Reza Negrestani Reza Negrestani Reza Negrestani Reza Negrestani Reza Negrestani I'm very happy to introduce now Reza Negrestani, who's an Iranian philosopher and writer who currently lives and works in the USA. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies, lectured at various international universities and institutes, And initially, he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Shiraz in Iran, if I'm not wrong. He's the author of Cyclonopedia. And I think the subtitle is something like Complicities in Anonymous Materials or something like that. A great book that you should not read,
not read because you should wait for another two months or so until the German translation is out with Merve. So even if you're a non-German speaker, learn German and wait for that. But in general, read the book. it's a classic. A very intriguing theory fiction book, but today's topic will be quite different. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism, beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing towards contemporary philosophies of rationalism. While working on this ambitious project, he luckily gave some widely discussed papers on such diverse topics like ethics, aesthetics, both like the discipline of aesthetics, Kant and others, but also very polemical papers on the current functioning of the art world or the art system.
And also on the concept that I mentioned briefly in my introduction, the inhuman. Before I give Reza the word, I promise myself to not forget to also thank Barbara Topikov from the fabulous team of Susanne Pfeffer here at the Frida Etienne. I'm close to trying to become her successor at one point. Only if I get the team, of course. But Barbara Topokov did an amazing job in order to get the visa for Rasa. For those who weren't part of this amazing project, getting the visa for Rasa, they don't know what a fantastic work she did. So thanks a lot to Barbara. I didn't see her today. yeah so I'm very happy having him here
it's not a hologram he's really here it's not one of his famous Skype talks and his talk today is like at least that's what he announced frontiers of manipulation I'm very curious and yeah just one technical announcement we'll have like the usual half an hour and then a Q&A and during the Q&A I will give signs to the speaker to just join us and And without a break, we'll just go immediately into the roundtable final discussion. And so please prepare your questions and don't hesitate. It shouldn't just be a kind of, well, it can be and should be a philosophical discussion, but not just by academic philosophers. So yeah, I want to encourage you to ask questions. Thanks a lot, Reza. Thank you very much, everyone. So first, I need to apologize for a couple of things.
One is that I don't have a paper. I'm just going to extemporize from a bunch of notes. And second, I haven't slept for almost 48 hours, so my apology for excessive pauses between sentences. So it's basically, what I'm going to talk about is a continuation of Ian's paper that manipulation actually is able to account for materiality. But what I want to do this is by way of introducing a formalism of manipulation.
and for this purpose I have to kind of restrict the scope of, for example, the kind of materiality that we are talking about. I mean, I don't go to very cosmological ramifications of this. So we start with this idea that one of the most revolutionary ideas in the field of modeling and intervention, scientific intervention, and also different tools of intervention and what they call engineering epistemology, which I will get back to later, is the revolution in the definition of the system.
So in the last, I would say, 30 years, we have this kind of rigid system theory that starts from the Gestalt systems of, for example, the 19th century and then comes to fairly a straightforward system theory of, for example, Bert Lenfee and what system engineering is about. But nevertheless, in the last 30 years, the understanding of what system is has fundamentally changed. And that has allowed for unfolding of a completely different understanding of what epistemology of matter is and how can you really render the material intelligible.
