Sociality

New Directions

Nicholas J. Long, Henrietta L. Moore, Nicholas J. Long, Henrietta L. Moore

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857457905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

The notion of 'sociality' is now widely used within the social sciences and humanities. However, what is meant by the term varies radically, and the contributors here, through compelling and wide ranging essays, identify the strengths and weaknesses of current definitions and their deployment in the social sciences. By developing their own rigorous and innovative theory of human sociality, they re-set the framework of the debate and open up new possibilities for conceptualizing other forms of sociality, such as that of animals or materials. Cases from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe explore the new directions of human sociality, illuminating how and why it is transformed when human beings engage with such major issues as economic downturn, climate change, new regimes of occupational and psychological therapy, technological innovations in robotics and the creation of new online, 'virtual' environments. This book is an invaluable resource, not only for research and teaching, but for anyone interested in the question of what makes us social.

1
Avatars and Robots

The Imaginary Present and the Socialities of the Inorganic

Henrietta L. Moore, University College London

From time to time, particular ideas take hold in the academy and we feel closer to fully comprehending the world we live in and share with others. These ideas are most often a combination of periodizations with their attendant forms of progression, underpinned by organizing concepts which form the basis for models and guide critical thought by acting as quasi-organizing principles for certain pre-theoretical assumptions (Moore 2004). Where once we spoke of dialectics and structures of society and mind, we have now largely eschewed the world of scaffolded representations to embrace the digital, bio-informatic age where all talk is of potentialities, emergent properties, forms of becoming and modes of attachment and affect (e.g., Braidotti 2006; Thrift 2008; Bennett 2010; Connolly 2011). In this important and beguiling moment, questions of immense interest are thrown out as challenges: is agency restricted to humans; can we speak of cellular subjectivities; is social change the product of vital forces largely outside of human control (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002; Latour 2004, 2005; Coole and Frost 2010)?

Two developments seem particularly salient. The first is the way that changing technologies enable new forms of data which are then turned into meaningful information through the application of new metaphors. These metaphors, in their turn, change the character of our objects of enquiry, our approaches to them, and the way we think about them. Once we assign scallops agency (Callon 1986) and claim to be able to hear yeast cells scream (Roosth 2009), it is inevitable that we see new connections, ask alternative questions. However, metaphors do not necessarily characterize the way the world is, but rather how we choose to talk about it. In the eighteenth century we fantasized about men as machines, and in the twenty-first we take a different tack and speak of assorted connections between humans and non-humans with novel propensities. Methodological and theoretical approaches redefine our objects of enquiry. One element in recent developments that illustrates this point well is how the boundaries between the human and the non-human are being breached – some would argue erased – through the extension of agency to non-human animals and to inanimate objects. In anthropology, the larger project of criticizing subject–object dualisms has perhaps been most salient in approaches to material things that argue against privileging language and representation, and seek instead to explore the intelligence of non-human ‘actants’ (e.g., Miller 2005; Henare et al. 2007). The dominant inspiration here is Latour, and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) more generally. The result is a series of interrogations about the category human, and its relation to, and difference from, the non-human:

For the thing we are looking for is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman thing. It offers, rather a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It translates the one into the other. The thing is the nonhuman version of the people, it is the human version of things, twice displaced. What should it be called? Neither object nor subject. An instituted object, quasi-object, quasi-subject, a thing that possesses body and soul indissolubly. (Latour 1996: 23)

More broadly, however, such interrogations reconfigure the relation of humans to the natural world and to other living things, where embodiment involves a generative capacity as opposed to a finished form:

Behaviour can no longer be localized in individuals conceived as preformed homunculi; but has to be treated epigenetically as a function of complex material systems which cut across individuals (assemblages) and which transverse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries (rhizomes). This requires the articulation of a distributed conception of agency. The challenge is to show that nature consists of a field of multiplicities, assemblages of heterogeneous components (human, animal, viral, molecular etc) in which ‘creative evolution’ can be shown to involve blocks of becoming. (Ansell Pearson 1999: 171)

