulses. Lawrence caricaturizes conventional psychoanalytical assumptions in an endearing manner: Is it true? Does the great unknown of sleep contain nothing else? No lovely spirits in the anterior regions of our being? None! Imagine the unspeakable horror of the repressions Freud brought home to us. Gagged, bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes, fæcal inhibitions, dream-monsters. We tried to repudiate them. But no, they were there, demonstrable. These were the horrid things that ate our souls and caused our helpless neuroses. We had felt that perhaps we were wrong inside, but we had never imagined it so bad. However, in the name of healing and medicine we were prepared to accept it all. If it was all just a result of illness, we were prepared to go through with it. The analyst promised us that the tangle of complexes would be unravelled, the obsessions would evaporate, the monstrosities would dissolve, sublimate, when brought into the light of day. Once all the dream-­ horrors were translated into full consciousness, they would sublimate into—well, we don’t quite know what. But anyhow, they would sublimate.4

The dream world, out of control of the sphere of rationalization and idealization, holds many in an unknowing thrall. Out-of-body 4

 Ibid., p. 9.

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experiences, deep creative impulses, poetic flourishes, existential warnings, even scientific intimations have been reported through the ages during deep slumber and the dream state. Must we discount all of that and only admit the horrors of repression and the demons of neuroses in tune with classical psychoanalysis? Do we not do ourselves a great disservice by casting the occult and the anterior side of our being as mere effects of inhibitions? The calculative and rational side of the being has been unsupportive of the intuitive and the instinctual side of it, resulting in a denial of the wonders of the aesthetic dimension. Rational humanism sought to sort out our apparent inner mess by dragging it out into the so-called conscious territory and resolving it there. What happens after the supposed resolution occurs, has never been made clear. One has perhaps to assume that one entered some kind of serene placidity akin to being lobotomized, cut off from one’s existential surge. The latter becomes the source of conflict when it is badly understood. An analysis of conventional psychoanalysis is useful to us here in that it reveals to us the problem with idealized humanist formulations in general. As with other reflexive humanist truths, it illustrates the dangers of a narrow and incomplete truth when applied indiscriminately. Psychoanalysis may instead be a narrow gate of escape, leading to more profound energies that do not require any mental assumptions. In fact, mentation may only be a nuisance and a block to their access pathways. Civilization is not merely repressed sexuality but a cutting off from our source energies through reflexive ideas and self-induced hubris. What we discover by means of a deeper-than-conventional psychoanalysis is that all formalizations and mechanism-type pictures must be abandoned if one is to return thought to its pre-conscious origin. In the present context, one must be humble enough to realize that thought-driven images such as viruses are only a minor truth. But the larger truth cannot be accessed in the usual manner of positing concepts. The larger truth lies in the waves of energies in which we are awash. We have to withdraw little by little from the mental trap and plunge back into these waves. There is nothing unusual or surprising about this. Every artist or composer worth the name knows of these waves that have no name, and knows also the pain and suffering of having to leave their such-ness behind in their daily social grind that for the most part does not acknowledge the subterranean movement. Although essentially unspeakable from the point of view of ordinary experience, the substratum of thought may be identified by a kind of empty signifier for the sake of discussion: without attaching the usual

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baggage to the word, we might proceed using the term religious, from religare “to bind fast.” Binding fast here implies a kind of obligation— thought is obligated to be bound to its substratum. Why do we choose the term religion to represent the substratum? Here religion does not connote formal or doctrine-based belief, faith, or school. By the term religious I mean a domain of non-divided flow or creative life energy that is the source of organic existence. When thought separates itself from its source, it forgets its obligation and imagines itself as autonomous. All trouble begins there. Why so? In the organic life’s accidental meetings with aspects of the outer world, it aggregates, imagines, introjects, and projects that partial world into a certain model, which hardens over time into a stable “reality.” We are now taken up with this reality and forget that it was our own partial and reflexive creation. On the other hand, the religious requires that we return from time to time to the source from where we launch into the world and hence remain true to the substratum. Forgetting the substratum is the root cause of all the crises in the world. We cannot respond accurately to the world from the partial accretions and concretizations of the past. An adequate response can come only by returning to the creative substratum. However, there is a further problem. The essentially religious or creative motive is the first motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And there is great conflict between the interests of the two, at all times. What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use putting one under the feet of the other. The great desire today is to deny the religious impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud is with the scientists.5

The creative-generative principle has within its fold both the libidinal function and the spiritual function as complimentary aspects. Unfortunately, an opposition has been created between these two due to improper understanding. Those who are on the pious side, are dismissive of the 5

 Ibid., p. 67.

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carnal-libidinal aspect. Others coming from the side of empirical science, such as psychoanalysis, claim the libido as the basic impulse. When such a split is introduced (at some historical moment), two basic poles are created—the carnal and the spiritual. The latter denies the carnal in a gesture of piousness, and, in turn, the libidinal dismisses the spiritual or the religious as collective fantasy or hoax. But the entire antagonism is ridiculous, because each is the obverse side of the other, and cannot come into being without the other. In other words, the religious function and the libidinal function are both absolutely necessary for the totality of human existence. Neither the spiritual, as we are using the term here, nor the carnal are indulgences or add-ons to life, nor are their values to be determined or determinable by the mental. The first is the world of the causal; the second is the dimension of the causeless. Each is complimentary to the other, but a mix of ignorance and arrogance makes us dismiss the other side. The result is that we are deprived of the wholesomeness of the creative ground of the unconscious. The entire corpus sensorium or the body is managed by this creative substratum of which we are unaware at the conscious level. In fact, if consciousness were to intervene, there would likely be chaos. It is for a good reason that thought is kept out of the body corpus. Little by little we have to learn to brush aside thinking where thinking is not necessary and reach for the deeper aspects of ourselves that are prior to the evolution of thought. In other words, we have to put thought in its place along with its dichotomies—this is what psychoanalysis of the present kind tells us. A second point arises in our critical examination of humanist thought. It centers around the question of origin. Thinking has been obsessed with the idea of origin. From religious conceptions of origin today we have astronomical theories of origin. And yet we are nowhere near resolving the question which seems to recede from us the more intensely we pursue it. Since terrestrial phenomena seem to arise and subside, thought generalizes and supposes everything to have an origin. In actuality, nothing originates, but merely transforms. This is very difficult to accept obsessed as we are with the idea of origin. Additionally, even if there was an origin it would not matter how we talked about it, for the simple reason that language would not be able to grasp it. If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same, whatever we say about it. So is the Cause. Let that be a comfort to us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God has been talked about quite

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a lot, and He doesn’t seem to mind. Why we should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have a teaparty with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any other Cause. Only don’t let us have sex for tea. We’ve all got too much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me. But it is tiring to go to any more teaparties with the Origin, or the Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om from the pit of the stomach, and proceed.6

Although the language above is light-hearted, there is a very important message here. A kind of intellectual immaturity is involved in the search for origin; besides, the origin (if one can speak of such a thing) must always be beyond sight or measure simply because it is the Origin and all else follows. Thinking can never grasp what is prior to thinking. Nietzsche wrote: “That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated past.”7 In a sense, psychoanalytically speaking, posthumanism is nothing other than the loss of this tiresome originary pretensions, on the one hand, together with the ability to admit the other side of existential reality as a limit. Once we do this, thought cannot escape through proliferation and is forced to face itself. This is the two-way connecting link between crises (such as the ongoing one) on one side and posthumanism on the other. The promise of Origin, of whatever kind, lends a stamp of sovereignty to the reflexive figure of the human, a pseudo-sense of rightfulness, as it were, as though we were always on the right track, going forward or going back, in our assumption of sovereignty. But if there is no origin, then we can never tell who or what we are and must give up the attempt to define ourselves as human or something else—we remain just what we are, nothing more, nothing less, without any defining view from the outside. In the same breath, it would be possible to say that the multi-dimensional hubris leading to present-day crises can be traced to the grand narratives constructed out of originary myths and assumptions. Without its grip, life’s vital force takes over to create the balance it needs from within. It is our pretensions that stand in the way of something new happening. The way  Ibid., p. 71.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Public Domain Source: Project Gutenberg, @ https://www.gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/38145/pg38145-images.html. 6 7

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out is to back off from mental conceptions and be silently aligned with the living unconscious, and not in the Freudian sense. Thirdly, we must closely examine what might be called the innate organismic impulse and distinguish it from the mental force. In humanism, the dominant force generator is the brain and its output. Humanism has trusted the brain in its comprehensive effort to dominate every other thing on this planet including itself. And as it has paid dividends, humanism has painted itself into an evolutionary corner by ignoring the subtler pre-rational impulses that work in tandem with the biological being. These affective impulses are essentially free but have at times been colonized by ideas. Only on recoil from ideas and their products, one might on occasion intuit and make acquaintance with this strange domain. We see the brain, like a great dynamo and accumulator, accumulating mechanical force and presuming to apply this mechanical force-control to the living unconscious, subjecting everything spontaneous to certain machine-principles called ideals or ideas. And the human will assists in this humiliating and sterilizing process. We don’t know what the human will is. But we do know that it is a certain faculty belonging to every living organism, the faculty for self-determination. It is a strange faculty of the soul itself, for its own direction. The will is indeed the faculty which every individual possesses from the very moment of conception, for exerting a certain control over the vital and automatic processes of his own evolution. It does not depend originally on mind. Originally it is a purely spontaneous control-­ factor of the living unconscious.8

To begin with, let us think of the “will” as a non-mental spontaneous force that the organism possesses in order to fulfill its evolutionary goal; we will see it here as the actual “living unconscious” that has little to do with sexual repression or oedipal longings, and so on. That’s how deep we have to go in order to review the functioning of thought and its relation to the so-called unconscious. This living unconscious is co-opted by the mechanical force of the brain and put to use in reducing life to machinic principles and ideas that aid in control. Trouble starts in our inability to recognize and keep apart the will-force and the mind-force. One becomes subjugated to the other, rather than remaining two distinct poles that keep a check on each other. Once co-opted, the will or the living unconscious begins to aid in its own subjugation, domesticating the living ferment, and 8

 Lawrence, op. cit.

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giving priority to the mind’s penchant for control. Nevertheless, the will-­ impulse was never meant to be controlled by the mind, but is a vital reality that is ever-present in the background. It is this great evolutionary impulse to which it seems we must turn when thought fails us or finds itself in a deep predicament. It seems as if the will were given as a great balancing faculty, the faculty whereby automatization is prevented in the evolving psyche. The spontaneous will reacts at once against the exaggeration of any one particular circuit of polarity. And against this automatism, this degradation from the spontaneous-­vital reality into the mechanic-material reality, the human soul must always struggle. And the will is the power which the unique self possesses to right itself from automatism. [Therefore] the second danger is that the will shall identify itself with the mind and become an instrument of the mind. The same process of automatism sets up, only now it is slower. The mind proceeds to assume control over every organic-psychic circuit. The spontaneous flux is destroyed, and a certain automatic circuit substituted. Now an automatic establishment of the psyche must, like the building of a machine, proceed according to some definite fixed scheme, based upon certain fixed principles. And it is here that ideals and ideas enter. They are the machine-plan and the machine-principles of an automatized psyche. So, humanity proceeds to derange itself, to automatize itself from the mental consciousness.9

The organismic impulse or spontaneous will-force is a force of resistance against automatization. There is a tendency toward automatization in the evolving psyche, toward pattern accumulation and thus exaggeration of some circuits over others. As these fixations grow, the plasticity and fluidity of the vital life gets weakened. Certain repetitive processes may be automatized in order to ease the process of living, but when automatization becomes an overwhelming thing, the spontaneous vitality of life is reduced to a mechanical reality. In this sense, the unconscious or the pre-­ mental will-force must remain independent if it is to offer resistance to the mind-driven and maintain balance in the organism. However, when the creative unconscious is subsumed, the mind takes complete control and the established circuits simply do their thing, reducing the vital life into repetitive patterns. This we call normal existence, but in reality it is a form of neurosis—obsessive repetitions of uncreative behavioral patterns. 9

 Ibid., p. 73.

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Education serves as a very good example here of obsessive repetitions. It would not be misplaced to say that education’s best interests would have been served if the thinking process and the vital process were to become aligned. In other words, education itself ought to have been a process that studied the innate evolutionary vital force and given it the necessary help for its flowering without interference. Self-knowledge is nothing other than the understanding of the different forces at the intersection of which lies the organism. But what has become normalized, regularized, and recognized instead as education? Formal and institutionalized learning is universally a standardized process of repetition of mental knowledge through a calibrated structure that testifies to a progressive accumulation of symbols and images. A person is supposed to be educated if s/he can decode and encode in the symbolic domain or follow algorithms adequately. No one, other than a few fringe elements, questions this formula anymore. Go to school, read some texts, listen to some lectures, answer a few questions, and after doing this as a set routine for a certain number of years we are seemingly educated. Some manage to escape, despite this dreary, mindless routine, and retain a semblance of their free psychic powers. Others succumb to it and become indistinguishable from the routine, gradually believing these routines to be the reality. Psychologically, the little “me” is a by-product of the automatized circuits that repeat themselves ad  infinitum. Blocking out the light of the living unconscious, the me becomes host to numerous mental illnesses that are the result of the reduction to automaton. And there are times when there is complete takeover by the obsessive routines. Sometimes the free psyche really collapses, and the will identifies itself with an automatic circuit. Then a complex is set up, a paranoia. Then incipient madness sets in. If the identification continues, the derangement becomes serious. There may come sudden jolts of dislocation of the whole psychic flow, like epilepsy. Or there may come any of the known forms of primary madness. It is a process of derangement, just as the fixing of the will upon any other primary process is a derangement. It is a long, slow development in madness. True, we must all develop into mental consciousness. But mental consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us only with endless appliances which we can use for the all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneous-creative fullness of being. It provides us with means to adjust ourselves to the external universe. It gives us further means for subduing the external, materio-mechanical universe to our great end of creative life. And it gives us plain indications of how to avoid falling into

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automatism, hints for the applying of the will, the loosening of false, automatic fixations, the brave adherence to a profound impulse. This is the use of the mind—a great indicator and instrument. The mind as author and director of life is anathema.10

The most dramatic and evil instance of the complex collapse of the psyche—its surrender to the automatisms of the mental domain and its ideas—is evidenced in the phenomenon known as fanaticism. The world is presently hostage to a range of fanaticisms, which must be counted as among the foremost of global crises. The fanatic’s élan vital or psychic will is completely subordinated to the idea. This idea might be some supremacist fantasy, hallucination of divine ordinance, political ideology, homegrown belief, or even techno-rational obsession, among others. Once stuck in this circuit, a gradual derangement sets in through the fixation of the will, resulting in a slow descent into primary forms of madness. Nevertheless, this madness since it is a common condition is generally taken as acceptable standard of normalcy, there being no independent critical vantage point outside ideational humanism. This is because mental consciousness is seen as the prime achievement of species evolution. However, mental consciousness, although it gives us wide-ranging powers over the external world, cannot be the goal; it is but the means to an end. The objective is always to contact the creative-spontaneous life for which the mind is an aid at best. Fascinated by control over the mento-­mechanical aspect of the world, the species calling itself human becomes obsessed by the extensive development of mental consciousness. And when unchecked, the automatisms involved actually take us in the direction of psychosis. Incessantly we follow an ideational path to our detriment or to the detriment of the creative will-force. The deranged being caught in the trap of repetitive behavior becomes seriously ill from within which we call normality. Mental consciousness is a necessary capacity in order to effectively deal with the outer world, but it is not, and cannot be, the evolutionary goal. The mind can supply us with tools to enhance life but cannot be a substitute for the creative flow of life. Freeing the spontaneous will-force and keeping it free of the mental is rather the goal. The unconscious-will has its own inner compass which comes from the evolutionary life-force. It has no need of the mental as such and is the only wholesome route to countering crises.  Ibid.

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So, the few things we have to say about the unconscious end for the moment. There is almost nothing said. Yet it is a beginning. Still remain to be revealed the other great centers of the unconscious. We know four: two pairs. In all there are seven planes. That is, there are six dual centers of spontaneous polarity, and then the final one. That is, the great upper and lower consciousness is only just broached—the further heights and depths are not even hinted at. Nay, in public it would hardly be allowed us to hint at them. There is so much to know, and every step of the progress in knowledge is a death to the human idealism which governs us now so ruthlessly and vilely.11

Spread through the corpus sensorium there are various centers of (non-­ mental) consciousness, or rather, planes of trans-consciousness and spontaneous polarities. These cannot be revealed all at once and possibly ought not to be revealed in a casual manner. Rather, a successful contact with the first level or plane will progressively lead to other spontaneous and creative zones that are inherent in the being. Humanism’s idea-centric world has to be left behind in order to reach the posthuman consciousness. Humanism might even be thought of as a stage in our evolution that needs to be transcended. This is what is revealed to us through the “psychoanalysis” of thought. There is a “Nobody” hidden behind the mental “Somebody,” an impersonal terrain which is the actual living unconscious that belongs to no one in particular. This sub-individual Nobody is pure evolutionary power that can deal with anything that the evolutionary range has granted to the organism, so long as the mental plane does not interfere. While apparatuses produced by the mental energies are useful appurtenances for the organism, these do not ensure adequate response in countering crises, since the latter are often unprecedented and do not abide by historical responses. Fourthly, this means that the creative life within must have the innate power to spontaneously and innovatively combine with the elements in order to reach its evolutionary goal. The mind can do little in reality to further the evolutionary goal of the organism; it can only be a useful tool within the historical (past) range and not outside of it. All of the foregoing discussion was meant to bring us to the point where we can reveal this plane of non-mental action that has been lost to us since we have been living too much in the head. Taking this view forward, what we call the germ (Covid, for instance) is an idea, a mental image imposed on an  Ibid., pp. 42–43.

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underlying flux. The “Nobody” can deal with the actuality of the “germ” on its own terms without the Idea—it has the necessary power. But when we set up two ideas against one another, the result is an unpredictable mess because the ideas clash without accessing the direct clarity of the actuality beyond. The level of the clash is all wrong—in order to absorb or overcome the actuality lying behind the germ, that is, its force-field, we have to be in proximity to our own force-field or the living unconscious. Thus, when we say x causes y, we have already cut off the unconscious in highlighting the causality. There is nothing wrong with causality as such, when it concerns external matters. But the effective cause that we identify is rarely the ultimate cause of anything. Germs are everywhere. They are constantly breaking off from the rest of the things-at-large and attempting to combine and recombine with other processes for their own evolution, just as we do. The ultimate cause of both ease as well as “dis-ease” is therefore evolution or organic momentum of force-fields, and not germs, which is an idea. Does that mean we allow germs to evolve at our cost? That is certainly not what is implied here. But I implore the reader to see what happens when we change our manner of viewing things. We are no longer cowering behind the germ-disease equation but are learning about our own force-field process that must remain true to its potential. The onus of staying “disease-free” is upon us from this point on. What is the pedagogy involved here? We have to learn to be ourselves, that is, in full charge of our evolutionary potential. Here learning does not imply intellectual or symbolic learning but rather a kind of learning that is trans-intellectual or pre-mental. The final aim is not to know, but to be. There never was a more risky motto than the Know thyself. You’ve got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. “Be Yourself ” is the last motto. The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is always premental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever lived would know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new and utterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid his nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions.12  Ibid., p. 105.

