Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

ALIENATION, FREEDOM AND THE SYNTHETIC HOW

Diann Bauer

To cite this article: Diann Bauer (2019) ALIENATION, FREEDOM AND THE SYNTHETIC HOW,
Angelaki, 24:1, 106-117, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2019.1568738

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1568738

Published online: 12 Feb 2019.

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 24 number 1 february 2019

H ow to live at multiple scales? We are

immersed in infrastructure, economics
and politics that function at a scale beyond indi-
vidual experience yet we still need to get
through our quotidian existence as embodied
bits of biology. We have capacities for reason
and abstraction yet these capacities are often left
to the side when making political decisions. It is
in part through our capacity for abstraction that
we have become a geological force on the planet;
industrialisation that has been the cause of the
Anthropocene is itself only possible because of
abstract reason. Yet also because of this capacity
for abstraction we are the only species on the diann bauer
planet that has any chance of developing
systems that can assure less rather than more dev-
astation as a result of these planetary shifts. ALIENATION, FREEDOM
Humans need to think and act in relation to
the global, in part because of the potential exis- AND THE SYNTHETIC
tential threats these planetary shifts now pose,
for the species, the infrastructure on which
HOW
much of our modernity depends as well as a
range of non-human life. Given these urgencies,
computing, mobile and urban-scale software,
how do we think about concepts dealing with the
universal addressing systems, ubiquitous
individual that we have long held dear? How do
computing, and robotics, and so on) not as
we contend with the idea of Freedom of the indi- isolated, unrelated types of computation but
vidual whilst having to oscillate between local as forming a larger, coherent whole. They
and global conditions? Is freedom still a useful form an accidental megastructure […] that
concept when its meaning is so context depen- is not only a kind of planetary-scale comput-
dent and the contexts proliferate so widely? If ing system; it is also a new architecture for
we want to keep the concept of freedom, what how we divide up the world into sovereign
kind of freedom? How do we construct a politics spaces.1
that can operate in this global condition whilst
The question that looms is how to gain traction
recognising we still have to live as individuals?
on a megastructure that functions at a scale that
Benjamin Bratton in his book The Stack
can feel removed from daily experience and
proposes
where the controls seem out of reach well
we view the various types of planetary-scale beyond any individual or even beyond any
computation (e.g., smart grids, cloud single government. How to construct a politics

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/19/010106-12 © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1568738

107
 the synthetic how
when the very structures on which we have his-
torically done so seem no longer adequate. To
retreat into a nostalgia for a life less complicated
is not an option, the complexity is already hap-
pening. Ignoring it and choosing not to partake
(if one is privileged enough to be able to make
such a choice) will not make the problems go
away, it will not stop your city from being sub-
merged or your hillside from being consumed
by drought or wild fire. Nor would a retreat be
in the interest of the species as a whole. The
complexity that enabled the Anthropocene also
enabled contemporary medicine, for example.
There is no going back. However, this does
not mean a tactic of just letting things run to
wait and see what happens is a viable way
forward. Laissez-faire got us here. A multitude
of individual good (and bad) ideas, designs,
plans that in themselves may have been
designed well and made suitable for purpose
are cumulatively becoming Frankenstein with
distributed cognition. We may have unwittingly
constructed our conditions but we need not be
merely subject to them. What is essential is sys-
temic thinking and a utilisation of our ability to
think on multiple scales at once. We must
further develop our aptitude for merging our
capacity for reason and forethought with our
instincts, synthesising the slow temporality,
the time of forethought and reflection with our
capacities that are faster than reason, our
capacity for quick judgement, adaptability and
heuristics.
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation is
a text written in 2015 by the working group
Laboria Cuboniks. It articulates this condition
of globality and abstraction as the basis for the
construction of a future. It articulates and re-
tools some useful concepts as a means both to
think through as well as act upon these
conditions.
