Incredible Machines 1

Hello everyone. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Hi. Thank you so much for coming tonight. Good evening. My name is Biliana Vokova and I'm the Vice President at Access Gallery, the Board of Directors of Access Gallery. and I'm here to welcome you today. Thank you so much for coming. On behalf of ACCESS and our director, curator, Kimberly Phillips, I would like to welcome you and I also would like to thank all the people that have been involved with this conference, the volunteers, the speakers, the respondents.

And last but not least, I would like to welcome Mohamed Salani. Thank you so much for coming. Hello everyone, so I couldn't get my iPad online here, so I have to read my speech from my phone or whatever it is, so just bear with me. I want to welcome you to the Incredible Machines Conference. This has been part two of a three-part curatorial project that I'm doing with Access Gallery. The third part will be launched sometime this year, probably in June or July, which will be a server encyclopedia of research material by Iranian artists and knowledge producers.

this second part of my project I decided that rather than being very local somehow involved more of a global theme and a global audience global theme in the sense that because both of the projects the exhibition of Access Gallery and the web project that I'm working on somehow relate to the idea of technology but I wanted the second part to sort of not be about Iranian artists and knowledge producers but involve more of a global sense of people who spend some time researching or the research intersects with the question of technology. So that's how it goes. So like a spoken word goes before I read you my statement.

Tonight and tomorrow you have a chance to witness and hopefully participate in multiple conversations with a large group of scholars and artists whose research somehow touches upon the question of technology. They have been invited to this event because of the conceptual and political urgency that in my opinion makes a collective conversation about computers, computation, and the notion of digital relevant to our time. And if we agree to agree among ourselves with one thing that Heidegger ever said, It must be his statement that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. This is why you might want to prepare yourself in this gathering to hear about all sorts of related and unrelated things

that have more to do with this essence, this non-technological essence, of the various technological various objects of scientific investigation or everyday life. or even artistic practice. This conference is a combination of my research so far into a few things, among them the trajectory of technogenesis or the origins of technology as well as the limitations of today's machines and the impact of legal start and the future ones, the ones that have yet to be constructed. Inspired by both the network structure and scattered logic of artificial intelligence

and using interfaces such as screens, routers, cables, and the almighty Google, our guests from around the world will literally gather here to look into the past, present, and future of technology in order to comment on the increasing relevance of machines to the production of knowledge. I'd like to make a clarification about this event, which is, tonight and tomorrow, you may not directly hear a lot about art. in fact except soher malik who currently teaches at bar college all other presenters in this event have been intentionally selected from the fields other than artistic practice art history cruises or and curation of course i'm talking about respond i'm talking about practice but not respondents and we're going to get into that does this mean that artists art historians and critics

have been left out from this event. Certainly not. However, instead of being kept in the usual position of defending or making claims about their works or about the larger field of art, they have been asked to question and respond to the conference's participants from their perspectives, a strategy that hopefully will create a tension space that itself can contribute to the generation of new knowledge. This dialogue between the fields of philosophy, media theory, and art will hopefully benefit all sides of the debate and be particularly useful towards generation of a new operational space for art whose claims about authenticity and humanistic spirit, through overextension, has become the accelerating production

of mechanical creativity and knowledge. From the other hand, if you identify the industrialization and homogenization of the field of art as the most troubling outcome of the colonization of the field by the twin engines of capital and computer, then a critical and enlightening look at the problem may help, if not also put a demand on art, to quit playing around with the notions of art reform and surface as places of significance and get serious with having a stake about the future of the theory of knowledge. For myself as a curator, thinking rigorously about art and technology has entailed researching and working with not only artists, but also thinkers and scholars whose contributions deserve a similar treatment as that of artists. This is not to suggest that the practices of thinkers and scholars are identical to those of artists,

but that their work can and should be treated with the kind of methods usually reserved for making sense and of organizing works by artists for exhibitionary purposes. What I'm trying to say here is that instead of theory, instead of theory referring to art or art referring to theory art and theory need to be seen and acted upon on the same scale and the same methodologies what I'm suggesting here is beyond what has been known in the art world as the public programming associated with art exhibitions so like curating knowledge rather than just curating public programming associated with some exhibition I'm instead suggesting

that the inclusion of a deeper investigation of intellectual and philosophical works in the job responsibility of curators is another way of injecting rigor back into the field of contemporary art Now, a little bit about the event's name. The event's name, Incredible Machines, shows the title of two unrelated films as well as a series of computer games that were written for Macintosh and MS-DOS computers and can be played today on an iPad. The first film, though, is about the invention of graphical user interfaces at Bell Computers from 1967, and the second one is a 1970s movie about the interiors of a human

body made by the National Geographic. This kind of shows how related machines are to humans and how inseparable it is. Every time you talk about machines, you end up talking about humans and vice versa. There's also another thing I want to address, which is the unfortunate thing that due to conflicting schedules, I was not able to have everyone whose contributions have constituted a major part of my research here tonight with us. Some of these scholars and thinkers are women who from a universal or their particular feminist position have engaged with the question of technology. People like Donna Haraway, Catherine Hales, Catherine Malibu, Wendy Chun. There's also guys like Bernard Sivier and Joseph Lindo, which I would have loved to have here.

Then there are those thinkers like Gilbert Sennendo and Jill Shadouille who are long gone and not even with us to be invited here. But their spirit or their ghost or their specter hangs above their own. So having said that, I would like to start the program tonight. I think we're going to have Jane sort of like chairing or like moderating the first session of the program. Thank you Mo and again welcome everyone to the first night of incredible machines. My name is Jane Wilkinson and I'll be introducing the speakers and sort of keeping things going

tonight. So again we're just so pleased to have such a really dynamic range of scholars, theorists, activists, writers, artists here to present and Mo kind of gave you a scope of the of the whole conference. So I'll just sort of run through what the format will be for tonight and then we'll get started. So we'll first have three 20-minute presentations in succession by Benjamin Broughton, Benjamin Woodard, and then Clint Burnham. We'll have that followed by the keynote presentation by Alexander Galloway. And that will be followed by a response to the keynote from Ty Smith. And then to conclude the evening, we'll have a sort of roundtable discussion with four respondents who will each individually respond to the presentations, and then we'll have time at the end for Q&A

as sort of part of that discussion. So for each of the individual presentations, if you have questions, if you could just leave them till the end and then we can discuss at the end. I think for the format, that's all I have to say, but I'd just like to remind our speakers, we're on a bit of a tight timeline tonight. You may have noticed there's no break in the evenings program, so we'll try to keep everyone sort of to the allocated time. That would be great. And then, yeah, so I'll just introduce our first speaker of the evening, will be Benjamin Bratton. He is a theorist whose work spans the fields of philosophy, art, and design. He's associate professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. His research is situated at the intersections

of contemporary social and political theory, computational media and infrastructure, architectural and urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. His current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing and highly granular universal addressing systems. The title of his forthcoming book is The Stack on Software and Sovereignty, and his presentation tonight is titled The Black Stack. So please welcome Benjamin Bratson. Hi, this is Benjamin Bratson. I'm sorry I won't be able to be with you today in Vancouver. Vancouver would have been quite a lovely trip, I'm sure. It would be great to see old and new friends alike. Unfortunately, it's a very busy weekend here at UCSD, graduate admissions, and I have administrative duties which will keep me here for the duration.

I also thanks very much to Mohamed for the invitation, however, to speak with you today. And I've prepared a presentation, which I'll give by video here, Brian Oblivion style. And, of course, look forward to your comments thereon. It's a newer piece called The Black Stack, which was originally written for the keynote at Transmediale in Berlin a couple months ago and was recently published, like yesterday, in a special issue of – an issue of EFLUX, which is, I think, a special issue, actually. And it's available there, the full text, if you want to read through it or go through it after the talk as well.