And I would say I will introduce this definition and then I will briefly refer back to this idea that this is not a very new idea. This has been the case since probably the beginning of the Greek philosophy from Socratic understanding and then goes to, for example, late scholastic philosophy, Renaissance, and then, for example, the modern times. So very straightforwardly, the new understanding of the system is that system is not about an intrinsic architecture. System does not have input and output. You do not need, I mean, it has input and output, but you do not need to interpret or
understand the system in order to act on it by way of factoring in ideas such as input and output, intrinsic architecture, foundational dynamics, certain form of essence, analytical constitution. All you need is two things, the behavior and functional integration, or what they call functional organization. Now, this becomes important because functions, systematic or technical understanding of function, is that functions are abstractly realizable entities, meaning that they can be abstracted
from the content of their constitution. So, a functional organization can emerge and can be manipulated. It can be automated. it can actually gain a form of autonomy that developed not because of the constitution in which it was embedded, but in spite of it. Hence, functions allows for an understanding of the system that is no longer tethered or chained to an idea of constitution. This is the functional organization. and the functional organization in the sense that system is understood not in the sense of rigid systematicity, but as a functional integration. And it has, a system has stabilized causal components
that are inferentially linked by way of, for example, these functions. And this allows for certain form of going back and forth or navigation between these causally established components, namely mechanisms of the system, in order to escape from the straitjacket of whatever constitution it was supposed to belong to. The second thing was the behavior and the understanding of the behavior of the system is directly connected to the understanding of what function is in a technical sense. And behavior is basically also connected to a notion of tendency in
systems. That systems are sets of tendencies. And what are set tendencies? Tendencies are abstract properties that are responsible for the behavior of the system. And you cannot You cannot interact with these tendencies unless you single them out, you identify them, but you cannot identify them unless you amplify them. So there is a certain form of intervention involved. Now, this identification of the system according to function and behavior allows for two things. One, a project understanding of system as a project of self-realization.
And I said that this is not a new idea. We have actually, the origin of this idea is basically the classical program of ethics. In the sense that self is no longer under, self is a material, for example, for Socrates and for Seneca or for the Cynics and the Stoics. Self is a material, and in order for you to know this material, you need to manipulate it. You need to construct it. Hence, it becomes the classical Socratic dictum that constitutes the origin of the ancient Greeks, ancient ethical program. It becomes that a philosopher cannot influence others unless it knows himself.
but you can, hence the Delphi oracle, know thai self, but you cannot know yourself unless you construct yourself. Hence, self becomes a hypothesis, an object of understanding by way of construction, by way of manipulating it. Hence, ethics becomes a program of design of conduct that allows for the constructability of self that is no longer bound to some sort of identitarian understanding of self, certain form of constitution. It's no longer moral. It's no longer contractual. But it is rational and destinal. And destinal in the sense of its self-realization.
Because once you understand it by way of functions and as these autonomous entities that can escape the straitjacket of constitution, then it actually starts to self-realize. And then it becomes, we see in fact, we extend this program of ethics as a very initial germ of this understanding of system by way of manipulation. Once you extend it, you actually arrive at, for example, Chinese modern philosophy, neo-Confucianism. Like for example, figures such as Shian Shili and Mosul Nksan. Shian Shili is a kind of a figure that belongs to 1920s. He mentored a lot of new Confucianist philosophers
who used Kant, but also they borrowed stuff from Confucianism, from Cynicism and Stoicism, combined them together. And Xi'an Xilin says something that the totality of the system is illusion. All there is is the integration of functions. And this is really a revolutionary insight, which is the fundamental definition of modern account of the system, of what a system is. Now, this is understanding of the system. And now you cannot understand a system unless you act on it, you manipulate it.
Because the behavior of the system is coupled with the concept of tendencies or the abstract properties that they need to be amplified. But also functions are manipulable entities. The functional organization is about manipulation. And you can't really identify this function unless you manipulate in the causal fabric. And then I will talk how this works and, you know, for example, how engineering approaches this, especially a kind of engineering that has been, you know, a philosophy of engineering that has been synchronized with this modern definition of the system. But before that, I would like to give a very brief introduction of what materiality here
is. You see, materiality is about a certain form of organization, a certain form of hierarchy. I understand that hierarchy in today's content of philosophy is a negative word, but hierarchy is really the register of complexity in material systems. It has something to do with the stochastic understanding of how accumulation of functions and accumulation of a structure works. So it creates this nested organization of different hierarchies. For example, you see in a biological organism, you have traces of inorganic that are not totally biological, but you also, and this is nested within the biological organism, and the biological organism is not physical.
