Category Archives: Techno Theories

At this point, it almost seems as if the discussion is on the brink of an in-depth phenomenology of writing, or perhaps a grammatology of grammatology. If it should proceed in such a direction, then that excavation can be said to have already begun, and this notice of it, merely its somewhat formalised announcement or acknowledgement.
There are many points, here, in your preceding response, that have been introduced, somewhat in the fashion of a proliferation, multiplication, or dissemination, of the initial topical impetus, though there was more than one topic. The comparative simplicity of origin has escalated into a constellation of potentially unruly complexities. Perhaps we have moved from a solar understanding to the requirements of a galactic comprehension?
The ‘standard moves’ point was not aimed at anyone in particular, but does indeed seem to constitute a large amount of theoretical and philosophical output that we probably both have seen over the years. It’s certainly not directed at you, Terence. Neither, really, is it a critique of anyone else, the ‘standard’ does occasionally require sufficient expression so as to constitute its standardisation. Your observation concerning the “time-wasting obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens” is a personal evaluation based on your own engagement with Stiegler’s oeuvre, as you say, and if I had read much more of Stiegler perhaps I would agree with you. But this is not really the central issue that I feel is at play behind these concerns.
The issue is, I would suggest, considerably broader in extent and sidesteps the more localised concern of basic immersion in a particular oeuvre, a concern that you characterise as a form of immanence. The areas that Stiegler addresses, that he actually writes, ‘about’, are common topoi to those of us with an interest in such things. With this in mind, another question can be asked: is there any philosophical writer, at all, who does not engage in “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, when they are under the impression of conveying some kind of conceptual innovation?
I ask this question, to point out the deeper pressures of conventional imposition that afflict every writing occurring between an author and a reader. Those pressures of conventional imposition are largely responsible for the over-explication, or, as you say, “obsessive ritual retracing of connections between tokens”, afflicting any philosophical author attempting to convey their particular weltanshauung. But the common denominator underlying all of these attempted conveyances are the somewhat uncertain figures
of ‘convention’. It is usually always with a never-spoken respect to, or for, this figurality; to the obligations of this ‘figured reality’ of the conventional; that most authorial productions seem to circulate. Every author senses the consensus in their own way, responding to it, according to their intuitions and receptions of it. But the consensual is always a generalising assumption, configuring the somewhat uncertain figures of convention.
If Stiegler has built a ladder to do a particular job of ascension, his continued maintenance of that ladder may not lead to any different elevation, but perhaps it maintains the safety of that stepped implement?

(Thank you, to Terence Blake of AGENT SWARM, for the Facebook discussion, of which this post is a response.)

You’ve done a number of posts requiring serious consideration and response, but I’ve simply not had the time to do that, though I’ve wanted to.

Affect-bubbles, as mutual corollaries to world-constrained epistemologies, are the natural result of a system catering to consumer desire. All things, to all people. This multiplies worlds, necessarily leading to varying stagings and simulations, as a ‘result’ of being obliged to track the capriciousness of libidinal flows, according to the disciplines of profitability.
The gaming of the algorithmic can only exacerbate these flows in various ways, leading to their incessant transmutation and the corresponding necessity of algorithmic revision. Thus, escalations of various sorts are produced, in a contest of partisan leveragings exploiting whatever techniques and opportunities are to hand.  So far, so good.
But tracing the mechanics of such social systematicity is only going to be a preliminary step. Perhaps that is enough, in some cases. But I suspect a lot more is required. At this stage, one becomes aware that performative ecstasy and justifying rhetorics of non-totality can always themselves be gamed for any purposes, including those of positivist habit, regressive nostalgia, and the denial of conditions constituting irresponsibility.
It may be that, as I have suggested many times, that an oneiric logic is the dominant mode of commonly perceivable configuration at work through all the transitions in play. The cybernetic epistemology is the vehicle for libidinal flow.
However, what interests me, are logics of configuration that are literally hidden, ‘in plain sight’, but are not usually talked about. Those that obtain after all conventions have been totalised, beyond their usual referential and habitual scopes, to a degree of non-pertinence opening out onto radically different ‘understandings’.

