7
AFTER NATURE
The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects
L U C I A N A PA R I S I
T
he dominance of information technologies in contemporary
culture has led to the widespread use of algorithmic processing,
which has transformed our conception of automation. From
smartphone apps to high-frequency trading, from the use of multiagent
systems in design to social-media censorship and national surveillancecontrol centers, automation, it will be argued, coincides with the proliferation of inhuman functions of decision making. While industrial forms
of automation aimed to reproduce physical movement mechanically, the
automated systems of the information age have become intelligent agents,
exhibiting a degree of autonomy from their programmers through complex algorithmic interactions.
It has been argued that the information age reveals a condition in
which the overlap between automation and autonomy has been triggered
by the speed of algorithmic procedures of evaluation, control, and decision making. In the contemporary context of “big data,” rule-based formal structures of data processing work at volumes and speeds that exceed
the capacities of individual human cognition and operate beyond human
awareness (Galloway 2006, Terranova 2004, Fuller and Goffey 2012).
From this standpoint, this chapter discusses the paradoxical overlapping
between thought and automation by questioning the assumption that
technoscience—and the contemporary convergence of biotechnology,
nanotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science—cannot
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(and should not) constitute the ground for explaining the ontological
consistency of being. This chapter questions the claim that it is now, more
than ever, necessary to distinguish human life from human technoculture
in order to keep the ontological autonomy of being separate from the history of technical objects.
This argument is not new, and there have been many attempts at rearticulating the relation between human nature and technology. As such, this
chapter will pay particular attention to Gilbert Simondon’s conception of
the technical object because his theory has been central to contemporary debates about the question of technology in human culture (Deleuze
1993, 2001; Brian Massumi 2009; Bernard Stiegler 2009). On the Mode of
Existence of Technical Objects discusses Gilbert Simondon’s proposition
that technical objects are not opposed to human nature but are instead
the result of the artificial action of human beings through which a mutual
relation with machines is engendered. I want to take this proposition seriously and suggest that this rather difficult question about the mode of
existence of the technical object involves a fundamental acknowledgment
that artificiality can and does surpass and irreversibly modify the autonomy of being. While rejecting both the hylomorphism of form and matter
and the mechanical view of the universe that runs according to the repetition of the same initial conditions, Simondon’s proposition seems to
embrace the technoscientific revolution of the Enlightenment, for which
machines were not simply tools but became embedded in culture and
used as a means of governance. However, for Simondon, while technical objects are cybernetic organisms, they are also importantly imbued
with a potential to aggregate and change over time. They are responsive
to the environment and constantly probed by what he refers to as human
creative action (Simondon 1958). Technical objects are not transcendent
structures abstracted from materiality only to reveal once again the ultimate horizon or the desire to transcend human finitude. Simondon’s view
of the ontogenetic capacity of technical objects to exist in a dynamic field
of relational constituency, I will argue, contributes to the disentangling of
the philosophy of technology from the question of human finitude.
In particular, it suggests that this disentanglement is crucial to an articulation of the ontological modality of technical objects. Nevertheless, this
chapter also addresses the limits of Simondon’s theory—showing that this
ontological modality is attached to an energetic conception of continuity
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between what being is and how being does, which risks overlooking the
tendency of the artificial to become autonomous from a mere energetic
plane insofar as artificiality is also, and importantly, a construction or a
conceptual architecture of a mode of thinking. To tackle this question, I
propose we revisit the concept of the digital vis-à-vis the notion of computation by looking at recent developments in information theory—for
example, Gregory Chaitin’s (2006b)—that expand on Alan Turing’s discovery of the limit of computation (that is, the incomputable or randomness) to suggest that automated forms of algorithmic calculation are
not simply absorbers of human creativity. Instead, algorithmic systems
of decision making seem to suggest that technical objects are not one
with human nature and, more importantly, are not simply simulations
of human cognitive functions. In opposition to the hype around interactive interfaces and the affective usage of digital media, I contend that
in order to challenge the critical theory of technology that maintains a
separation between human nature and human production, it is necessary
to acknowledge that this production involves the automation of logical
reasoning and cannot be explained solely as a mutual relation between
energy and information. The production involves the inhuman function
of decision making, which may be understood in terms of an emerging—
or rudimentary—autonomy of and for mechanized thinking. In what follows, I will first outline Simondon’s philosophy of technology in order to
explain how it is underpinned by a strong antiautomation view. I will then
clarify the relation between digitalization and computation so as to locate
my critique of Simondon’s energetic view of machines within the context
of the historical development of the mechanization of logic.
TECHN ICA L OBJE C TS
For Gilbert Simondon, the mode of existence of a technical object needs to
be explained fundamentally in terms of culture, but he also argues that
the technical object is culture’s constitutive vehicle for artificialization
(1980, 47). This means that the technical object needs to be divorced
from the critique of instrumental reason and at the same time from any
substantialist and essentialist ontology. Instead, Simondon claims that
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“culture must incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge
and its sense of values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical
objects should be the result of philosophical consideration” (1).