But as I know, we're on a bit of a tight schedule. I want to begin then without further delay. Planetary scale computation takes different forms of different scales, energy grids and mineral sourcing, phonic cloud infrastructure, urban software and public service privatization, massive universal addressing systems, interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects, users both overdetermined by self-quantification and exploded by the arrival of legions of non-human users, sensors, cars, robots. But instead of seeing these various species of contemporary computational technologies as so many different genres of machines, each spinning out on its own,

we should instead see them as forming the body of an accidental megastructure. Perhaps these align layer by layer into something not unlike a vast, but also incomplete, pervasive, if also irregular, software and hardware stack. This model of a stack that both does and does not exist as such, it is a machine that serves as a schema as much as a schema of machines. As such, perhaps the image of a totality that this conception provides would, as theories of totality have before, make the composition of new governmentalities and new sovereignties both more legible and more effective. My interest in the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation focuses less on issues of personal privacy and state surveillance, for example,

than on how it distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian modes of political geography, jurisdiction, and sovereignty, and produces new territories in its image. It draws from and against Carl Schmitt's later work on the nomos of the earth and from his albeit flawed history of the geometries of geopolitical architectures. Nomos refers to the dominant and essential logic for the political subdivisions of earth, of land, sea, and air, and now also of the domain that the U.S. military simply calls cyber, and for the geopolitical order that stabilizes these subdivisions accordingly. Today, as the nomos that was defined by the horizontal loop geometry of the modern state system creaks and groans, and as seeing like a state takes leave of that initial territorial

nest, both with and against the demands of planetary scale computation, we wrestle with what the irregular abstractions of information, time, territory, and the chaotic delamination of practical sovereignty from the occupation of place. For this, nomos of the cloud would, for example, draw jurisdiction not only by the horizontal subdivision of physical sites by and for states, but also by the vertical stacking of interdependent layers on top of one another, two geometries, sometimes in cahoots, sometimes completely diagonal and unrecognizable to one another. The stack, in short, is that new nomos, rendered now as a vertically thickened political geography. In my analysis, there are six layers to the stack. Earth, cloud, city, address, interface, and user.

Now, rather than demonstrating each layer of the stack as a whole, as the book does, I'll focus specifically on the cloud and user layers and articulate some alternative designs for these layers and for the totality, or better for the next totality than almost to come. The black stack, then, is to the stack what the shadow of the future is to the form of the present. The black stack is less the anarchist stack or the death metal stack or the utterly opaque stack than the computational totality to come, defined at this moment by what it is not, by the empty fields of its framework, and by its dire inevitability. It is not the platform we have, but the platform that might be. That platform would be defined by the productivity of its accidents,

by the strategy for which whatever may appear at first as the worst option, even evil, may ultimately be where to look for the best way out. There's less a possible future than an escape from the present. The platforms of the cloud layer of the stack are structured by dense, plural, non-contiguous geographies, a hybrid of USA super-jurisdiction and the charter cities, which would carve new, partially privatized policies from the whole cloth of de-sovereign lands. But perhaps there is more. The immediate geopolitical drama of the cloud layer is seen perhaps most directly in the ongoing Sino-Google conflict, so beginning in 2008, continuing to the present, China hacking Google, Google pulling out of China,

NSA hacking China, NSA hacking Google, Google ghostwriting books for the State Department, and Google wordlessly circumventing the last instances of state oversight altogether, not by transgressing them, but by absorbing them into the service offering. Meanwhile, Chinese router firmware bides its time. The geographies at work are often weird. For example, Google filed a series of patents on offshore data centers to be built in international waters, on towers using tidal currents and available water to keep the service cool. The complexities of jurisdiction suggested by a global cloud piped in from non-state space are fantastic, but they are now less exceptional than exemplary of a new normal.

And between the hackers of the People's Liberation Army and Google, there's more than a standoff between, just a standoff between the proxies of two state apparatuses, rather a fundamental conflict over the geometry of political geography itself. one bound by the territorial integrity of the state, and the other by the gossamer threads of the world's information demanding to be organized and made useful. This is a clash between two logics of governance, two geometries of territory, one a subdivision of the horizontal, the other a stacking of vertical layers, one a state, the other a parastate, one superimposed on top of the other at any point on the map and never resolving into some consensual cosmopolitanism,

but continuing to grind against the grain of one another's plane. This characterizes the geopolitics of our moment. That plus the gravity of generalized secession, but the two are interrelated. From here, we see that contemporary cloud platforms are displacing, if not also replacing, traditional core functions of states. were both good and ill, demonstrating new spatial and temporal models of politics and publics. Archaic states drew their authority from the regular provision of food. Over the course of modernization, more was added to the intricate bargains of Leviathan. Energy, infrastructure, legal identity and standing, objective and comprehensive maps, credible currencies, and flag and brand loyalties. Bit by bit, each of these and more are now provided by cloud platforms,

not necessarily as formal replacements for state versions, but like Google ID, simply more useful and effective for daily life. For these platforms, the terms of participation are not mandatory. Because of this, their social contracts are more extractive than constitutional. The cloud polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its users who trade attention and microeconomic compliance in exchange for global infrastructural services. And in turn, it provides each of them with an active, discrete online identity and the license to use that infrastructure. That said, it's clear that we don't have anything like a proper geopolitical theory of these transformations. Before the full ambition, the USA security apparatus was so evident,

it was thought by many that the cloud was a place where states had no ultimate competence, or maybe even a role to play. Too slow, too dumb, too easily outwitted by using the right browser. States would be cored out component by component until nothing was left but a well-armed health insurance scheme with its own World Cup team. And in the long run, that may still be the outcome, with modern liberal states taking their place next to ceremonial monarchs and stripped of all but symbolic authority, not necessarily replaced but displaced and misplaced to one side. But now we hear the opposite, equally brittle conclusion, that the cloud is only the state, that it equals the state, and that its totality, figural and potential, is intrinsically totalitarian.

Despite all, I wouldn't take that bet. Looking toward the black stack, we observe that new forms of governmentality arise through new capacities to tax flows. at ports, at gates, on property, on income, on attention, on clicks, on movement, on electrons, on carbon. And it's not at all clear whether in the long run cloud platforms will overwhelm state control on such flows, or whether states will continue to evolve into cloud platforms, absorbing the displaced functions back into themselves, or whether both will split or rotate diagonally to one another, or how deeply what we may now recognize as the surveillance state in the U.S. and China will become a universal solvent of compulsory transparency and or a cosmically opaque megastructure of absolute paranoia,

or all of the above, or none of the above. Between the state, the market, and the platform, which is better designed to tax the interfaces of everyday life and draw sovereignty thereby? It's a false choice, to be sure, but one that raises the question of where to locate the proper site of governance as such. What would we mean by the public, if not that which is constituted by such interfaces? And where else should governance, meant here as the necessary, deliberate, and enforceable composition of durable political subjects and their mediations, live, if not there? Not in some obtuse chain of parliamentary representation, nor in some delusional monadic individual unit, nor in some sad little community consensus powered by moral hectoring, but

instead in the imminent, immediate, and exactly present interfaces that cleave and bind us. Where should sovereignty reside if not in what is in between us, and derive not from each of us individually, but from what draws the world through us? For this, it's critical to underscore that cloud platforms, including sometimes state apparatuses, are exactly that, platforms. It's important as well to recognize that platforms are not only a technical architecture, that they are also an institutional form. And once they centralize, like states, scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols, just as they decentralize, like markets, coordinating economies not through the superimposition of fixed plans, but through interoperable and emergent interaction. Next to states and markets, platforms are a third

form, coordinating through fixed protocols while scattering free-range users watched over in loving, if also disconcertingly omniscient, grace. In the platform as totality, drawing the interfaces of everyday life into one another, the maximal state and the minimal state, Red Plenty and Google Ghost Plan, start to look weirdly similar. And from this, our own subjective enrollment is less as citizens of polis or as homo economicus within a market, but positioned rather as users of a platform. As I see it, the work of geopolitical theory and of design and geopolitics is to develop a proper history, topology, and program for such platforms.

These would not be a shorthand for cloud feudalism nor or the network politics of the multitude, but models for the organization of durable alter totalities which command the force of law, if not necessarily its forms and formality. Our understanding of the political economy of platforms demands its own Hobbes, Marx, Hayek, and Keynes. One of the useful paradoxes of the user's position as a political subject is the contradictory impulse directed simultaneously towards his artificial over-individuation and his ultimate pluralization, with both participating differently in the geopolitics of transparency. For example, the quantified self-movement here in California, a true medical theology, is haunted by this contradiction.

At first, the intensity and granularity of a new informational mirror image convinces the user that his individuated coherency and stability as a subject is real. He is flattered by the singular image of his reflection. And this is why quantified self is so popular with those inspired by an X-Men reading of Atlas Shrugged. But as more data is added to the diagram that quantifies his interactions with the outside world and as the outside's impact on his person, the health of the microbial biome in his gut, immediate long-term environmental conditions, his various epidemiological contexts, and so on, the quality of everything that is not him comes to overcode and overwhelm any notion of himself as a withdrawn and self-contained agent.

