The intrinsic relation between POV (Point of View) and locality and the (dis)orientation of Umwelt and originary technicity By Mitra Azar I. POV and (dis)orientation There is an intrinsic relation between the notion of POV (Point of View) and the notion of locality, and this essay will try to articulate why. In its fundamental understanding, the notion of POV is here understood as orientation, and it is proposed as the phenomenological feature that cuts transversally the divide organic/inorganic and can, thus, help to articulate the agential relation between the various scales composing Stiegler’s organology and exorganology1. Particles orient themselves according to spins2 (orientations) within, for instance, electromagnetic fields3. Since the formation of the first nuclei of protons and neutrons few millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the fundamental blocks of matter organize themselves producing orientations4. Matter is oriented, despite the organic/inorganic divide, and can be defined as POV-matter, once framed by the concept of orientation. Orientation manifests already at the inorganic level, right down to the spinning of particles inside atoms operating in parallel to the emergency of orientations produced by organic POVs within their ecological niches. The very same inorganic blocks of matter develop in time into organic forms of life capable of developing a POV (Point of View)5 expressed by the orientation phase emerging from the affordances between organisms and their ecological niches, or Umwelten (organology). At the same time, spins and fields of inorganic matter can be technically harnessed by human beings towards the construction of technologies which attempt to bridle organic POVs and their Umwelten 1 Stiegler, B. (1998; 2009; 2011). Technics and time I, II, III. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2 Spin, Cern Atlas, Cern.com. 3 Field, Cern.com. 4 Big Bang, Cern.com. 5 Organic forms of life develop a POV and are indeed oriented even if the unique orientations of the organism are detached from a visual sensing apparatus (it took evolution 600 millions years to produce the first complex protoeye during the Cambrian explosion). Evolution of the eye, Wikipedia.org. 1 (exorganology). The process “through which inorganic matter is organized and takes on the appearance of the living organism”6 – as Stiegler says – turns the orientations defining the biological relation between organic and inorganic oriented matter into “disorientation”7. The overlapping between inorganic technical POV-matter and human POVs and their Umwelten constitutes technics as an “always already materialized trace”8 giving shape to the temporality of human experience and marking the “de-fault of and at the origin, this originary disorientation”9 defining “human prosthetic beings”10. Thus, technical disorientation, intervenes on the oriented structure of matter (both organic and inorganic) to disorient it (and possibly re-orient it11) via the technical supplement. As I hope to demonstrate in the course of this essay, matter – and especially the biological notion of locality – presents already a tendency towards disorientation, a tendency which Deleuze and Guattari referred to as deterritorialization12. This tendency – which allows locality to be open to the exterior and to be sensible to novelties and bifurcations – is subsumed and radicalized by technical disorientation to the point of corrupting its key role in the sustaining and proliferation of locality itself. Matter is simultaneously oriented and disoriented, and technical disorientation accelerates and compromises the tendency towards disorientation already present in it. Matter takes the form of inorganic POV-matter and organic POV-matter, and the concept of POV or orientation becomes useful to cross transversally the 6 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and Time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 4. This overlapping is exactly what happen in the cinematic figure of POV. For the relation between the cinematographic figure of POV and Stiegler’s concept of cinematographic consciousness and archi-cinema please see Azar, M. (2019). “POV genesis, proliferation and apolcalypse. Cinematographic consciousness and refrains via the figure of (archi-)POV between cinema and POV-opticon”. The schizoanalytic clinic, La Deleuziana 9 (forthcoming). 7 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and Time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 8 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 4. 9 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 10 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.2 11 Technology disorients and orients because it is pharmacological, both poison and cure. Stiegler, B. (2010). What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity Press. 