A focus on the agency of human and non-human actors in hybrid networks has in its turn stimulated ideas both about context and environment, and about interrelations and affects. Our worlds are full of encounters – moments of co-presence, affect and contagion – that involve many things that are non-human. The relational connection and movement between things conjoins with ideas about intensity and potentiality. The cornerstone in this approach is matter’s capacity for self-organization: the potentiality of form that works through sets of intensities that come before, but are only realized in specific encounters between the human and the non-human, life and matter. As Massumi would have it: ‘Affect is as good a general term as any for the interface between implicate and explicate order’ (Massumi 2002: 37). The movement of affect is always indeterminate, vital, open to new possibilities, part of a series of potentialities that continually generate differences and divergences in what becomes actual. Affect as a term, and as an analytic concept, has diverse philosophical and disciplinary roots. But perhaps what is most significant about what has been called the ‘affective turn’ is that it wishes to inaugurate not just new theories, but new ontologies (Moore 2011: 170–205). At the present time, fields as apparently disparate as genetics, the biological sciences, astrophysics, neuroscience, narrative analysis, philosophy, media, informatics and cultural theory are all animated by the possibility of a common ontology that would link the social and the natural, the rational and the affective. The models and pre-theoretical commitments of this emerging ontology are grounded in ideas such as becoming, assemblage, relationality, autopoiesis, information and differentiation, its vitalism inhering in cellular capacities for replication.

The resultant impact is not just on our understanding of the category human, but also on the more fundamental issue of life itself. We have been used to thinking of the category human, and the notion of life, as foundational in the sense that they are conceived of as natural kinds. But, as the quest for new understandings of living things and life forms proceeds, we should recall that biology itself is not a natural kind and it has not always existed in its present form. As a ‘grid of knowledge’, it emerged in the eighteenth century (Foucault 1970: 139), and contemporary views of life are now overdetermined by the development of bio and information technologies that extract information and resources from bodies – human/non-human, organic/non-organic – and cast them into new frames. Life no longer has a single form or essence; it is not even necessarily the defining property of ‘living’ things (Helmreich 2011). Biological knowledge, biotechniques and biology ‘itself’ reshape each other. Life is changing as it gets remade, informatics have become constitutive of contemporary understandings of life and matter, and consequently the structure of our knowledge – its models, metaphors, frameworks – come more and more to resemble biological processes or ‘life itself’ (Moore 2011: 174). This has unhinged life from its self-evident manifestations, we are seduced by the realization that we do not know all the forms in which life might exist, and life has inexorably become something that can be abstracted from its forms (Helmreich 2011: 682–683). The result is that human capacities are no longer contained within the human, and life is no longer a feature only of organic things.

It is not surprising that how we think about the human is connected to how we think about life, but framings and classifications are always about politics. Politics, that is, in the sense of human purposes, and this is the second development that seems particularly salient. For example, when Donna Haraway (1991: 149–182) set out her cyborg manifesto, she envisioned a future when the cyborg’s combination of the organic and the machinic would rupture the dichotomy between the human and the non-human, the natural and the artificial, and free the human subject from the imposed categories of biology, gender, and race. A developed version of that vision continues to underpin much recent work in feminist philosophy (e.g., Braidotti 2006; Colebrook 2010). Like Haraway, these theorists focus on an escape from the bounded individual body and/or subject, and on the opportunities provided by sets of new relations to transcend the human, and to build new kinds of networks and/or collectivities for enhanced agency and cooperation across lines of culture, language, race, and gender, as well as across the human, non-human, post-human, and inhuman. The ethical good in the vision of humanity operationalized here resides in the notion of radical relationality. Humans are envisaged as being at one with their world, but need to enter into relations with multiple others. In this project, the ‘minoritarian’, the ‘other-than’, women, gays, ethnic and racialized others, the natural, animal and environmental others – all that has been excluded from the rational, humanist subject – are the site or locale of political transformation (Braidotti 2010: 46–47). The transcendence of social categorizations and sedimented lines of power is one that is given particular imaginative force by the adherence to metaphors drawn directly and indirectly from biology: replication, cellular generativity, vitality, the limitless alterity of life as a form of becoming. This then is a theory of humanity at a particular moment in history, a theory taking form within a certain politics, where the social is reimagined for particular human purposes in the idiom of biological processes. William Connolly sums it up well, when he declares that neuropolitics is all about ‘attachment to the earth and care for a protean diversity of being that is never actualized completely in any particular cultural setting’ (2002: 197). Humanity, like life, is not a natural category, because our ontological categories are tied up with our representations, and regulatory ideals frame our descriptive and analytic languages (Moore 2011).

