The Curious Case of Benjamin Bratton

This critical examination of a very interesting, but mortally flawed, emerging theoretical framework in the area of climate change, technology and political theory is largely based on this interview. All direct quotes are from the interview.

Benjamin Bratton is, in my view, an overlooked figure in philosophy, especially in the areas where philosophy join up with political theory, and, at his best, with practical philosophy. An art theorist by training, it's undeniable that his recent work reaches, at many points, the grand systematizing heights of philosophy. We can quibble on that: at any rate, his work is enormously provoking, politically and ethically serious, sometimes tantalizing, and robustly informed by an eclectic yet coherent array of disciplines and sciences.

He proposes a "planetarity," or ultimately a new sort of ontology of Earth, a new way of understanding what the planet could be. He expounds this new view in terms of a kind of Hegelian becoming-other, by detailing concrete,  mechanical, technological particularities without whose mediation the ultimate "goal," a sort of self-reflexive planet, could not exist. Bratton refers to the overall project as one aimed toward a fully "terraformed" Earth. Terraformed in two senses, it's important to note. 

In the first, Bratton refers to the urgent climatological need to actually replenish the Earth (through sophisticated technologies that run in the reverse direction of extractivism). To "terraform" is literally to "transform a planet" such that it can sustain human life. In this sense of the word, Bratton's idea runs directly counter to the standard environmentalist or ecological dogma that peaked in the 1970s but has largely lingered on, an unabated assumption. The latter aims at "de-growth," at reverting by organized passivity and consumption-refusal the planet we have made sickly with all that has been demanded by the capitalist doctrine of "economic growth." (See the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly on the "steady state," the term in economics for the implementation of de-growth ideas. A steady state, as David Harvey points out, necessarily means "a non-capitalist economy.")

The second sense of terraform is more metaphorical but surely threatens no less of a concrete impact. The second sense refers to what is admittedly hinted at by the first sense (Bratton writes of "oil rigs running in reverse"): that is to say, an enthusiastic embrace of not only the domestication of the planet: not only its abusive, traumatic and ceaselessly protracted domestication but man's dominion of the planet in its totality. (A bit of clarification on this distinction in a moment.)

Now, Bratton would likely prefer, even insist, that I change both the subject ("man") and the predicate ("dominion" of the planet) here. As for the subject, "man," the preference would hardly be "machine," or be re-worked into something awkward like "the computerization of the planet." What Bratton would likely argue is that this second sense of Terraforming corresponds to collective planetary governance, reciprocally responding to the "implications of climate models." The at-scale, self-reflexive, and constantly adapting form of the latter of which would amount to the final end of Terraforming in the first sense. 

Let's unpack this a bit right quick. First I should confess that I have no idea what this actually looks like. Bratton uses the helpful example of advertising to explain what this all means. Advertising is an example of a venture that is aiming (with remarkable success) to use "planetary-scale computation." That is to say that, under our present system of monopoly capitalism, we all know that corporations "spy on us," right? For data extraction, aggregation, and finally, for the "comprehension" of personal data itself, an increasingly global networked tapestry of computation is required. 

What if this model were used, Bratton asks, not only to gather "data" about climate patterns as they emerge, in a manner in sync and forming a totalizing network with computation on a planetary scale, but also--crucially--to (itself) perceive and comprehend this "data." Climate change is a long-term transformation, presenting itself as a patchwork of theoretically predictable sorts of patterns. Isolate a hurricane here, an ice cap melt there: you can thereby perceive a phenomenon and draw a relatively sophisticated connection between the isolated phenomenon and the larger, long-term force. But the capacity to reflexively respond to emergent phenomena requires a planetary, networked multiplicity of "perceivers," to use my previous awkward language. 

To quote Bratton: "It's identifying a comprehensive...transformation over multiple generations. But this is absolutely not perceivable by a single phenomenological subject." Seeing it, he argues, is then dependent not only on "front end" computational models (let's call them), but equally on an equally sophisticated "back-end" response system that adapts such models (and of course, the front and back mutually inform one another, as in the case of human self-government, wherein, say, new demographic information impacts government policy, and adapted government then effects the recapture of new demographic information, et cetera). 

Put as simply as I can think to, the Earth-sized computer system gathers the "data," aggregates it and adapts its modeling of the "real" Earth underneath to conform to the data, and then perceives the data as new empirical input. The ultimate goal, further, is for the Earth to become its own self-conscious and self-healing organism, with its mechanical Terraforming responsive to the computational Terraforming and programmed to perform tasks in compliance with emergent patterns derived from the planetary computation system's self-discovery.