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The precept know thyself construed within a conventional humanist paradigm must lead to the upwelling of the will-to-know that merely inflates the mental sphere. But when the ancient Egyptians inscribed this dictum at the threshold of their temples, they were not referring to the acquisition of knowledge as is commonly understood today. Rather, it was the discovery of the primitive self, the layers of pre-mental consciousness and the bio-geography of forces that were the archaeological project. And yet we have to know ourselves thoroughly to be ourselves. What kind of knowledge is this? Bodily or corporeal knowledge is negative knowing in the sense that it is not accumulative nor is it mental. We have to descend into our bodies through sensations that accrue each moment after giving up our mental images of ourselves. Only practice can tell what this actually means. There is no blueprint, however a deep acknowledgment is necessary, and is the starting point of a new discovery. The moment you start recoiling from mental knowledge and images the other door becomes open. It might sound somewhat esoteric, but really, it is a simple and intimate matter. It is the non-inclusivity of our education with its exclusive reliance on techno-rationalism that makes it appear strange. We have become trapped in a hall of mirrors whereby everywhere we look we see similar ideas reflected back at us, leaving us no room for radically alternate thinking. Finally, let us consider language, as thinking and representation are coeval with language, and any serious inquiry into thought must also involve scrutiny of language in some way. Let me begin with an analogy. In aviation trope there is something called “continuation bias.” It refers to an unconscious tendency among aviators to stick to original plans and existing orientation despite changing conditions. Small surprise then that this tendency happens to be one of the most frequent causes for aviation disasters. The point here is that continuation bias is not true only for aviation; it is possibly true for almost all social endeavors managed by language. We keep going in the same direction once linguistic experience has partially set into something. Since language plays a key role in all our dealings with the world and ourselves, an examination of language becomes essential in doing a psychoanalysis of thought, which in turn is necessary when we want to overthrow long-held habits of reality-framing language. Let us begin simply by examining two ordinary and apparently equivalent statements. The first being: I am cold; the second being: I can feel the cold. Although apparently similar, there is a world of difference between the two statements. Whereas, the latter declares a sensation of cold ascribed

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to an agent, the former statement disposes of the agent by making an equivalence between the cold and itself. One is agentive, the other is factual. One has processed the sensation of cold ascribing it to an agent, the other is primarily an observation of pure sensation. In the one, the “I” is central; in the other, it is more of a placeholder (whether intended or not). One narrows down the sensations and attempts to fit them into a pre-­ assumed self, whereas the other remains at the level of proprioception. Humanism begins with the ego as the organizer and the controller. From a posthumanist perspective, it is not as though the “I” as the organizer of sensation needs to be eliminated (for who is to eliminate it?), but we have to reach a point where it is no longer the pivotal point of reference. As language drops away, it reveals, behind the curtain of words, the nameless flow that pervades us and beyond. When examined it must be fairly obvious that there has got to be a pre-linguistic reality, and the linguistically organized agent cannot possibly be the starting point. We must therefore resist ascribing sensations and thoughts to a mentally constructed agent. All this is fairly clear. Nevertheless, we are stuck with the humanistic agent and unable to change course although the facts demand it. Something has to give and there must occur a softening of the language-­ constructed self or ego. And here I turn again to Nietzsche, and at such critical junctures when I turn to this veritable ironsmith of thinkers, he unfailingly gives us something to ponder about. The danger facing [strong and stable idealism] is that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is the more unfettered, uncertain, and weaker individuals upon whom [true] progress depends. … Countless numbers of this kind perish without producing any very visible effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole body is as it were inoculated with something new; its [underlying] strength must, however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and to assimilate it. Every progress of the whole has to be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest nature preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve….To this extent the celebrated struggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only theory by which the progress or strengthening of a race can be explained. Two things, rather, must come together: firstly, the augmentation of the stabilizing force through the union of minds in belief and communal feeling; then the possibility of the attainment of higher goals through…partial weakenings and

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injurings of the stabilizing force; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the tenderer and more refined, that makes any progress possible at all….In the case of the individual human being, the task of education is to imbue him with such firmness and certainty he can no longer as a whole be in any way deflected from his path. Then, however, the educator has to inflict injuries upon him, or employ the injuries inflicted on him by fate, and when he has thus come to experience pain and distress something new and noble can be inoculated into the injured places.13

Most people appear to think that the task of the teacher in general is to strengthen the self-preserving capacity of the student, and they are not entirely wrong in this assumption. However, the danger facing the strong and the stable is the very self-assuredness that eventually becomes a trap, not allowing the person to evolve out of her/his present state. In the words of Nietzsche, the problem is “that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow.” All stable strength eventually becomes its own victim, for each thing in life is accompanied by its opposite. Artists, for instance, know that red objects have green shadows—green being the complimentary of red and opposite to it in the color wheel—and vice versa, and they use this knowledge to good effect. This does not mean we must not pursue strength. Rather, it points to a complex situation that demands more than a simple straight line path to meaningful life. It indicates that weakness and uncertainty have their own value, although this may not be immediately apparent or may not have the visible currency like strength or stability. Nietzsche further observes, “It is the more unfettered, uncertain, and weaker individuals upon whom [true] progress depends.” Now, this is a very serious statement and requires some careful unpacking. Why would real progress depend on the weak? Now we know that Nietzsche had contempt for the constitutionally weak, and so he could not possibly mean that progress depends on the physically or emotionally weak. Rather, weakness here refers to the absence of moral inflexibility and the possibility of waywardness from the set standards of social behavior. I am reminded of Robert Frost here: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by/ And that has made all the difference.” The possibility of change is encountered not on well-­ established highways of social reality but on less-traveled paths. Travelers 13  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Public domain source: Project Gutenberg, @ https://www.gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/38145/pg38145-images.html.

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on the latter paths tend to be odd individuals, unsettled and uneasy about traditions and conventions. But it is not an easy equation. “Countless numbers of this kind perish without producing any very visible effect.” Individually, each divergence does not make a material difference, “but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community.” Collectively such divergence from the norms help to introduce tiny cracks in the concrete wall of reflexive beliefs and values. “In the case of the individual human being, the task of education is to imbue him with such firmness and certainty he can no longer as a whole be in any way deflected from his path.” Language, through its preservative capacities, sets the individual on the straight road putting him in a straitjacket as it were, and to recover from it “the educator has to inflict injuries upon him, or employ the injuries inflicted on him by fate,” meaning that the educator has to find ways to bypass the pupil’s defenses and psychic automatisms in order to help him grow beyond the limitations of his present. “And when he has thus come to experience pain and distress something new and noble can be inoculated into the injured places.” In other words, when the right kind of pedagogic dissonance is created, the being is ready to absorb qualitatively new ways of considering things. And the most obvious place where an “injury” can be inflicted is in our linguistic habits. What does this entail here? Humanism has acquired its stability from a self-generated discursive-­ narrative about its past. The analysis above shows why the hard-sell of this narrative prevents any real breakthrough, making us go round and round in circles within the ever-expanding narrative itself, whose material developments are taken as symbols of progress. Unless there is a weakening in this technological narrative and the utopianism implied in its language, there can never be a shift away from the entrenched path of humanism. Even as the crises loom one after another, humans will swear by the old habits of language and thought. Thus, the language of our way of constructing reality needs critical examination if we are to understand crises in their proper perspective. Let us proceed with an example. The essence of scientific endeavor may be expressed in the following statement: “Science is the theory of the real.” First, let us consider the word theory—this word was important to the Greeks even as it is important to modern day science, which can trace its origin among the Greeks. Hence, it is pertinent to initiate a dialogue here with Greek thought and language use.

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Bound up with the supremacy accorded theoria within Greek bios is the fact that the Greeks, who in a unique way thought out of their language, i.e., received from it their human existence, were also able to hear something else in the word theoria. When differently stressed, the two root words thea and orao can read thea and ora. Thea is goddess. It is as a goddess that Aletheia, the unconcealment from out of which and in which that which presences, appears to the early thinker Parmenides. We translate aletheia by the Latin word veritas and by our German word Wahrheit [truth]. The Greek word ora signifies the respect we have, the honor and esteem we bestow. If now we think the word theoria in the context of the meanings of the words just cited, then theoria is the reverent paying heed to the unconcealment of what presences. Theory in the old, and that means the early but by no means the obsolete, sense is the beholding that watches over truth.14

We cannot ignore the Greek origin of the word theory, nor can we gloss over it as an archaism. For that is where the notion emerged, and historicize we must in order to have a proper understanding of its essence. However, this does not refer to the history that passes away as an event, but rather the history that is alive in its essence.15 The word theory then did not imply to the Greeks a consideration of segments of an objectified world, as it does in its modern connotation. It was related to the very presencing of the world, its self-exhibiting out of itself, which was necessarily a mysterious and enchanted process. Over time, this mystery element was lost and replaced by a prosaic outlook. In our attempt to understand technohumanism and the scientific attitude, we cannot afford to overlook or minimize this shift in consciousness. Theory makes secure at any given time a region of the real as its object-area. The area-character of objectness is shown in the fact that it specifically maps out in advance the possibilities for the posing of questions. Every new 14  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Transl. William Lovitt (New York: 1977, Garland Publishing Inc.), p. 165. 15  As a word of explanation of what it means to have a dialogue with history, Heidegger clarifies: “That which was thought and in poetry was sung at the dawn of Greek antiquity is still present today, present in such a way that its essence, which is still hidden from itself, everywhere comes to encounter us and approaches us most of all where we least suspect it, namely, in the rule of modern technology, which is thoroughly foreign to the ancient world, yet nevertheless has in the latter its essential origin. In order to experience this presence of history, we must free ourselves from the historiographical representation of history that still continues to dominate. Historiographical representation grasps history as an object wherein a happening transpires that is, in its changeability, simultaneously passing away.” Ibid., p. 158.

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­ henomenon emerging within an area of science is refined to such a point p that it fits into the normative objective coherence of the theory. That normative coherence itself is thereby changed from time to time. But objectness as such remains unchanged in its fundamental characteristics. That which is represented in advance as the determining basis for a strategy and procedure is, in the strict sense of the word, the essence of what is called “end” or “purpose.” When something is in itself determined by an end, then it is pure theory. It is determined by the objectness of what presences. Were objectness to be surrendered, the essence of science would be denied……Because modern science as the theory of the real depends on the precedence that attaches to its method, therefore it must, as a securing of object-areas, delimit these areas over against one another and localize them, as thus delimited, within compartments, i.e., compartmentalize them. The theory of the real is necessarily departmentalized science.16

In modern science, nature is already present at hand in terms of definite object areas, which are mapped out in advance in order to raise questions. The present work of theory is to look at these distinct object areas such as thermodynamics or mechanics and propose causal explanations within these areas. The hardness of objectification and area-based determination present themselves to the student of science in a matter-of-fact way as though there are no alternative ways of looking at reality. The questions that may be raised within objectified areas are themselves attached to the methods arising out of the delimitation and compartmentalization of science. In this manner, we must proceed in our critique of language use that can break linguistic habits and throw us outside the existing angle of vision. The question with which we began this section is “what kind of pedagogical ‘injuries’ can we safely inflict on the student so that s/he does not remain entrapped within the existing modes of describing reality?” To put it differently, how can we become critically aware of the limitations of the language that we employ in our descriptions such that the illusion of its comprehensiveness is destroyed? When we soften up our linguistic habits, something new may be inoculated to pervade our consciousness. In the instance discussed above, watching-over-presencing is a very different way of thinking about science and takes away the self-assuredness and taken-­ for-­grantedness of the usual science discourse. It reminds us that science is but one way of determining what is real. And further, science cannot get around nature in the sense that it cannot encompass it or comprehend it.  Ibid., pp. 169–170.

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This is a serious enough injury on the modern psyche—the taking away of certainty. Nature, in its objectness for modern physical science, is only one way in which what presences—which from of old has been named physis—reveals itself and sets itself in position for the refining characteristic of science. Even if physics as an object-area is unitary and self-contained, this objectness can never embrace the fullness of the coming to presence of nature. Scientific representation is never able to encompass the coming to presence of nature; for the objectness of nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself. Nature thus remains for the science of physics that which cannot be gotten around. This phrase means two things here. First, nature is not to be “gotten around” inasmuch as theory never passes that which presences by, but rather remains directed toward it. Further, nature is not to be gotten around inasmuch as objectness as such prevents the representing and securing that correspond to it from ever being able to encompass the essential fullness of nature….Scientific representation, for its part, can never decide whether nature, through its objectness, does not rather withdraw itself than bring to appearance the hidden fullness of its coming to presence. Science cannot even ask this question, for, as theory, it has already undertaken to deal with the area circumscribed by objectness.17

To face nature or reality with the full understanding and acknowledgment that ours is a partial and very limited view introduces a new humility in our relations with what is. And what is more, the understanding that we can never overcome this limited view breaks down the arrogance of knowledge. We can only compartmentalize and “know” certain things within those compartments. But we can never know the real relation of the objectness entrapped within the compartments with nature in its fullness. In other words, reality will always escape its representation.18 This  Ibid., p. 174.  Not only nature, Heidegger shows that humans, history, language, none of this can be gotten around in the sense of encompassed or fully realized within representation: “Psychiatry strives to observe the life of the human soul in its sick-and that means always simultaneously in its healthy manifestations. It represents these in terms of the objectness of the bodily-­ psychical-­spiritual unity of the whole man. At any given time human existence, which is already presencing, displays itself in the objectness belonging to psychiatry. The openness-­ for-­Being in which man as man ek-sists, remains that which for psychiatry is not to be gotten around. Historiography, which ever more urgently is developing into the writing of universal history, accomplishes its entrapping securing in the area that offers itself to its theory as history. The word Historie means to explore and make visible, and therefore names a kind of 17 18

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humility is the first step not toward better or fuller knowledge but toward fuller and more creative living by avoiding over-investment in the mento-­ mechanical, and becoming more aligned with the organismic élan vital or the living ferment. Seeing ourselves not as humans or this or that, but instead experiencing ourselves without the relations of objectness that surround us is the first major task of praxis. This also means that we have to deeply question the language and the linguistic constructs in which we are entrapped and in terms of which we view ourselves and our relations with the world. Further, the psychoanalysis of crises means that we cut through the falsehood of linguistically constructed selfhood that is a source of false consciousness; it obfuscates the bio-geographical terrain, of which we shall speak next, which is our true source of redemption as we learn to face crises adequately.

representing. Historiography is the exploration of history. But historiographical observation does not first create history itself. Everything ‘historiographical’ everything represented and established after the manner of historiography, is historical, i.e., grounded upon the destining resident in happening. But history is never necessarily historiographical. Whether history reveals itself in its essence only through and for historiography or whether it is not rather concealed through historiographical objectification remains for the science of history something it cannot itself decide. This, however, is decided: In the theory of historiography, history holds sway as that which is not to be gotten around. Philology makes the literature of nations and peoples into the object of its explanation and interpretation. The written word of literature is at any given time the spoken word of a language. When philology deals with language, it treats it in accordance with the objective ways of looking at language that are established through grammar, etymology, and comparative linguistics, through the art of composition and poetics. Yet language speaks without becoming literature and entirely independently of whether literature for its part attains to the objectness with which the determinations of a literary science correspond. In the theory of philology language holds sway as that which is not to be gotten around. Nature, man, history, language, all remain for the aforementioned sciences that which is not to be gotten around” Ibid., p. 175.

CHAPTER 5

A Posthumanist Bio-Geography

The picture of the world that has been in the making since about the twelfth or the thirteenth century has its most immediate roots in Kantian humanism. Kant was responsible for two perilous humanist legacies that are increasingly problematic. The first was that empirical explanation of the sensible world was adequate and there was no room or possibility for direct illumination or some kind of organismic knowing from within. In other words, Kant kept all his philosophical eggs in the mental-intellectual basket denying other ways of knowing. And the second legacy, which is related to the first, was that there was nothing for us to do philosophically other than be informed about the explanations and descriptions of the sensible world and act accordingly. That is to say, there was no philosophical becoming in Kant’s scheme of things. We will examine these two fatal beliefs one by one and consider their consequences. Let us consider the first one, or the attitude that the purpose of philosophy was to give rules, norms, categories, and the rational individual must assimilate these in order to be a reasonable-moral being. The idea that philosophy is something exclusively of the mind, rather like thermodynamics or the laws of motion, that map out an objectified world, is tantamount to applying a kind of closure to the world as if the world was a given and not an open one, and all we needed to do was to figure out the pieces in order to get the complete picture. While this attitude may be useful and acceptable in the sciences which deal with the material world and must therefore assume the finitude of objects and causal relations between them, philosophy had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_5

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to help us get beyond the mentally fragmented world; otherwise, we become trapped in a world of our own making. In other words, the purpose of science and the purpose of philosophy are not the same. They must aspire to two very different kinds of knowing, and this is where Kant makes the first serious error as he confounds the two. In wanting to get a clear picture of the perceptual world, Kant is more like a cognitive scientist, to give a contemporary figure of comparison, in his approach to philosophy. The second serious deficiency in the Kantian view of the subject and world relations that has contributed to humanism’s complacency is the attitude that the only thing to strive for lies within the realms of reason and rationality, and there is no becoming outside of it. To put it simply and bluntly, Kant forgoes the possibility of any kind of direct insight or illumination. The highest form of inquiry envisaged by Kant rests in mathematics and the mathematical modeling of the world which is why, according to him, it forms the basis of the sciences. This extraordinary investment in mental capacities has as its darker side the dismissal of the subtle effort of the élan vital to push the organism beyond its present state and toward an emergent being. To deny that there are things beyond the mental sphere that nevertheless we need to acknowledge and be cognizant of is to become blind to our own evolution and the evolutionary potential in which the mind may ultimately turn out to be a passing thing. It also reduces us into slavery of the “expert” view since we are no longer able to entertain the possibility of evolving on our own beyond the current official view of things. The civilizational perspective with its discourses, practices, buildings, roads, institutions, offices, bureaucracies, and personages dominate our mental consciousness from end to end, with little room to consider new ways of becoming and conceiving ourselves. This is sometimes called the disenchanted view of the world and the relations within it. Here each thing is within the field of the known, and therefore in a sense commonplace and stale. Whatever “new” occurs is always an extension of the present or a modification of it. The individual has no contact with an organismic becoming that is uniquely outside the realm of the civilizational norms. This was the frightening closure of the humanistic world that was the result of the Kantian view, which also coincided with the emerging scientific viewpoint. The ordinary person had nothing to do but follow the expert, if s/he was so inclined, in order that they might stay up-to-date with current wisdom. Our growth was determined and limited by the rational benchmarks and moral standards of what has come to be known as secular society. The task before us now is to retreat from this