12 Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2 various scales of Stiegler’s organology and exorganology13 and to approach them from the perspective of locality, and its disorientation. Before investigating the relation between POV and locality, let’s focus on the notion of a biological form of locality. II. Locality as (dis)orientation between POVs and Umwelten: the biosphere What are the conditions of possibility of a biological form of locality? What are the minimum conditions (necessary and sufficient) for the existence of a biological form of locality? Answering these questions, will open a perspective to understand the relation between POV and locality. To exist, a biological form of locality needs organic POVs (or orientations) and Umwelten as its necessary and sufficient conditions, and this is the form it takes as biosphere – understood as the composition and reticulation of the Umwelten of all the organic living POVs-matter that exist and has existed since the prebiotic soup14. Umwelt is here initially understood in the way Uexküll refers to it, as a “subjective experience”15 defined by the affordances generated by the interaction between organisms and space. A biological form of locality is a composition of POVs and Umwelten. Furthermore, an Umwelt is always oriented, always a subjective experience, and as such a situated experience, from this POV oriented towards this or that (organic/inorganic) POV, or orientation. Its situatedness consists in being within an orientation phase composed by the articulation between the orientations of organic POV matter and inorganic POV matter. The 13 Stiegler uses the word disorientation in many occasions in his series Technics and Time, and the subtitle of Technics and Time, II is Disorientation. For what concern the notion of orientation, Stiegler refers to it in Technics and Time III, when talking about Heidegger’s de-severing operate by the Dasein: “de-severing, Dasein orients itself on the basis of signs that open up access to the "regions." In the matter of orientation and access, however, the actual opening up of the "region" is determined yet again by the attention provided by the supports of having-already-been qua access givers — as much "images" that resituate and reconstitute as "tools of navigation" and piloting programs that make up so many prior understand. Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.252. Stiegler mentions the concept of orientation also when it comes to Kant’s What does it mean to orient oneself in Thinking?, to which he dedicates a paragraph in Technics and time, II. Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 78-81. 14 This is, in short, the vision of Vernadsky. Vernadsky, V. (1998) [1926]. The Biosphere. New York: Springer. 15 Uexküll, Jacob V. (1982). “The theory of meaning”. Semiotica 42(1): 25-82, p. 31. 3 exchange between inorganic POV-matter, organic POV-matter and Umwelt sustains and continues the production and proliferation of biological locality, and as such is what has sustained the process of (a)biogenesis around 4 billion years ago on planet Earth. Back then, the prebiotic soup – a “warm little pond”16, as Darwin refers to it in his letters from 1871 – provides the condition for the generation of complex structures that lead towards the appearance of life. Depending on the reference theory17, the prebiotic soup was composed by a combination of hydrogen, carbon, ammonia methane and water vapour in a reducing atmosphere (without oxygen) exposed to U.V. ray, a combination which allows the formation of monomers first and amminoacids and polimers later from where nucleic acid, nucleobase, RNA and DNA could eventually form. In Simondonian terms, the prebiotic soup can be interpreted as the preindividual18 soup from where the biosphere emerges as a consequence of the complexification of matter and the metabolic activities and metabolic waste produced by the process of complexification itself. In other words, the metabolic activities of monomers first and polimers later contribute to enhancing the conditions for the production and reproduction of life. Organic life continues and intensifies metabolic activities and the exchanges between the orientations of organic POV-matter and inorganic POV-matter, together defining the orientation phase related to the affordances emerging from the Umwelt which these exchanges contribute to give shape to. The production and sustainment of life from the prebiotic soup shows that biological locality contributes actively to the production and conservation of the condition required for sustaining biological locality itself. The exchange between organic POVs and their “intersecting”19 16 Burkhardt, F. et al. eds. (1985). The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 17 There is not full agreement on the exact forms of the passage from inorganic matter to organic living matter – theory such as the heterotrophic origin of life, abiogenesis, biogenesis, panspermia and more have been attempting to provide some descriptions. According to scientist Marov, Vernadsky didn’t position himself clearly within these theories – although he studied closely both biogenesis and abiogenesis and was convinced that “notions about the beginning of life on Earth that were not connected with the planet’s geological structure and history ran counter to accurate knowledge”. Marov, M. Ya. “Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky: The Science of the Biosphere and Astrobiology”. 