Senseless Distributions: Posthumanist Antidotes to the Mass Hermit


Senseless Distributions
Posthumanist Antidotes to the Mass Hermit

Davide Sisto
Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Turin

doi: 10.7358/rela-2016-002-sist da.sisto@gmail.com 

abStRact

This essay aims at showing how the “mass hermit”, as defined by Günther Anders, is the logi-
cal point of arrival of that philosophical process which has interpreted human subjectivity as 
a closed system, intended as the sum of two mechanically overlapped parts: a biological-nat-
ural one and a psychological-intellectual one. This figure is counterposed with a subject who 
is “always already somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution”, as defined by Jean 
Baudrillard. A subject who is intended as a “living circuit” (cf. Schelling), a multi-identity 
that – like with dissipative structures – is regulated by the dialectical relationship between 
order and chaos. This essay aims at comparing these two human figures, showing how the 
philosophical fruitfulness of the second figure can be ascribed to its ontological hybridization 
with what is not human, beyond any unproductive anthropocentric conception of humanity.

Keywords: anthropocentrism, mass hermit, senseless distribution, living circuit, dis-
sipative structure, rhizome, surpass-rebuild, technology, dualism, hybridizations.

1. SuRpaSS-Rebuild. foundationS of poSthumaniSt thought

Whenever we try to determine a clear genesis of the concept of “posthu-
man” – with or without a hyphen – we cannot help but consider as a starting 
point two basic ideas: the surpassing of humanism and the corresponding 
rebuilding of the self (Hassan 1977). Surpass and rebuild: the acts of over-
stepping and going beyond, recalled by the first of the two verbs, imply the 
necessity of revising some conceptual parameters, those of modern human-
ism, that were given for granted throughout the development of western 
culture, and commonly – and uncritically – considered as belonging to our 
tradition, therefore intangible and unquestionable. In other words, there 
seems to be no reason to question the typical dualistic and rationalistic way 
of reading reality as it has developed throughout the centuries according to 

mailto:da.sisto@gmail.com
http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

196

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

humanistic precepts, regardless of all different philosophical schools that 
have emerged one after another. The foundation of this way of reading is 
the idea according to which explaining reality implies the simultaneous 
presence of two distinct principles or elements, the oppositional character 
of which hides any possible pretension of complementarity, from which 
follows a praise of separation, isolation and distinction from an arbitrary 
perspective that ultimately aims at favouring the human privilege over all 
that is not human. 

As Hans Jonas points out, those very unilateral philosophical schools – 
materialism and idealism –, as they try to resolve dualism inside a particular 
form of monism, namely the one that stems from the distinction between 
substance and function in materialism and between consciousness and 
appearance in idealism, cannot in themselves elude the dualistic shadow. 
The error of both is distinguishing a first level form a second level of 
reality: to concentrate all their attention on substance or on consciousness 
is indeed a strategy that results in a sort of reductionism which, as it does 
not understand the complex and hybridizing character of reality, remains 
stuck on the separation that is typical to all kind of dualism and on which 
humanism has built its empire (Jonas 1966). 

Founding the act of “surpassing” on this awareness means that we 
cannot avoid the simultaneous act of “rebuilding”. Indeed, trying to sur-
pass a current of thought implies the lucid ability to rebuild it immediately, 
in an unprecedented form, from the ruins of what has been surpassed. And 
this is exactly the first aim of any posthumanist perspective, the inherent 
value of which depends on the ability to even out the pars destruens with a 
particularly convincing pars costruens. 

This essay wants to follow two parallel theoretical paths, which keep 
into focus the double act of surpassing-rebuilding that connotes every 
genuine perspective internal to a philosophy of posthumanism. Along the 
first path we will try to highlight how the deepest degeneration of a dualistic 
interpretation of the man-world relationship must be the mass hermit as 
described by Günther Anders and related to the development – through the 
XX century – of mass media. Along the second path, parallel to the first, we 
will show a possible alternative to the mass hermit, and develop an image of 
man that, identified by the features of a “living circuit” (Schelling 1810), of 
a “dissipative structure” (Prigogine and Stengers 1978) and of a “rhizome” 
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980), lives with the awareness that his relation-
ship with the non-human is permanently unstable, constantly redefined by 
hybridizations, contaminations and exchanges that attest how the individual, 
intended as pure and strong identity, does not exist but in the shifting form 
of someone “trapped in a senseless distribution” (Baudrillard 1993).

