Planetary Choices
The podcast 'Planetary Choices' is created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance, located at Aarhus University, Denmark.
The concept of 'The Planetary' has gained increasing traction in almost all scientific disciplines. From physics, to litterature, to history, law and economics - planetary thinking and policy making is taking more sophisticated shapes, amounting to an emerging new paradigm.
In season 1, called "Mapping the Planetary", we map and assess the concept of the planetary, where we stand today and in which direction planetary thinking and activism may develop in the future.
With this podcast, we also intend to explore scholarly research through an alternative venue of dissemination that allows for aural intimacy, faster publishing and full open access. As each episode contributes to a larger question investigated throughout a season, every episode becomes a data point on its own, consequently making "Planetary Choices" a place of output and on-going research.
Join us and explore the big questions of our planet!
Planetary Choices
The Planet and Military Tele-Technologies—A Conversation with Ryan Bishop
In Episode 4 of Mapping the Planetary, Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Art and Politics at the University of Southampton, joins us to explain how the technological sphere increasingly shapes the geosphere of the Planet.
Bishop unpacks the concepts of poly-scalar remote sensing and the concealed dimensions of tele-technology, reflecting on how media technologies intersect with governance and military power.
How do remote sensing systems operating at multiple scales transform our relationship with the environment? In what ways might hidden tele-technologies constrain—or empower—individual and collective agency?
Academic Reference:
Ryan Bishop, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, James Quilligan; The Planet and Military Tele-Technologies—A Conversation with Ryan Bishop. Global Perspectives 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 144297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.144297
This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).
To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary
Today we're happy to welcome Ryan Bishop. Ryan is a professor of global arts and politics at the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. He has a long list of publications and research fields. Among them are critical theory, critical cultural studies, literary studies, visual culture urbanism aesthetics, critical military studies, I think of what we will talk about a lot today, visual culture, of course, is a part of it as well, institutional studies, architecture, center-perception and knowledge formation. Our theme today is how this infosphere of technology is controlling the geosphere of the planet.
Ryan Bishop (RB):Hi, thanks.
HSF:Great to have you. I'm really, really, really cool.
RB:I really appreciate the invitation. And it's great to be here to chat with both you and James.
HSF:That's wonderful. Well, let me start, Ryan. When you talk about remote sensing and tele-technologies, which reach from the skies to deep underground, they have become a hidden part of society since the Second World War. Now, that I think not many people know. But how did that happen?
RB:Well, I mean, I think it happened through a host of technological developments that were operative, many of them with military provenance that goes way back. But if you just think about the tele that resides in telecommunications, that's Greek for at a distance or far away. And so, telecommunications would include the telegraph, writing at a distance, the telephone, which is voice at a distance, right? And television, clearly, vision being able to see at a distance. So, all of these have a kind of way in which media technologies merge with governance and military power and control. So, remote sensing is just a further I mean, if we take, say, McLuhan's configuration of how telecommunications work as technological extensions of corporeal sensory capacities, then if you think about that and then extrapolate it out further, then remote sensing systems are merely a further extension of that where we remove the sensing that operates at the human corporeal or animal level and place it into a sensing device, a technological object, that is able then to determine either sound, light, movement, smell, and anything that we're able to sense as a human, we are able-- I mean, as a mammal, as a cognitive species, is then able to be placed externally to us in very specific ways. In some senses, all sensory perception is essentially at a distance. Everything comes at us, and we're able to filter it either proximately or distantly. The only real proximate senses we have are touch and smell. And touch is the one that I think is the most interesting because it's the most distributed across our entire body. Everything else is located in a particular place. So, there's touch, there's smell, there's taste. Those are proximate. Everything else is at a distance. So, sound and sight are tele. So, this then creates a kind of momentum of development that leads to the capacities to control space and time. One of the most interesting dimensions of telecommunications is the way-- and military technologies in this regard. And I would say that the US Military Department of Defense is the institution that has the most control over our understanding of physics and of metaphysics of time and space and how we manipulate those. So, a very easy way to think about it is to just articulate what we're doing right here, right now. Whereas we're at a distance, but through temporality, we're able to control that distance. So, over there, very far away, becomes right now.
HSF:I see. Yeah. So, and then this leads to a further extension of ways in which we can do tele-surveillance, data gathering, information development, and control over time and space. The way you make it-- the way what you say-- it's great that we're able to sit here, the depth of space to the embrace of synchronicity and we're able to talk across the ocean here. But it does sound as if this was created with an interest.
RB:Well, I don't think any technology is necessarily in and of itself neutral. It was-- the interest is manifold. And so, it's not just one interest, it's multiple interests. Now, the way in which those maybe coalesce and converge is of particular interest. For example, to what extent is the military an economy? To what extent is the government of any nation state separate from any events that happen anywhere in the world and how have particular wars made that the case? And so, the interest is an interest of trying to construct a-- one way of thinking about it is a self, and a self that scales up, is any bounded entity that perceives itself as potentially under threat, whether that's a community, whether that's a nation state, whether that's an individual, whether it's a community. So, this can scale from one person or one phenomenon and scale out to something as grand as the nation state or the United Nations, which is conceived in a way to protect the planet, to protect global governance.
James Quilligan (JQ):So, Ryan, this has all happened within the last, let's say, 70 years. I mean, most of the concentration in terms of the military interest in looking at this infosphere and being able to control that. And so, I think in your work, you talk about how there's been a build out of these tele-technologies and remote sensing since that point. And could you talk a little bit about also, how it's been affecting people's identity and the impact on our security and control as individuals?