It's not reducible to the laws of physics. It has its own exclusive explanatory and rules of governance. You can't basically reduce biological domain to the physical domain. There is a unification should be made, but we do not have that unifying field tool that allows for this kind of reduction to be done. because it just doesn't work. Because physics is about, for example, organizational materiality at the level of proper physics is about optimization or what they call geodetic principles, the law of the least action. For example, a river always runs along the shortest path,
the geodetic curvature, toward the sea. But you do not have this kind of optimization in biological organisms. Because evolution is not about this kind of optimization, this kind of simple geodetic optimization. It's about optimization according to a certain form of ecological fitness that renders the understanding of the effective optimization of the laws of physics obsolete. Hence, for example, life is not effective. Evolution is not effective in the sense of effectivity of geodetic principles of physics. So this creates a certain form of organization, and these organizations have different strata that cannot be reduced to one another
in this very kind of straightforward leap between different explanatory and organizational levels. The same thing about materiality, even physical materiality. You basically have different strata of structural elements and functional organizations. And these functional organizations are which make what materiality is all about. They have their own specific rules of manipulation. They have their specific rules of conception. They have their own specific conceptual behaviors.
So, for example, that's why eliminativism usually is quite misguided, because you are trying to overextend the conceptual resources of surface phenomena, or macroscopic, for example, levels to the microscopic and atomic scale level. But by doing so, you are simply overextending one conceptual resources to another, one function or one rules of manipulation to another. But there is actually a discontinuity, a certain form of discontinuity between these estrata that does not allow you to make this overextension. hence it requires a certain form of interaction with this causal
stratification or this causal fabric or this organization and functional hierarchy Now, the understanding of starts with this. the way that you can gain traction upon these various levels without overextending the conceptual resources and the rules that they functional rules and or
perspectives that are exclusive to these levels. You can have them, but in a sense that you don't want to overextend them. So how does this work? You see, in the classical modeling, in the classical understanding of materiality or material organization, models are constructed in the sense of infinite idealization. Basically, what is this infinite idealization? You have a physical materiality. You have a steel beam. You get the surface phenomena, which is the grains of the, for example, the beam, the steel beam.
and then you zoom in on it. And then this is the function of infinite idealization. Once you zoom in on it, you are basically, in a mathematical sense, you endow this zooming effect with a limit function that allows you to create a cross-level navigation between all these levels of strata in this steel beam. But in reality, this has proved roinsome for engineering. Why is that? Because a steel beam or any kind of phenomena usually fits in three domains of hierarchy. One, what they call the scale length. One, the macroscopic level, which is usually associated with, for example, surface phenomena, affordances.
You know, that's like a solid, you know, and it's descriptive. You can describe it by ordinary language. And then a mid-level, a mesoscale, a microscopic phenomenon. For example, for a steel beam, it's a crystal structure. Then beneath this crystal structure, what you have is an atomic scale. Now, the thing is that all of these, the descriptive resources, the functions, the level, the forms of intervention and the rules that govern them are completely discontinuous to one another.
You cannot basically overextend the macroscopic grain to atomic scale because behavior of the material will completely change because even the concepts that are associated with surface phenomena are different from the concepts that are associated with atomic scale. So you can't really make a conclusion by way of conception at the level of surface phenomena and ramify its conclusions to, for example, downward to the macroscopic. This is basically, so it rules out so many of bad modelings that are around in the sense of, for example, certain forms of bottom-up hierarchies that you try to supervene atomic
scale or elementary particles, or for example, particulate phenomena to the level of the upper scale phenomena, like for example, understanding of the brain behavior just by way of, for example, its plastic structure, neurotransmitters. Or, for example, in the case of the steel beam, you can't just overextend the conceptual resources of the atomic scale in order to explain phenomena or the behavior of the steel beam at the level of the macroscopic level. The same thing, conversely, from top to bottom.