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

197

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

2. man aS maSS heRmit: technological degeneRationS
 of anthRopocentRiSm

In 1956, when the first volume of The Outdatedness of Human Beings is 
published, Günther Anders describes – with his typically disenchanted and 
sarcastic style – the harmful consequences on the relationships between 
man and world of the widespread diffusion of radio and television in the 
homes of Western people. These considerations develop in a historical 
period when the man-world relationship is strongly marked by a process of 
mechanization of human activities, which harbours the hope of ultimately 
bringing to a solid perfection our biological flaws through means offered 
by the machines. These are the years when studies on cybernetics multiply, 
so studies on the idea according to which there is a similarity between the 
behaviour of living beings and that of communication machines, as showed 
above all in Norbert Wiener’s book The Human Use of Human Beings 
(1950).

In this book Wiener engages to show, on the one hand, the possibilities 
offered by machines in fields considered exclusive domain of human activi-
ties and, on the other hand, how the deciphering of messages and means of 
communication between man and machine can result in an improvement 
for our existence. Wiener aims at optimising the resources, and at doing so 
by hybrid assemblies of technological and biological elements. Particularly, 
he dwells on the – apparently commonplace – distinction between the figu-
rine dancing in a carillon and animals tout court. As we all know, a carillon 
is nothing but a model arranged for automatically causing the figurines in 
it to move. It does imply a message, but such message is translated into 
a repetitive and unidirectional command, that causes just the movement 
going from the carillon to the figurines. There is no influence from past 
to future actions; each movement and communication is limited to the 
univocal and repeated relationship between the machinery of the carillon 
and the figurines, completely ignoring the presence of a world external to 
such relationship. In other words, the dancing figurines in the carillon are 
closed systems – isolated, catatonic and alienated – totally dependent on the 
founding mechanical laws of the carillon, which are subjected to no other 
influence and produce, in their turn, no effects external to themselves. By 
contrast, animals find themselves inside a complex web of messages and 
communications, through which they articulate their relationship with 
the world, so that the constant interaction between internal and external 
determines significant and mutual influences and changes. I draw a cat’s 
attention and he stares at me: this means I have sent a message to the cat, 
and he receives it with its specific sensory organs, assimilates it and then 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

198

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

reacts, in his turn, by a given act which will cause unpredictable effects on 
me. The cat is hungry and meows: the cat shows a specific need, so sends 
me a message that I receive with my own sensory organs, I elaborate, and 
then I react, in turn, with a specific act. From these obvious observations, 
Wiener derives that modern machines, far from taking the carillon as a 
model, must be built keeping in mind the relationship between man and 
cat: namely they must be provided with sensory organs like with animals, 
organs that can receive external messages so as to generate a relationship 
between input and output as with animals. For Wiener, building modern 
machines with sensory organs similar to those of animals is an effect of 
being aware of how degrading it is to segregate man in a factory and force 
him to carry out merely mechanical activities, which employ less than one 
millionth of his cerebral faculties. Consequently, having at our disposal 
machines with features comparable to ours would allow to free man from 
his robotised working condition, leaving mechanical work to the machines, 
and to exploit the wide abilities of the human brain, that have been so 
far hindered by societies unable of taking full advantage. In other words, 
in The Human Use of Human Beings we find the intention of having the 
endless potential of the mind and brain interact with physical and bodily 
pleasures inside the human beings, an interaction that is usually prevented 
by working activities where the mechanical repetitiveness of actions clouds 
any possible spark of creativity (Wiener 1950).