RB:Yeah, there has been a kind of momentum to it. It's something that Heidegger kind of formulated under the notion of technicity. And technicity is where technologies begin to have a momentum that builds on their own. One way to think about this would be to think about the technology of chemical treatments of illness. If you've ever been around anybody who's been ill for a long time, they start off with just a few bottles of pills. And then those grow exponentially because each pill has a side effect. And so, what do you do? You add more pills to that to counter those side effects. But what happens is a proliferation of side effects. Same thing happens with technologies. So, technologies become increasingly a way of understanding. And they begin to build and have a momentum of their own and then get deployed as a way of trying to protect the self, as keeping everything at a distance. Some of this, when you begin to-- in the question that you just provided here, gets to the notion of what is the self when you're talking about identity? And how do we understand the self? Another technology that I think is incredibly important to the way we think about this, imagine this, and constitute it is the technology of language. And those languages, teach us to think about agency in a particular way. And certainly, in English, less so, for Hagen in German, but in English, there's a subject, verb, object engagement. Whereas we believe-- and I think all of the technologies that we have on the agenda for today are just reconfigurations of this, where the subject is abled through the verb, through the medium, to-- is able to reach out and control and manipulate an object in a particular way, and to do so, without necessarily having that come back onto the subject. So, that the subject is separate from the object, as opposed to understanding the subject as co-constitutive of the object through the verbs in which we engage the world. So, for many people, that's not a way of thinking about politics. But I think it is a very basic-- I have a real knack for the glaringly obvious. I think it's a very basic insight as to how we begin to think about the self as an agent, and how we constitute agency. And where does agency come from? And where do we have it? And where does it rebound on us? And where does it not? Because one of the things that happens, particularly in the last 70 years, as you were alluding to, James, starting with World War II, but going back before that, I would say maybe back to the US Civil War, and maybe the Napoleonic Wars as well, is this idea of control from a central site that is agential, but not necessarily involved directly with anything that is going on. And with the developments, post-World War II into the present is an intensification of our capacity to do things increasingly at a distance. And maybe the longbow is the earliest version of this. As a kind of weapon of technology that allows us to kill and control from far away without imperiling us. That's what aerial bombing is. That's what drones are. Each one is just an intensification of controlling others at a distance and not getting our fingers bloodied or muddied in the process. And initially, in the lore and ways of thinking about warfare, it was considered cowardly to kill at a distance. And we have subsequently decided as societies, as nation states, as all kinds of other organizations, it's good to be a coward because you don't get killed. But it then intensifies this capacity to do so, in a way that means we're able to just turn off the television. We're able to click away. We're able to look away. It's nothing to do with us.
HSF:Yeah. Wow. Well, thanks for these-- that already sets quite the framework. I would like to dig deeper a little bit into one of the essays that you wrote. Maybe then to drill into that example and then illustrate a little bit the broader frameworks that are fascinating and have such humongous consequences. Every time I read or now have the ability to talk to you, I'm blown away by the consequences of language, of the seemingly innocent beginnings of computing or communication, and how that is taken to a whole different level of security thinking and threatening and even killing. But you've written this essay about a naval destroyer where you compare a naval destroyer to USS Zumwalt, if that's the right way of saying it, with a global environmental tracking system that was offered by a nonprofit called Planetary Skin Institute.
RB:Yes.
HSF:Fascinating name.
RB:Yeah.
HSF:Now, and then you say that these two systems weave into the world and change people's engagements with them. So, I'd love you to elaborate a little about this phenomenon and what does it do to our agency as subjects.
RB:Yeah, well, I mean, I should maybe contextualize a little bit of this research. Well, a lot of this research and place it within the domain of a research group that I was involved with through the new school, but primarily through the University of California San Diego and the Winchester School of Art. And this is where I currently work. And it was a group of researchers that included me, Jussi Parikka, who's now a colleague of yours, Hagen, at Aarhus, Jordan Crandall, who's an artist, Benjamin Bratton, who's written a very influential book called The Stack, and Ed Keller, who was at the New School. And we were looking at a series of ways of thinking about computation, universal computation, global computation, what it allows us to do, how that then links to autonomous remote sensing systems, how that in turn relates to robotics and other issues. The book that Ben wrote called The Stack is he argues that there are layers of platforms that work autonomously but interact in ways that they don't intend to operate with. And that new political formulations emerge out of this. Ben kind of approached this from a position of design and trying to think about how can we begin to correct some of these things. I kind of wanted to take it in another direction and inflect it through sort of a rethinking of political philosophy and the positioning of selves within this and the harm that might be generated intentionally or unintentionally to the self from the notion of the self that I think is an illusion that we wish to perpetuate at all stages. So, to return to those two systems, one is essentially a state of the art, a naval destroyer that is a completely bounded entity. All of its capacities to see, to hear, to sense, to engage the world in terms of surveillance or conflict or just merely navigating through the waters is done via tele-technologies. This is an extension that continues from some earlier work that I had done about helicopters with my colleague, John Phillips, where the pilots in fighter helicopters and Apache attack helicopters, their helmets are almost completely sealed up and everything that they have is mixed reality enhanced. And so, they're getting computational information in real time through all of this input data gathering, much of it from remote sensing systems. So, the Zumwalt exists completely through its capacity to mobilize, to utilize and to act upon. And again, a lot of this is a key about taking the moment of our perception and being able to act on it and trying to collapse that temporal gap between perception and action is part of what's operative within a military technological standpoint. But if you think instead about the global echo tracking system that one sees in something like the Planetary Skin Institute, which operates for the most altruistic of reasons to link NGOs to, to, and for people to identify areas of risk that could be perhaps avoided to monitor environmental crises, to understand the state of agriculture in certain areas. These seem like almost completely antithetical formulations, but they all rely on exactly the same polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems and tele-technological capacities of tele-surveillance data gathering, being able to, being able to hoover up information and act upon it in as rapid a speed as possible. And so, in that kind of a situation, one of the things that I wanted to do in that particular essay was to say, well, what do those two systems which seem completely antithetical to one another, what do they share in common other than the technologies? And one of them is a belief in the agency of the self, a belief in that subject acting on the world and being able to do something that controls events that are far away, in a way that is either for the common good, but the military believes it's acting for the common good. So, both are acting for what they believe to be entities that are perhaps threatened by the information that is being gained and that is being gathered while perhaps being concerned about the wellbeing of others and in other cases, not necessarily. So, in thinking about this, I started to think about what does, what are the roots of autonomous? If you take them and you take that and say the autos and the nomos. So, the autos is the self and the nomos is the law.
HSF:The law.
