Body/Brain/Culture-in-the-World

?The Body Reimagined as a Node in a Nested Network of Social Ecologies: Body/Brain/Culture in the World*

Sal Restivo**

Most recently professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, retired 2012; Senior Fellow, University of Ghent, 2012; Adjunct Professor, NYU, retired 2017; Honorary Lecture Professor, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, 2007-

A NIETZSCHEAN OVERTURE

1. THERE IS ONLY BODY.?

2. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A NETWORK OF SOCIAL RELATIONS

3. O those Greeks! They knew how to live.?What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, the whole Olympus of appearance.?Those Greeks were superficial- out of profundity.

In this paper, I will argue for reimagining the body as a node in a nested network of social ecologies that is grounded in the Body/Brain/Culture-in-the-World.?If the late 20th century was in one dimension the Age of the Body, the 21st century has challenged our understanding of the body imperative by exposing us to two pandemics: COVID-19 and POTUS-45, the Trump presidency.?COVID-19 forced us to confront the social nature of the body.?For the most part studies of the body in the late 20th century focused on the influences and contexts of technology, biology, and medicine on bodies.?COVID-19 forced us to return to sociological imperatives in body studies.?POTUS-45, the presidency of Donald J. Trump, forced us to consider how threats to democracy were threats to the body as a center of freedom and liberation.

The seventeenth century philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked that all of our problems stem from our “inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”?This has been widely quoted and discussed but rarely are we given insights into why this is so.?Many studies have demonstrated that humans become uncomfortable when forced to sit in an empty room with only their own thoughts to dwell on.?Social science offers an answer to this problem that social psychologist Steve Taylor (Back to Sanity, London, Hay House 2012) has diagnosed as “humania.”?It follows from the fact that we are culturally victims of the myth and cult of the individual.?We experience ourselves as individual, isolated beings. Left to our own devices, we become locked in a spiral of increasing awareness of loneliness.?We have been loosened from our deeply social natures by cultural developments, especially in the industrial West and its geo-political satellites.?In evolutionary perspective, we humans arrive on the evolutionary stage already, always, and everywhere social.?We do not arrive as individuals who then become social by way of some “social contract” event.?We arrive social and culture individuates us (Sal Restivo, The Age of the Social, New York, Routledge, 104-107). ?Loosening us from our evolutionary social nature produces what I’ve designated “dissocism.”?This is a spectrum of alienative conditions that blind us to our social nature and make it impossible for us to “see” the social and to see it as the causal foundation of all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.?Contrast this with the reigning neuroist assumption that our brains are the source of all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.?This is reflected in the rationales for the various late 20th and early 21st century brain initiatives, including Bush 1990 and Obama 2013.?Under these conditions the social problem of loneliness is exacerbated.??COVID-19 has underlined and brought to light the nature and implications of neglecting our social nature.?It has alerted those of us prepared to see its implications to the fallacy of the transparency of introspection.?Our experience of our selves as free willing agents is as much an illusion as our experience that the earth does not move.?

Loneliness has been a concern for many observes of the human condition, especially in America, for some time now.?The late John Cacioppo, one of the founders of social neuroscience, pioneered research on the effects of loneliness.?Social isolation or rejection disrupts our thinking, our will power, and our immune systems. It is for this reason that solitary confinement should be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.”?Loneliness – lack of connections - may be the key to violent behaviors ranging from bullying to street violence and school shootings.?It’s not too much of a leap to suggest that it might play a role in terrorism and warfare.?Not only should we not underestimate the relevance of the loss of community in explaining violence, we should also pay more attention to the relevance of touching in a radically social species.?Fear of and barriers to touching (and sex which is a more complicated extrapolation of touching) are implicated along with loneliness in many if not most of the problems of the human condition (as Ashley Montague (1971).?

Loneliness is not just an individual phenomenon.?The separation of groups and cultures may cause collective loneliness.?Ecumenical thinkers like Karen Armstrong (Charter for Compassion) and the Dalai Lama have argued that world peace could be based on the compassion that is at the center of all religious traditions.?The problem is that compassion is a centripetal force and reinforces the boundaries that separate groups and cultures.?This force tends to overwhelm any centrifugal forces that might help to link us across our cultural differences.?There are certainly cases in which the centrifugal forces of compassion can be mobilized to support communication and exchange across national borders, and across barriers of sex, gender, race, class, and ethnicity.?But the differences represented in all these categories of our lives are intensified by the centripetal forces of compassion.?And this breeds actual and emotional violence across these categories.??

In Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) Robert Putnam documented the ways in which we have become increasingly disconnected from each other.?Putnam may indeed have deftly diagnosed the damage that loneliness has done to our individual and collective health but this kind of analysis is not new.?It became visible as part of the collateral social damage of the industrial revolution.?It is iconically represented in the distinction between gemeinschaft (communal society) and gesellschaft (associational society) societies.?That dichotomy was voiced in such English pairings as rural-urban, country-city, informal-formal, primary-secondary, status-contract, and community-society.?There was a sense of loss – the loss of community, the loss of connection – in these dichotomies, not a sense of progress.?It is time we gave serious attention to the evolutionary sociology lesson that humans arrive on the evolutionary stage already, everywhere, and always social.?We do not arrive as individuals who become social; we arrive as the most radically social of the social animals and culture individuates us. This leads to new ways of thinking about body, self, brain, mind, and consciousness.?And it gives us a new way to understand creative thinking and genius.??There are no “lone wolves.”?Even when alone or in isolation the person is a social being.?

Let’s go back to the nature of the body in this ultra-social context.?When human persons come into contact with other human persons a field is generated that engages a process of rhythmic entrainment.?This field carries emotional communication and the fuel of consciousness.?Human bodies are rhythmic systems, essentially vibrating entities.?Our postural vibrations are constantly adjusting to what comes under our gaze, whether an object like a painting or plants, animals, and other humans.?When two such human vibrating entities come close together they are enveloped in a field that conducts emotions and consciousness.?Dance is the gross expression of the fine-grained rhythmicity that is innate to all levels of life from cells to bodies; and even social systems have their rhythms, even societies and groups dance. When we sociologists and anthropologists argue, contrary to the physicists and biologists, that consciousness originates in the social world (C. Whitehead, ed., The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World, Exeter UK, Imprint Academic, 2008), we are pointing to the innate rhythmicity of humans and their capacity for dance as the in-between conduits that generate consciousness.?

If you do not have access to this social model and you are restricted to brain-centric thinking, you might solve the hard problem by proposing a transducer theory.?This is exactly what Robert Epstein has done (2021).?Epstein is aware of certain mysteries that require explanation.