Like Theseus' paradox, where after every component of a thing has been replaced, nothing original remains but a metaphysical husk, the user is confronted with the existential lesson that at any point he is only the intersection of many streams. At first, the subject position of the user overproduces individual identity, but in the continuance of the same mechanisms, it then succeeds in exploding it. The geopolitics of the user we have now is equally inadequate, including its oppositional modes. The Oedipal discourse of privacy and transparency in relation to the evil eye of the uninvited stepfather is a necessary process toward an alter-globalism, but it has real limits worth spelling out. A geopolitics of computation predicated at its core upon the biopolitics of privacy,

of self-immunization from any compulsory appearance in front of publics, platforms, states, others, can sometimes also serve a psychological internalization of a now-ascended general economy of secession, castration anxiety, whatever, resulting in the pre-paranoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere we call the neoliberal subject. The space in which the discursive formation of the subject meets the technical constitution of the user enjoys a much larger horizon than one defined by these kinds of individuation. Consider for example proxy users. New Proxy is a project supported by Google Ideas, a browser modification that lets users

easily pair up across distances to allow someone in one location, trapped in the bad internets, to send information unencumbered through the virtual position of another user in another location, enjoying the good internets. Recalling the proxy servers set up during Arab Spring, one can see how Google Ideas, Jared Cohen's group, might take a special interest in baking this into Chrome. For Sino-Google geopolitics, the platform could theoretically be available at billion-user scale to those who live in China, even if Google is not technically in China because those users acting through and as foreign proxies are themselves as far as the Internet geography is concerned, both in and not in China. Developers of Uproxy believe that it would take two simultaneous and synchronized man-in-the-middle attacks

to hack the link. In a population scale, that would prove difficult, even for the best state actors, for now. More disconcerting, perhaps, is that such a framework could just as easily be used to withdraw data from a paired site, a paired user that for good reason should be left alone. Some plural user subject that is conjoined by a proxy link or other means could be composed of different types of addressable subjects. Two humans in different countries, a human in a sensor, a sensor in a bot, the human in a robot in a sensor, a whatever and a whatever. In principle, any one of these subcomponents not only can be part of multiple conjoined positions, but not know or need to know always which meta-user they contribute to, any more

than the microbial biome in your gut needs to know your name. Spoofing with honeypot identities between humans and non-humans is measured against the theoretical address space of IPv6, roughly 10 to the 23 addresses per person, or some other massive universal addressing scheme. The abyssal quantity and range of things that could, in principle, participate in these vast pluralities, includes real and fictional addressable persons, objects, locations, even addressable massless relations between things, any of which could be a sub-user in this internet of hiacities. So while the stack and the black stack stage the death of the user in one sense, the eclipse of a certain resolute humanism, they do so because they also bring the multiplication and proliferation of

other kinds of non-human users, including sensors, financial algorithms, and various robots from nanometric to landscape scale, any combination of which one might enter into a relationship as part of a composite user. And this is where the recent shift by major cloud platforms into robotics may prove especially vital, because, like Darwin's tortoises finding their way to different Galapagos islands, the Cambrian explosion in robotics sees speciation occur in the wild, not just in the lab, and with us on their inside, not on the outside. As robotics and cloud hardware of all scales blend into a common category of machine, it'll be unclear in general human-robotic interaction whether one is encountering a fully autonomous,

partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence. Everyday interactions replay the Turing test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so, how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human or even carbon-based life as a threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference. The position of the user, then, maps not only very incompletely onto any one individual body. From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one. Elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiation of these composite user positions.

The neoliberal subject position makes absurd demands on people as users, as quantified selves, as cis-admins of their own psyche. And from this, paranoia and narcissism are two symptoms of the same disposition, two functions of the same mask. For one, the mask works to pluralize identity according to the subjective demands of the user position as a composite alloy, and for another, it defends against those same demands on behalf of the illusory integrity of a self-identity fracturing around its existential core. Ask yourself, is that user anonymous because he is dissolved into a vital machinic plurality, or because public identification threatens individual self-mastery, sense of autonomy,

social unaccountability? The former and the latter are two very different politics, but use the same masks and the same software suites. Given the schizophrenic economy of the user, first over-individuated and then multiplied and de-differentiated, this really isn't an unexpected or neurotic reaction at all. It is, however, fragile and inadequate. In the construction of the users as an aggregate profile that both is and is not specific to any one entity, there is no identity to deduce other than the pattern of interaction between partial actors. We may find, perhaps ironically, that the user position of the stack actually has far less in common with the neoliberal form of the subject than some of today's opposition-less formats for political subjectivity

that hope, quite rightly, to challenge reform and resist the state stack as it is currently configuring itself. However, something like a digital bill of rights for users, despite its cosmopolitan optimism, becomes a much more complicated, fragile, and limited solution when the discrete identification of a user is both so heterogeneous and fluid. Are all proxy composite users, one user? Is anything with an IP address a user? If not, why not? If this throne is reserved for one species, humans, when is any one animal of that species, any one of us, being a user, and when is it not? Any time that is generating information, is it a user? If so, that policy would, in practice, crisscross and trespass some of the most basic

concepts of the political, and for that reason alone it may be a good place to start. In addition to the fortification of the user as a geopolitical subject, we also require a redefinition of the political subject in relation to the real operations of the user, one that is based not on homo economicus, nor on parliamentary liberalism, nor on post-structuralist linguistic reduction, nor on the will to secede into the moral safety of individual privacy and withdrawn from coercion. Instead, this definition should focus on composing and elevating sites of governance from the immediate, suturing, interfacial material between subjects, in the stitches and the traces and the folds of interaction between bodies and things at a distance, congealing into different networks, demanding very different kinds of platform sovereignty.

I will conclude then with some thoughts on the stack that we have and on the black stack, the generic figure for its alternative totalities, the stack to come. The stack we have is defined not only by its form, its layers and platforms, and by their interrelations, but also by its content. As is now painfully clear, leak after leak, is that its content is also the content of our daily communications, now weaponized against us. If the panopticon effect is when you don't know if you are being watched or not, and so you behave as if you are, then the inverse panopticon effect is when you know you're being watched, but act as if you aren't. This is today's surveillance culture, exhibitionism in bad faith.

The emergence of stack platforms doesn't promise any solution, or even distinctions between friend and enemy within this optical geopolitics. At some dark day in the future, when considered versus the Google caliphate, the NSA may even come to be seen by some as the public option. At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits, they will say, rather than merely stockholder avarice and flimsy user agreements. If we take 9-11 as the rollout of the Patriot Act, as year zero for the USA's massive data gathering, encapsulation, and digestion campaign, one that we are only now beginning to comprehend, even as parallel projects from China, Russia, and Europe are sure to come to light in time, we could imagine the entirety of network communication for the last decade, the big haul, as a single deep and wide digital simulation of the world, or a significant section of it.

It's an archive, a library of the real. Its existence as the purloined property of a state, just as a physical fact, is almost occult. Almost. The geopolitical profile of the big hall, from the energy necessary to preserve it to the governing instrumentality understood both as a text, very large text, and as a machine machine with various utilities, overflows the traditional politics of software. Its story is much more Borges than Loris Lessig. Its fate is as well. Can it be destroyed? Is it possible to delete this simulation, and is it desirable to do so? Is there a trash can big enough for the big delete? Even if the plug could be pulled on all future data halls,

stopping immediately, surely there must be a backup somewhere. The identical double of the simulation, such that if we delete one, the other will be forever haunting history until it is rediscovered by future AI archaeologists interested in their own Paleolithic origins? Would we bury it, even if we could? Would we need signs around it, like those designed for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site, warning off unknowable future excavations? Those of us lucky enough to be alive during this fifteen year span would enjoy a certain illegible immortality, curious to whatever macro-cognitive entity pieces us back together by our online activities, both public and private, proud and furtive, each of us rising

back centuries from now, each of us a little Ozymandias of cat videos and porn hub. In light of this, the black stack could come to mean very different things. On the one hand, it would imply that this simulation is opaque and unmappable, not disappeared, but that the whole thing is ultimately redacted. Could imply that from the ruined fragments of this history, another coherent totality can be carved against the grain, even from the deep recombinancy at and below the earth layer of the stack. Its blackness is the surface of a world that can no longer be composed by addition because it is so absolutely full, overwritten, and overdetermined. And to add more is just so much ink into the ocean.

Instead of tabula rasa, this tabula plenis allows for creativity and figuration only by subtraction, like scratching paint from a canvas by carving away, by death, by replacement. The structural logic of the stack system allows for the replacement of whatever occupies one layer with something else, and for the rest of the architecture to continue to function without pause. For example, the content of any one layer, Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface user, could be replaced, including the masochistic hysterical fiction of the individual user, both neoliberal and neo-other things, while the rest of the layers remain a viable armature for global infrastructure. The stack is designed to be remade. That is its technical form.