The mode of existence of the technical object, however, is not to be
thought in terms of prosthesis or artificial extension of an always already
incomplete human nature. The reproducibility of the natural into a mechanized form is not Simondon’s concern—he offers instead a counterintuitive theory that the technical object is at its most concrete phase when it
is able to behave as a natural object. In particular, it is the concretization
of the technical object (defined by increasing levels of internal resonances
and by the crystallization of its phases) that makes it independent from
the external regulatory environment (laboratory, factory) in which it was
ideated. By achieving an internal coherence in which its systemic functions become closed and organized, a technical object therefore becomes
comparable to an object produced spontaneously—independent from the
environment and defined by its capacity to have incorporated external
dynamics within itself. Its concrete state thus shows conditions of operation that are regulatory and self-maintaining. In other words, by becoming
concrete, the technical object loses its artificial character. The concretized
technical object approximates the mode of existence of natural objects
because, like a natural object, it tends toward internal coherence, closing the system of the causes and effects that operate circularly inside its
boundaries. It thus incorporates and transforms parts of the natural world
that intervene as a condition of its functioning (14).
But what does it mean to conceive of the process of concretization of
the technical object in terms of a tendency to achieve a natural state? It is
evident that Simondon is here pointing to a new notion of functionality
of the technical object. Far from being the incarnation of instrumental
reason, Simondon argues for a dynamic function of the technical object
primarily understood in terms of an energetics of time (9–10). Here
the functionality of the technical object is explained in terms of critical
phases of change in which the past and the present are coextensive rather
than being defined by discrete and sequential units of time. The technical
object is not, however, defined by an autonomous ontology or an autonomous being of time. Instead, the technical object incorporates and is at
once part of the time of the living. Its process of concretization involves
a transindividuation of different fields of potentialities that allows the
AFTER NATURE159
technical object to become individuated as an ensemble of living energies
(62). This is also how a technical object is able to acquire a natural state
and thus cease to be the artifice of man.
From this standpoint, to enter Simondon’s philosophy of technology
is also to ask: What does it mean for artificial objects to become natural? To what extent does this view offer us a nonhumanistic or nonanthropomorphic approach of the technical that sees beyond the horizon of
human finitude? I want to suggest that Simondon’s emphasis on the mode
of existence and, thus, of being—of the what and the how of the technical
object—provides us with an important point of departure from which to
develop a new view of the digital and of digital automation. In particular,
I will focus on how Simondon responds to and radically transforms one
of the kernels of the digital in his original analysis of the relation between
energy and information. Simondon’s view makes us realize the importance of an entropic conception of energy for understanding the mode of
existence of technical objects (9, 27–31).
However, while recognizing Simondon’s novel philosophical account
of the technical machine developed in view of the historical shift from a
thermodynamic to a cybernetic conception of technology, I want to add
that a closer analysis of information theory may show us that the digital
has more than simply a regulatory function for energy. Instead, information theory presents us with a challenging view of the mathematic theory
of communication. It is well known that Claude Shannon (1949) conceived of entropy not as a threat to communication but rather as an element of surprise. Extending Shannon’s insight, I characterize this element
of surprise in terms of entropy that is immanent to information. From my
discussion, it may become evident that Simondon’s energetic view of technical objects is fundamentally an ontological study of technical objects,
one concerned with the being of or the becoming of technical objects.
However, I suggest that the theorization of technical objects in terms of
energetic accumulators of being, involving an ontogenesis of being, cannot
explain how thought becomes formalized as it is incorporated in technical
objects. By drawing on Gregory Chaitin’s (2006a, 29–32) view of the relation between energy and information in terms of the tendency of information to increase in size (i.e., information is itself entropic or non–size
compressible), I aim to disentangle the symbiosis of being and thought
granted by the mutual relation between energy and information.
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Drawing on the central role that Alfred N. Whitehead (1929, 1967) assigns
to capacities of abstraction, I will tend to view the automated processing
of information in terms of a mode of thought that includes both physical
and conceptual prehensions, or the speculative functions of elaboration
and the becoming thought of physical data. I do so not to merge being and
thought but rather to explain the process of becoming as the asymmetrical
continuity between the physical and the conceptual. But, to clarify these
distinct levels, I will first explore Simondon’s energetic philosophy.
A N TIAUTOMATION
It is well known that Simondon rejected the positivistic view of the universe predicated upon the physics of reversibility premised in classical
mechanics and sustained by the figure of the Laplacian Demon and its
ability to calculate infinite amounts of information without error (Longo
2008, 68–70). Here, error is seen as an external and arbitrary incident in
opposition to the function and efficiency of the machine. According to
Simondon (1980, 49–50), this deterministic view of the machine, defined
by the constant return to its initial condition, is represented by the regulatory function of information in cybernetics. As Simondon notes, the
technical ensemble of the twentieth century—thermodynamic energy—is
replaced by information theory, a guarantor of stability (regulation and
stabilization). The cybernetic machine augments the quantity of information, leading to the emergence of negentropy that surpasses or incorporates the degradation of energy. The cybernetic machine is opposed to
disorder, the heat-death of the universe. Its aim is to stabilize the world.
However, this clear-cut reaction against cybernetics may perhaps
reveal a richer history of cybernetics to which Simondon’s own theory
has implicitly contributed. Cybernetics (and, in large part, computation)
is less an extension of positivism and more an attempt at constituting a
formal language that could take into account the inevitable truth of a universe losing the equilibrium theorized by concepts of irreversibility and
entropy that constitute the core of the nineteenth century’s second law of
thermodynamics. Also, contrary to classical determinism, which argues
that all results could be known in advance, cybernetics accounts for the
AFTER NATU RE 161
centrality of variations, or the impossibility of foreseeing whether previous conditions could determine future outcomes.