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cul-de-sac in which humanism has left us, and find our way to a new becoming, which is in reality nothing other than a homecoming, as we shall see later in this chapter. The “reality” that we are left with today might be called a secular present that is culturally a mix of techno-populism and demagoguery. Secular here refers to the discursive firewall that screens out non-empiricist and non-rational understandings of organismic existence, growth, purpose, and relevance. It is through blindness to the other side of life, the non-­ empirical side, that we have gained world dominance. Accordingly, we are awash with the deafening chatter of humanist triumphalism even as the natural world winds down in terms of the viability of complex eco-systems. The deafness has resulted in the loss of power to listen to ourselves, to the deeper rhythms and exchanges within ourselves that temporally maintain the organism. Even as the great laboratories make breakthroughs in scientific understanding, we have lost the art of turning ourselves into laboratories of observation and watchfulness from where can come innate organismic realizations and expanded existential powers well beyond the dreams of humanism. Posthumanism, by aligning itself with itself, seeks this expanded existence through deep questioning of the present and the humanist past. This “questioning” is not intellectual interrogation but a different kind of opening up that shall be discussed at length. The distinction between the two levels of “reality” we have discussed earlier—the civilizational level wherein cause-effects are established through mental-ideational configurations, and the organismic level that is fundamentally pre-mental—is critical for grasping the posthumanist terrain. Civilizational goals and social priorities are basically contingent, the result of chance encounters with the outer dimension, which are then interpreted and acted upon through ideas and ideologies. On the other hand, the native evolutionary impulse has its own inner goal that is not open for social action or interpretation. Pedagogy must help us learn to distinguish between the two and keep in focus the relation between them. It is in proper understanding of this relation that we come to understand what might be called posthumanism. Proper understanding here implies going beyond the humanistic proclivity for one-sidedness; humanism hates to admit that there is something vital outside and beyond the borders of its ideas that the mind-based projections cannot reach. Posthumanism is not an idea or something that can be represented in some fixed or externalized manner. It is a kind of corporeal counter-practice that overcomes our obsession with the mental. And precisely because we have to side-step the mental formations that it is so hard to talk about

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it today. Posthumanism does not succeed humanism historically; it has nothing to do with history. Therefore, the term posthumanism is somewhat misleading because it is also prehumanism, a layer of being that has always been with us from the beginning of our appearance on the planet. It is for this very reason that we go back to it in our search for a dynamic plane that is not crisis ridden. Or, to put it differently, posthumanism is the path to increased contact with our existential energeia whose dynamic intensity can deal with opportunistic obstructions, and planetary exigencies, among other things, in novel and holistic ways. Of course, for this we need a new kind of knowledge that is not conventional subject-object knowing. The pedagogy involves immersion into what I’m going to call “bio-geography” or a spatial biology alluding to a corporeal distribution of energy that is neither mental nor accessible to the mind. Hints of this distribution are to be found throughout the book, but here there is a more focused discussion on this topic. The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is always premental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever lived would know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new and utterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid his nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the most conventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicate knowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aim has been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and mental consciousness. Our poor little plants of children are put into horrible procrustean beds, called schools, and the young idea is there forced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warm cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, no life. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake.1

A certain kind of negative self-knowing—negative, because unlike knowledge, which is accumulative, and affirmative, this knowing has to be negated at every turn—is necessary in order to go beyond “ideals and conventions,” and inwardly shatter the image of the self as an aggregate image in time. One has to negate what has gone before, break out of the 1

 D. H. Lawrence, p. 105.

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“automatisms of ideals and conventions” in order to get to the underlying flow, in a slow, but deliberate manner. And yesterday’s knowledge, or even the knowledge of the last moment, is not helpful here. That is to say, neither surface knowledge of things, nor the ego’s musings, are of any help in order to get to the bio-geography of the dynamic being. The dynamics of primary consciousness have nothing to do with the mental, which is, at best, an offshoot of our interactions with the material. The dynamics of consciousness have a life of their own that arrive in waves and contractions, such as fear, or desire, or something nameless. These might get entangled in and mixed up with the mental, but have nothing to do with it as such. These are primordial life impulses whose source we know little about. These impulses are not personal or individual, but traverse the being like the tremors of an earthquake pass through the land. No matter how much knowledge we might possess, we cannot know what our state of being is going to be tomorrow or even the next instant. In other words, our mental productions cannot secure our existential state in any manner that could preclude the falling apart of the neatly manufactured self. When I take a big and unexpected hit in the stock market, my carefully manufactured self falls apart. But this has nothing to do with the primary consciousness which does not know anything about the stock market or losses and gains therein. Thus, it’s entirely possible to be on an inner elevation even as there is negativity outside, as well as the other way around. This divergence from the mind-made world gives us a measure of autonomy and is the first step toward recognizing elements of a bio-geography. Thus, in sharp contrast to some innate assumptions of humanism, as well as its focus on mental-ideal representations, the primary consciousness has nothing to do with the personal or social constructions. It is non-­ personal and yet it holds the key to our well-being, since it is the principal self-motivated drive. Hence, it is important to trace the movement of primary consciousness, but the catch is that it cannot be done through the mind. A different kind of non-verbal and sensory-corporeal awareness is necessary. Mental consciousness is but a superficial beneficiary of this primary movement through the organism whose origin is unknowable. A certain quantum of this primary consciousness-energy leaks through to the so-called mind or mental sphere. This is what we call thought-images and the sphere of thinking. Humanism is founded in this derived sphere, which is why its main instrument is representational thought. Is there any other kind of thinking? It is not easy to answer the question right away, and we have to wait for the rest of the discussion. But the directness of

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insight, that carries a flash of vital unity (unified energy, not subject/object opposition), might be another entry point in realizations about ourselves. Hence, we have to carefully distinguish between levels of consciousness that are available to us in our pedagogic search for a posthumanist bio-geography. The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But this we can say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals the natural degree is very low. The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word education shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static. Now before we set out so gaily to lead our children en bloc out of the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a moment what we are doing.2

How does transfer take place from primary consciousness to the mental plane, and by what degree? While the process of transfer is not within the realm of the known or the knowable, one thing we can say is that its quantum is highly variable from person to person. Also, it is true that in the general run of humanity, the transfer quantum is quite low, and perhaps what distinguishes the creative person from the rest is a relatively higher transfer between the two domains. Conventional psychology attempts to sort out the knots in this transferred content, and what we call education is directed solely at manipulating the transferred energy in the mental sphere. In other words, it is a very small fraction of vital energy that is associated with so-called education—the static and finite energy of mental consciousness. Instead of holding back and allowing the depth of dynamic energy (sensuous life) to come to fullness, education attempts to shape what is already lifeless. It results in what Ludwig Feuerbach had pertinently observed: “the present age, [ ] prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to 2

 P. 106.

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essence …”3 As the signifier begins to dominate consciousness, it offers an accelerated tempo and with it the illusion of a rapid positivity that is the product of continuous slippage of meaning. The need for acceleration is acute in the present age and therefore the reduced possibility of allowing room for the phenomenologically authentic that is grounded in actual experience. Signs and symbols, if these need appear in the child’s consciousness, must arise out of her/his experience, and not be injected from the outside. The uncertain dynamic consciousness of the child is choked and straitjacketed by firm symbolic structures because it supposedly pays greater social dividends. Inevitably, in the process, the price paid is in terms of the vital Eros dried out of the system. Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can’t do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates from the dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone any value. This, in most individuals, is very little indeed. So that most individuals, under a wise government, would be most carefully protected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas into them. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. For the [young], knowledge must be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This means, you must have a higher, responsible [educator], and then in varying degrees [pupils], varying in their degree of consciousness. Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But the interpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in the higher, responsible, conscious group [such as educators]. To those who cannot divest themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentality and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet.4

The generalized picture of education as the stimulation of the mind by introducing new ideas is commonplace. But a moment’s sober reflection on this conventional practice will reveal that when we pump representational matter or sign systems into the mental consciousness of the young (in the name of education), we only succeed in restricting the fluid, autochthonous, and organic movements in their consciousness. Symbolic activity, especially in the pre-mature, is not emancipatory; it merely captures the transferred or sublimated dynamic energy and forces it into 3 4

 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Blanchard, 1855), p. xiii.  P. 111.

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the fragmented immobility of the sign. The clash of symbols creates pandemonium in the consciousness rather than a harmonious flow. What must educators do then? Young beings must be encouraged to develop their senses to the fullest extent possible; they should be helped to intensify their instruments of knowing rather than dabble in knowledge. For the young, knowledge must not be fixed in formal structures, but be fluid and dynamic, and have a form that is a morphogenetic field rather than a strict form. One way of maintaining knowledge in a fluid form is mythology. The famous scholar of myth Joseph Campbell explains: “mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be sensed but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this [life].”5 Here, I wish to make a small detour and add an extremely illuminating conversation between Campbell and Bill Moyers with regard to the value of mythological thinking. Campbell: The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed. Moyers: Why must the hero do that? Campbell: It’s a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled. In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him. There are then two 5

 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).

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possibilities. In a story of the Jonah type, the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected—a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme. The conscious personality here has come in touch with a charge of unconscious energy which it is unable to handle and must now suffer all the trials and revelations of a terrifying night sea journey, while learning how to come to terms with this power of the dark and emerge, at last, to a new way of life. The other possibility is that the hero, on encountering the power of the dark, may overcome and kill it. You see consciousness thinks it is running the shop, but it’s a secondary organ of a total being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side. Moyers: The dark figure. Campbell: Yes, that’s the figure that in Goethe’s Faust is represented by Mephistopheles. Moyers: But I can hear someone saying, “well, that’s all well and good for the imagination [and] the scholarship of a Joseph Campbell, but that isn’t what happens in my life.” Campbell: You bet it is—and if he doesn’t recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.6 Posthumanist bio-geography concerns the encounter of the limited (conscious) personality and the unconscious vital energy that is in the background, the vast powers of creative life that operate below the surface of the mind. The proper contact is a kind of resurrection, a redemption 6

 Ibid.

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from the second-hand life of mind-and-sign-obsessed civilization. But it is not enough simply to speak of the dynamic unconscious, we have to seek it relentlessly. The challenge of course is to retain a limited functional and symbolic self while letting the dynamic energy of the non-self flood one’s being. The pedagogy must concern itself with our ability to be resurrected and be transformed beyond narrow humanist obsessions and petty pieties that Nietzsche had identified long ago and cruelly exposed. One can seek the help of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who was after the radiant life that had nothing to do with socially constructed ideas and moralities. He was after the pure energy of the unconscious. We hear in conventional education how we are supposed to make children think. But the raw material of thinking in children is paltry in terms of authentic life experience and hence thinking becomes a shallow exercise in copying adult thought forms that are not native to the child, and hence merely promote humanist idea-­ images that are difficult to transcend later. Thinking and ideas that have no root in experience become poisonous for the growth of the child. What is necessary is to prevent humanist fallacies rooted in over-inflation of thinking and instead to hold children closer to their sensory centers, by focusing on movement and action of various kinds (e.g., theater, music, dancing, games, kinesthetics, art, etc., everything that has dynamism as its focus). When thought is not given priority, and rather the other affective centers are gradually awakened by means of pertinent activity, there is an idealess awareness of the other plane that grows more intense with time. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn understanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, not theory. Never have ideas about children—and never have ideas for them. If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move. And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and teasing, and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blithe and free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion. And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all the centres, through all the emotions…. The fact is, our process of universal education is today so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion, we force them into a certain amount of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain num-

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ber of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life.7

While the powers of organized symbolic activity are considerable, its pre-mature introduction in the young does prevent the being (which is neither humanist nor anything else—having no reflexive identity as such, being pure dynamic flux) from coming into its own and participating in the releasement of its innate powers of sensuous life. But wait a moment, “innate powers of the psyche?”, “releasement of sensuous life?”, “what’s all that about?” asks technohumanism, for this is alien territory indeed. Each affective and sensory center when activated in proper contact with the world—that is, teased out in organic activity—leads to a continuous pulsing action from all the centers that build on each other. The consequence is a vibrant, radiant life that is very different from the dry life of mental tricks that is at the core of humanist-technicist education. The distinction may be summed up as the difference between moving in flowing water and merely knowing the formula or having mental representation of water. In a sentence, the curious case of technohumanist education can be summed up as the circular application of scientific laws to the basic assumptions of science. The subject-object division is first reified and “things” are isolated through the enframing of empiricist-positivist discourse. Next, the scientific laws are applied to those scientifically produced objects in a circular humanist world. The circularity is so obvious, once you have the willingness to look at it, that you wonder how it escapes notice of the majority. It escapes notice because at the heart of humanism is navel-gazing, which leads to what has been colorfully called a menopause of the spirit. Spirit here refers to the dynamic consciousness and vital life that has gone to sleep, replaced in consciousness by the mechanics of the symbol and the sign. All this sounds strange and esoteric because we have lost track of ourselves long ago and have been replaced by the sign and the commodity. We have led an alienated life for so many generations that this reductionist life no longer appears strange; instead, a discussion regarding the possibility of authentic life now appears weird. This is a classic inversion of values that has replaced spontaneity and authenticity with deliberateness and calculation. Besides alien ideas that have no root in experience, the young are also surrounded by loud talk of love and of morality (inoculations of 7

 Lawrence, op. cit., p112.

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humanism) that leaves the discerning soul cold because love and morality are not things of the mind but of the heart. They are not to be spoken of but felt as compelling impulses in the nerves and the sensorium. If one is allowed to grow according to the inner principles of one’s own growth, then there would arise no necessity for artificial discourses of love and morality. The tree is as “moral” as it needs to be—that is to say, necessity is already aligned with its own codes of existence. It is only when we grow in the soil of artifice and cunning deceptions that the instinct for these things is lost to be replaced by twaddle. The authentic life or the expression of the living unconscious has no need of humanist morals, because it is a becoming aligned with evolutionary potential; it is moral in and of itself. A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled. Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of the great primary centres. If one of these centres fails to maintain its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or both. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in the primary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to another livingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law.8

The negativities of culture and behavior that humanism tries hard to hold back through the manufactured discourses of justice, rights, duties, and so on, ultimately triumph simply because the latter are not connected to the primary centers of our living unconscious. To put it simply, no matter how hard we try, when something is unconnected to our primary centers, it is not going to work. Moreover, all distortions and antisocial tendencies arise precisely because some artifice that has no root in our living unconscious has been pressed into service. The life of posthumanism has no need for artifices for it lives according to its inner, impersonal, organic rules, which are the supreme rules of the evolutionary impulse. It is the artificial constructs of humanism that require artificial boundaries. 8

 Ibid., p. 113.

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In posthumanism there are no such boundaries and consequentially nothing to transgress. So the pedagogic work involved is a negative one to begin with—the slow recoiling away from imagined humanist boundaries and constructs, and reentering our primitivities. No two persons will have the same trajectory in de-articulating themselves from the humanist bandwagon, but the goal remains the same. At the same time, it does not mean that my ego-self with its humanist predispositions and imagery is able to stand by and watch this transformation. The transformation is essentially a dismantling of the humanist ego to be replaced by a fluid, nameless entity, whose outer surface and inner surface are unified, rather like a Möbius strip. In point of fact, now there is no conscious or unconscious—the polarity itself disappears. This also means that there is no one to watch over or supervise the mutation of the psyche as it reconnects to the living unconscious. All this is accomplished without recourse to the world of ideas—it is non-discursive. There are no ideas in the unconscious, only intensities of various kinds, and movements. To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today. Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind grind grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centres, our centres of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatised that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people—and not we alone—of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don’t even know we are raving … an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly expressed until its dynamic cause is finished: and that to continue to put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of ennui, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche….9

Obviously the conception of a being and its development are not ideas. The embryo is not an idea, nor is the cell differentiation that follows (although their description may involve ideas). The marvelous brain grows 9

 Ibid., p. 115.

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along with the most complex neural centers without the help of any idea. In other words, the most magical things happen without the intervention of ideas. And yet, suddenly, the brain is teeming with ideas. Why? Of course, the birth of the idea is preceded by the image and its recording. And the image interferes with the instinctive adjustment to the world in an organic and living manner. Images begin to clash with other images because they are fragments of reality. Gradually the primary genitive centers become dormant, and we are only operating from the images, and chains of generalized ideas born of linked images. Instead of living from the entire corpus sensorium, we start to live only from the head—a lop-­ sided cerebral life. We try to squeeze out from the brain each little idea because we began to believe (at some point of our evolutionary history) that our redemption lies in milking the brain.10 Thus, the primary affective centers that had nothing to do with humanist pretenses begin to become atrophied, and technohumanism relying on the brain alone becomes the totem of the species. The primary affective centers including the basis of the instincts lose their sharpness and fall into disuse. But another equally important issue awaits to be discussed and that is with regard to the nature of the idea itself. An idea is the final expression of an interchange of living energies rather like a vapor trail left behind by a jetliner. It is merely a record or registration of the complex passage of a chain of reactions. When we teach or introduce an idea, we often forget the all-important fact that the idea is the photograph of the finished effect and nothing more, and cannot be used to reach back into the dynamism whose “pug-mark” it represents. Nevertheless, it is the cache of accumulated ideas that we use for education and in this way create the well of humanism in the young mind that is difficult to get out of later. Let me explain this. Humanism was not born in one day, or even in a short time. There has been a cultural synthesis of bios and chronos, or a temporal integration of ideas about life, over a fairly long period to concretize the experiences that have culminated in what we call humanism. In order to turn back humanism, we have somehow to push back or recoil from this cache 10  Anyone who has heard of the fuss over the cerebral remains of Einstein (and other intellectual celebrities) will recognize the point being made. Einstein’s brain has been preserved and mapped in different ways to find out the locus of genius. Unfortunately for the “cerebralogists,” nothing has ever turned up that remotely suggests that Einstein’s brain was materially any different from any average brain. The reason is obvious. Genius does not lie in the brain, but in the transferred energy of the living unconscious. The brain is merely an efficient filter and not the source of anything.

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and retrieve the original ground whence it all emerged. We cannot afford to confuse the ground with the expression. Humanism or technohumanism is only one expression of the ground, and not the prettiest. And when we aim our energies tirelessly at finished products like ideas, the result is a concretized world with no means of escape from the ceaseless chatter of the brain. We end up being disconnected from our source, cut off by the chatter of ideas which appear more real than reality itself, and leave entities close to emotional ruin. This collapse is the root of social disorder, and ultimately of war. This collapse also leaves us bereft of belief in ourselves as the source of our own redemption. Posthumanism (or prehumanism) requires the reinstitution of this belief in our own organic capacities and not the belief in humanist institutions. Institutionalized humanism is a sickness that takes away the possibility of returning to ourselves once we have thrown off the burden of history. Why might that be the case? Because the senses and the instincts have become lazy due to disuse and misuse. They have lost their sharpness and become ineffectual in the manner in which a sharp stone becomes rounded through constant friction. That is why, from the young age, pedagogy must guard against excessive humanism and allow the flourishing of affective movements and intensifications that reconnect to the ground or the living unconscious. Why do we not protest against the excesses spoken of above? Quantitative changes are the order of things within humanism, since the overall paradigm is taken for granted and has therefore become the background of things in general. The world of ideas and the mental life has been considered superior for centuries. Qualitative transformation now appears an odd kind of reference, not within the purview of the ordinary. As an example, both the left and the right scream about law and order, one from the angle of protection for the ordinary citizen, the other from the angle of privilege of the propertied. Both discourses cannot acknowledge that law (and the juridical) can never eliminate the penchant for creating harm and disadjustment. Only qualitative change, or natural yearning for sensitive adjustment, can create harmonious translations of social problems into active and dynamic solutions. And this natural yearning cannot come to be unless we are connected to our creative dynamic or the bio-­ geography that lies at the source of our being. Natural justice occurs in that active source and nowhere else. What does all of this have to do with global crises? Humanist delusions and projections hold us in thrall preventing the strength and power of the ground or the source energies that possess their own inner compass.