RB:Yeah, and so, if we think about that, I mean, you think about Schmidt, the nomos of the earth, et cetera, right? Then the autonomous thing that enters into this is we have made extensions of ourselves to act as proxies for ourselves, operative in the world in particular ways. So, what does that do to another term that I think is important in this? And that is the munis. The munis is the community that we're a part of munis sits right in the middle of community as it does with communication. It is a gift of the collective and our responsibility to that gift and to that collective. And it is an important part of how we think about political philosophy. It is the verb; it is the medium that connects subjects and objects. And within that, you can think about the root of subject and object in terms of the jet. The jet is, and this also, comes up in Heidegger, is the thrownness, right? We are thrown into the world. Right, and one of the things we're thrown into is the technology of the world, the techne of the world, and the language of the world, another technology. So, a subject is something that is thrown under. So, from the very beginning, the thing that we want to ascribe agency to is already under the control of something else and is lost in the world from the beginning. And an object is something that is thrown aside. But it is also, something that is thrown forward. It stands in front of us, it engages us, and it seems to demand something of us or to offer something to us, depending on how we choose to interpret it. Right, so, that's just, maybe, so, when you begin to think about the constitution of the political subject, what are the myriad ways in which we are so, constructed? The standard way to think about it is through the media, through broadcast media, social media, information, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, all that, that is part and parcel of it. But I think there's a more fundamental element of this. And one of the ways that I like to think of it is kind of as a techno-noetics. I'm really interested in how technologies and imaginaries operate together in a loop of mutual influence and inextricability.
HSF:Thank you. James, could I just, because you mentioned poly-scaling, poly-scale sensing systems. And that seems to be a spatial description of spaces that overlap and direct, but they're not nation-states or they're not, what are poly-scale sensing systems?
RB:Poly-scaler autonomous sensing systems are systems that can scale. That's the poly-scaler. Right. And so, they can be very localized, or they can be very wide-reaching. So, if you think of something like, something that I was quite interested in some time ago called smart dust, and that was remote sensing at the cubic millimeter. And that's quite a phenomenal little thing, right? And so, what you would do is you would dust all of that. And then that linked up with kind of NGO and then corporate engagement with it, with a thing called the central nervous system of the earth, which made infrastructure intelligent and sensate. But what you did with that, and this links to a military strategy of swarming, is you could do a dust of the smart dust, you can do a dusting, but you could do it from the bottom of the ocean, in theory, up into near space. And this capacity then would allow the information, the software that feeds the sensing system to sense certain sorts of things. This is the difference between aesthesis which is just raw perception, and aesthetics, which is perception with a judgment. So, another way of thinking about it is noise and signal, right? So, you're picking up all this noise from the world, but each time you have to get, you have to challenge, you have to train the sensing system, human or machine, to be able to determine what's a signal and what's a noise. So, you can scale up and down, in theory, localize universal. So, those are polyscalar, autonomous, remote sensing systems, and they are often controlled by nation-states, but they're also, controlled by international corporations, which have long been a challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state. But all of this is, to my mind, a challenge to one of our most vaunted and cherished ideas in the West, which is the sovereign subject, as agent, as individual.
HSF:Yeah, yeah.
JQ:Most people don't have much sense of this. At least they're not aware of it in the way that you're speaking of it.
RB:Yeah.
JQ:And I wonder if you could comment on that in terms of what you see is the lag between the understanding of all this for the average person and the reality of what is actually taking place at the level you're talking about and in the depth that you're talking about. Because right there is a huge area of cognitive dissonance where people are really not, people are getting the cues from the tele-technologies and the remote sensing, and we're living in that environment. And yet at the same time, we don't necessarily recognize it in terms of the broader implications that you're discussing. Could you comment on that?
RB:Yes.
JQ:And what it does, how it affects people.
RB:Oh, okay. Well, okay, there are multiple ways to approach that, but one basic thing to perhaps underscore is that technology is a lot like ideology or the body. All three of those work best when they don't seem to be working at all. When we're only really aware of our bodies if something goes awry or something goes really well, like we have a nice romantic relationship or something. Something has to take us out of the norm, but the body seems to work best when we're the least aware that we have it, that we're not aware of it. We have it, that it just kind of continues. Technology is the same way. Ideology is exactly the same way. And the one way to think about answering that question that you've just posed, James, is to think about it in terms of the relationship between technology and ideology. We're not rewarded necessarily for asking very much about how anything that arrives in our sphere, how it arrives. We don't really want to know that much about how we were able to turn the lights on. We don't want to think about the extractive industries that make that possible. Certainly, we don't want to know about the rare earth minerals that's in this, right? That we all want to have, that we all feel is necessary. We just feel that it is part of who we are as a person. But as we know, it's the cause of civil war, corporate greed, mercenary groups, and civil unrest in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, we, similarly, I mean, I actually have on a fairly expensive sweater right now. Usually it's something quite cheap, but we don't want to think about how come I can buy a T-shirt for two pounds, a discount store. How is it possible for something to travel that's made halfway around the world, travel here and I'm able to get it for two pounds? What are the conditions that make that possible? Most of what we do on a quotidian basis is just trying to make the rent, pay for the house, worry about the cost of groceries as Trump was underlining in his run for another term. Is this idea of what do we get rewarded for paying attention to? What are we implicated in? And what is too painful for us to understand our enmeshment in it? And so, I think that's part of the gap. That's part of the operation. Some of it is too painful. Some, we cannot grip completely the horrors of the world present, past and future. We would not be able to function as cognitive entities. But getting glimmers of it is useful for a refinement, and perhaps of where we do have some agency and where we do perhaps have some responsibility.
HSF:Now I feel a little bleak, but.
RB:That's my happy thought for today.
HSF:That's your happy thought for today. No, but of course you're right. I mean, to take it that far, to think, I love how you break it down to individual, to ideas about the self and identity, and how we then engage in community and create a community integrating technology into this building of a community, which if we blow this up, and since this is called planetary choices, and all of these technologies, and what you also, describe as a tension, I guess, about controlling this technology, centuries old struggle between these transnational corporations, if you wish, or the tech giants, and the interest of nation states supposedly representing us as individuals in a representative form. How do you think this technology, as it is right now, is already impacting the governance of our planet? And how do you think this may evolve in the near future?