Similarly, we know that Simondon’s philosophy is influenced by
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and by Luis De Broglie’s study of the
wavelike behavior of particles, which reveal that the exact measurement
of positions and momentum cannot be known.1 Isabelle Stengers (2003),
for example, points out that in Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence there
is a shift from a notion of causal indeterminism linked to the effects of
measurement to Niels Bohr’s conception of indeterminism beyond measure—here conceived as being constitutive of physical reality itself. Bohr’s
conception of indeterminism assigns a constitutive role to the energetic
fluctuation of matter and explains that randomness is not an incident of
measurement but is instead the very condition against which measurement could not but fail. Indeterminism is said to be the veritable condition of microphysical reality. It seems safe to argue that it is this new
condition that allows Simondon to reconceive the technical object away
from mechanistic tradition and move toward embracing an energetic
understanding of matter.
In Modes of Existence of Technical Objects, we witness a renewed notion
of physicalism, no longer inscribed in the substantialist, atomistic, and
monistic traditions in which the smallest part is the universal absolute
principle of the individual and of the individuated universe. Instead,
Simondon’s thermodynamic conception of matter in terms of potential
energy, of scales and degradation, is rather a radicalization of microphysical indetermination—arguing that any object is primarily inexhaustible
despite the tendency toward increasing degradation. But for Simondon,
decay does not correspond to the inevitable finitude of Being or beings.
Instead his view embraces the quantum state of matter, revealing that the
modality of being is defined by critical phases of energy in which nothing
is lost and the potential reserve is never scarce. A fundamental dynamism
is here sustained by the constant process of transformation of energy for
which there is no finite moment or arrest.
This energetic view also characterizes his insistence on the intrinsic
validity of technology for human culture. From this standpoint, what
Simondon calls concretization does not simply mean that ideas become
physically tangible in human culture (a sort of Aristotelian physicalism of
tools). Instead, technical objects are here cast as processors of live energy
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that becomes crystallized, and somehow objectified, and thus rendered a
mode of existence in itself. But this is not to be confused with a notion
of externalization or passive prosthetics of human faculties. Simondon’s
argument against mechanization instead aims to keep the technical object
alive, to bring back its energetic impulse. In terms of culture, this means
that technical objects are living repositories of ideas, practices, forms,
and innovations that are modulated by or in a transductive relation with
humans. Ultimately humans and machines do not share the same ontological conditions of being. On the contrary, Simondon is more interested
in matter’s self-organizing tendencies, involving the assemblage or temporal synthesis of heterogeneous elements that constitute the machine.
Hence, the mode of existence, or being, of technology is not to be
framed in terms of a recuperation of ontology or an appeal to an eternal
state. Rather, Simondon’s reconceptualization not only of the mode of, but
also the condition of, the technical object crucially reveals that the process
of concretization is above all part of a larger ontogenetic process of being.
As such, the technical object enjoys a condition beyond the world of the
constructed and exists within the very energetic field of matter.
CYBERN ETICS
In this section I will home in on the ways in which Simondon’s philosophy
can or cannot help us sustain the theorization of the inhuman condition
of digital, algorithmic computation. Contrary to much of the critique
against cybernetics, for Simondon, information is neither an input nor
an output—it is not to be looked at in its finite state of individuated data.
Information above all instead corresponds to “more than unity,” insofar
as its discrete, individuated, and binary state is inseparable from the preindividual field of energetic potential through which information individuates a difference. In other words, information is understood in terms
of topological formations whereby a tendency toward change, and not
a binary state, defines information in terms of its dynamic form, or “la
bonne forme,” as Simondon puts it (1980, 190).2 It is this aspect of Simondon’s philosophy that provides a sense of the neutralization of information that results in a rejection of its discrete state.
AFTER NATU RE 163
To put forward his philosophy of technology, then, Simondon calls
into question both Shannon’s mathematical model of communication and
Norbert Weiner’s conception of information. For Simondon, a philosophy of technology cannot be founded on research into form, or the efficiency of form, in the transmission of information. Against the univocal
concept of information and energy, according to which these are equivalent and already determined unities, Simondon points out that information is not a preexisting form that is then to be applied to matter. In a
radical move, Simondon reconceptualizes information as the variability
of forms, the addition of variation to a form, and the unpredictability of
variation in form (13–17).
It is clear that Shannon defines information neither as form nor as
meaning. Information instead denotes the uncertainty of the outcomes
and/or the necessity of noise in the transmission of a signal. But the
cybernetician Norbert Weiner gives information a regulatory function,
ensuring that the thermodynamic tendency of a system to run out of
equilibrium is reduced, modulated, and put to work. Under this interpretation, information is the measure of order and is located in opposition
to entropy, which is marked as the measure of uncertainty or thermodynamic decay. Following Simondon, one could argue that not only is
information univocally related to energy while energy is locked within a
process of irreversible degradation but also that cybernetics establishes
an equivalence between humans and machines in its assertion that any
system—living and nonliving—resolves the threat of entropy through the
regulatory function of information. This regulatory function can both lead
to a return to homeostasis and more notably, channel energy in order to
overcome the threshold of decay and thus enter a new level of order. This
is the notion of negentropy (the negative use of entropy that results in a
modulation of energy in a transmission channel): information produces
more information and becomes the motor of evolution toward a more
complex level of order. Simondon rejects this functionalist and instrumental view of information as the regulator of energy’s tendency toward
chaos and instead argues for the necessity of an evolutionary mode of
being whereby information is always already in the process of formation.