21th century Science and Technology, Spring 2013. 18 Simondon, G. (2005). L'individuation à la lumière des notions de formes et d'information. Paris: Jérôme Millon. 19 Uexküll, Jacob V. “The New Concept of Umwelt”. Semiotica 134-1/4 (2001), p. 117. 4 Umwelten, all together giving shape to the biosphere – functions as the engine for the production and sustainment of biological locality itself. This position is akin to Vernandsky’s understanding of the structure of the biosphere, especially outlined in his report “On the Conditions for the Appearance of Life on Earth,” presented in 1931 to the Leningrad Society of Naturalists and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. There, Vernadsky claims that “when we speak about the appearance of life on our planet, we are actually referring to nothing other than the formation of its biosphere”20. Organic POV-matter serves as the catalyzer and as the transitional object between different biological localities, ecological niches or Umwelten, sustaining the exchanges between them to the point of becoming their unite of measure. According to M. Ya Marov’s understanding of Vernadsky’s biosphere, “the appearance and persistence of metabolic processes and primitive replication, […] served as the foundation of the incipient biosphere”21. III. A new definition of Umwelt and its relation with entropy and originary technicity The concept of locality is inspired by organic living matter understood as anti-entropy or the place of organization, novelty and bifurcation the way Schrodinger articulates it in his What is life?22 and within the philosophical framework proposed by Stiegler on the basis of Schrodinger’s arguments. Departing from these assumptions – the assumptions that organization, novelty and bifurcation are intrinsic features of organic living POV-matter, or a biological notion of locality – the relation between POV and locality can be analyzed from the perspective of the relation between POV and Umwelt. According to Uexküll, “everything a subject perceives belongs to its perception world [Merkwelt], and everything it produces, to its effect world [Wirkwelt]. These two worlds, of perception and production of effects, form one […] unit, the environment [Umwelt]” (Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans 42). To connect the concept of Umwelt to organic life understood as anti-entropy, the concept of Umwelt needs to be reformulated to include a new functional cycle beside the ones used by Uexküll to 20 Vernadsky, V. (1998) [1926]. The Biosphere. New York: Springer. 21 Marov, M. Ya. “Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky: The Science of the Biosphere and Astrobiology”. 21th century Science and Technology, Spring 2013. 22 Schrodinger, E. (1967) [1944]. What is life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5 describe Umwelt – a cycle which opens Umwelt to the concept of entropy. In this new sense, Umwelt needs to be constitutively composed not only by Merkwelt (perception-world) and Wirkwelt (action-world), but also by Müllwelt23, or waste-world. Müllwelt is the Welt of the Umwelt inhabited by metabolic waste produced by organic POV-matter – including feces, urines, sweats and other waste derived from metabolic activities, or from the becoming necromass of organic matter. The Müllwelt is the missing functional cycle which allows to frame the Umwelt or ecological niche of an organic living being or organic POV-matter as the locality where entropy can be transformed into different forms of negative entropy – defined by Stiegler24 as antientropy (biological novelty and bifurcation), negentropy (organization and structure) and (neg)anthropy (the increase or decrease of entropy connected to human activity and especially conditioned by human being’s originary technicity). Furthermore, this new cycle allows also to rethink the tendency of the Umwelt to deterritorialize (or disorient) and reticulate. Within the neganthropic framework proposed by Stiegler to re-articulate the relation between the political sphere and the economical sphere, the definition of Müllwelt understood as the place where the entropy of a given Umwelt can turn into forms of negative entropy within another Umwelt, renders the notion of Umwelt a relevant political category. To put it simply, metabolic waste intended as the entropic deposit produced by the exchanges between organic POV-matter and Umwelt, becomes the anti-entropic locality allowing the proliferation of life and of new metabolic activities. Thus, if it is possible to say that matter is oriented, it is also necessary to be aware of the tendency towards disorientation intrinsic to the structure of matter itself. This tendency is evident within biological locality, which tends always out of itself, and by doing so becomes 23 Obviously, Uexküll recognizes the importance of excreta as signaling materials in the Umwelt of the animal. Nevertheless, by defining them within the activities of the animal, he is not able to look at them in their autonomy and in their crucial function to open the Umwelt of the animal to other Umwelten. I’m tempted to believe that this is also the reason why he refers to the functional cycles composing the Umwelt of the animal as close cycles, whereas – as I hope to be able to articulate in the continuation of this essay – the Müllwelt is an open cycle that as such open the Umwelt in its entirety to the exterior. For these reasons, I omitted the word closed from Uexküll’s expression “from one closed unit” quoted above, and I reserve some space on this topic in the section III of this essay. 