The Teleodynamics of Postmodernism
Terrence Deacon’s Teleodynamic Theory (especially in it’s social application), I contend, can be seen as an incredibly formalised version of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism. The process of Dialectical Materialism is often conceived in terms of the Base/Superstructure model.
Even a vulgar comparison provides an immediate example of the synchronicity between Teleodynamics and Marxist Critical Theory, but Deacon’s work also reformulates some key points made by some of those in the Critical tradition that specifically wanted to distance themselves from the Dialectical model, including Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari:
Firstly, these thinkers wanted to clarify that what is characterised ablatively as “negation” or “constraint” is actually felt by us firsthand as explosive desire; that is, we need a mode of thinking that acknowledges what’s driving us through the world is not experienced as restriction but as an unquenchable need for fresh interaction. Deacon not only acknowledges this “reversal of logic” but formalises it as necessary to the dynamics of emergent forces in general...
Though Marx was able to radically reconceptualise mind as something emerging spontaneously from matter, he (or at least a naive mechanistic reading of his theory) is unable to conceive of work (labour) beyond the Newtonian conception of transferring energy from one place to another or one form to another. The Dialectical Materialist tradition seemed to be left thinking of what the mind is doing (“sensuous human activity”) in purely orthograde terms: the mind, like a muscle, was a store of potential labour that could be expended on the world and must be replenished.
Newton’s Universal Laws, in their own time, were decried by some as Occult Philosophy for their formulation of non-corporeal yet causally-efficient forces (and in fact, Newton was secretly writing more on the occult than he ever did on hard science).
Just as the (colloquially) “self”-organising contragrade properties of morphodyamic processes, the ways they reorganise matter spontaneously, are constituted by yet irreducible to the interaction of lower level homeodynamic process, so the contragrade features of teleodynamic forces like life and mind are the result of orthograde homeodynamic (or lower-level teleodynamic) forces interacting to spontaneously generate a completely new orthograde tendency at a higher level of complexity.
That is to say: In teleodynamic systems like life and mind, the drive towards self-preservation and self-actualisation, desire per se, emerges as a completely new force in the universe; reciprocally reconstituting but irreducible to the interaction of merely “material” forces. And this desiring-force, though physical in cause and effect, does not operate on the “universal laws” of physics, but on the emergent laws of meaning, value, and association.
In a way that is completely consummate with the mainstream scientific discourse we can finally start to articulate something which that discourse had previously considered taboo; something that Foucault and D+G and others have been saying for years (in what perhaps is the true echo of Marx): The processes of life, mind, society, and language (not to mention the evolutionary processes which reciprocally produce all of them) are not only materially effective things that must be accounted for in the discussions of the “real”, but are (in a way that is now also just as rigorously definable) all truly sentient.
The experience of being sentient is what it feels like to be evolution.
- Terrence Deacon
My brain is made up of billions of sentient creatures, neuronal cells, but my sentience is not made of their sentiences. Every cell, and every molecule in every cell in that system is replaceable, must be replaced in order to keep it functioning. My sentience is neither contained within the “stuff” of my brain nor is it the aggregate of it’s sentient parts; it is a function of those parts’ dynamical interactions. Teleodynamic social processes can be thought of the same way: They are effectively real, they are sentient. But our sentience is no part of their sentience.
In their concept of Desiring Production and the Body without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari not only formulate that desire is this real productive force, characterizing human beings as “desiring-machines”, but that social processes are sentient “beings” with their own desires, which are constituted by the interaction of human processes and yet inherit none of their desires from below.
There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.
Foucault was similarly keen to portray not just society but discourse itself as a system without an author, happening “for” itself. This idea developed out of the language oriented tradition of which he was a part. But Foucault’s criticism of Dialectical Materialism was not that it was factually inaccurate; Foucault was rigorously anti-foundational. Rather, he doubted it’s usefulness as a tool of self-actualisation.
Rather than trying to situate the exact material conditions of a subject, he instead championed a return to language that put focus on the genealogy of a given idea or area of discourse: focusing on how a subject is treated throughout different epistemes, searching for what can be expressed through the dominant mode of speech and what can not, in order to discover who has been excluded from the discourse and to formulate new posibilites.
Incomplete Nature provides a detailed genealogy of the concept of Self in the Western Natural Philosophy and Emergence Theory discourse (a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Dialectical Materialism, almost), revealing long upheld logical fallacies that disguise and constitute the power imbalances of the present. The explicit remit of Deacon’s work is to conceive of alternatives to the current mode of scientific thinking that alienate us from our sense of self.
As in the theory it presents, what is important to focus on in Incomplete Nature is explicitly what is absent: In attempting to catalogue a geology of Emergent, Absential theories of life and mind he makes but brief, tantalizing reference to the Critical and “Occult” ideas that have informed their development, arguably since the beginning of our History. Truths divine and heretical, previously stricken from the collective record, now team with possibility under this new critical lens.
Deacon, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, not to mention Marshall Mcluhan, Walter Benjamin and many others, know that it is long-past time to break down the arbitrary divisions in our ways of conceiving of the world and our place in it, to open up whole new horizons for radical change.
J.