As a political project, xenofeminism (XF)
recognises the necessity of operating on a scale
beyond the local and the need for an agile poli-
tics that can accommodate adaptation and revi-
sion. In addition, XF makes explicit the need
for decoupling the building of future platforms
from centuries of habituated injustice and the
miserable imbalances of power that exist
around race, gender and economic background.
Its aim is to maintain a corrosive effect across
disciplines, geographies and cultures with
regard to these imbalances whilst arguing for a
synthetic future, a future that needs to be delib-
erately constructed. Xenofeminism recognises
that possibilities of reorienting the complex
systems in which we live towards broader
justice can, in part, be made possible by technol-
ogy, alienation and the capacity for abstraction,
not despite these things. As a philosophical
project XF takes concepts, in part, from a
male European canon and re-tools them for its
own purposes. It avows Reason as a capacity
that can be utilised towards the construction
of a more just future with regard to gender,
race and class. It claims alienation as a vector
of emancipation. The manifesto states the
following:
XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate
new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we
ever been otherwise? It is through, and not
despite, our alienated condition that we can
free ourselves from the muck of immediacy.
Freedom is not a given – and it’s certainly
not given by anything “natural.” The con-
struction of freedom involves not less but
more alienation; alienation is the labour of
freedom’s construction. Nothing should be
accepted as fixed, permanent, or “given” –
neither material conditions nor social forms.2
Xenofeminism understands that the future is
emergent rather than something that can be
wholly directed. However, we are not solely at
the mercy of this emergence; particular
futures can be encouraged over others and XF
provides us with some conceptual tools to
understand where to begin, not least of which
is alienation.
alienation
Alienation is a core concept for XF, but is also a
re-tooling of it. It is in the title “A Politics for
Alienation” but what is evident, even in the
title, is that alienation is not something that
one needs to be emancipated from; this would
be “a politics ‘of’ or ‘from’ alienation.”
108

Rather, as a term, the implication is that alien-
ation can be used as a means to construct some-
thing. It is a politics for alienation, it is a
proposal of how to use something, how to
utilise a capacity rather than proposing a way
of getting out of a condition.
Xenofeminism proposes alienation as an
estrangement which is the condition by which
humans have been able to do anything involving
scale or abstraction, rather than being an inhibi-
tor to what a human can do. This is now crucial
because these are the conditions in and by which
politics now operates. Conditions of abstraction
have deep effects on much of the species regard-
less of individual access to the mechanisms of
that condition.
When XF speaks about alienation it is not
something one feels as an individual. It is not
the estrangement of an individual subject from
their community or society. It is instead the
estrangement between our sapience and our sen-
tience. Alienation is the capacity for abstraction
that we have developed as a species. Robert
Brandom makes the sapience/sentience distinc-
tion with the example of a parrot. If you have a
parrot that is trained to distinguish the colour
red from other colours, and make a noise indi-
cating as much (for example being taught to
say the word “red”), this does not qualify as
sapience. For Brandom, just because discrimi-
nating noises can be made, this is not the same
thing as having the capacity to understand the
concept of “red.” He says:
the sapient being responsively classifies the
stimuli as falling under concepts, as being of
some “conceptually articulated kind” rather
than “mere differential responsiveness.”3
Alienation for XF is both knowing, for
example, that particular configurations of
matter have combined in such a way that the
universe has come to know itself, whilst also
embodying that very configuration of matter.
This later thought is owed to both Carl Sagan
and Nikolai Fyodorov; the idea that matter
folded in such a way that consciousness
evolved, enabling a universe that can be said
to know itself, is an idea that did not originate
109
bauer
with XF. However, XF’s claim is that this con-
dition is a productive alienation that can provide
opportunities through which we can think poli-
tics in general and feminism specifically. Also,
for XF it is an idea not limited to the human.
