bodies without organs

A summary of sorts---

TS Eliot first made the point that the ability of culture to produce novelty is dependent on its capacity to store and transmit collective memory. Through its destabilisation of material conditions and its commodification (and hence alienation) of cultural products, capitalism undermines this ability. Consequently innovation becomes impossible. Since exchange-value is privileged over use-value, the assignment of value to a cultural product is dependent on this alienation—its removal from its lifeworld, its social context, its function and meaning to the individuals and communities who produce and use it, and its relocation within a universal system of exchange. This corresponds to a shift in the mode of encounter with cultural products from that of participation to that of spectatorship. Culture ceases to be a participatory forum for shared projects of self-narration, and becomes a factory for the production of aesthetic objects to be consumed in the passive mode.

Intellectual and political belief are increasingly consumed without participation. Anticapitalism becomes something consumable—this itself is an effect of capitalism (the villain of the Hollywood film is the evil corporation). What occurs is the overvaluing of belief at the price of action: the privileging of exchange-value over use-value in the particular case of the conviction. The role of the conviction as a form of social capital takes precedence over its function as a motivation to act. It becomes more important to perform one’s beliefs than to act on them. Expressing a cynical belief becomes a worse crime than acting cynically. ‘Being negative’ becomes the ultimate faux pas, while acting in a way that is insensitive, unkind, or flaky becomes barely worthy of comment.

Capitalist realism is a pervasive atmosphere constraining thought and action. Direct moral criticism is not effective, because it has successfully installed a reality principle according to which it is the best that can be done given the way things are. Any suffering present in the world is not caused by capitalism, but is a necessary part of the world which capitalism will supposedly minimise. To be threatened in this atmosphere capitalism must be challenged on its internal inconsistency. The existence of poverty is not a threat, as the reality principle declares it inherent to human nature. The existence of eco-catastrophe, however, is, as it is a necessary consequence of the infinite growth model inherent to capitalism. Two significant others are the mental health epidemic, which correlates almost perfectly with the spread of capitalism, and bureaucracy, which capitalism is supposed to do away with.

Political action today is muted by reflexive impotence: the sense that although things are bad there is nothing you can do which will make them better. The affective parallel is depressive hedonia: the inability to do anything other than pursue pleasure. The ubiquity of depressive hedonia is an effect of what Deleuze identifies as a shift from the disciplinary systems described by Foucault to even more decentralised, cybernetic forms of power. These societies of control work according to a principle of indefinite postponement, in which the apparatus of surveillance is internalised (the paternal superego is publicly denied at the same time as being internally assimilated). This form of control has the character of addiction—what is indefinitely postponed is satisfaction. Capital deprives us of our apparatus of self-narration, and hence our capacity to either identify with the past or to form visions of the future. The gap it leaves has the character of depressive hedonia, fuelling both the sense of reflexive impotence in the domain of politics, and addiction-shame cycles in the domain of pleasure.

In late capitalism all memory is reduced to formal memory, pure methodology and professionalism. Flexibility, and the ability to adapt to new circumstances are valued above all else: anything that ties one down—relationships, the family, nostalgic attachments to particular places—are factors that limit one’s capacity to flourish. The paradox is that the family is increasingly destroyed by capitalism exactly at the moment it becomes critical as a respite from the strains of living with permanent instability. These kind of tensions fuel the boom and bust cycles characteristic of late capitalism. Social systemic causes of mental health like these are difficult to see because mental stress itself has been privatised.

Control societies demand that their subjects express themselves, making affective as well as productive demands on workers. Doublespeak infuses bureaucratic standards: satisfactory grades are not actually satisfactory. These hidden expectations belong to the big Other (a concept of Lacan’s representing the public imagination in its ideological form), and the task of those existing within these structures is to both interpret and satisfy those expectations. The result the primacy of PR, that which is consumed by the big Other. The individualism promoted by capitalism amounts to the claim to have dispensed with the big Other, but the opposite is true in practice. One of the mechanisms of Deleuzian control societies is to trick us into identifying our own desires with those of the big Other, while officially the existence of the big Other is denied (no one can tell you what you should want). Cybernetic control circuits such as reality TV take our own present desires and feed them back to us as the desires of the big Other (a point made by Baudrillard).

In a society in which instability is the status quo, the ability to forget carries a premium. Since the Real is unbearable, even unthinkable, consensus reality becomes a tissue of inconsistencies. What counts as sane in this situation is the capacity to accept the incommensurable without question, as the dreamer does. This loss in narrative memory gives way to an emphasis on formal memory, or memory through methodology. At the level of culture this plays out as a reliance on familiar forms while the rapidity of change in content actually increases. The inability to create memories leads to an over reliance on established forms, and hence a stagnation in innovation.

Big Government serves as a bugbear to be blamed for its failure to act as a centralising power, precisely because of the centerlessness of global capitalism. It is not possible to vent anger anywhere else. The center is missing, yet we cannot stop searching for it. It presents a false dichotomy between centralised collective responsibility and individual responsibility, when the unthinkable truth is that responsibility lies with a diffuse impersonal structure.

Capitalist realism is the idea that the conceptual resources required to imagine alternatives to capitalism no longer exist. Throughout the memorial lecture last week, Jodi Dean linked this idea of Mark Fisher’s to the contention that the left has lost a common vocabulary which once made such imagining possible—the vocabulary of solidarity and comradeship.

To me there seemed to be a tension running throughout Dean’s talk, one that was probed by some of the questions from audience members. More than one challenged Dean’s repeated and polemical use of the words ‘communism’ and ‘comrade’, pointing to their Stalinist associations and tendency to act as a major turn-off to anyone without prior investment in this kind of talk. Dean’s response to this felt inadequate: she dodged the problem of effective rhetoric by making a nitpicking point about the historical inaccuracy of linking these terms with Stalin.

She felt that these words belonged to the common vocabulary the left has lost. If her point was that our present inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism is linked to a loss in solidarity, then I tend to agree. Elsewhere the point was made that solidarity functions in a group by increasing its affects and capacities. It’s difficult to imagine now the kind of collective will required to establish something like the Paris Commune, or the collectivisation of agriculture in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, moments when genuine alternatives to the status quo were not only imagined, but briefly enacted. Nowadays moments of potential action in the face of injustice seem perpetually haunted by prisoner’s dilemmas, deficits of trust that others will take action in kind, even in scenarios where the power of group action would clearly be decisive.