Epstein’s mysteries include spirits, dreams, and the immaterial realms transcending the reality we know.?We have had a sociological theory that explains these phenomena since the late 1800s in the work of Emile Durkheim.?Once we understand rituals, emotions, and collective effervescence we have the basic ingredients for explaining the origin of religious experience and the gods.?These form the foundation for a rejection of transcendence and the explanation of Epstein’s other mysteries then fall readily into place. Epstein’s transducer theory is a mechanical solution – and an admittedly brilliant one – but it assumes a brain that doesn’t exist, an isolated biological brain that operates independently of its cultural environment.?The social brain paradigm which I discuss in detail later in this paper is a theory that stays within the framework of sociocultural phenomenon and doesn’t require an electro-mechanical solution.?Nonetheless, perhaps what we have are two sides of the same coin.?We have a phenomenon which lends itself to two different theories depending on whether the approach is brain centered or social centered.?The evidence for a social brain gives the edge to the social theory.

Socialness is a fuel and our social being must be constantly re-fueled.?The amount of fuel in our “self-tank” is measured in units of cultural capital.?Adapting a concept introduced by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977/1990; and see Bourdieu, 1985), I use the term “cultural capital” to refer specifically to the forms of cultural capital that can be embodied.?That is, what kinds and parts of accumulated cultural knowledge can be held in a memory cache (self-tank) with sufficient stability and sustainability to fuel one’s conscious awareness of and access to the cache.?Language is a primary example of this form of cultural capital.?The larger the tank and the more cultural capital it holds at any given time establishes the limits of sanity when alone or in isolation.

Loneliness is a social disease and can kill you or disable you in various ways and to different degrees.?Putting anyone including a prisoner in isolation should be understood to be cruel and unusual punishment. ?

The Pascal problem of being alone arises in part because of our innate radically social nature but also because?and to the extent that we go into the room alone with a fuel tank almost empty of cultural capital.?The more cultural capital in our tank the easier it is to be alone, within limits (Restivo, 2018:81-83).?

These efforts are grounded in a critique of the traditional understanding of science and ultimately of the Western subject as universal norms. To approach this in terms of an orientalist/occidentalist or nordist/australist perspective connects the theory and critique of science to “the secular notion of an individual ‘I” as an abstract and universal consciousness free of all embodiment and locality” (Yegenoglu, 1998; on the north/south divide, see Diamond, 1998; Richards and Ruivenkamp, 1996; Seabrook, 1993; Strathern, 1992). The Western subject (already gendered to subordinate the female and the feminine) is brought into being as a universal norm in the process of the West’s expansion. This norm denies the subject’s dependence on the Other and produces the illusion of autonomy and freedom. In fact, this abstract and universal consciousness was always embodied, male, and European, whether indigenous or transplanted.?Women and non-European men — even if they achieved the required education— could enter science only as surrogates, disciples, or through passing (that is, by adopting the language, gestures, attitudes, and values of Euro-American men).

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT THE BODY BY LOOKING AT GENIUS, THE VERY IDEA?

Few personalities in human history are more entitled to the epithet “genius of all geniuses”?than Albert Einstein.?There are a handful of other contenders – notably, for example, Newton, Leibniz, Da Vinci, Goethe, Emmy Noether.?Less well known candidates made invisible by pervasive racism include Dorothy Vaughan, and G.W. Carver . In John Wayne’s America, genius has “Big Shoulders” (the Comanche chief Scar’s name for Wayne’s character in “The Searchers,” 1956) and little room for women who might want to claim the genius mantle.?Gertrude Stein made room for herself?by saying out loud, “I am a genius.”?She went on to domesticate the concept in documenting her relationship with Alice B. Toklas.?But Albert Einstein is our genius of geniuses.?In 1916, and not yet forty years old, he predicted gravity waves (a consequence of the General Theory of Relativity).??It took one hundred years before scientists had technologies and computers that were a match for Einstein’s brain and that could detect gravity waves.?When I was a young boy?in love with science and math, Einstein was already a scientific saint.?And when he died on April 18, 1955, his brain became a sacred relic.?????

Dr. Thomas Harvey famously removed Einstein’s brain during the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, in Princeton, New Jersey. He did this on his own initiative, probably inspired by Oscar Vogt and Cécile Vogt-Mugnier’s study of Lenin’s brain.?The Vogts, at the behest of the Soviet government, were looking for the origins of political genius; Harvey thought he might be able to discover the origins of scientific genius.??It was years before the sliced preserved pieces of Einstein’s brain began their journey across John Wayne’s America, from sea to shining sea.?The search was on for Einstein’s genius in the architecture of his brain.?This seemed perfectly reasonable in John Wayne’s America. When we identify Einstein as a genius, and when we assume the secrets to that genius are in his genes and neurons, we learn more about ourselves and our culture than we do about Einstein.?

When Orson Welles was asked to name his three favorite directors he said “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”?Ford constantly toyed with the relationship between truth and fiction, fact and legend.?In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” (1962) Ford and Wayne created an exit line that belongs in the definition of the American mythos.?Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) is ready to publish a story about senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and the mythical figure he has become for killing the villain Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin).?In the closing scenes, Scott learns that Stoddard didn’t kill Valence.?Scott tears up his notes.?Stoddard says: ”You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” Scott replies, “No, sir.?This is the West, sir.?When the legend become fact, print the legend.”???????

Valence was actually killed by Tony Doniphon, John Wayne’s character.?Here Wayne is associated with the conflict between the autonomous hero affirming the myth of individualism in tension with the eternal recurrence of the myth.?It seems to get defeated from time to time as collective, community interests come into play.?Ethan Edwards (Wayne’s character in “The Searchers”) embodies the American myth of individualism, the hero who stands outside of society and its surface norms, values, and beliefs.?Edwards, like many of our heroes, appears often enough to feed our need for violence, and then disappears to wander across America’s spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and fruited plain.?He leaves a trail of masculinity, patriotism, self-reliance, and self-responsibility in his wake. Occasionally we may get images of something more than a cowboy riding or walking off into the sunset. There may be a hug, a kiss, a look of longing, a farm saved from disaster, villains dispatched and a town’s solidarity restored, something that has the scent of community.?But it doesn’t last in John Wayne’s America.??

Individualism returns again and again.?And this is why John Wayne, bracketing the reality of his complexity and contradictions as a real human being, is the embodiment of the myth of individualism and even a kind of genius of masculine posture, pride, and stride.??He is our icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity.?One doesn’t usually associate Einstein with rugged masculinity but his numerous affairs and his attraction for women speak to some kind of masculinity and certainly something gendered about his genius.?It made the role of his wife Mileva virtually invisible in his life and in his work.??