This alienation, this knowing, is a capacity
that humans have as well as potentially other
non-human life or artificial intelligence. It is a
capacity to form and be formed by concepts, a
capacity held at least by, though not necessarily
limited to, humans.4 It operates at a global scale,
it is constitutive of what we are as a species, it is
what we can do as a species, rather than being a
feeling of disconnect or loss as felt by an
individual.
This is an important point because there
would be political dangers if this capacity were
thought about purely at the level of the individ-
ual. It raises the question: what status is main-
tained by humans that do not have capacity to
form concepts? It would be dangerous to use
this as a defining characteristic of the human.
Humans with cognitive impairment, for
example, are not less human. But for XF the
alienation and the sapience so central to the
project is the collective capacity of the species,
not of any one individual. Alienation for XF is
about what we can do, and indeed what we are
and how we function as a species not as individ-
uals or even as cultures. And thinking about it
at a scale beyond the individual is an essential
component of XF and the work being developed
from it, and indeed for any political project to
be viable in our contemporary global condition.
For example, Helen Hester (a founding
member of Laboria Cuboniks) has developed
the idea of “sapience + care” through which
she maps out why alienation, this capacity for
abstraction, is so important in practical
terms.5 Hester says that it is our capacity for
abstraction and thinking beyond the local that
bestows us with a unique responsibility for
care; this includes those of our own species
but her point is broader than that. We have
the capacity (and indeed the responsibility) to
construct what “ought to be” (itself a
concept), whether or not it affects us personally.
So this applies to questions of care for other
 the synthetic how
creatures, sapient or not, but importantly that
we uniquely have the capacity to care for
things at a scale beyond the individual and
beyond the human, things like complex ecosys-
tems. She says this:
as a species capable of achieving an abstract
understanding of ecologies, and with an
unsurpassed insight into complex and inter-
secting global systems (including environ-
mental, economic, infrastructural, and
socio-political networks), humans have a see-
mingly matchless capacity to attend to the
environment beyond our local situations.6
This is core for understanding what alienation is
for XF and what it can do, and indeed why it is
an essential concept now. As we become witness
to our species becoming an unprecedented geo-
logical force we much also recognise that we are
the only species (that we currently know of) that
has the capacity to contend with such a situ-
ation, at such a scale.
The sapience/sentience divide is valid and
useful for understanding what a productive
alienation might be; however, too much
emphasis on the human would be a mistake.
For Brandom the question of sapience is
about the game of giving and asking for
reasons, and this is rooted in language; it is a
language game and, as far as we know, a
human game. But XF is calling for a broaden-
ing of what intelligence might be. The empha-
sis on the capacity to deal with concepts is
central, but to preclude the non-human would
be too limited. On the one hand, if we are com-
mitted to the idea that concepts are linguisti-
cally instantiated then to limit the concept of
language to that which humans can compre-
hend would be a mistake; on the other hand,
a case could be made for concepts being non-
linguistically instantiated. This argument is
beyond the scope of this paper but, either
way, humans at present are the one species
where it can be said, with some certainty,
that they do have the capacity to form and be
formed by concepts, precisely because of
language and the capacity for discourse. But
to make definitive claims about the capacities
of certain non-human animals or, speculatively
speaking, AI or non-terrestrial intelligence,
would be contrary to the commitments of XF.
For the purposes of this paper I will limit the
scope to that of the human. As a species, we do
appear to demonstrate a capacity for complex
thinking and abstraction that is not evidenced
by other animals. The capacity to know that
we know, to be aware of our knowing, is both
a form of alienation and a form of emancipation.
This is the shift that enables emancipation in the
first place, both as a concept and as a condition.
This is the alienation that XF avows, it is the
leap from making the bulk of our judgements
based on what we could feel to making them
via a nexus of sense and comprehension,
feeling and abstraction. Humans have the
capacity to turn that stimulus into something
more than just sensation. This is the result of
our sapience. This is our alienation.
freedom
How to think about freedom in the context of
the Anthropocene? Is it still relevant in that
context? What is meant by freedom in XF, a
project where contending with planetary-scale
politics is central?
