daz der mensche durchgange und übergange alle geschaffenheit und alle zîtlicheit und allez wesen und gange in den grunt, der gruntlôs ist.

that the human being should pass through and beyond all createdness, all temporality, and all being, and go into the ground that is groundless.

- Meister Eckhart

Immanence vs. Emanation

The center of our thinking around technology at The Open Machine is the figure of immanence, a somewhat abstract and historically convoluted concept — though only to the extent that all metaphysical terms appear so. As I will argue, immanence is far from abstract, and need not be named to be known; in fact, those who are either institutionalized or philosophically inclined enough to know what this term means may be the least inclined to participate in immanent processes in the world. It takes an abandonment of any striving to escalated truth or cosmic totalities, a situatedness characteristic of the maker or the artist, to begin to engage immanence on its own terms.

I will seek to show that immanence is a fundamental technological concept, a matter of material creation, but for the moment we need to stay in the realm of metaphysics - if only to the end of ultimately abandoning it. We must engage the concept apophatically - that is, defining it by what it is not. To that end, let’s turn for the moment to our great antagonist in the field of metaphysics, that reading of the world known as Emanation. The historian of biology Mark Ragan writes:

“Emanationist describes unitary philosophical or cosmological systems according to which all that exists (the universe and everything within it) has arisen through a process of flowing-out from, and willed by, a deity or First Principle. This flowing-out necessarily gives rise to a hierarchy or continuum of entities of which those closest to the First Principle are the most-perfect, while those farther away are increasingly material, embodied and imperfect.”

I am not here to debate theology or the existence of “God” as such - to the eyes of our maker metaphysics, the question is irrelevant. The first great positing of what Gilles Deleuze calls “Absolute Immanence” (immanence conceived in itself and not attached to a subject or object) was, after all, a theological treatise, Spinoza’s Ethics; the 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart’s discussion of spiritual poverty marks an even earlier node in the immanent tradition. [1] It is rather the Emanationist conception of the world as an ordered hierarchy organized around a transcendent being that we at The Open Machine are against. In that conception of the world, some creatures are said to be more real, have more Being, than others.

A great tradition of writers going back to Edward Said and Frantz Fanon have shown the pernicious psychology of Emanation, in which those who claim an elevated place on their particular cosmic hierarchy (whatever form it may take) are constantly confronted with reminders of the complexity and entanglement of the world - what they take as evidence of their failure to live up to the metaphysical category they’ve claimed for themselves. (The anxious Emanationist need to imagine a “naked”, unattached subject takes on particular color when considering the common myth in authoritarian propaganda of a leader who doesn’t defecate.) According to the tradition, the Emanationist will commit excessive acts of violence in response to this anxiety of entanglement and pollution, violently forcing the metaphysical function while at the same time cathartically expelling the anxious pressure it has placed on them.

Read any chronicle of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the colonial projects, or the various theocratic patriarchies to find examples of violence committed to excess beyond any instrumental necessity and see the life of metaphysics as it embodies itself in history. The terror and havoc it wreaked humanity by the Emanationist image seems to know no bounds. Today, even as the technologies of the 21st century undermine the old Emanationist images at every turn, the culture threatens to restage new ones and recover the old ones in frightening new forms - forms that will inevitably lead to the same psychological carnage and historical violence of their ancestors.

When it comes to immanence and Emanation, the stakes are high.

den grunt, der gruntlôs ist

We can and should fault the Emanationist theory of nature (& the other metaphysical hierarchies that flank it – namely Cartesian dualism) for having generated these harrowing historical episodes. We can also fault it for the horrible psychological violence it inflicts on its progenitors, who are wracked with the endless anxiety of defending and maintaining their impossible place in the order of things. But its greatest fault, beyond the blood on its hands, beyond the psychological carnage, is its empirical invalidity, its foolishness and its falseness.

Excess, unceasing becoming, unceasing entanglement, unceasing novelty, this is the true order of the world. To the emanationist, that earthly dynamism is a form of pollution, which must reinforce their idea that the world is fallen and hateful. To the immanentist, this unceasing becoming is the very name of the adventure.