In Wiener’s intentions we can trace the roots of the way in which we 
intend technology nowadays, that Nikolas Rose effectively sums up with 
these words: 

Technology, here, refers to any assembly structured by a practical rationality 
governed by a more or less conscious goal. Human technologies are hybrid 
assemblages of knowledges, instruments, persons, systems of judgment, 
buildings and spaces, underpinned at the programmatic level by certain pre-
suppositions and objectives about human beings. (1998, 26)

In opposition to Wiener’s considerations, integrated with Rose’s definition 
of technology, Günther Anders maintains that, behind the intention of 
generally improving the human condition, the most important develop-
ments in the mechanical and technological field – such as the universal 
diffusion of mass media – secretly aim at reducing man to a dancing figu-
rine inside a carillon, exploiting the idea of technology as “any assembly 
structured by a practical rationality governed by a more or less conscious 
goal”. Both Wiener and Anders build their theories from the role robots 
start to play in the life of XX century human beings: yet, while Wiener 
refers to the first definition of robot, indicating a “machine that emulates 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

199

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

the movements of animated bodies” so as to provide a valuable help to 
human activities, Anders focuses on the second definition of robot, indi-
cating a “person devoid of a will and performing gestures and actions 
automatically”. In other words, the theoretical difference between the two 
thinkers is based on the semantic opposition in the term “robot”, that can 
refer both to a machine that rises to the level of man, so man retains a 
qualitative superiority on the machine (Wiener 1950), and to man low-
ering himself to the level of a machine devoid of consciousness, so that 
the machine becomes superior to man (Anders 1956). We must now see 
why Anders, from his point of view concerning mass media, cannot accept 
Wiener’s perspective and consequently the first definition given to the 
word “robot”.

First of all, according to Anders, the new media have changed the 
established meaning of “mass”: this concept, as it retains the idea of a 
product of a process through which the individual is depersonalized in 
a uniform collectivity, with the spread of television no longer indicates a 
group of undifferentiated individuals gathering in a single place where they 
can develop emotional drives in compliance with the arbitrary demands 
of an external subject. It now indicates that people have been divided in 
the highest possible number of buyers: not the possibility that everyone 
consumes the same thing, but that everyone, driven by the same need, buys 
the same thing (Anders 1956, 100).

According to Anders, from this division created by means of communi-
cation a particular model of man is born, the “mass hermit” (Anders 1956, 
102). With this expression he wants to define the millions of human speci-
mens who, separated from each other yet all alike, sit like hermits inside 
their homes, not because they want to renounce the world, but rather 
because they don’t want to miss a second of a world totally encapsulated in 
its own audiovisual reproduction (Anders 1956, 101-2).

Indeed, the mass hermit is nothing but the final, technological outcome 
of that philosophical process that gives a dualist and anthropocentric inter-
pretation to the man-world relationship, namely starting:
• from a complete identification of man with the structures of his con-

sciousness, intended inside an antithetical bond with what has no con-
sciousness in itself: namely, and broadly speaking, corporeality. In this 
way, man – considering himself as the only living being endowed with 
consciousness – can convince himself to be an exception in the universe;

• from a radical reduction of the world to a representation that is subjec-
tively produced by consciousness itself, so that it is impossible to con-
ceive an objective reality independent from the gnoseological and episte-
mological instruments of the human individual.

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

200

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

Indeed, according to Anders, mass media determine the whole trans-
position of the world from the outside to the inside, so that it finds its more 
congenial seat in the individual’s own room, in the form of an image to be 
consumed, of mere eidos, thus achieving on a practical level that conver-
sion of the cosmos into a possessive, to which every form of philosophical 
idealism has aspired. The difference that is thus created between outside 
and inside, together with the attribution of a greater social relevance to 
the reproduced form over the original, causes the world, in the form of an 
image or a ghost as it is half-present and half-absent, to become my own 
representation or the outcome of my act of posing it, as it is the world itself 
that splits in two and, in its new imaginary and virtual form, meets me and 
my needs.

The world that is represented in images and sounds from TV and 
radio, as it becomes my world, meets me and my needs: this sentence allows 
us to understand with precision the hermeneutical gap from the frame of 
interpretation inside which the gnoseological theories of philosophical 
idealism have developed. The concept of world that Anders describes in 
relation to the rise of mass media is no longer – for example – that object of 
rational cosmology, an unconditioned unity of all external phenomena, of 
which Kant said it could be thought but not known, according to an idea 
of knowledge that was completely unbalanced in favour of the conscious 
phenomenal individual. It is still a representation, unrelated to any form of 
objectivity that can transcend my peculiar way of interpreting it, but a rep-
resentation that is built first and foremost outside of me and for me, accord-
ing to that “practical rationality governed by a more or less conscious goal” 
which – according to Rose – organizes the set of technologies (Rose 1998): 
namely, the world represented through images and sounds by the television 
and radio comes to meet me and my needs in the sense that it comes with a 
“home delivery”, just like with gas and electricity (Anders 1956, 110). 

