The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Edges 141
If Latour gives us a paradoxically anthropomorphic version of the
nonhuman, then Jean - François Lyotard gives us the opposite: the abso -
lute limit of the human, a quantum, even cosmic, nonhuman. Lyo -
tard prefers the term “inhuman,” but we detect the same debate in
his later writings. Lyotard suggests that one does not need to theorize
the nonhuman, for a process of “dehumanization” has already been
taking place for some time via postmodern technology and postindustrial
capitalism. An inhumanity is produced in which all politics
is reduced to voting, all culture to fashion, all subjectivity to the
stratifications of class, and so on. The only response, he argues, is to
discover another kind of inhuman, one that is a “no - man’s land,”
one that explores another type of transformation, a transformative
transformation (rather than a change that produces the same).
“Humanity is only human if people have this ‘no - man’s land.’” 46 By
definition, this potential site of resistance cannot be named unless
it is discovered. For Lyotard, this is the domain of our contemporary
“sublime” in the arts, the very site of discovering that which is
beyond representation, that which lies beyond human thought
itself.
Between these two approaches to the nonhuman, an incorporating
and a discorporating one, the nonhuman continues to be negatively
defined: the human “minus” something, or “what the human is
not.” One always begins from the human and then moves outward.
But what of a nonhuman within the human, just as the swarm may
emanate from within the network? Or better, what of a nonhuman
that traverses the human, that runs through the human? Would this
not be the “matter” of the nonhuman? By contrast, the matter of the
human is hylomorphic, a set of matters that have their end in a given
form, matter - into - form, form as the telos of matter. This is the human
view of technology, instrumentality as the ability literally to shape
the world. The inverse of this would be a metallomorphic model, of
which metallurgy is the privileged example. “Matter and form have
never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms
tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the
variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous
variation.” 47 Melting, forging, quenching, molding—metallurgy