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Deluded by technohumanist visions for the world, we become prisoners of insane groups who sit in laboratories making coronaviruses or plan systematic destruction through nuclear holocausts or something even more sinister. The essence of technology is not technological, as Heidegger had so astutely observed, meaning that it does not lie in its expressions. Technohumanism has got to accept the blame for creating these monsters and cannot afford to look the other way. It has opened the Pandora’s box and does not know how to put things back. The politics of power and totalitarianism have a natural affinity for technology and the populist discourses that surround it—the dictator is the natural ally of the technocrat, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze once put it. This has created an evil nexus that threaten the very surface of this planet and all that lives on it. The name of that evil nexus is technohumanism. This does not imply that all technology is problematic or wicked. It points to the fact that when techno-consciousness becomes the ruling idea hegemonically established by the ruling classes, there emerges a peculiar mixture between the former and the bad conscience that Nietzsche spoke of in Zarathustra. The resultant composite is a rather deadly one that stops urgent questioning toward freedom. Intellectual cultivation brings before man a model in the light of which he shapes and improves all that he does. Cultivating the intellect requires a guiding image rendered secure in advance, as well as a standing-ground fortified on all sides. The putting forward of a common ideal of culture and the rule of that ideal presuppose a situation and bearing of man that is not in question and that is secured in every direction. This presupposition, for its part, must be based on a belief in the invincible power of an immutable reason and its principles. [However] the age of intellectual cultivation is coming to an end, not because the uncultured are gaining ascendancy, but because the signs are appearing of a world-age in which that which is worthy of questioning will someday again open the door that leads to what is essential in all things and in all destinings.11

The cultivation of the intellect is paradigmatic and follows an overarching ideal that secures itself from all sides as something foolproof. It posits the possibility of such foolproofness and then pursues it with a single-­ minded plan of action. Even the so-called falsifiability doctrine is in reality a lookout for an improved explanation. In other words, the assumption  Heidegger, op. cit., pp. 180–181.

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that the intellectual explanation is giving us a correct view of the world is never in question. The details may have to be refined, that is all. The expert view has come to dominate all areas of life, and this means there is little room for the cultivation of ad hoc or other kinds of views. The expert can say one thing one day and something very different the next, as we have seen during the pandemic, but he is still the expert. The result is that we no longer have any faith in ourselves—that is the biggest loss. It also means that the non-expert (rest of us) have no responsibility, and like children be taken care of by the adult (expert). Thirdly, you are also not supposed to question or doubt the expert. S/he represents reason’s infallibility. Technoscience as the common ideal of cultures across the world has become fortified on all sides preventing true questioning and has instead ushered in an age of complacency and assuredness in the invincibility of reason. Nevertheless, crisis after crisis puts a question mark against such an overbought situation, and technohumanism, despite its apparently invincible powers and limitless reach, is beginning to look vulnerable. This might be the prompt that opens the door to a fundamental reconnection with our pre-humanist and nonhumanist essence. The fundamental necessity for recuperation of our bio-geographies is the capacity to trust ourselves. This trust is not something blind or an affectation. It is the result of careful questioning of things we have taken for granted. We have become attentive to that which is inaccessible and not to be gotten around, which is constantly passed over. It shows itself to us in [an] the objectness into which the real sets itself forth and through whose whole extent theory entraps objects in order, for the sake of representation, to secure those objects and their coherence in the object-area of a particular science at a particular time. The inconspicuous state of affairs holds sway throughout the objectness in which the reality of the real as well as the theory of the real moves freely, and in which consequently the entire essence, the coming to presence, of the modern science of this new era moves freely also. We shall be satisfied with having pointed to the inconspicuous state of affairs. To bring out what it is in itself would require that we pose further questions. Through this pointing to the inconspicuous state of affairs we are, however, directed onto a way that brings us before that which is worthy of questioning. In contradistinction to all that is merely questionable, as well as to everything that is “without question,” that which is worthy of questioning alone affords, from out of itself, the clear impetus and untrammeled pause through which we are able to call toward us and call near that which

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addresses itself to our essence. Traveling in the direction that is a way toward that which is worthy of questioning is not adventure but homecoming.12

The last line captures it all. We are not embarked upon an adventure to seek out posthumanism as some fresh existential ground. In actuality, the thing we are calling the plane of the posthuman is not some novel discourse, trope, or practice that is somehow to be created, achieved, or stumbled upon. Rather, it is, as is said above, a homecoming, re-­collecting, and transducing of nervous energy toward (nonhuman) essence. The goal of posthumanist pedagogy and ultimately of education is this coming-­ toward or aligning-with our own bio-geographies from which we have been for long alienated, being trapped within a settled discourse and seduced by the techno-positivity of the expert. The exercise carried out in these pages is only to bring out in the end that which is truly “worthy of questioning.” Everything that is merely questionable, and all that is accepted without question, both are superficial when placed against the permanent ontological question mark that remains enfolded in evolutionary emergence or bio-geography. But we need to clarify what we mean by questioning. Does questioning here imply the usual kind of verbal expression that contains an interrogative clause or phrase? Or do we mean by questioning a very different thing here? Does it mean that the questioner is separate from the question in the usual manner, or is the questioner an embodiment of, or integral to, the question itself? The latter would imply that this questioning is not a thing of the mind, and it is not just another matter of curiosity or knowledge. And this immediately also puts it out of the domain of technohumanism. In other words, this questioning is not what we usually understand by the term. Then what do we mean by it? When the subject directs a question at externality or the object-world, there is evidently a gap, a space between the questioner and what is sought to be explained or clarified: “Is that your child crying?” or “Can I see your ID please?” or “Is it raining?” The normal question already presumes the object prior to invoking the interrogative that is directed either at something questionable or at something that is accepted without question. But the bio-geographical query is not about predetermined object referents and hence questioning cannot presume an existent. So what is the question about if not directed toward a predetermined object referent or a situation? In other words, posing a  Ibid., p. 179–180.

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counter to Husserlian phenomenology, when there is no intentionality, what is the direction of consciousness? When consciousness is not directed at object referents or recognizable situations, it encounters an openness. The entire organism is united in this openness, unlike the fragmentation of the mental consciousness. In other words, the questioning spoken of here is a kind of orientation of the entire being away from conventional technohumanist chatter and obsession with the conditioned present toward an evolutionary space of emergence or the fountainhead of all experience. This fountainhead of experience is always present in the background of the corpus sensorium and has little to do with the ultimate form that experience takes. In other words, it is free of humanism or any other “ism” for that matter. It is raw, dynamic vitality that is the source energy of the organism. The “homecoming” mentioned above is the becoming-­ aware of this source. It is the strangest of things—we are in it and yet we are out of it. Now, we have somehow got to push ourselves back into it rather like a vehicle moving in reverse gear. The questioning is therefore not questioning in the usual sense, but making a clearing where there is the acuteness of a pushback. It also lowers our “center of gravity” from the head to the spinal region which carries the vital energy around the various centers. Instead of verbal consciousness in which we are immersed all the time, we become immersed in a system of energetics that is very different from the humanist structuration of ourselves within mental and representational consciousness. In the world of dynamic energetics, which lies just beyond mental consciousness, there is no representation or image of the human which is a construction of the mind. The “human” is a result of thinking, whereas the energy of thought itself has no place for the human as it is a dynamic movement within a spinal-sensory flux. This, however, does not mean it has no effect on thinking. The transfer spoken of earlier is a flow from this occult level to the level of thinking. The greater the flow or transfer the broader and deeper are our abilities to deal with the world, simply because it reconnects us with our evolutionary potential. If crises are emergent, then so are our powers to deal with them. For what are “crises” after all but the evolutionary potential of still other composites surrounding ours. When we learn the living meaning of transfer, we go beyond crises to a domain that no longer sees things in terms of crises, but in terms of flow and blockage, intensity and transvergence. That is to say, posthumanism is both hard work and no work (in the usual sense) at all, since it is homecoming. The hard work is because we have been away for so long from our nativities, and the ease is due to the fact that this

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is not alien to ourselves, but our own evolutionary capacities that have been trapped under the burden of the manufactured discourse and grand narratives of humanism. But there is always the remainder that escapes, the evolutionary potential that is beyond the reach of the mind, on which we can bank to help us get on our way to homecoming, once we begin the process of questioning. This leads to pushing aside every formulation of the mental sphere and regaining the open terrain again and again. For example, humanism has taught us to repudiate death, which becomes the chief cause of fear. There is the illusion that we can push back against death, and techno-medicine is on the verge of a life expansion project. This modern myth is built on humanist time that opposes life to death. The reality is that life is not opposed to death but lies on a continuum in which each continually changing composite has a specific bio-geographical becoming. The resistance offered by humanism to this naturally evolving process makes us misunderstand the relevance of what we call life. Instead, if we focus on emergence and becoming from the core of our vital energies, then life-death opposition becomes out-of-place since there is no external humanist observer that is fearful of a change of state. Thus, we overcome a chief superstition of the humanist plane by learning to push back the mental images that sap our energies by creating false oppositions and dualities, as well as giving a false picture of the world that is projected as reasonably complete. Essentially the work of posthuman bio-geography begins with the awareness of the reflexive counterfactuals with which humanism has helped us construct our “selves.” In fact, parts of that false reality begin to collapse like a house of cards as soon as the nature of the mind-­consciousness is realized. A lot of energy is freed up because we are no longer in politics—no longer are we concerned with the left, right, or the center. We see all of that as polarities within the same mental constructs and are no longer fooled by them. The energy released from being bound to these polarities (even implicitly or unwittingly) is considerable. This released energy now goes to work to free us from the slavery of (technohumanist) ideas and ideals. How does this released energy remain free of ideas? By aligning itself with the affective centers of consciousness, a new dynamism works free of the old habits of thought and structure. One can sense a new found intensity in our ways of being that has nothing to do with intellectual freedom. Organic intensity can be felt as it works its way through the system. It raises the level of being to creative action, or rather, it aligns consciousness to the spontaneous creative action that is emergent life.

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That leaves us with one other question that if we failed to raise will leave us in the same problematic corner as it did humanism. And that question relates to our relation with the world around us and what is called the natural environment. If the dynamic surge or redemption in consciousness is merely a surplus for the individual, then it does not do very much to bring about a change in the right direction. The question is, does it break out of the usual separation of human versus nonhuman, and human versus environment? The power of the humanist narrative, as it gathered steam, focused on the externality as power over nature. Nature was to be overcome by any means available. This was explicitly sanctioned by the philosophers including Kant, Bacon, and others. Nature was seen as the Other, and even sometimes as the enemy. Humans had to wrest out of nature its secrets and force it to yield the truths about its inner workings. What we have come to understand subsequently is that the encounters with externality indeed produced certain pragmatic “truths,” but these productions were not about an independent or autonomous world but in a simultaneously constructed one. To put it differently, the world became altered or changed in the very act of production of knowledge because we had to separate ourselves from the relations that bound us to the world. So, humanity was not producing knowledge about Nature, but rather about an objectivized nature produced by consciousness and the limits of its measuring methodology. But how can we even presume such a Nature (with a capital “N”)? There are illimitable anthropological and philosophical ways of inferring it. The most notable among them is the fact of appearance and disappearance. Phenomena seem to come out of nowhere and disappear into nothing (whole stellar systems have appeared and disappeared). This arising and subsidence bespeaks of unknown and unknowable layers beyond the consciousness-produced world. The effort of posthumanism is not toward further knowledge, but toward consciousness expansion that considers and acknowledges Nature. Its relation with Nature is not one of “power-over,” but one of compassionate relations. Obviously, the closest and the most predominant natural phenomenon we are aware of is our own bodies because we live in them. And compassionate relations would mean that we do not mistreat or misbehave with our bodies. It begins from there and moves in ever-expanding circles till compassion is our primary relation with the world. Science or technohumanism cannot speak of compassion, because it is based in fragmentation and control. Compassion, on the other hand, means passion for the whole. This wholeness is what posthumanism seeks, but not as

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knowledge; it seeks it in phenomenological relations with all else. What does this mean? The pedagogy of compassion first meets a dense body that seems like a given. However, with close observation we find spaces or potential in it that are not fully exposed or realized. These could be physical, emotional, psychic, or anything else that is not symbolic. We start from there and actualize whatever we have got and stretch it to the maximum. Alongside we observe with great care the changes it brings to our overall constitution. The most important immediate realization is usually an increased sense of autonomy. We seem to have a greater correspondence with the world, bypassing the social discourses that shape our reality. This does not mean the discursive has no effect on us; rather, it means that we become aware of a parallel understanding of the world that is not political but ontological. I call this the ontological turn. Unlike the speculative “onto-theology” of the earlier philosophers that Heidegger had rightly criticized, this is something phenomenological, spreading outward from our bodies and our psyche. One consequence is that the boundary between self and other now becomes less unyielding and more porous—a result of increased transfer from the living unconscious that we have discussed earlier. Compassion is not something sentimental; it is not even mental. It is a vast ontological strength that encompasses everything. And it is a consequence of ripples from the expanding transfer of consciousness. These ripples that spread outward to all things is compassion. It is physical and ontological. The superior and intense connection to everything cannot be produced by willing, but is an involuntary expansion of consciousness that is at the heart of what I have called posthumanism. The focus now moves from objects to relations. The constricted consciousness of humanism is obsessed with objects and an objectified world. As distinct from that, the deepened and broadened consciousness of posthumanism is concerned with (compassionate) relations. The whole world view now changes to an inclusive one and less of a control-based, dichotomized one. Such a compassionate world cannot be brought about without the release of consciousness from its present constricted state. We have to understand the fact that the brain is a mere filter and is neither the seat nor source of consciousness. It is the transfer of the dynamic from the living unconscious that changes the terrain from humanism to posthumanism. Now it becomes clear why we had to begin our journey in this section with the issue of transfer-intensity and quantum of the existential dynamic or evolutionary impulse. We have consequently to turn ourselves toward the

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mystery of consciousness and begin a deep questioning. If there is such a thing as a fundamental existential attitude that can make sense of phenomenal existence, it is the attitude of compassion, for it connects us to the world and thereby grants meaning to our lives. Cut off from the larger planetary world, humanism has never been able to give meaning to our so-called progress. The ecological arguments coming out of humanism, including deep ecology, also fail to be convincing because they miss the key element of praxis. These are still mind-based intellectual positions that get bogged down in questions of relative and absolute value of nature vis-à-vis humans and questions of that nature. We do not have to persuade anyone about the intrinsic value of nature because we are nature itself, and this must become as obvious as daylight in our lived lives. Therefore, the real difference between the ecological positions and the posthumanism visualized in these pages lies in the mutation or revolution in the psyche that immanently reveals to us our true ontological status. No amount of affirmation of nature has any meaning if there is no immanent or phenomenological connection that needs no persuasion. The pedagogy envisaged here is directed precisely at this phenomenological realization. No one, who is acquainted with the raised level of being from a higher transfer of the dynamic élan vital, will fail to move in the direction of the evolutionary impulse. The relation is virtually tautological. It is only the artificially restricted consciousness that comes into conflict with nature and everything else including itself since its fundamental flow is obstructed through ideas and ideals. The breakthrough necessary is not in the mind but in the heart that manifests itself in an intensified consciousness. Therefore, the posthuman consciousness is a dual one, with a practical ego-based socially useful self and an immanent one that is simultaneously felt as a “facing toward the Open.” The latter is not socially or culturally constituted, nor is it imbued with language. Rather, it is waves and sensations, accelerations and expansions, wordless insights and formless strengths that link us to our source. This linkage is primal and timeless, and therefore I continue to insist that posthumanism is also prehumanism and is not to be seen as temporal succession. In fact, the primitive function of posthumanism is non-temporal, as we shall see next.

CHAPTER 6

The Primitive Function

It is time to draw together the different strings of the discussion— humanism/posthumanism, societal-global crises, and educational-­ pedagogical response. Let us begin with the first one. Most writers on posthumanism make the error of first assuming the facticity of the human and then attempt to think their way beyond humanism as an added step or a development on the assumption—which could be in the direction of technohuman hybrids, animal-human consanguinities, eco-biological redescriptions, or some other bearing. Whatever it is, the point of departure is almost always the human to something beyond the human—the self-identified human trying to transcend his own self-assigned category. Besides, most discourses on posthumanism frame the latter in heavily intellectual terms dealing with it almost exclusively on the mental plane as though there were no other existential planes. Consequently, these fall into the trap of not recognizing that the human is a reflexive invention of a species-under-becoming that has learnt to appropriate power through naming and narrative construction. And if there is no originary or sovereign moment associated with the so-called human, rather only discrete developments and immanent unfoldings, then there is also nothing that can truly be called the posthuman. In other words, the human and the posthuman are both imagined terms based on reflexive imagery. This is the simplest and yet the most difficult truth to grasp simply because we have invested so much in a narrative at the center of which is the name we have ascribed to ourselves. From the immense limitlessness of public © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_6

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continuities and sentiments, to the tall stories about species greatness, the individual organism has borrowed, in turn, its own little piece of illusion, carving out a psychological continuity together with its peculiar brand of humanism. Within this double illusion are born the dualities and oppositions that haunt the species and its members, and from which it takes its cues for escape. From the beginning then, the ontological necessities (what-is-there) are forces, agglutinations, compositions, and decompositions. Nothing else. Nothing comes into being other than compositions, nor does anything go out of existence. What occurs are contingent combination and recombination of forces within evolutionary limits. From this continuous flux we select some and give it a name, and then deselect and give it some other name, and so on. We confuse the name with the reality. And that is the start of our problems. This is not too philosophical; it is simply facts. There is no such thing as the human; instead, there are evolutionary forces—forces of change—that bear a particular combination toward another combination, period. Why is this pedagogically important? It is vital because it helps us to have the correct attitude to things. Attitude is everything, whether it is about being a stock trader or a competent swimmer, whether it is about disease or well-being, or whether it is about life or death. And correct attitude can only come from facing the truth under all circumstances. And the truth is that forces and intensities have no sovereignty. They move, and movement is all there is to them. Forces are nomadic; they do not seek anything beyond temporary confluences imposed by the terrain. They become range-bound for a while due to larger circumstances, before they break out for fresh convergences and entanglements. Extraordinary amounts of psychic energy are wasted in conflicts generated due to false perceptions. Humanism and technohumanism fall squarely within the basket of false perceptions. One must learn to play with the forces without attempting to transcend them by means of a reflexive vision or imagery. All humanistic-transcendental imagery must be drained out of the psyche, and then we come to the remainder. There is no “ascent of man,” but a descent required of us—a vital correction. When we are able to descend to the remainder, we are face-to-face with what actually confronts us. Then we are free to suffer—literally, carry a burden—according to the convergences and divergences set out in the geo-psychic terrain that surrounds us. The main pedagogic effort here is a negative one—to block humanistic chatter. We have learnt to take support from our self-created narrative. Once this support line breaks, we are back in the terrain of the different primal intensities that confront each other