In a certain sense, and starting from a broad anthropology perspective, there is nothing new in any of this. The idea that humans are not the only things imbued with agency is a commonplace in many other cultures and philosophical systems where unstable connections between the human, the non-human and the inhuman can be equal sources of joy and concern. Anthropology has a large archive of communities of people whose ideas and beliefs extend the capacity for agency to non-human things and inhuman or post-human entities. In the 1940s, Maurice Leenhardt argued that the Canaque of New Caledonia regarded the person as being connected to other persons, both human and non-human, material and non-material (Leenhardt [1947] 1979), while Anne Strauss, for example, also suggested that for the Cheyenne the concept of the person extended beyond human beings to include other non-human persons (Strauss 1982: 124–125). Evidently, humanity has not always been synonymous with persons or agency, and humans are certainly not the only actants or agents shaping human/non-human relations. For example, in many contexts in Africa and Melanesia, artefacts are not just tools, but things that effect transformations through their agency. Constructions such as houses or the more famous Malanggan are regarded as extensions of bodies or persons, made up of parts of humans and animals, evidence (one might even say forms of mediated information) about the ways that bodies and things have affected each other in the world (e.g., Strathern 2001). In Latin America in recent years, new political actors have forced themselves onto the scene; these so-called earth-beings and/or earth-practices embody and enact the respect and the affect between humans and non-humans, including animals, plants and landscapes, that maintain the possibility of a life-world. The ‘things’ (forces of nature, sentient mountains, etc.) that are now being made public in this form of politics are not simply non-humans, but sentient beings whose existence is threatened by the intersections between capital and the state, such as mining (de la Cadena 2010: 341–342). As de la Cadena makes clear, the public emergence of such earth-beings upsets the locus of politics (2010: 343), because having been excluded historically from nation-state institutions, defined, and thus confined, as little more than cultural beliefs, they are now becoming significant political agents within the emergence of a regional indigenous politics that both interacts with and makes claims upon the nation-state (Moore 2012). The decentring of the human subject and the notions of actant and affect in some ways hold no surprises, so why has contemporary anthropology turned to ANT, biology and informatics to re-theorize ideas about materiality, humanity, sociality and life, rather than to its own resources?

There are perhaps two reflections that might be relevant here. It’s easy to comprehend that our accounts of what life or humanity are or could be are necessarily bound up with the stories we want or feel compelled to tell, but in the present moment those narratives have been both amplified and destabilized by the development of new bio and information technologies which provide new means of seeing and imagining, new ways of visualizing and recording the interiors of bodies and other spaces, and subsequently of categorizing and re-categorizing the information we uncover (Latour 2010). In this sense, new reproductive technologies, biology, evolutionary models, informatics have all been good to think with, they have enlarged our imaginations, provided new metaphors, reinvigorated our objects of study. This in itself is seductive, and most probably we find it particularly alluring because ideas about affect, oneness with the natural world, idioms of the shared planet, and the emancipatory pull of theories that privilege affective dispositions over rationalist thinking, are in tune with politics of the moment (Moore 2011: 170–205). The second reflection, however, concerns the appeal of moving definitely away from dominant models of language, signification and representation, where the postmodern transmogrifies into the post-human (Hemmings 2005; Leys 2011). The importance of human engagement with a world of non-humans, both organic and inorganic, cannot be overstated (see below), and key to these engagements is the body, as well as emotions and affects. Certainly, what is attractive about theories of affect is their attention to somatic experiences and forms of communication that are outside or below linguistic registers, their insistence on how bodies stay in touch with other bodies and attuned to the many ‘others’ who people the material worlds humans inhabit and share with others (Moore 2011: 180). But affect in the work of many writers is held to be prior to and external to all social meaning. Massumi defines it as both ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic’ (Massumi 2002: 28), and Barnett describes it as a form of practical attunement to a lived world that is autonomous of propositional intentionality (2008: 188–189). It is the autonomy of affect, its ceaseless escape, that is the guarantee of both its vitality and its changeability (Massumi 2002: 35). Social constructionism and the humanist subject now seem arrogant intellectual formulations/preoccupations, and suddenly we have a problem with anthropos being the centre of our world. The long history in anthropology of the critique of the subject–object distinction, and its immense archive of empirical data notwithstanding, we have slid away from the notion of ‘others who are rational in context’ since we no longer wish to make them or us the centre of explanation. While babies and bathwater come to mind, as has been cogently pointed out (Navaro-Yashin 2009), it seems impossible to resist the move away from social determinism towards the decentred freedom of affect, where the vitality of affect is confused with freedom itself (Moore 2011: 182).