However, what was missing was any recognition in Dean’s polemic that specialist vocabularies also function as mechanisms of exclusion, and often serve to reinforce destructive in-group out-group dynamics. This, it seemed to me, was the question she was dodging. She even demonstrated the dodged objection in her response to the very first question—someone said that when they post about communism on Facebook the comments often contain the suggestion that communist sympathies are somehow pathological. She dismissed these comments as something only capitalists or liberals would say. It’s hard to see how she did anything but contradict herself here. Isn’t the whole idea of capitalist realism that you do not have to be pro-capitalist to be anti-communist? If there’s any possibility of recovering the lost futures no longer imaginable, will it not begin by building solidarity between those who have suffered this loss? Won’t this necessarily contain those who now regard communism as pathological, because this is precisely the nature of the condition to be overcome?

What was strange was that Dean seemed to recognise this point in relation to vocabularies she herself had less of a taste for. There was subtext underlying the talk, a lament that class consciousness had been replaced by identity as the primary vector of left politics (Dean’s phrase), and with it the language of comradeship by that of intersectionality. Dean didn’t offer any specific criticism of this shift, but rejected the suggestion (again posed by an audience question) that it came as a response to the failure of minority groups by early leftist movements. Her contention that a common vocabulary has been lost despite this shift implicitly amounts to a further contention: that the new vocabulary of identity and intersectionality is dysfunctional as a vehicle for building the solidarity required to imagine alternative futures.

Which is why it felt like a lament. While (and I stress) not an argument made by Dean, a point often made by left critics of discourses dominated by identity is that too often group dynamics are used as a substitute for empathy. The reaction to dissent is to place the scarlet mark on the dissenter and exclude them from the dialogue, rather than to put serious effort into engaging with their perspective. With this is lost the possibility of persuasion. It is a homogenising effect, increasing both the sharpness of the group’s boundaries and the strictness with which participation is signalled by the performance of certain socio-linguistic norms as opposed to sympathy with the group’s goals. But as Dean herself demonstrated, these kind of substitutions are no less possible among the vocabularies of class and comradeship she offers, and are by no means unique to those of identity, intersectionality, and privilege.

What all this points to, in my mind, is a certain moral ambivalence cooked into the concept of a shared vocabulary. On the one hand they serve to create and maintain solidarity among those who use them. On the other they function as a mechanism for increasing the territorialisation of a group and decreasing its capacity to access empathy for those external to it. Here perhaps it’s worth linking the concept of a vocabulary to the Wittgensteinian notion of a language game, highlighting the fact that vocabularies, like games, are normative systems. A vocabulary is not just a set of terms and signs, it is a set of rules governing how they are to be used. This highlighting makes visible the sense in which shared vocabularies can function in a similar way to identities. After all an identity—gender is a lucid example here—is fundamentally a set of norms. Given a group containing different and perhaps conflicting identities received via an unconscious and unchosen process of socialisation, a shared language game offers a way of consciously choosing a larger normative context which can subsume them, and build solidarity across them.

But this kind of solidarity ultimately has the flavour of group inclusion. In this case, participation in the group is participation in a shared discourse (where discourse is taken in the broad sense including non-linguistic signalling such as expressing approval or disapproval via body language, choice of what to leave unspoken, perhaps even clothing style, etc). This is no doubt an improvement on a participation based on inherited and often problematic sets of norms assigned to a person by the accidents of birth, but it’s not difficult to see how doing so runs the risk of creating a strong sense of exclusion in anyone who has not already signed up to the norms constituting the discourse. How can this be anything but counterproductive? If the discourse is to function as a tool for creating a better society, then those who are not already signed up to it are precisely those who are most worth convincing.

The real problem, it seems to me, is how to recover solidarity in inherently heterogeneous groups where it cannot be assumed that members adhere to the same discursive norms. Because surely this is always the situation at the level that actually matters? It will always be possible to achieve unity of political will in a group by tightening its boundaries to exclude dissenters, but this achieves little of substance. Those excluded remain inhabitants of social space, continue to possess and exercise political agency. At the widest context (perhaps any context which has not been artificially narrowed) it will never be possible to assume that everyone participating in the dialogue start from the same assumptions or operate under the same discursive norms.

The real question is how to communicate across discourses, not within them. This would enable the cultivation of a solidarity based not on the camaraderie of shared identity but on empathy across difference—difference not only of identities received, discovered, or created, but of discursive spaces inhabited. In this regard, the process by which vocabularies and discourses come to function as identities is something to be resisted. Camaraderie is, in a sense, the opposite of empathy—where sameness is assured, there is no need for the labour required to meet sincerely with otherness. The point to stress is that sameness in this sense can take the form of a shared vocabulary.

Taking inspiration from Richard Rorty, one strategy of resistance to the crystallisation of discourse into identity is the cultivation of a sense of irreverence towards particular discourses. They are, in the first instance, tools (a point whose implications Rorty works through in Solidarity, Contingency, and Irony). As such there is simply nothing to be said about the inherent value of a vocabulary; value is always relative to the task to which it is put, and comparisons are only meaningful insofar as they are made between vocabularies put to the same task. Rorty wants us to make a virtue of discursive shapeshifting, the ability to slip into new language games even when they are incommensurable with those more familiar to us. To my mind this seems like a key step in creating the conditions for the emergence of solidarity across lines of difference.

Returning to the issue of class and identity, it’s not difficult to see where the friction arises. Insofar as identity discourses focus on minority struggle, they necessarily place working class struggle in the background, since it is by nature (almost by definition) a struggle of the majority. Highlighting this point Dean quoted Fisher, “the interests of the working class are the interests of everyone, because the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, and those are the interests of no-one.” Perhaps this helps to account for the feeling sometimes expressed by the critics of newer leftist discourse with an orientation toward identity that it lets capitalism off the hook. But similarly a discourse focused on class consciousness risks backgrounding minority struggle, perhaps accounting for the feeling that early left movements propagated the marginalisation of minorities, replacing a hegemony of rich white men by a hegemony of white working class men.

Spurred on by the approach of the Mark Fisher memorial lecture, a talk entitled Capitalism is the End of the World by Jodi Dean, hosted at Goldsmiths next week, I have been reading his collection Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.

Making contact with Fisher for the first time has been an experience of peculiar concurrency for me. The music he describes as hauntological—artists like Burial, The Caretaker, Philip Jeck, the various projects belonging to the Ghost Box label—was music I was devouring at the time he was writing about it. But this was long before started engaging with this kind of text. I had heard the term ‘hauntological’ applied to this music, but without Fisher’s frameworks and certainly without any knowledge of the origins of the term in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. I had received this word primarily through sloppily written blurbscrawl on Boomkat. Still, it had resonance. There was a clear aesthetic picked out by it, a sensibility uniting artists lacking any commonality which could be described in terms indicative of anything so homogeneous as a genre. Fisher calls it, aptly I think, an ‘existential orientation’.

The artists that came to be labelled hauntological were suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and they were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory—hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence.