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without make-believe. Just as in calculus there is a primitive or antiderivative of a function, the organism has a primitive function. We have to reduce ourselves to the primitive function, for the primitive alone can deal with the forces that be, and not the derivative. Then there is no crisis—the language itself changes. If the language is wrong, then perception framed by such language is also wrong. The language of posthumanism or nonhumanism rejects the self-description of the so-called human and faces the world according to a different set of coordinates. Here organismic compositions are mapped in terms of forces, velocities, tensions, vectors, intensities, binding energies, and so on, and not as selves or according to the invented grandeur of a species. Thus, we arrive at the primitive function. The derived function is civilization, with all its entropic trappings. The primitive function is the antiderivative; it is prior to civilization and counter-entropic. We have to return to the primitive function once we realize the limits of humanism, and from time to time, in order to shake off the accretions of civilization. The primitive function contains within it the generative-evolutionary powers that can shake off the attempted binding by a bug, for it must fulfill its destiny. That said, it would be appropriate to acknowledge also that if a bug, or something else, were meant to overwhelm in the direction of a general recomposition, there is nothing anyone could do about it. One cannot extend beyond the primitive; it is the existential limit of any composite, beyond which the composition loses its viability. And this is the essential problem with the civilizational or the derived function. It cannot deal with erasure— its basic assumption is continuity, which is contrary to the intrinsic and fundamental discontinuity built into existence. The picture or the image emphasizes continuity, whereas the reality is impermanence and effacement. The primitive encounter is withdrawal into the core evolutionary project of the organism that has nothing to do with the various accumulations and accretions that we call civilization. One might even go so far as to say that the civilizational function is the enemy of the evolutionary project. It weakens the latter. The larger task of education is to bring before thought this tension between the evolutionary project and the civilizational project— the latter being an offshoot that has begun to look like the principal thing. How does the civilizational drive weaken the evolutionary project? Take, for example, the current pandemic. Among a hundred other things, the path of civilization makes us tilt toward the institutionalization of “health” and the consequent loss of responsibility and obligation for one’s physical well-being. In terms of our conceptual paradigm, we are further distanced from our primitive. The doctor and the hospital combine, that is,

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institutionalized disease care, breeds a false sense of complacency. And when an epidemic of this scale strikes, and the experts have no answer, the whole civilizational thing falls apart, as evident from the present crisis. The civilizational function searches for a solution in the wrong pocket. The answer lies in the primitive domain that is a pristine zone untouched by civilizational dross. Given today’s technological mesmerism, the foregoing sounds like bosh. Is not technology or technological medicine supposed to take care of everything? Well, not quite everything. There are fundamental things we can take care of by ourselves, which when strong enough can overcome crises. Breathing, for instance. We know that oxygenation of the blood is primary, and oxygen is free being one of the most abundant of elements. Until, that is, when one falls ill and then does not know how to combine with that which is everywhere. Then one must pay for oxygen to be pumped into one’s lungs to keep one from becoming a piece of statistic. This reduction is one of the greatest of ironies spawned by the latest crisis. We are surrounded by the most expensive array of medical equipment and pharmaceutical concoctions, yet we die for lack of oxygen in the blood, that which is essentially free. It goes to show where our attention is—in the wrong place obviously. The fact of breathing is taken for granted like so many other things within the civilizational paradigm. Primitives and ancients knew that combining (with air) is not to be taken for granted and that the secret of existence partly lies in the breath composing and decomposing in the body. Humanism takes the image of the human as primary and sees the breath as one of the functional elements, whereas the primitive sees the breath as primary, out of which emerges various living configurations. Cultures become virulent when they lose sight of the basics, and they go on reproducing in a hegemonized direction, spawning a “successful” cul-de-sac such as technohumanism. But we must be careful, and not confuse the primitive individual with the primitive function. There is nothing liberating or redemptive about the primitive life. In fact, as we had D. H. Lawrence pointing out in an earlier chapter of this book, the primitive person is a highly conventional creature. The primitive function has nothing to do with being primitive. It is the evolutionary function that transcends the accidental side effects of evolution such as civilization. Consequently, our pedagogic task is to recover from civilization and not remain blind adherents or victims of it. The path to the recuperation is not an easy one. But before we can even envisage such a possibility, we have got to acknowledge that such a thing

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is even required of us in the first place. Some of us may have been, or are, critical of the excesses of culture, but few have realized the gradual impotence that is built into the “successes” of civilization. Posthumanism, whatever else it might mean, is definitely pre-civilizational. Pedagogically, it would be an error to think that anything that grows out of humanism can be truly posthuman. It would still be an outcrop of humanism, no matter that it be the latest version of it. To shake off humanism, one must fall back on that which lies outside humanist history and the humanist paradigm. Obviously, the best time for examining all of this is during a humanist crisis, especially a crisis from which no part of the world is immune, and we are momentarily knocked off our pedestal with the technological arrogance and complacency taking a beating. Even as I write this book, I do not know whether I will live to finish it. It gives an extra keen edge to the writing as we live through mayhem where bodies are disposed of in rivers and mass graves become common. It is clear that unwittingly the civilizational function has come to an unconscious halt in many parts of the world. People are in line waiting for the person ahead to die so that they can occupy the now freed-up ventilator-bed. Photos have aptly captured vacant eyes besides untimely burning pyres as the mind has been emptied of the civilizational paradigm. Once the mind is emptied of the latter, which is nothing but a given set of images and habits of thought, what remains is the pre-civilizational or the pre- (or post) human, if you please. We begin on this different and difficult journey, that is, the discovery of the primitive function, by a realization that humanism is the greatest enemy of the human species as well as of the planet in general. In other words, the impotence of the civilized and institutionalized self is the seed of all crisis that afflicts the species-environment. Baby elephants instinctively follow large, dark, moving objects. We instinctively follow our institutions and institutionalized discourse-narratives, even when they lead gradually to dis-capability. It is not as though we can entirely be without our institutionalized or oedipalized selves. But we have to learn to distinguish it from the primitive self. And in that zone we will find new energies and new capacities dormant within our situation, in line with the evolutionary potential of the organism. These energies are not personal, but systemic. They appear with the arising of the context, if we let them. The next point concerns a rectified picture of the true nature of things. We know that at the fundamental level, the phenomenal world is energy, and energy is nothing other than convulsions or waves. Using that basic

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knowledge, we can say that phenomena are nothing but confluence of wavelets or a periodic phase synchronization of waves. All materiality is nothing other than a temporary binding together of the highs and lows of micro-convulsions. At a certain point, the phase synchrony disappears, and the waves go their different paths, and what was material, falls apart to reconvene elsewhere in a different form. This convulsive coming together and falling apart is the essential nature of the material universe. Now, the problem with civilization is that it consciously attempts to draw a linear path without convulsions; it marks this attempted straightening-out as “progress.” This is akin to straightening a dog’s tail, which curls up the moment you let go of it. The problem is that we never acknowledge this essential feature in our picturing of the civilizational function or the world in general. Holding on to a wrong picture of things against all available evidence exacts a huge existential price. Let me explain this point using an example. Consider the notion of gravity. Since the time of Newton, and perhaps earlier, it has been a source of great puzzlement. Newton gave us a description of it and a formula for calculating it, assuming gravity was there. As a scientist, he was uneasy about the fact that he had to assume gravity and was unable to explain it. The idea of “action at a distance” or force between distant bodies in space was somehow mysterious and not very scientific, and Newton would have liked to have explained it in a better way. But the mystery remained and he had to be content with his description. Later came Einstein who realized that gravity had to be described in a different way and not as action at a distance—there was nothing acting as such. In a moment of insight that was his moment of epiphany, Einstein realized the equivalence between “gravity” and acceleration. He saw that a person in free fall would not feel anything called gravity in his frame of reference, which Einstein called “inertial frame.” The question immediately arises what makes the person in free fall crash into the earth (or some other body in whose neighborhood he happened to be), and hence what might have caused the “fall” or movement in the first place? To answer this question one has to go into the nature of space-time as theorized by Einstein. The reason why bodies in space moved around each other as they did was because, or so Einstein reasoned, space-time was curved and dented around big masses. He eventually wrote down an equation for it which was better able to explain the behavior of planets in their orbits than the Newtonian schema. But this theory too had to assume gravity at some level (or some form of mystery force), for how else would matter induce

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curvature in space-time? In other words, although the Einsteinian description was more subtle and sophisticated, it still begged the question. And despite the technical successes of general relativity theory, the debate around gravity did not die down, and that is obviously because no satisfactory explanation has been found till date. A description, however useful, is not an explanation, and the mind seeks explanations. The problem with the relativistic description is that it is circular: Bodies follow the curvature of space-time, and the curvature of space-time is induced by the presence of bodies. Additionally, it introduces an extra concept of curvature of space-time. But the overwhelming successes of the calculations have silenced its explanatory lacunae. Now if we apply our corrected vision about phenomena as a product of wave coalescences, and not as hard matter, it is easier to see what causes “gravity.” It is impossible to understand gravity when we perceive the world in terms of hard matter. How can matter produce action where there is no matter or in in-between spaces? But when we think of matter as nothing other than bunched up waves, the thing becomes more or less clear. Gravity is nothing but the counter-wave of a wave—the negative of the positive that must always accompany each other. There is no additional concept involved. In other words, each (positive) wave has its (negative) shadow which is the “gravity wave,” and it attracts the positive of the others. This is impossible to see so long as we hold on to the matter-view or solid-perspective of things. There is a visible side of phenomena as well as an occult side; such is inevitable—for each thing in the universe occurs in pairs and never singly. We walk or sit comfortably in our chairs, only because the negative wave of the phenomenal earth synchronizes with our own (positive) wave function, and for this we do not need any assumption about space-time curvature. We merely have to learn to think in terms of waves. Why this longish detour into gravity? It shows rather vividly the manner in which our commonsense, billiard ball perspective of the world affects our formal theories. The idea of space-time curvature follows from the commonsensical analogy between matter and space-time. Curvature, even it is in a large sense metaphoric, is derived from our experience with matter. Else, in what sense can it be claimed that non-matter (space-time) possesses curvature? Can it be said that non-things have material attributes just as things do? The root of the problem of course lies in the basic tenets of logical-positivism, the overarching conceptual paradigm within which scientific theories began to be organized. It refused to recognize anything

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other than the empirical or that which is directly derivable from the senses. Gravity cannot be sensed directly, only its effects can be studied. It is not an attribute of matter, but the obverse side of matter-waves. In other words, in order to give a reasonable explanation of “gravity” one must admit of the occult side of phenomena. The civilizational function generates crises by denying the obverse side of things and holding onto a partial reality picture. When we see our reflections in the mirrors (of the partial reality) that we have built, we think of ourselves only as solid and continuous entities. From this is born the basic illusion of the human as a sovereign species with an imaginary special status. But let us examine the facts. No doubt we are somewhat solid, possessing a certain limited endurance. But we must also be wave-like, with no constancy but undulations. This is not immediately obvious but requires a certain amount of reflection. The most fundamental ingredient in the production of biomass is sunlight which is nothing other than waves, and the most basic process of production is photosynthesis, which, as the name itself suggests, is a synthesis of photons within a matrix. It would come as no surprise therefore to know that the apparent solidity of biomass is consolidated waves. The smallest changes in these rhythmic undulations can produce havoc in the overall stability of the system. Therefore, it is not really solidity but a dynamic equilibrium and relative homeostasis that gives the appearance of solidity. But it is only with a special effort that we can shake off this peculiar idea and replace it with something more fundamental that helps us acquire a posthumanist perspective. Posthumanism is simply the obverse side of humanism—none other than the negative of its positivity. Now let us get back to the primitive function once more and see how the foregoing helps us to carry the discussion forward. The way to understand posthumanism is not by inventing a new narrative or by seeking some direction away from humanism, but by systematically deconstructing humanism to arrive at its negative. And what better way to do that but by looking into the micro-level actualities of the organism, which we have been doing. As I stand here on this planet, confronted with the latest crisis, I am not secured by any grand explanations of humanist existence, nor will all the grand theories put together prevent my eventual extinction, one way or another. If I am thesis, then we need an anti-thesis, period, in order to settle the ontological question—is there anything to the so-called human? The wave form spoken of here is merely an anti-thesis and not an elaborate theory. As far as I’m concerned, and perhaps other like-minded

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people are concerned, at the point of extinction, all the accumulated wisdom of the present will turn to nothingness, reminding us of the Biblical phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” This is simply another way of saying we return to the wave form. The thesis will meet its anti-thesis, and no amount of humanist delusion will prevent the cancellation. This is the point at which the civilizational function collapses into the primitive function, as it always and inevitably must. What does all of this mean in terms of education and pedagogy? The primitive function is pure potentiality as we have seen before. It never ceases to be anything else. It is untouched by civilization, and therefore, it is primitive or prior to it. The waves of psycho-somatic becoming proceed from it, unfolding according to the available evolutionary pathways and other contingent encounters. The importance of recognizing this lies in the imperative that we have to resurrect ourselves, rise from the ashes each time, and find ourselves anew without any presumptions. Neither technology nor humanism nor technohumanism can help us there. We must learn to shake off the dross of civilization and move on. The learning involved is in a parallel sphere and not in the domain of the acquisition of ideas. But unfortunately, our education, which is the acquisition of mind-based tricks, goes wholly in a contrary direction to this imperative. A most graphic account of this error is given by none other than D. H. Lawrence as he describes the scenario with a provocative degree of dark humor. The fact is, our process of universal education is today so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of the race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion, we force them into a certain amount of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls. The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps on and off tramcars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates and feeling very very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails. That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for

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a wage. Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going quite mad.1

The Dulcinean allusion is probably evocative of the modern rat race toward objects of desire. Nature does not produce a child so that it can be programmed into the rat race of the modern urban life. This is not adaptation but mal-adaptation. Rather, nature has its own evolutionary plan. Nevertheless, why does education deserve such blanket condemnation? Almost all of our education consists of stuffing alien ideas into a child’s mind in rapid succession. When we bring mind-thought, which is a derivative of the civilizational function too early into a child’s life, we essentially block the unfolding of the primitive function. Fearing s/he will remain uncivilized, we tilt at the windmills of “savagery” in a quixotian fashion and quickly turn the child into a second-hand being ready, in turn, to tilt at the windmills in her/his head. This is not to romance the primitive, but to observe the fact that native to each child is a range of intrinsic circuits of energetics that need to be actualized before anything else. These intrinsic circuits must not be colonized too soon or ever through the ideational-­ moral impulse. Every idea which is introduced from outside, into a man’s mind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is a fatal stumbling block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his true individual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being. For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Now, this idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deduced from certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a disease of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularly teachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, and proceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man, living his own life from his own spontaneous centres. He is a theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life. It is the death of all life to force a pure idea into practice. Life must be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centres of every individual, in a vital, non-ideal circuit of dynamic relation between individuals. The desires which are thought-born are deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives an exclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous.2

1 2

 p. 115.  p. 116.

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Stuffing the body with food is perhaps an unconscious analogy legitimizing stuffing the mind with knowledge. But what is prior to the mind is the psyche-soma that does not need to be fed but awakened. The psyche is not a thing, but a dynamic primitive wave function that is compressed at or in several centers in the body. When we stuff the mind with alien ideas, it is like silting up a river. It chokes the psychic flow that is native to the body with second-hand mental dross. We can see that the main pedagogic task therefore is a negative one. It is to protect the child from the civilizational function that forces upon consciousness a static view of things too early. A child mustn’t understand things. He must have them his own way. His vision isn’t ours. When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn’t see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck, and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don’t want him to see a proper horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature.3

The educational discourse emphasizes understanding, which mostly means effective inward mimicking of reality. Understanding is a mental function which proceeds incrementally by linking a to b, and b to c, and so on, thereby creating partial mental representations that mimic reality to some operationally successful extent. This is no doubt useful, but if it is forced upon the nascent being too early, it only succeeds in drying up the direct gut-level affinity that the organism has with its environment and things in it. This “vital rapport” exists without naming that reality, in terms of various presences. The dynamic direct perception happens at the edge of being without any intervening image. When we thrust upon the child the empirical “truth” that yonder is a black crow, the child repeats 3

 p. 121.

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after us, but what actually happens is that a fluid nameless reality is replaced by a counterfeit reality accompanied by a moral stickiness which makes the child afraid to be wrong. This is the actual process of oedipalization and not the incestual craving normally understood by the historical usage of the term. It is our relation with civilizational authority that is at stake here. The reader may wonder about its relevance in the current context. The oedipalized being belongs to the state (or to the anti-state, which, after all, is the same thing), for his perceptions are managed by the institutions of state or statist forces. The fluid reality that comes from the “elemental nature of the creature” is gradually replaced by a hegemonic reality and managed perceptions. And then we are ready to work in the Wuhan laboratories of the world producing deadly viruses that are bound to escape sooner or later and destroy millions and millions of lives worldwide. Civilizations are crisis-prone and must eventually break down at some point (it does not matter from what exactly) because in general they are energy-based and cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics. But what breaks through entropy is the evolutionary impulse—the miracle of higher organization that seems to transcend the dissipative tendency. The evolutionary unconscious, the real powerhouse within the organism is an impersonal impulse, which is why I will call it the nobody. It gathers calcified layers that are collectively called civilization. But like the cracking of a shell, crises can break open the hardened casing of the outer persona, the so-called human, releasing the posthumanist nobody within. This is possibly what Nietzsche had in mind in writing Zarathustra. And not merely Nietzsche—many, many philosophers, writers, thinkers, composers, artists have hinted at these powers of the unconscious that is the true agent in their creativity. But this miracle of the living unconscious is not available to the mind. Rather, the mind is subservient to it. It is by stepping aside from the claims of the mental that we understand the living unconscious and realize the significance of the nonhumanist nobody. All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the four great nerve centres. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, our love, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously at these four great centres or well-heads of our existence: everything vital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results from the emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion of this impulse with its object. … Knowledge is to consciousness what the signpost is to the traveller: just an indication of the way which has been travelled before. Knowledge is not even in direct

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proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry in a man who is a rather poor being: and those who know, even in wisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, not at the beginning. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. That is, how to live dynamically, from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that.4

Humanism lives in and from out of knowledge—it prides itself on its empirical knowing-ness about the species and the world. However, the great dynamo of life is not situated in knowledge. It is rather located in the centers of nervous energy or plexuses distributed throughout the corpus sensorium. The impulses and emanations therefrom are constitutive of the primitive function of which we have spoken earlier. To note as an aside: that is why the greatest manipulators of the species have not operated from knowledge but from a power emanating from the gut; and if they could do it, then it is all the more important for the general others to awaken to the primitive function, if only to resist being manipulated. The civilizational function, by handing over power to technocracy, misleads and misdirects us away from the source of power and strength. All our longings, hopes, and fears spring from a primal source that has nothing to do with knowledge as such. Knowledge is a kind of book-keeping, not unlike the ledgers of an accountant that keep track of the transactions— the record of a transaction is not the transaction, and the impulses of life precede the knowledge of it. The mind or consciousness can only register the consequences that proceed from the nervous emanations and is not the source of the latter. One may know a tremendous lot, but that knowledge does not translate itself into expansion of being, nor does it necessarily increase the intensity of one’s involvement with life. One may be highly erudite, and yet be a little person in terms of the quality of being. The civilizational function hitches us too early to the mill of knowledge stifling the possibility of discovering our true source. Little by little we must learn to withdraw from obsessive knowing and to resist being over-civilized. The (return) path to posthumanism is the resistance to becoming over-civilized, which is a blind alley. The humanist 4

 Ibid., pp. 110–111.