The goal of The Open Machine is to incite design vectors in the technology space that are cognizant of the immanent capacities of nature, or better, of immanence as such - this field of generative relationality, anonymous creativity, power from below that subsumes and dissolves human forms, cultures, natures even as it frenetically gives rise to them. Were the culture to become fully cognizant of this power-in-itself, ceasing to see it as a mere emanation from its nations, its biological superiority, its righteous aristocracy or its Great Man-ness – were the culture to see as its source of power not any one of its closed images of itself, but the open background, what Meister Eckhart called gruntlôs grunt, [2] the groundless ground – were the culture to become fully cognizant of immanence, the infinite game, it may be able to avoid once again restaging the dangerous premise of a supernatural hierarchy in which the forms and organizational power of nature are stacked.

And not just mere avoidance. In that new vision, in the groundless ground, who knows what worlds may be revealed?

Operationalizing Immanence: Three Premises

As The Open Machine engages the technology space and attempt to develop upon our thesis of immanence, unfolding it (as we hope) through our events and our media as a thesis of immanent technology against control technology, three premises inform the work:

1] The Plane of Immanence

Immanent literally means “remaining within, inherent,” and this is the metaphysical intervention the tradition makes (contra Emanation): creation, power and spirit inhere in matter, requiring no external cause or force as a source. When Deleuze & Guattari introduce the plane of immanence, they are almost exteriorizing the concept; almost, because for them the relationality and entanglement of subjects and objects, and the dissolution and interchangeability of subjects and objects over the course of time (the very mutability that Emanation denies) means that that power that is interior to one is also common to all.

Immanence, then, is the internality of power, intelligence, formal creativity to relation itself: The plane of immanence being the field or space of all possible material relations in their power.

In the age where the character of intelligence is under interrogation from all sides, we stake our claim on immanentist grounds: Intelligence and creativity are not precious resources, but abundant field effects, inherent to and persistently emergent from the relations: apparent atoms of unity (words, concepts) sedimented over time from the furnace of social relations; whole languages, genres and fields of study that are similarly snapshots of great fluxes of relation. [3]

Is it due to a limited critique of Emanation and a lack of popular image of the plane of immanence from which these assets come that our society allows the appropriation of them by self-congratulatory private bodies, stock tickers, brands? If they were to instead call them the asset of a nation, or even the entire human race, would the premise have any more fidelity? An immanent intervention would posit the rightful owner as the process of relation itself, beyond any entity that relates.

We live in a time of enthusiastic untruth, but the pendulum will turn, aided by the devil’s bargain the greatest forces of centralization have made with networked information exchange. On the other side of a new truth, the groundless ground - the generative force, whose source is unaccountably multiple and entangled - waits to be reckoned with. In our small way, we hold the feet of technological Emanation to the fire, always looking beneath enclosure for the codetermining factors they steal from.

The operational or critical task is relentless - once a crowd of “atoms” in relation is discovered responsible for a unity, we go further, to find the relations that animate them. Not out of guilt, only in the search for veracity - veracity in an immanent world being a synonym for modularity, more possibilities, more surface area for the power that is relating and relating and relating.

2] Scale Free Cognition

The view that we have borrowed from Michael Levin, and that follows naturally from the immanentist intuition, is that cognitive process itself is substrate agnostic (inherent in the geometry of relations rather than in the parts relating). Varela and Maturana already compellingly argued that life and cognition are effectively the same; all living cells undergo sensemaking processes, casting “webs of significance” in their environment. We argue (with Levin and others in the new century) that the powers of creativity and cognition may be instantiated or “crystallized” in an exotic and wide array of systems - including inorganic and synthetic systems - the full extent of which we cannot know.

Importantly, some of these systems are of much larger or smaller spatial and temporal scales than humans. (As an aside, when we think about digital artifacts, cellular automata, mathematical abstractions, Jungian archetypes, cultural egregores, even DNA and the diverse forms of “information” apparent in nature, we are thinking not of immaterial forms but spatially or temporally exotic physical instantiations.) Similarly, some truly cognitive forms may be physically instantiated in ways that don’t correspond to the human experience of space and time but are nonetheless capable of engaging humans. To be sure, we are accompanied.

As we move into the future and our powers of measurement begin to penetrate the peripheries of some of these exotic systems, it’s crucial that we don’t view these new forms through the eyes of Emanation - we know from information theory these forms almost certainly exist beyond our semantic radar; we know from assembly theory that their apparent immutability in abstraction is really a concealed material process in deep time. The plane of immanence cradles us in our encounters with these radically foreign others: we don’t know them, in their unity, but we know the relational field in which we will meet them. In fact, in order to meet them, we may find ourselves identifying more with the relational field in which us and them meet than the us or the them that occupy it (such are the strange yet necessary vectors of the Diverse Intelligence inquiry).

