[ISEA2015] Keynote: Brian Massumi – Collective Expression: The Ecology of Thinking in Action

Abstract

What are the conditions for an interaction to spark a collective movement of expression that is truly ecological in the sense of exceeding both the individual inputs of the agents involved and the sum of those contributory parts? This is the question addressed in electronic art, embodied cognition, network theory, and posthuman philosophy under such rubrics as “distributed agency,” “distributed cognition,” and “nonhuman agency.” Too often, presuppositions about what constitutes agency and cognition are left unchallenged, with the gesture of multiplying and redistributing the existing categories implicitly considered adequate to the task. This talk will attempt to set in place certain conceptual signposts for an integral rethinking of these categories along radically ecological lines. The starting point will be the seemingly least amenable to this project: language interaction. Starting from pragmatically from a particular technique for collective expression practiced at the Montreal-based research-creation laboratory, the SenseLab, the discussion will work out from language to the ecological field within which it takes place. The aim is to resituate language in relation to its outside: the larger field within which it occurs, populated by elements and beings beyond its ken, and beyond the purview of the human subject, whose capacities for thought and action they immanently inform. The path will lead through certain outlier concepts of C.S. Peirce’s theory of signs, revolving in particular around his enigmatic concept of a “Commind,” cast in terms we would call ecological today, as more fundamental to expressive action than the individual utterer or agent.

  • Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent books include Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015), The Power at the End of the Economy (Duke UP, 2015), and What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Duke UP, 2014). He is co-author with Erin Manning of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (co-written with Erin Manning; University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Also with Erin Manning and the SenseLab collective, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction, most recently in the frame of the “Immediations: Art, Media, Event” international partnership project.  brianmassumi.com