<nettime> Experience, Democracy, Learning Machines, and Evolutionary Time

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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The most important thing we all need to do this year is experience.  

It might seem pointless to say so, but it's important to remember because one of the most fundamental things about experiencing beings – organisms capable of having experiences – is that their capacity can be manifested in a wide variety of possible outcomes.  In quantum fashion, you could say, we all exist each day somewhere on a continuum of experiential richness from very low to highly complex, full, and resonant, and every quantitative volume if you will can occur in a million separate varieties of nuance, timbre, and composition.  The whole biosphere does this too, in its way, over the entire planet.  You could call it the Experience Quotient if you wanted some shorthand.

This is the most important activity for all of us to do this year, for one, because it is the one activity we all have in common.  Not in the specifics of course, these all being completely unique and as different and distinct as each person's heartbeat, respiration, and metabolic chemistry, but in the functional principle which is as identical for every human as their metabolic chemistry, respiration, and heartbeat are.  We all experience, and we all have experience, and as Calvino wrote in the penultimate paragraph of his Six Memos for our millennium, "what are we, what is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences (esperienze)...?"

The absurdity of saying such a thing as this is a clear sign of its dire necessity.  We no longer really think that experience even matters; as Joyce wrote of the new future in Ulysses "machines is their cry."  If someone asks you about your experience you feel harvested and go on defense.  If someone recommends an experience to you, it's a trap or move to confiscate your attention.  If someone tells us about their experience we consider it less than trivial: "that's just your experience!"  We want rules, and instruments to apply and enforce them for us: every New Prince their own Leviathan.  Even reality is irrelevant, a nuisance at best and at worst the end of the world.  We don't cultivate experience, but technology and product, or if we do it is in salable packets denuded of life's freedom and uncertainty.

Experience and experiment, i.e. experientia in Latin and esperienza in Italian, is therefore the most universal human power and the action most applicable to "all of us."

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What about "this year"?  Well, this year is the now or the time of the now, as understood by Benjamin as a combination of the two German words for experience "Erfahrung" and "Erlebnis," which he contrasted to Kant's Reason as the basis of all human knowledge (as in The Critique of Pure Experience, so to speak).  This is the unfinished work of modernity (Habermas' incomplete project) and there is nothing "post" about it.

Beyond such a priori reasons however 2024 is a very meaningful year.  In it, the people of the world will elect either autocrats or democrats to power, and these autocrats or democrats will define the course of the rest of the century in terms of war and peace.  Just as the United States had to choose whether to have any Union and Constitution at all in The Federalist 1 and 85 (written by Hamilton with the word "experience" in 1's first sentence, and via Hume in ALL CAPS twice in 85's last paragraph), and had to decide whether to preserve the Union a century later under Lincoln's call to have "the faith that right makes might," we are now at a bookend or bridge-spanning stage of deciding whether to voluntarily abandon constitutional democracy as financially and administratively unsustainable in our competition with global autocracies like those of Russia and China.  

In panic over the productive might of despotism, especially in its feral production of violence and seafloor-like survival without a single photon of freedom's energy, many in the US today (especially among its digital technology leadership) want to scale back democracy even to the point where lynch mobs riot at the very capitol to overthrow fair elections.  These putatively American neo-autocrats value neither democracy nor constitutionality and wish they were Eastern despots from somewhere less East.  It's really a very sorry spectacle, laughable really, which would be hilarious were not the earth's biosphere on the verge of irreversible collapse and billions of people threatened by desertification on the scale of Eliot's wasteland, not to mention all the regular problems too.

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Elections in such a world make one want to hide in a shell.  They are ugly and discouraging and the autocrats ensure they remain so.  We want to dial our experience of reality down to almost nothing, to an algorithmic feeding tube of the least disturbing and difficult diet of information possible.  We want our experience to go dormant, hiding in artificially constructed patterns of simulated comfort, and shrink from not just the moment but any and every moment.  Sometimes even the guru-like presence we have made of our technology itself (not just its techbro titans) tells us that having virtually zero experience is the perfect adaptation and true bliss.  How many technologies, after all, or technologians tell us "stop wasting your time on me, meditate to repair the damage I've caused you, and experience the world as is your solemn duty like every living thing"?  None.

Meditation, after all, has one primary effect: to increase experience.  It does this by alleviating stress, which is the gluey noise or solder that endears us to all the technological cognition-cages we subject ourselves by, and this obstacle removed allowing experience to flow.  Pamela Smith, in her award-winning 2022 book From Lived Experience to the Written Word, calls this by its medieval early-modern name "the water of inspiration" or aqua natura; and although it is really the flow of ions through synapses across liquid water, not the water itself, it is definitely comparable and a metaphoric match.  Experience is a lot like a membrane connecting us to the real environment which has to be meditated upon in order to function.  As a unity of Benjamin's two special terms it reflects the frontal cortex made one with the Default Mode Network of the brain as per the latest science of Zindel Segal on how brains can change for the better, adapt, and survive.  Nick Lane's theory of consciousness, as it were, in bacteria (real-time through their ionized membranes and slower-time by their DNA) also pertains.  