The concurrencies run deep. I was not fed these sounds via a steady drip, they arrived in a frenzy of discovery, exploration and reorientation in my musical world. It was a frenzy fed, ultimately, by depression. I was living in Manchester, studying for a masters in mathematics, and deeply alone. I found the city architecturally hostile, and far too spacious. During the year I was there I experienced a catastrophic erosion of purpose, for the first time in my life. I had told myself I was becoming an academic; the process of becoming so revealed to me, in a way that felt unequivocally violent at the time, that there was nothing for me in that world. It was too isolated for me, too cloistered and niche. Yet I had put myself there.

This was not my tribe. Not only did I not care, I had never cared. My reasons for being there had everything to do with my inability to face the task of working out what else there was and nothing to do with it being where I belonged. Reasons dissolved into causes. The disjunction between how I was and how I had presented myself to myself was so severe it left my sense of self in shreds. This period of angst was accompanied by a rapid shift in my music taste from complex, pattern-based dance music to vistas far more spacious, formless and moody.

A phrase Fisher is fond of using when he wants to situate hauntology in a conceptual landscape wider than music criticism is one he borrows from Franco Berardi: the slow cancellation of the future. The hauntological, he writes, is best understood as the agency of the virtual—that which acts without physically existing. The sense of loss contained in the hauntological is the loss of such an agency, a possible future which dictates the structure of the actual present. It is strange to me that I was drawn to this music by a loss of this type playing out on a personal level, and which Fisher theorises as a similar loss at the level of culture in the early 21st Century.

A thought I had ages ago, but never got round to writing down, was that there is an important link between the technique of anamorphosis used by certain Renaissance painters, and the way the temporal extension of an installation can be harnessed by its creator.

Anamorphosis, the process of hiding distorted or elongated images inside normal images so that the hidden images can only be seen from certain angles, is elucidated beautifully by the Quay Brothers in this stop animation film (where I first encountered the technique).

What they drive home is that hiding an image within an image in this way allows the painter to delay revelation. In Holbein’s painting the Ambassadors appear to be shown in all their finery and opulence, but the distorted image of a skull conceals a warning of the emptiness of wallowing in material possessions.

Hiding the message in this way ensures it is not experienced on first viewing the painting, only later once it has been studied. At first the Ambassadors appears as an image celebrating the material things it portrays. The skill with which they are portrayed encourages the viewer to bask in them with the ambassadors themselves. So when the deathly message does intrude it does not appear as some point being made at the rational level, but as the derailing of a much more experiential process which has already been set in motion.

Installations take some time to take in. They involve moving around a space, looking at, hearing, touching, and so on, different things. Or perhaps they don’t. Whatever—the point is that there is clearly a lot of space here for delaying revelation, setting in motion experiential or conceptual processes which are later derailed or distorted.

This USB drive cast in amber is the physical medium for qgb’s Hornets, released on Brighton’s Present Tense label.

Notes:

A theme on a sculptural vibe that has been recurring for me lately is the relationship between the form of an object and the way its material is perceived.

I started thinking about this after seeing a piece in the Tate Modern by Liu Jianhua called Blank Paper, which appears to be (as the title suggests) some sheets of blank paper hung on a wall. It appears to be paper because of its shape: flat with some minor curling at the corners. 

On closer inspection we discover it is porcelain. There’s a moment of peculiar disjunction when the properties associated with paper— bendiness, tearability, etc—have to be mentally replaced with the brittleness of a ceramic. 

The form suggests a material which comes with a set of associated judgements about possibilities for tactile interaction which then have to be jettisoned. Its presentation in a gallery means that we cannot touch it, forcing us to use our eyes to make what turns out to be a false judgement about how we could manipulate it with our hands.

I wanted to attempt something like this in Fluid Form. I wanted to make a shape which conjured all the associations of liquid and then realise it in something as uncompromisingly solid as concrete. 

But what was weird about the whole process was that plastic intruded in a way that took the project in a direction I believe has enhanced it, though I find it difficult to pinpoint why. 

I never had any intention of creating a final product made of plastic. Actually I came into this year with a feeling of outright hostility to the stuff, believing it to be a domain of seagull-murdering evil that I wanted no truck with whatsoever. In the case of Fluid Form it was a necessary evil, an intermediary stage which would allow me to 3D print the shape before making a silicone mould from which to cast the concrete. In the end it was only time and money constraints which stopped me from doing this.

What I later realised (what other people helped me to realise) was that the white resin was actually a far better material than concrete for this form. That was unexpected. 

One of the incidental aspects of the process that I ended up taking a lot from was learning about the science of stereolithography. I wanted to use the best 3D printer we had—the Formlabs SLA printer as opposed to the Ultimaker FDM printer. To do so was a more involved process that required learning a little about how the machine worked. In contrast to FDM machines, which melt a filament and drop tiny beads of molten plastic which harden in the desired shape, SLA machines use stereolithography. This is when a directed laser is fired at a liquid resin which causes the short monomers to bond into longer chain polymers, which have solid state at room temperature. 

What’s unique about this is that the resin undergoes real chemical change, unlike in simple melting and hardening. In the end you are left with a chemically unified object with no discrete layering, which is why it is so smooth compared to the prints given by an FDM machine.

I find this fascinating. It seems to represent a completely novel (to me, at least) way of introducing form into matter. Learning about it has brought me into contact with something I suppose I was always aware of at an abstract level but wasn’t feeling in my bones: the deep weirdness of plastic. 

These are materials that can be engineered not only for their static properties, but for their dynamic tendencies and capacities too. That’s weird. It suggests to me a space of plastic possibilities wildly more vast than than anything industrial capitalism has so far explored, exploited, and thrown into the sea. 

The shapes I created required the level of smoothness SLA printing can achieve, so to some extent they showcased this weirdness. What I had originally intended to be a critical comment on the gaps, limits, and discontinuities in human subjectivity turned out to be a constructive comment about the openness and potential of nonhuman matter. And that, I believe, is far more interesting.

Reflecting on this has helped me to locate some of the constructive threads in my own practice. Which has come at a good time, because to be honest I was starting to get lost in the critical side of things. I have some more thinking to do about how all this plays out and what to explore next. But one lesson I will take from this is to not underestimate the value of getting stuck into the gritty details of the science behind the technology.

As a final note, a lot of the thoughts I’ve begun to lay out here have been cemented by some of Andy Lomas’ work I saw at the Flux exhibition last week.

The forms he creates based on growth patterns are organic and complex, and the prints induce an experience as much of shock at seeing plastic take on these highly idiosyncratic forms as an appreciation of the algorithms than created them. 