This is not simply, for Simondon, the claim that emphasis on the
notion of “in-formation” is not an essentialist return to a fundamental
analogy. This is instead an ontological claim of a totally different nature.
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He uses this notion to argue that the manner in which (or how) information becomes is constitutive of what it is. Thus not substance but quantic
indeterminacy is the motor of the emergence or modification of form—
information has no content, no structure, and no meaning, in itself; it is
disparity, not univocity.
But what does this mean, and how does this explain the mode of existence of technical objects as involving a becoming natural of the artificial?
To answer this question, first we need to bear in mind that Simondon’s
fundamental conception of self-differentiation or individuation is characterized in terms of a primary disparity between information and energy.
The mode of existence of a technical object thus implies a resolution
between two different orders of reality— information and energy—sustained
by the operation of transduction. This also means that the disparity
between information and energy cannot be understood in quantitative
terms and is therefore free from any kind of stable formalization.
Nevertheless, it may perhaps be reductive to argue that Simondon
rejects all notions of quantification as a reduction of qualities to probabilities. He is known, on the contrary, to embrace the puzzles offered
by the quantum physics of his time. Rather than being reductive, then,
Simondon does not simply refuse but audaciously rearticulates the
notion of quantity, quantification, and measuring from the standpoint of
quantum physics. Drawing from De Broglie, Simondon uses the idea that
a quantum leap coincides with the discharge of a measurable amount
of energy but adds that such a leap also importantly coincides with a
passing of a threshold to a qualitatively new level of existence. This inclination to explain the relation between energy and information in terms
of what could be defined as the quality of a phenomenal experience also
reveals that his indebtedness to De Broglie’s notion of indeterminacy is
based on the observer’s measuring effect on the movement of quantic
particles. Nevertheless, Simondon’s close reading of this scientific enterprise adds another level of understanding of indeterminacy. While he
suggests that quantification is always laboring under a deficit of potential and that formalization always labors under a deficit of energy, he
crucially argues for a notion of qualitative differentiation and energetic
variation of form that defies the centrality of the subject and the human.
Extending Bohr’s conception of indeterminacy as the fundamental condition of the microphysical fluctuations of matter, Simondon endorses a
AFTER NATU RE 16 5
microphysical understanding of the technical object. This means that he
rethinks the exchange between information and energy in terms of the
qualitative variations of quantity. Here quantity is no longer described
in terms of measure—as external observer or tool for measure—but
becomes the manifestation of energetic variation. This means that
there is no information without energy and that the relational exchange
between them is precisely the process that ensures the constant transmutation of quantity into quality. The exchange indeed is not determined by
a system of equivalence but rather of irreversible differentiation whereby
information is always already affected by the energetic impulse. Here
the energetics of a system are not defined by the system’s decay; rather,
because of the ontogenetic force of the relation, information becomes a
catalyst for novel ensembles of elements and individuals. In other words,
one can suggest that for Simondon it is not measurement that involuntarily causes fluctuation but that it is information itself that becomes an
energetic form of measure.
This is a key point, as it places Simondon outside the phenomenology
of experience and brings his work closer to a metaphysical investigation
in the mode of the existence of technical objects—to the dynamic being
of technical objects. In this sense, information ceases to be seen as the
regulatory form of pure chance (otherwise described as entropy), and,
going back to Simondon’s radical notion of la bonne forme, information
is seen now as corresponding to a process of individuation or ontogenetic
formation (Simondon 1992). Information seen in this way includes the
potential field for difference that triggers and conditions the process by
which individuation occurs (Simondon has in mind a form-taking informational activity that starts from preindividual energetic variations).
But it is a mistake to compare this preindividual field to an amorphous
pool of flows. The preindividual is not undifferentiated but is radically
indeterminate; that is, it does not correspond to an ontological being but
circumscribes the margins of indetermination that are always left to run
with, or are consistent with, the informational operations of the technical object. One could, thus, argue that Simondon offers a new model of
cybernetics that, although it is set in opposition to the mechanistic view,
nonetheless embraces information by way of its proposal to understand
measuring and quantification as defined primarily by the indeterminacy
of physical reality.
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So, what does it mean to rethink information in microphysical terms?
As opposed to a function set to reduce energy or to sacrifice and/or use
qualitative variation, information is the expression of individuation and
differentiation. In its transductive process of energy exchange, information is an event. In other words, information is subtracted from scientific
objectivity and positivistic measurement in order to expose the levels of
crystallization emerging from its relation with energy. One could also talk
here of an affective relation to the extent that information is the affected
recipient of an uncontainable spring of energy.
What does it mean to com-penetrate quantity with quality or to suggest
that the indeterminacy of physical reality is fundamental to understanding what appears to be the inhuman or inorganic dimension of technical
objects? And what are the consequences of developing an energetic conception of information? Can such a microphysical conception of the technical object indicate a posthumous life in which it is possible to account
for a continuous relation between the biological and the technical, human
nature and human production, without falling back into binarisms and
flat ontology? And finally, to what extent can this microphysical motor of
machines coincide at all with the same level of order as technical systems?
By merging the molecular—physical and biological—and the technical
orders of function into one plane of continuous variation, information
itself becomes neutralized and unexplained.