But unlike replacing copper wire with fiber optics in the transmission layer of TCPIP, replacing one kind of user with another is more difficult. Today, we're doing it by adding more and different kinds of things into the user position, as described above. We should allow for more comprehensive displacements, not just by elevating things to the status of political subject or technical agents, but by making way for genuinely post-human and a-human positions. In time, perhaps at the eclipse of the Anthropocene, the historical phase of Google Ghost Plan will give way to stateless platforms from multiple strata of synthetic intelligence and biocommunication to settle into new continents of cyborg symbiosis. Or perhaps instead, if nothing else, the carbon and energy appetite

of this ambitious embryonic ecology will simply starve its host. For some dramas, but hopefully not for the fabrication of the stack to come, black or otherwise, a certain humanism and companion figure of humanity still presumes its traditional place in the center of the frame. We must let go of the demand that any artificial intelligence arriving at sentience or sapience must care deeply about humanity, us specifically, as the subject and object of its knowing and its desire. The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the big machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant or not even as a discrete thing to know about. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all. As Eliezer

Yudkovsky puts it, the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which you can use for something else. One of the integral accidents of the stack may be an anthracidal trauma that shifts us from a design career as authors of the Anthropocene to the role of supporting actors in the arrival of the post-anthropocene. The black stack may also be black because we cannot see our own reflection in it. In the last instance, its accelerationist geopolitics is less eschatological than chemical because its grounding of time is based less on the promise of historical dialectics than on the rot of isotope decay. It's drawn, I believe, by an inhuman and inhumanist molecular form finding. Precambrian flora changed into

peat oil, changed into children's toys. Dinosaurs changed into birds, changed into ceremonial headdresses. Computation itself converted into whatever metamachine comes next, and stack into black stack. So thanks very much for the invitation to share the text with you. Again, apologies for not being able to join you in Vancouver today. I truly wish that I could have. I do look forward to getting any comments and feedback and extending the conversation on these topics with all of you. So until then, I'll see you. Thanks again. Bye. So far, moving on to our second presentation, Benjamin Woodard, the doctoral student at the

Center of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His dissertation focuses on the relation between thought and nature in the philosophy of F.W. J. Ron Schelling, focusing specifically on the relation between speculative physics and pragmatism and the context of an extremely expensive naturalism. He is also interested in philosophical pessimism and ecology, and the title of his presentation tonight is Computing the Unprethinkable Plato's Line and Deflationary Ontology. Please join me in welcoming Benjamin Litter. Okay, thank you very much, and thank you for the introduction, and thank you Mo for bringing

me here. I'm just going to go ahead and jump into this, and hopefully it makes some amount of sense. But we'll see. In her essay, Epistemology of the Line, Sybil Kramer notes a peculiar feature of Plato's divided line, namely that the capacity for making images and with it visuality forms the essence of Plato's ontology, understood as a doctrine of what is real. Even the highest level of being, the forms, are introduced as originals, thus as templates for pictorial copies. Degrees of reality are held up against the measuring stick of the original copy relationship. Given Plato's purported hostility to this image,

to the image, this might seem surprising at the very progression of Plato's dialogues of the exhibition and demonstration of abstraction's necessity posits that the imaging of abstraction is required. Furthermore, Cramer's reading of the line indexes the one world, two method reading of Plato's thought, championed by Constantine Ritter, against the two worlds model, which suggests an unmediated invasion of the abstract upon the actual, and locates transcendental capacities as out of this world. Demonstration, or any act of determination, maintains the abstract constitution of the act of determination, but not its conception. If we assume determination is a logic,

then how we conceive the constitutive power of the abstract requires locating the place from which determination arises in order to mobilize determination non-trivially. To not do so makes the conceptual inexplicably compatible with the constitutive. The problem of differentiating thinking and being, or conception and constitution, has issued a flight to the middle of Plato's line. In one case, the abnegation of epistemology conjoined with the contrary demand for structural determinancy, as in Bidu or Measu, or in another case, the atomization of epistemological access in the name of descriptive breadth in Harmon and other autotronic philosophies. That is, either a narrow mathematization of ontology or ontologization of the all without knowing.

Both strategies fear two opposed extremes, the hard epistemological limit at bottom and the infinite capacity of the abstract above. This is not to erase the differences between Meosu and Bidou, but highlight their joint attempt to transcendentalize without Kant. From this fortified ontological middle ground, the efficacy of a process such as computation appears as an absurdity, which simultaneously undercuts human ontological status, while inflating technological and scientific capacity as only a mass psychological error. Whereas Husserl defended the frail human spirit from the sciences as the ongoing abstraction of the concrete Kramer argues that Plato's aforementioned diagram

diagrammatic determinations emphasizes science and philosophy's concretion of abstraction. Kramer argues that icons and symbols manage quantities which extend from them this extension itself and augmentation of the performance of mind Pictorial demonstration is a consequent or noble abstraction and perfectly captured by human techniques suggests a potential isomorphism between the spectrum of digitality various physical extrapolations of computational efficacy and the spectrum of contemporary ontologies These spectra are ranging from weak to strong in terms of epistemological description that nature itself is discrete

that nature is computational and up to the universe is simulation. Returning to Plato's line affords us the capacity to place such positions along it and say that their movement across it is not to absolutize or ontologize a particular segment but to determine the place from which its demonstration is engaged. The aforementioned Greek ontologies attempt to fortify the mid-region of the spectrum. The line, yet ontologized this very occupation, hardening doxa at its highest peak, bound to the basis form of knowledge as logic, strapped to an eventual temporality. Shortcuts necessitated by their collective evasion of epistemic mediation or mobile iconicity.

Amidst this combative fray for the middle ground of synthesis, rise inflationary and deflationary counts of German idealism, functioning as the pivot between weak and strong ontology or digitality and computation. In particular, it is the different utilizations of the quantitative and the qualitative which separates Schelling and Hegel's view of determination as synthesis. For Hegel, the shift between the universal and the particular is a qualitative shift, whereas for Schelling, such a shift is a quantitative or augmentative one. Both Hegel and Schelling involve distributive models against ontological solidification of subject or object in the name of non-foundational spirit or non-foundational nature. Both Hegel and Schelling advance vectorial modes of thought, whereas Hegel constructs social circularities.

Schelling attempts to synthesize the endless fluctuations of nature's augmentative and recursive continuity. Along the spectrum of known being, or conception, constitution, the Hegelian long view runs the top of the line of abstraction to the point of origin. Then a determination is a self-differentiation of a concept from the negated genes of its conceptual history. Creating nests of conceptual difference was for shelling the model as distributive in a ficurative or branching way. The consequent totality of these branches is retrograded in nature, and that any sense of the all is a potency located in the unthinkable. Schelling's vectorial model takes exponentialization as directions of the augmentative process,

where each branch is further potentiated under the physical model of polarization, past and future as poles of each line in its creation, testing the potentiality of an actuality only in its future consequent. This extensity test, as Ian Grant puts it, is further complicated than that Schelling's genetic method is constantly recapitulated as an epoch or age or division along the line, as a selection or cut of branches, constructing a hierarchy without totality. Whereas Hegel's discrete units enact the social as knowing, Schelling's indifferent points index the joints of the continuous, thereby quantifying the qualitative.

Against these victorial mediations, the weak ontology of Meosu and Bidu obviates the level of the pragmatic by inflating the outside as determining the human only ontologically, never in terms of capacities, but only ever on its own already ontologized location. The self-standing quality of the subject trivializes the discriminations of the outside as naively abstract, while its minimal definition leads to uncritical ubiquity or logic from nowhere. The peculiar formalism of weak ontologists or strong ontologists in the opposite motion in the guise of anti-epistemology avoids both the rational capacities which unground constructively or destructively

the reasoner, represented as a social creature for Hegel or the inactivist procedure and self-altering unground of nature represented as productive, self-limiting activity by showing. To return to Plato, the spectrum of knowing and being, represented by the divided line, can be taken as a demonstration of each segment of nature, where the division again is not passage from this world to the next, but in directing the next node or branching of the line of the universal in nature. Furthermore, the lower or higher orientation becomes less a qualitative judgment than one of stratified Genesis, where apparently qualitative symmetry breaks our meta-level extractions or virtualizations

of a larger augmentative process or of the scalar difference between function and structure. Within these strata, the interacting components would seem to function under a Hagenian social model as conceptual interplay and under the Ashlenian model as the tracing of experimental extensity. extensity. The opposition of Hegel and Schelling is transformed in terms of the line. Passage along it is for Schelling an exploration of nature that expands its trajectories, but for Hegel, the passage on the line is that of the context of world history enfolded. Both Hegel and Schelling are thus engaged in the philosophy of future-oriented synthesis, but emphasizing a social domain for the former and a natural domain for the latter. The solhégo constructs history with the social relation

the assumption of the subject or individuation is the mystery for Schelling The point to investigate here is whether the location from which the inflationary and defamationary accounts of ontology are whether they are adjacent to that from which computation occurs or is computation so far conceived as careful as synthetic view and if not, is it due to a similar ontologization of the human. The central difficulty becomes that of whether computation is always an application of an epistemic operation upon the physical, or whether computation itself is physical, i.e., are matter-energy abstractions of computations. Ian Horswell notes that this conflict arises regarding the necessity of a medium in carrying

out computations, and yet, for quite some time, the measure of the capacity of computation has often been their behavioral equivalence. That is, computational success is measured by the correlation of simple input and output. However, the functional mode is still affected, at least in a primordial sense, by mediation or representation, such as number systems affecting the form of an algorithm. Orswell outlines an imperative model of computation, addressing commands or imperatives as manipulations of images. The synthetic capacity of computation is localized, and there is no clear means of relating mathematical or abstract computation to physical computation, as universal Turing machine, of which any computer is a bounded or limited example, can compute only that data which can be translated into algorithms, i.e. work done by another machine.