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image must give way to analogs of the forces that help create the image in the first place. I must learn to see-feel myself as a sinusoidal pulse and nothing else, or rather as a bunch of curves that by overlapping provide the illusion of form. Here we see how posthumanism, the primitive function, and the wave theory all come together. To not interfere means to allow the pulsations to do their work as they come up from the source to the surface (consciousness). It means preventing reflexive self-­consciousness from dominating with ideas. What we need is not knowledge but compelling living, and the first step in that transformation is the discovery of the primitive function. It is a bit like how a vehicle has to back out of a blind alley. We have to back out of the blind alley which technohumanism has created for us by surrounding us with technological chimera. The path out of the blind alley is by reverting to the core nonhumanist forces. You can sense the inner freedom, the lifting of oppression, even if momentarily, a sudden glimpse of something beyond the personality, a shadow of something that is uncorrupted by image or idea. To live dynamically “from the great Source”—that is what the pedagogy of transhumanism or posthumanism teaches. The source of our vitality is not human but obviously something prior to the human. We have to learn to re-source back into that source and live from there. It is always there in the background, and we have to learn not to interfere with it, superimposing our ideas on that primordial movement. It is not as though we take leave of the world of ideas—that would obviously be a ridiculous proposition. Instead, we put ideas in their place, allowing the dynamics of the intuitive energies surface with its primitive tensions and intensities. Living from ideas or fixed desires chokes the free-flowing energies, that is, the nature of the source. Rather, one must learn to live posthumously, after the death of ideas and the blandness they impose on the living movement. What does this have to do with crisis? A crisis is nothing but the result of stifled source flows. Laboratory pathogens are born in lab cultures. Cultural pathogens are born in societal cultures—a culture by nature is the point at which things begin to settle down and parametric stability enters. In ordinary culture, a set of organized and dominant beliefs and practices begin to grow as “truth” and take the place of dynamic source flows—a good example is technohumanism and its embedded beliefs. These grow like pathogens in the petridish of culture and soon overwhelm the peripheral groups and spaces, taking over their “RNA” and using these to replicate their beliefs. This is called the civilizing process. Viral pathogens and

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cultural pathogens, in this sense, mimic each other. The “spike protein” in the case of the latter consists of hegemonic ideas. It is through ideas that we latch onto various existential spaces and groups converting their “RNA” into majoritarian use. Viral culture thus carries double connotation: the replication of viruses and the replication of culture itself in a viral manner. To fight the former, we have to fight the latter. Alongside, there are powerful inversions to be overcome. Let me give an example of the extent to which a particular viral culture has penetrated the doing of science itself. The Bulletin for Atomic Scientists reports that “During a recent panel discussion hosted by Science magazine, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said that those who believe the pandemic may have begun with a lab accident have to grapple with a seeming contradiction: ‘You face this fundamental issue of, if it started with research, why does it look like it actually started at one of these markets selling these animals that were implicated in the first SARS outbreak’?” Anyone can see how logic is perverted by a reputed scientist just to support a point of view. The argument made above is specious at best and analogous to saying that the people who have justified belief that the earth is round are somehow answerable for the fact that to some the earth appears flat or that there are others who believe the earth to be flat. (“If it is round, why does it appear flat?” To which one might answer: “Because you choose to be blind.”) The round-earthers are not called upon to attach any special significance to the flat-earth view beyond the integrity of their own evidence. No one is accountable or responsible for the misperception of others except those who hold such distorted views; otherwise, we will be running around all day correcting the misguided. This is fairly straightforward, except when the mind is clouded by other considerations such as reputation. The real problem of technohumanism is not technology but that we are hostage to the experts who control the discourses and practices and thereby exert immense power. Today the culture of the expert is one of the biggest threats to planetary existence because the expert has learnt to see things solely from his or her perspective and therefore to protect his particular corner at the cost of larger truths. This claim might annoy some but such are the facts of the case, and the loss of belief in our own redemptive powers is the price paid for the state of affairs. Posthumanism as it is understood here is the reclamation and recovery of our own “fluid dynamics” in the face of crisis. The humanist enframing through which we have lost contact with our primitivity, or the source

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energy, or evolutionary impulse, must return to us in urgent ways so that a new configuration emerges. But if technohumanism has resulted in excesses that are the cause of crises, how can we assume that posthumanist vision will not cause similar depravities? The answer to that is complex but conceivable. What we understand by posthumanism is phenomenological encounter with organismic intelligence. Now, organismic intelligence has built into it various kinds of homeostasis, that is, steady internal conditions necessary for optimal functioning. Take, for example, body temperature or blood pressure. These are maintained within strict limits by highly intelligent processes not fully understood by the mind. Loss of homeostasis in different bodily processes can lead to healthy cells becoming cancerous or losing heat to collapse of hypothermia or a hundred other sub-optimal conditions. The phenomenological contact with these decidedly intelligent organic processes acquaints us with energies that function not according to our will but according to their own internal wisdom and discipline. Only a highly disciplined body can and ought to have access to these dynamic energies. It is a slow and gentle process of opening up ourselves, and an appropriate pedagogy that trains the sensibilities adequately for an ever-expanding phenomenological awareness is the need of the hour. Of course the mind must be trained in the conventional disciplines, there can be no doubt about that. But we have to understand that the disciplines are part and parcel of the same worldview that has produced the stressed planetary life in the first place. And we can be more or less certain that evolution did not bring us to this point so that we could simply sink into the swamp of crises in the name of civilization. If we bring these two facts together, then it becomes clear that there must exist another kind of knowledge that is differently produced and organized than the exclusively mental labors of present-day education. This anterior education is not symbolic or abstract learning, but a deepening of the pool of awareness from which we and the world of experience emerge. We begin not by the transfer of knowledge, which is an end-product, but by focusing on the source of knowledge, which consists of the instruments of knowing and their phenomenological contact with exteriority. This change in priority itself brings a vital change in pedagogical outlook. We also begin our descent into ourselves by distancing ourselves from the organized present. If we focus too much on the present built-up state of the world, we again end up with the finished products. The ophthalmic-­ spectacular view of the humanist world, along with the available modes of expression and accumulation, dazzles the average onlooker. The result is

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that we are overwhelmed by the scale of things and gradually lose belief in ourselves as creators of our lives in the face of a preponderant reality. This fact is easy to miss, because of the ostensible counterpoint that one can be engaged creatively in the workplace. That is something very different from the point being made. Workplace creativity and phenomenological creativity are of two different orders altogether. The production (or transformation) of substance and the production of oneself is not to be mixed up. Besides knowledge and the objectivized world as finished products, we must be wary of a third kind of finished product, which is the self. The image we hold of ourselves—introjections—must be continually loosened up and yield to intuitions of continuous becoming. There is nothing to be done here other than preventing the hardening of layers of memory. The nominal self, built up of socializations, private sentiments, identity politics, and existential struggles, carries an inner image of a semi-permanent nature. This fragmentary self is at odds with the ontological self that is nameless and ageless because it consists of energy fields that are in the organism ab initio. The primitive function is the pedagogical action that aids the gradual release of the primal activity of the great nervous centers bringing about phenomenological contact. The movement in these great centers or plexuses keeps the channels supple and ready for any eventuality. Such a body-being does not capitulate before a bug, nor does it institutionalize its expectations from life. It has tasted freedom from the reductionism of humanism. It has touched the elevated zone of the posthuman seizing back the initiative and shaping new passages with the real.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: A Dialogue

Interlocutor: I want you to clarify the process a little more. You speak of a primitive function that is at a subterranean level, a kind of active unconscious, is that accurate? Author: We have to keep it very simple. How could there not be a level of consciousness not dominated by the sign? After all, abstract signs are fairly late entrants … on an evolutionary scale, that is. Interlocutor: Are you then suggesting some kind of return to primitivity? Author: No, that would be absurd! We cannot return anywhere. There is nothing to return to—the past is a retrojection held in memory. Interlocutor: OK. Then what is it? Author: There has to be a phenomenological awareness of the life waves in us that have nothing to do with signs or ideas. We have to deliberately draw our attention to it, now that we are dominated by the sign. Interlocutor: Are you saying that signs are somehow an obstruction to the more basic life waves? Author: We have to teach ourselves to withdraw from the sign at least part of the time, only then can we perceive our fundamentals. Interlocutor: What about education then, which is mostly to do with recognition and manipulation of the sign? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6_7

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Certainly one must learn to manipulate the sign and learn it well. But alongside one must learn about the source of the sign, as to its appearance. And that cannot be learned through the sign surely? Obviously, the sign cannot reveal itself, it can only point to something other than itself. What about meaning then, we speak of meaning all the time? Meaning is indefinite substitution, the replacing of one sign by another. Also, what about science? It is an area where the sign dominates, but the sign also helps us manipulate matter adequately. The jet engine, or the chimera virus for that matter, could not have come about without the sign. Each sign is progressively an accretion and arises reciprocally with the matter under consideration and possible manipulation. There’s no confusion there. The trouble starts when you look at the origination of the sign. Then you enter into a zone of deep uncertainty. Why bother? The manipulation of the sign evidently gives power and clarity to arrange matter according to needs. Yes, till you come to a point where the sign is yielding in a manner that is akin to a runaway condition. This is what we call a crisis. Please explain that, if you will. Well, take the case of the pandemic. The ability to manipulate viruses comes from the sign under which the work was undertaken. The “gain of function” is a carefully selected group of signifiers that corresponds to and holds together a wide variety of sophisticated techniques for viral manipulation. The runaway condition occurs when the matter-sign system—agent+sign+vector—begins to behave in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, they put in what is technically called a “furin cleavage site” on the virus (something that does not exist in natural coronaviruses), a sign or signature that initiates a split that can lock on to the cells of the target species more effectively. This has led to the runaway.

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Interlocutor: But that is arbitrary and as per your particular conscience. How do you identify what you are calling runaway? Author: It is not necessary. The problem is not with a specific crisis; neither does the solution lie in relation to it. The problem exists in the proliferation of the sign in general. When you go back and back, from one sign to the previous one, and so on, you do not meet some solid thing but more signs. Interlocutor: So where does it end, and where would accountability begin according to you? Author: There is no point of origin. All things occur in pairs. What we need to do is to activate the other side of the sign. The parallel reality. Interlocutor: Which is what? Author: The sign-less dynamic, the pure thrust of organic life. Interlocutor: How can we be sure of that, or that such a thing is even conceivable? Author: There are moments of elation or of devastation that are not managed by the sign. If the sign is there, there must be that which is independent of the sign or the idea. Interlocutor: That is fine as theory goes. Our problem is the pedagogical one. Author: No doubt. Pedagogically there must be no difference between teacher and taught. We must all attempt to attain to the other polarity. Interlocutor: What is involved pedagogically? Author: First, we must not get carried away by a single polarity. Even as are immersed in the sign, we have to be critically aware of the manner of world construction. We must not be naïve about it. How often do we speak of the signless or idealess reality in education? Interlocutor: We do not, but where is the toehold in that polarity? Signs are easy to understand. Ideas are there in books; signs are all around us. The other thing is not. Author: There is too much invested in the sign and the idea, that is the problem. The dynamism of the affective is ignored or left to the private domain. Interlocutor: How is affective dynamism to be given the right priority? Author: It involves an enormous effort of the will. Let us proceed with an example. Take the case of illness. We have ­medicalized illness to a fault so that there is nothing for the ill person to do but follow the doctor.

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Interlocutor: What are we supposed to do? Author: The non-medicalized approach must be given equal priority; it must not be crowded out. In small ways we must strengthen our capacities, which means allowing dynamic forces to circulate more freely. We must have patience and understand what is going on when the body is unwell. The medical paradigm is inadequate for this as it makes you a foreigner within your own body. It does not teach you anything. Interlocutor: Does this have a bearing on the present crisis as well? Author: Of course it does. When well-being is institutionalized you have no faith in your own processes. You look at illness as something foreign to be treated only by pharmacology. Most people who were hospitalized could have survived well without it if they had prior training in the dynamics of breathing. Interlocutor: You are speaking of self-reliance I suppose. Author: That is to trivialize the matter. We must know what the self is, or is not, before we can rely on it. No, this is not self-reliance, but entering the processes of the self in an open, questioning manner. We were not sent here so that a little bug can kill us. What a waste, can you imagine? Nature is bountiful, but not wasteful. It would not put together a complex being so that some passing DNA can destroy it. Interlocutor: And yet the world has already lost five million souls! Author: It is the result of alienation from ourselves. We have allowed the sign and the idea to come between. Interlocutor: Between what? Author: Between the performative self and the primitive function. Interlocutor: And what of it? Author: It has reduced our powers of self-healing. The sophisticated system has been led astray and been allowed to be overwhelmed by a silly little bug. The primitive function has been crippled. Interlocutor: Ah! There it is again—the primitive. Your reference to the primitive is intriguing. Author: The primitive is the organic consciousness that is the founding layer born of the evolutionary impetus. The

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superficial consciousness is an effect of it and nothing more. And the sciences? They are also surface effects? Science is determined by the quantum of transfer from the background consciousness, or the living unconscious, to the superficial layer. The greater the transfer, the more profound and interesting the results. But a particular science is the consequence of a specific level of being. So there is nothing objective about science? Objectivity, subjectivity, these are nothing but ideas and oppositions invented by the mind. There is nothing purely objective because our modes of perception already predetermine the object under study. It is not extrinsic to the relation. And this realization changes our stance in the world? We are not here to promote anything or oppose any view. That should be our universal attitude. We must be deeply watchful of ourselves and the world, skeptical of any grand view, whatever that might be. The moment we are stuck with a grand view, there is corruption. But surely you cannot deny the success of some of these views. What you call success is also our own invention and standard. How do we know what is success and what is not? Success cannot be measured by the amount of concrete poured on the world or the number of satellites sent out in space. All of that is humanist invention and part of a grand illusion. How would you measure success then? I wouldn’t. It’s one of the most misleading terms. It’s the first word we should get rid of from education. It prevents creative, experimental living and thinking. What are we left with then? We are left with the entire evolutionary potential which is not bound to success. What about adaptation, natural selection, and all that? Are those not in some ways connected to the idea of success? Clever ideas, but cannot be applied to the observing species. It results in what is called self-referentiality. And you

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know as well as I do that self-referentiality leads to absurdity, to unfounded conclusions. And yet you have often talked in terms of evolution and evolutionary biology. In speaking of evolution I am referring to evolutionary potential in the individual and not to extrinsic succession. I am not concerned with conventional evolutionary biology, species adaptation, and suchlike. I speak about the possibility of mutation here and now and the release of powers trapped in the organism. Conventional biology talks of structures and not of the elan vital or the life essence. In other words, you are using the terms differently as per your liking. And deliberately, because biology does not dare speak about life. It is a mystery beyond science. So in order to remain at the cutting edge we have to invent what I have called bio-geography—a geospatiality of the bios. Is this speculative? It is experimental. How is that the case? Please explain. It would not make sense to be merely speculative. We are talking about a space called education which is a practical field. Let us carry out a small experiment. What do you see out there? A tree. No, you don’t see a tree! Try again. What do you actually see? Well, I see branches and part of the trunk. Try once more. What are you actually seeing? Patches of brown, black, and green. Ah, that’s much better! That’s what you actually see. But the mind is habituated to calling it a tree. The tree is a concept, an idea. It is a summation of sensory inputs, an aggregate. It is a useful way of speaking, is it not? If you had to spell out each attribute of the tree every time, then we’ll never get to the tree. And likewise with everything else.

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The signs are important, as are the ideas and concepts. What is equally important is to be aware of how we arrive at them. How does that help? For the sake of experiment avoid using the idea and see what happens. There are sensations that are seeking to find expression, a termination of sorts. Disaggregating the idea you become aware of little wavelets in your consciousness. That is the wordless reality. But that is fairly trivial. We are not done yet. Please be patient. Now what you did to the “tree,” do that to yourself. Disaggregate. You are a compound. Uncompound yourself. How do I do that? Start with your name, your physique, your ideas, and go very close to them in your mind till the large pieces go out of focus. What can you see? Nothing … No, wait, not nothing, I see colors and … random feelings and sensations. Disaggregation produces the terrain of the bios, the stuff of the mosaic, or the pieces of the collage. How does this experiment help? This is actually not an experiment. This is what is going on all the time in what we call consciousness. Cognitive processes are well known. They may be well known from the outside, but not understood phenomenologically. They are recognized as knowledge but not engaged with at the lived level. One might even have written books about cognition but at the symbolic level without having delved into it at the experiential level. What is the advantage of the experiential? When you become aware of the magical processes by which you are put together, you are also closer to the raw materials out of which you are being compounded in ­consciousness. You are closer to the creative font. You are riding the thing itself that expands and contracts in consciousness. Not the word, but the thing itself.