{AK}: “(Microsoft) Cognitive Services”, is on the Azure, cloud platform. I looked at that, a few months ago, it’s very good.

[Fabio Moioli] “The improvements we are making in understanding speech and language are driving a paradigm shift, moving away from a world where we’ve had to understand computers to one where computers understand humans. We call this conversational AI. In addition, tools such as Microsoft Bot Framework, already used by 130.000+ AI developers, are helping people to interact in a more natural way with AI.”

{AK}: There are different ways of looking at that.
It contrasts two forms of understanding, ‘computing’ and ‘human’. But we must ask, on what basis, does this contrast obtain? Do not humans compute? What, really, is ‘computing’? What, really, is ‘human? Here’s what Sol Yurick has to say about it:

“With the invention of new sensing devices, new perceptual systems come on line. All beings are some function of their information intake, no matter how indirectly the information is received. What was done in the mind must now be done through computers … programs begin to become quasi-solidified thought. New procedures for action and behavior take the form of a ritual, requiring the playing of an excruciating game called programming. People resist? The languages are too hard, the steps too long and complicated? Money is now poured into developing computers that “talk English,” are touch-responsive or voice-activated. Computers for dummies.”
Sol Yurick, “Metatron”, in “Introduction”

If we look at things informationally, then there are only different systems, whether biological in form, or not. Arguably, everything ‘human’, is susceptible to cybernetic or systematic representation, and thus, to computability.
Equally, though, everything ‘human’, through this very computability, has the potential to re-present, and configure, cybernetic systems.
The establishment of the cybernetic algorithm as a wider worldly emphasis, is the mundane institutionalisation of the purposes originating that cybernetic algorithm.

As we have seen, cybernetic control is a two way street, and all its systems can be gamed, by anyone ‘determined’ to do so. Both the good and the bad, of the human experience, are susceptible to cybernetic inflation.  As the technosphere steadily permeates the ‘world’ with its systems; and as those systems spread according to human modes of utility and weaponisation; the entire spectrum of irresponsibilities characterising humanity secretly configures that ‘world’, in its own image and only according to its horizon of possibilities. ([Fabio Moioli] “We are also infusing AI into every product and service we offer, from Xbox to Windows, from Bing to Office.”)

Relinquishing the obligation to understand anything that transcends average human capacities, whilst increasing use of powers transcending those capacities, leads only to scenarios of dangerously inflated ignorance. One in which the ‘lack of understanding’ referred to earlier, infects those transcendences. It is too easily observed, that average human capacities, en masse, prefer the insularity of ignorance to the efforts of understanding. When the lazy ecstasy of thoughtless irresponsibility prevails over the demands of deep consideration, only anthropic futility and the limited horizons of its insularity, are left, with regard to informed action. As in ancient times, religious soothsayers filled the gaps of an unknown future. So now, artificial intelligence constitutes another hallucinated configuration of salvation waved at anxieties over the future; another system of prescribed ritual to be followed; another prewritten and inhabitable document of cybernetic self-fulfilment!   ([Fabio Moioli] “To conclude, as the computer scientist Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Considering all of this, as an alternative, you may use Artificial Intelligence to predict it.”)

I couldn’t be bothered, to read more than two pages, and the abstract, of ‘Rocco Gangle’s’ essay, “THE THEORETICAL PRAGMATICS OF NON-PHILOSOPHY”, so I wrote this instead.

