5. Potentiation

In ancient philosophy, the word metabolé (mεταβολή) meant revolution or grand transformation (Gonzalez, 2019). In biology, metabolé came to define metabolism as that which reinvents itself as it goes about its business, given its processes are defined not merely by its own striving to persist, but also its needing to adapt in order to reproduce into adaptive offspring (Godfrey Smith, 2016). Metabolism thus refers not to a linear momentum that converts input into output leaving its processing mechanism and its operations unaltered, but to a multidimensional charge (a ‘storm’) that affects all of its own dimensions and processes.

Degeneracy equates with robustness: “… robustness (also referred to as degeneracy) … gives evolved complex systems … the ability to survive in an environment with changing internal and external conditions” (Mitchell, 2009: 70–72). “Degeneracy is seen at many levels of biological organization, ranging from properties of cells up to those of language. A good example is the genetic code: each triplet of bases in DNA specifies a particular one of the 20 amino acids that go to make up proteins. Since there are 4 chemically different bases, there are 64 possible triplets. However, since there are [in reality] only 20 different amino acids, the code must be degenerate” (Edelman, 2006: 33).

Cf. Engeström’s work on ‘expansive learning’ (Engeström, 1999).

Uexküll defined Umwelt in 1909 as “the space peculiar to each animal [which] can be compared to a soap bubble which completely surrounds the creature …. The extended soap bubble constitutes the limit of what is finite for the animal and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity” (Uexkull cited in Buchanan, 2008: 23). Heidegger writes about the dissolution of animal environment (Umwelt) as follows, marking ‘language’ as the agency that liberates /expels /distances humans from their given animal Umwelt rendering them ‘worldless’: “at any given moment, plants and animals remain bound to their environment, but are never liberated in light of being (and the “world” is only in light of being), for that reason language does not matter to them. Nor, however, do they therefore hover, worldless, in their environment because language is denied them. But in this word ‘environment’ is condensed all that is puzzling about animate nature. In essence, language is not what comes out of an organism; neither is it what comes out of a living thing. For that reason, it can also never be thought in an essentially correct way when reduced to symbolic expressions or even to semantics. Language is an illuminating that is itself at the same time an obscuring of what is to come of being itself” (Heidegger, 2000 [1946]).

Gould cites Julius Kollmann who defined this 1885 neologism as follows: “We have neoteny when an animal, in becoming adult, retains certain infantile characters” (Gould, 1972: 227). Childhood and adolescence are identified as neotenous life stages: “The human childhood and adolescent stages of life history were defined as novel periods in human development, not shared by any non-human primates” (Bogin, Varea, Hermanussen, & Scheffler, 2018: 839). Gould comments that neoteny arose in protected environments ensuring “stable, favourable and ‘crowded’ situations” (Gould, 1972: 303) where the main survival pressures issued not from resource scarcity but from species-internal competition. Given the young have “higher metabolic rates” (Gould, 1972: 293) than adults, they have higher levels of competitive energy and therefore a greater competitive advantage.

DeLanda reminds us that “the idea that these social forms followed each other in time has been replaced by the study of their coexistence in space: an archaic state may have formed the core of a large region dominating a few complex chiefdoms, with simple chiefdoms and agricultural villages forming an exploited periphery. The concept of a linear evolution usually leads to models in which a single entity, “society as a whole,” develops from one “stage of development” to another. But once we replace that conception with one involving the coexistence and complex interaction of agricultural communities, chiefly lineages, and institutional organizations, we need several models” (DeLanda, 2012: 167).

The English translation of Sloterdijk’s book has “the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, that cannot remain as it was”. I think a better translation is: “the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, unable to remain as it was”. Hoban’s translation of Sloterdijk’s book is a general disappointment. The rush with which this book was translated is evident from parts of some of the German sentences not making it into the translation. Of the many instances, just one example is the omission of the name Rilke from the first paragraph on p. 19 of the translation, while this name does appear in the original German. Another is the rendering of this sentence: “uns einer nicht versklavenden Form von Autorität, einer nicht repressiven Erfahrung von Rangdifferenz auszusetzen” (p. 37 of the German version) as ‘simply’ “a non-enslaving form of rank differences” (p. 19). In addition to these omissions, much of the poetics of Sloterdijk’s writing is lost. The translation is so awkward that it may well generate a negative rather than a positive effect on the Anglo-American reception of Sloterdijk’s work.

Involution refers to the shrinking of an organ.

Heidegger’s emphasis on ecstasis as a moment of intense energy and explosive change anticipates ‘symbiosis scholarship’ whose interest focuses on ‘metabolic-energetic networks’ rather than information exchange and communication: “Symbiosis scholarship, most prevalent in feminist science studies, provides an account of change that undermines the dominant Darwinian story of small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development. This is because evidence in bacteriology increasingly found that that new organisms were often not discrete, but rather stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse …. In such instances traits were inherited outside of sexual dissemination (i.e. through digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnering) – processes which called forth vast, amorphous and phylogenetically-mixed symbiotic complexes, or ‘consortia’, as opposed to anatomically bounded objects or ‘organisms’. These biotic meshes are metabolic, energetic networks rather than systems of information and exchange” (Campbell, Dunne, & Ennis, 2019: 131; my italics).

Colebrook’s steadfast refusal of human redemption weakens in resolve right at the end of her 2010 book when she writes about life affording “a fleeting and fragile perception that at once gets caught up in territories and recognition, only to break down again when life is blessed with enough violent power to overcome self-maintenance” (Colebrook, 2010: 166). And again here: “This bounded life is not necessarily a subject of trauma, but it is only after trauma – after the self has experienced what is other than itself as an alien infraction – that it can have a sense of life beyond trauma” (Colebrook, 2010: 176).

This process is referred to as ‘video-reflexive ethnography’ (Iedema, 2020; Iedema et al., 2019; Iedema, Mesman, & Carroll, 2013).

Heidegger defines ready-to-hand as follows: “The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically” (Heidegger, 1962: 99).

Diegetic means: answering to the structure of a narrative rather than to the structure of actual time. Christian Metz adopted the term ‘diegesis’ from Etienne Souriau (Metz, 1974: 98; also see Nichols, 1981: 81) to highlight the difference between what cine-film editing implies happened in ‘real’ time, and what the footage in fact shows. In cine-film, what the footage shows is generally less than and different from that which imputedly went on in ‘real’ time. Most cine-films compress time and space, or, in Metz’ words, “[in] the chain of images the number of units liable to occur is limited” (Metz, 1974: 99). An exception to Metz’ rule is Andy Warhol’s Empire, an 8-hour ‘real time’ filmed capture of night engulfing the Empire State building.

I retain the term ‘ecstasis’ rather than using the term ecstasy to emphasise that the ecstatic experience of ‘standing outside’ a taken-as-given life is a technologically-enabled and pragmatically-situated affect and not a spiritual-mental serendipity.

My translation. The original reads: “[Ein] Spielintelligenz von Menschen in einer entfalteten Netzwelt, in der man keinen eigenen Zug machen kann, wenn man nicht zugleich mit sich spielen läßt.”

“The ordinary process of habit formation can no longer be trusted for adjusting to new conditions because it is so slow, unsystematic and uncertain… Given the rapid rate of contemporary change, even if we are lucky enough to develop a good habit unreflectively, it could easily be rendered obsolete by the time it is successfully achieved … We thus need a systematic method for the intelligent reconstruction of habit” (Shusterman, 2008: 93).

Steinberg explains that the ingenium played an important role in Hobbes’ De Cive, albeit as a means to underwrite his understanding of education as civic indoctrination (Steinberg, 2020).