This is a key moment, as it reveals a change of no small importance: 
I am no longer the active protagonist in representing the de-objectified 
world, as an individual provided with consciousness, but the role is taken 
by the technological device in itself, that turns me into a passive user who is 
given, from the outside, a world already made into representations in order 
to satisfy the more-or-less conscious aim that rules the practical reason. 
Namely, “real” events are chosen, chemically purified and prepared for us 
as “reality” or a substitute of the same. Since I dispose of this, as soon as 
it’s given to me from the outside, in the seclusion of my home, just as in all 
the homes of the other mass hermits like me, it generates in me the illusion 
to have a freedom of individual choice that actually hides the dissembled 
imposition of a unified lifestyle, inside of which actions, opinions and feel-

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

201

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

ings for the whole humankind are centrifuged. Indeed, television and radio 
turn all citizens into passive spectators, and hand them over to programmes 
that are all alike through the different stations and channels (Horkheimer 
and Adorno 1969), conveying at will individual experiences and creating a 
ready-made reading of reality. 

This is precisely the “familiarisation of the world” (Verbiederung der 
Welt, Anders 1956, 117), that is to say the process that makes people, 
things, events and situations feel familiar, even if they have nothing to do 
with our existence. Three-dimensional cinema, hat was not invented for 
the sake of technical improvement nor to make the role of spectators more 
captivating, but rather for the desire to give maximum sensitive and spatial 
credibility to the suppression of the distance between what is given and 
those who are given; the familiarity between the spectator and the charac-
ters of tv fictions tailored by the screenwriters; the deliberate affectation 
that female TV presenters have to adopt; and the phantasmagoria of scenes 
inside of which everyday events are projected: all those are cunning forms 
of familiarisation that hide the intention to manipulate the lives of the citi-
zens. Ultimately, the alleged freedom of choice that should be guaranteed 
by mass media is nothing but a way to turn man into an outcome of mass 
production, where difference is seen as negligence, as an error in the weav-
ing of the single specimen, as a consequence of non-predisposition, vague-
ness or strains in the manufacture product that is man (Anders 1984). The 
mass hermit is involved in a world that is reproduced in images and sounds, 
that “is given” from the outside, so that he is nothing but an “undetermined 
article”, the automatic figurine – though in flesh and blood! – dancing on 
the carillon that Wiener speaks about, as he finds himself involved in an 
autistic and alienated relationship with a fictitious world, depending from 
a mechanism where both the influences from and the effects on the outside 
are missing. Just when we have closed the door behind us, the “outside” 
becomes visible; just when we have become windowless monads the uni-
verse is reflected for us; just when we have given our soul and body to the 
ivory tower, so that we sit inside instead of standing on it, just then the 
world is due to us, and touches us (Anders 1956, 110).

The alienated and solipsistic relationship between the mass hermit and 
the world reproduced in images and sounds through television and radio 
brings to the fore a series of aspects that show how his gradual automation 
implies an absolute identification of mechanisation and control (Centini 
1999). Firstly, if things are arranged so that the world comes to me and 
not vice-versa, then I am no longer “in the world”, but I am just its pas-
sive consumer – the undetermined article or windowless monad mentioned 
above. Secondly, as the world comes to meet me and my needs, but only 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

202

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

in the form of audiovisual representation, it is a ghost-world and not a real 
world. Thirdly, if the world communicates with me but I cannot communi-
cate with it, I am condemned to be debarred, and so subjugated. Fourthly, 
if an event happening in a determined place can be transmitted and caused 
to appear in any other place in the form of “broadcasting”, it is turned 
into a movable good, even into an ubiquitous good and loses its principium 
individuationis that comes from a clear placement in space. Fiftly, if the 
world is a movable good, that looks homologated and appears in a virtual 
way in countless specimens, it becomes a sort of serial product, turned into 
a merchandise in the moment it is supplied. Finally, if the experience of 
the world is turned into the experience of a serial product, it means that 
indeed a world does not exist anymore and all our attempts at relating to it 
turn into fiction (Anders 1956, 111-2). In order to support this considera-
tion with an example, Anders mentions a tale where an evil fairy heals a 
blind man. Yet this healing does not consist in taking away the blind man’s 
cataract, but rather in a supplement of blindness: the evil fairy makes him 
unaware of the existence of his own blindness, makes him forget reality as 
it is, sending him dreams that endlessly follow one another (Anders 1956, 
125).