I have no objection at all, to using category theory or any other metaphoric, as a way of modelling philosophical structures in different ways, hopefully innovatory and insightful, at least for those who do them. Utilising the characteristic structures of different domains, as mutual metaphorics of transformation and transposition, is just one basic, combinatorial technique of SF thinking. To be done well, it really has to be intuitive and fast, at the speed of thought, sensing all possibilities, and no longer being bound by any habitual ideology of conventional use. When it’s done badly, it descends into mere contrivances of uninspired variation, essentially anchored within the anchoring horizons of conventional fixation.
It’s against this bad trend, the trend towards self-satisfied ‘banality’ described below, that the animus of what I’ve written is a cautionary gesture. Especially so, given the current confusions of epistemological inflation observable throughout contemporary cultures. This is not a time to retreat into the false security of nostalgias, disingenuously erecting old challenges as a ‘holding pattern’ of new sensationalisms.  Piddling around with a combinatorics of disciplinary differences and outlook is ‘merely’ the specularity and fusion of what are, after all, initially contrived Aristotelian habits. Using, but not being bound by the conventional disciplinary protocols of, those habits of disciplined difference, is an automatic prerequisite of SF thinking.  But SF thinking, at least in terms of my own personal receptions, moved far beyond these incidental transcendences at its outset.
Hence, a certain reluctance to return to such archaic concerns, especially when such emphatic sensationalism is presented so exclusively. It’s a bit like watching an ecstatic crowd learning the first two letters of the alphabet, and inflating the bare achievement of that task, to the proportions of a universal revelation.
It’s just the logic of mass hysteria; a painfully slow and sensationalist shift of fixation by structures of consensual dogma; a ‘reality’, that just can’t be taken too seriously.
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The distinction between the performative and the constative is an opportunity to critique both; not only in terms of each other, their usual conceptions; but also, in conjunction with the greater, fresher insights and understandings, enabled by a theorisation no longer quite so tightly bound by their insular everyday nostalgias.

Raging absolutism is the corollary of everyday insularity, whereby, it is not any thinking of the Absolute, in itself, whether in its ‘philosophical’ or ‘religious’ guises, that is generative of problems, but rather, it is the social game of authoritarian fetishism, or fetishising authority, that arises due to the lazy, narrow, and utilitarian demands for totemic simplicity exemplified by everyday insularity.
The hostility to the alleged alienations of ‘philosophical theory’ are the characteristic response of everyday insularity, of its contrived resentments towards any cultural horizon exceeding its immediate, avaricious grasp, the stubborn belligerence towards any development not susceptible to its order of banality. This is the revenge of positive instrumentalisation (instrumental isolation?), of an insularity itself an instrument of general instrumental production, on everything that does not submit to the injunctions of instrumental isolation, to its “unilateral usage… as mere material”.
Unwittingly perhaps, Laruelle gives unilateral expression to a Heideggerian enframing, to a technological telos, and a primacy of purified manipulation as an ‘end in itself’. One which converts everything into a resource, into ‘mere material’, into the homogenised techno-calculi always constrained to monumentalise ‘unilateral use’.

As soon as people are viewed as ‘expendable’, whether ‘instrumentally’, or even as a result of some logic of humility and charitability, privileging the social over an overweening individuality, Kant’s injunction concerning the treatment of people as ‘ends in themselves’ is lost. Whatever the dialectics of initial value may be, contrary gamings of casuistical interpretation are always a possibility; not only because of disingenuous desire, though that is all too commonly displayed, to the extent of formally constituting entire institutions of exploitation; but because the boundaries of perceived fidelity are themselves often problematic and inherently perspectival.
That Laruelle, at first glance, might be seen as rehabilitating the perspective of a lost proletarianism, with an ‘alternative stream’ of ‘oraxiomatic’ usage; sidestepping the perceivably baroque convolutions, and apparently resolution-allergic of Derridean usage, for example; is certainly the positive rubric or face of its contemporary display.  But one has to ask, whether or not, this fasces or fascia is singular, in the monolithic and perhaps ‘narcissistic’ way it would like to consider itself – it’s so called ‘vision-in-one’? On the one hand, it is possible to sympathise with Laruelle’s metaphoric of what is after all an ancient concern stretching back to Eastern forms of thought, then to Ancient Greece, and on to the ‘present day’. The stock of images by which this concern has been known through the ages, are profuse.

Laruelle’s selection from this resource, and retrofitting of that which he selects, are highly specific to his purposes. The usage, is not that of some expansive tolerance resulting from immersal in an oceanic understanding. Unlike Freud, he does not disparage spiritual contemplation so readily, largely because he exploits the logics and concepts of its labours, in the service of the very instrumentalisation and everyday insularity that, ironically, they always gently questioned and transformed.  Whatever Laruelle’s personal relation to this area of ‘spirit’, his appropriation of its resources occurs, as we have seen, according to the modular receptions of a contemporary positivist nostalgia.