John Wayne’s America sings the hymns of individualism, of self-interest, of capitalism not as an actual economy but as an ideology.?The classic Robber Baron, individualist to his core, is also a philanthropist – and this tension is revealed in all of our heroes.?Einstein is in this context a transformation of that mythology and its conflict with the mythology of “we the people,” E Pluribus Unum.?He was unique, individual, living in his own world by his own impenetrable rules – but he was also the great humanitarian.?That is why it seemed so natural to imagine that the secret of Einstein’s genius could be read from the architecture of his brain, the inner landscape of a unique individual outside of society, culture, history, time, and space. And what a landscape we imagined it might be like.?Awe-inspiring, of course, like the landscape of Monument Valley, Utah in the opening scenes of “The Searchers”.????????

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My study of the fate of Einstein’s brain (Restivo, 2020) and the socially networked roots of his genius echoes Hélène Mialet’s 2012 study of Stephen Hawking.?Mialet identifies the human, material, and machine-based networks that are Stephen Hawking.?Hawking, like Einstein, is widely portrayed as a bodiless singular individual.?Viewed through the lens of anthropology and sociology Hawking is seen as incorporated, materialized, and instantiating a complex network of machines and humans.

If individualism is a myth, if as Nietzsche claimed the “I” is a grammatical illusion,?can we say anything about Einstein with confidence that doesn’t erase his obvious uniqueness? Developments in neuroscience (especially environmental enrichment studies?and mirror neuron and plasticity research), social neuroscience, epigenetics, social science, and network theory between 1950 and the 1990s do pose challenges to Einstein’s uniqueness.?They don’t erase it but they do force us to re-think the nature of his uniqueness.?With respect to his physics, for example, the idea of mass-energy equivalence was not new; it was already in the conversations of physicists by the 1870s.?Poincaré published papers on relativity theory in 1904 and 1905 (Einstein’s annus mirabilis).?

Uniqueness is not a matter of genes, neurons, quantum phenomena, or the biological brain.?Einstein’s uniqueness is defined by the uniqueness of the social networks he encountered as his life unfolded.?If his brain holds any clues to his creativity those clues would be functions of how his social and cultural environments impacted the architecture of his brain.?This idea is reflected in the social brain paradigm, introduced into the neuroscience literature by Leslie Brothers in 1990.?Einstein’s dead brain could not be a narrative of innate genius.??The story of his genius has to be a story of connections in the world at large.?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The lone wolf genius only lives in John Wayne’s America. The term “genius” rests on the concept of the individual as an entity that stands apart from society, history, and culture.?Genius even escapes time and space.?The mythical genius is “an island entire of itself” but he is not alone; etymologically, the genius has a guiding spirit, a tutelary deity.?This makes the genius not only an island unto himself but a god, and classically masculine.?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

If genius were simply a matter of genes, neurons, or “ineffables,” geniuses would appear at random, scattered willy nilly across various disconnected cultural landscapes.?But genius clusters. And genius clusters do not appear randomly but during the rapid decline or ascent of civilizations and cultural areas.?At the center of Einstein’s genius cluster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century stand relativity pioneers like Lorentz and Poincaré, and geniuses across the full spectrum of the sciences, humanities, and arts including Edison, the Wright Brothers, Planck, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Sibelius, and Picasso, all anchored by the sympathetic mutuality that linked Cubism (see especially Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and relativity theory.?They both challenged conventional ideas about absolute time and space.?Stein associated her writing with Cubism and thus with relativity theory.??These developments give us a new way to think about consciousness.??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness is the problem of explaining the relationship between the physical (material, “hard”) phenomena of the brain and brain processes on the one hand and mind and consciousness (immaterial, “soft”) on the other.?Classically, the problem is: how do brains create minds and consciousness??Theologically, the problem revolves around bodies and souls.?The very statement of the problem has trapped it in the jurisdiction of philosophers, psychologists, biologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists.?Physicists, who believe they can explain anything, and theologians who can explain things that don’t exist, are also prominent players in the consciousness game.?The “hard problem” is hard because students of consciousness have been looking for it in the wrong place.?They have been looking for it in the brain and ignoring an idea that has been around since the 1800s, that consciousness is a network of social relationships.?But social relationships as the source of causes that impact our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts are invisible in John Wayne’s America.?They are made invisible by the myth of individualism.?This in turn invalidates sociology as a science and as a science that might have the key to the hard problem.

Psychologists and philosophers of brain and mind regularly start to hone in on this reality.?They might recognize, for example, that we are more sociological entities than single unified psychological entities.?But if they interpret this as a metaphor, as some do (the prominent psychologist Michael Gazzaniga for one) they will be diverted to their default biological explanations for consciousness.?Their failures create an explanatory vacuum physicists are all too enthusiastic to fill with their tool kit of quantum concepts.?So now we have the wrong scientists with the wrong tools looking in the wrong place, guided more by what they experience as the introspective transparency of their own minds (an illusion) than by science. It is not my intention to drive the physical, natural, and behavioral sciences out of the game.?It is more a matter of?giving sociologists and anthropologists some playing time. Consider that philosophers of mind like John Searle and neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have recognized that social and cultural factors must play a role in cognition and consciousness.?Searle says he doesn’t know how to mobilize these factors and Damasio finds trying to bring them to bear in brain studies too daunting.?Neither one of these particular players seems to be aware that sociologists exist who do know how to mobilize these factors and do not find this daunting.?They certainly know that sociologists exist so I can only conclude that they are not prepared to take them seriously.?

The myth of individualism causes social blindness, the inability to see the social, and then to fail to see it as a causal force shaping our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. I call this dissocism, and there is a dissocism spectrum disorder.?To the extent that we are all to varying degrees victims of social blindness, what I’ve been writing will undoubtedly be counter-intuitive for many readers.?Let’s make it intuitive.?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Consider that as individuals we do not experience the earth in motion.?And yet it spins on its axis wobbling in precession, it is rotating at any point along the equator at about one thousand miles per hour; it travels around the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour; and it is part of a solar system orbiting the center of the Milky Way.?The Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies (The Local Group) traveling toward the center of the cluster, and The Local Group itself is speeding through space at three hundred and seventy miles a second.?None of this motion is accessible to individual experience.?Yet we have knowledge of these motions through the collective generationally linked intersubjectively tested experiences of scientists.?What if the introspectively accessed free-willing self is as much an illusion of individual experience as is a stationary earth???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The studies of Einstein’s brain proved in the end to be sterile.?They were guided by neuroist assumptions (mind and consciousness are brain phenomena), a dissocist perspective, the fallacy of introspective transparency, and a conspiracy of mythologies: the myth of individualism, the myth of the brain in a vat (think The Matrix and speculations that we are a simulation); and the myth of brain-centric thinking reinforced by gene-centric thinking.?In a 2006 study of Einstein’s brain, J.A. Colombo and his colleagues found nothing distinctive about the four blocks they’d studied.?They saw a diseased brain rather than the brain of a genius.?They criticized the earlier studies of Einstein’s brain for their inconsistencies and methodological flaws and doubted whether microscopic neuroanatomy studies could ever prove useful.?