So bottom up and top down by themselves independently are just bad models. They are basically overextending certain properties. And that creates different weak or bad interpretation of what materiality is and how you can intervene with it and how you can explain it, render it intelligible. So what engineers have, basically, they do not want to just get a picture of a steel beam and zoom in on it. And then they say that, oh, as we zoom in on it, every property that was conserved on
and surface phenomena is going to hold up as we zoomed in. So they don't want to say that. So what they do is they need perspectives, perspectives that are capable of dissociating, stratifying these different causal fabrics or structural functional fabrics, and then appropriately associate a specific functions and specific concepts to this estrata. So what are these perspectives? When I say perspective, people might misunderstand it as subjective perspective. But no, these are special tools. They are basically forms of manipulation or intervention.
Now, how does this work? this works by way that what you need in order to go from one level to another you need to understand it by how one level explain another level. This is what they call a causal and functional explanation. Now causal and functional explanation is about, for example let's just make a very kind of a rudimentary example you have a for example shadow on the wall and you try to describe it or you are trying to explain it if you do not have a manipulation on account of intervention that I'm going to explain what it is all you do is just describing
this shadow you are not explaining it in order to explain this shadow you need to intervene with what creates the shadow with a for example this chair now what they do is and this has become you know the standard of understanding of what explanation is causal explanation is they define explanation by way of intervention. They say that X explains Y. Had we intervened with X, Y would not have been produced. So how they define this idea of explanation or causal explanation or functional explanation is
by way of intervening with an account of invariance. Invariance is what makes this, allows this continuity between different strata that holds stuff together. If you intervene with something under certain, for example, criteria, and the invariance doesn't hold up, then this is not explaining that. Then you need to look for another form of explanation, probably in another level. So what they need are these kind of cross-cutting perspectives, namely tools of manipulation and intervention,
that treat invariances as certain forms of information required for rendering material intelligible, and also rendering its manipulation, its constructive dimension coherent. And now it's interesting that, as I said, that manipulations at the level of, for example, atomic scale or the deep lower levels doesn't essentially translate to effects on the macroscopic
phenomena. So you can't even overextend manipulation from one really domain to another. You need a specific form of manipulations that target a specific, for example, a strata of a material organization. And this is, you cannot develop, that means that this is where, for example, engineering comes into play. What is really engineering? Engineering in this sense becomes an armamentarium of heuristics. And what are heuristics? It's not just a trial and error. Heuristics are basically devices of manipulation, or manipulation as a form of inference. What is in this inference, it's not really deductive inference or inductive inference. It's what
they call material inference. Material in the sense that it is not abide by logical norms. It's basically non-formal. What Peirce, for example, calls it abductive manipulation. Now, how does this work is that what you need is basically is a form of intervention or manipulation that is error tolerant, that is fallible, that treats the material as a hypothesis. So you can intervene with a certain, for example, patch of causal fabric to see what is really the conceptual behavior from this level to that level. What is the specific functions of this and how these specific functions explain the functions on another level without creating a rigid designation?
Now, the way that heuristics works, heuristics are about non-entailment. They don't entail something. And that's why they can turn the system or turn the material into a living hypothesis. That basically, you understand the material, you understand the intelligible constitution of the material by way of an asymptotically infinite manipulation. And once you manipulate something, which is the case of heuristics or these perspectives, it implies two things. One, heuristics are about non-entailment. What does that mean? It means that they do not preserve foundations.
They do not preserve truth. They do not preserve axiomatic assumptions about what the constitution of this, for example, book is. They basically, what they do, as I said, they turn this into a fallible hypothesis in the sense that in order to render it intelligible, you just need to deepen the scope of your manipulation. You need to expand the scope of your manipulation techniques. But in the sense, constructability then becomes isomorphic to understanding what this is. because, as I said, they do not transfer foundation or axiomatic understanding of what, for example, this materiality is constituted of.
They do not preserve that. They actually transform them. They are synthetic operators. Heuristics are not analytical devices. They are synthetic operators that they basically treat material as a problem. But they don't break this problem into pieces. They basically transform this problem into a new problem. And this is what the preservation of invariance is. Once you transform a problem by way of heuristics to a new problem, you basically eliminate so much of the fog around this problem that initially didn't allow us to solve it.
