[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="235"] Berlinde

De Bruyckere, PXIII, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, Tasmania,
Australia[/caption]

Alexander Wilson's  paper 'What Aesthetics Tells us About Posthumans' (WA)  provides a
synopsis of a challenging account of aesthetics developed at greater length in his new book
Aesthesis and Perceptronium (AP). This is nothing less than an aesthetics generalized beyond
the human phenomenology cited in philosophies of aesthetic judgement. I'm currently
working through AP, so the following remarks about this wider account and its relevance to
Speculative Posthumanism should be treated as tentative reflections.

The question asked by AP and AW is: what are the minimal (or most general) conditions for
aesthetic experience, not necessarily human aesthetic experience? By 'aesthetic experience'
Wilson does not only refer to experiences that prompt judgements of aesthetic value among
optimally placed humans (e.g. according theories of the beauty or other forms of aesthetic
validity). This is because judgements of aesthetic value can be treated as species of a wider
genre of indistinct cognitions, discussed in the work of early moderns such as Baumgarten
and Leibniz, but also in the work of later thinkers such as Kant, Husserl, James, Heidegger,
Derrida, Wittgenstein, Lyotard and Deleuze, to name but a few.

Following Leibniz, the spectrum distinct/confused should be distinguished from that running
from clear to obscure ideas. The clear/obscure spectrum refers to the subjective conditions of
cognition - that is, to the precision or lack of ambiguity with which a given cognitive state
refers to or picks out its object. The other distinguishes objects whose nature is such that they
can be adequately represented with finite sequences of distinct marks (syntactically discrete
representations) and those whose adequate representation is always approximate and thus
potentially infinite.

What we call - following Kant - 'Judgments of taste' or aesthetic worth are examples of such
confused cognitions since,  even if we allow that our aesthetic judgements are generally clear
(reliably distinguish aesthetically worthy things), there are no explicatable criteria for beauty
or other aesthetic desiderata. Or as Leibniz puts it in 'Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and
Ideas':

we see that painters and other artists correctly know [cognosco] what is done properly and
what is done poorly, though they are often unable to explain their judgments and reply to
questioning by saying that the things that displease them lack an unknown something. But a
distinct notion is like the notion an assayer has of gold, that is, a notion connected with marks
and tests sufficient to distinguish a thing from all other similar bodies.

However, this condition of indistinctness plausibly generalizes beyond the aesthetic

(narrowly conceived) to many or most objects of phenomenal consciousness. We distinguish
phenomenal differences along a colour or pitch spectrum while often having only the crudest
explicit concepts to express these differences. That is, the number of phenomenal states that
we can reliably discriminate outruns the number we can 'apperceive' under introspective
concepts that pick out tokens of the same phenomenal type at different times. As Thomas
Metzinger explains it, such states may be attentionally available or play a refined role in
motor control without being conceptually available in ways that could ‘transport them out of
the specious present’ (Metzinger 2005, 82; Roden 2019a, 521).

What we might - question beggingly - refer to with the philosophical term of art 'qualia' are
just the states of mind whose phenomenology is (in my terms) 'dark' (Roden 2013; 2014, Ch
4). Having them as ‘subjective’ states, responding appropriately to them, responding
differentially to them, etc. does not entail a conceptual understanding of their nature or
identity conditions.

As Wilson goes on to argue at some length in his book, this already generalizes aesthetics to
an inquiry into those conditions of knowledge and cognition that are in some way
undecidable or that resist precise explication by the cognizer. It is thus far from being an
enquiry into some epistemically self-intimating given but - in an elegant segue between
Quine's naturalized epistemology, Jamesian radical empiricism and the poststructuralism of
Deleuze and Derrida - a speculative enquiry into those boundary conditions of thought that
cannot be explicitly thought (AP, 47-50).

Indeed, it is important that this speculative concept of aesthetics does not eschew some kind
of naturalization: that is, the use of formal or scientific models of nature and mind as tools for
exploring the indistinction of the aesthetic at a more abstract level. This is where Wilson's
account cuts across the theory of posthumanity as disconnection developed in Posthuman
Life. For just as disconnection requires a model of agency that generalizes beyond (say)
intentionalist concepts of agency or rational subjectivity (Roden 2014, Ch6), so a generalized
aesthetics cannot rest with a parochial human-centred discourse on consciousness that (given
phenomenological darkness) is at best an partial and thus highly fallible account of
experience in general. If our phenomenology is dark, phenomenological discourse does not
tell us what phenomenology is and thus provides an inadequate groundwork for aesthetics in
the wide sense proposed by Wilson.

Since the aesthetic is that part of our cognition that exceeds apperception, the aesthetician is
better advised to abstract from actual phenomenology and consider - as Wilson does - the
relation between indistinction and distinction within cognitive agents in general. Wilson
achieves this by relating Leibniz's procedural account of indistinction (that which resist finite
expression) to current computational accounts of embodied cognition and predictive
processing in a way that allows him to generalize aesthesis beyond the human to any living
system.

Here, he exploits the idea of a 'markov blanket' used in Karl Friston's Free Energy
interpretation of the predictive processing model of cognition. A markov blanket is a set of
causally interconnected states which comprise the internal milieu of a living system such as a
singled cell bacterium or an animal. It includes internal states ('the  beliefs' which influence
actions); action states that influence external states in the world outside the blanket, while the
external states influence perceptions that influence internal states/beliefs, giving rise, as
Friston puts it, to a 'circular causality', a continuous sampling of the environment which
results (given the assumption of ergodicity) in it tending (on average) to occupy regions of
the blanket’s state space that are the most probable for the system (Friston 2016). Wilson puts
this nicely where he writes that the living system can be interpreted as a cognitive agent
which tends to maximise the evidence that it exists or is differentiated from its environment.