The retrofitting, caters to the immediate, avaricious grasp of everyday insularity, to its order of banality, and the modular-mechanical procedures of blocked understanding it follows. When these procedures are transposed to metaphysical and experiential registers; everything; every relation, every sign, every nuance, every self-image; is converted into an isolated and autonomous block. The contrivance of isolation and autonomy is the surface concession to ideologies of freedom. Beneath this concession, however, there is only the order of banality; it’s positive instrumentalisation; and its unilateral, monolithic and insular, purpose. This incommensurability of instrumental isolations, is the raging thought of alienation, on disconnection from that unilateral order. The exclusively modular understandings of positive instrumentality, can only function as component in the order of banality. Without this function, there is only rage.
That all this is so, is shown quite clearly by a history of that order’s domesticating responses, all of which seek to first abbreviate and then appropriate whatever developments might not be in line with its basic, unilateral procedure. We are not speaking of an alienated order, not resident in those who cling to its unilateral and modular procedures as its exclusive proponents. On the contrary, it is difficult to find those who have not been coerced into inhabiting its modes, in some way.

The rage for the Absolute, is a misnomer. Absolute thinking or thought always exceeds itself, usually in gestures of novel understanding. It naturally proceeds according to a free theorisation and inquiry. Such inquisitiveness is primary and playful, never under duress to any delimited fixation.

Rage, is always reactive, the result of frustration when expectations or desires are not realised; this discord between expectation and realisation generates a fixation, the fetishisation of the real. In contrast to the playful inquisitiveness of free theorising, which sets no boundaries of expectation, the entire spectrum of emphatic and emotive concerns revolving around the rubric of reality, is characterised by reactionary disappointment or disillusion.
Such a reaction is inherently the production of a social conditioning issuing discrepant injunctions and instructions concerning this ‘real’, which it simultaneously inculcates as insularising fetish, psychologising it as a cybernetics of ‘personal frustrations and satisfactions’. The reactive thinker is characterised by an onset of inquisitive thought subsequent to such inculcation; instead of exploratory free theory, there are only social inquisitions, all of which occur under the fetishised sign of ‘reality’, or the ‘real’.
It begins in disappointment; the psychosocial real, does not keep its expected appointments! Reality, is not real! This reneging on the consistency of pretences towards objective agreement, stages the reality fetish as consensually constrained, social drama, rather than exploratory expedition. The thinker who fetishises the real, is always a reactive thinker, never an exploratory one; always socially directed, never theoretically free; always an evangelist of the vicarious, of a vast variety of disingenuous indirections, never of honest innovations.

The Absolute was always the province of the ascetic, the mystic, the recluse, no one else really cared for it, enough to get angry over it. But realisation, however, was a different story. Absolute reality, could be left to itself, and those ‘crackpots’ who chose to dwell there. But the more mundane modalities, the realities!, of this Absolute, could be contrived both as a horizon of psychosocial contention; as a production line of regimented insularities supplying that horizon; and as ongoing narrative of discursive narcosis, the addictive configuration of the ecstasies of so many petty realisations. It is this narrative, which is the rage of the real. A rage that speaks with the full fury of alienated emotions invested at the outset in that social ordering of a disillusioning, regimented reality; because it never learned to think or question, naturally, without coerced reaction, for itself.

That this is so, is indicated by a distinct lack of experiential understanding, of spontaneous vitality of insight, in favour of bare articulation of the modular calculations of convention. Whereas, a spontaneous vitality whose understanding is already absolute, requires neither rage nor the ever-unfulfilled modular-metaphysical arrangements and production quotas generating that rage. Realities are enjoyed, when and where they are available; but “unilateral usage… as mere material”, is too redolent of robotic injunctions and cybernetic exploitations, both of them in the pejorative sense, to prove as anything other than profoundly distasteful.