At the end of the day, the most insightful discussion of Einstein’s brain can be found not in the halls of science and philosophy but in TV land.??On July 21st, 1999, the David Letterman audience was allowed to ask “Einstein’s brain”?(a model brain in a beaker of green gelatin) questions.?After each question, the questioner is told that due to Einstein’s death in 1955, the questioner is addressing dead tissue.?This comedic vignette does more for the neuroscience of Einstein’s brain than all of the papers and lectures on Einstein’s brain in the literature.?

The “I” is a grammatical illusion.?We are all social in a radical sense as opposed to being individuals in a radical sense.?From birth to the present, contexts and networks have been shaping my thinking and my “choices.”?And yours too.

Whatever earlier social forces in my life had made me imagine myself as an astronomer on Mt. Palomar, guidance counselors and science teachers were now working to funnel my interests into engineering as I progressed through grades 5-8.?And their advice was being shaped by forces at work in the larger society. My story was all about structures, contexts and networks. A different ?story would be told by someone who subscribed to the myth of individualism.?This would be a small tale within the larger narrative of the Great Man theory of history.?That theory claims that history is the result of the actions of “Great Men” (individuals): Gabrilo Prinzip started World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand; Hitler caused the Holocaust.?Lev Tolstoy proposes an alternative to this theory in his novel, War and Peace.?The closing pages are a treatise in the philosophy of knowledge, causality, and the illusion of free will.?The Great Man Napoleon is portrayed as a baby in a carriage holding a couple of strings and imagining he is driving the carriage.?What actually propels the carriage are social, cultural, and historical forces.?

Wait.?Isn’t it possible that there is some sort of dialectical relationship between the “I” and social structures or networks??Some social scientists do indeed take this path.?For those who do, there is always a volatile potential for prioritizing psychology and biology over social science.?There is always the danger that their introspective sense of self will override the science of the social.?That’s why I think it’s wise to assume that it’s social networks all the way down. ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Remember Ragged Dick??Unless you’re around my age, the name may not resonate.?Ragged Dick, Richard Hunter, is the “rags-to-riches” literary invention of Horatio Alger, Jr. It has become absorbed into the American mythos as the story of the “self-made man.”?The curious thing about Alger’s rags-to-riches boys is that their success depends in the end on the luck of finding wealthy businessmen mentors and patrons.?Alger himself sponsored philanthropic efforts to help the Richard Hunters of the world.??There were two female protagonists in Alger’s writings, Helen Ford and Tattered Tom.?Tattered Tom dressed and lived like a boy and like many Alger heroes she was a news boy.?Girls are not prominent in Alger’s writings because the possibility of finding a mentor or patron in the business world was not open to them.???

The Horatio Alger myth of individual success through will and initiative is not just a myth about America, it is a myth about the Alger stories themselves.?If you read my biography psychologically or what is essentially the same thing from the perspective of the American mythos it looks like the story of a strong-willed boy taking initiative and pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.?To tell the story this way requires being blind to social forces and social contexts.?This is a trained incapacity in the families, churches, and schools that “educate” us to think in terms of individuals, individual self-interest, mythical heroes and icons, and the rags-to-riches narrative.?Remember what you learned about opportunity and social mobility as part of the story of American exceptionalism??Social mobility rates in the US are not substantially different than they are in any modern industrial nation-state.?And they depend in any given era on political and economic factors that can raise or lower rates of social mobility.?Incidentally, the phrase “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” comes from an eighteenth century fairy tale and was a metaphor for an impossible feat of strength.??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The early phases of my life story superficially support the Horatio Alger myth.?The later phases show how the nature and power of social structures slowly came into view for me.???I was then able to build on this as I went on to a professional transformation that opened up new vistas of understanding and explanation.?Not all sociologists go as far as I do.?But everything before graduate school primed me for taking the concept of social structure and running with it.?It was easier than you might imagine to discard free will and agency along the way.??

WHAT THE SOCIAL BRAIN PARADIGM CAN TELL US ABOUT THE BODY

The original version of this model was designed with Sabrina Weiss. I have taken it through a number of revisions designed to keep pace with developments in neuroscience, and in social neuroscience and neurosociology. It was designed to graphically represent and expand Clifford Geertz’s argument for the synchronic emergence of brain and culture. In review, then: (1) biological, social, and cultural causal forces are reciprocally intertwined and conjointly causal; (2) human behavioral repertoires emerge from the complex parallel and recursive interactions of cells, genes, neurons, neural nets, organs, biomes, the brain and central nervous system, other elements of the body’s systems and subsystems, and our social interactions in their ecological and umwelt contexts; (3) socialization is re-imagined as a process that simultaneously informs and variably integrates the biological self, the neurological self, and the social self to construct personality and character; (4) each element in the model is a dialectical entity containing its own internal “seeds” of change, and as following a temporal dynamic that may be at different times synchronous or dyssynchronous relative to other elements; (5) each element is conceived as an information system with all systems multiply inter-linked by the circulation of information; (6) the diagonals with double-headed arrows which crisscross the model map the chaotic dynamics and cooperative neural mass discussed by Skarda and Freeman (1987, 1990); (7) the unit model is activated in a triad of unit models and it is that triad that is the basic model of brain/mind/culture/world. This reflects the idea that the triad is the basic unit of social life (Restivo et al. 2014: 104n1); and (8) the diagram is the General Connectome. A connectome maps the elements and interconnections in a network. The term has been used specifically in connection with mapping the neural connections in the brain.

Connectomes may range in scale from maps of parts of the nervous system to a map of all of the neural interactions in the brain. Partial connectomes have been constructed of the retina and primary visual cortex of the mouse. In line with these developments, my model represents the highest level of the connectome, a connectome of connectomes.?????Researchers in neuroscience have been exploring the vagus nerve which forms a complex network linking the brain and the internal organs.?This network is being viewed as shaping thoughts, memories, and feelings.?This network is implied in my model (Underwood, 2021). ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Based on the ideas introduced in the previous chapters, I can now offer an initial concept formula for the probability of an “innovative thought:” iTp = qc2 (K + G), where qc2 is the amount of cultural capital the person commands and K is a constant that represents the cultural context and network structure the person is embedded in; qc2 because doubling the amount of cultural capital, for example, quadruples its impact factor. K = C + Nt. C = Cultural Context, an index that takes into account a variety of demographic, class, gender, and institutional diversity indicators; N = the density and diversity of the network structure of the society. G = the genius cluster quotient at time t. When considering the etiology of behaviors traditionally considered to be genetically grounded, it is now important to recognize that the brain, like humans, arrives on the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere, social. Therefore, what we have considered to be linearly transmitted genetic phenomena must now be viewed in the context of a brain that is -- at no stage of development -- separated from the social and cultural imperatives that form us. The very notions of “genes” and “genetic” must now be revised in the context of the social brain paradigm.

