E-cologies Part 3: Cyber-Pan
BY ALIS OLDFIELD
To locate vitalism within the network, we need to go back to the invention of electricity, the life-giving force of the internet. Eric Davis notes that “[m]any of the earliest books on electricity described the force in distinctly alchemical terms, dubbing it the “ethereal fire”, the “quintessential fire” or “the desider atom”, “the long-sought universal panacea” (Davis 2015, 52). Men of science were often also men of God and the not-of-this-world nature of the electrical spark drew religious study and consequence. Known as electrical theologians, these religious scholars subscribed to the idea of anima mundi, the living world soul, a connection between all living things. This independent life force, or spirit, is known as vitalism and for the electrical theologians, electricity embodied this vitality. They believed that the first mention of light in the bible was proof of an electrical fire “which penetrated and stimulated the primeval chaos, giving it form and energy.” (Davis 2015, 55)
Imbued with this power, the internet is full of life, live and charged with the living world spirit (divinely) manifest in electricity.
This vital internet has vital matter. Where monotheistic religions know their Gods to be in control of Earthly matter, shaped, formed and created by them, in pantheologies we find a God that is matter, where matter is animate and God is multiple. This challenges us to question our conception of what God is or can be. I will use pantheologies as a framework to begin to investigate what radical shift of perception thinking and using the internet with reverence might engender.
Pantheologies – Gods, Worlds, Monsters by Mary-Jane Rubenstein works to create a consensus and critical history of pantheism, a belief system derided and ostracised from Western philosophy and science. Firstly, Rubenstein must determine whether pantheism refers to the all (das eine all), that Hegel subscribes to, or all things (alles) as Spinoza espouses. Whether God is single or multiple. As Rubenstein explains, the risk of a monistic pantheology is the possibility of creating hierarchies within the all that justify dominion and consumption. Indeed, for Hegel, the material (animal/vegetable/mineral) world is inert material for the becoming-divine of human history. Therefore, Rubenstein’s Pantheologies is crucially multiple, it is a “complex collected but untotalizable many…dynamically shaped by the particularities that express it… it becomes”. (Rubenstein 2018, 58).
The science that the West inherited from the ancient Greeks was infused with a different image of God, which saw humans as appointed rulers of nature. Their divine right was to control and consume their domain, in a world where scientific enquiry would discover the rules by which God had created it. The denial of the agency of matter was the birth of mechanistic science.
Newton inserted God in the gaps in his understanding of the world, as a force that maintains the rules of play, so “Newtonian mechanics in the resulting centuries did not so much abandon God but take its place” (Rubenstein 2018, 115). In this way religion and (Western mechanistic) science are opposite sides of the same coin, with parameters defined by a monotheistic Christian God. The long Christian battle (eventually won) against Paganism removed animism from the Earth and “persisted throughout the spatiotemporal adventure of Christian imperialism and in its tentacular entanglement with industrial capitalism and technoscience” (Rubenstein 2018, 117). It enabled the exploitation of people and earth in its justification of dominion and its legacies of the great divide. Western philosophy, Rubenstein argues, aims to move from the womb to the father’s light, from paganism to monotheism, the cave to the sky, dust to ideas. Pantheism is dark, primitive, feminine. It threatens the capitalistic drive of the west. The threat of pantheism is the collapse of the binaries we have held sacred - mind/body, human/animal, male/female, changing/unchanging. The former terms maintain historical privilege by denigrating the latter.
But this isn’t a contemporary idea or theology. It is one that was encountered and dismissed in indigenous wisdoms, world over, where nature was not separated from culture and the earth not violently consumed. ‘Animism’ as termed by colonial ethnographer Edward Tylor in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, is observed in indigenous cultures world over; Sioux ‘wakan’, Melanesian ‘mana’, Iroquois ‘orenda’ – a force coursing through all totemic life that is more concentrated in some beings. New Animism (a reclaiming of the term) is described as “beings whose movements, growth, interweavings and ruptures constitute being itself. Being is this irreducibly embodied and perpetually related becoming” (Rubenstein 2018, 96). Biologists in western science are discovering similar phenomena, interrelatedness in systems and micro-ecologies. In 1972 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela coined the term autopoiesis to describe life’s continual production of itself in self-maintaining chemistry, raising questions of cognition and consciousness. Symbiogenesis, Lynn Margulis evidenced through microbiology in 1967, uncovers how organisms evolve by interspecies exchange, cooperation and co-optation. In 2016 Donna Harraway re-names autopoiesis “sympoiesis” as a challenge to make-with others in this time of ecological trouble, “because nothing self-organises, it’s relationality all the way down”. (Rubenstein 2018, 100)
In Game Screenshot from SimEarth Video Game (IBM PC)
Developed by Maxis Games in Collaboration with James Lovelock.