These forms couldn’t be more different than than boxy straight lines and cylindrical plastic shapes capitalist imperatives have populated our world with. It’s a realisation that feels somehow utopian.

Last couple of days I’ve been dipping my toes into Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Ecology and Philosophy After the End of the World. This book has been on my radar for some time, though it always seems to get bumped down the list when something seemingly more pressing takes my attention. Which is a shame, because even fifteen pages in I can tell this is a text of great breadth and beauty, not to mention a much more subtle and lucid explication of Object Oriented Ontology than I’ve encountered so far. Many juicy thoughts have floated by already, but one in particular has tickled me.

The point is one Morton credits to Graham Harman in his reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis at the beginning of Being and Time. This is simply that when tool-objects (what Heidegger calls ‘equipment’) are functioning they become withdrawn from access. It is only when a tool is broken that it becomes present to consciousness as an object of contemplation. It’s interesting to see the point raised in this context as it is one of the few things that has stuck with me from when I struggled through Being and Time several years ago. The distinction Heidegger makes between being-ready-at-hand and being-present-to-hand always felt to me like a useful insight, though at the time I was unable to situate it in the broader landscape of my own thought.

But the way Morton puts the way Harman puts the way Heidegger puts it has helped me to make the link between this idea and some of the threads I have been following lately in my own practice. One of these threads concerns the way that technology fades into the background (what I have started to think of as the technological unconscious) when it is working, and how disrupting the normal functioning of technologies (via e.g. recontextualising, or engineering malfunction) induces them to intrude into human consciousness, stimulating new modes of encounter with the Machine. I hope that what these encounters provide is direct confrontation with the agency of these machines and technologies. By their ‘agency’ I just mean their capacities to affect and be affected in themselves which is never exhausted by what they are for humans. Chitter was my first attempt at this.

I’ve been asking myself recently why I care so much about this. For many this will seem academic and niche. But in truth I think it is neither abstract nor narrow; I think it is a matter of global and spiritual urgency. 

The concept of the unconscious seems crucial in untangling all this. The practice of foregrounding elements of technological background—disrupting their functioning for humans to reveal them in themselves—directly parallels in my mind the reality-hacking practices of hermeticism, witchcraft, chaos magic, etc, which aim to manifest archetypal unconscious contents in conscious reality through rituals, chanting, psychedelics, sigil crafting, divination, etc etc. I see my practice developing in a line which very much coheres with the spirit of these forms of occultism.

Morton mentions that Freud referred to the decentering of the human in the cosmos by Copernicus and later Darwin as the ‘great humiliation’, adding a snarky comment of Derrida’s that Freud’s own theories only deepened this humiliation. But the person this brings to mind for me is Carl Jung, who’s theory of the archetypes and the collective conscious continues to animate me. Despite some of the more problematic aspects of Jungian theory---Jung’s own empirical sloppiness, the swathes of shallow interpreters--- I can’t help but love it for finding empowerment and re-enchantment in the same decentering in which Freud found humiliation.

The links I want to make between empowerment, technological foregrounding, and the occult have started to become more clear recently. Shaviro’s essays on accelerationism have been a great help in this, particular the distinction he draws been predicting the actual future and extrapolating the potentialities of the present (that wonderful phrase he uses: “the futurity that haunts the present”). 

This resonates utterly with my experiences of tarot reading. Engaging with the tarot almost never feels like a process in which you learn something new. Much more often it feels like something which you already knew but was somehow blocked or obscured from consciousness has been brought into view. It is never a case of reading the future, but of reading the potentialities of the present. It raises into consciousness what is present but unconscious, or semi-conscious. 

The value of this is that once something has been made conscious it can be acted on. This is why these practices are empowering. They make possible new actions by unveiling present potentialities.

Some collected quotes from Steven Shaviro’s Introduction to Accelerationism, from the No Speed Limit essay collection. 

[A]ccelerationism is best defined—in political, aesthetic, and philosophical terms—as the argument that the only way out is the way through.

The way out being the way out of capitalism, of course. Put this way I’m inclined to agree. Curious also is the link Shaviro draws between accelerationism and science fiction: 

[S]cience fiction as a genre does not claim to actually predict the future. Rather, it works to extrapolate elements of the present, to consider what those elements might lead to if allowed to reach their full potential. That is to say, science fiction is not about the actual future but about the futurity that haunts the present. It grasps, and brings to visibility, what Deleuze calls the virtual dimension of existence, or what Marx calls tendential processes.

Accelerationism is a speculative movement that seeks to extrapolate the entire globalized neoliberal capitalist order. This means that it is necessarily and aesthetic movement as well as a political one. The hope driving accelerationism is that, in fully expressing the potentialities of capitalism, we will be able to exhaust it and thereby open access to something beyond it.

Drawing some support for this kind of thinking from Marx:

Marx is fascinated by the way that capitalism creates wealth and poverty simultaneously. It produces the conditions of possibility for a world of affluence and freedom at the same time that it produces misery and alienation. Marx is compassionate toward the victims of history and full of scathing sarcasm toward their oppressors. But he also remains relentlessly non- and antinostalgic. For him, there is no possibility of going back from capitalism’s own convulsions.

Capitalism has indeed created the conditions for general prosperity and therefore for its own supersession. But it has also blocked, and continues to block, any hope of realizing this transformation. We cannot wait for capitalism to transform on its own, but we also cannot hope to progress by appealing to some radical Outside or by fashioning ourselves as militants faithful to some “event” that (as Badiou has it) would mark a radical and complete break with the given “situation” of capitalism. Accelerationism rather demands a movement against and outside capitalism—but on the basis of tendencies and technologies that are intrinsic to capitalism. Audre Lorde famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones available? Accelerationism grapples with this dilemma.

In her keynote at Transmediale Lisa Nakamura took this claim of Lorde as near axiomatic, though I never really understood why. Why can’t the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? Doesn’t this depend on an assumption that the capacity of the master’s tools are exhausted by the master’s purposes? But this just seems wrong to me. Isn’t history teeming with examples where exactly this has happened?

Extrapolating what Shaviro takes to be a key tenet of neoliberalism:

The redefinition of human beings as private owners of their own “human capital.” Each person is thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become “an entrepreneur of himself.” In such circumstances, we are continually obliged to market ourselves, to “brand” ourselves, to maximise the return on our “investment” in ourselves. There is never enough: like the Red Queen, we always need to keep running, just to stay in the same place. Precarity is the fundamental condition of our lives.

My life is precarious, at every moment, but I cannot apprehend the forces that make it so. I know how little money is left from my last paycheck, but I cannot grasp, in concrete terms, how “the economy” works. I directly experience the daily weather, but I do not directly experience the climate. Global warming and worldwide financial networks are examples of what the ecological theorist Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects. They are phenomena that actually exist but that “stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.