Yet physical computation, often described as mapping, can produce highly predictive models not because of the apparently unbound capacity of the computing device, but because many complex systems can be accurately predicted with only a small subset of data. In various accounts of computation as mapping, an isomorphism is posited with differing ontological implications in terms of the structure mapped as causal or dispositional. Hector Zennel suggests a behavioral model as an advancement from the functional or representative imperative model as that which attempts to read a system by its perturbations Here, moving along the line of knowing and being we are in the middle ground as Zennel's model

as well as the evolutionary model of Fogel and Atmar who push back against nature as computation but embrace evolution as a process of unifying intelligence accelerating computation in which inactivist models of computation occur at phylogenic, ontogenic, and sociogenetic levels. Moving to the top of the line, to abstraction, we find pan-computationalism, which differs between the various approaches to information and to broad physical models of the universe. The semantic model, akin to the functionalist model above, lends itself more right away to philosophy of mind, with a division between whether initial states should be evaluated in externalist terms of sense to reference or in an internalist way of cognition itself

being the ground for webs of reference. Following a philosophy of mind track, a variation of pancomputationalism, one at the most abstract level, we argue that nothing cannot be mapped by computation or as a strong or physical model of pancomputationalism would mean that all physical systems compute. Within physical and computationalism, debate arises as to over what degree and what kind of computations physical objects perform. How can the pervasiveness of logic's effect be divided from a purely logical form of the cosmos itself, as well as an uncritically ideal notion of human cognition? David Duch, in discussing artificial general intelligence, has argued that while Turing-Church universal computability may be applied to physical models,

models of quantum computing are not adequate to explain how thought occurs. In Is the Brain a Quantum Computer? Lita et al. write that explaining thought through quantum mechanics is akin to explaining bird flight through atomic bonds. The area's lack of domain specificity or egregious property dragging from one field to another without converting or adequately grounding the kinds of affordances of a given activity such as thought or flight Fogel's model of evolutionary computationalism addresses the converse in that only the functional capacities or behaviors of entities are exposed to selection and that the merits of such behaviors are judged solely in how they predict conditions prediction as effective memory whether internal or external

correlated in time once again the line is the analysis of a polarized segment of time an activist grounds and functional predicate consequence with Albia admittedly more limited in its conceptual and experimental resources the core of Schilling's thought lies in the way thought moves along the divided line accepting the primordiality of representation while creating camps along the way locating in thought's location within nature, or whether that location reforms the landscape viewed from it, where Hegel's explorations are sociogenetic and Schelling's tracing the path from the phylogenetic to the ontogenetic. To ontologize one's location in the name of weak ontology

is to reject the locative aspect of Kant's project, expanded by Negristani, which is its most impressive contribution. This rejection occurs in the name of freeing the human from the imposition which in effect maintains the equi-primorality of thinking and being without acknowledging its structure or its need for structures, functions, or imperatives to operate. That is, because thought is innate, it does not mean that the constitutive is the conceptual, as seems to be the case in the ontologization of the middle, but that the constitutive must be adequately conceived to know how the constitutive is in the conceptual. Rather than pit Hegel against Schelling, I would emphasize for the former that the law of the world

is reason demonstrated in history, or for the latter it is that all possibilities self-fulfill and none are suppressed. The point here is that Schelling and Hegel, albeit in different senses, force the capacity for abstraction backwards in time. for showing the oddity of postulating the unprethinkable is what necessitates, not contradicts, that one must start from the lowly image, that representation is the engine of predication. The danger of computation, it seems, is that it valorizes the ontology of determination over the determination of ontology as only a perspectival determination of the concept nested within constitution. The lesson of Plato's divided line, like the dialethic reading of the paraminides, the relationship of being and unbeing,

is that the mobility of the line is an asymmetrical cause in tension with the motion of ideal recuperation. Momentum engenders a method of demonstration which to reach the abstract veers towards the pictorial. The demonstrative which asserts an abstract value retroactively not to escape structural dependencies but to confirm their temporal and spatial procedures. To open the past in this sense is to confirm that the levels of nature thus far discovered, phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and sociogenetic, may well be in turn compounded by another level. And while this may be technological, to pursue this thesis by ontologizing the determination both outward and inward hardens the cryptohumanism of fixing ontologically our place on the line.

or put otherwise we cannot ontologize orientation without depotentiating our ontological orientation ontology is the provisional maximal stability of the most basic structures within nature to ontologically crystallize the human capacity to discover such structures assumes the conceptualization not only captures the past but captures and contains human essence as such the potentiality of the future I will leave it to others at this conference, probably, to flesh out the sociogenetic attempt of Hegel producing a mobile platform of thought and pursue the shelling path of naturalizing Plato and tracing the various paths of nature. Such tracings can appear hollow

if the ungrounding and regrounding of human capacities through inactivism and the geometrical cognitive procedures are not redeployed simultaneously at upper and lower levels, but not in an ontologically determinant sense by each and every outcropping of human intelligence. To push abstraction back in time as a potency of nature gains traction with Plato's Pyramidides, the wellspring of the dialectic as that of being and non-being. The dialectic as non-resolving creation indicates the asymmetry of nature of the continuum of being and non-being as the engine of predication as limit to creation as creation following a grand priest reading of Plato

and also Schelling's articulation of nature as self-inhibited becoming. Thus, the nodes of nature's production are the ideas or universals that are maximally productive. They are generic patterns of nature which maximize participation. The image is the being of visual apprehension of motion and its potential to virtualization. Or, the image is the question of experience retroactively traced versus extrapolation of that experience. The image is the immediacy of the visual, the dialectic of the function and structure, but also a timestamp of the function backwards and forwards. The instant becomes the strange contradiction of motion and rest. This figures into each instant of creation, such as the line. The thinker draws the line.

The small motion is a smearing of points, pressures a selection of space, a direction, a view, and an action. The action occurs as a gesture which is enacted, not traced out in a careful manner. This line is then projected or is attached only because the line is the guess of the gesture, a trace of any motion. Each motion is a motion found within other motions. In addition, in hollowing out, the line adds another line. The trajectory, but it also expands the periphery and branching paths of Schelling's model of nature. the drawing of a line not only divides as a bifurricate space producing two spaces of action that from the line propose fields but the line is an icon of thought

of computation as it extends or pushes outwards thus the ontogenetic approaches the epistemogenic in the inactivist program of Schelling's naturalism and that the dangerous triviality of branching space-time as only an image, or only a line denaturalized, or the other extreme, decentralized or denaturalized. The depotentiation of our ontological position begs the question of the natural sense of the machinic, or whether the machinic can be placed along the line to, as Kramer puts it, avoid defining computation as merely the arbitrary manipulation of signs. The difficulty lies in that if reason is separate from intelligence,

Or if orientation arises from movement as the former collectivizing the latter, then what is the human role in collectivizing computational processes into machinic intelligence from a deontologized position? Or is any such attempt always indicative of nature, of thought, as a current augmentative and recursive motion which addition pushes outward? the past is a potentiation for us in terms of biological time but the potentiation of the biological and the abstract allows us to potentiate time itself allowing us to posit times at different scales scales which bear the weight of dimensionality built from biologically potentiated directions

each augmentation, each lengthening and every so often a horizontal cut suggests a new stage but each stretch of the line digs deeper into the past, requires it to be more generative than we thought it could be. Thereby, the unthinkable past pushes itself into the present, and the more the present potentiates, the more the future determines the direction of potentiations, or where could this go? The attempt to augment the present into the past, if we had only known, augments the past into the future, or what we cannot not know, which determines the future as neither we which determines the future as neither, or we don't know how much we don't know about failure, instead of the synthesis of both,

or this can only go into the unknown. The social, hegel, and natural shelling mediation of paths to be taken robs the grounding capacity of thought, of computation, other than to produce and to halt, to add to that conceptual production to that production itself. Thus even subtraction and isolation are additive to nature's extending or pushing outwards force Deflationary ontology is not towards the outside But should deflate the concepts of ourselves which override the uncertainty of our constitution as reasoners Or deflate ourselves as non-explorers of nature for the sake of stabilizing a dysmological depth Especially if it overrides pragmatic efficacy The hyper-contextualization of the inactivist model engenders wagers and should not crystallize the human inability to act, given the insufficiency of our knowledge.