Meditation is arguably the basic principle of reason, or ratiocination, ratiocinationem, that is, a calm measuring and assessment of flowing patterns.  Reason, truly understood, is experience; hence Benjamin's call for a new philosophy that reworks Kant's Reason into a philosophy of Experience like a planetary perspective finally allowed to revolve in space with other bodies as their equal.  This is not a repudiation but a refinement, development, and adaptation to reality of both art and science applied to the old, early system.  However, as we all know German autocracy's fantasy of control over all living being destroyed Benjamin, and the Bauhaus, and a great many more quite promising developments before they could finish their thought.  This is how autocracy sticks around, with more or less oblivious trench-diggers like Schmitt and Foucault doing much of the earthwork: it kills the experience of constitutional democracy.  

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And really, what is more democratic than experience?  We all have it; we can all influence how we have it by our active agency, reason, art, and vows, we can share it most freely; it does not favor one city, nation, people, or even hemisphere.  It is no slave to money, and the poor as well as the rich (shown by every major religion and indigenous prehistory) are capable of it, as is all of nature; and nothing other than this capacity can change humans from what they are into something better as either individuals or as a group (trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria).  It is, literally, the lifeblood of the rule of law based on rights.  As much as autocrats hate the law, they hate the idea of rights – any rights – even worse (as they well should, such ideation being the low-cost and innate antidote to their toxic method of control by might makes right).  Only experience can salvage the future from electoral destruction in 2024; and both experience and experiment mean "out of many attempts."

Experience is the true essence or even the quintessence of democracy, and indeed of all law and every conception of rights.  That's why it was the most important word in The Federalist Papers (at least as far as Hamilton was concerned).  It is the core principle of resilience in every life form, even bacteria building their little flagella and thermoregulatory responses from their direct experiences, and therefore the sole and whole fabric of both adaptation and evolution.  Biologically speaking, it is as close to the "All" as you can get, and it is under attack by your smart phone.

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But don't take my word for it.  That would be the worst thing you could do.  Do it yourself, and with others when you can.  Nothing is more fun or more healthful or can accomplish more good.  Talk about the word "experience" as it has been used by artists and writers you admired before reading this email like Tokarczuk, Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps using Ctrl-F since time is of the essence.  Run a net search on it, with a mental filter of course for the autocratic algorithm's attempt to co-opt and digest your very life-spirit (which it does by selling you in hyper-processed, non-nutritive dribs and drabs what you already have in plenitude but forgot).  If you wish I can send you a bibliography of books and articles about it; but really meditating is the straight and royal road which is your birthright.  Simple breath meditation for five minutes, while looking at the Mona Lisa, especially its bridge, garment, and hand gesture, as the Anthropocene’s fulcrum allegory Esperienza, or not looking at it, will do.

Then you will have the motive and ability (or forza) to do your own best work to help save life on the planet by salvaging experience from moribundity, both your own and that of other people and living species.  Hug a tree if it helps you, or talk to a squirrel.  Swim.  Feel grass and touch flowers with the back of your hand.  Sight birds in flight or at rest.  

If you are in Paris for the Olympics, tell the people you speak to from every nation that the true title and quintessence of La Joconde is in fact Experience, Esperienza, who is as Leonardo said "la mère commune de toutes les science et de tous les arts."  And if you are young or communicate with anyone young, especially but not only in the USA, reassure them that experience is the true guide on whom they can rely for help in every case and the foundation of democracy, the latter being well worth saving in November by voting no to every autocrat without regret.

If enough of us do this or some working variation thereof the planet will have hope.


Max Herman
March, 2024

ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is
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"The Mindful Mona Lisa" at Leonardo.info/blog
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Commedia Leonardi Vici full MS in PDF format available free on request


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References:


Calvino, Six Memos – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Memos_for_the_Next_Millennium

experience etymology https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=experience

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Benjamin student paper – https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m5322tj

Federalist 1&85 – https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2014jeff21562v2/?sp=365

Cooper Union speech – https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm

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Pamela Smith – https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/directory/pamela-h-smith

>From Lived Experience to the Written Word – https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo133038690.html

The Body of the Artisan – https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo3618964.html

Nick Lane – The Electrical Origins of Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLaTU-t1CQM

Susan Neiman – https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critically-cringe-on-susan-neimans-left-is-not-woke/

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The Dawn of Everything –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

Mazzotta, G. (1993). Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvmzw

Anil Seth's article on art –  https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zvbkp

Jeffrey Rosen's new book on virtue in constitutional democracy – 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/20/founding-fathers-demagogues-civic-virtue/

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Tokarczuk's Ognosia – https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/ognosia-olga-tokarczuk-jennifer-croft/

Emerson – https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/experience.html

Walter Pater – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4060

Kiefer's Athanor Louvre – https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010203381

Leonardo wikiquote – https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

Jung on alchemy – https://archive.org/details/c.-g.-jung-collected-works-volume-12-psychology-and-alchemy/mode/2up

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