3. “tRapped in a SenSeleSS diStRibution”:
 man aS living ciRcuit, diSSipative StRuctuRe and Rhizome

Apart from Anders’ philosophical and sociological reading of the changes 
brought by mass media in Western society, certainly provided with an 
excessive pessimism, we want to highlight how the human figure of the 
mass hermit, as it is outlined by the German philosopher on the basis of the 
second meaning of robot, cannot but represent the technological degenera-
tion of that reductionist and anthropocentric process to which, through the 
centuries, Western culture has subjected the relationship man-world.

The narcissistic belief to be “special” among the living beings, and so 
to have a particular privilege as the only being presumably endowed with 
reason and consciousness, gradually encourages the individual to become 
an undetermined article or a windowless monad, at the mercy of a ghost-
world serially reproduced, the representations of which are “virtual”, tai-
lored by the inner workings of mass media in order to achieve a rigid social 
control. This is to say that the mass hermit is for the ghost-world what the 
dancing figurines on the carillon are for the machinery that governs them. 
This shows how the gap between man and the world, brought about by 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

203

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

the anthropocentric conception of reality and leading to a depreciation of 
reality, to a cultural demonisation of all that is not consciousness and sub-
jectivity, and to the sovereign power of representations, can turn against 
man himself. Indeed, from a dominant subject of a world reduced to a 
mere object and instrument of his activity, he becomes in turn the object 
and instrument of a world that has been re-built in his own likeness to the 
extent that it takes control over him.

If we want to take the relationship between man and world away from 
the technologically distorted reality where the mass hermit builds his exist-
ence, we need to follow the double process of surpassing humanism and 
rebuilding the self, starting from which the posthumanist theories of our 
days have developed.

In order to achieve this, particularly useful are the words of Jean 
Baudrillard, in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, when he connects 
the typical Western difficulty in considering death as an integral part of 
life to a strict and erroneous rationalistic concept of subjectivity. Whether 
the cultural tradition of Western humanism likes it or not, the individual 
never holds a fixed position inside a world that is simply represented, but 
he is rather constantly “trapped in a senseless distribution” in the folds of 
an unobjectifiable world, that endlessly influences and changes him. “In 
reality – Baudrillard writes – the subject is never there: like the face, the 
hands and the hair, and even before no doubt, it is always already some-
where else, trapped in a senseless distribution, an endless cycle impelled 
by death” (Baudrillard [1976] 1993, 159). The subject, that is never fixed 
and simply counterposed to an external object, and that is “always already 
somewhere else, trapped in a senseless distribution”, represents a way of 
relating to the world founded on mutual exchange, on hybridization, on 
contamination of elements that are never alike and fully corresponding. 

Man trapped in a senseless distribution is not a closed system or an 
automatic being, that is to say a self-referring subject, devoted to the cult of 
the pure and unstained, and obsessed with cleansing, that is to say taking a 
diverging way from what is empirical and applied, a direction projected far 
from what is telluric and transcends experience, from what is incarnate and 
perceivable (Marchesini 2002). This cleansing operation, based on fixism, 
namely on the idea that it is possible to give a definition of man that does 
not change with time, and on essentialism, namely on the idea according to 
which there are some traits in man that are exactly essential, that can iden-
tify and set him apart from other entities (Longo 2015), is at the base of the 
atrophied relationship between man and world that serves as a background 
to the development of the mass hermit. The senselessly distributed man 
as defined by Baudrillard is rather one who has the three basic features 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