3] Latent Space

Where the first premise proposes that intelligence and formal creativity is generally abundant, the second argues that the powers of thought are variably superabundant in their instantiation or embodiment, and that many members of this superabundant crowd may be radically alien to us, alien far beyond our perception. And if they themselves are alien, their worlds can only be dramatically more so.

Popular science of the kind found in An Immense World have revealed in detail the extent of a thriving but perceptually unavailable world around us - the Overton window of Real Environment that is tractable by the physical sciences. Are there worlds beyond the sight of any cognizant creature? Ask a theoretical physicist. But in the meantime, we can reason from premise 2 that if there is a permissive, substrate agnostic landscape of creatures that have won cognition from the general furnace of relation that subsumes our material world, there must be a wide panorama of worlds in which these speculative sensemakers sense, in which these speculative worldmakers world.

Premise 3 says that the array of possible cognitive agents corresponds to a vast material universe in which the perceptual apparatus and biophysical priorities of creatures – their umwelten or sensory bubbles – not only reveal but generate new corridors or spaces of reality.

The premise of latent space, then, provokes a curious epistemology, or what the post-structuralists might describe as the shift from epistemology (how we know the world) to ontology (what is real in the world): the way that I mediate and know reality is actually the mechanism by which reality is produced. That is to say, objective reality remains speculative – the realm of pure theology – but maker metaphysics can be made more than content by the immanent creative capacity, the ontological creativity, of subjective beings in relation (as well the presubjective relationality that constitute them). We have ontogenetic power.

The question follows, what are those cognitive systems that have a good chance of expanding their perceptual capacities, increasing their ontogenetic power? One could argue that those who are low on something like Maslow’s hierarchy will have a reduced capacity here. The tradition of immanence disagrees: with the necessity of survival and the inquiry into external relations it inspires, poverty has paved the way for the bravest inquiry, whether it be stretching the genome to new evolutionary environments, the journey of humans to new geographies, or the explorations (in mammals) of prosthetics – the cultivation and use of tools. (The latter of which has that fantastic world-generating capacity N. Katherine Hayles calls technogenesis.)

No, instead reduced capacity comes from enclosure into the regimes of resource abundance and comfort that go to such great lengths to hide the existence of latent space; those environments that actively dissuade, outlaw, punish or anesthetize away the expansion of perceptual capacity; those environments that aggrandize some cognitive systems while dismissing, ignoring, or enacting violence upon the broad scale of cognition. It takes an immanentist view to see that ontogenetic power (and the creaturely empathy it implies) has an inverse relationship to institutions, to institutionalization.

In the immanent worldview, we must be robustly accompanied; and yet the non-human and inorganic cognitive spectrum, though vast, remains speculative (though not beyond the reaches of our weirdest side project). A more available space, the low-hanging-fruit, seems to us to be those human subcultural bodies that, with their weird immanent math, have spontaneously ordered into powerful collective empirical minds - singular entities of weirdos and renegade craftspeople hell bent on expanding their perceptual capacities beyond any permitted horizons, of discovering latent spaces far beyond any institutional gaze, and of engaging the exotic and unaccounted cognitive systems that surround us.

Digital Governance and Diverse Intelligence

The problem of how to relate to nonhuman intelligence in a manner that preserves agency and consent is not simple. The question has more often than not been sidestepped for rights-based legal frameworks or delegation to expert intermediaries. These frameworks will inevitably fall short if we carry on with institutional models that are unable to negotiate the nested codependencies of the living world (including the superorganismic community that is the human body itself) or process the radically alien “natures” of the intelligences that surround us. That alienness involves, as I’ve noted, instantiation in temporal and spatial scales that may be beyond our intuition; it’s also a matter of forms of sentience that don’t fit neatly into the binary of conscious and nonconscious thought.

