Alienation is a social cancer
On socioeconomic institutions to foster 'resonance'
Mind Matters is a newsletter written by Oshan Jarow, exploring post-neoliberal economic possibilities, contemplative philosophy, consciousness, & some bountiful absurdities of being alive. If you’re reading this but aren’t subscribed, you can join here:
Hello out there, fellow humans -
In many ways, the only difference between biology & sociology is scale. Sociology is just biology, stretched from cells and micrometers to cultures and miles. Along the way, you acquire more confounding variables, more dynamism and uncertainty.
But the two - biology & sociology - are far enough apart that they’re considered different sorts of science altogether, hard & soft. The chasm between them is difficult to cross, but folks, I’ve found a bridge, & I’d like to share it.
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Specifically, if you listen the biologist Michael Levin describe how the computational boundary between self & world can shrink or grow at the cellular level, & you simultaneously read the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s treatise on resonance and alienation as socially-mediated relationships subjects develop with the world, you might discover, as I believe I have, that they seem to be talking about the same thing. You might discover that cancer and alienation look like the same phenomenon at different scales.
Cancer occurs when cells gets electrically decoupled from their larger networks; alienation occurs when subjects get relationally, resonantly decoupled from their larger world.
Let me explain.
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Cancer as a software problem
Let’s begin with cancer. According to Levin, we can think of cancer as a defection from multicellular cooperation. The body is a universe of cells collaborating, in part because of these little connexin bridges that bind the fate of each to the other. Every cell remains perfectly self-interested, but it is in their self-interest to cooperate with the others, since these bridges promise that whatever happens to one cell will happen to another. Cells are also electrically bound together, further aligning their self-interests and harnessing these systems towards larger scale goals.
Cancerous cells are defectors. They do not participate in the agenda of the collective. Instead, they seek their own self-replication at all costs. Why?
The standard theory of cancer was fundamentally genetic. Baked into the hardware of cancerous cells is some defect that triggers the defection. Levin’s research was not kind to the standard theory. Instead, he found that morphogenetic fields - electrical networks, essentially, I think? - can actually overrule genetics here, & that’s a huge deal.
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More specifically.
Levin ran 3 experiments. These experiments involve oncogenes (cancer-causing genes), voltage dyes (that allow us to see voltage gradients, or electrical networks, in organisms), and unfortunately, what is basically the torturing of tadpoles.
First Experiment
Inject voltage dyes into a tadpole so that you can see the voltage gradient of its body. The dyes make the electrical networks visible. Inject a human oncogene into the tadpole.
What they found is that, even before a cancerous tumor becomes apparent, you can see where it will form via the voltage gradients. Cells in the area that will eventually host the cancerous tumor become depolarized, i.e., they’re decoupled from the tadpole body’s electrical network.
Second Experiment
Take a perfectly healthy tadpole with no oncogenes. Disrupt its electrical networks and manually depolarize cells. Lo! Cancer forms, without any oncogenetic basis.
Cancer requires no genetic basis, no defect in the hardware as the first-cause. It can be caused entirely on the basis of manipulating morphogenetic fields, electrical networks, or ‘software’. Keep this in mind when I make the jump to sociology & alienation.
Third Experiment
Inject an oncogene into tadpole. But also, inject an ion channel that forces the cells to remain in electrical communion with their neighbors. Lo! No cancer forms! Despite the blazing oncogene, the cancer-causing gene, no tumor forms if the cells remain electrically coupled with their neighbors. Software overwrites hardware.
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Alienation as a software problem
Now, resonance & alienation.
The two form the polar extremes of how Rosa characterizes one’s ‘relationship to the world’. The old philosophical chestnut of ‘the good life’, to Rosa, is a question of the “quality of one’s relationship to the world”.