Now, if the problem has been preserved, the problem, not truth, the problem, the constructability problem, the intelligibility problems, has been preserved, then means that this problem now can be approached and solved on a simpler, more optimal level. because all of this extra, you know, conflatory stuff that happened between different levels and made these problems difficult to be solved, now they have gone away. Because we applied a form of heuristics that dissociated this content of conflation into different strata, and now we can approach this problem in a kind of a new way that allows us to tackle it.
So this is another implication of how synthetic operators or heuristic manipulation works. Heuristic manipulation removes the lower bound of the materiality. and what is its lower bound? The understanding of constitution and understanding of fundamental assumptions or axiomatic conceptual behaviors. And also, by virtue that it is hypothetical, its manipulability can be expanded further and further, means that it also removes the upper bound of materiality. It basically turns materiality, as I said, into a living hypothesis that can actually, its behavior can be expanded.
Its evolution, its constructability becomes part of the project of self-realization. Hence the understanding that the system is nothing but its behavior. And behavior is a register of constructability. The same thing about materiality and how engineers approach materiality by way of heuristics, which is rooted in this new understanding of systematicity, by way of understanding it in the sense of functions and behaviors. How long do I have?
Oh, yeah, sure. You have 35 minutes in total, but you use already like 30. OK, 10 minutes. So what one needs for manipulation is information about invariant relationships, and one can identify invariant relationships even in cases in which one doesn't know laws,
cannot trace a spatiotemporally continuous process, or unify and systematize. So in order to manipulate a system, you do not need an a priori understanding of systematicity. As I said, the new understanding of the system according to the manipulability is import for manipulability, doesn't need an intrinsic understanding of what a system is. It's a so-called systematic structure. You do not need that architecture in order to understand what a system is. Another thing now, and this is like a basic thing, how does engineering work? engineering usually uses just macroscopic level phenomena and uses its descriptive resources.
This table is solid. All that I know is this table is solid. It's the level of ordinary language, description at the level of ordinary language. It says that it uses manipulation conditionals, if-then's antecedent consequence that are specific to the domain of ordinary language. If I push this hard, it might break under a certain form of intervention. You see, an engineer doesn't need the atomic scale level in order to make things, and things still function. Now, in the sense that, but this has something to do that, you know, the descriptive resources of surface phenomena are established, are really the ramification of established of those macroscopic
levels. And that allows you to have basically construct out of the nature of what materiality is. And science in the sense for engineering doesn't really change what materiality is, but the conception, the scientific conception of matter. Engineering uses scientific conception of matter in terms of fine-tuning its structure, but it doesn't use this in order to construct something. And engineering, yes, goes to the atomic scale and crystal level in order to fine-tune its manipulability, but it starts its manipulation conditionals by way of the surface phenomena.
And then if a manipulable conditional that can be extended to the manipulation conditional of the microscopic, then it is a good manipulation conditional. And then if the manipulation conditional or the descriptive resources of this bridging microscopic can be extended to the manipulation conditional of the atomic scale, then it is the really good engineering. But it always starts from the surface phenomena, and it navigates its cross-level by way of extending of, if my manipulation conditionals, if my manipulation techniques, how much can they be extended to possible manipulations at a different level? This is what is the space of possibility for an engineer
that is interpreted completely based on what manipulation is and how it can be extended from one level to another. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Reza, for, like, I think you brought up, or you brought up again, like, several of the key, like, ontological, philosophical questions, like, we briefly encountered or, like, had already discussions about, like, during the day. Maybe before I started the
Q&A or opened the floor, I have a kind of methodological question in that regards the the difference between, like, in what you just told us, the difference between... I tried to ask you about how to distinguish different levels of your analysis or your theory. What's the difference, for example, between the epistemological level of what you said and the ontological, or a theory of computation or engineering theory? Engineering is part of... what engineer is basically a form of transcendental realism, that epistemology makes sense of ontology. But for engineering, making sense of ontology is basically tampering with what ontology is.
