The Self as a Specter of Nature: A Symbiotic Ontology of Consciousness

Presented April 26, 2019 as part of "Queering the 'I' in Individual: A Symposium on Posthumanism & Symbiosis"

Symposium website:

Here I want to argue that Ray Brassier's notion of 'sapience' resolves the problem of human exceptionalism by allowing us to think of consciousness, culture, and our sense of Self devoid of anthropocentrisms. Through Brassier's neo-rationalist epistemology we can begin to understand ourselves as part of a much larger cosmological narrative in which the noosphere can be seen as a legitimate, non-anthropocentric evolutionary event. I connect this assertion to Lynn Margulis's research and her theorization of the Self as a microbial soup in order to explain the noosphere as a direct yet non-teleological result of microbial partnerships, or endosymbiosis. Finally, I argue that it is inaccurate to understand the noosphere as an evolutionary stage belonging to us in the traditional sense. This next chapter of history—the chapter of consciousness studies, feminist science studies, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology—should not be viewed as a reflection of human ambition, but rather the sophisticated expression of various collections of bacteria. We are, after all, a community of communities.

See prior presentation on holobionts & assemblage theory:

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