24 Notes on neganthropocene and discussion between Stiegler and Longo. 6 capable to produce other localities, and to reticulate with them. This process of disorientation of biological locality is promoted by the Müllwelt of a given Umwelt, which turns into a new Umwelt composed by newly formed Merwelt, Wirkwelt and Müllwelt – producing new orientations in the disoriented and entropic structure of the originary Müllwelt. This new definition of Umwelt allows to read the disorientation produced by Stiegler’s originary technicity of “human prosthetic beings”25 as the acceleration of the disorientations already traversing the structure of matter, up to the point of the disruption of the equilibrium between the various functional cycles of the Umwelt, and between the Umwelten’s reticulation as such. Technics catalyzes the activation of the Müllwelt of a given Umwelt into the transitional space between different Umwelten – the one from where the Müllwelt is coming from, and the one in which it is artefactually transformed and from where new ones will emerge. This new techno-Umwelt departs not only from the Umwelt in which the Müllwelt has been produced, but also from the emerging one in which the Müllwelt has been integrated by the technical act, thus opening the properly technical disorientation at the foundation of hominization. IV. Müllwelt as infra-locality and its relation to entropy, negentropy and anti-entropy. A biological notion of locality is open and this openness allows the avoir lieu of another locality within the locality itself, which produce a disorientation of the Umwelt via the transformation of entropic metabolic waste into anti-entropic metabolic activity, or an emerging locality – a process similar to the one from where the biosphere emerges from the prebiotic soup. The intervention of the originary technicity of human prosthetic being disbalances the relation between the functional cycles and disrupt the Umwelt, generating new ones in which the production of metabolic waste or Müllwelt tends to increase in relation to Merkwelt and Wirkwelt, and the newly formed techno-Umwelt increases entropy instead of containing it. This is the reason why Vernadsky says that “we are present at and vigorously participating in the creation of a new geological factor in the biosphere”26, and that, as a consequence, “man has actually comprehended for the first time, that he is an inhabitant of the planet and may—must— 25 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 26 Vernadsky, V. [1967] (2007). Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, p. 185-6. 7 think and act with a new perspective, not solely with the perspective of a single individual, family, or clan, or of nations or alliances among them, but with a planetary perspective”27. How to integrate the notion of entropy (and anti-entropy) inherent to the exchanges between organic POV-matter (or organic life) and Umwelt – as shown by Schrodinger and Vernadsky – into a notion of Umwelt only composed by perception world (Merkwelt) and action world (Wirkwelt), as Uexküll intended it? As such, Uexkull’s notion of Umwelt dismisses the role of metabolic waste as integral part of the exchange mechanisms regulated by the functional cycles at work between organic POVs and their intersecting Umwelten. As a consequence, he dismisses the notion of entropy and anti-entropy necessary to understand them, once they are integrated by a new cycle that specifically refers to the production and management of metabolic waste. This is the reason behind the attempt to introduce the notion of Müllwelt on the side of the notions of Merkwelt and Wirkwelt to define the waste world where residuals of metabolic activities accumulate as both excreta and bio necromass, when organic POV-matter dies. Müllwelt is a key element in the ways organic POVs interact with their ecological niches because it functions as the transitional space for the communication between different Umwelten. In this sense, Müllwelt is indispensable to the constitution of biological localities because it reticulates them and operates as the infra-locality between different Umwelten. Müllwelt is what is not reducible in the relation between organic POVs and their Umwelten, and as such it is a key factor in the formation and reticulation of locality. Müllwelt as the residual of the chemical and metabolic activities related to the Merkwelt and the Wirkwelt of a given Umwelt for a given organic POV is the residual deposit of the unreducible relation between the two. As such, Müllwelt is the part of the Umwelt where the entropy or metabolic waste of the chemical and metabolic activities deposits. At the same time, Müllwelt turns into the conversion-engine between entropy and anti-entropy, becoming the source of energy for processes of complexification of matter that produce new biological localities or ecological niches which attracts other organic POVs and activates other chemical and metabolic processes which inevitably produce other metabolic waste, ad infinitum. This is what happens in the case of metabolic waste such as feces deposited by organic POVs- 27 Vernadsky, V. [1967] (2007). Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, p. 185-6. 8 matter as part of their Müllwelt cycle, which turn into the new Umwelt for a number of different and at times emerging organic POVs-matter. In this sense, locality is always already out of itself, always in the écart between localities, in the infra-localities defined as the Müllwelten which connect the Umwelten of different organic POV-matter. The transformation of entropy into negentropy happens in the Müllwelt intended as infra-locality between localities because, following Leroi-Gourhan, cited by Stiegler, “for an individuality to have been perfect, no separated part of the organism should have been able to live separately. But in this case reproduction would become impossible”28. According to Sonnenschein and Soto29, cells within complex organism (understood as a form of microscopic biological unit of locality) tends to proliferate in their default state, manifesting a performativity akin to the performativity of an Umwelt characterized by its openness expressed via its Müllwelt, which allows the Umwelt to exchange, intersect30, reticulate and proliferate. Locality tends to bifurcate and re-organize, and to produce localities within locality. Locality tends always out of itself, and this tendency suggest the possibility to think globality and globalization as a distortion or technological disorientation of the very tendency which defines locality itself, that of being out of itself, or of deterritorializing. When the deterritorialization of locality deposited in the Müllwelt of a given Umwelt is harnessed by technologies, the qualitative and quantitative impact over the structure of locality alienates locality itself and disrupt it, increasing the amount of necro mass part of the new milieu generated by the disruption. As a consequence, locality loses its enworldiness, or faire monde, which is the avoir lieu of locality that happens at the level of the biological transduction31 of necro 28 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1943). L'homme et la matière. Paris: Albin Michel, p.12 in Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 282. 29 Sonnenschein, C. and Soto, A. M. (1998). The society of cells. Cancer and control of cell proliferation. New York: Taylor & Francis. 30 To intersect is the world Uexküll uses when thinking about his notion of Umwelt. Uexküll, Jacob V. (2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press. For the definition of Umwelt which includes the Müllwelt, it seems more accurate to follow Stiegler and to say that localities reticulate – and that they reticulate because they’re open between each other. 31 Transduction is here used in the way Simondon defines it, as “a physical, biological, mental, social operation through which an activity propagates gradually within a domain, by founding this propagation on a structuration of 9 mass into anti-entropy – and into a new locality. The avoir lieu of locality is the valve which modulates the deterritorialization of locality itself via the dissemination of traces of Müllwelt all around the Umwelt, keeping their distribution balanced and consistent within the functioning of the other functional cycles, so that the dynamic negentropic structure of the Umwelt can sustain and proliferate. Biological locality is meta-stable32 because of its tension to deterritorialize, or to be oriented towards a change of scale – that is to say, to be capable to disorient. The change of scale manifests first and above all in the emergency of orientation phases tuning the interactions between emerging organic POV-matter and necro mass becoming-locality. To put it shortly, the chemical and metabolic activities of a locality in the form of their residual or deposit, functions as the engine for the disorientation of locality itself, of for the deterritorialization of its Umwelt. The re-orientation passes through the formation of new POVs (Points of View) or bifurcations in the structure of matter which are at the same time singular (the emergency of POVs as novelty and bifurcation) and collective (the organization or negentropic structures designed by the affordances between POVs and their co-emerging Umwelt and by the very formation of this emerging Umwelt within the Müllwelt of another Umwelt). Biological disorientation is the emergency of an infra-locality from the disorientation or residual of the interaction between organic POVs and their Umwelten – an infra-locality which opens locality towards deterritorialization and reticulation. POV (Point of View) becomes the expressive quality of locality and through its Umwelt – and especially its Müllwelt – generates the condition for the exchange between organic POVs and their different Umwelten. Such a locality is open in terms of its capability to produce differences and indeed novelty and bifurcations, and yet finite in terms of its affordance-organized (oriented) negentropic structure. This is another significant the domain that is realized from one place to the next”. Simondon, G. (2005). L'individuation à la lumière des notions de formes et d'information. Paris: Jérôme Millon, p. 32. 