The manifesto says:
Xenofeminism is about more than freedom
from patriarchal networks. We want to culti-
vate the exercise of positive freedom –
freedom-to rather than simply freedom-
from.7
In the quote here, both “freedom-from” (nega-
tive freedom) and “freedom-to” (positive
freedom) are mentioned. Very broadly speak-
ing, negative freedom is the freedom from
restriction, whereas positive freedom is the
freedom to pursue one’s own or collective inter-
est, the freedom to construct a future. In their
book Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and
Alex Williams explain negative freedom as
the freedom of individuals from arbitrary
interference by other individuals, collectives
and institutions (paradigmatically the state).
Negative freedom’s insistence on the
absence of interference has made it an ideal
110

tool to wield against purportedly totalitarian
opponents, yet it is a woefully emaciated
concept of freedom.8
But rather than positive freedom as the counter-
point they offer the idea of synthetic freedom.
They go on to say:
Whereas negative freedom is concerned with
assuring the formal right to avoid interfer-
ence, “synthetic freedom” recognises that a
formal right without material capacity is
worthless […] (Maximising synthetic
freedom) involves at least three different
elements: the provision of the basic necessi-
ties of life, the expansion of social resources
and the development of technological
capacities. Taken together these form a syn-
thetic freedom that is constructed rather
than natural, a collective historical achieve-
ment rather than the result of simply leaving
people be. Emancipation is thus not about
detaching from the world and liberating a
free soul but instead a matter of constructing
and cultivating the right attachments […]
Freedom is a synthetic enterprise not a
natural gift.9
This is the freedom avowed by XF. It is both the
freedom from oppressions and the freedom to
utilise our capacities to construct a future. The
line from the manifesto quoted above is refer-
ring specifically to freedom from patriarchal
structures but is also calling for a re-tooling of
existing structures and technologies. It is advo-
cating being constructive not just reactive. This
is akin to what is described by Srnicek and Wil-
liams as synthetic freedom.
However, it is important not to dismiss nega-
tive freedom; it is an essential component of
synthetic freedom but it is not sufficient. The
capacity for abstraction and productive alien-
ation proposed by XF can be accessed only if
basic conditions of survival are already met;
this involves negative freedoms like freedom
from hunger and threats of violence, so although
these negative freedoms may be limited as an
understanding of freedom per se, they are none-
theless essential. The point here is not determin-
ing which freedom is better but rather that
freedom of any kind is made, not given. That
111
bauer
is to say, these are conditions that need to be
constructed – they are not a natural state. This
is where the idea of alienation is an a priori con-
dition of freedom. Because freedom, negative or
positive, is synthetic. It is constructed; there is
no natural state of freedom. There needs to be a
capacity for abstraction beyond immediate cir-
cumstances to be able to construct the con-
ditions of freedom.
Important questions here are: whose freedom
and what is freedom’s relationship to power?
On one level it is hard to argue against
freedom – who wouldn’t be an advocate of
freedom? But not all freedoms are created equal.
I’d like to look at some questions of freedom
as it relates to power through the lens of
housing, because it is a basic human need. If
one does not have a stable housing situation
(freedom from homelessness, the elements,
instability, violence, etc.) it becomes much
harder to develop a possibility of positive
freedom or indeed synthetic freedom. As an
example, housing raises questions regarding
both individual and collective freedoms as well
as positive and negative freedom, and it makes
explicit this relationship between freedom and
power.
I will limit my example to the context of the
United Kingdom, though I imagine there are
structural similarities in other international con-
texts. In the United Kingdom, building code is
set by the Secretary of State under the guidance
of the Building Regulations Advisory Commit-
tee.10 It is then interpreted and put into practice
by the industry and, though attempts have been
made to simplify regulation to make it clearer
and easier to follow, there is nonetheless room
for error or the possibility of poor judgement
given the myriad decisions that go into the con-
struction of a building. Decisions around
materials or workmanship can comply with
regulations in one context, but not another.