204

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

of Western anti-anthropocentric and anti-dualistic culture, that are funda-
mental in order to surpass humanism and at the same time rebuild the self, 
keeping the distance from a conception of man as an undetermined article. 
These features, strictly bound to each other, are:
1. being a living circuit, according to the precepts of the romantic-idealistic 

tradition derived from Schelling (Schelling 1810);
2. being a dissipative structure, as theorised by the sciences of complexity 

(Prigogine and Stengers 1978);
3. being a rhizome, as described by Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and 

Guattari 1980).
First of all, man trapped in a senseless distribution is a living circuit 

where every term continually flows into another and where no element can 
be separated from the others, as each one needs all the others (Schelling 
1810). The conception of man as living circuit is developed by Schell-
ing at the beginning of the XIX century, inside a radically anti-dualistic 
philosophical thought. His thought counterposes to the classic Platonic-
Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa the image of a 
man intended as a psycho-physical unit, starting from the assumption that 
in every living being – considering the original unity of the natural with the 
spiritual – the incorporeal and the corporeal correspond to and harmonize 
each other, so that it makes no sense to fix a rigid boundary between what 
is corporeal by definition and what is not. This aspect is very important in 
order to understand the kind of relationship that is established between 
the inside and the outside. Indeed, man as a living circuit is the one who, 
by organizing and shaping himself, is open to what is outside of him, so as 
to be influenced and determined by it, and therefore placing himself inside 
a thick web of relationships that condition his own relationship with the 
world. 

In other words, the living circuit can organize himself only if he does 
not elude what influences this self-organizing process from the outside 
and changes it according to specific cases. In Schelling this “outside”, that 
is fundamental for the self-organization of man as living circuit, is nature 
intended in spiritual, symbolic and mystical terms; a nature inside of which 
man is placed and that is both his fruitful starting point, from which he 
draws the impulse for constant self-development, and his dark abyss, an 
inhibitive force that recalls an ambiguous primordial state. According to 
this reading, external nature corresponds to internal nature and deeply 
influences the way man is. Now, for a posthumanist reading of subjectivity, 
apart from any reference to the symbolic and the spiritual, the main points 
of interest of a conception of man as living circuit, according to Schelling’s 
precepts, are the following:

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

205

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

• Relationality as ontological character of man as living circuit; yet, a rela-
tionality that is never harmonious, but rather marked by moments of 
unbalance, gaps, disharmonies, disturbances. The disharmony that char-
acterizes this relationality, and that stems from Schelling’s contrasting 
conception of nature, brings to the fore how unfruitful a merely ration-
alistic reading is, and underlines the influence of chance as well as how 
thin is the line that joins or separates logic from chaos.

•  The succession of balance and unbalance as founding element of the rela-
tionality of man as living circuit: a succession that defines the concept 
of life itself. The whole life of man as living circuit is structured on the 
boundary between balance and unbalance, a boundary that gives move-
ment to it and drives it towards constant self-reworking.

Therefore: man as living circuit is undetermined by his nature, marked 
by a kind of order that can never do without chaos, by a kind of certainty 
that can never give up chance.

Relationality and the succession of balance and unbalance that charac-
terize man as living circuit are the basic principles of the theory of “dissipa-
tive structure” developed by Ilya Prigogine and the theorists of complexity 
more than one century and a half after Schelling (Sisto 2013). Dissipative 
structures indicate the tight affinity that can exist between structure and 
order on the one hand, and loss and waste on the other, so that conditions 
which are far from balanced can become a source of order. In life there 
are accidental crossroads where the tiniest fluctuations and moments of 
unbalance, happening under favourable circumstances, can generate new 
functions and behaviours. An apparently minor change inside or outside of 
man can be enough to determine a new discontinuity, from which follows 
a new creative event or a new organizing rule, from which again can follow 
both success and failure. As famously stated by Napoleon, the outcome of 
a battle depends on a single instant that – during a fight – represents what 
makes the battle take a specific direction. Dissipative structures must be 
thought in this sense: the central role of chance and chaos in human self-
development (Prigogine and Stengers 1978; Gandolfi 2008).