Hyperobjects affect everything that we do, but we cannot point to them in specific instances. The chains of causality are far too complicated and intermeshed for us to follow. In order to make sense of our condition, we are forced to deal with difficult abstractions. We have to rely on upon data that are gathered in massive quantities by scientific instruments and then collated through mathematical and statistical formulas but that are not directly accessible to our senses. We find ourselves, as Mark Hansen puts it, entangled “within networks of media technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc.)” We cannot imagine such circumstances in any direct or naturalistic way, but only through the extrapolating lens of science fiction.

Not to mention that the data and scientific instruments harbour their own agency as mediators in the causal chains between hyperobjects and ourselves. 

This thought brings to mind a passage from Don DeLillo’s prophetic mini-novel Cosmopolis:

He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

Back to Shaviro, hating on neoliberalism:

Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it turns everything into an eternal present.

And what should we do about that, Steven?

We cannot escape the global “network society” by rejecting the latest technologies and retreating back to a supposedly simpler and better time. We need to embrace, and even extend, the abstractions of capitalist modernity, if we are ever to do anything about them. We cannot put a stop to environmental catastrophe and economic exploitation by adopting “small is beatiful” localism (E.F. Schumacher) or by building “a bridge to the eighteenth century” (Neil Postman). We cannot escape complexity by simplifying. We cannot secede from multinational capitalism, because it is everywhere and nowhere—just like the (heavily polluted) air that we must of necessity breathe.

Phenomena like Wal-Mart must be understood dialectically, Jameson tells us, rather than moralistically denounced.

Williams and Srnicek follow this line of thought, as they seek to “unleash latent productive forces” and to “accelerate the process of technological evolution.” They reject the idea that the new digital technologies are therefore value-free and neutral. They claim, rather, that these technologies are not exhausted by the goals under which they have been initially developed, and for which they are currently used. Rather, “given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives . . . we surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been developed?”

On the whole I feel quite compelled by Shaviro’s take on accelerationism. The point about technologies not being exhausted by the goals under which they have been initially developed is, for me, a key one, and one I’d like to see explored further in this context. In fact Shaviro does begin to start threading some strings with actor-network theory, albethem too skinny and few:

[T]he affordances offered by new technologies are not limited to their current, consciously intended uses under capitalism; but they are also not entirely flexible. For our tools incessantly modify us, even as we produce and extend them. We cannot simply manipulate them just as we please. This means that we need to engage in alliances with our tools, as Bruno Latour would say, rather than seeing them as flawless instruments or prosthetic extensions of our will.

Some further reading:

Richard K Morgan - Market Forces

This somewhat lazy post stockpiles a load of quotes I’ve pulled out of Brian Massumi’s paper Autonomy of Affect [1], which I’ve found extremely helpful for patching up some of the leaks in my own understanding of affect theory. I’ve left these quotes verbose to capture the context. 

[I]t could be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic. What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its socio-linguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the determinate qualities of the image; the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity.

Intensity, Massumi says elsewhere, is being treated as synonymous with affect in this context.

[T]he event of image reception is multi-leveled, or at least bi-level. There is an immediate bifurcation in response into two systems. One, the level of intensity, is characterized by a crossing of semantic wires: on it, sadness is pleasant. The level of intensity is organized according to a logic that does not admit of the excluded middle. This is to say that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered. It does not fix distinctions. Instead, it vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate. When asked to signify itself, it can only do so in a paradox. There is disconnection of signifying order from intensity – which constitutes a different order of connection operating in parallel.

To identify a feeling as sadness is to qualify it as an emotion, and to ‘fix its difference’ from e.g. pleasantness. But since the level of intensity is prior to such qualifications these differences remain unfixed.

Both levels, qualification and intensity, are immediately embodied. Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin – at the surface of the body, at its interface with things. Depth reactions belong more to the form/content (qualification) level, even though they also involve autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing. The reason may be that they are associated with expectation, which depends on consciously positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity. Modulations of heartbeat and breathing mark a reflux of consciousness into the autonomic depths, coterminous with a rise of the autonomic into consciousness. They are a conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another. Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder.

These distinct bodily reactions to intensities and qualifications are autonomous but interfering:

The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence, but of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening. Linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant. When on the other hand it doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case a sense of futurity, expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static – temporal and narrative noise.

Summing up the lessons of the first section:

Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguisitically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event – in favor of structure. Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory. The stakes are the new. For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox.

Next Massumi discusses the origin of philosophies of affect in Spinoza’s Ethics:

One of Spinoza’s basic definitions of affect is an “affection (in other words an impingement upon) the body, and at the same time the idea of the affection.”

In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two removes. For it has already been removed once, by the body itself. The body infolds the effect of the impingement – it conserves the impingement minus the impinging thing, the impingement abstracted from the actual action that caused it and actual context of that action.

Spinoza’s Ethics is the philosophy of the becoming-active, in parallel, of mind and body, from an origin in passion, in impingement, in so pure and productive a receptivity that it can only be conceived as a third state, an excluded middle, prior to the distinction between activity and passivity: affect. This “origin” is never left behind, but doubles one like a shadow that is always almost perceived, and cannot but be perceived, in effect.

Linking Spinoza to Deleuze, and suggesting that they could both be read profitably (Bergson gets a look in here too) in relation to chaos and complexity theory:

Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual.

Then it’s Simondon’s turn (all these links to other thinkers and theories is one of the main reasons I found this essay helpful):

According to Simondon, the dimension of the emergent – which he terms the “preindividual” – cannot be understood in terms of form, even if it infolds forms in a germinal state. It can only be analyzed as a continuous but highly differentiated field that is “out of phase” with formed entities (has a different topology and causal order from the “individuals” which arise from it and whose forms return to it). A germinal or “implicit” form cannot be understood as a shape or structure. It is more a bundle of potential functions localized, as a differentiated region, within a larger field of potential. In each region, a shape or structure begins to form, but no sooner dissolves, as its region shifts in relation to the others with which it is in tension. There is a kind of bubbling of structuration in a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential. The regions are separated from each other by dynamic thresholds rather than by boundaries.

“Implicit” form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time – extension as actualization; actualization as expression.

Emergence, once again, is a two-sided coin: one side in the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation). What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sideness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly.

This last paragraph has brought some light to something that has always puzzled me about affect theory. Sometimes affect is described in a very general sense (usually with reference to people like Spinoza and Deleuze) in terms of concepts like potentiality, capacities and virtualities. At others it is described in the more easily grasped sense of feelings (i.e. conscious events) before they’re qualified (often Lauren Berlant gets invoked at this point viz. Cruel Optimism [2]). I’ve never understood how potentials can be identified with events in this term ‘affect’. But Massumi provides some clarification: the Berlant variety of affect is a special case of the Deleuzian variety---it’s Deleuzian virtualities becoming actual in the perceiving organism from the perspective of that organism.