This quality is determined by the many axes of resonance that connect self to world. These define the nature, qualities, and most importantly, phenomenology of the self-world relationship. He details a bunch of axes, ranging from family, friends, politics, body, craft, sports, schools, religion, nature, art, even history. Crucial, for Rosa, is that these axes of resonance “are never simply individually defined, but rather are always socioeconomically and socioculturally mediated”. This opens the door for his project: a sociology of our relationship to the world, which is a sociology of the quality of our lives.
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Definitions
Resonance: “a relationship to the world formed through intrinsic interest and perceived self-efficacy, in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed.”
Resonance arises when the axes of resonance between self and world vibrate intensely, “in which our relationship to the world begins to breathe”, and we perceive ourselves as capable of both affecting it, and being affected by it.
Alienation: “a relation of relationlessness” to the world. “a mode of relating to the world in which the subject encounters the subjective, objective, and/or social world as either indifferent or repulsive. Alienation thus denotes a situation in which the subject experiences his or her own body or feelings, material and natural environment, or social interactions as external, unconnected, non-responsive, in a word: mute.”
Alienation arises when the axes of resonance between self and world lie mute.
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Parallels
So we have resonance as a responsive coupling of self and world via vibrating axes of resonance, and alienation as a decoupling of self from world via those axes going mute.
And recall: multicellular agency is a coupling of cells via electrical networks, and cancer is the decoupling of cells via depolarization of its electrical connection to the whole.
The same thing is happening here, just at different scales.
Our standard theory of alienation - a relative of depression - was equally reliant on hardware. An imbalance of neuro-chemicals. But if we extrapolate the logic of Levin’s study, you can have a perfectly healthy, chemically well-balanced brain that nevertheless suffers depression & alienation. The cause needn’t be inside the individual brain, but a disruption in the software, in the networks, the fields that connect it to its environment.
We can understand alienation as a software problem.
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So?
Levin’s research has clear implications for preventing & mitigating cancer. You can, possibly, act directly on the electrical fields, maintaining polarization despite oncogenetic cells that would otherwise cause cancerous tumors.
Rosa’s theory has less clear (because remember, scale introduces more confounding variables, dynamism, & uncertainty), though still provocative implications for preventing & mitigating alienation. You can act directly on the socioeconomic institutions of society in order to affect changes in the phenomenology of our relationship to the world.
If you’re familiar with my stuff, you can imagine my delight in discovering Rosa’s work. The tangled relationship between economics and phenomenology is something I’ve explored in both Acid Capitalism and We Should Get Better at Consciousness.
Rosa explores how the story of modernity is of transformation from an ancient world before ‘progress’, where “life’s blood flowed through creation”, where resonant relationships were aplenty, to a technologically super-powered present, which has become "an ‘empty frame’ in which a mournful silence reigns…an ‘insensate orb of fire’ whirling through space, whose woods and waves resound only with empty echoes.” The axes of resonance are going mute.
Or, as Kierkegaard writes, what our age has gained in “extensity”, we’ve lost in intensity.
Building from Levin’s work, we can put this a bit differently: ‘progress’ has had an almost literally cancerous aspect. It disrupts the social fields, the axes of resonance that couple subjectivity to the world, such that individuals are increasingly prone to decoupling from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural networks.
Subjectivity is depolarized from society’s electrical networks. Its computational boundary of self-interest shrinks, such that agency is no longer in relationship with the broader social organism, but has shrunk, has lost its relation to the whole.
But I find Rosa’s work inspiring, even cautiously optimistic. We shouldn’t approach alienation merely with pills and morning meditation. These are focusing on the hardware. Instead, if we can change the nature of the fields that bind us, the environmental dynamics that structure our lives and relationships, changes in phenomenology will follow.
How do we do that?
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Economic Reforms
Rosa characterizes modernity as a drive to increase the ‘reach’ of our relationship to the world. More possibilities, more technologies, more opportunities. Resonance theory asks us to pivot from evaluating what we can do in the present, to what the present feels like:
“At this juncture, resonance theory suggests a cultural paradigm shift. Not the reach, but the quality of our relationship to the world should become the measuring stick for political and individual action. In turn, not escalation, but the capacity for and possibility of establishing and maintaining axes of resonance should serve as the measure of quality, while alienation (on the side of subjects) and reification (on the side of objects) can function as seismographs of critique.”
