Just as humans communicate through the medium of sound-waves and writing, dolphins and whales through sonar, octopi and other cephalopods through changing color patterns on their skin, insurance companies communicate through forms. Rather, insurance companies only communicate through paperwork. It’s something taking place between humans, not between a human and the insurance company. It is commonly believed that we’re communicating with animals like insurance companies when we talk to an insurance agent, but that communication between ourselves and the agent is outside communication with insurance companies. This is what they can perceive of their environment.

As far as I can tell, insurance companies are only open to forms or paperwork, events such as deaths, accidents, and natural disasters, and fluctuations in the economy. Take the example of an insurance company. Similarly, corporations have their “transcendental aesthetic” or structure of sensibility their way of being open to the world. It is their way of being open to an environment. This is part of the “transcendental” receptivity, aesthetic, or structure of sensibility that cats possess. Cats are able to hear and smell things that human cannot, and are able to map the entire geography of rooms through their whiskers which detect subtle breezes moving about furniture, plants, and walls as they move about. These aliens have nervous systems, modes of communication, brains, and forms of receptivity or sensibility just as any other animal does. They are often every bit as terrifying as the aliens in a film like Independence Day. And just as alien intelligences are often depicted as terrifying in films such as War of the Worlds, these aliens are intelligences quite different from our own, with aims quite different from ours. In other words, we don’t need to look beyond our planet to answer the question “is there intelligent life beyond us?” I believe that intelligent life other than humans is right here on the planet earth, it just takes the form of entities like corporations, government agencies, institutions and all the rest. What I want to argue, and I’ve been arguing it for a long time, is that entities like corporations, government agencies, institutions, and organized groups like, say, Greenpeace, are alien intelligences, minds, or animals that cannot be reduced to us.

Levi’s turn to “machines” goes a long way navigating these conceptual challenges. Football teams and nation-states are not ‘objects’ but assemblages.Ĭoding this ‘delicate balance’ in relation to actual ecologies and the possibilities they afford is the task of ontography/onto-cartography proper, and has always been at the core of my discomfort with object-oriented rhetoric generally. Attributing ‘thinghood’, then, becomes a tricky game of avoiding the polar tendencies of either over-exaggerating extensive connection and/or under-appreciating the intensity of cohesion and operational efficacy. Some assemblages are materially/structural continuous or extensively bounded (e.g., lawyers, sales reps, etc) and rightly considered ‘objects’, while others are primarily aggregate and extensively adjacent (corporations, social groups, etc), best described as ‘aggregates’ – no matter how operationally coupled they may seem. Whereas all objects are assemblages ontologically speaking there are different types of assemblages. What DMF is alluding to is that fact that insurance companies are sets rather than units. Dmf asks,ĭo/can I interact with an insurance company or rather with a particular salesrep, webpage, lawyer, or an answering-machine, etc. In response to my last post, dmf and Michael make some interesting remarks.

Alien among us movie