NBP: Inaugural Workshop – UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrrative, and AI

The No Body Problem inaugural workshop gathers in person at UCLA a group of scholars working broadly in eighteenth-century studies on the long history of thinking about the yields of–and yieldings to–disembodied media. The eighteenth century is a natural moment to launch these questions, since it witnessed the emergence of modern media (including print), new collectivities in so-called republics of letters, the epistolary novel, widespread literacy, theories of information and social complexity, and forms of being attending on communication at a distance. That age is rich in reflections upon, and responses to, innovations in communication media, since it was encountering modes of disembodied relationality which anticipate our own. Our goal is to think collectively, in person, about the long history of thought about the relationship between embodiment and modern media; we aim to unearth the roots of modern patterns of thought in early experiments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a historical counterweight to arguments over virtuality which are anything but novel.

The workshop we envisage will therefore think in a sustained and serious manner about the pros and cons of meeting with and without bodies, studying the literature and philosophy of the first era which staged a serious encounter with the disembodying effects of modern media. Some of the questions we anticipate collectively thinking through include the following:

What does it mean to meet without bodies, to think collectively without bodies? How do we think differently when we meet “in person” (as opposed to remotely, asynchronously, etc.) What do we lose when we think without a body? What might be gained?
How does the eighteenth century conceive the body’s relationship to thinking? E.g. could we think of the sentimental empiricist response to Cartesian rationalism as partly an insistence on the body’s givenness?
Likewise, when we consider that the most prominent and accessible forms of AI–large language models–are disembodied, might we see that as a perpetuation of Cartesian (and other) models of thinking that understand thinking as divorced from embodied experience? How are large-language models articulations of the early modern era of systems (when the field of the rhetorical arts was largely replaced with systems of grammar and dictionaries).
How did the eighteenth century already produce a series of laments about virtuality, in (for instance) the epistolary novel, or poetic “epistles.” How are Pamela’s cries for help in Samuel Richardson’s novel or Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” or even Katherine Philips’s epistles on absence and longing, really postcards to the present? In other words, can we study epistolarity in person?
How, contrariwise, did people sing the advantages of virtuality, in for instance celebrations of the penny post or the newspaper? How did forms emerge, prompting new aesthetic achievements, by the very constraint of disembodied communication? How have the sciences evolved at once in the laboratory and the exchange of skills and disciplines, and, on the other, as a system of virtual witnessing or repeatability-at-a-distance?
What sorts of scholarship, knowledge, and inquiry do we inherently devalue by declining to meet “in person”? What sorts of collaborative inquiry become impossible, when conducted remotely? What sorts open up, when remote conversation becomes possible?
How does remote work invent new forms of complexity, or ways of conceptualizing complexity, as for instance differently theorized by Georg Simmel or Niklas Luhmann, for whom “operational closure” (like the individual in a communication circuit) is the precondition for “structural coupling” in complex systems? That is, how are complex social systems like “networks,” as we currently conceive them, dependent upon the long history of innovation in virtual and remote communication technologies? And how, contrariwise, was the very theorization of “complexity,” by thinkers like John Locke, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle, dependent upon lessons won through embodied knowledge?
How did the eighteenth century respond to philosophical debates about the mind-body problem? How did the period use imaginary beings–like the Lunarians or Frankenstein’s monster–to imagine thinking without the body? In what senses might eighteenth-century innovations in new media have prompted the long history of thought about cognition as fundamentally embodied? Does the modern field of embodied cognition have its roots in, or in a response to, eighteenth-century media innovations?
How do eighteenth-century thinkers contribute to our understanding of the relationship between presence and virtuality, personhood and anonymity, as theorized by Catherine Gallagher, Hans Gumbrecht, and others?