But how to enact this shift? How can we shake off modernity’s “logic of escalation”, its drive to expand reach, in favor of something more qualitative?
“…overcoming the logic of escalation is inconceivable without fundamental institutional reforms. This is particularly true with respect to the economy…so long as the accumulation of capital remains the true subject of modernity’s economic relationship to the world, the imperatives of escalation will remain in effect…a more resonant form of modernity’s institutionalized relationship to the world cannot be realized unless we tame, or rather replace, the “blind” machinery of capitalist exploitation with economically democratic institutions capable of tying decisions about the form, means, and goals of production back to the criteria of successful life. This does not mean that there would be no space for competition and markets in such a new economic order; it means only that this space would be necessarily and in some respects radically limited, that it would have to be politically demarcated”
In particular, Rosa singles out two political projects with high potential to spark such a transformation:
Economic democracy, and guaranteed basic income.
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Economic Democracy
In practice, economic democracy can mean many things. Codetermination, sectoral bargaining, worker-owned coops. Rosa’s interest lies in nationalizing crucial infrastructural institutions, ‘politically demarcating’ them, and thereby removing them from the blind logic of capital.
He mentions transit authorities, energy utilities, banks, and healthcare as prime examples. Equally interesting are ideas like social wealth funds, which put the public in charge of allocating a significant portion of the nation’s capital, such that investment can be driven by social deliberation as opposed to market incentives (see “patient capital”).
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Basic Income
The welfare state, according to Rosa, is presently designed as an on-ramp into the ‘escalatory logic’ that’s draining the resonance/vitality from modern life. Welfare redistributes others’ gains in order to provide the less-successful with the tools they need to become more productive, & therefore, access more economically secure lives. Economic security is only to be had via participation in the escalatory dynamics of productivity & growth.
A basic income generous enough to secure the basic means of existence for all (it’s unclear how high this must be), Rosa suggests, could be “the key” for transforming the logic of welfare & culture alike:
“This is the welfare-state dimension of dynamic stabilization, and if overcoming it requires a fundamental revision of what we know and think about welfare states and how they operate, then an unconditional basic income might provide the key for doing so. Its appeal lies precisely…in the fact that it could shift the basic mode of being-in-the-world from struggle to security, removing existential anxiety…from the equation without undermining a positive economic incentive structure…Securing resources without being compelled to constantly increase resources seems to me to be a precondition of reorienting our way of living.”
On the question of how to afford such a generous basic income, Rosa points towards a global inheritance tax, as discussed by Thomas Piketty (more detail here and here).
It’s interesting to note the alignment among social philosophers on the *potential* (if done right) basic income carries to catalyze a deeply transformative cultural logic. I’m thinking of André Gorz, who couples basic income with systematically reducing the working week as his program for reform in Critique of Economic Reason.
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Opaque Seismographs of Resonance
If the difference between biology and sociology is scale, then we should expect the phenomena arising in biology to echo through into sociology. For biology, we have voltage dyes that reveal polarization gradients. For sociology, we don’t have such clear-cut tools. We have consciousness. We have ourselves, walking “seismographs of resonance”, each plugged into a particular point in the cosmic network, giving out readings, in the form of an interior experience that cannot be read, only felt.
If voltage dyes and ion channels that sustain cellular polarization suggest a possible future course for mitigating cancer at the cellular level, how might consciousness and economic policies mitigate alienation at the social level?
Parting Notes
If any of this resonates with you, let’s explore. You can reply to this email, chat on Twitter, or join the Discord. There’s plenty more writing & podcasts on my website.
Thank you to all those who support my work on Patreon, the recent wave of support (Nate, Ryan, Christian) means the world; thank you.
Until next time,
~ Oshan