WW Spinoza S?*

As you already know, my amoeba amiga doesn't seem moved by much—when I come around to see what she is up to, let’s just say that she doesn’t do handstands! But even if she can't be bothered to wave when I drop by, her reactions to salt and sugar constitute simple yet complex adaptative behaviours that can be imbued with much more meaning than simple adaptation. And when it comes to basic, simple adaptation to an environment, Theo Jansen’s (http://www.strandbeest.com ) strandbeests (Animaris Percipiere & Ventosa) come to mind. And maybe because all this takes place in Holland, it kinda makes me think of Spinoza.

Yes, WW Spinoza S? He would see these beasts running lickety-split down the sand flats, come to a stop in 3 inches of water and backtrack--like sensible adults, these creatures know better than to get their feet wet! Spinoza would understand that one of the strandbeest’s perceptual mechanisms works in such a way that if the tide comes up or the wind sends the creature towards open water and its sensors detect water, their plastic, soft-drink bottle bladders make them go uncontrollably -- from wet to dry land. Actually, the sensors do not sense water: when the sensor’s tip is immersed in water it creates a suction that affects very rudimentary valves, which in turn make the strandbeest move in the opposite direction—if you blocked the sensor with gum, it would likely have the same effect. Yes, WW Massumi S? However, its single channel cognitive performativity provides the strandbeest with a limited responsive repertoire. Yet, even with one perceptive mechanism, we can speak of strandbeests being propelled to action through this cognitive channel by adequate ideas. Can we push this further and speak of the strandbeest’s existence as capable of affective experience?

The biggest hurdle in applying Spinoza's ideas of affect to the strandbeest is that he uses humanity as a paradigm for his theory of affect. And that when he uses the word mind, it would seem to imply that affect is actually the dynamic envelope of the individual affects of whatever constitutes consciousness, i.e. the affect that expresses the compounded underlying affects that are constitutive of the presentness of being. In the case of the strandbeest, its consciousness is constituted by a binary mutually-exclusive affective response to move forward or to move backward. Now, because the strandbeest’s sensory circuitry is so rudimentary, the envelope curve of its affective being comprises one affect, and this leaves very little room or finesse for affective modulation. As clever a creation as a strandbeest is, it is still a brute.

Yet, despite its limitations, the strandbeest is a complete being. It might not be very communicative, but in the way that it reacts to its environment, is this not just pure being? How do I know that it does not think? If we see the mind as as the ever-changing, ever moving entity of presentness interacting with our memory, could the strandbeest have a mind or is it enough for it to have a body? It’s smart enough to retreat from water, and because this affects its self-preservation, can’t we say that it retreats in fear? Can we not also say that even though it is not very smart, it has infallible memory since it consistently remembers to act in exactly the same way in similar conditions? Is its limited cognitive ability sufficient to generate images in its small mind? When the sensors and the valves configure the need to retreat, does a strandbeest generate an image in its mind of what constitutes retreat and then act on it? How do we know that the strandbeest’s private unexpressed cosmology does not imagine the Arizona salt-flats as Heaven and being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as its own vision of Hell? Why should we be so keen to need to know where lies its seat of consciousness when we don’t really know where lies our own? Does the strandbeest understand freedom as a steady 10 knot wind propelling it across an infinite salt-flat? And as it hums along down the beach, like a tourist taking a solitary early-morning walk by water’s edge at a resort in the Caribbean, couldn’t we say that that constitutes pure joy?

*What Would Spinoza Say?