32 Meta-stable is here used in Simondonian sense, as “a state that has been discovered by thermodynamics. It is a state that transcends the classical opposition between stability and instability, and that is charged with potentials for a becoming”. De Boever, A. Murray, A., Roffe, J., Woodward, A. eds. (2012) Gilbert Simondon. Being and technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meta-stability as such, thus, refers to the default state of the “living individual” or of a biological notion of locality. 10 divergency from Uexkull’s definition of Umwelt, which is instead composed only by closed circuits. That is why, while explaining Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt at the beginning of this essay, the word closed has been omitted from Uexküll’s quote stating that “[…] these two worlds, of perception [Merkwelt] and production of effects [Wirkwelt], form one closed [italic mine] unit, the environment [Umwelt]”33. If Merkwelt and Wirkwelt are possibly closed in Uexküll’s sense, Müllwelt is originary open but finite, which means open to a finite amount of affordances emerging from the transformation of the Müllwelt into a locality via the metabolic activity of organic POVs intervening and emerging from it, according to Vernadsky’s view. The fact that the missing functional circle is open but finite, makes the Umwelt in its entirety opens to the exterior, which is to other Umwelten as much as to the becoming-locality of its Müllwelt for other organic POVs attracted by it or emerging from within it. The fundamental features of locality are openness – understood as novelty and bifurcation, and indeed as anti-entropy –, and finitude – understood as organization and negentropy defining the interaction between POV and Umwelt. A locality, indeed, is open (far from equilibrium, bifurcating) because attached to a POV and finite (organized) because oriented in relation to it, or transformed into an orientation phase between an organic POV and its Umwelt. The default proliferation state of organic POVs expressed by their Müllwelt opens the closeness of Uexküll’s Umwelt not only towards entropy and anti-entropy but also in towards (de)territorialization and reticulations. V. The (neg)anthropy law of the economic process of humans’ originary technicity and its relation to the infra-local The modulation of the avoir lieu of locality is nowadays harnessed by a techno-scientific apparatus which – uncapable to properly manage the economy between enworldiness and its deterritorialization – produces globalization. Globalization is the deterritorialization of the local singularity and its subsumption into the de-differentiated globality via “the globalization of the technical system”34 consisting into the “unified production through international technical 33 Uexküll, Jacob V. “The theory of meaning”. Semiotica 42(1): 25-82 1982, p. 31. 34 Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and time, III. Cinematic time and the question of malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 108. 11 norms, the globalization of the industrial division of labor for the production of consumer goods, […] and a global technical system of diffusion for the programming industries”35, enabling a “mechanism of communication resulting in wide-spread out-sourcing and tele-management”36. The opposite tendency of enworldiness and re-localization is, instead, a form re-territorialization which regulates the process of deterritorialization via the production of open homeostatic synthesis preparing the conditions for the appearance of new localities. Technology catalyzes both the tendency towards deterritorialization (disruption of a milieu) and reterritorialization (creation of a new milieu) already inscribed into the functioning of biological locality. Nevertheless, technology amplifies the qualitative and quantitative change of scale inherent to an open notion of biological locality accelerating it and by doing so reversing the biological conversion of entropy into anti-entropy: technology increases the production of new entropy or Müllwelt disbalancing the functional cycles of the biological Umwelt – producing what Stiegler refers to as anthropy37. Following Vernadsky, human being as organic POV-matter marked by Stiegler’s originary technicity, have the capability of accelerating and disrupting the disorientations already present in the structure of oriented matter by distorting the relation between Merkwelt, Wirkwelt and Müllwelt. The process