The next stage in this project is to embed the basic triad of the General Connectome in the nested networks of the social and cultural connectomes locally, regionally, and globally so that we now visualize a Global Connectome driven by the circulation of information across nested networks. (On the rationale for a global connectome (my interpretation), see Khanna (2016) on “connectography.”)

CONNECTOMICS

A connectome comprehensively maps neural connections in the brain. More broadly, a connectome maps all the neural connections in an organism’s nervous system.?Hagmann (2005) and Sporns et al. (2005) independently and simultaneously introduced the term “connectome,” inspired by the efforts to construct a genome. Connectomics is the science of assembling and analyzing connectome data sets. Hagmann and Sporns discussed research strategies for developing comprehensive structural descriptions of the brain’s networks, a dataset they called the “connectome.” Such a connectome would help us understand the emergence of functional brain states from their structural substrate. Connectomics, the production and study of connectomes, can be applied at different scales from the full set of neurons and synapses in a part or all of an organism’s nervous system to macro-level descriptions of the connections between all cortical and subcortical structures. The full connectome of the roundworm has been constructed along with partial connectomes of a mouse retina and primary visual cortex.

This is a pathway to understanding the relevance of POTUS-45 for the body. The main lesson of the POTUS-45 era in the United States is that our Constitution needs to be updated.?We have learned that it cannot protect us from actions that undermine the rule of law, democracy, and progress toward a more perfect union.??It cannot protect us from demagoguery and authoritarianism in the Oval Office itself, never mind in other governmental arenas.??We should consider several new amendments to reinforce the Constitution’s protections of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a democratic society.?It is long past the time for a Constitutional Convention.?We are no longer living in 1776 or 1791. What does this have to do with the body??Non-democratic governments must discipline the body.?In societal terms, this means that bodies will be raced, classed, and enslaved.?

A great many of our lawmakers are averse to a politics of compassion and enemies of science, education, and the life of the mind.?This is true everywhere but America is the model for the politics of enslavement.?Our lawmakers believe the individual should bear the burdens of social structural outcomes that interfere with the quality of life.?The absurdity of using the Dow Jones average as the main indicator of the health of an economy, marked by intolerable levels of poverty and gaps in wealth and income, should finally be recognized.?The lack of a politics of compassion means that health care, social security, and other parts of the social safety net are always going to be at risk.?We may need to test the capacity of the law to institute compassion in the short run and hope that, in the long run, compassion will become a norm of our culture.?We have seen such an achievement in practical (not utopian) terms in other nations.?Remember what I said earlier.??

Unadulterated compassion is a centripetal force that reinforces boundaries and restricts connections across social categories, groups, cultures, and nations.?Are there compassionate politicians??Of course there are.?But they cannot see beyond capitalism and democracy.?The ultimate politics of the body requires that we recognize that capitalism is not, has never been, and can never be an actual economic system.?It is rather an ideological smokescreen the masks a system of exploitation.?If an ideology’s basic assumptions violate the laws of nature and human nature any effort at any level to implement the ideology will be destructive.?Such violations in capitalist models, for example, include rational self-interest, the invisible hand, the “free market,” an even playing field, a profits first philosophy prior to or without accounting for people and environments, a homogeneous plane (equal distribution of resources - quality and quantity -across the planet, competition, &c.?The reality is that the planet and it’s flora, fauna, ecologies, humans and societies are characterized by inequalities. Furthermore, as Darwin already recognized, ecologies and environments thrive on cooperative principles more than on competitive ones Any viable economic system has to be based on these inequalities and the cooperative principle?No model that deserves the label “capitalism” does this.?See my chapter on “the black hole economy” in my book The Age of the Social.?I argue that no actual economy has ever manifested the collection of features in any model of capitalism.?Capitalism is an ideology not an actual working economy.?The standard features that define any of the models of capitalism fail to conform with the social, cultural, environmental, and planetary ecological realities of the earth and its peoples.?Any effort to put an economy into operation based on a capitalist model will almost immediately have to import non-capitalist features (handicapping)?to avoid environmental and socio-cultural disasters.?Following such an ideology full-tilt will destroy ecological and human systems.?Even Adam Smith handicapped “capitalism” in his theory of moral sentiments which is ignored by capitalists and almost everyone else.

Democracy is only valuable as a stepping stone to anarchy.??I do not speak of anarchy here as a term that connotes chaos and disorder but rather of anarchism in the terms it was given to use by Peter Kropotokin, as one of the social sciences.?Translated onto the political arena, it gives a government that is de-centralized to such an extent that we humans become self-governing.?We become the caretakers of the planet and of our bodies.?

A word finally on how science fits into this perspective.?All knowledge claims escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible.?There is no justification for investing any scientific claim with positive or absolute belief; everything is in flux, and subject to criticism and change.?That doesn’t leave us entirely groundless.?Grounding our sciences in our experience of crossing the street, an imperative of pursuing the profundity of the surface, modifies the idea that everything is in flux.?The profundity of the surface is not the end of inquiry but a portal to deeper and even more profound levels and dimensions of knowledge.?But we must begin with this.?

Our world gives us levels of closure that make social life possible and subject to definitive-descriptions-in-practice. I have made an effort to preserve “sciences,” the basic human capacity for reason.?Nothing has cost us so dearly, Nietzsche wrote, as that “little bit of reason and sense of freedom…which now constitutes our pride.” The knowledge gained by way of discourse and practice in sciences and reasons is indeed presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and comes without positive or absolute belief.?The caveat of course is rooted in the recalcitrance of everyday reality’s factual closures that make life possible.?Anything goes, but even Feyerabend left buildings through front doors and not by leaping out of windows.?And those factual closures are what make a practical explanatory, causal science possible.?STS scholar Steve Woolgar is right when he claims no definitive descriptions are possible.?But because we live at the boundary of the ding an sich and the everyday reality of our experience, definitive-descriptions-in-practice are possible.?Look both ways when you cross the street, my friends?That is a “definitive prescription.”?

The body is a boundary object between information and control in an era of bioinformatics.?We have been witnessing a shift from a cryptographic to a pragmatic paradigm in biological discourse, and the emergence of hybrid bodies. The general process has been a commodification of the body, something we should recognize in more general terms as part of the commodifying blitzkrieg of latter day “capitalism” (the economy that never was and never could be: Restivo, 2018: 186-193). Consider, for example, Robert Mitchell’s (2004) views on body wastes, information, and commodification. We are living in transitional economies organized around an informational mode of production. As we informaticize objects, bodies, and relationships, everything becomes more readily commodified, including body parts and body wastes. The global economy, as discourse and information, reaches its apex (as a system of inclusion and exclusion) in commodity imperialism, colonialism, and market expansionism.