By specifically addressing Simondon’s dynamic conception of information, Gilles Deleuze (1993) helps us clarify that this form-taking activity
is not the result of an external relation nor the result of interactive communication between energy and information. On the contrary, this activity involves “at least two orders of magnitude, of two disparate scales of
reality . . . it implies a fundamental difference, like a state of asymmetry. If
it is nevertheless a system, it is only insofar as difference exists as potential energy, as a difference of potential distributed within certain limits”
(246). Deleuze conceives of difference in terms of an internal principle
of dedifferentiation through which he argues that quantity comprises a
difference in itself that cannot be precisely measured and, thus, remains
an intensive quantity. Individuation on this model reads as the organization of a solution, of a “resolution” (derived from two complementary yet
asymmetric activities) for an objectively problematic system (a metastable
system existing in a state of asymmetry). This means that, on the one
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hand, difference coincides with internal resonance, “the most primitive
mode of communication between realities of different orders” (Simondon 1992, 298), and on the other hand, it is information that, in its turn,
establishes communication between two disparate levels—one defined by
a form already contained in the receiver, the other by the signal carried
from the outside.
The relation between information and energy, however, never involves
a simple breakdown. Instead it entails a temporal resolution—a crystallization or concretization in the form of critical phases of change. The relation therefore is also a self-differentiation, always a more than one, so that
the relation is both superimposed above the terms and simultaneous to
itself. Nevertheless, the relation as individuated is again multiple because
it is “multiphasic”; it is a “phase of becoming that will lead to new operations” (Deleuze 2001, 49). From this standpoint, one can understand the
digital object as a mode of existence of a metastable system, which is itself
a structure (not yet a synthesis) of the heterogeneous.
At this point, it is interesting to note how Deleuze and Deleuze and
Guattari follow Simondon in theorizing the technical object in terms of
machinic assemblages and are therefore motivated to ask to what extent, if
at all, the machinic assemblage embraces a nuanced conception of information. One could argue that it is possible that a machinic assemblage
involves the capacity of the technical object to behave as a metastable system in which the artificial is no longer built out of what exists in nature.
If so, the machinic—but not the mechanical or the technical—becomes a
natural object only to the extent that it is placed within the larger field of
metastable systems in which the relation between information and energy
primarily leads to—or becomes the causal efficacy for—the concretization
of preindividual potentialities. In this case, information ceases to coincide with a quantification of energy and becomes the subjective form—in
Whiteheadian terms—of energetic force. Entropy can then be thought as
productive and not simply regulated by information; its power is amplified rather than repressed. Far from being the measure of (deterministic)
chaos, here entropy marks the margin of indetermination of any system
of communication. It becomes the condition for communication rather
than the moment of its deconstruction. Entropy is indeed no longer put in
contrast to information, insofar as quantity cannot be divorced from difference. Similarly, noise cannot be completely silenced or expelled from
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the signal. Entropy is thus amplified and distributed across both communication channels and the algorithmic infrastructure of the communication apparatus itself.
But what is entropy in the digital? Do digital systems not operate precisely by transforming energy into information, modulating variation
through an immanent mode of calculating potentialities, ergo, at base by
eliminating friction?
Like Simondon, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari reject the automatism of communication, and at the same time they propose a new notion
of information and of the technical machine in which energy is the motor
of computation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1996). Defying the deductive
method of formalism upon which computation is based, the machinic is
envisioned as a praxis defined by the encounter, the affective and transductive production of the absolutely novel. The disparity between information and energy is, thus, resolved by means of reverse causality. Entropy
is not the effect of measuring the incident emerging in communication
but is of another order all together that constitutes information.
My initial question about what it means for the technical object to
become naturalized through concretization needs to be readdressed. In
line with Simondon, the machinic is not defined by an ontological equivalence with the natural. Instead, the machinic explains the primary process
of difference defined by the superiority of the relation, the transductive
(and not deductive or inductive) operation of the encounter. Taken in
this way, the machinic is precisely this continuous process of transduction between energy and information, not simply a naturalization of the
technical. One can locate this point in Guattari’s (1995) discussion of the
emergence, within the postmedia age, of machinic heterogeneities understood as living or live machines and no longer as a subset of technology.
This is a big departure from Laplace’s or Turing’s universal, mechanical
models in that the machine is ontogenesis, a mode of existence or a modification of being, an irreversible transformation of nature. However, if the
machine acquires the status of a living being, one must reject the specific
function of information because it, thus, can only be subsumed in the field
of energy and cannot exist on its own. From this perspective, it is impossible to surpass the incumbent paradox that has afflicted the critique of
digital technologies: While technical objects cannot be reduced to their
information function because their processes of individuation coincide
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with becoming alive, digital objects, with their heavy reliance on discrete
states and formal axiomatics, can never achieve such a state. What we are
left with is the assumption that the becoming alive—or concretization or
naturalization—of technical objects involves not a posthumous life or the
seeping of inhuman, inorganic functions into the biological order of the
organism but a tendency to incorporate the inhuman into the organic
order without recognizing the information capacities of technical objects
to be more than organic.
COMPUTATION
In this section, I return to theories of information that have tackled the
question of entropy in the context of algorithmic machines, and I propose that the digital function of information needs to be contextualized in
the history of mechanized logic. I revisit these kernels of cybernetics and
information theory, from both the computational model of quantification
and from the problem of entropy in systems of prediction and control,
in order to develop a view about the specific function of information in
automated systems.