The living circuit and the dissipative structure cannot but find their 
balance inside a definition of man that values his non-linear, non-univocal, 
non-consistent relationship with life and with reality in a broad sense. 
According to Schelling’s and Prigogine’s theories there is never a strong, 
static, self-centred and self-sufficient identity, namely a sovereign subjectiv-
ity independent from a relationship with the other. There are accidental 
or chaotic conditions, undetermined circumstances and crossroads that 
ontologically influence man; life itself, by definition, avoids order, rational 
rules and structures without obstacles. Man thought as living circuit and 

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

206

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

dissipative structure, unlike the mass hermit with his automatism, is a 
multi-identity open to contamination, the outcome of a creative process 
and not of a determined one, that constantly moves his own boundaries 
through exchanges, relationships, moments of unbalance. Multi-identity 
implies a conception of the body as a fundamental threshold from which 
all relationships between the inside and the outside unravel, so that every 
single encounter with the biological and with the technological determines 
a significant change in the regulating principles of the vital activity of the 
single individual, and generates new forms, new identities, new living cir-
cuits. Multi-identity, typical of a man inside of whom the Romantic theory 
of the living circuit and the scientific theory of dissipative structure meet, 
is the element that best of all shows the bond between the Romantics and 
Posthumanism, as the following words demonstrate:

[…] multi-identity is an old idea that the Romantics and modern culture 
have already expressed: inside of us we have many identities, as with Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even with the Avatar. The image of a multitude 
belongs to the tales of the XIX century and to popular tradition. There is 
never anything new, but everything happens again. Multi-identity is the idea 
that, through communication forms that are no longer unidirectional, verti-
cal and centralized, but are based on relation, interactivity and exchange, 
strong identities are not what is realized, but rather several identity moments 
that change according to conditions, to problems, to what is going on. 
(Abruzzese and De Kerckhove 2010; our translation)

The several identity moment that outline the idea of a man that is alien to 
strong identities, as shown by the theories of living circuit and dissipative 
structure, cannot but remind us of the concept of rhizome as structured by 
Deleuze and Guattari, adding to multi-identity the belief that it is possible 
to create fruitful connections in all directions. Rhizome, in reminding us that 
that there are never linear and vertical hierarchies we must necessarily comply 
with, following the rigid binary or dualistic categories of modern philosophi-
cal tradition, connects any point with any other, and each of its traits does 
not necessarily recall other traits of the same nature; it puts into play series 
of much different signs and also states of non-signs. The rhizome cannot be 
brought back to the One nor to the multitude. It is not made of units, but of 
dimensions or rather of moving directions (Deleuze and Guattari 1980).

The heterogeneous connection recalled by the concept of rhizome, that 
derives from the moving directions on which it was shaped together with 
the characters of Schelling’s living circuit and Prigogine’s dissipative struc-
ture, allows us to understand the way followed by posthumanism in order 
to free itself from the mass hermit, the anthropocentric legacy of a reading 
that sees the counterposition between man and world.

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Senseless Distributions

207

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

If the mass hermit is a windowless monad that develops a purely exter-
nal bond with a totally subjectivized world, man trapped in a senseless 
distribution, as he holds all the features of the living circuit, of the dis-
sipative structure and of the rhizome, is a multi-identity subject marked by 
an active relationality with the organic, the natural and the corporeal. This 
relationality is alien to any autistic vision of the world typical of a strong 
and unidirectional identity, so that the multi-identity individual cannot 
but be influenced in a fruitful way by the effects of chance and chaos on 
his choices, which are never completely linear. He is a sort of open pro-
gram who, placed inside a life that is hybrid and undetermined in itself, 
is structured so as to be penetrated from external reality, thus developing 
a dialogue with what is not human that aims at a mutual contamination 
and not at dominion or control. In other words, he cannot but radically 
reject the home delivery of a prefabricated world, because his own nature 
of a hybrid, contaminated and impure being causes him to place himself 
outside an anthropocentric reading of reality, which trivializes all that is 
not human treating it as a mere instrument of human fulfilment, and con-
sequently ending up with the paradox of placing man in the condition to 
be abused.