New forms of embodiment abound; for example, in the form of virtual informatic surgeons, digibodies (a third space between mind and body), and informatic emotions. Finally, we find ourselves at the intersection of bioinformatics and the visual arts, engaging installations such as “Einstein’s Brain” (Dunning, Woodrow, and their collaborators), and Kac’s “Genesis.” Here are the results of moving from conceptual criticisms of biotechnology to using it in aesthetic formations. A cult of information arises out of a sea of media bodies, reality-transforming symbols, and the mindbody concept. The meaning of the human genome is not simply the province of scientists but a boundary object batted about and battered in the arenas of art and culture. As we move through this world, representation fades away and data is made flesh. Simultaneously, the flesh becomes more complicated.

Nietzsche (and certainly our own contemporary students of body) helped make a place for new kinds of bodies, with new kinds of lives. It is in our (will to) power to construct new bodies, new entities, and new forms of life and kinds of lives. Bodies are systems of meaning, of interpretations, and this means that what counts as a “body” is a cultural decision. One could easily imagine that we are witnessing the end of the body. Claude Levi-Strauss (1967) argued that academics tend to focus their attention on things just at the point they are coming to an end. On closer inspection, however, endings are more likely to be transitions and transformations. This is implied, for example, in Martin’s (1990:1) contention that one sort of body is coming to an end and another kind of body is coming into being. In an era of postmodernisms, it is more prudent to think in terms of plurals rather than singles. Just as we are cautioned in science studies to think in terms of sciences instead of science (or Science), so we should be prepared to think of the body, and especially the emerging body, as bodies. This is simply postmodernism at work, pluralizing our classifications and categories. The body, always in fact the focus of a pluralizing discipline if we think about it in historical cross-cultural terms, is arguably at the center of more intense disciplining actions than ever before. One reason is that the body is centrally linked to all the other entities now being subjected to pluralizing disciplining.

Judith Butler (1993) expressed her frustration with how resistant the body is to being disciplined. In order to get some purchase over her subject (and perhaps over her own body, her own self), she adopted a Foucauldian posture to address the regulatory norms through which the body is materialized. She found herself engaging with constructivism and questions about agency, but she problematized these ideas contra constructivism (or “constructionism” as I prefer) in a way that was prohibitively narrow, sociologically. Notice that pluralization and disciplining impose new restraints and regulations on bodies and simultaneously provoke multiple forms of bodies (e.g., transgendered and trans-sexed bodies, and LGBTQ+, homo- hetero- and trans-normative relationships).

In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles (1999) analytically distinguished the body from embodiment. Like many of us who are struggling to escape dualistic thinking, Hayles found it difficult to stay the pluralist or holistic course. More recently, she tried to complete her escape by adopting the strategy of positing “relation” rather than pre-existing entities (on relational thinking as a recurring intellectual strategy see Restivo, 1983: 40-41), She adopted Mark Hansen’s term “mindbody” to denote the emergent unity of body and embodiment in a dynamic flux of biology, culture, and technoscience. The relational stance gives us mind, body, and world as constructions of our experience (Hayles, 2004; cf. No?, 2010; Clark, 1998; and Restivo, 2017: 33-34).?The model described here is Fig. 1 on page 63.

The body as subject and object is a locus of tensions that emerge around new technologies. The powers behind these technologies announce them as gateways to utopias – it was atomic power in the mid-twentieth century, it’s the human genome and bio- and nano-technology today. These announcements call forth critics who respond with dystopic and doomsday scenarios. As the

body technology, increasingly fluid and evasive, emerged in the last century, Wells, Kafka, Orwell and others imagined the dark futures that might lie ahead of us (Dyens, 2001). Today, authors such as Don DeLillo, Caleb Carr, Dan Brown, and Michael Crichton oppose the utopias of the utopitechnologists and the utopinformation engineers with visions of bodies and cultures transformed in near future dystopias.

Experiments in robotics and artificial intelligence are blurring the boundary between the living and dead (perhaps the source of the zombianism that is so prominent in popular culture). We need to consider more critically what is at stake in the development of socially intelligent, sociable, and emotional robots. Woodward (2004) took steps in this direction in her “low key manifesto in favor of respect for the material lifeworld that we are creating in our image.” She discussed the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess match that was billed as a “man versus machine” event, and reinforced predictions about the emergence of machines with emotions. Her defense of “artifacts” spilled over into a Latourian world of machines with voices. It is important to remember that Latour is at best ambivalent and at worst maddeningly obscure on the issue of whether he believes machines can speak for themselves (Restivo, 2004).

Let’s reconsider the Kasparov-Deep Blue match. The rhetoric of “man versus machine” masked the fact that Kasparov and Deep Blue were stand-ins for two networks of humans (including experts on chess and computers) and machines. “Man” is already a cog in a cyborg network. As for machines with emotions and consciousness, the problem resolves itself differently if we proceed from the idea of “robots ‘r’ us,” which gives us a new life form, or if we think of “robots as robots” which gives us machines; and of course there is a middle ground, the Technium (Kelly, 2011). The Technium is the self-organized global network of interlocked technologies; it is not alive but it exhibits life-like behaviors. It is the “inevitable” next stage in the process that gave us self-organized life. (This idea should make us think of Latour’s actor-networks, except that Latour’s concept explicitly includes humans whereas Kelly’s concept is more generally technocratic.)

The “robots ‘r’ us” position leads to skepticism about whether robots could ever be conscious in the way that we are conscious or experience emotions in the ways that we humans do. If we adopt the “robots as robots” position, we are encouraged to think in terms of machine consciousness and machine emotions. It’s important to remember that we humans are organic machines ,so we already know that machines can be conscious and feel. It might then be possible for inorganic machines to develop their own forms of consciousness and emotions. Actor-network and Technium concepts suggest, on the one hand, hybrid machines and, on the other, sociologically impoverished futures. I am not dismissing the concept of the Technium here, only asking that it be less a technological fix than a concept that signifies a profound integration of the organic, the inorganic, and the social. In all of these cases, robotics engineers and futurists are going to have to pay more attention to the role of mimesis in the evolution of human communication, consciousness, and emotions (Donald, 2001: 259ff.); the nature of interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains (Collins, 2004); and their significance for the emergence of consciousness and emotions. The technological materialization of mimesis, rhythm, and entrained imitation may be sufficient to generate machine consciousness or embryonic awareness.

We can now see the significance of dancing and why robots should be able to dance. Dance is the gross expression of the fine-grained rhythmicity that is innate to all levels of life from cells to bodies; and even social systems have their rhythms, even societies and groups dance. When we sociologists and anthropologists argue, contrary to the physicists and biologists, that consciousness originates in the social world (Whitehead, 2008), we are pointing to the innate rhythmicity of humans and their capacity for dance as the in-between conduits that generate consciousness and emotions. If we want to build robots that are conscious and emotional, we will have to teach them to dance and build rhythm into their silicon and steel. There is, in fact, a movement in robotics that recognizes the importance of dance, without yet connecting it to consciousness and emotions (see the work of Amy LaViers and her colleagues: The Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab, Philadelphia, PA).