Elaborating on this:

Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage, are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is in most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.

Our brains and nervous systems effect the autonomization of relation, in an interval smaller than the smallest perceivable, even though the operation arises from perception and returns to it. In the more primitive organisms, this autonomization is accomplished by organism-wide networks of interoceptive and exteroceptive sense-receptors whose impulses are not centralized in a brain. One could say that a jelly-fish is its brain. In all living things, the autonomization of relation is effected by a center of indetermination (a localized or organism-wide function of resonation that de-linearizes causality in order to re-linearize it with a change of direction: from reception to reaction).

Finally, Massumi steps back from the overarching theory to suggest some ways the order of affect plays out in pop culture:

Think of the image/expression-events in which we bathe. Think interruption. Think of the fast cuts of the video clip or the too-cool TV commercial. Think of the cuts from TV programming to commercials. Think of the cuts across programming and commercials achievable through zapping. Think of the distractedness of television viewing, the constant cuts from the screen to its immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits. Think of the joyously incongruent juxtapositions of surfing the Internet. Think of our bombardment by commercial images off the screen, at every step in our daily rounds. Think of imagistic operation of the consumer object, as turnover time increases as fast as styles can be recycled. Everywhere, the cut, suspense – incipience. Virtuality, perhaps?

The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory.

Notes:

Brian Massumi, Autonomy of Affect

For this project I will research how the use of technology in natural science feeds back into humanity’s conception of itself. I will be taking octopus cognition as a case study.

Octopi are notorious for defying attempts to quantify their intelligence, thwarting experimental design with capacities typically regarded as quintessentially human, such as inventive creativity, acute awareness of the wider context of their situation, and an ability to suspend primary functions such as the drive to retrieve food, seemingly to assess their options. Tension between the alien otherness of octopi and the curious affinity between human and octopus minds—revealed precisely by their resistance to scientific analysis—make octopus studies a site of potent reflective clarity.

To research this topic I will collect data of various formats (text, image, and video) relating both to the specific study of octopi and to associated topics such as marine biology, oceanography, and consciousness studies. This archival process will be guided primarily by core themes from affect theory. These sources will be selected for their affective resonance in the general viewer (i.e. in the nonspecialist). In addition to a text detailing the themes and findings of this research, I will produce a short experimental film collating these sources which will aim to mobilise this affect.

The analytical framework I will be approaching the project from is actor-network theory. I will assess how technological elements usually considered part of the experimental background function as contributing mediators between human and non-human (in this case cephalopod) actors. These elements contain both technologies of knowledge production—lab equipment, analytical software, etc—and technologies of knowledge dissemination—educational films, textbooks, internet archive, etc. I will also draw on Karen Barad’s agential realism in considering how these elements interact with background discourses (about human uniqueness, the immateriality of the mind, narratives of scientific exploration, etc) in the experimental setting to co-constitute concepts of both human and nonhuman as products of these interactions.

I am captured, not by something I see but by something I hear. 

I’ve enter a room where a piercing high-pitched sound hangs in the air, quiet yet impossible to ignore. 

I turn to the source and see an old television with a peculiar screen, taller than it is wide. 

A single vertical beam of blueish white cathode ray light falling down the centre of an otherwise blank screen.

The piece is Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV. 

It seems to have captured the attention of everyone in the room, despite its being surrounded by other artworks, many of them far more elaborate and complex. 

Captured is the right word: my attention feels coerced. 

That once ubiquitous ringing sound screams out that something is not working as it should be. 

But this is a gallery. 

However things are is how they should be. 

I am prevented from interpreting what I encounter as malfunctioning, despite having encountered it in the mode of repair. 

Unable to act, the signification falls away. 

All that's left is sound as sound, non-image as non-image.

I began to reflect on this experience, which occurred over a year ago now, after being reminded of it by something said on a panel at Transmediale last weekend (the panel was titled Computation and Affect: Hard Feelings). I forget who said it, but it went something like: ‘affect’ refers to feelings, sensations or emotions before you can give them a word. That is, prior to their being identified under a conceptual scheme or situated in a narrative.

At the time I wondered whether the ‘priority’ referred to is a conceptual or temporal priority, though now I’ve thought about it more the distinction feels unclear. These thoughts brought to mind Nam June Paik, and on further reflection I came to reckon these ideas can help to understand Zen for TV. (Or perhaps Zen for TV can help me understand affect theory. Either is welcome.)

The associations of the piercing sound provoke a movement of affect, an orientation to act experienced as a kind of unspecified discomfort. There is a change in intensities, to use a Deleuzian term, which initiates a process (as do all intensive gradients, Deleuze tells us). There is a desire to seek and categorise, to locate the causal source of the discomfort, identify it and act upon it. All this is set in motion prior to any possibility of describing it.

The trajectory is common to all encounters with malfunctioning technology. What is supposed to remain in the background suddenly intrudes into consciousness, forcing us into a temporary role as an engineer-bureaucrat until it can be fixed and allowed to fade away. 

Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such. The difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical, and the corresponding determinations are only extrinsic. However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground.

What is the nature of this ‘trailing behind’? How does the lightning trailing the black sky behind it show us that the black sky does not distinguish itself from the lightning? Deleuze is saying: when lightning strikes we can say, there is the lightning, but this is insufficient for our being able to say, there is the black sky. Why?

Another clue:

Form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is a form.

The ground is never distinguished for to be distinguished as ground it takes the form of something—the form of being distinguished from form, and so it is a derivable ‘ground’, not the true formless.

In truth, all the forms are dissolved when they are reflected in this rising ground. It has ceased to be the pure indeterminate which remains below, but the forms also cease to be the coexisting or complementary determinations.

The asymmetry of the situation seems analogous to the old riddle of nonbeing. Parmenides argued that nonbeing is unthinkable because it is self-defeating to say that a thing does not exist. (Because if that is true then what is it being said of?) 

A thing is only distinguished against a ground, but when this ground is itself distinguished as a ground then what is also distinguished is a composite thing formed of the thing and its ground. But what is this composite thing distinguished against? Deleuze seems to be pointing out the infinite regress: if ground is distinguished as well as figure, this can only be so in relation to some deeper ground. If this regress is to end there must be some primordial undistiguished ground against which all figures are distinguished.

Notes:

Two different types of repetition in music distinguished by Deleuze are cadence repetition and rhythm repetition. Cadence repetition is extensive, “a regular division of time, an isochronic recurrence of identical elements.” It depends on a prior notion of duration, a time already segmented into measurable divisions.