Pretty cool stuff, I think! The difficulty, however, lies in that tendentious "man" (I'm using philosophy-speak here, but of course I mean human beings in general.) It's unclear at what point--or why there would even be a point--at which the dominion of the Earth by man qualitatively gives over to the transformation of the Earth into a self-sustaining organism whose very self-sustaining functions are, of course, built, maintained and mediated by man. This is hardly the meat of my critique, barely an appetizer. But first let us be clear: it is surely the case that what Bratton envisages is a complete domination, an imperforate strangulation, of the entire planet by the technology of man. A good Adorno reader (or maybe just phenomenologist) might note here that by subordinating the entire planet ("nature") to man's technological devices of power, the human herself is undermined if not "negated," since the very "world" in which alone she could persist and stake her claim has now been subsumed by forces let loose from her agency and standing above it. 

Is this a problem? Is it mere sentimentality to entertain it as a problem, given the dire stakes? I think it is a dire problem, but it is only truly understood as one in the context of my broader gripe with Bratton and his Big Idea. 

What is interesting is the way that this project puts--and these are his terms--"geotechnology" before "geopolitics." Bratton has difficulty sorting out what counts as "politics," and one must wonder if that ambivalence works to his advantage. He can evoke and suggest "forms of governance" or understandings of politics as such, and the question is thereby allowed to sort of gradually evaporate before the grand edifice. 

A few things Bratton says in the course of the long interview get under my skin, and seem to put his whole project in danger of failure before launch. All of them relate to the pesky problem of the human. 

"Traditional Schmittian concepts about 'the political'," Bratton argues in light of the subsumption of "sovereignty" under the remit of technical systems, "no longer really explain much." He refers to Carl Schmitt, who famously theorized politics as a contest between "friends" (one's own state or sovereignty) and "enemies," diluting "geo-strategic" particularities down to a surprisingly interesting, pliable, and somewhat ominously apt framework. Now, Bratton's being wrong here would not be worth quibbling over if it were not for its essential bearing on the question. He says many hyperbolic things in the course of the interview--tangential and only barely aesthetically relevant dismissals of the Situationists, et cetera--that is what theorists are paid to do. However, Bratton's dismissal of "politics" even in the narrow Schmittian sense gives us our first clue that Bratton may not have much clue what he is talking about. If he does not have a clue what he is talking about when he talks about politics--and here is the crux--what is proposed as a concrete plan is in danger of becoming purestrain science fiction. 

It is absurd to say that, because of the growing power of technocracy, these "traditional concepts" of adversarial politics "no longer really explain much." It is not that they explain less about what they ultimately set out to explain. It is simply that there are more things surrounding, bearing upon, and mediating those things. Any cursory look into Sino-American relations at the moment; or into the condition of Palestine and a nuclearized Israeli police state, funded with "friendly" American dollars, reveals that if ever Schmitt explained anything, the explanatory power of his ideas remain well intact. And, more to the point: taking the long, absurd Russia affair from the Trump administration into account, a conflict whose particulars lie to a large extent in data, computation, and technological governance, one can yet easily see a sharp illustration of Schmitt's ideo-political notion of the "enemy." So even if it were the case that technocracy has so qualitatively swallowed up the form of global politics, what bearing does that have on the explanatory power of the phenomenon? The particulars described in Marx's capital, the concrete moments of labor and exploitation and exchange, have almost entirely vanished: yet his fundamental critique of political economy remains as salient as it was in 1867, because Marx managed to penetrate beneath the form and reach the substance, the necessary and sufficient conditions that always hold for labor, exploitation, and the commodity. I doubt that Schmitt would have proposed his political theory under the impression that the form of political relations were historically and geographically static and homogenous, or under the bizarre worry that a change in their form defeated his claims about their substance. 

It should be clear to anyone that what Bratton proposes requires politics. Arguing for the causal priority of "geotechnology" over "geopolitics" would seem to mean that the self-reflexive computational terraformed planet Earth could be built first, and then the politics could be sorted out later. This, of course, is preposterous. And the Schmitt comment, hidden in an aside, reveals quite a bit: by summarily dismissing it, he is able to continue making the case for a pre-political planet-size infrastructure project without having to confront "politics." He appears to confuse "is" and "ought," imagining we are presently occupying the world in which the terraformed planet exists and thereby also a one in which politics has become defunct. But causally, I hate to be the bearer of bad news: you need politics, first. The ordinary kind, not the already-terraformed, imaginary one.

"To be clear," he argues, "the issue today is [not that] some kind of total oppressive order of reason needs to be dismantled, but rather that the order we need does not exist. We need to create, compose, construct and defend the economics, political ecology, architecture, and urbanism that can compose and construct a world in which we want to live in. They must be projective, and more about putting one brick on top of another than "Sous les pavés, la plage!""