The work on social and sociable robots and affective computing has created a social space of border tensions between minds, brains, bodies, machines, and humans, and scientific and theologico-religious authority. Not only are we reinventing bodies, we are reinventing science and posing new challenges to religion and ethics. As a species, we are working globally on so many different planes of action that we are faced with the unintended, unpredictable, and unknowable consequences of a multiplicity of multiplier effects.

Information technologies are ready targets for social criticism and critical theory, and for ethical analyses. Information itself has until recently escaped these critical and analytical tools. The Critical Art Ensemble collective (see the CAE reference section in the Bibliography) draws attention to the theological rhetoric that surrounds the human genome project and how it masks the eugenic origins of this discourse. Genesis creator Kac (1999) explains that he has tried to represent the continuity between imperialist ideology and reductionist genetics. He accomplishes this artistically by translating a passage from the King James Bible into Morse code and then translating the Morse code into a gene.

What is at stake here? Transgenic artists such as Eduardo Kac may be creating early-warning systems to alert us to the consequences of the world(s) we are fashioning for “nature,” species, culture, and self in their independent and networked forms. The quotes around “nature” signal an increasing awareness that the very idea of Nature is not as transparent, unified, or universal as we once assumed. Indeed, that signals that we should probably put quote marks around all of the forms I listed with nature. We need to become comfortable with the idea of natures, just as we are learning to become more or less comfortable with the idea of sciences instead of Science and bodies instead of Body (and so selves instead of self – I am multitudes). Indeed, we are moving toward a pluralization of all of our basic categories and classifications. ?

When Oswald Spengler wrote in the 1920s that there is no Mathematic, only mathematics, he foreshadowed the emergence of ethnomathematics and helped usher in a world of multicultural pluralities and multiplicities. In this (brave?) new world of pluralities, even the bodies and identities of children are at stake. What sorts of children will come from a world in which the forms of family life, sexual and gender identities, and relationships are multiplying side by side with novel child-machine images? The future holds new ways of inscribing the body with desires and erotics, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead means the end of (depending on how much reality you ascribe to the Freudian notion) the Oedipal child (Poster, 2004). Perhaps we are harvesting lessons about children and humanity we have been taught by history (e.g., in the work of Phillipe Aries) and imagined in science fiction (notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End).

Pluralities and multiplicities do not mean that the future will be messier than the past. Unities, dichotomies, and trichotomies are connected to dimensional shifts.?Things become multidimensional and blossom into pluralities and multiplicities; pluralities and multiplicities in many dimensions eventually resolve into unities that provoke polarities, the multiplication of dimensions, pluralities and multiplicities again, and so on. Life in this sense is cycles and spirals of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, thesis, anti-thesis and on and on. What drives this process is the innate dialectical nature of living things.

The late twentieth century may have ushered in the Age of the Body, the era in which echoes of Plato’s complaints about the body finally faded away and thinking men and women began to rally around Nietzsche’s claim that there is only body. All efforts in the post-Phaedo world to dissociate minds and brains from bodies have failed. Today, what remains of the Platonic vision and its transcendental progeny have become victims of the embodiment movement. What is this, but the triumph of materialism(s)? We need to mobilize efforts that reject transcendence and eradicate vulgar versions of materialism without rejecting materialism.

Marx brought the calculus down to earth; Spengler and Wittgenstein went further and anthropologized mathematics. Durkheim is the modern locus classicus for the general rejection of transcendence. He is well-known (though in a limited way considering the scope of the world intelligentsia) for the argument that God is a collective formation and a collective elaboration – a symbol of society. What is not so well known is that, in the closing pages of the study in which he argues that God is a cultural construction, Durkheim also demonstrates that logical concepts are cultural constructions. With the coming of science studies and cultural studies we disciplined mathematical and scientific knowledge as cultural and social constructions. The next phase of this rejection of transcendence is now underway in the sociology and anthropology of mind and brain (e.g., Restivo, 2019). The final phase comes with the sociology of the gods, religion, the supernatural, and transcendence itself (Restivo, 2021).?

Information has classically been as recalcitrant as mathematics and logic in resisting embodiment and materialization, but now it, too, is falling under the disciplining regimes of embodiment and materialism. The Age of Information might be enveloping the Age of the Body, even as both fall under the umbrella of the Age of the Social (Restivo, 2018).

R. Doyle (2004) affords us another opportunity to consider what is at stake in the informatic understanding of life by linking LSD and DNA narratives. He asks: What if Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language? The language of information becomes a locus of the organic and the machinic (or mechanic) enfolding each other helically, with the result that sometimes “the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling.” Imagine this as at one with the cycles and spirals of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis and you have some idea of the roots of the complexities of life forms. Doyle perceptively infers a Nietzschean joyous science (or science of joy) from life as information. He comes very close to embracing my claim that the best science is practiced anarchistically and within anarchistic social formations. If life emerges at the edge of chaos, moreover, we may as well say that it emerges at the edge of information, that life is informatic and that bodies are at once and already bodies of information. It is a relatively short step to recognizing where the “feeling” for the cyborg (Woodward, 2004: 194) comes from; embodiment is necessary for learning emotions and generating consciousness.

The possibility of “peaceful collaboration” between humans and other forms of artificial entities (collaboration between organic and inorganic machines) is dependent on the cross-species communication of the “caring emotions” (especially empathy and sympathy). We are at the threshold ,not simply of understanding the conditions for relating to machines, but to other humans, and most generally to the Other. Success depends on everyone coming to the dance.

All of the visionaries imagining The Age of the Body and The Age of Information are haunted by the specter of The Age of the Social. They must turn around and face this terror squarely (as must we all) in order to ground embodiment and bodies in social discourses and social practices. We and everything we invent and discover are socially constituted; there is no other way for us to make our worlds than through our interactions with each other as socially constructed selves, as members of a species that is always, already, and everywhere social. Here is where we will find the re-solution of the mind/body and mind/brain problems and the hard problem of consciousness. The turn to the body is a significant reply to the mistaken focus on neurons and genes as the seats of our humanity, our creativity, our consciousness. It is not brains and genes that learn and act but an integrated informatic system that erases the boundaries between brain, body, and world. We socialize this informatic system, not selves, persons, or individuals in the classical senses of these terms. We “inform” this system. Some move in this general direction is necessary if we are going to overcome the cults of the brain, the gene, and the body.