of originary disorientation of the human Umwelt produced by technicity tends to increase the production of entropy or techno-metabolic waste, whereas the process of disorientation within organic POV-matter and Umwelt is at the basis of an open notion of locality capable to reticulate in various ways the functional cycles of the Umwelten which compose them. Technology can possibly sustain this reticulation and anthropy can turn into neganthropy and anti-entropy when Müllwelt is instead re-invented as a techno-Umwelt capable to enable the differential reticulations of localities within locality: the neganthropic techno-Umwelt is opened by the technical gest to variations (anti-entropy) while 35 Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and time, III. Cinematic time and the question of malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 108. 36 Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and time, III. Cinematic time and the question of malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 108. 37 Stiegler, B. (2018). Hangzhou Seminar, China Academy of Art. 12 managing to be (dynamically) stable within them (negentropy). In the current political scenario, the realization of the deterritorializing power of contemporary technologies in terms of the debilitating effects on the resources and agency of various form of locality, has triggered a wide number of people of the world population into supporting a close notion of locality, which as such denies the biological role of the Müllwelt functional cycle as the opening of the locality to its alterity, as much as its disruption and re-articulation by human’s originary technicity. How does technics intervene in this newly designed structure of Umwelt which include the Müllwelt within its function cycles? An interesting research path seems to open in regards to the possibility of reading human’s originary technicity as the attempt to transform and activate the Mülllwelt of a different (non human) Umwelt. In this sense, technics appears originary as a disorientation which operates a form of management of metabolic waste, activating the transition from non human Umwelt to human Umwelt. The originary disorientation38 constituting the horizon of the human techno-Umwelt, constantly disrupts and simultaneously generates Umwelten. Human beings disorient matter (and themselves) by inventing technics as the form for incorporating and re-activating metabolic waste deposited in the residuals of the exchange between organic POVs-matter and their Umwelten, opening to new biological, social and cultural milieux. In Stiegler’s terms, “everything happens as if the organism itself were but an excrescence, a bud brought to life by the old germ working to survive in the new one”39, in accordance to Leroy-Gourhan concept of reproduction, cited by Stiegler: “in fact what is reproduction, if not the reconstitution of a new organism with a separate fragment of the old one?”40 The idea is that the functional cycles of Uexkull’s Umwelt need to be integrated with the Müllwelt because in the Müllwelt this process of reconstitution of a new organism with a separate fragment of the old one is exactly what is at stake. The incorporation of the Müllwelt by the originary technicity turns the Müllwelt of a given Umwelt into a technics capable to trasform the Müllwelt into a source of energy from where new Umwelten proliferate. The conversion of dry wood into a source of energy for the production of fire for hunting or cooking is an example of 38 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 39 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 281. 40 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 281. 13 this. Dry wood can be considered as the Müllwelt of the Umwelt of a tree once detached from the tree’s trunk, re-activatated by technics and transformed into a source of energy driving the formation of new social and cultural localities. To say it with Stiegler, “socio-genesis recapitulates techno-genesis. Techno-genesis is structurally prior to socio-genesis—technics is invention, and invention is innovation— and the adjustment between technical evolution and social tradition always encounters moments of resistance, since technical change, to a greater or lesser extent, disrupts the familiar reference points of which all culture consists”41. The construction of a chip flint from residual fossil material is also an example of activation of necromass by the intervention of a technicity capable to disrupt the Umwelt in which the process of incorporation of the Müllwelt of a different Umwelt by the technical object takes place. Although the exact modes of formation of the flint are not fully clear, it seems that it is formed departing from compressed sedimentary rocks bored by holes derived from crustaceans or molluscs sediments over the rocks42. Human technics activate this necromass part of what is left of the Müllwelt of an Umwelt which is no longer there (that of the crustaceans or molluscs), and turn the flint into a chip flint enabling not only the activation of the death Umwelt of the crustaceans or the molluscs via their Müllwelt, but also its disruption via the simultaneous establishment of the human techno-Umwelt defining human species and their (originary) disorientation. The peculiarity of the human techno-Umwelt developing from this state of things, consists into its capability of integrating any Müllwelt of any Umwelt into the human (techno)Umwelt, turning it into a source of energy aimed at sustaining the techno-biological forms of life attached to it. Technics acts as a form of activation of the necro mass and re-invents metabolic waste or Müllwelt by generating new milieux and affordances within the human Umwelt. 