As already mentioned, I suggest that the interactive paradigm, which
more clearly sits in second-order cybernetics, has become the dominant
form of mediatic communication today by way of its expansion of interactive algorithms. This paradigm specifically involves:
1. An organization of data no longer originally inputted into the system
but rather derived from the outside via the social and personal use of
software and the capacities of algorithms to interact with one another
in the computational architecture of digital media
2. A computational model of prediction based on an open architecture
of axioms, whereby new rules can be added as a result of the adaptive
response of algorithms to the environment
3. A conception and use of the incomputable, whereby real numbers or
infinities of data are no longer incalculable but are part of the data
landscape that algorithms transform into patterns that then become
quantified as randomness, complexities, or Omega infinity algorithms
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The dominance of the interactive paradigm thus requires a new level of
critique that can no longer hold the algorithmic regime of communication
in opposition to the qualitative form of variation of the living, the subject,
and thought. A return to computational theories reveals that incomputables or randomness—noncompressible quantities of information—are
part of the computational tendency to elaborate information and establish a functional order of integration of data at the limit of the incomputable. Not only are incomputable quantities of data at the epicenter of
communication, but also they unravel the importance of another order
of entropy.
Here entropy—the measure of disorder/chaos/noise in a system, or
simply uncertainty—is no longer, or not, exclusively resolved through a
negentropic process of transduction whereby the information becomes
modulated as if it were energy; the problem of algorithmic randomness
in the computational processing of increasing quantities of data instead
denotes the tendency of information itself to increase in size—defining a
fundamental complexity corresponding to patternless information. Gregory Chaitin’s (2006a) algorithmic information theory shows that the
incomputable is not a probability known in advance that the program
is expected to perform: Incomputables are maximally unknowable information quantities—infinities—that are nonetheless detected within computational processing as incomputables. These are at once discrete and
infinite quantities of information. On this interpretation, computation
does not resemble the Laplacian Universal Mechanism that repeats preset
conditions, since incomputables (or randomness emerging in algorithmic
sequencing) define computation as an incomplete affair. Likewise, such
incompleteness ceases to mark the limit of information in terms of measure, as it involves the discovery of algorithmic entropy, that is, the capacity of information to increase in size/quantity. In short, in the algorithmic
age, entropy cannot exclusively be explained by recourse to the function
of primary energetic order. Whereas the function of energetic fields cannot of course be denied, what happens in the computational processing of
vast amounts of data is indeed the emergence of patternless information.
This defines the tendency of information as increasing in size complexity and reveals the function of information as implicating an algorithmic elaboration of primitive data. As such, in the order of iteration of
the algorithmic function, this continuous compression of data leads to
AFTE R NATU RE 17 1
the emergence of Omega, or patternless information—of which only few
ciphers can be decoded with rational numbers. This form of information
complexity, however, must not be confused with an absolute incalculability that breaks down the ceaseless patterning of data into information.
This entropic or size complexity of information can instead be used to
explain how information constitutes its own domain of complexity, a
domain emerging from the function of integration of data and involving
an algorithmic metaelaboration for which randomness cannot be reduced
to algorithms yet emerges from its own function (Chaitin 2006b, 74–81).
The size complexity of algorithmic information as described above
points to an even more alien (or nonreducible to the energetic ground)
complexity rather than an intensive notion of information. Drawing on
Simondon, we saw that Deleuze argues for forms of energetic variation
against the univocal relation between energy and information. Rather
than opposing discreteness and continuity, or the digital part and the differential dynamics of the whole, the incomputable exposes incompleteness and complexity both at the core of discreteness and in models of
quantification. On this view, one can suggest that the extension of microphysics to the technological field problematically overlooks the algorithmic order of the function of information and its own levels of complexity
(that is, the incomputable character of the discrete). One could therefore
argue that information entropy is central to what could be theorized as
third-order cybernetics, which also explains anew the persistence of an
inhuman form of elaboration of data that cannot be explained in terms of
its physical causality.
But this new centrality of the algorithmic randomness/entropy embedded into computational interactive systems implies that it is no longer
possible to overlook either the discrete nature of the digital or the possibility of algorithmic randomness in digital sequencing. It is therefore also
impossible to exclude the mechanization (or the becoming inhuman) of
the function of reason by either remaining attached to the primacy of
the being of the sensible (or of affective potentiality) or by returning to a
cognitivist being of the intelligible—a formalism that imposes a logic of
symbol manipulations on data.
What I am proposing here is neither a re-vision of computation attached
to the ontology nor the ontogenesis of being. Computation, within the
context of algorithmic machines, instead points to an ontological process
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by which an inhuman thought emerges from the complex elaboration
of data and patterns. The notion of information entropy in this instance
enables a new understanding of the nature of the digital itself as expressed
from within a dynamic conception of computation, already envisioned
in the nonlinear form of interactive algorithms and parallel distributed
systems. But this dynamism stems not from an energetics of information
but rather from within the quantitative nature of information itself by way
of the computational problem of incomputable and incompressible randomness. To revisit the question of the digital from that problem implies
a retheorization of the meaning of information. The quantitative attribute
of information denotes not simply a mechanical view of complex computational dynamics but points to the problem of incompressible quantities
within algorithmic systems: a potentiality that is properly quantitative
and involves the entropic character of quantities, or the irreversible tendency of information to increase in size. Despite its limits, Chaitin’s work
on the problem of the incomputable produces a new notion of both the
digital and information—now defined by incomputable dynamics (irreversible change) rather than a relation of exchange with energy, which is
not to dismiss the epistemological and ontological importance of such a
relation. I intend to unpack the layers of dynamism in both the microphysical and the computational order. In other words, far from extending
the microphysics of energy to information, I revisit the digital in order to
find a way to articulate a computational dynamism proper to the strata of
encoded information.