RB:Well, I mean, I think it goes, I think Bernard Stiegler wrote about it, and certainly, Kittler wrote about it in terms of communication systems, discourse network. So, I think these are long-standing concerns about how the nation state is organized, and how any ruling entity is organized. So, I think if we are to, kind of bring it back to the idea of agency and control, that's where so much of this emerges, because we want a represent, in a way, the governance that we have in a representative system, in a representational system, is us, is us, it's ours. We have chosen all of this. Everything that exists right now is something that we, as a collective species, have chosen. But at the same time, ontologically and existentially, we've been thrown into it. So, an important part of that is to think a little bit about what is our inheritance, individually and collectively, in any given moment. Governance has long had a relationship to forms of technology. So, I mean, whether it's the technology of writing, whether it's the technology of language, whether it's the technology of representation, whether it's a connection to the metaphysical relationships that humans have with the gods or God, or with anything. Governance has always been in a position of having to be a medium that operates between a number of different domains and a number of different spheres. So, governance, in and of itself, has a kind of fictional function as a sovereignty that is but a checking point and a lever of multiple medial influences and technological influences in a very basic way.
HSF:But where do you see this going?
RB:Where do I see it going? Right. That would be— Well, I think when push comes to shove, it's going to be bad news for the little person. Now, it's just an old joke. I think that much of it is going to be more of the same. OK. We've known about climate crises for a very long time. And it was only-- there's a very good book about this by Paul Edwards called A Vast Machine, where he talks about universal computation as a means for us to really get a hold of climate crisis in a way that brought it to bear in the way that we understand it now. But if you go back and look at writings from the 1950s and the 1960s, people like Buckminster Fuller, a number of people were well aware. And certainly, somebody like Gregory Bateson, who had been involved with the Macy conferences, and the birth of cybernetics, and Robert Wiener, of course, and Claude Shannon, all the people who are architects of our contemporary telecommunications and data systems and our economies and our governance, they were well aware of the environmental impact of all of these things. And if we think about systems theory, systems theory comes from biology. It's a 1930s configuration of understanding the planet as a set of systems that operate together, and that there is a kind of, perhaps, homeostatic element to it, a self-correcting element that operates within it. And so, that sort of knowledge we've had-- and has been at the forefront of scientific, technological innovation, development, iterations, all of it continually being cast under a teleology of progress. And that's where we constantly go. But of course, we have a schizophrenic relationship to time. The future is always going to be better, but it's never going to be as good as the good old days. And so, we're always caught in these multiple temporalities, and yet we're also, completely ensnared in the quotidian.
HSF:Yeah, I'm asking also, because I'm personally blown away by quantum computing and what it can do. And if I take this new technology and see what it can do to remote sensing systems, can it be even faster, even more data, even though maybe it's just me, but I imagine that the world you describe will have a very dynamic, and I'd say, development.
RB:Yeah, I mean, I think increased speed, if you wanted to go, say, to the writings of Paul Virilio. And Virilio talks about dromology. And dromology is a way of understanding developments globally, universally, but primarily in the West, as one of increasing acceleration.
HSF:Yeah.
RB:And that leads to the establishment of cities. It leads to politics as buck speed in politics, for example. Everything is built on this idea of acceleration as an unquestioned good. So—
JQ:You—
RB:Sorry, James. So, everything that you were just outlining there, Hagen, is just another iteration of this intensification. It's a repetition with a raising of the stakes.
HSF:Yeah.
JQ:You brought up the question of the environment. And in some of your writing, you've pointed out the real dilemma that we have been in, in terms of these technologies that you're describing. And the dilemma has to do with the form of governance that our sovereign national states are providing right now. So, the social contract is based on the security that the state provides to the citizens. And in return, the citizens give their power to have sovereignty to the national governments.
RB:Yeah.
JQ:And that's been the social contract. And most people are vaguely aware that something like that exists. And yet, at the same time, the sovereign state is getting involved in the military technology, as you pointed out, that constitutes a kind of threat to the average person in terms of the destructive power that it has, even though the individual doesn't necessarily experience that. But that power does exist out there. We're aware of it. And as you said earlier, it constitutes a kind of understanding that there is killing that takes place from a distance. But it's sanitized. Because we don't get our hands dirty, and we don't have a draft, we're not going to war. Therefore, it doesn't affect me or my family or anyone else that I know. But we're aware that this violent kind of control takes place in spite of the fact that we're not necessarily involved. So, you've mentioned in your writings that this goes beyond the social contract that has been assumed of the state offering us protection to citizens. And it comes closer to something that is more about self-destruction and even a kind of self-suicide in terms of what the results of this complex are. And I wonder if you could talk about that. There is a foreboding sense of self-destruction that has to do with the climate crisis and in its relationship to our governance and in its relationship to our technologies.
RB:Yeah. Those are all areas that are very big and very interrelated. And they do have very long histories. I mean, in terms of weapon systems and at a distance, if you remember during moments of concerns under the War on Terror, there was this spate of suicide bombings. And that just really scared governments because it was a way of-- asymmetrical warfare was being conducted by people sacrificing themselves in this particular way. But another way to think about that, to return to this kind of self-other subject-object relationship and what links us or not, is that we could kind of reconstitute that as thinking of all bombing is suicide bombing, that there is a way in which it does and will rebound to us. And the military has long been concerned with the notion of blowback. But we don't often think about blowback. We don't really think about any of this coming back to affect us. And this links back to the history of the establishment of Europe and North America as centers of wealth and control. And that comes out of, for example, colonialism and slave trade and a long history of inequitable, brutal relations that builds wealth and power and accrual of it that, again, we perhaps learn about. But we don't see it as related to our current existential situation. So, we have inheritances. We have histories. If you think about people who like to say, I'm fortunate to be born where I've been born, they don't really understand that fortune is the residue of design. We are in advantaged positions because it has been designed that way, and it has been made that way. And yet, we often believe it is our right. We are entitled to it. And we think of nature in this situation in the way that Heidegger would talk about it as standing reserve. The planet is there for us to benefit ourselves. And yet, in the process, we are committing-- I mean, there is that really kind of very basic level of suicide, which is the sense in which we have a biosphere that is fragile, and we need it in order to exist. So, if you think about the writings of somebody like Bernard Stiegler, he talks a lot about locals. But locals also, scale. One of the locals that we have is the biosphere. The biosphere, because we need it. And people talk about saving the planet. It's not about saving the planet, as we all know. The planet will continue. It's whether or not humans as a species can survive on the planet. That's kind of what's at stake. But also, what's at stake is our capacity and our willingness to take down any number of species along the way in order to maintain us. And these are things that operate in the popular culture sphere in speculative fiction in terms of cinema and in terms of all kinds of ways of thinking about it. So, we know these things. We imagine them. And we have the technoetics that allow us to understand the way in which they operate. But again, I think the elements to link it back to suicide that I'm kind of interested in is the idea of the self as a bounded entity. Now, whether that self is a community or a nation state or scales up in any way we want to think about it, but as a bounded, threatened thing that is a monad in a Leibnizian sort of way, separate from other entities in the world and not in any way connected to them in any kind of immunis, that's a suicide of the self. That's a felony against the self. And the self that I would like to see kind of all by the wayside is a self that believes everything that operates in that domain is a self that is essentially suicidal. That is a self-destructive way of understanding the world. Yet we have representational governments, which accrue to individuals who have individual rights, human rights. And many people thought that the US Bill of Rights meant that that was the end of the individual as a political entity. Because as soon as it gets institutionalized, it's kind of met its end in a particular way. The individual as an institutional formulation external to itself is not an individual in the sense of a sovereign subject. So, there's some interesting and weird ways in which our perpetuation of the thing that we think will sustain us is indeed the very thing that will kill us.