Otherwise put, the system’s action will tend to minimise (act as an upper bound on) the
'surprise' associated with representational states, keeping it within ‘physiological bounds’.
Interestingly, the markov formulation provides a way of identifying the phenotype of a given
creature with the surprisal associated with given environmental states relative to the kind of
creature that you are (Hohwy 2013, 52).

Wilson’s crucial move, then, is to use this model to provide an operational account of
indistinctness in terms of the distinction between states that tend towards maximizing
evidence of the model (cognizer’s existence) and those which are idiomatic, providing no
criteria for minimizing the surprisal associated with the organism’s internal states:

An indistinct cognition provides no such algorithm or recipe. While it is also surprising and
contrasts with our inferential model … crucially, it does not provide a finite series of
operations by which we might correct our inference in order to re-maximize our model or
boundary (AW).

In Deleuzean terms, indistinct cognitions (Wilson’s aestheta) are the surprising events which
puncture our ‘phenomenal bubble’, alerting us to the fact that something happens without
supplying organismic or conventional criteria for ‘carrying on’ (Deleuze 20014, 139).
‘Events’ are anti-normative cognitive disturbances that defy apperception or rule governed
cognition, though they can furnish material for new rules or concepts (as per Kant’s account
of reflective judgement).

This conception of the aesthetic, incidentally, comports well with the account of
improvisation in terms of idiomatic affects provided in my paper ‘Promethean and
Posthuman Freedom’. Improvisation involves fast and very refined affects that are too
idiomatic to be assigned phenomenal categories such as stereotypic emotions or feelings
(Roden 2019a, 521-22). These generate spontaneously variable, if patterned, behaviour that
has no direct representational role (they aren’t definitive of the phenotype in the sense
supported by the markov blanket conception of cognitive systems). In WA Wilson also
associates such conditions with Adorno’s concept of the ‘shudder’, which penetrates
subjectivity without conceptually subordinating its object:

Shudder may be likened to the effect of an experience that, while operational, is undecidable.
Thus, as Adorno suggests, it threatens the dissolution or dispersion of the subject. In our
terms, we might say that shudder is the operational result of an experience that provides
evidence that the Markov blanket is approaching a critical threshold, while also not
simultaneously providing any constructive means of correcting the inference such that model
evidence may be reestablished (WA).

It follows that if we define the human in terms of a typical markov blanket, the aesthetic
corresponds not to a particular kind of phenomenological description (e.g. in terms of a
refined species of pleasure) but to marginal, anti-normative states that provide no ‘decision
procedure’ whereby the flow of its dynamics undertakes a gradient descent towards minimal
surprisal. Many forms of art may induce such states, but also forms of erotic experience or
other extreme or limit experiences (Wilson cites the example of extreme sports). Thus, as I’ve
suggested elsewhere, transgressive forms of eroticism may disable hyperpriors (high level
assumptions) about expected states of the body.

While I haven’t plumbed the depths or extent of Wilson’s account of the aesthetic, I hope to
have shown that it suggests a promising operational account of aesthetic subjectivity which –
as I’ve indicated – generalizes from the human in precisely the way that a posthuman or anti-
anthropocentric account of aesthetics requires, without falling into – in my opinion – the
extravagances of panpsychism.

In WA Wilson goes onto use this model to question whether a posthuman disconnection
could ever be neat or absolute. For even if phenotypes are defined by their most probable
states (the ones that minimise surprisal) the aesthetic or limit events are atypical and thus can
overlap in principle. In particular, to understand the posthuman 'other' we must always
contaminate or extend our phase boundaries in novel, anti-normative ways (which is why the
term 'other' is best put in scare quotes ). That is, we cannot conceptualize the posthuman
adequately – e.g. by doing posthuman bioethics - other than as an
aesthetic/erotic/transgressive encounter. This is ultimately the moral impasse of speculative
posthumanism explored in Posthuman Life and later work such as Roden 2019b and Roden
(Forthcoming). It implies that any ontology of the posthuman must be considered firstly as
marker of aesthetic disturbance. Here, the formal idea of disconnection is not representational
but expressive of an aesthetic encounter with disruptive technological change.

References

Ariew, R. and Garber, D., 1989. GW Leibniz Philosophical Essays. Hackett.

Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.). London: Athlone Press.

Friston, K., 2016. ‘I am therefore I think’. In The Unconscious (pp. 127-151). Routledge.

Hohwy, J., 2013. The predictive mind. Oxford University Press.

Metzinger, T. 2004. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Roden, D., 2012. The disconnection thesis. In Singularity Hypotheses (pp. 281-298).
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Roden, D., 2013. ‘Nature's Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology’.
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 72, pp.169-188.

Roden, D., 2014. Posthuman life: Philosophy at the edge of the human. Routledge.

Roden, D., 2019a. ‘Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and
Time’. Performance Philosophy, 4(2), pp.510-527.

Roden, D., 2019b. Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia. Identities: Journal for Politics,

Gender and Culture, 16(1-2), pp.40-46.

See David Roden. Forthcoming. “Posthumanism, Critical, Speculative, Biormorphic” In The

Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Joseph
Wamburg (eds)

Wilson, A., 2019. Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation,

Cognition, and Matter. University of Minnesota Press.

Wilson, A. Forthcoming. 'What Aesthetics Tells us about Posthumans'. In The Bloomsbury

Handbook of Posthumanism, Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Joseph Wamburg (eds)
Bloomsbury Academic.