The difficulty of pinning down responsibility
in the case of the Grenfell fire is a case in
point.11 The insulation used in the renovation
of the tower is acceptable for use in tall build-
ings when used in combination with fibre
cement panels, but not with the (significantly
 the synthetic how
cheaper) polyethylene-filled panels that were
used when the building was refitted.12 Who
made that call: the contractors, the local auth-
ority, the company that sold the cladding?
Responsibility here ends up being widely dis-
persed and hard to pin down.
When using this example to think about the
practical meaning of freedom, what becomes
evident is that individual freedom is available
for those responsible for making that multitude
of decisions. Deregulation provides freedom to
one group while jeopardising the freedom of
another. It enables freedom to make choices
based on profit margins, efficiency, budget
reduction, etc. that can each still be within
remaining regulation, but when combined with
a number of other decisions can have disastrous
results. These toxic freedoms proliferate
throughout global neoliberalism.
Deregulation provides negative freedom for a
particular collective, and to make it clear this is
not “negative” in the sense that deregulation is
bad for huge parts of the UK population (which
it is) but negative in the sense that it provides a
particular group with a “freedom from”; a
freedom from what is often described as costly
and restrictive regulation. What constitutes
this particular collective? It already has power
to some extent. In the case of housing, it is
not only industry but also those who benefit
from ever-increasing property prices within
the British real-estate market.
Whose freedom gets priority here? What of
the freedoms of those who live or work in the
buildings that are being built or refurbished
now, and even more where does it leave those
in buildings that were built before more strin-
gent regulation was introduced, regulation that
councils, building associations and private
landlords are not obliged to meet retroac-
tively? The relationship between freedom and
power seems very clearly laid out here. The
question that begs to be asked in this context
is whose freedoms does legislation protect?
In this case, it prioritises the freedom of
those who already have power over those who
do not. “Freedom and power become inter-
twined […] the more capacity we have to act
the freer we are.”13
a synthetic “how?”
What remains urgent is the question of how to
move forward. How to assure that those with
less power have their freedoms safeguarded. In
any political project there needs to be both a
“knowing that” and a “knowing how” – so if
the “that” is synthetic freedom, if we know
that synthetic freedom is a synthesis of positive
and negative freedoms and is a commitment
worth making and a more adequate understand-
ing of freedom than either positive or negative
freedom alone, could the “how” also be
thought of as synthetic, and not just with
regard to freedom but more broadly as well? It
would seem that a synthesising of our capacity
for reason and the construction of what ought
to be, with our ability to get a feel for things,
to have a sense of how things are going, to
understand how they are working without yet
having the clarity of linear reasoned argument,
is the only way to adequately construct a politics
of now.
As I have argued, the alienation in XF is our
capacity as sapient beings to form and be
formed by concepts, to construct structural
aspects of our world, with deliberation and
reason. However, when we shift from knowing
that to knowing how we have to take into
account the way humans actually work, not
just our capacities. For example, just because
humans have the capacity to construct synthetic
freedom for those not already in power, it does
not mean that will happen without the impo-
sition of rules or incentive beyond just
knowing what ought to be done. Indeed,
because freedom is not “natural” it is synthetic,
it needs to be constructed. Humans have the
capacity for reason but often don’t demonstrate
it unless it is in their interests, their tribe, their
group or if they are obliged to do so by laws,
norms or a combination thereof. The question
in this case is how to construct a system that
decouples the link between power and
freedom. And what are the differences if we
are talking about freedom at a range of scales
or freedom of a collective vs. freedom of an indi-
vidual? And how does this system actually func-
tion? How is it adhered to? Reason is very useful
112

in constructing an idea of the way things ought
to be, but it can not be relied upon when trying
to understand how humans will actually behave.