HSF:We'll let that sink in. But this is very well put. And I hope people can zoom back and listen to it again. I understood that. And it brought back a little bit of a maybe broader sweeping understanding. And let me ask you whether I understand you correctly here. One of my favorite historians, Reinhart Koselleck, has once written in his analysis of modernity that bourgeois society, or what we would call the West, is basically-- he called it the pathogenesis of bourgeois society. That there's this inbuilt mode of self-destruction. And the way we create time, create legitimacies over time, that then legitimate our agency. In which we constantly believe that maybe through the adding of more technology as a solution to an ongoing current crisis, we create the next level of possible self-destruction. And so, it's like we're trying to get out of the mud. But we can't. Ultimately, there is a self-destruction going on. Do I understand you correctly? That this is a little bit what you're saying, too?
RB:It's a little bit of what I'm saying. But part of what I'm saying is, yes, there is that. But I also, think it's-- and it's more complex than the way that I've been articulating it here. I don't want to be technophilic or technophobic. And nor do I want to understand technologies and media as neutral entities, because they're not. They operate with an interest, as you had underscored earlier. But it's not a bleak-- everything is doom and gloom other than the fact that we're mortal. And nobody gets out of this alive. And so, there is-- I mean, not to go Freudian death drive or anything like that. But there are different ways of articulating what's at stake with us as individuals, as communities, as a species, within the fact that we also, have mortality looming over us. And therefore, our temporality, it's very hard sometimes for us to imagine beyond our own temporal space. And this is one of the things that I think is an interesting element of kind of autocratic impulses, to be honest, is it's very hard for certain kinds of leaders to imagine a world without them. And the poetry, history books are filled with civilizations going to dust. No system of government, of governance, no system of economics has survived. Everything is temporal. And so, when we begin to understand the self and all of this as verbs and as processes, and including our own individual existences, as processes rather than as objects, as reification of the world, that there is-- that we are thrown to systemic relations with each other, that we can compound either through, say, a naturalist frame, if you think about US naturalism, American naturalism, as opposed to, say, French naturalism, in which all institutions are mere extensions of the biological failings of the body and of humans and of our psychology and our potential cravenness, as well as our capacity for good and generosity and embrace, then these have been ideas that have been percolating around for a number of centuries, and certainly since the establishment in the west of a bourgeois culture. But it did exist everywhere and in different places in different ways and has been articulated at different scales and in different modalities. But I don't see that there's this necessarily a rush, an intensification for self-destruction. But I do think it is built into those things that we have been taught as being important for us in terms of our security and our well-being.
HSF:Yeah, great. Thank you. I'd like to move-- since you talk about teaching, I've been taught to maybe talk a little bit about education as a field of what I wanted to talk about, what we wanted to talk about with you. Many of the people you mentioned, Heidegger, Stiegler, there was Leibnitz and many people I don't know and have to read up on, but some of them we do know. And you've learned about them in universities, I guess, in places of-- is it a place of free education, free learning, autonomous knowledge building? Are we doing this in these places? And I'm asking you a question here about the role of universities in all this, because you say at some point that ever since the Second World War, really, what we're doing in universities is we're turning into departments of research and development or research and development institutions. So, it's the critical thinking that we so praise merely part of an R&D industry.
RB:Yeah, I mean, this is-- OK, it's a little bit like that parable of the ship, right? There's that Greek parable where all the parts of the ship have been replaced. Is it the same ship? It carries the same name. But yet, we are all-- well, many of us who would be involved with this podcast are part of a particular institution, the university, right? Now, the university, we act in some ways as if we all know what it is, and we can all agree on what it is, and that it has been one thing through time. And that's not the case, right? Most obviously. I mean, it's important to remember in the West that there are three institutions that have survived since the Middle Ages-- the military, the church, and the university. And they're organized in similar ways. They operate in similar ways. They're hierarchically arranged. They all have a kind of cultural capital within socioeconomic formulations, et cetera. But the iteration of it is like that ship. Is it the same ship? And how has that ship changed? And one of the things that I think-- that I mean, because I have chosen to be a part of the university, and the reason why I wanted to be a part of the university, is because I liked being a student. I really liked sitting in a classroom. And so, I thought, wouldn't it be great to be able to further this, increase the circulation of pleasure that comes from sitting in a classroom or standing in front of one? And how exhilarating that might be to be able to teach, to be able to read and write and do all of these things. But then again, if you sign up for something, it's important to know what you're signing up to. So, trying to figure out what does it mean? How does it come from? How do disciplines-- and it's an interesting word, disciplines-- how do disciplines emerge? How do they shape people? How do they shape minds? What are the histories of these disciplines? How did the university and its current configuration come to pass? And one of the things that I think occurs post-World War II is something that I would call the global R&D University, which becomes a de facto model out of North America, out of a university system that was developed in very specific ways, but strategically from the early part of the 19th century into the present, as a site for the model that global universities had built themselves around, as opposed to earlier or alternative instantiations of that. Now, the US model comes out of France, and it comes out of Germany, but it gets inflected when it hits the US. One of the ways is through its bringing in of technological sciences and placing that on the par with the natural sciences and with the humanities. If you think about the trivium and the quadrivium of classical learning and the university that is formulated in the Middle Ages, it didn't include technology. It included the natural sciences, but not technological sciences. And so, when you have the establishment of something like the University of California system and the University of California Berkeley, you have a justification there of making technology an integral part of the university. And then this is continued on with Johns Hopkins, but these predate World War II. World War II brings this into a kind of focus and centralizes it, because what happens is an extended cooperation between the government, the corporate sector, and the university sector to come together, build technologies and weapons systems and mobilization. And this goes from the soft social sciences all the way through to kind of hardcore weapons systems, et cetera, as a means of a larger national agenda to achieve a particular goal, which is the defeat of the Axis forces in World War II, leading to the thing that I think has changed the world more than anything else. And that's the splitting of the atom and the dropping of nuclear bombs and anger during World War II. Because one way of thinking about this-- and this is just a little side note-- is I think in some ways, that moment is the end of a public sphere. I don't know if there is a civic sphere anymore. I think from that moment on, anybody who's born after August of 1945 was born with a target on their heads. And so, when people ask me, why am I interested in the military and military technology, I usually answer by saying it's interested in me. Not me as Ryan Bishop.