41 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 2 42 Flint, Wikipedia.org. 14 At the same time, technics disbalances the processes of exchange between Umwelten happening at the level of the Müllwelt when the Müllwelt is left untouched by the technical gest, and function as the catalyzer of a reaction that turn the Müllwelt into a technical object which not only activates the necro-mass and create new milieux but also increases the production of necro mass itself in the process, instead of controlling it. In fact, the process of activation of necro-mass and the production of new necro-mass out of this process is a problem of entropy and of forms of negative entropy, and the threshold between them is what marks the functioning of technics either as poietic43 force (generative) or as enframing44 force (gestell). Technics which enframes, or gestell, increases necro-mass more then re-activating it, and turns into an instrument for necro-politics45. Technics is, indeed, pharmacological, because can be both poiesis and gestell, depending on the entropy law of the economic process – to say it with GeorgescuRoegen46 – of the technical gesture over the Müllwelt. Technics emphasizes and radicalizes the tendency towards deterritorialization already present in the notion of biological locality, and by doing so it disbalances – or, in Stiegler’s terms, disorient – the relationship between Merkwelt, Wirkwelt and Müllwelt, and actively contributes to the increase of Müllwelt while simultaneously operating its re-activation – which consists into its re-organization and bifurcation as a new milieu or locality. Technics operates at the threshold between localities, in the Müllwelt defining the residual of the relationship between organic POVs and their Umwelten, and indeed functions as the catalyzer of processes of exchange of localities through the construction of a technical infralocality which blurred the borders of the closed functional cycles of Uexküll’s Umwelt. Technics establishes itself as the other within the intrinsic otherness of an open but finite notion of locality 43 “Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiēsis in the highest sense”, while “above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiēsis, let’s what presences come forth into appearance”. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. New York: Garland Publishing, p. 10. 44 “The work of modern technology reveals the real as standing-reserve, and “the essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call Enframing”. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. New York: Garland Publishing, p. 21 and p. 23. 45 Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. 46 Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 15 revised departing from the integration of the Müllwelt functional cycle into Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and understood as the engine for the simultaneous disruption and proliferation of localities within locality. The Müllwelt is the infra-locality where the exchanges orchestrated by the originary technicity of human prosthetic being take massively place, at the fringes of the relation between organic POVs and their Umwelten, where POV (novelty and bifurcation) turns into Müllwelt (entropy), and – symmetrically and simultaneously – entropy (necro mass) becomes first negentropy (metabolic and chemical organization) and then anti-entropy (emerging locality). Stiegler’s double redoubling of technicity can be read here as the fact that originary technicity disorients and deterritorializes a locality which already tends to deterritorialize, tends towards the infra-local as the zone of indetermination between entropy, anti-entropy, negentropy and neganthropy. The double redoubling consists in the redoubling of the originary technicity simultaneously disrupting and creating milieux over the doubling of locality on itself via the residual entropic deposit of the metabolic activity between POV and Umwelt acting as the infra-locality where the conversion of entropy into negentropy and antientropy takes place. As Stiegler points out, “it is a matter of determining the possibilities of epokhal double redoubling within the conditions of contemporary technics”47, and, as a consequence, to set up the conditions for the proliferation of infra-localities capable to articulate Stiegler’s (neg)anthropic economy of human being’s originary technicity. 47 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 77. 16