This needs to be taken seriously, not as an
inconvenience, which it might well be if you
avow reason as a tool for emancipation as XF
does. The reality that humans have the capacity
for reason but are often influenced by drives and
impulses contrary to reason must be understood
as constitutive of the human. We have other
capacities that operate via a different tempor-
ality than our capacity for reason. Reason is
slow, it takes time. But we are not completely
in the dark when we find ourselves operating
in an accelerated temporality, when we need to
understand things faster than reason will allow
for. We have the capacity for getting the sense
of a situation through knowledge that is non-lin-
guistic, faster than reason. We obtain knowl-
edge derived from quickly sensed stimulus,
before there is time to transform that stimulus
into an articulated concept. Acknowledging
the importance of this kind of knowledge is
not to denigrate the capacity to utilise concepts,
but to disregard it would itself be against
reason. It has been important for the survival
of our species and we cannot leave it behind
(even if we wanted to) when the capacity for
reason made us what we are, when sapience
emerged. These capacities work together.
If one is committed to the construction of a
counter-hegemonic politics, would it be served
best by utilising a synthesis of alienation, that
is our capacity for reason and abstraction, with
our capacity to feel our way through things
and disposition, a shifting of norms rather
than solely constructing a convincing argument
of what ought to be? Both are essential.
This is not to say Reason isn’t useful or
important; rather, in the context of politics,
Reason is more useful when used in combi-
nation with disposition. One only needs to
look at what seems to have become two funda-
mental political indicators in the United States
and the United Kingdom in the early twenty-
first century – Brexit and the election of
Donald Trump; despite our capacity for
reason, politics does not function by reason
alone, or in many cases, at all. The things that
113
bauer
drove those political outcomes were not primar-
ily reasoned argument, but rather how people
felt. It was disposition.
There are two uses of the idea of disposition
at work here, one that deals more specifically
with how humans make decisions but another
that can be extended to objects, systems and
infrastructure. Keller Easterling uses an
example of a ball at the top of an inclined
plane as an example of disposition; balls and
inclined planes tend to do some things more
than others.14 It is propensity combined with
conditions of objects, people, infrastructure or
populations that make up a disposition.
Years of government subtly, and not so
subtly, blaming systemic failure of services on
pressures from immigration rather than auster-
ity and the use of terms like “hostile environ-
ment” in relation to immigration both enable a
particular disposition,15 a disposition that jus-
tifies segments of a population that may
already be inclined to right nationalism who
also may be acutely suffering the consequences
of the systemic failures generated by austerity
measures. So when the United Kingdom gets a
“yes” vote to the 2016 Brexit referendum and
then there is “the highest spike in religious
and racial hate crimes ever recorded,” should
we be so shocked?16 This is power using disposi-
tion, knowingly and deliberately in some cases,
and in others just through carelessness and
ignorance. Each is as effective as the other. East-
erling, however, offers us something other than
doom and resignation; she claims “two can play
at this game.”17 Because the power and capacity
to do this are more diffuse, more distributed,
less top-down than power’s historical function-
ing, because of technology, at least in part, the
capacity to affect disposition can be hacked,
both literally and figuratively.
To elaborate this idea of disposition,
Easterling uses the metaphor of the game of
pool:
The balls on the table are a topology, a
network of sequenced relationships. There
is no single target at which to aim but
rather a stretchy network of hard and absorp-
tive surfaces. The player who sees only one
fixed sequence will sink fewer balls, reduce
 the synthetic how
the potentials of the table, and lose. Rarely
are the cue ball and its target geometrically
aligned with the hole, so the majority of
shots involve the expertise of indirect
contact and ricochet. The game is played
like a chain reaction with multiple branching
possibilities that change after every shot.