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Interlocutor: What is this thing? Author: I wish I knew. You can call it energy, dynamic wave, it does not matter. Something raw and unformed that you can sense throughout the organism once you have sufficiently sensitized yourself. Interlocutor: In a sense, we are again becoming, rather than living as fixed entities. Do I understand you correctly? Author: The most dangerous thing is the lack of dynamism or movement. We have to come to the point of emergence. We must remain close to the evolutionary impulse. Interlocutor: And that is key to posthumanist education I suppose? Author: It does not matter what we call it, posthumanism, prehumanism, or something else. What matters is this phenomenological experience that is more real than reality itself. Interlocutor: But what is to be done at the pedagogic level so that these are not mere words? Author: We have to disaggregate, promote as many activities as possible that delay or slow down aggregation. Interlocutor: From what you have said earlier, that means increase sensory activities and postpone ideas? Author: Ideas are aggregates, finished products. When we pester children with ideas, we block their inner flow. Pedagogically, we have to go to the source of ideas, nothing more, nothing less. Interlocutor: And the source of ideas are the perceptive gateways and the instruments of knowledge rather than knowledge itself? Author: It is a kind of agriculture: to plow the land well, to irrigate it correctly, to drain it of excess, to mix the right minerals, and so on. Once the land is well prepared, anything can grow in it. The preparation is the pedagogy. Interlocutor: Increase the fertility of the mind! And this cannot be done with ideas but with the primary resources that go into the formation of ideas in the first place. Author: Humanism is an idea. A very big one apparently. And yet when you search your consciousness you will not find it anywhere. What you will find instead is pain, elation, fear, anxiety, love, hate, attraction, repulsion, desperation, indolence, insight, devotion, contrition, and so on. All of this and more have nothing to do with humanism. They

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predate humanism by a billion years. They also exceed humanism by a million miles. Interlocutor: I see this quite clearly, but why do you oppose humanism? Author: There is no question of opposing humanism. It is a bit like opposing a ghost. I simply point out the nature and date of its fabrication. I observe the ingredients of its manufacture. I realize the ideational artifact is not something ontological. I see it as a historical trap. I attempt to release myself from this snare and move beyond. I activate the ingredients lying dormant in me in order to recuperate the dynamics of the organism. Unfortunately, I have to give it all a name, and so I call it posthumanism for want of a better term. That is all. Interlocutor: And you propose that getting beyond humanism is one way to face global crises adequately? Author: Global crises are not independent of humanism. The basic crisis is in humanism. In fact, humanism is the crisis from which all else proceed. Interlocutor: How do you maintain that not polemically but pedagogically? Author: There is a project, and that project is organismic becoming and intensifying beyond the arbitrary goals set by society. The pedagogic angle is covered the instant you recognize the importance of the project, and alongside, the arbitrariness and fragmentation of the goals of civilized society. Can we remain out of it? No. But we can begin to question the humanistic assumptions very deeply, whether of the republican, liberal, totalitarian, or any other kind. Both politics of the Left and the Right are underwritten by humanistic assumptions. Interlocutor: What are these assumptions? Author: The mind-driven, empirically configured, and symbolically expressed reality is the only true reality. That is the central assumption. Everything else follows from that. Interlocutor: What alternative do we have? Author: From a Kantian perspective, none. But Kant lived in his head and led an almost disembodied life. For Kant reality was a given and so was consciousness. The question was how consciousness figured out what was already a given

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through the categories, rules, and limits of perception. Thus, consciousness was cognitive activity. Kant did not have the benefit of anthropological insights that might have shown different kinds of consciousness and thrown a seed of doubt perhaps? But we are still proceeding on those Kantian assumptions. While we can forgive Kant for not being acquainted with anthropology, we cannot forgive ourselves for the same. We must be fully cognizant of the fact that consciousness is not mere cognitive activity. It is much more than that. We have referred to it here as the living unconscious. Here there is not the experience of a fixed consciousness, but an emergent one. The reason why we generally do not see it that way is because we are controlled by aggregates and focused on objects. We rarely talk about consciousness, except in a cognitive manner. Kant tried his best to make sense of how an object came to be in consciousness. And in the process he gave a rather thin description of consciousness, and we have been stuck with it ever since. Consciousness is actually vast and rich, and not as predictable as Kant made it out to be. Then why don’t we feel that way. Some do. The great composers, artists of various kinds, and other folk including great scientific minds have often alluded to it. But we have dismissed it as freak or genius or something else. So what you are suggesting is that consciousness should make consciousness its object of study? Not in an abstract, ideational manner, through formulas and theories, but rather in an observational way. We must have the humility to do that for ourselves, and not hide behind knowledge. We have to admit the unknown as the unknowable. Knowledge gives status and power, to repeat a homily. And it gets us stuck in the rut wherein we cannot conceive of anything else but what the socially powerful tell us. We call them experts. I call them the path to ruination.

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Interlocutor: That is too harsh. Author: And deliberately so. They do not know themselves, and yet they deign to speak of others. Interlocutor: We cannot do without them. Author: Contexts, contexts … There are domains where the engagement is with specific externalities where expertise is valuable. But when we come closer to ourselves, it is best to stay away from the expert and strike out on our own. We must regain the belief in ourselves before we can do that. Crises cannot be resolved by the expert, but can only be compounded. Let us be, I say. Interlocutor: Can we strike a balance? Author: Balance between what and what? Interlocutor: Between outer knowledge and inner clarity, perhaps? Or between what you call the logical and the phenomenological? Author: It is too facile to talk of balance. We say it to strike a compromise, feel comfortable, and forget about the problem. The balance, if there is any, will come of itself when there is an awakening of the phenomenological. Interlocutor: Let us return to the pedagogical question. You have said many things throughout the book that provides hints to a vision. How can we link all that you have said to a pedagogical reform, if you will? Author: For me, education neither begins nor ends in the classroom. It is a phenomenological continuum that forms the practice. So, it is not reform, but a form of revolution is what we need here. We need first to acknowledge the phenomenological, something that education has refused to do, focused as it is on the logical. Interlocutor: Does your critique of techne come from this intensive and exclusive focus on the logical side of things? Author: There is nothing wrong with techne as such. If there was no techne we would not be having this conversation, nor would this book get written. The problem is with slavery, the enslavement to each technological marvel. There is a scientific arrogance and halo around technology that exactly resembles tribal fetishism.

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Interlocutor: I need one more clarification before we go back to education. Is it not natural for humans to be anthropomorphic? Author: Humanism is not the same thing as anthropomorphism. We cannot but be anthropomorphic, since our biology has determined us in a way. We see, hear, and feel within a certain range, and not outside of it. And if anthropomorphism means measuring the world according to our own measure, it can hardly be otherwise. But humanism is a different thing. It is the idea that anthropic measure is the most supreme and ideal measure. Interlocutor: And what is the problem with that assumption, if I may? Author: The problem is that it is simply not true! We cannot be the supreme measure simply because we do not know where we come from and into what we disappear. We are the expressed of something, like a meteorite in the night sky. Briefly lit up and then gone. The lit-up state cannot know its source, nor its denouement. Interlocutor: And this cosmic perspective destroys the arrogance of humanism and empiricism, if I understand you correctly. But that leaves me with an additional question. What alternative assumption can we make, and what other measure can we adopt than those presently dominant? We seem to have done pretty well up to this point. Author: Till something like the pandemic hits us. Interlocutor: And that negates all the progress? Author: It puts the whole thing in perspective. For the millions who died, progress meant nothing. It didn’t, couldn’t, save them. Interlocutor: But what about those who made it … survival of the fittest, no? Author: Survival toward what? Toward a different crisis? Interlocutor: I cannot accept that. For many of us who survived, at least up to now, we went through a great learning experience. Our world was turned upside down, and we had to make new adjustments, sometimes even embraced new values. Author: Reacting to crisis externally is symptomatic response. I wouldn’t call that learning. Interlocutor: What would constitute learning then?

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Learning is an ugly word anyway. I would like to avoid using it as far as possible. I prefer awakening. Learning is a mechanical concept. A computer can be made to learn heuristically, but cannot awaken. We awaken to things. You have changed the terrain suddenly. Now I have to get used to “awakening.” The purpose of education is not the gathering of knowledge or reacting to it, which any computer can do, but a phenomenological awakening to our being-in-the-world. With the change in expression, it is a little easier to understand your position. But can you clarify “awakening” for the reader? To be awake fully is to be fully sensitive to what is. It cannot be done through the mind alone. The body cannot be left behind in another zone. Therefore, we have to go easy on representational knowledge, on ideas. We have to grasp things intuitively, before we can go on. And intuition means the involvement of the sensorium in a non-­ empirical manner. I have lost you there. Normally, a synthesis of sensory inputs creates a cognitive moment—a representation of reality. Intuition works differently. It requires a rejection, a negation, or a recoil from the empirical. This wakeful rejection expands the inner spatiality. Does it give you an alternate understanding of things? It provides resonance, rhythm, not understanding. We sense the rhythm of things. To understand is to reduce things to your measure and representation. To resonate is to be in the same frequency with other things of the world. That is what compassion really means. To be compassionate means to be in the same frequency with other things. Can we do away with understanding then? Is that even thinkable? We are not doing away with anything. This mutually exclusive way of thinking is what needs to be discarded. We need this and that, and not this or that kind of approach.

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Interlocutor: I can see that you are resisting any easy formulation of a posthumanist educational vision, because that would be reductionist. Would that be accurate? Author: Enough has been said, the rest must come out of practice. There is no blueprint. Instead, there are indications, allusions, intimations, and suggestions. Infinite amounts of data make the organism’s responses foggy. We have to learn to resist data and turn instead to practice. Interlocutor: You have said many troubling things about the current crisis and the surrounding medical discourse. Some would take it to mean that you are rejecting modern medicine. Could you respond to that as an educator? Author: There is no question of rejecting modern medicine. What we are saying is that it is not sufficient. People have to be taught to take responsibility for their own health and not leave it to the experts. And that requires adequate discipline, a word that is frowned upon today because it is misunderstood. We have learnt to oppose discipline to freedom. But discipline is not regimentation, and a truly disciplined organism is also free. Interlocutor: How is that? Author: To be disciplined means to be free of a priori mental images and ideas about things. That is the real meaning of discipline, and then you are free to take appropriate action. It also means you are free of fear and unnecessary anxiety, and hence the psychic energies are conserved. Interlocutor: I can get a glimpse of that in the case of, say, health. But I cannot see that in the case of general crises such as environmental damage. Author: Discipline works hand-in-hand with conservation. The more disciplined you are, the less you take out of the environment. Discipline is not suppression or control, but the urge to make the most of whatever one has. To make the little yield plenty. Discipline is the production of plenitude without harming anything. Ultimately, the source of the problem is the same, and so is the solution. Interlocutor: You are saying that if we understand the nature of a particular crisis, that leads to a general way of responding to other crises. Is that it?

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Crises will always come and go, and each one will be different from the previous one. We have to be outwardly alert and inwardly conserved. This cannot be achieved through greater institutionalization. Posthumanism leads to a fundamental amendment in thought and therefore a new direction in practice. Interlocutor: Guy Debord had written somewhere that truth is nothing but maneuvered reality. Can this fundamental amendment in thought you are proposing go beyond maneuvered reality? Author: The basic impulse in any set of organized or institutionalized truths such as the doctrines of humanism work toward a maneuvered or manufactured reality. And if you are born within it, or stayed long enough within this ambit, you are bound to lose touch with the emergent flow of the actual. Your sensibilities are going to be conditioned by the organized truths around you. Interlocutor: But you are not rejecting contemporary deployments and apparatuses out of hand? Author: It is ridiculous to sit within the contemporary and reject it. It cannot be done even if one were to attempt it. The effort here is to understand the darkness of the contemporary and offer a complimentary viewpoint and action. Interlocutor: And what makes you think this will succeed? Author: There are two paths. One, we can see, leads to a blind alley of dependencies and destitution. The other seems more open but much more steep and rigorous. Let us see where this other path leads.

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A Abstraction, 21, 57 Activity, 8, 15, 16, 36, 41, 46, 49, 56, 57, 66, 67, 69, 70, 84, 88, 95, 105, 113, 137, 140, 141, 143, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171, 180, 182 ADHD, 55 Aesthetic, 7, 34, 36, 102, 112 Affectations, 3, 147 Affective centers, 140, 144, 150 Aletheia, 15, 126 Amnesia, 72 Analytical, 3 Antagonism, 114 Anterior, 7, 9, 23, 48, 88, 102, 111, 112, 170 Anthropological, 15, 25, 151, 182 Antibodies, 60n7, 63, 64 Anxiety, 6, 8, 44, 65, 69, 98, 180, 186

Apparatchik, 5 Apparatus, 4, 14, 18, 19, 36, 72, 77, 120, 187 Apriori, 43, 186 Archaeology, 25 Arendt, Hannah, 93 Assemblages, 1, 40, 57 Assumptions, 2–4, 7, 27–29, 39–41, 48, 50, 61, 64, 65, 90, 111, 112, 115, 124, 135, 141, 146, 155, 157, 161, 181, 182, 184 Automatism, 117, 119, 121, 125, 134, 135 B Bateson, Gregory, 27 Become, 20, 21 Becoming, 131

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Roy, Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99439-6

189

190 

INDEX

Being, 2, 6–8, 10–15, 18–20, 22–25, 27–29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41, 45–51, 54, 57–61, 64–66, 69, 71, 73, 77, 78, 81, 82, 86, 89, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 111–116, 118–120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 131–135, 138–141, 143–145, 148–150, 153, 156–158, 164–167, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 103 Bio-geography, vii, 2, 122, 131–153, 178 Biomass, 162 Braidotti, Rosi, 31, 37–38, 41, 42 Breakthrough, 78, 125, 133, 153 Breathing, 57, 102, 103, 158, 176 Bug, vii, 5, 46, 47, 49, 59, 61, 61n8, 63, 79, 82, 102, 104, 105, 157, 171, 176 Bureaucratized, 6 C Carnal, 114 Cartography, 31, 33–34, 37 Case study, 4, 46, 58, 61, 78, 79, 96 Catastrophe, 3, 5, 93 Categories, 12, 25, 29, 36, 39, 40, 56, 75, 131, 155, 182 Certainty, 19, 63, 77, 81, 86, 90–92, 124, 125, 128 Chaos, 3, 114 Chimera virus, 46, 81–105, 174 Christian theology, 23 Civilizational, 1, 3, 38, 45, 50, 76, 110, 132, 133, 157–160, 162–167 Clinical practice, 55 Clock time, 100 Clueless, 5, 84 Codification, 12, 57

Cognitive, 20, 36, 41, 45, 55, 132, 179, 182, 185 Collation, 12 Communication, 18, 27–30, 32, 35, 37 Co-morbidities, 65, 71, 73 Co-morbid pool, 74 Compartmentalize, 127, 128 Compassionate, 151, 152, 185 Complacency, 6, 20, 50, 59, 72, 132, 147, 158, 159 Complexity, 27, 28, 34, 38, 39 Composite, vii, 1, 20, 21, 29, 34–36, 38–40, 45, 46, 49, 53–55, 60n7, 65, 78, 79, 146, 149, 150, 157 Concept, 22, 25, 29, 30, 32, 40, 112, 161, 178, 179, 185 Consciousness, 3, 23, 25, 29, 44, 46, 49, 50, 65, 94n11, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 108n1, 110, 111, 114, 117–122, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134–139, 141, 143, 149–153, 165–168, 176, 177, 179–182 Constitutive, 4, 35, 39, 54, 107, 167 Construct, 2, 4, 18, 26, 32, 46, 89, 109, 129, 142, 143, 150 Contemporaneity, 4 Contraction, 22, 40, 135 Contradiction, 5, 6n1, 20, 21, 38, 63, 69, 169 Control, v, 4–9, 12, 15, 26, 45, 59, 60n7, 70, 75n22, 97, 103, 109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 134, 138, 139, 151, 169, 186 Control obsession, 4, 54 Coopted, 5 Coronavirus, 5n1, 59–60n7, 61n8, 62, 63, 66, 76, 77, 82, 85, 86–87n4, 87, 90, 93, 94, 97, 146, 174 Corporeal, 46, 47, 105, 122, 133, 134

 INDEX 

Corpus sensorium, 114, 120, 144, 149, 167 Correct, 7, 10, 11, 61n8, 147, 156, 165 Correspondence, 6, 27, 59, 152 Covid-19, 5–6n1, 45, 58, 59–60n7, 62–64, 66, 76, 77, 82, 85, 86n4 Crisis, vi, 2, 3, 5, 7, 45–47, 50, 53–80, 82, 84, 88, 91, 102, 105, 107, 134, 147, 157–159, 162, 166, 168, 169, 174–176, 181, 184, 186 Critical, v, 4, 10, 11, 13, 41, 42, 47, 60n7, 69, 70, 101, 104, 107, 108, 114, 119, 123, 125, 133, 159 Cultural, 4, 7, 12, 23, 26, 28, 33, 36, 73, 84, 101, 144, 168, 169 Culture, 7, 12, 60, 76, 82, 87n4, 89, 90, 94, 142, 146, 147, 158, 159, 168, 169 Curvature, 161 Cytokine storm, 5–6n1, 62, 63 D Darkness, vi, 23, 34, 187 Deconstruction, 7 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 146 Delusions, 8, 18, 19, 31, 45, 107, 145, 163 Dependencies, 2, 64, 76, 77, 187 Destining, 16–19, 22, 129n18, 146 Diagnosis, 5n1, 62, 72 Difference, 29, 30 Disadjustment, 100, 145 Disclosure, 7 Discontinuity, 50, 53, 157 Discourse, v–vii, 3, 8–10, 26, 31, 46, 53, 55, 56, 77–79, 127, 132, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 165, 169, 186

191

Discursive, 7, 54, 55, 125, 133, 152 Disease, 5n1, 7, 38, 50, 53, 55–59, 60n7, 62, 63, 67–73, 75, 76, 78, 85, 97, 121, 156, 158, 164 Disenchanted, 132 Disjunction, 47, 105 Dividends, 39, 60, 116, 137 Divinities, 25 Doctrine, 23, 25, 42, 89, 91, 113, 146, 187 Domesticated, 12, 40, 48 Dominant, 6, 18, 29, 39, 40, 116, 168, 184 Dream, 111, 112, 133 Drug combinations, 4 Dynamic, 4, 35, 44, 49, 53, 79, 121, 134–138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 149, 151–153, 163–166, 168–170, 175, 176, 180, 181 Dynamic equilibrium, 53, 162 Dynamism, 2, 3, 140, 144, 150, 175, 180 E Ecological, 2, 4, 20, 26, 40, 75, 76, 153 Education, 2–4, 20–22, 29, 33, 36, 39, 40, 48–51, 76, 78, 96, 102, 118, 122, 124, 125, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 148, 157, 163, 164, 170, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183–185 Educational, 3, 7, 10, 11, 37–40, 46, 155, 165, 186 Einstein, 144n10, 160 Élan vital, 40, 48, 100, 102, 111, 115, 119, 129, 132, 153, 178 Emergence, 24, 29, 30, 43, 54, 56, 84, 85, 91, 92, 94, 96, 102, 148–150, 180 Empiricism, 3, 29, 32, 40, 54, 184

192 

INDEX

Energy, 13–15, 17, 20, 28, 30, 34–36, 49, 79, 82, 102, 112, 113, 115, 120, 134–140, 144, 144n10, 145, 148–150, 156, 157, 159, 166–168, 170, 171, 180, 186 Enframing, 10, 15–18, 24, 43, 58, 64, 76, 78, 141, 169 Enlightenment, vi, 31, 38, 42 Entanglements, 44, 100, 156 Environment, 4, 27, 28, 34, 36, 71, 75, 76, 151, 159, 165, 186 Epidemic, 4, 45, 50, 58, 59, 66–73, 75, 77, 84, 93, 96, 97, 158 Epidemiological, 5 Epistemological, 4, 39 Eros, 88, 100, 109, 137 Essence, 9, 10, 15–19, 22–25, 29, 57, 60, 76, 102, 125–127, 126n15, 129n18, 136, 146–148, 178 Essential, 3, 8, 23, 50, 57, 59, 64, 66, 67, 75, 110, 122, 126n15, 128, 146, 157, 160 Evolutionary, 7, 26, 35, 37, 41, 45, 49, 50, 75, 79, 92, 116–120, 133, 142, 144, 148–150, 152, 153, 156–159, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 173, 176, 178, 180 Evolutionary potential, 51, 121, 132, 142, 149, 150, 159, 177, 178 Existential, vii, 2, 7, 8, 11, 31, 39–41, 45, 72, 92, 98, 103, 105, 112, 115, 134, 135, 148, 152, 153, 155, 160, 169, 171 Existential powers, vi, 46, 79, 133 Expansion, vi, 22, 40, 54, 57, 150–153, 167 Experience, 9, 11, 12, 17, 18, 29, 39, 41, 42, 49, 59, 100, 103, 112, 122, 124, 125, 126n15, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 149, 161, 164, 170, 180, 182, 184