Life as dispersed and self-regulating within a system can be seen in Daisy World, a computer simulation in which a hypothetical world orbits a star whose radiant energy is either increasing or decreasing. It’s meant to mimic important elements of the earth-sun system and was developed by James Lovelock and Andrew Watson in 1983 to illustrate the plausibility of the Gaia Hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth, forming synergistic and self-regulating complex systems that help maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. Homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota. In global relationality, we might see a diffuse divinity – a pantheological entity that is multiple, embodied, perpetually becoming. Though instrumentalised as an illustrative tool in Daisyworld, perhaps there is more a more entangled relationality between humans and their technologies. Perhaps these technologies are a facet of God too.
In her book Unthought, Katherine Hayles explores the growing impact of cognitive technologies. As one example, she considers the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System in Los Angeles – ATSAC, that monitors and controls traffic on 7,000 miles of streets. Hayles sees ATSAC as part of a cognitive assemblage of “human conscious decisions, human nonconscious recognition of patterns by both operators and drivers, and the technical cognitive nonconscious of the computer algorithms, processors and database” (Hayles 2017,123). She quotes Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland of the MIT Media Lab who notes “it seems that the human race suddenly has the beginnings of a working nervous system. Like some world spanning living organism…networks are becoming intelligent reactive system with… sensors serving as their eyes and ears.” (Hayles 2017, 98) Through analysing cognitive assemblages, Hayles urges us to face the complexity of these cognitive assemblages that we barely understand, though they have huge effect in many facets of our lives. She warns against the levelness ascribed to the agency of all matter within the philosophies of New Materialism, instead suggesting a spectrum of responsibility and accountability in the capacity to conceive of possible futures and to act. Through digital humanities, Hayles wants us to consider these cognitive assemblages and the opportunities inherent within them for direction change. For, she says, “it is now apparent that humans and technical systems are engaged in complex symbiotic relationships, in which each symbiont brings characteristic advantages and limitations to the relationship. The more such symbiosis advances, the more difficult it will be for each symbiont to flourish without the other” (Hayles 2017, 216). In Rubenstein’s book ‘Pantheologies; Gods, Worlds, Monsters’ the figure of Pan, the Greek God, interrupts and disrupts throughout. He induces pan-ic, part animal, part human, both tamed and wild; “Harraway might call him a ‘contact-zone’; a cross-species concentration of world making entanglements” (Rubenstein 2018, 31). A ‘cyber-Pan’ might be a way to symbolise the technological non-conscious whose role we do not yet fully understand.
If contemporary science is recognising the complexity and connectivity of the universe, why do we need belief to change our earth-consuming behaviours? Because believing in a God that is all things, we are no longer the rightful rulers of the earth – either with divine right or evolutionary superiority. Instead, we are engaged in a complex reality that demands entangled empathy and egalitarian thinking across all types of matter.
To me, the internet feels like more than the sum of its parts – more than the cables and motherboards and data centres that form its infrastructure. The network is imbued with its users’ data, memories, cultures, but maybe something more still…
In early 2020, I came across my first punch card knitting machines whilst helping to clear an old art college site soon to be dismantled. I brought home a few, in the hopes I could Frankenstein them together to create a working machine. Though the mechanics were relatively simple, it was only by finding machine knitters on Facebook groups that I felt confident enough to strip the machine down, clean it and replace parts before starting to use it. I met people with such expertise and enthusiasm for the craft that they were able to help a stranger in another country and time zone to remotely get a knitting machine running again.
Screenshot of my Facebook conversations with machine knitters and group recommendations
It is these precious networks of experience and care that keep a dying memory alive. That attend to the knowledges that sit outside of capitalism (you cannot make much profit out of old-tech repeatedly repaired). Indeed, much of craft refutes the logic of commodity, the time and materials spent undermined by large-scale production and therefore far outside competitive pricing. Perhaps it is in these moments that we spy a glimpse of Cyber-Pan, a contact zone where the species of virtual and visiting life are entangled.
When arguing for God as the all, a singular hierarchical God of nature, Hegel points out the absurdity (monstrosity) of having an all things God manifest in a snuff box. Perhaps in the same way we might scoff at the idea of God existing in a router or airport card. But do we not see the internet as an awe-some thing, capable of our redemption or destruction? Does it not feel greater than the sum of its physical parts? It matters whether we see the network as animate, because as a reflection of ourselves, it too will conquer, consume and devour the earth.
Alis Oldfield is a lecturer and artist, currently working on a PhD at Northumbria with supervisors Christine Borland and Fiona Crisp. As an artist, she’s interested in networks both digital and cultural, infrastructural and metaphorical.