CONCLUSION: WHAT NOW, THAT ROBOTS CAN DANCE?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

These are liminal times. Perhaps all times – or recurring moments in history – are liminal in some way. When I say “our time” is liminal, here in the early decades of the twenty-first century, I do so in recognition of a radical flux of categories, classifications and cultural configurations local, regional, and global unlike anything we have ever seen and experienced. The categories, classifications, and configurations at issue at this juncture of history, culture, and biographies are fundamental. They represent the foundations of the world’s cultures, values, norms, interests, and goals. Social movements and social changes in general have made such primordial classifications as male-female, life-death, nature-society, human-machine, person- fetus and the classifications of sex and gender problematic. I don’t mean to ignore earlier examples of this sort of problematic but rather to suggest that we are engaging a fundamentally qualitatively and quantitatively different problematic. The very idea of science has become problematic in three ways: (1) science and cultural studies have led us to a more complex social and cultural understanding of the sciences and the good terms associated with it: truth, objectivity, logic, and reason; (2) the related engagement of Western modes of science with non-Western modes of thought and philosophy; and (3) the challenge of fake news, fake science, pseudo-science, and the triumph of media-driven opinions over evidence-based truths. Dichotomous and hierarchical thinking across the spectra of intellectual life have given way to thinking in terms of complexities, non-linearities, chaos, fractals, multiple logics, heterarchies, and networks.

One of characteristics of our liminal era is the proliferation of hybrid and monstrous entities and ideas. We are everywhere ,in and out of the academy, in and out of the business community, in and out of all of our institutions, accosted by inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarities.?Competing theorists are charged with exploring new ways of organizing our categories and classifications, and producing new ways of ordering the world that work under our new and radically changing circumstances. These efforts will in general and inevitably strike us as awkward, counter- intuitive, obscure, and even monstrous; but they draw our attention to the need to reconfigure, reconstitute, reform, and revolutionize our reigning categories and classifications.

If sociology has to be reconfigured as the “end of the social” movement suggests, so be it. Bruno Latour has tried to do this without understanding first what it is that sociologists do and then ignoring the very nature of what science is and what a social science is and could be. There is no doubt that, as an intellectual industry, he has attracted an enormous amount of attention by being (above all else) an ideological entrepreneur and presenting his messages in the languages and rhetorics of theology, philosophy, and metaphysics. Our intellectual elites and public intellectuals are more comfortable with these languages and rhetorics than they are with the language and rhetoric of the social sciences. Those sciences are viewed as less robust than the physical and natural sciences, even though they have unrecognized levels of robustness and scientific integrity (see Restivo, 2017, 2018). Intellectuals, journalists, and science watchers in general miss this because they are sociologically myopic and suffer from dissocism, the inability to “see” the social and to see it as a nexus of causes. Latour’s efforts to develop an alternative to the constituting and constructive activities of social relations have failed because he is at heart anti-scientific (or better non-scientific), reflecting his allegiance to ethnomethodology, non-evidentiary philosophy, theology, and metaphysics and the cult of individualism (Restivo, 2011).

The traditional world of brains, minds, and bodies can no longer support our experiences and experiments. We need to think about things – ourselves above all – in new ways not grounded in categories, classifications, and configuration that have reigned for hundreds of years and in some cases for millennia. This has already taken root within the inner sanctum of the neurosciences (see Brothers, 1997; Donald, 2001; and Rose, 2005) and among at least some postmodernists in the humanities and social sciences.

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GENERAL CONCLUSION

We can look forward to robots in “just like us” terms; robots with human forms of mentalities and emotions; or to robots in “robots as robots” terms, robots with machine mentalities and emotions; or perhaps hybrid robots who possess hybrid mentalities and emotions. In any case, humans are going to be the “likeness” against which we measure the qualities and achievements of the “Others” in our midst. Social robots in our midst will confront us with questions of what alternative forms of embodiment and semio-materiality mean for us as humans, as men, women, and children of culture, ethnicity, class, sex, gender, and age. Sociable robots will be our new Other companions, taking the places of or working with our dogs and cats. How will these robots fit into our lives and how much control will we have over how this happens? Will they come into the world as appliances or humanoids, treated the way we treat our stoves and refrigerators in the former case; or treated as partners in love, sex, companionship, and friendship and as assistants in our daily lives and health care in the latter case? Will they give us a new class of industrial robots or a new class of robots with feelings and self-awareness, that will be enslaved for scientific experiments, work, warfare, and sex?

There are invidious implications in these sorts of questions. I have no doubt on the positive side that social and sociable robots will help us understand our dynamic and social selves, bodies, and social groups. They will problematize our embodiment, our senses, our sensuo-erotics. As these robots come into the world, we will come into the world differently, and we will matter differently. Social, sociable, and Other robots should be understood in the context of specific and overlapping social locations, and not simply in terms of the ideas and practices of individual scientists and engineers. Attention to social locations means more broadly attention to historical, cultural, and social locations locally, regionally, and globally. In the end, the limits of robots of all forms are not in the limits of silicon and steel but in the limits of our interpretative courage and technological recklessness. We really have no more and nothing different to fear from robots than we do from each other. When we meet these robots, we will meet ourselves. Social, sociable, and Other robotics are important vectors in the movement of science and technology across the world. This movement is a multilinear, multicultural dialectic that heralds the creation/emergence of a new form(s) of social order. The story of this social order begins: “In the beginning was INFORMATION. And perhaps this social order will intersect with a new evolutionary order, THE TECHNIUM or some new order of bio-social-technological entities.

Dancing robots now possess the basic rhythmicity needed to engage each other in rhythmic entrainment, the foundation for the emergence of consciousness and emotions.?Continuing research and development and experiments will test the theory that non-organic machines can develop consciousness, emotions, and thinking.

* Round Table 3 (Dialogues). Knowledge in Praxis: The Social Construction of the Body, Post Porto Alegre, Brazil,?International Sociological Association?Forum, RC 54: The Body in the Social Sciences: Bodies in the Pandemic Context, 9/4/21.

**Dr. Sal Restivo is a retired sociologist/anthropologist.?He has held professorships and endowed chairs in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China. He was most recently Professor of Sociology, Science Studies, and Information Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1974-2012, retired); Senior Fellow, Center for Intercultural Communication and Interaction, University of Ghent, Belgium (2012); and Adjunct Professor of Technology, Culture, and Society, New York University (2015-2017, retired).?He is an Honorary Special Lecture Professor, Research Center for Philosophy of Science and Technology, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China 2007-?He is the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford’s Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia (2005), a founding member and former president of The Society for Social Studies of Science, and most recently the author of Science, Sociology, and the End of Philosophy: How Society Shapes Gods, Brains, Maths, and Logics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture and Social Networks (Palgrave Pivot, 2020), and?Society and the Death of God (Routledge, 2021).?His Inventions in Sociology: Studies in Science and Society will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

Fig. 1.?Restivo’s Model of the Social Brain

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