HSF:Yeah, I see your point. Yeah, sure.
RB:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Vannevar Bush led the charge under FDR and then under Truman of keeping this organization together, this cooperation. And then when the war ended, he said, we need to keep this alliance between the corporate sector, the university sector, and the government. We need to keep that advantage together because the dropping of the bomb in some ways was the end of the Second World War, but it was the first shot of the Cold War, the historical Cold War. And so, if that immediately we're moving into a new set of antagonisms and agonisms. And so, he said, the reason why World War II happened is because we had a similar alliance in World War I, but we allowed them to go back to their own domains. We need to bring them closer together. And so, Vannevar Bush writes a book called 'Science, The Endless Frontier', which was a paper that he wrote for the government, but then it was published as a commercial publication. And it becomes a justification for blue sky scientific research. And the site in which this needed to be conducted primarily was the university, but with certain kinds of corporate input and relationships with corporations. And so, to my mind, this is when the global R&D University really gets to be established. And that leads to massive investment in Western Europe, certainly in North America, in public universities, private universities, relationship of military, of governmental research. And I would say Vannevar Bush's ideal of there being multiple stakeholders with regard to blue sky research has now unfortunately been kind of narrowed. And the only place that I think it is allowed to exist is with the Department of Defense in the US. That that's the only place that can actively and consistently engage in blue sky research. It can research anything, any endeavor it wishes to pursue. It justifies it in terms of dual use. That is any research that it generates might in the future have a civilian application. So, like microwaves. Microwaves were developed for telecommunications. They were not developed to heat up our takeaway. Right? And so, all of this gets bound up in a model that then goes global. And it also, means a realignment of those disciplines that exist within the university that have more instrumental value than others. Instrumental for governance, for military, for economics. And it's very difficult to disentangle any of these spheres, any of these domains.
HSF:So, Ryan, in effect, what happens to the students is that the object of the university is to turn the students more into producers of... Or you could put it that the students are expected to become corporate workers and consumers. And so, that's another dimension of, I think, the effect that the R&D universities have had.
RB:Yes, absolutely. I mean, part of what happened post-World War II, another thing that happened that was incredibly transformative to the university system within the US, for example, was the GI Bill. The GI Bill, as we know, meant that anybody who'd served in the military would then get a free university education. That was part of this rapid explosion of people who never thought they'd have a chance to go to university, of suddenly having a chance to go to university. And that changed how disciplines operated. It also, coincided with the historical Cold War. It also, coincided with the emergence of decolonial movements and movements towards independence in large parts of the world. So, there was a very complex situation in which this institution was emerging. But there was a book by a guy named Bill Readings called 'The University in Ruins' And one of the things that he said was that under neoliberal agendas economically within the US from the 80s, to the present, was a training of corporate citizens. Because prior to that, the idea was the upper class would attend university for the most part, and that they would be trained in terms of history, literature, philosophy, a range of arts so, that they could be enlightened leaders of various endeavors within society and politics. But then the GI Bill was a way of leveling that in a particular way, but it also saw the rise of big science. It saw the rise of corporate entities as having increased power in a way that has now been dissipated in certain ways or reconfigured into other kinds of corporations. So, the university as a global R&D site is now perceived as an important and integral part of the economy that is directly instrumental as opposed to being kind of an epiphenomenon of R&D that would be going on anyway.
HSF:That's fascinating. And again, but if I translate part of what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, or maybe not, or please come in, if I translate this, it almost sounds as if parts of the university, if not all of the university sector are kind of a perpetuation of a war economy.
RB:It is, absolutely. Yeah.
HSF:So, if we were to break it down to, that's what it is. It always serves the purpose.
RB:Yeah, parts of it are, yeah.
HSF:It always serves a certain purpose. It always has some kind of higher cause, an unlimited budget, acts outside market spheres, and so, on and so, forth. And yet it then spills into marketization and the conceptualization of the citizen as a consumer.
RB:Yeah, and the student as a consumer.
HSF:And the student as a consumer.
RB:And just the student, yeah.
HSF:Yeah. Now what does that do to this? You also talked about a lot, and we talked about it today as well, about the relationship between autonomy and technology. Now does it take away agency and autonomy in a certain way? And if it does, well, what does that apply?
RB:Okay, well, I guess in the formulation of that question, what autonomy are you discussing here?
HSF:I'm talking about the subjects, or the individual subjects' autonomy.
RB:Okay, well, this was part of, I think, what emerges post-World War II, again, in a particular way, when we think about the man in the crowd, the idea of a lockstep existence, as it were. You grow up, you go to the right school. But this is all kind of related primarily to white men. You go to the right school, you study the right sort of thing, you meet the right kind of person to marry, you have 2.5 kids, you have the house in the suburbs, then you hit middle age, and you go crazy, and then the midlife crisis. And there's all this kind of stuff sort of attract existence that was so, much a part of post-World War II fiction, cinema, arts. The idea of autonomy was always something that was at stake with all kinds of developments of economic systems. Where does autonomy exist? Did a feudal peasant actually have more latitude, leeway, and choice than somebody who has to get into the Buick and drive to the corporate headquarters every day? So, where is autonomy and where does agency reside? And I've always thought that autonomy is kind of an illusion.