However, such periods or measures (bars, for example) owe their existence to the prior existence of a tonic accent, that is to an intensive gradient. “We would be mistaken about the function of accents if we said that they were reproduced at regular intervals.” Rather they are responsible for creating a sense of temporality in the first place. When there is no difference in intensity—in a flat tone, for example—there is no perceptible division of musical time. Quantised musical time arises from the prior presence of changes in intensity, not vice versa.

This is why, Deleuze appears to argue, cadence repetition can only becomes meaningful in virtue of an underlying rhythm repetition. This is the sense in which an extensive repetition (a repetition of the Same) is always only an “envelope” of an intensive repetition, “constituting it and constituting itself in distinguishing itself.” 

Notes:

Writing in Instrumental Vision, Rose Woodcock makes an intriguing point about the difference between perception of a picture and perception in stereo-immersive virtual reality:

Pictorial possibilities [...] include stylistic, semantic, aesthetic, poetic, formal, physical and other aspects that vivify the pictorial art of various cultures. Importantly, these possibilities designate the capacity to see a picture as referring to something else […] In contrast, stereo-immersive VR gives the observer its world as a substitute, real-like world. [1]

A picture is a surface on which is a scene: a world within the world. And it is this presence as an object within the world that makes possible its representation of something else within the world. VR does something quite different: it discloses an entire world independently of its being embedded within the ‘real’ world. The distinction, illuminated by but not limited to VR, marks a fundamental difference in the epistemic modes of pictorial and ordinary perception. The former discloses an object within a world which may relate to others, the latter assumes a world which constitutes the condition of further disclosures.

Woodcock’s point is elucidated with reference to James J. Gibson’s earlier theories of vision. The perception of object as object—not as representation of object—depends crucially, according to Gibson, on a perceiver’s capacity to move around an object, so that they may extract from the multiplying disparate images the ‘invariant layout’ which is the true spatial structure of the environment. This extraction is an evolved feature of perceptual systems, occurring automatically, unconsciously, systems whose adaptation to 3D environments is already evidenced by the perception of depth created by the combining of two retinal images (one from each eye) with their minor differences in parallax.

The motif of novelty arising from disparity recalls Gilbert Simondon’s theory of ontogenesis. Elizabeth Grosz, considering Simondon’s description of how individuals arise from pre-individual processes, writes:

The pre-individual is both individual and collective, both wave and corpuscle, both matter and energy, both form and matter, both space and time, both conceptual and material. It can be expressed equally though either term, though each then entails the other as its necessary milieu. Like the doubling of the image that constitutes stereoscopic vision, each image is the image of the other; but each is slightly different, askew, and it is their non-coincidence that produces the possibility of three-dimensional vision, of depth. [2]

There it is again: stereoscopic vision. The Simondonian point is that disparity is a precondition of novelty. In fact it drives the production of new individualities, the processes of creative synthesis which resolve the disparities that created them. The perceptual system solves the problem of disparity in retinal images by unifying them under a new percept: depth. Or in Gibson’s case, the multiplication of perspectives as a perceiver moves through an environment produce a sense of the invariant structure aka realness.

The metaphor of stereoscopic vision invites extension to other forms of seeing. In 1962 Wilfrid Sellars described two conflicting images of human in the world occupying contemporary thought: the ‘scientific image’, in which humans are seen as material aggregates of organs, cells, atoms, and subatomic particles bound by blind causal laws; and the ‘manifest’ image, in which humans are seen as beings furnished with intentions and purposes, desires and beliefs. The conflict in these images, Sellars held, provided much of the driving force behind philosophy, whose task was to form a stereoscopic synthesis of both without subsuming one under the other [3].

More recently, Nishat Awan has investigated how various kinds of digital seeing play roles in the construction of narratives about distant and inaccessible places:

I am particularly interested in those places that have become more difficult to spend time in through conflict and war or that have been constructed as out-of-bounds by governments, state actors, and so on. Distance in this sense is not just about being located far away or being inaccessible, but it speaks of those places that through their material conditions repel us in some way, or from which we are repelled. Distance is here considered in a topological idiom, as resulting from a lack of relational connections that stretch topographical notions of nearness. Whereas in the past, such places would remain out-of-sight and out of our consciousness, increasingly they reveal themselves to us. Often this occurs through the use of digital technologies, from the impulse to map and create a digital globe of the whole world to the various social media platforms that transmit images and videos. [4]

Taking the Pakistani port town of Gwadar as a case study, Awat notes a disparity in its digital ‘image’ arising from its frequent citing as a place of strategic economic import combined with the highly restricted access granted by Pakistan’s army:

Many of the issues just discussed coalesce in the Pakistani city of Gwadar, where bodies and materialities come together in unexpected and cruel ways in the wake of geopolitical manoeuvrings by states and other regional actors. On the one hand, Gwadar as place is almost entirely invisible to those outside the country; on the other, it could be described as being hypervisible. [4]

We might ask: what processes of synthesis might the disparities between the digital images of Gwadar—its hypervisibility and its invisibility—drive? Awat offers a clue:

Whereas in the past, such places would remain out-of-sight and out of our consciousness, increasingly they reveal themselves to us. Often this occurs through the use of digital technologies, from the impulse to map and create a digital globe of the whole world to the various social media platforms that transmit images and videos. This situation is very different from the past when such places could only be seen in a few, select images that were often heavily mediated in reports by journalists and through the narrative of nongovernmental organizations and state actors. More than ever before, we are compelled to act, to somehow feel responsible for and bear witness to what occurs at a distance from us. [4]

What is this drive to action if not an attempt to respond to the eeriness of the presence of places—geopolitical places, yes, but also emotional places, speculative and liminal places—with no entrance point, of nodes inaccessible via paths in one’s own network? If the first stage of digital seeing is to become aware of these places then this first stage manifests as the weird awareness of absence, the perception of unreachable nodes. Surely the next stage will see the multiplication of images and hence the multiplication of disparities in images. Simondonian imperatives can’t help but follow. To be compelled to act is to be compelled to establish connections with these nodes, to send out exploratory tentacles to seek and grasp them, for better or ill.

Notes:

Rose Woodcock, Instrumental Vision

Elizabeth Grosz, Identity and Individuation: Some Feminist Reflections

Wilfrid Sellars, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man

In his work of speculative fiction The Princess Steel, written between 1908 and 1910, W. E. B. Du Bois envisages the ‘megascope’, a device capable of revealing material history via its trace in the present.

You know we can see the great that is far by means of the telescope and the small that is near by means of the microscope. We can see the Far Great and the Near Small but not the Great Near. [1]

The Great Near is this material history---not only the structure of material conditions as they are now but the patterns of social relations that have driven and produced them.