The divide of Plato's line, then, is another trajectory, a joint in the network of nature's production. The elsewhere, the highest, is not some transcendental realm, but a pedagogically abstract component of a rationalist system. Likewise, the mere image from which any demonstration of such future potentiality is itself a past potential, an unground, a tool that demonstrates the potential for a higher potentiality or future to be imaginable Imagining pushes the sensible to expand the thinkable in order to outline the universals of nature to map out its potential developments Schelling via Plato demonstrates that the quantitative is not reductive capture but merely the progression of nature reductive only by ignoring its potential future grounds for the sake of grounding a human

of keeping it apart from nature and apart from a temporality that might potentiate it outwards the multiplication of current pet ontologies for each and every object is only a symptom of the fear to unwind the human into the vibrations of nature the stubbornness of the image is the persistence of nature's expansion in and through us. Thanks. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Benjamin, for that presentation. So for our third presentation of the evening,

I'll introduce Clint Burnham Clint is an associate professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University and is taught at Kaplan College, Emily Carr and UBC so please join me in welcoming Clint Burnham sorry, thank you I just want to get the PowerPoint out I got Benjamin's face right in front of me that's cool, but how do I get the PowerPoint out? I got the PowerPoint out thank you I'm your technical assistant tonight which one is your problem you

Man we can go like that and then we can just use Yes to Maybe we just go like What happened to the next one? Yeah, that's okay. Just go with this. What happened there? It says the image could not be... Oh, I guess here. What? That's okay. We can just leave it. Okay. Leave it up with it. Yeah. I just have to go change the screen there. Thank you. Sorry, there was some fuck up with a... I had a stoke from Thomas Hirschhorn. It's Sunday afternoon, Vancouver winter.

The windows are open and the neighbor's child is playing in the front yard. Lionel Hampton and Art Tatum on the stereo vinyl. My son is lying on a loveseat reading a book he picked up for the library after skiing with his mother. On the laptop, I am watching a Vimeo feed image that would horrify you if we could actually look at it right now, from Thomas Herschorn's video installation, Touching Reality. It's two minutes long, punctuated only with what sound like bombs whistling in. The images of someone else swiping, pinching, enlarging, and reducing images of atrocities. The first picture is swiped, then the second stopped. It's of a man in a hospital bed. His genital is visible. Blood soaked through various bandages.

Eyes staring in shock. The fingers of the viewer open up the image to the face and close it again. This takes 10 seconds. And swipe on to the next image where a man lies on the ground. His scars split open and off brown brain matter split him out. Swipe to the next image. No, come back. Open up the details of the brain matter. And so it goes. How are we to look at these images, and not only these images, but also at the hand that is touching these images, touching reality, where Hirschhorn will also insist, à la bête du, truth, truth as an event, and then moving on. Hirschhorn gives an eloquent defense of his practice of the necessity of looking at images of atrocity in today's internet violence, in the Journal de la Trinale from 2012, countering such obscenities as Rumsfeld's observation that death makes war depressing,

or a situation when a photo of Obama and his cabinet watching the Navy SEAL's assassination of Bin Laden. But Hirschhorn does not talk about the framing that activates touching reality, That is the very fingers slurping and pinching. In this paper, I want to investigate what cohabitation of Zizekian or post-Zizekian theory, an object-oriented ontology, or OOO, or even Triple O sauce, which is a local reference, can bring to thinking about the internet or digital culture. I take my cue from the mean world vertices, the recent turn to the object, Bill Brown, John Kopchak, my own students. William Fords of the Object or Thing in Psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan's Dostean. Winnicott's New City Object, Lacan's Four Objects, and his Object Petit R.

The dialogue or missed dialogues between G-Shell and Triple O in Less Than Nothing and William Harmon's Toolbeam. Ian Burgess specific comments on computers and software but also debates between Zizek, Carmen and Levy Bryant with respect to retroactivity in the split object. But in the short time I have here today, I want to work through ideas of the object via Ian Burgess and Levy Bryant, the so called democracy of objects, keeping as our cultural object the Hirschhorn video, but then turning to how Zizek discusses Lacan's concept of of the object, the T-A, the object that is in AAA and more than AAA, not only the object of AAA's desire, but the object that structures its desire, that provides its fantasy.

Now, my purpose in this paper's opening description, of course, was to highlight the radical and violent juxtaposition of the body and the image that Hirschhorn's work makes possible. His film makes the viewer of said images complicit, and I don't know if it's a film or video, I'm not paying attention to that. His film makes the view of said images complicit not only in the production of images of atrocity, but in their reception, the touching and swiping that is a typical reaction and their interaction with digital technology in the first world. Then my reception of Hirschhorn's piece in a domestic place, surrounded by the objects, but also children, brings ethical and political questions to the front. What is the effect that is of seeing such images and seeing their reception, touching, swiping, pinching, and poking when surrounded by more innocuous objects

like vinyl records and my son. But here, a first objection, forgive the pun, am I saying my son is an object? Is this not to objectify him? Obviously, such a critique goes back to 1970s feminism when an argument against pornography was made that it objectified women. That is, that it encouraged men to view women as objects and to treat them as such, to view women as new vehicles for men's sexual pleasure. But from a triple-O perspective, this is as misguided an argument as to call a rapist an animal. It is unfair to objects or animals. That is, to argue that objectification leads to the dehumanizing or violent or even just disrespectful treatment of women by men necessarily depends on an understanding of the human-object relationship,

what Quentin Mayer-Sill calls correlationism, although I'm squishing together his argument with respect to how we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, as inherently unequal, violent, or instrumental. A student quoted that, and then he found the exact same quote on Wikipedia, so I'm just hoping that Wikipedia got it from a student. I don't know if he's here today. And I'm not saying that pornography does not encourage its views users to mistreat the persons in the pornography and possibly degrading matters. just that this should not be called objectification. In part because there are many ways not only that we relate to objects, our passionate attachments, that is, but that there are many things and ways in which objects themselves relate to each other. But if I am objectifying my son in my consideration of the environment

in which I looked at touching reality, that is, considering the biological human being as an object, that may also be what is going on in the Hirschhorn film. I think of the objects that are involved in the piece where bodies lying in hospital beds or otherwise with gaping wounds and medical bandages and other aquatis. There are cameras or camera phones which made still images from those bodies in situ. There are those images as part of an archive collected by Hirshhorn in his practice of creating the piece. There is the photo stream that Hirshhorn then created as an iPhone simulator. There is the digital device, the iPhone or whatever, on which the images are then stored. There are the hands and the fingers that scroll through, touch, swipe, pinch, poke the images.

There is the film made of that process, a film which may have had many varieties of outtakes, retakes, shots, angles. Then there is that film made into a digital video. There is that digital video that has been filmed and uploaded to the Vimeo website. Well, in my search terms, in search for that video after reading about it in the Claire Bishop article, we're not supposed to do that, right? Say that you first heard about something. I think we just knew about it. Then there was my viewing of that video on an iPad in the context described above. These objects or things or units in IronBase was part of a system or network called the internet. But what is the internet, conceived of in this object-oriented ontology? Is it the hardware of servers and fiber optic cables for Wi-Fi towers? Objects themselves that generate anxiety about server farms and electrical consumption,

the laying of cable, surely the next frontier for pipeline debates, but also currently observes much inequity with respect to Canadian impersonations in rural communities, and wide-file radio waves in public schools. Or is the Internet the panoply of consumer devices, consumer in-office devices, smartphones and tablets, laptops and desktops, through which human objects connect with and interact with those other objects and with each other, the digital devices with which we suck with such passionate attachments? Or is it the software-based devices, servers, and Wi-Fi towers, the programs that sort photographs in Facebook servers and run coolant through other servers that store passwords on our devices and immune systems? Or is the internet the content of those software programs, whether the user-provided content,

user-generated content of Web 2.0 systems, Wikipedia, social media, Flickr, or the images and texts that I store on my laptop or on the cloud as I write this text? Finally, what surely not is the object of the internet, its thing, the relationships between different objects, between human objects themselves, but also between human objects and object objects. This last list will be familiar to readers of Ian Burgess' Alien Phenomenology, where he delineates in a more exhaustive fashion the various ways of thinking about the E.T. video game. Arguing finally that the game is all of these things, bytes, packaging, code, landfill. Burgess argues for a liberal democracy of images, all are equal but not equally so, to which a Zizekian response might be to call for a communism of objects, a Leninist party of objects, a dictatorship of the objectified.