HSF:Yeah, that makes it kind of difficult to imagine a democracy.
RB:It makes it difficult to imagine a democracy and it makes it difficult to imagine agency. I mean, we all like to believe in agency and it's important for us to understand that we have individual responsibility. But then at the same time, where do we have individual responsibility? How does it operate? What is in a consumer society, you are a good citizen by consuming. You are most realizing your own self as a subject, as a unique individual, because I have the same clothes as everybody else, right? I get to wear the same sneakers. I get to carry the same phone, and boy, does that make me special and different. The same as millions of others. So, I mean, there are lots of ways to think about that, but part of it is this formulation and a fictionalization of the subject that gets written into something like the Bill of Rights as the individual citizen. But that glorification of the individual is also, an important part of a sociological analysis that was operative post the 1930s, because there is a big fear of the crowd. There is a big fear of fashion. There is a concern about groupthink and what happens with groupthink. So, we're always, again, if you think about the Greeks, the Greeks were really fascinated with the question of the one and the many. How does the one become the many? How does the many become the one? And I think we're we still are trying to sort that out. How do the many elements constitute a one that is sitting here right now? The three of us, we're all ones that are constituted of all these millions of manys that biochemically inhabit us and create us in the process. But we're always in this position of where is the one, where is the many, and where do we become isolated? Where do we become alienated? That's another important part of modernity. And then post-modernity is being perhaps rooted in too many different places. So, where are we? And this then becomes a very important set of concerns for those things that we value and all of which are under question at all times and always have been. In terms of institutions, in terms of organizations, in terms of anything. These have always been up for grabs. Yet we'd like to think of them as stolid and existing for all time and space because we value reification.
JQ:I think the question of the R&D University is interesting because it does promote a kind of, I mean indirectly it promotes a kind of war footing that we're still engaged in, even though we may not be completely conscious of it. And that takes us back to where you started with our conversation here about the very technologies that you were describing and how they are affecting us. And they didn't just come out of the blue. They were instrumentally accelerated after, as you say, after the Second World War. And the universities definitely helped to aid in that process and catalyze it. So, I think that's a very important point to make. And lastly, your comment about the one and the many. And the one or the many and the many are one, I think is really crucial to this moment in our reflection of the politics that's taking place, the economics and the politics that are taking place in the world today. Because those questions loom large over all the recent developments that were involved in now, including the environment.
RB:So, I mean, the idea that somehow it is interesting, not necessarily just to always return to a U.S. centric base, but a lot of my research kind of comes out of that, is that it's interesting that the U.S. populace likes to think of itself as a peaceful people, even though there's rampant gun violence. But all you have to do is look at the history of warfare. I mean, it's quite shocking to think about the large-scale technological systems and weapon systems that are at play. And for people to think of that as very far away. It's not very far away. We've just come out of one of the longest wars in our history, our engagement in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And so, that's for many people, I mean, the development of military technology is also, exponentially, the development of medical technology. We blow up bodies, but we also, need a medical technology to put them back together. And the rise of prosthesis of all kinds, and in fact, our remote sensing systems are prosthetic devices. So, the prosthesis, like the phantom limb of the body politic, is something that I think is incredibly important to think about, because the war in Iraq comes home. People who wouldn't have survived the kinds of explosions they survived, that they're able to survive now through medical technology are home. They're in homes. They're in institutions, but they're parts of families. It's a very visceral element of, I think, a discontent that exists within the US. But I think it goes back to maybe that moment of World War I, where we had a number of different ideas about the power of technology to liberate us from nature, that we could turn nature to our own advantage, that we had self-determined governments, that we had economic systems that weren't reliant upon birthright as ways to change one's lot in life. But with World War I, those three major trajectories for us to understand the potential for individual growth and collective progress were used by the self-determined governments to send the people to die in numbers that they had never died in previously, and with massive profits for corporations. So, we talk a lot about World War II as a consolidation, but I like the work that I've done with John Beck. A lot of it is about what we call the long Cold War, that there is the Cold War, which is historical, but the longer trajectory of that, the longer tail of that, is a set of systems, techniques of thought, modes of being in the world, ways of organizing governance, ways of creating economic systems that funnel into and formulate the historical Cold War and then comes out and continues into the present. I don't think we have left the Cold War, and I don't mean the historical Cold War of just the US versus the Soviet Union, but the way in which we created a globe that reflects that, and we created proxies everywhere. The idea of the Cold War was to keep it cold because if it got hot, it would get very hot indeed, and we didn't want that. And so, we had proxies, we had ways of having stand-ins, we did a whole range of things, and we still do it in the contemporary moment.
HSF:James, if I may go on, I'd steal one of your main interests to ask Ryan another question and maybe go to a final field of conversation. Much of the discussion about the planetary is connected to a notion of the Anthropocene.
RB:Right.
HSF:In this interview that you have with Daniel Ross, there's a talk about how you twist that term to the entropocene. Now, that's an interesting spin on the, of course, the Anthropocene is a critical perception of human impact on the system of the planet, but when you talk about the entropocene, it just brings in something very different to the whole perception of the planetary. If we replace Anthropocene with entropocene, it has a very different connection. So, I would like you to elaborate on that thought and on that term.
RB:Yeah, I mean, well, that's not, that's a term that Bernard Stiegler used.
HSF:Yes, yes, I should have said that, sorry.