In a survey of the topic, Reynaldo Anderson defines Afrofuturism 2.0 as

the early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black Identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere, with transdisciplinary applications [2]

Du Bois’ megascope is an early imagining of the mechanisms of such a technogenesis, a machine whose use reveals the hidden histories that have structured the present. Such a technology must out of necessity change the identities constituted by the perception of these histories.

The processes through which human interaction with technology change identities may work in destructive as well as constructive directions. N. Katherine Hayles describes how the circulation of ideas driven by developments in digital technologies informed her work on posthumanism:

Posthumanism was in part about about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes normally associated with it such as autonomy, free will, self determination and so forth. What I saw happening in the 1980s and 1990s was the rise of a new way of thinking about human beings that was in flat contradiction to all these attributes; that was what I called posthumanism.  One of its manifestations was the idea that if you capture the informational patterns of the human brain, you could then upload it to a computer and achieve effective immortality. [3]

Both du Bois’ megascope and earnest about mind uploading expose an important facet of technogenesis: a technology does not have to exist to have an impact on human identity. Sometimes it is enough that the limits of what technologies it is possible to imagine have changed, often spurred on by developments in scientific theory or more everyday technologies (computers in the case of uploading and, Anderson suggests, Einstein’s theory of special relativity in the case of the megascope).

A similar point is made by Len Manovich about 3D composition in the context of his theory of deep remixing:

When the generations of young architects and architectural students started to work systematically with with 3D software such as Alias in the mid-1990s, the ability to directly manipulate a 3D shape (rather than dealing only with its projections as in traditional drafting) quickly led to a whole new language of complex non-rectangular shapes. In other words, designers working with the medium of 3D computer graphics started to imagine different things. [4]

Both artistic practices and identities are conditioned as much by what is imaginable as what is possible in actuality. This point highlights the role that technological change plays not only in defining the landscape of what can be done now, but what might be possible in the future. This role of technology is critical in constituting the way that we, as individuals and communities, conceive our own potentialities.

Notes:

W. E. B Du Bois, The Princess Steel

Reynaldo Anderson, Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Art Movement

Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayles

Ulrik Ekman offers this perspective on what is unnerving about computational systems, like targeted advertising, AI assistants, or data-driven crowd management, that use covertly gathered information to tailor their behaviour to individual circumstances:

A supposedly ‘natural’ setting turns out to be nothing if not a highly artificial context or an information-intensive environment, and it appears attentively oriented towards us rather than being neutral or perfectly non-caring. [1]

The peculiarity common to these encounters stems from the perception of agency where none is expected. Environments, whether natural or artificial, are not typically the sort of things we take to care about anything, let alone about us. While some, such as buildings, may be designed by humans with human needs in mind, it is not yet natural to expect such environments to respond dynamically to the needs of particular people in particular moments.

Two facets can be discerned in the ‘attentiveness’ present in such systems: they both (i) gather data, and (ii) do things in response to this data. This alone seems insufficient to distinguish these systems from those which respond to changes in ambient conditions without inviting attributions of agency. Thermostats provide one example, their behaviour analysable in terms of cause and effect, requiring no appeal to agential concepts like care, concern, or attentiveness.

What does seem critical in furnishing the systems Ekman describes with a sense of agency is the presence---real or imagined---of intention in their behaviour. They do not gather their data indiscriminately. Intention constrains and structures data-gathering processes, enacting discriminatory practices that delimit categories of revelant and discardable information. Intention is what allows us to describe the causal path from environmental event to sensor to database as a kind of sensing; what allows us to describe the response of the system as a kind of acting.

If it is the feeling that such systems sense us and act towards us that imparts them with their often unsettling shades of agency, and an event being a sensing or an acting is dependent on its being intended, we might ask to what extent is this agency parasitic on the agency of the humans who built these systems in line with their own purposes and intentions? The primary intention of targeted advertising may be to display to a person adverts relevant to their interests, but if this intention only exists in virtue of the human intention to profit from the targeting, can we not disregard the ‘agency’ of the system itself as being of a derivative kind, a metaphor for what is ultimately no more than a patterning of causes and effects determined by external human agents?

But perhaps denying agency to these systems on the basis of such strict criteria is unkind. Isn’t it too much to ask of a sensing, acting artefact that its behaviour be wholly independent of the intentions of its artisan? What seems more reasonable (and more permissive) in assessing its claim to agency is that it senses and acts with autonomy, that is that it acts without explicit human direction. And this is a feature these systems certainly exhibit.

A final consideration: in addition to their creators, what hand do the humans who experience and interact with them have in constituting the perceived agency of these systems? After all, it is questionable whether it would even occur to us to describe them as caring if it was not us they sensed, us they acted for?

But in this case also it seems possible to generalise. A system that dispensed food to animals based on the detection of behaviours associated with hungriness would attract the same attributions of agency, for all the same reasons. And if, say, there was a machine that performed optimally at a certain temperature, and there was a separate system which monitored the conditions in the room housing it, adjusting the temperature to meet optimal conditions, would not all the same factors be in play here too? Would we not want to say of this nonhuman system that despite its lack of any interfaces facilitating human interaction, there is nevertheless an agency present in its attentive care to a nonhuman other?

Notes:

Reading Richard Grusin’s introduction to The Nonhuman Turn, what struck me was a distinction he makes early on between the nonhuman and the posthuman:

Unlike the posthuman turn with which it is often confused, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman, after or beyond the human.

He goes on to accept that work on the posthuman need not make teleological claims about the human progressing towards some final expression, state, or goal. But, Grusin notes, even drained of any traces of teleology the posthuman must, at the very least, be said to concern the transformation of what is now human into something which is not.

To an extent the nonhuman also deals with questions of identity. But where the posthuman concerns the persistence of human identity over time (or the failure of such persistance), the nonhuman concerns identities of composition and co-constitution:

The nonhuman turn […] insists (to paraphrase Latour) that “we have never been human” but that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman.

Humans are composed of nonhuman things like cells, organs, and thoughts, are embedded in nonhuman networks like ecosystems, coexist in interactions with other animals, viruses, moons, and trees. The air of paradox in the final phrase of this last quote pays heed to the notion that it is these very entanglements within networks comprised of both humans and nonhumans that constitute the human in the first place.

The posthuman orients thought towards our long term future, to the enticingly utopian space opera thematics of life extension, mind uploading, superintelligence. The nonhuman alerts us to the more proximal lessons of cyberpunk: we are situated in a world that we share with nonhuman entities and agencies with their own potentials and their own agendas---agendas which may or may not align with or be mouldable to our own.

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