Experimental, 19, 20, 48, 51, 177, 178 Expert, v–vii, 4–6, 46, 47, 50, 60n7, 61, 61n8, 63, 64, 73, 78, 79, 83–85, 88, 90–93, 93n11, 98, 100, 101, 105, 132, 147, 148, 158, 169, 182, 183, 186 Expertise, v, 46, 64, 79, 183 Expression, 22, 140, 142, 144–146, 148, 170, 179, 185 Externality, 148, 151, 183 F Fear, vii, 6, 45, 75, 98, 103, 135, 150, 167, 180, 186 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 136 Forces, 8, 30, 32, 36, 44, 47, 49, 79, 84, 95, 98–102, 105, 115–118, 121–124, 134, 137, 140, 151, 156, 157, 160, 163–166, 168, 176 Foucault, Michel, v, 25, 54, 57 Freedom, 17, 19, 20, 37, 101, 103, 146, 150, 168, 171, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 48, 88, 108–111, 108n1, 113, 115, 116 Furin cleavage, 87n4, 95, 96, 174 G Gain of Function/gain-of-function, 86n4, 93, 97 General relativity, 161 Geography, 46, 99, 103, 105 Geo-ontological, 2, 46, 47, 99, 100, 102–105 Germ theory, 69 Gravity, 3, 149, 160–162 Greeks, 11, 12, 23, 24, 56, 125, 126, 126n15

 INDEX 

H Habit, 12, 20, 32, 39, 54, 73, 84, 100–103, 122, 125, 127, 150, 159 Heal, 72 Health, 19, 46, 50, 55, 64, 67, 68, 70–79, 74n22, 157, 186 Hegemonic, 8, 76, 85, 166, 169 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 126n15, 128n18, 146, 152 Herd immunity, 68, 69, 71 Heretic, 85, 98, 99 Hermeneutic, 9, 30, 33 Heterogeneous, 40, 41 Historiography, 16, 128–129n18 History, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 45, 46, 71, 88, 94n11, 98–105, 126, 126n15, 128–129n18, 134, 144, 145, 159 Homecoming, 133, 148–150 Homeostasis, 2, 162, 170 Homogeneity, 44 Horizon, 5 Hubris, 19, 46, 75, 112, 115 Human, 1, 4, 7–9, 12–21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 32, 37–40, 42–45, 53–55, 60, 65, 73, 75, 78, 83, 86, 86–87n4, 89–96, 99, 108, 108n1, 109, 111, 113–117, 119, 120, 124–126, 128n18, 129, 149, 151, 153, 155–159, 162, 166–168, 184 Humanism, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19–21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 54, 57, 60, 64, 75–78, 82, 85, 98, 99, 107, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 131–135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149–153, 155–159, 162, 163, 167, 171, 180, 181, 184, 187

193

Humanistic, v, 3, 4, 7, 15, 19, 24, 38, 40, 45, 46, 53, 58, 76, 79, 123, 132, 133, 156, 181 Hysteria, 56, 69 I Iatrogenesis, 73 Idea, 2, 4, 17, 19, 28–31, 33, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 75, 81, 84, 85, 86n4, 90, 91, 94n11, 107, 109, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119–122, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140–146, 150, 153, 160–165, 167–169, 173, 175–180, 184–186 Identity, 39, 102, 105, 141, 171 Ideological, 5, 81 Illich, Ivan, 69, 72, 73, 74–75n22 Illumination, 131, 132 Illusion, 5, 17, 18, 51, 70, 73–76, 81, 127, 137, 150, 156, 162, 168, 177 Image, 4, 18, 20, 24, 28, 30, 33, 38, 41–43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 100, 101, 105, 107, 112, 118, 120, 122, 134, 138, 144, 146, 149, 150, 157–159, 165, 168, 171, 186 Imagination, 5, 7, 37, 55, 72, 82, 92, 96, 139 Immanent, 26, 30, 31, 33, 37, 39, 79, 110, 153, 155 Immune system, 5n1, 61n8, 62, 63 Immunological response, 59, 73 Impermanence, 50, 82, 157 Impoverishment, 7 Impulse, 12, 19, 31, 39, 84, 109, 111–114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 133–135, 142, 152, 153, 164, 166, 167, 170, 180, 187 Indeterminate, 1, 13 Inertial frame, 160

194 

INDEX

Infections, 5n1, 59n7, 62, 67–72, 76–78, 94, 97, 102 Insights, 20, 30, 35, 132, 136, 153, 160, 180, 182 Institutionalized, vi, 1, 2, 6, 21, 46, 50, 59, 79, 92, 118, 145, 158, 159, 176, 187 Instrumental, 10, 11, 15, 18, 81 Instrumental relations, 14 Intellectual, 31, 33, 69, 88, 110, 115, 121, 133, 144n10, 146, 147, 150, 153, 155 Intelligence, 47, 71, 98, 105, 170 Interpretation, 12, 23, 129n18, 133, 137 Introjection, 8, 33, 41, 45, 54, 171 Intuition, 7, 101, 171, 185 Investigations, 4, 23, 36, 86n4, 88, 92 K Kantian, 28, 131, 132, 181, 182 Knowing, 21, 25, 29, 39, 42, 43, 49, 89, 121, 122, 131, 132, 134, 138, 141, 167, 170 Knowledge, 13, 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 39–43, 48, 49, 55, 59, 64, 76, 82, 84, 87, 96, 102, 118, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129, 134–138, 148, 151, 152, 160, 165–168, 170, 171, 179, 180, 182, 183 L Language, 6–8, 16, 21, 26, 31, 34, 37, 54–57, 64, 94, 95, 101, 114, 115, 122, 123, 125–127, 128–129n18, 129, 153, 157 Lawrence, D. H., 2, 108, 108n1, 111, 158, 163 Legacy, 4, 131 Libido, 114, 115

Linguistic, 6, 7, 46, 57, 58, 78, 122, 125, 127, 129, 129n18 Living ferment, 110, 116, 129 Living unconscious, 2, 50, 116, 118, 120, 121, 142, 143, 144n10, 145, 152, 166 Lockdown, 4, 61n8, 66–68 Logical, 11, 42, 44, 56, 81, 102 Love, 19, 109, 141, 142, 166 Luminous consciousness, 25 M Machinic, 109, 116 Madness, 91, 118, 119 Man, 10, 11, 14, 16–18, 20, 21, 23–25, 38, 41, 57, 75, 94n11, 99, 109, 113, 121, 128–129n18, 134, 137, 139, 146, 156, 164, 167 Manifestation, 9, 20, 84, 110, 128n18 Materialistic, 109 Mechanism, 5n1, 62, 108–110, 112, 143 Media, 5, 24, 64, 85, 91, 97 Medical gaze, 54, 56 Medical lexicon, 55 Memories, 23, 98, 99, 102, 105, 107, 171 Mental, 12, 24, 41, 46, 48, 55, 67, 71, 101, 105, 108–112, 108n1, 114, 116, 118–120, 122, 132–136, 140, 141, 145, 149, 150, 152, 155, 163, 165, 166, 170 Mental consciousness, 3, 23, 46, 49, 103, 105, 108n1, 117–119, 132, 134–137, 143, 149 Mephistophelian, 8 Metaphor, 6, 65, 91 Metaphorical, 49, 138 Metaphysical, 15, 41, 81 Metaphysics, 22, 23

 INDEX 

Military, 86 Mirage, 8 Modernity, 4, 10, 69 Moral, 7, 20, 45, 69, 75, 124, 132, 142, 164, 166 Morality, 26, 31, 45, 140–142 Motivational structure, 48, 108, 109 Mutation, 26, 46, 47, 56, 104, 105, 143, 153 Mystification, 7, 44, 54 Mythology, 49, 63, 70, 138 N Narcissistic, 7, 8, 45 Narrative, 1, 4, 7, 16, 19, 28, 36, 37, 45, 69–71, 76, 77, 82, 86n4, 99, 107, 115, 125, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159, 162 Nature, vi, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 32, 34, 35, 38–41, 45, 53, 54, 57–59, 65, 69, 73, 78, 81, 84, 86–88, 94n11, 101, 103, 108n1, 110, 123, 124, 127, 128, 128–129n18, 134, 136, 137, 144, 150, 151, 153, 159, 160, 164–166, 168, 171 Navigation, 8 Nervous energy, 148, 167 Neurosis, 117 Neurotic, 56 Newton, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 9, 19, 30, 38, 45, 48, 115, 123, 124, 140, 146, 166 Nihilism, 22, 23 Nomadic, 156 Novices, 6 O Objectivized, 102, 151, 171 Observation, 23, 25, 33, 37, 58, 90, 101, 123, 129n18, 133, 152

195

Oedipalized, 159, 166 Ontological, vii, 7, 20, 22, 25, 30, 36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 53, 54, 65, 75, 90, 102, 148, 152, 153, 156, 162, 171 Ontology, 31, 40, 65, 102 Onto-theology, 152 Organic, 17, 34, 35, 49, 77, 102, 113, 115, 121, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 170 Organism, vii, 1, 6, 34, 35, 48, 50, 60, 79, 81, 96, 102, 103, 110, 111, 116–118, 120, 132, 133, 135, 149, 156, 157, 159, 162, 165, 166, 171 Organismic, 46, 47, 79, 104, 105, 110, 116, 117, 129, 131–133, 157, 170 Origins, 1, 2, 5, 12, 29, 54, 83, 85, 86n4, 96, 110, 112, 114, 115, 125, 126, 126n15, 135 P Pandemic, v, 2, 3, 46, 50, 61, 61n8, 66, 76, 79, 83, 84, 87, 90, 92, 95–98, 102, 147, 157, 169 Paradigm, 2, 39–41, 50, 73, 76, 78, 122, 145, 157–159, 161 Passion, 21, 109, 151, 164 Passional, 108–110 Pathogen, 90, 91, 96, 97, 168, 169 Pathological, 56, 58 Patina, 7 Pedagogy, 3, 22, 45, 102, 121, 133, 134, 140, 145, 148, 152, 153, 163, 168, 170 Perception, 21, 26, 40, 54, 59, 67, 76, 85, 91, 104, 156, 157, 165, 166 Perilous, 3, 86, 90, 98, 131 Phantasy, 25 Phenomenological, 8, 30, 41, 81, 90, 99, 102–104, 152, 153, 170, 171

196 

INDEX

Phenomenon, 6n1, 7, 13, 25, 58, 63, 84, 85, 119, 127, 151 Philosophical, vii, 7, 8, 11, 12, 23, 42, 131, 151, 156 Picture, vi, 3, 6, 9, 11, 21, 23, 24, 28, 31, 33, 37, 38, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 64, 78, 79, 110, 112, 131, 132, 137, 150, 157, 159, 160, 162 Planetary, 3, 7, 8, 17, 77, 82, 134, 153, 169 Planetary life, 2, 60, 92, 170 Poiesis, 11, 15, 100 Polarity, 92, 117, 120, 142, 143, 150 Political faintheartedness, 45 Politico-medical, 5, 65 Posthuman, 2, 26, 30–32, 40, 43, 44, 120, 148, 150, 153, 155, 159, 171 Posthumanism, 8, 25, 26, 29–32, 37–42, 44, 83, 103, 105, 115, 133, 134, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 151–153, 155, 157, 159, 162, 167–170 Potentiality, 75, 104, 163 Pre-linguistic, 7, 56, 123 Pre-rational, 102, 116 Presence, 10–12, 15, 39, 63, 64, 74n22, 87n4, 126–128, 126n15, 147, 161, 165 Presencing, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 126, 127, 128n18 Prevention paradox, 66 Primal, 18, 19, 110, 153, 156, 166, 167, 171 Primitive function, 49, 153, 155–171, 173, 176 Progress, 6, 8, 27, 37, 38, 42, 44, 48, 70, 71, 73, 77, 120, 123–125, 153, 160, 184 Projection, 1, 5, 8, 22, 23, 25, 33, 41, 45, 54, 65, 133, 145 Protein, v, 46, 79, 89, 90, 93–95

Psyche, 7, 108n1, 109, 111, 117–119, 128, 141, 143, 152, 153, 156, 165 Psychoanalysis, 2, 47, 54 Psychologically, 1, 3, 71, 103, 118, 138, 140, 163 Psychology, 136 Psycho-pathology, 47, 107 Public, vi, 5, 64, 66–68, 72, 82, 83, 85, 86n4, 87–89, 92, 94, 95, 104, 120, 155 R Randomization, 44, 45 Rationale, 8, 92, 95, 108 Rationalism, 42, 76, 98, 122 Reality, vi, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14–16, 18, 19, 21–23, 33, 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 69, 101, 105, 107, 109–111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122–125, 127, 128, 133, 136, 144–147, 150, 152, 156, 157, 162, 165, 166, 171, 175, 179–181, 185, 187 Realization, 1, 18, 51, 108n1, 133, 136, 152, 153, 159, 177 Reflexive, 3, 4, 8, 12, 23, 25, 35, 41, 45, 53–55, 99, 107, 111–113, 115, 125, 141, 150, 155, 156, 168 Regulating, 13 Relational, 102 Relations, 3–7, 9–12, 14, 16, 20, 22, 24–26, 30, 34, 46, 51, 55, 57, 66, 74n22, 78, 96, 102, 116, 128, 129, 131–133, 151–153, 164, 166, 175, 177 Relaxation, 22 Religious, 15, 41, 70, 113, 114 Representations, 12, 16, 23, 24, 35, 37, 41, 75, 99, 110, 122,

 INDEX 

126n15, 128, 128n18, 135, 136, 141, 147, 149, 165, 185 Repressional, 108, 109 Resources, 3, 13, 14, 40, 60, 77, 80, 102, 107–129, 180 Ressentiment, 38 Retardation, 22, 30, 33, 99 Revealing, 7, 12–18, 55, 69, 108 Revealment, 12, 15 Rhythm, 22, 36, 100, 133, 185 Ricochet, 4 Route map, 4 S Scale, 2, 21, 31, 50, 77, 81, 87n4, 158, 171, 173 Scenario, 5, 18, 73, 76, 82, 85, 88, 163 Schema, 11, 24, 160 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7, 14 Scientific, 5, 5–6n1, 63, 65, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 112, 113, 125, 126, 128, 132, 133, 141, 160, 161, 182, 183 Scientific community, 63 Scientists, 5n1, 24, 62, 63, 75, 82, 85, 86n4, 91, 97, 113, 132, 160, 169 Secular, 94n11, 132, 133 Secure, 13, 77, 126, 135, 146, 147 Self-description, 16, 157 Self-recovery, 34 Self-referential, 3, 27, 28, 75 Sensibilities, 4, 12, 104, 170, 187 Sensorium, 44, 114, 120, 142, 144, 149, 167, 185 Sensory, 11, 40, 55, 57, 103, 140, 141, 178, 180, 185 Sickness, 3, 73, 145 Signified, 6, 136 Signifier, 6, 112, 137, 174 Silence, 22, 82, 97 Smokescreen, 7

197

Social isolation, 4 Sovereign, 7, 19, 21, 29, 39, 53, 78, 155, 162 Sovereignty, 115, 156 Space-time, 160, 161 Spatial, 55, 134 Spatialization, 46, 56, 78 Species, 1–51, 71, 75, 76, 92–94, 98, 99, 119, 144, 155–157, 159, 162, 167, 174, 177, 178 Spectacle, 5 Spectrum, 5 Spinoza, 25, 30, 45, 54 Spiritual, 113, 114, 128n18 Standing-reserve, 14–16, 18, 60 Sublethal illness, 73 Sublimated, 49, 137 Substratum, 112–114 Symbolic, 12, 118, 121, 137, 140, 152, 170, 179 Symbolic activity, 49, 137, 141 Symptoms, 5n1, 55, 58, 62, 66, 73, 76, 78 Systems, 1, 5n1, 16, 26–28, 33, 34, 36, 41–43, 49, 54, 61n8, 62, 63, 68, 72, 73, 76, 78, 81, 137, 142, 149–151, 162, 174, 176 T Techne, 9, 11, 12, 18, 183 Technohumanism, v, 2, 8, 9, 11, 16–18, 45, 60, 64, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87–89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 126, 141, 144–148, 151, 158, 163, 168–170 Technohumanist, 45, 47, 83, 84, 89, 99, 105, 141, 146, 149, 150 Technological, 8–10, 12, 16, 19, 26, 45, 46, 50, 64, 79, 82, 94n11, 125, 146, 158, 159, 168, 183

198 

INDEX

Technology, 8–11, 13–19, 45, 50, 60, 61, 64, 72, 81, 94, 126n15, 146, 158, 163, 169, 183 Teleology, 21, 42 Temporal, 16, 25, 30, 31, 98, 100, 144, 153 Tension, 22, 29, 30, 50, 69, 88, 101, 102, 157, 168 Terrain, 3, 6, 40, 51, 76, 107, 120, 129, 133, 150, 152, 156, 179, 185 Thanatos, 88 Thinking, vi, 3, 7–9, 11, 12, 18, 20–22, 26, 28, 31–33, 35–38, 43, 47, 51, 54, 65, 68, 75, 76, 79, 93, 96, 98, 107, 108, 114, 115, 118, 122, 127, 135, 138, 140, 149, 177, 185 Thought, vi, 2, 4, 7, 8, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30–33, 38, 41–44, 47, 48, 50, 54, 67, 79, 85, 105, 107, 108, 110–117, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 126n15, 135, 140, 149, 150, 157, 159, 164, 187 Threshold, 55, 94, 122, 138 Traditional, 29, 102 Transcend, 7, 140, 155, 156, 158, 166 Transfer, 30, 50, 51, 77, 89, 136, 149, 152, 153, 170, 177 Transformation, 13, 46, 47, 53, 94n11, 105, 143, 145, 168, 171 Transforming, 13, 14 Transient, 13, 81, 82 Trauma, 6n1, 67 True, 4, 7, 10, 11, 19, 21, 31, 48, 53, 54, 65, 71, 74, 74n22, 81, 83, 85, 89, 91, 103, 110, 111, 113, 118, 121–124, 129, 136, 137, 142, 147, 153, 159, 164, 166, 167, 181, 184 Truthfulness, 6 Turbidity, 7 Twentieth century, 4

U Unconcealment, 12–15, 17, 126 Unconscious, 2, 4, 22, 48, 50, 82, 108–110, 108n1, 114, 116–118, 120–122, 138–140, 142, 143, 144n10, 145, 152, 159, 165, 166, 173, 177, 182 Unfoldment, 8 Universals, 21, 26, 37, 41, 51, 77, 128n18, 138, 140, 163, 177 Unmediated, 12, 101 Unthought, 23, 32 V Vaccine, 4, 63, 69, 71, 72 Variants, 4, 41, 46, 105, 111, 139 Vector, 6, 47, 67, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 104, 157, 174 Virologists, 61, 82, 85–87, 89–92, 97 Virus, 4, 5n1, 7, 44, 46, 47, 53, 59n7, 61n8, 62–66, 68, 70, 75, 77, 78, 81–105, 112, 166, 169, 174 Visceral, 4 Visibility, 5, 55 Vortex, 7, 16 W Wade, Nicholas, 83, 84, 97 Waves, v, 44, 77, 98, 112, 135, 153, 159–163, 165, 168, 173, 180 Waypoint, 7 Weber, Max, 4, 98 Will, 116 Will-to-truth, 13, 18 Wolfe, Cary, 25 Worldviews, 26, 41, 58, 100, 152, 170 Wuhan, 59, 84–86, 86n4, 88, 90, 96, 99, 166 Z Zarathustra, 140, 146, 166 Zealot, 85