RB:It's not from me. But Bernard also, got that from some earlier writings in the 1920s, this idea of once we began to understand the second law of thermodynamics, what were the ramifications of it and what were the implications. But Bernard's thought coincides with, and Dan Ross is a phenomenal translator of Stiegler and a terrific interpreter of Stiegler's work. I mean, he's top notch, he's really, really good and helped me understand large chunks of Bernard's work that I hadn't engaged previously. So, tip of the hat to Dan. But the Anthropocene in this way and the way that Bernard begins to talk about it is a way of imagining communities and that it is about the conversion of the biosphere into the technosphere and then into the infosphere. And what are the ramifications of this? Some of this aligns with a universal computation system that has operated in particular ways and creates another kind of entropy. And part of what he was, that Bernard was really interested in, was the narrowing of possibilities, the narrowing of horizons that exist, that people believe that they feel that they have access to in, say, the last 70 years or so. That all the possibilities are getting stripped away. That our horizons are becoming increasingly predetermined. That they are calculated out for a kind of control that moves from the battlefield to the social domain. But that process is age old, certainly with regard to, say, colonial power. People like to think about colonized sites as somehow, you know, in terms of the progress of humanity as somehow past kinds of things, right, to go out there on the civilizing mission to civilize the primitives. But they were actually sites of future engagement because they were sites of experimentation. And if things worked there to control populations and societies for particular strategic instrumental reasons, they were then brought back to the cosmopolitan center and applied there. So, what we have here is different iterations and re-articulations of the same sort of thing. And that is a narrowing of power into the hands of the few to control the many. But that's a really simplistic way of thinking about it. But in a way, it is this constant consolidation of power in certain ways. And that various complex systems perpetuate that kind of model. So, what happens to the citizenry? What happens to the society? What happens to the munus? And it is this loss of energy. It is a loss of taking advantage of the power that exists within humans and within imaginaries to change their position. So, this is the flip side of what we were talking about before, this kind of, you know, endless death drive of technological development is a way of thinking about, well, how can we reformulate institutions? How can we think about critically constructive ways of reconstituting governance? How can economic systems not necessarily be built on a zero-sum gain kind of way of articulating these kinds of things? What is it that we need as a species and as communities in order to live well? Is it important for us to live well in the sense of having the good life in the ancient sense, which means that, you know, it's not about material goods. It's about immaterial values and beliefs and knowing that our neighbor is not hungry and knowing that our neighbor is not in fear and knowing that our neighbor, wherever that is in the locale of our biosphere, and no matter what that neighbor is, whether it's a plant or whether it's a riverbed or whatever it is, is that its well-being is directly proportional to our own well-being. That these are necessary ways of existing in the world that isn't this bounded entity, to kind of wrap some things up here, that moves through the world in this autonomous fashion. So, that's part of what Bernard's thinking was about, and it's very complex out of the history of philosophy, but he also, did a lot of organizational work around labor and around communities and institutional building, cooperating with the French government, cooperating with museums, cooperating with corporations, to work with areas where people are underrepresented, kind of tucked away, not part of the larger trajectory. And that, as we know, is part of what gives rise to the right-wing populism that exists today, this kind of revenge and this nationalism that becomes prey to autocratic sorts of leaders because people see a simple solution to a complex problem. So, that's that kind of so, it's about how, and part of what I write about, as you and I have discussed in the past, Hagen, is how to make the planet a globe. That's a lot of what a lot of the technological systems that I look at are trying to achieve. And the planetary gets set up as this kind of touchy-feely, wonderful antithesis of that. But I think both are very complex, and both can be badly simplified and detrimentally simplified. So, it, but it is another way of returning to kind of thinking about systems and interrelatedness, media relations, middle voice, and the grammars in which the subject and the object are necessary to are bound by a verb that links them but also, creates them in the process of its action, if that makes sense.
HSF:Yeah. James, do you want to come in on this? And sorry for first for stealing the second law here, which is, I know that James has been thinking about this for many, many years. It's been so, inspirational to his own work. So, I feel bad for taking that question. But I, you know, you should read James's piece on 'Who pays back the earth', which is much, you know, a reflection also, on these thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. But James.
JQ:Yeah, it's, I'll be very brief. It's so, the second law talked about the dispersion of heat waste.
RB:Yes.
JQ:And the idea that the Anthropocene ought to be called the Entropocene is based on the idea that the, if the planet has, if the human impact on the planet has created a new kind of narrative, and, and if we could define it in all the different fields in physics and chemistry and biology, what does, what does that mean? And what does it look like? And the idea that the Entropocene is maybe a better word than the Anthropocene has to do with the narrative that we've been building for the last 500 years, let's say.
RB:Yes.
JQ:Which has created the crises of carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity, which are directly related to entropy.
RB:Absolutely.
JQ:And that's, that's the point I think that Hagen was inducing for me on this. But I do think that I do think that it's, it's a very good field to look at for creating social policy that reduces entropy, or, and it provides us a way of living in a world where we have to take entropy, very, very seriously. And yeah, that's it in a nutshell.
RB:Yeah, and that's very much in the terrain that Stiegler was working in. And I'm in complete agreement because the, again, one of the things that is completely compelling for me is that profound relationship between material bases and immaterial imaginaries and ways of conceptualizing and reconceptualizing based on that, that important dynamic. And as you were talking about over the last years, this loss of biodiversity, this loss of heat, this loss of biochemical engagement with the environment or reconfiguration of it is profound. And it should have huge policy implications, but we tend to have instead that that extractive, agential role, which says this is there for us to do with as we wish, drill baby drill.
HSF:And this, sorry to end on a sad note, but I think time is slowly up.
RB:And I really want it to be a much, I hope that there's a sense of nuance and complexity that's operative across all of this that you're obviously both deeply aware of, and how we begin to think about governance and policy. Out of this, I think is key, but the planetary, I think, does offer a kind of alternative model to the global, but it also, risks being turned into a simplistic engagement. And there are ways. So, for example, as James was articulating, the Entropocene is a much more nuanced and complex way of thinking about the Anthropocene, perhaps. And so, I think that we need to, these are not easy, easily answerable things. And some of it is just basic to basically an element of our existential conditions. And the epistemologies that we generate out of those is where we might be able to have some leeway and where we might have some agency that would be worthy of the term.
HSF:Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Ryan Bishop for this truly, truly fascinating discussion. I mean, from individual grammar use and different language traditions to smart dust that can rise from the ocean beds to the skies and military warships and Leibnitz. And you've taken us on a ride and definitely shown us how planetary study requires new narratives in many areas, including epistemology and the governance that is related to epistemology. I think it's very important that we highlight that the knowledge that we create or the knowledge through which we see the world and create the world is not something that we as university scholars or as university people do for our own sake. But as you also, pointed out, it's very, very tightly connected to the creation of governance systems and the way we move in this. So, with this, we invite our audience to the next iterations of this wonderful podcast that James and I and the whole Center for New Critical Politics and Governance is working on. And I'll be talking with Christian Dubois-Gillard and your former colleague, Jussi, who's now my new colleague here in the very near future.
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