Simondon’s recuperation of the technical, the technical machine, and,
to some extent, reason from the cognitivist and representational understandings of technology constitutes an important step in the formulation
of an inhuman form of information that bestows the tendencies to the
artificial. However, I argue that, while this microphysical conception of
the technical object has now become central to the dominance of an energetic view of interaction in the computational paradigm, further scientific
and philosophical investigation into the algorithmic nature of computation can help us challenge the mechanical view of technical objects more
directly. Doing additional research would, I think, expose the irreconcilable, perhaps nonresolvable, schism defined by the incomputable
dimension of quantification rather than a mutual relation between information and energy. This is not simply to delimit our engagement with the
AFTE R NATU RE 173
complexity of computation to the mere level of information but to zoom
in to this informational level in order to amplify the levels of dynamic
change and thus propose that the two orders of randomness or entropy—
both at the informational and energetic levels— point to a computational
process in which one order cannot be collapsed onto the other.
IN HUMA N THOUG HT
Information randomness indeed cannot be resolved by energetic randomness but instead needs to be explained and unpacked in terms of a real
mode of information production, one where the precondition is not being
organically bound. I borrow this idea from Whitehead’s discussion of the
function of reason, which is set in contrast from both pure and practical
reason and from deductive and inductive methods—he insists that the
function of reason remains speculative (Whitehead 1929). This nondeductive understanding of reason and ultimately of a function of thought
that can draw consequences from the physical prehension of reality, sustains my view that the artificial dimension of thinking encapsulated in the
computational order of information also involves a speculative functioning that goes beyond the ontological grounding of being in the energetic
impulse of living. In a sort of reversal between life and thought, being and
reason, Whitehead insists that thinking is a function for living. In other
words, for Whitehead, reasoning involves the conceptual elaboration of
physical data, or the envisaging of the consequences of such a process,
which precisely requires placing reason after nature. Instead of a bifurcation between the complexity of nature and the complexity of thought,
Whitehead insists that the function of reason is to elucidate, explain, and
unpack the reasoning behind living and thus beyond the art of surviving. “Reason is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes the
urge towards the attainment of an end realized in imagination but not
in fact” (1929, 16). The finality of reason, however, is not part of a grand
plan toward a preestablished schema. Instead, it is embedded in the actual
occasion of which reason has a constructive function. This means that
while Whitehead recognizes that all thinking emerges from the biophysical constraints of the living, he also argues that the function of reason is to
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elucidate and evaluate the causes through which these can be transcended.
For Whitehead, the function of reason has almost a metaconceptual task,
to the extent that it transcends immediate fact by relating systems of
ideas and generalizing observations. In other words, the function of reason involves a passage leading from the awareness of what is observed in
(sense) experience—also defined in terms of a physical prehension—to
the conceptual understanding of this observation, which leads to complex
related entities as presented by mathematical thought (1920, 13–15). In
particular, for Whitehead, mathematical thought enlightens all thought;
mathematics is an essential element in the history of thought. Whitehead’s
process philosophy thus leaves an important place to mathematical logic
and to the importance of separating mere matter of fact from the purely
abstract conditions that they indicate. The function of reason is not determined by the direct apprehension of experience but is rather a function
of abstraction of the particular entities involved and crucially involves the
elaboration of the general conditions of the observations that they are
expressible without having to make reference to particular relations or to
particular relata occurring in that particular occasion of experience. For
Whitehead, the rational attainment of this condition of generality ensures
that these hold for an indefinite variety of other occasions (1967, 24–25).
With mathematical logic, the concreteness of entities and relations has
become a variable and absolutely abstract propositional function. This
does not mean, however, that pure mathematics is imposed on concrete
occasions. Instead, the function of reason is precisely to explain the process by which logic or the establishment of rules is attained through a
process of abstraction in which the varieties of sense awareness are conceptually prehended. Whitehead’s view on the speculative function of
reason thus can help us push Simondon’s philosophy of technical objects
in another direction. As I have suggested, Simondon’s reflections on the
mode of existence of technical objects inscribes the relation between
energy and information into a physicalist-oriented schema concerned
with the material—or even biophysical—order for which information
patterns are fundamentally propelled by a preexisting energetic field of
dynamic or highly perturbed level variations. In other words, this relation
is defined in terms of a transductive modulation by which information
ultimately coincides with informed energy. For Whitehead, instead, process involves various levels of abstraction, including physical, conceptual,
AFTE R NATU RE 175
and metaconceptual or generalizing systems of relations that highlight the
importance of a rational articulation of data. While for Simondon, the
conceptual, ideal, or abstract configuration of a technical object needs to
become concrete in order to be an effective or bonne forme of a culture,
society, and mentality, Whitehead instead argues that indetermination,
or not knowing, is the condition by which conceptual generalization—or
determination—can be achieved through distinct degrees of prehension.