So the epistemological engineering becomes co-constitutive with its own ontology. This is what, you know, kind of matches with what Yan said, that the manipulation actually becomes the very understanding of constitution in a sense. I was asking because you started with some, or at the beginning there were some ethical remarks, and I was reminded, I'm sure you know what Foucault was talking about, this aesthetics of existence. So my question was about the different layers or levels of analysis, like how you transfer epistemological ontological questions on
an ethical level or this like Esthetics of Existence because you talk about systems and then you take Socrates as an example what I was saying was based on epistemology at the level of ethics the understanding of know yourself It's an act of epistemology. You need to know your intelligible constitution. Self for program of ethics is not phenomenal. Self is an intelligible constitution. Now, in order to understand this intelligible constitution, you basically construct it. You organize it. This is what really project of ethics is. Design of a conduct that manipulates what the self is, what intelligible constitution is. It constructs it.
And this is the project of self-realization, for example, for ramification of the Kantian project in the sense of ethics, and then goes to the new Confucianism and certain proxam of ethics. It was really just as a clarification. So you would say this ramification is, in principle, possible for various different philosophical disciplines, whether it's aesthetics or ethics? Okay, I have to think about this, but I just wanted to, the reason that I went for ethics, I wanted to just emphasize this idea of engineering, that engineering epistemology becomes co-constitutive and integral part of making sense of ontology and making it. The main kernel of this idea is actually a philosophical idea.
And this is really the initial trigger of the project of ethics as a design of conduct. That cross cuts between ontology, between epistemology, between manipulation, between design. Questions? Yeah, same. Thanks Reza. I wanted to ask a slightly less art oriented question. So if the intervention with or by causal functions into material and their co-constitution on their material level, Is this performed exclusively in the realm of abduction or in the sense of inference?
Do we work from finding a rational norm and then asking to see what can be done with it? Or are we moving through materiality, especially with surfaces where we don't know the structurality of what we're looking at? Do we look for the norm using abduction or do we follow from it beginning with inference? Yes. You see, abductive inference is a form of material inference. And material inference doesn't have an explicit account of norms. And that's why it's called material inference, because it's non-formal. It's not classical logic. It's basically, it's fallible and error tolerant. As you manipulate, you gather information. As you manipulate, you construct
and render intelligible. My question goes actually to, also in the direction of Armin, because there's a difference, for example, between a beam of steel and the self, and there's a difference between the self and the work of art. And in the technologies of the self, the interesting thing is, which I think makes sense with what you just said, is that the technologies are incredibly different from physical exercise to dream analysis to writing letters to your mentor, whatever. And then if you come to making art, there's always these two things. It's I'm making it and I'm making it also to be perceived as. So there's
different ways of actually generating epistemology and ontology at the same time because it's It's dealing with experiential knowledge that the perceiver is implicated in other than being perceiving, trying to understand the beam, the steel beam. So how would you, how would, I would like to hear more about how you make the jump to artistic practices, because that's the difference between a practice and intelligibility, let's say. Yes, and that's why I did not want to mention the word art, because I think it's hard to overextend this field of engineering or even ethics as a design
of conduct that manipulates self and Foucault's technologies of self or Seneca's understanding of design of making things. They cannot be overextended as you say to art, but I think you can actually, you can make a connection between them by way of a functionalist account of what they do. You see, in art, you do not have intelligibility, but you have material inferences again. That's what you experiment, and you refine your methods. There is a form of refinement and tweaking. It's not pure, I think. Is it really pure experimentation for the sake of experimentation?
But it's also from the perspective of the viewer. and different forms of design. But this brings back to the understanding of art that it's a multimodal, basically, friction upon, for example, material that entails certain forms of emotion, material inferences,
and that makes the problem complex. This is something that I really don't have any answer. Further questions? Well, we could just start our... Yeah. It was more about facilitating a potential dialogue between Markus and Reza, because we started the day where to know yourself is to know your false beliefs, and then you were speaking of knowing the self as a kind of epistemic ethics, so I was wondering if that may stimulate some debate amongst you, especially you're talking about the fallibility of materials.