And yet with every shot, the most construc-
tive thing that can be done is to increase
the chances for more shots – generate more
branches in the network of possibilities,
more information. There is no need to call
each shot, and it is better to keep the specta-
tors guessing. Then there is also the matter of
touch, which can’t easily be described, but
only understood by doing it. Pool is only a
reminder of all the things that can change
when a body, with all of its sentience and
force fields, brushes against the air. It can
be a matter of deliberate speed and impact,
coming from hands through the cue stick
and out to the ball. But sometimes it is a
matter of English – the spin placed on the
cue ball that is later transferred to another.
English is an advanced technique that can’t
be predicted, but it can be exploited. It is
less about the intention of the shooter and
more about something between the moving
solids outside the human skin. The player
who can continue to set up potentials and
options can play the table longer.18
Easterling is suggesting here that there is a kind
of dispositional knowledge. She speaks about
this in her book Extrastatecraft, citing Gilbert
Ryle, for whom the “knowing how” is explained
through the example of how to tell a joke. East-
erling says
what is funny is contingent on a set of choices
contingent on the audience’s reaction, the
clown’s performance relies on a “knowing
how.”19
My sense is that Ryle does not put sufficient
value in an ever-shifting “knowing that.”
“Knowing that” importantly is not some rigid
fixed thing but also changes in time, but the
analogy of both the clown and of pool seems
nonetheless useful for thinking about this dispo-
sitional knowledge, its importance and its
efficacy when trying to operate politically now.
The question, however, with regard to
disposition is a question of scale. Can – or
rather how can – disposition operate sufficiently
at a larger scale? Does that “touch that can’t be
easily described” still function at a scale beyond
the experiential? At a scale where there is no
“touch”?
We are a global species and our lives are inti-
mately affected by global conditions whether we
do or do not have access to global financial
markets, the internet, or a mobile phone,
though the ever-broadening access to the inter-
net is changing both the scale at which disposi-
tion can operate and who has access to shifting
it. To think out this scale problem, we can
carry on with the metaphor of pool. There is,
of course, physics involved in pool – there is
the reality of the force with which the ball is
hit, direction, spin, etc. All of this has the poten-
tial to be calculated. The kind of knowledge that
calculation would provide could theoretically
enable an understanding of what needs to
happen to control the table and to win the
game; however, making these calculations
would not be the most practical way, in fact,
of winning the game. Much more effective is,
as Easterling describes, getting a feel for the
table, knowing the space between things.
However, this does not work as a tactic for all
situations. Often when working on a scale
where there is no possibility of feeling the
space and intuition is insufficient, we need
abstraction.
A metaphor to pair with that of Easterling’s
game of pool could be the Cassini space probe.
It needs to be put into a precise orbit around
Jupiter. Getting a feel for things and human cor-
poral experience are of little help here. This
work cannot be done by disposition. It is
through the abstraction of mathematics that
this is possible; it is through calculus that this
can happen. This is the capacity for abstraction
that has enabled us as a species to function at a
planetary scale. This is alienation, which is
where we began. This abstraction is now
present in our economics and our politics. It is
perhaps closer to the “knowing that” but it is
a “knowing” that is in constant flux, and
cannot be dichotomised with the knowing
how. They are intimately linked. We need a
114

command of both abstract and dispositional
knowledges if we want to have political efficacy.
What would a combination of our capacity for
dispositional knowledge look like with our
capacity for abstraction if the aim is shifting
the trajectory of humans towards broader
access to synthetic freedom? Would this be the
construction of a synthetic “how,” a “how”
that synthesised our capacity for reason with
our capacity for heuristics?
The example becomes all the more salient
when thinking about something like climate
change and sea-level rise. This is happening at a
scale beyond the human, beyond the scale of
the nation-state, yet is the result of human
activity. The fact of global climate change
cannot be corrected by disposition or reason
alone, but how we function as a species in the
coming decades will affect how this will play
out. How we act and function as a species is
affected by both reason and disposition. Rising
sea level and the havoc it will inflict on coastal
infrastructure can be dealt with piece by piece,
treating bullet wounds with sticking plasters, or
we can use our capacity for reason, forethought
and abstraction to recognise the need for the
whole system to be rebuilt, made all the more
urgent because of the impending climate con-
ditions. We can take this as an opportunity to
remake both cities and the labour involved in
constructing and maintaining them in ways that
are more just and more sustainable. To conceive
of what this will be is a project for reason but to
make it real it will take the construction of politi-
cal will, and that takes skills of shifting disposi-
tion. This is the synthetic how.