What is the relationship between the different objects or systems of objects in the Hirschhorn video? Well, this for example, in his discussion of Stephen Shore's photography, makes a connection between the type of camera that Shore used and his ability to capture the specific objects in say, a 1970s McDonald's meal. He raps of assets about the salt on the fries or whatever it is. In a similar fashion, Hirschhorn's film makes a radical connection between two different objects or sets of objects. The bodies that have been photographed and the bodies that manipulate those photographs. The bodies that have been photographed to first of all be the victims of trauma, of military or terrorist or imperialist violence. Projectiles that have ripped into those bodies, or those projectiles be rifle shells, IED

junk, depleted uranium missiles, or other objects that moved at high speeds because of the form of that is buildings or cars or bodies that have themselves exploded. I should add that I resisted going by Wikipedia on specific, I couldn't remember which part is it the shell? Which part is the shell itself? Because actually, I was in the military for a year, 30 years ago, but also just the Vizhizhekian thing, that's not it. It's not the actual empirical thing. The bodies have been photographed because of today's ubiquity of objects, what we call cameras, their presence as image-making machines carried in many lawn photographers, like myself, pockets, or satchels, or other objects. The cameras have been In a new concept protective case, buttons are pushed or swiped and images are made.

From this point on, a pervasive technological object we call touch screens, the images are touched, or rather the screens or their skins are touched, setting off code and other objects which in turn temporarily distort or crop or resize the image. The broadest images exist in a bewildering variety of objects now. The memory systems of the camera phones or cameras, the Wi-Fi systems is very un-uploaded, or the memory sticks of cameras proper, the laptops and larger computers and media companies or amateur or activist or NGO photographers. Think of how upset we were when we learned that abode-weared images were used as screensavers. A communism of objects with a sort of political solidarity of the hands that do the touching and swiping those objects

with the bodies that have been photographed, those objects. and this solidarity is not only via or made possible by the thing that is the internet but also by the object that is the Thomas Herschel artwork touching reality. But of course this is a solidarity that is working with antagonisms which differs from the concept of the democracy of objects argued in Levy Bryant's book of the same name as well as by Ian Burgust. Auguste in 18th, the phenomenology makes an explicit connection between flatness and democracy, mistaking perhaps equality, a flatness where all objects have the same political size, as it were, for the process of democracy, the political stavards for the same, which

is to say a necessity communist. Now, like Brian's thesis, where he presents his manifesto of a flat ontology upon which such a democracy of objects rests, is based on four arguments. The first of seven rather wholeness of theory I'm going to do here. No more lists of objects. So Brian argues first against, he has four arguments. First, his first argument is against the self-presence of any entity, a Derrida critique of metaphysics that is also indebted to Lacan's graph of situation. Not just subjects of lack, but objects of lack. Hence Zizek's argument that the gap or split or lack or void in the real, in the universe, is related to that in the split subject, but in

reverse. So Bryant's kind of elapsed Lacanian. Then Bryant claims there is no singular world or universe. Quote, there is no super object that gathers all other objects together in a single harmonious unity. Then the by now familiar O shibboleth that the subject cannot be privileged in any subject-object dyad, with a critique of same drawing on Harmon. Finally, Bryant argues that, quote, all entities are on equal ontological footing, and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects. So I was saying political before and he's saying ontological. So to rehearse Bryant's democracy via Hirshhorn,

all entities constitutively split are lacking. This would mean not only the viewing subject and the bodies of the victims, but the systems and units or assemblages and broglios, entanglements, to use other vernacular, that networks such actors. The camera that a person pulls out of his bag or her pocket, the bed or ground that the victims lie in, the computer networks and signals and passwords. All lack. All are constitutively split. A link may rot. A battery may die. A person may die. All of this has happened. But this question of the object can also and should also be discussed in psychoanalytic terms. Now, Mo, you said there was going to be a gong going off at hour 28 or minute 28 or something. Okay, I'll just keep going to the gong. So we should also talk about this in psychoanalytic terms. That is, first of

the tradition from Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, which begins with Freud's 1895 project for a scientific psychology, the ENTWIRF. Here, when Freud is discussing memory and judgment, that is to say, ethical activity, he argues that when presented with a Nabenmensch, also translated as fellow human being, the subject is reminded, quote, of an object of a similar kind that was the subject's first satisfying object and also his first hostile object, so looking at, say, the caregiver. Freud remarks, the complex of a fellow creature follows into two portions. One of these gives the impression of being a constant structure and remains as a coherent thing, while the other can be understood by the activity of memory, that is, can be traced back to information about the subject's body. So you see this other body, on the one hand it's the thing, it's this thing that you don't know, or you

want to get close to, or you can't get close to, and then there's something human. So there is in Perception then a splitting of the ego or a splattering of the object into what is already known and what cannot be known. What will perhaps stay the thing, ripping open a hole, as John Kopchak says, in our signifying practice. This thing in the other, in the neighbor, comes to be, this is when Benjamin Bratton was talking about friends and enemies or frenemy, right? That's the neighbor in the psychoanalytic category. It comes to be quite important to Lacan, and he keeps the word in the German as Dastieng for this Heideggerian kind of flavor. For Lacan, Dastieng has two dimensions. It is the unknowable, the terrifying, dumb real, but it is also an object of desire.

Which is to say, and just I'll cut to the chase and then see if I fit any Zizek in here. The psychoanalytic argument would be that, I actually had it a bit better here, right? That confronted with this jouissance-laden thing, the subject turns to the object petit a, as it sublimates the object, raising it to the dignity of the thing, which is my argument with respect to object-oriented ontology. That confronted with the loss of the thing, which is really lack, the philosopher constructs the object as object petit a, endlessly circling around it, desiring it, enjoying the barred other. Okay, five minutes. to finish up here.

So this argument is made very clearly in Zizek's Less Than Nothing when he brings Badiou's formulations to bear on the question of the object Pétit A. He makes this argument in terms of Badiou's subtraction, protraction, and obstruction. So the object, first of all, begins as a Badiouian subtraction from reality. Zizek's examples are the brought-together couple in Hollywood movies or the scent of a woman that the hero of the novel film Perfume extracts from his victims. The object as a subtraction from reality because of its impossibility. Thus, in both Hirshhorn and Dao Lin, in the chapter this paper is taken from, I also talk about the novel Taipei by the American writer Dao Lin. In both Hirshhorn and Dao Lin, that object might first of all be affect or emotion.

What emotion is possible as we watch another's hand pinch and swipe? In our watching, we are complicit, so there is no outside of the ideology of uncaring voyeurism. And to return to our panoply of objects in the ET video game proposed by Ian Bogost, we can argue that the very bewildering variety of objects, as he writes, ET is a flow of RF modulations, ET is a mass ROM, ET is a molded plastic cartridge, that very bewildering variety itself represents a subtraction from the reality of a landfill of millions of video games. Et qua object petit a is precisely a subtraction. And just very quickly too, that thing that Moe centered around about Nagaristani and the Corpse Bride,

he uses this language of subtraction and the remainder that's entirely, with all respect, I can't see where he's in the second row there, entirely Zizekian. I'm just quoting, he's talking about Aristotle's subtraction, but Reza writes, as the inward vector of subtraction remaining or more accurately, the persistence of the remainder characterizes an intensive vector of subtraction, whereby that which continues to remain brings about the possibility of being, qua being, or the ideal. So yeah, just that's, you know, as, and to use Reza's vocabulary, that's my fanboy moment there. But Zizek continues in this path with the object-put-Avenas protraction, giving as an example the extended shots of Tarkovsky's films. Again, our cultural objects provide a way into the theory

and Hirshhorn's touching reality, the fingers that pinch and swipe. First of all, we must consider these gestures as forms of what Alexander Galloway has theorized in his critical inquiry paper as micro-labor, quote, users perform micro-labor whenever they send email, post messages online, or update websites. hence Google is merely skimming values from information networks that ultimately have their origins in human laboring activity. And then when the fingers pause or go back, it's not such a pause or rewind, to use VCR terminologies, itself a form of protraction. Zizek's third term for the object is then obstruction. The object A as an agent of the cunning of reason, the obstacle which perturbs the realization of our goals. Here we can turn to form or genre or medium, but also our old friend flatness.

With Hirshhorn, the very medium of the artwork is precisely such a constitutive obstruction. Because of the images and its manipulability, we cannot touch reality. We cannot read reality. The objects get in the way of the object. And here I want to make a quick reference as well to The Belles, a work of Damien Moppet currently on exhibition at the SFU Gallery in Burnaby. This is a slideshow of photographs of sculptures in which someone's hand arranges a stack of photographs, drawing connections between the fingers, manipulating the photographs as material objects, and the role in the photographs pinching and holding pottery. The fingers touch reality qua the photographs and slideshow, which then becomes a reality we cannot touch.