What Can we Learn from Robots and Avatars?

I suggest that turning afresh to the notion of sociality is a productive way to consider what we might know about being human and being alive. One starting point for a renewed theory of sociality would be to ask ourselves what we have learnt about human sociality from the general gamut of theories of affect, co-presence, networks and assemblages. Is there something about a focus on anthropos that still requires a genuine anthropology? It may seem counterintuitive, but starting with robots and avatars is useful because it allows us to begin an enquiry without necessarily assuming a divide between the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic. Robotics is an especially provocative terrain because many of its practitioners believe that building robots tells us something both about how humans function, and also about what makes them distinctive. What is evident is that at the present time new personal relations are arising between humans and robots. New generations of robots, rather than being designed to replace humans – for example, by assembling cars or packing food in a factory – are being designed specifically to interact with humans, and to perform human tasks such as caring for children and the elderly, performing domestic tasks and providing companionship. Japan is the largest producer of robots in the world, and according to Jennifer Robertson there is already an established ‘market for “intelligent,” autonomous humanoid robots that can: operate power shovels and forklifts (Enryuu), patrol premises and extinguish fires (ReBorg-Q, Guardrobo D1), replace human service sector employees (Actroid, Asimo), babysit and tutor children (PaPeRo, Wakamaru), housesit (Nuvo), nurse the infirm and elderly (Ri-man), provide companionship and entertainment (ifbot, Pino, Posy, Robovie), and even provide sex (Kaori)’ (Robertson 2007: 372–373; see also Sabanovic 2010). What is perhaps equally surprising is that robots and humans are co-developing in new ways. For example, Noby, short for ‘nine-month-old baby’, looks and feels like a human baby, with soft urethane skin and flexible joints. Developed by Yasuo Kuniyoshi and his team at Osaka University, Noby is powered by a powerful computer, and has 600 body sensors to feel touch, and cameras and microphones for vision and hearing. Research on child development enabled Noby’s creation, but now researchers are using Noby to test theories of human development (e.g., Cowley and MacDorman 2006; Demiris and Meltzoff 2008).² We make the world as the world makes us.

Modern robots have to be designed to operate – not just function – in changing human societies. Key to this process is the question of embodiment. Both humans and robots are enabled and constrained by their particular morphologies. Physical constraints shape the dynamics of interactions between the embodied system and its environment; linked sensorimotor activity and body morphology (shapes of body and limbs, placement of sensors/organs) i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sociality’s New Directions
• 1. Avatars and Robots: The Imaginary Present and the Socialities of the Inorganic
• 2. Imagining the World that Warrants Our Imagination: The Revelation of Ontogeny
• 3. Sociality and Its Dangers: Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust
• 4. Group Belonging in Trade Unions: Idioms of Sociality in Bolivia and Argentina
• 5. Utopian Sociality. Online
• 6. A Sociality of, and Beyond, ‘My-home’ in Post-corporate Japan
• 7. Actants Amassing (AA)
• 8. Doing, Being and Becoming: The Sociality of Children with Autism in Activities with Therapy Dogs and Other People
• 9. Materials and Sociality
• 10. The Art of Slow Sociality: Movement, Aesthetics and Shared Understanding
• Notes on Contributors
• Index