In conclusion, Anders’ considerations on man as a mass hermit are 
useful, inside a posthuman perspective, to show one of the possible degen-
erations that stem from the idea according to which man is at the centre of 
the world, and the world is, consequently, made for man to use and abuse, 
characterized only by the interpretations that it is given by man himself 
starting from his specific features. Surpassing such a way of interpreting the 
relationship between man and the world needs a process of rebuilding of 
subjectivity that, considering the positive characters of concepts like living 
circuit, dissipative structure and rhizome, never forgets that the only ways 
man has to relate himself to what is not human are constantly moving and 
strongly influenced by the teachings coming from the non-human. In fact, 
admitting to be trapped in a senseless distribution exactly means giving 
value to our own human features through the exchange and the hybridiza-
tion with the other, starting from the fundamental premise according to 
which life itself has its own norms based on a constitutive indetermination, 
and culture, far from being an instrument to obviate to natural lacks, is 
nothing but a “creative non-balance”, a constant movement of thresholds 
that favours the hybridization processes with alterity (Pireddu 2006). In 
spite of the mass hermit.

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73


Davide Sisto

208

Relations – 4.2 - November 2016
http://www.ledonline.it/Relations/

RefeRenceS

Abruzzese, Alberto, and Derrick De Kerckhove. 2010. “Saper leggere il li-
bro del mondo. Reti e connessioni al tempo di ‘Avatar’”. Multiverso 10. 
Retrived on July 10, 2016. http://www.multiversoweb.it/rivista/n-10-
link/saper-leggere-il-libro-del-mondo-reti-e-connessioni-al-tempo-di-
%E2%80%98avatar%E2%80%99-3382/.

Anders, Günther. 1956. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. I. Über die Seele im Zeitalter 
der zweiten industriellen Revolution. München: C.H. Beck.

 1984. Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur. München: C.H. Beck.
Baudrillard, Jean. (1976) 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by Iain Ham-

ilton Grant. New-York: Sage. 
Centini, Massimo. 1999. La sindrome di Prometeo: l’uomo crea l’uomo. Dalla mitologia 

alle biotecnologie. Milano: Rusconi. 
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizofrénie. 

Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Gandolfi, Alberto. 2008. Formicai, imperi, cervelli. Introduzione alla scienza delle com-

plessità. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Hassan, Ihab. 1977. “Prometheus as Performer: toward a Posthumanist Culture?”. In 

Performance in Postmodern Culture, edited by M. Benamou and C. Caramella, 
201-17. Madison, WI: Coda Press.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1969. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philoso-
phische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

Jonas, Hans. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life: towards a Philosophical Biology. New-
York: Harper & Row.

Longo, Giuseppe O. 2015. “Evoluzione culturale: verso il post-umano?”. In Natura, 
tecnica e cultura. Profili etico-pubblici del dibattito sulla natura umana, edited 
by Davide Sisto, 27-46. Pisa: ETS. 

Marchesini, Roberto. 2002. Post-human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza. Torino: Bol-
lati Boringhieri. 

Pireddu, Mario. 2006. “La carne del futuro. Utopia della de materializzazione”. In 
Post-umano. Relazione tra uomo e tecnologia nella società delle reti, edited by 
Mario Pireddu and Antonio Tursi, 13-28. Milano: Guerini e Associati.

Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1978. La Nouvelle Alliance. Métamorphose de la 
science. Paris: Gallimard.

Rose, Nikolas. 1998. Inventing our Selves. Psichology, Power and Personhood. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1810. “Clara, oder Ueber den Zusammenhang 
der Natur mit der Geisterwelt”. In Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 9: 1856-61, edited 
by K.F.A. Schelling. Stuttgart - Augusta: Cotta.

Sisto, Davide. 2013. Narrare la morte. Dal romanticismo al post-umano. Pisa: ETS.
Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 

Company.

http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/issue/view/73
http://www.multiversoweb.it/rivista/n-10-link/saper-leggere-il-libro-del-mondo-reti-e-connessioni-al-tempo-di-%E2%80%98avatar%E2%80%99-3382/
http://www.multiversoweb.it/rivista/n-10-link/saper-leggere-il-libro-del-mondo-reti-e-connessioni-al-tempo-di-%E2%80%98avatar%E2%80%99-3382/
http://www.multiversoweb.it/rivista/n-10-link/saper-leggere-il-libro-del-mondo-reti-e-connessioni-al-tempo-di-%E2%80%98avatar%E2%80%99-3382/