In conclusion, we return to the idea of the
“accidental megastructure.” According to
Bratton “this apparatus […] is the primary
means by which we are able to identify, to
measure, and to model climate change, is also
one of the primary causes of the climate
change that it itself is modelling […] the inte-
gral accident, the snake eating its own tail”20
A planetary-scale crisis that needs to be dealt
with by a locally embedded species which also
has the capacity for abstraction. We already
function at multiple scales at once, but to
contend with the complexity that such a
115
bauer
looming material catastrophe demands we
need to get much better at it. The capacity to
oscillate scales quickly is all the more essential.
We will need to shift our tendency to be com-
mitted primarily to localist temporal tendencies,
short-termism, election cycles and lifetimes to
much longer temporal scales. We need to get
cosy with deep time. Doing this will take both
disposition and abstraction. The question of
how, in its many particular instances, remains.
The particulars of the how will be articulated
across many fields but, regardless of the particu-
lars of context, the how itself will be synthetic, it
will be constructed. It will need to be both
designed but also responsive, utilising the
breadth of our capacities as a species. The
“how” will be constituted by both global and
micro-localised acts, using both reason and dis-
position across scales. Living in this megastruc-
ture means acting globally; as an individual this
isn’t as daunting or insurmountable as it used to
be – small yet global spaces open across a
myriad of fields with the potential to broadly
shift cultural norms and habits as well as shift
structures within global politics.
If we are trying to construct a more just future
we will need to develop the dexterity of operating
at multiple scales at any given time, as individ-
uals, as a species and across the structures we
have created. We need to use our capacity for
reason, abstraction, and forethought to design
what a future ought to be, whilst keeping it
open to regular revision, given
how things actually happen,
how people actually behave
within the persistent contingency
of the conditions in which we are
immersed.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
1 Bratton, The Stack 19.
2 Laboria Cuboniks.
 the synthetic how
3 Brandom 101–02.
4 “We are able to do things with concepts in as
much as they are able to do things with us” (Bras-
sier 8).
5 Hester.
6 Ibid. 76.
7 Laboria Cuboniks.
8 Srnicek and Williams 79.
9 Ibid. 80.
10 UK Government.
11
The Grenfell Tower fire broke out on 14 June
2017 in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of
flats in North Kensington, West London,
United Kingdom. It caused 72 deaths, including
two who later died in hospital. Over 70 others
were injured and 223 people escaped. This
incident ranks as the worst UK residential
fire since the Second World War. (Wikipedia,
“Grenfell Tower Fire”)
At the time of writing the fire is under public
inquiry, police investigations and coroner’s
inquests.
12 See Booth.
13 Srnicek and Williams 79.
14 Easterling, Extrastatecraft 72.
15 Wikipedia, “Home Office”:
The UK Home Office hostile environment
policy is a set of administrative and legislative
measures designed to make staying in the
United Kingdom as difficult as possible for
people without leave to remain, in the hope
that they may “voluntarily leave.” The
Home Office policy originated from a June
2009 UK Border Agency ruling. The ruling
later went into effect in October 2010,
after the coalition came to power and
Theresa May was Home Secretary. The
policy was widely seen as being part of a strat-
egy of reducing UK immigration figures to the
levels promised in the 2010 Conservative
Party Election Manifesto.
16 See Bulman.
17 Easterling, Extrastatecraft 241.
18 Easterling, “No You’re Not.”
19 Easterling, Extrastatecraft 82.
20 Bratton, “The Stack.”
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Diann Bauer
E-mail: diannbauer.email@gmail.com