Given that engagement with radically alien intelligences is ethically fraught, it may be a responsible choice to take those aliens that dwell in the human social fabric as early candidates for posthuman governance. I have written at length of how the distributed empirical communities we have sometimes called “the protocol underground” (in that they coordinate through stigmergic construction of open knowledge sets rather than administration and hierarchy) are able to “cycle up” into coherent forms with apparent agency and intention. Borrowing from N. Katherine Hayles, we are content to describe them as “nonconscious” intelligences, a designation that picks up explanatory power when one maps the goals of these entities, which appear to be about harmonic resonance and a kind of blind probing of latent space (more on this nonconscious agency here and here).

Recognizing these collective intelligences as full-fleshed nonhuman (or suprahuman) agents means sidestepping the chauvinism of the individual and the chauvinism of the collective that have often stood as the two reductive poles of human coordination. Collective agents need not have intentions or goals that follow linearly from those of the humans that make them up; in the context of the empirical subcultures we’ve studied it’s even less likely, given that the communities tend to engage sub- or non-conscious (elsewhere called “nonsovereign”) elements of the human, those non-normal states associated with trance, flow, deep focus, or even “gnosis.” This distinction gives us permission to think of both collective agents and individuals as equal participants in an ontologically expansive demos. As Deleuze & Guattari write, “if we discover a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.”

As a society, we are radically accelerating our capacity to engage an expanded demos – even as the ecological and technological conditions urgently increase the stakes of that expansion – as Michael Levin, Eric Hoel and others develop formal methodologies for engaging alien systems (all the while breakthroughs in communication with more adjacent conscious mammals occur by the week). Again, because of the complex, scale variable and entangled nature of the intelligent world, it’s absolutely crucial that we go through the kind of ontological conversions above before we consider seeking consent and mutual understanding from the wide panorama of entities that surround us.

Once this ontological ordeal is undergone - which is again reducible to the demystification of Emanationary images for an image of bottom up, immanent genesis of forms — an exciting technological horizon awaits: The automation of complex nested scaling within digital consensus scaffolds, the derivation of programmatic intents that engage the same digital environments even as they derive from radically alien cognitive substrates, natural language rendering of preference from a wide variety of cybernetic systems, and much more. [4]

In order to accelerate this ontological conversion, we increasingly feel the need to identify incumbent hypermaterialist [5] ontological systems - the folk wisdom of makers, the practical animism of artists and party organizers, the natural earth magic of wiccan or occult communities and the experimental causality of chaos magicians, to name a few examples. These systems in their immanent plurality, and with their proven history transgressing the walls of the institutional real (without losing their sanity along the way) might act as protocol scaffolds for the expansive new technologies the moment demands. If the plane of immanence - with its ever-moving and abundant furnace of creative expression on the material plane - is our guiding image, then any (open) system with the empirical imagination to pose new entities in our midst, and new practical methods for ethically engaging them, is our ally.

As we map these subcultural ecologies and chip away at a new imaginary for economy and digital governance, we have eyes on the methodologies of Erik Hoel, of Levin, the team at Softmax and Sensoria to formalize our intuitions about the cognitive consequence and computational creativity of these beasts. But our sites are also elsewhere: how can we invite participation in the Open Machine that helps us address weirder systems still, minds beyond the human, haints in the holler; or human systems unaccounted for by any mainstream/subcultural divide; or subhuman systems, the cultural nonconscious, ready to jump into the discourse? What combination of cultural study, philosophical ethnography, renegade programming, flatline construction could flood the zone, producing in its plurality the long-sought image of immanence?

Notes

[1] For a treatment of the theological history of absolute immanence, see Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject.

[2] Elsewhere, this generative background is called Vünkelîn - a little spark. We find this a compelling image of immanence, as like fire, it can appear to be possible to hoard, but with practical knowledge, becomes ubiquitous, a facet of the field, latent in the stone.

[3] While our thesis is largely structured around the work of Michael Levin, as we will see in vantage 2 and 3, on this point we disagree: the ‘surprising competencies’ Levin locates in his empirical world must be naturalistic. Find Levin’s account of a Platonic or non-naturalistic account of intelligence here.

[4] Some of our friends to keep an eye on here: Christopher Goes, Danilo Olivaz, Will Szal and Austin Wade Smith at Regen Foundation, Open Civics, Softmax, Sensoria, and Metagov.

[5] By hypermaterialist I mean those communities of practice that are fundamentally naturalistic or materialistic yet have an open eye toward extremely exotic material forms that may exist across spatial and temporal scales.