From this standpoint, Whitehead’s insistence on the central function
of reason can support a view of technology that involves not simply a
mechanical function of organization whereby information is defined
by the algorithmic pattern that encodes it. His view allows us to shed light
on the importance of the logic by which technology functions. This means
that Whitehead’s processual ontology could allow us to explain the emergence of computational logic not in terms of predetermined axioms but
according to an emerging abstraction by which the energetic field cannot
simply be the grantor of the ordering of information into patterns and the
logical abstraction of patterns into a series of determinations. While it is
true to say that algorithms are above all encoders of complexity and that
Turing’s Universal Machine was devised to compress infinite variations
into finite instructions to accomplish determinate tasks, this algorithmic
procedure cannot be isolated from the problem of the incomputable nor
from the entropic tendency of information to increase quantitatively and
add volume to patterns. From the standpoint of algorithmic information
theory, computational logic has thus become ampliative, which means
that results are not directly deducted from inputs (that is, they do not
reproduce premises) but instead add more information to the starting
set of instructions. In other words, the algorithmic elaboration of data
also involves a growth of information. However, since the incomputable
is the condition of information, the fallacy of deductive logic is not simply
an error in the system expressing the limit of computation; instead, the
emergence of a nondeductive logic of interactive, distributive, and learning algorithms implies the partial or continuous determination of randomness. Indeed, this nondeductive logic has its own function of reason
that, one can suggest, implies a process of algorithmic determination of
randomness. This can also be theorized as the advance of an alien thought
in the form of complex algorithmic evolutive patterns that continuously—
albeit partially—incorporate randomness.
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Nevertheless, in relation to my suggestion, one could easily argue that
the function of reason in computational processing is strongly limited by
the lack of a metaconceptual form able to accomplish anything else than
a faster mechanization of decision making. My suggestion therefore may
work ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge the fundamental problem of automation that Simondon took pains to avoid. In other words,
while Simondon’s theory of a technical object may help us unearth the
inhuman field of energetic potential that challenges the instrumental view
of technology as an extension or a prosthetic of human skills, it could
appear to some that the form of automation that I am proposing only, and
at best, manages to reproduce the mechanistic assumptions of the formulation of the inhuman in the context of a software culture.
Nevertheless, it is possible to recognize that the automated processing of information does not fulfill Whitehead’s model of the function of
reason, insofar as algorithmic computation cannot achieve the order of
abstraction that encompasses an infinite infinity of variations without representing any particularity. In other words, this kind of processing seems
to be too attached to the operations of classification and labeling of information, however complex these may be. On the other hand, however, it is
also problematic to dismiss the specificity of algorithmic information and
the emergence of a computational formalism that moves from indetermination to the determination of randomness—or the incomputable. My
point is that this kind of formalism could instead serve us to explain the
complexity of the technical object in terms of the algorithmic procedures
that run it and according to a form of logic that no longer obeys its initial
premises or axiomatic preestablished truths. This is a form of abstraction
that can neither be ascribed to a bland mechanism nor to the force of
energetic impulse.
Neither mechanicism nor vitalism thus will suffice to explain how
important it is to radicalize both informational and energetic dynamisms
because these have both become defined in terms of their margins of
indetermination. This is true not only of the living but also, significantly,
of thought—both concrete and abstract, both practical and theoretical,
and in both its natural and artificial dimensions. From this standpoint, it
is crucial that algorithms cease to be representational forms of energy and
become hosts of the order of information entropy that must be addressed
from within their computational matrices. The algorithmic information
AFTE R NATU RE 177
theory’s conception of entropy can serve as a point of departure for theorizing a third-order cybernetics in which the technical object needs to
be understood in terms of a function of reasoning that is inorganic and
nonbiologically bound to any particular organism. How we understand
this functioning, however, involves not falling back into the representational framework of cognitivism promoted in classic AI discussions. To
conclude, I want to reiterate that my reflection on the advance of the inhuman thought of technical systems is inspired by the condition of randomness at the core of the complex function of elaboration in the algorithmic
processing of data, which are embedded in socialities of all sorts within
distributive agglomerations of systems. The task ahead, then, is to elaborate further the distinct orders of function of energetic and information
systems without grounding them in a specific field (either energetic or
mechanical). The task, therefore, is to analyze the process by which algorithmic classification and evaluation of data involves functions of abstraction and how these functions map the emergence of automated reasoning
and its inhuman capacities of thinking after nature.
NOTES
1.
2.
This is also to say that Simondon does not reject but reevaluates the statistical calculus in
the mathematical formulation of the principle of indetermination insofar as this calculation can be useful as a diagnostic tool of the effective reality of the quantic behavior of
particles and the knowledge or the measure of it. A parallelism between what is and what
is possible to know allows Simondon to propose a new notion of information as being
always already attached to the reality of the preindividual.
Simondon’s critique of the concept of information proposed by Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics was also a critique of the notion of totality of form proposed by Gestalt, which,
contrary to the hylomorphic schema, based on the analogy between matter and form,
pointed to a fundamental equilibrium of the form. However, for Simondon the concept
of information had to account for an internal dynamics that sustained the process by
which the unity of individuation could rather encompass the variations of form, the
crucial variation emerging from the tension between energy, matter, and information.
Information is thus important because it can resolve the disparity between matter and
energy insofar as it is here posed as another level of condition for achieving the integrity of complexity of form. However, as I discuss in this chapter, Simondon’s notion of
information is profoundly attached to the microphysical explanation that precondition
information (and matter) is ontologically dependent on the highly vibrating consistency
of the energetic field.
178 INO RGANIC RITES
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