It's hard not to see in Bratton a contempt for the human that's been allowed to ferment until it's lapsed into delusion. His italics fail to convince that the order's lack of existence differs in its being a lack of existence from, say, an American Socialist order. Each case in which an oppressive order of reason (I take this to include ideologies, et cetera) needs to be dismantled is at once a case in which the needed order does not exist. They are two ways of saying the same thing. The last bit of this, however, is most irksome. Throughout the entire piece, he inveighs against the spirit and products of the May '68 movement; the obvious logical resemblance between this latter intellectual and political movement, and his own upstart movement, seeming not even to register in the least. 

"Sous les pavés, la plage!" means: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" It was one of many popular slogans of the French May 1968 mass revolt and the political, artistic, and intellectual movement that preceded and followed it. "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible" was another. As a non-French reader (like myself) may be able to decipher, that one means: "Be realistic, demand the impossible." The first is a poetic expression of the spirit of the second. Immediacy, the immediacy of liberated experience without the precursory intervention of the "political" in any recognizable sense: this was the spirit of '68. Dig up the paving stones, liberate yourself: underneath the rationalized order of the capitalist built world, there always lingers freedom. Just beneath. 

Illegal strikes, vandalism, property destruction. This is certainly the techne at work before or in lieu of the polis (at least the demolition side of technology!) But it also is and was possible, as a matter of fact. In contrast to these petty crimes, the mass terraforming, by computational systems, of the entire planet seems like a lot to ask from every government in the world--after the fact. It may indeed be one of those things in which it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. However, human beings can't move at the speed of light, and making enough robots to terraform the planet only adds another pre-political step, itself involving more extracted resources than probably any other project ever attempted in history. It's fitting to point out that human beings cannot move at the speed of light, because, since the scientifically-versed Bratton surely knows this fact, it adds to the persistent question: where the fuck are human beings in all this? 

Human beings, and politics, are the same thing here. "Man is a political animal," et cetera. "Politics" refers to the participation of human beings in the construction of their environments, conditions, rights, prohibitions, et cetera. The conditions of their lives. This holds true regardless of the political system. And since "politics" reeks of human flesh, Bratton prefers "governance," specifically "in the kind of positive Foucauldian sense of the capacity for systems to enforce themselves." 

Look. I read three or four of the guy's books. I'm not a Foucault expert. But I know the basics of what he was doing. I'm not aware of any positive political theory of Foucault's, but if it properly emerges from the negative critical position, it's difficult to believe that Foucault hailed systems' self-enforcing properties as a positive! And if he did, it's hard to tell what that even means (what "system" doesn't "enforce itself"...if a system is exogenously enforced, you have a totally formal infinite regress, et cetera)--except that it simply is meant to indicate that Bratton has come upon something plausibly headed under the aegis of "politics" that properly meets his criteria of being anthropophobic, abstract and nonexistent, and functionally apolitical. How else could politics, other than by being already abstracted from their actual content, accommodate the demands implied by the following critique (by far the most tendentious in the piece):

Our approach is in contrast to Extinction Rebellion, or other kinds of more aesthetic approaches. These groups hold that there first needs to be a psychological transformation, which then becomes a cultural transformation, then a political one, then economic, then finally technical. In that view, eventually, the atmosphere gets changed as a reflection of our inner moral state. This chain of relays down the line presumes a tremendous degree of subjective agency for human legal systems.

Well, I'm no Extinction Rebellion stan. But the sort of the thing that they do is precisely the kind of thing that is required--causally necessary--for any change in political will to emerge successfully. I am going to guess that a lot of previously nonexistent political will would need to be shored up in preparation for preparations for the Big Terraform. His analysis of how Extinction Rebellion or any other activist or advocacy group works is nonsense: these things don't happen in the kind of rigid, clunky order that it proved polemically convenient for Bratton to impute to them. Nobody believes that "the atmosphere gets changed as a reflection of our inner moral sense." We believe that the atmosphere gets changed as a reflection of our outer show of mass political power. 

And yes, very good: "human" (?) legal systems themselves do not possess subjective agency. But the people inside of them do! And those types of people are the people for whom the option is to ignore you, at best laugh at you; or, in the face of mass antagonistic political power, bend to the people's will. Sustaining the delusion that politics (in the form of mass human organizing power and its ability to force change) simply does not exist and in fact need not exist is precisely what keeps Bratton's admittedly impressive, beautiful idea right where it is: In the Arts Department. How much more of an "aesthetic approach" can you get?