Zizek adds a fourth way of thinking about the same excessive lacking object, an object which is never in its own place, always missing and exceeding it, which distorts reality by inscribing itself into it. This fourth mode of the object, PTA, is destruction. So subtraction, protraction, obstruction, and then destruction. And I want to finish this paper with a lengthy quote from Zizek on this matter because of how it summarizes, I think, the status of the object not only for Hirshhorn's artwork, but also for our present political moment. So he begins, as you see, to the three modes of the object A of how it distorts reality by inscribing itself into it, one should add then a fourth, destruction. It's what happens in the case of a post-traumatic subject, not the destruction of the object A.

This is why such a subject is deprived of engaged existence and reduced to the vegetative state of indifference. What we should nonetheless bear in mind is that this destruction results also in the loss of reality itself, which is sustained by the object A. When the subject is deprived of the excess, it at once loses that with regard to which the excess is an excess. And then he adds a bit more, but I didn't want to cram it on the slide. This is why the Muslims, the living dead of the concentration camps, were simultaneously reduced to bare life and stood for the pure excess, the empty form, which remains when all the content of human life is taken away from the subject. To properly understand the world historical dimension of the post-traumatic subject, one should recognize in this extreme form of subjectivity

the actualization of a possibility that announces itself in the Cartesian cogito. It's not the radical desubstantialization of the subject, it's reduction to the effinescent point of, I think, the very operation that gives birth to the cogito. As such, the cogito, the modern subject, or the subject of modernity, should not be too hastily dismissed as Eurocentric. One can argue that the cogito stands for a kind of unhistorical excess which underlies and sustains every historical life form. Thank you very much. Okay, great. Good evening, everyone. And thanks, Mo, for that introduction and for setting up this whole event and for inviting me.

and as Mo said I did grow up in in Oregon and Washington so it's nice to be back in the future people's Republic of Cascadia and also to share the evening with Ty Smith an old friend so that's also a special thing for me tonight so the title of my talk is the black box of philosophy compression and obfuscation and In recent years I've returned again and again to the concept of the black box Which is the technical trope that appears most vividly in the post World War II era and I would argue has become one of the most pervasive

organizational principles for information aesthetics and indeed for contemporary life as a whole and and the black box is interesting on many levels for me and we won't have time to talk about them all tonight unfortunately but I'm most intrigued by the techniques of compression and obfuscation and the way in which a structure of obfuscation is embedded within the very architecture of the black box and here I'm referring of course to the black box in the technical sense, by which I mean any technical device that has an obfuscated interior functionality, but for which the surface inputs and outputs are clearly legible. Curiously, the black box

champions obfuscation as a virtue, and it's this normatively positive spin on obfuscation that I find so interesting and indeed inspiring, particularly these days, these dark days of compulsory visibility. So the talk I wanna give tonight comes partially from a new piece called Compression in Philosophy, a new essay that I'm actually co-authoring with Jason Lariviere, who's a doctoral student in my department. So the first part of this talk is a totally collaborative process, And I want to acknowledge Jason Hillis will be a respondent tomorrow afternoon, so he's joining us. And then also partially from this new book that Mel mentioned that I'm finishing on the work of French theorist Francois Laruel that will be published this fall.

A general history of compression. This is the prize of Jonathan Stern's book MP3, The Meaning of a Format. A book devoted to the philosophy and science of making sound smaller. Indeed, the theme of compression has begun to appear more and more within aesthetics, cultural theory and media theory. In recent years, Hito Steril has written in praise of the compressed or poor image, while Luciana Parisi in praise of the incompressible. Online privacy activists seek new technologies for encryption and

obfuscation, just as hacker groups configure their own identities around principles of anonymity and collectivity. Now of course the theme has dominated theories of media and aesthetics for some time already, particularly around issues of resolution, definition, and fidelity. Marshall McLuhan's hot and cool media hinge on the way in which media may contain either copious helpings of information ie minimally compressed requiring less participation or meager helpings that is highly compressed requiring more participation and media

historians have long examined aesthetic artifacts along a continuum from expansion to compression Whether it be a question of minimalism and abstraction thinking about codes and shorthand redundancy and ornamentation or any number of other qualities and techniques that either delete or proliferate aesthetic material Now, as you probably know, in engineering jargon, right, the phrase lossy compression describes any technique in which information is lost or deleted as a consequence of compression, while lossless compression indicates that no information is deleted.

Conventional wisdom might suggest that lossless compression is superior, given that it reduces file sizes without sacrificing the integrity of the contents. Yet, lossy compression finds its own respectable uses, particularly when excess information is unnecessary or disruptive to the sensorium of the viewer or listener. And in certain cases, such as audio, such as telephone audio, lossy compression is superior. And I actually feel like lossy compression is the most interesting

part of thinking about compression. The conversation around compression is also rebounded in continental philosophy Friedrich Kittler has written on how literature arrests the sounds of speech into a compressed system of 26 letters and Bernard Stiegler uses the term grammatization incorporated from the work of Jacques Derrida to indicate how human experience is compressed into discrete units of mediation. Alain Badiou addresses the topic too, albeit in a totally different way, when he proposes his theory of the subject rooted in the

operation of fidelity, which we can't forget is compression's putative nemesis. So functioning as a kind of platonic yardstick, fidelity measures the subject's ongoing commitment to an ideal, what Badiou calls a point or an event. Yet Stern seeks something slightly different in his book on digital compression. For Stern, the most urgent question for media and culture today is not that of an ever-increasing fidelity in which subjects adhere ever more closely to a representational ideal,

but that of compression in which subjects slowly delete and disencumber themselves of the representational contract altogether. So what would it mean to have such ambitions? What would it mean if compression replaced representation as the core axis of inquiry in media and aesthetic theory? And that's the basic kind of set of questions that I want to talk about today. So taking up Stern's challenge, I think we can re-examine representation within the Western philosophical tradition, particularly the way in which metaphysics recasts philosophy as a kind

of media theory in which certain things, ideas, minds, forms, essences, nature, mathematical concepts, may or may not be represented in the form of other things, phenomena, qualities, bodies, environments, worlds. And this is kind of Laruel's genius, I think, is to recast philosophy, all of philosophy, as media theory. Using compression as an analytical framework, we might tackle, if you will, a kind of reigning dogma of compression, compression, which is what I want to describe first. And I think the best label for this is

the dogma of abstract compression. So in the most basic sense, abstract compression assumes two things. One, that there is a superlative nature and two, real phenomena appear as selective deletions of the superlative nature. The world is thus in a never-ending process of, if you will, forgetting or forgetting the details, deleting details. The natural real is synonymous with the uncompressed, whereas the everyday experiences of society and culture,

the abstractions of the mind, the alphabet, language, images, and technologies are synonymous with compression. The metaphysical real is virtual and superlative, while lived experience is compressed and reduced. So again, this is how I'm trying to define this reigning dogma of abstract compression. one that there is a superlative nature and two that real phenomena appear as these kind of selective deletions of that superlative nature So engineers refer to this as the round off right?

Round off indicates the way in which analog values are rounded to discrete numbers So the the minute precision of something like a floating-point number will be rounded to whatever integer is closest. Now ironically this reintroduces precision only in a new way. And here's a quote from Giuseppe Longo where he says that digital machines will iterate in an always identical manner manner because given the rounded precision of both inputs and commands a digital machine will execute commands with identical repetition and thus

contra to analog machines digital machines shed themselves the story goes of all the small inconsistencies that when executed multiply and compound into legibly different outcomes. So you might say that digital precision is a kind of precision within abstraction whereas analog precision is a precision of the real. So in my reading of this I see a number of concepts that go together abstraction, compression, and digitality. I think all of these concepts are alike in one important way. They all forget the details by selectively deleting certain

small bits of information. Longo explicitly links engineering and philosophy on this point, showing how the invariance of the transcendental, its ability to remain unchanging in the face of change, right, is a consequence of reduction or abstraction. Quote, forgetfulness is constitutive of invariance and therefore of conceptual abstraction, writes Longo. Because in this way we can forget the details that which are unimportant. So following this we might say that this form of transcendental abstraction is, if you

will low bandwidth or world poor because it selectively removes information in order to persist as such and this is why I think the transcendental and digitality are essentially one in the same thing. Of course Marx's critique of the commodity form hinges on this very issue for the commodity obfuscates the history of its own making and thus embodies a kind of lossy compression of the conditions of production. Indeed, such ideological processes are essentially coterminous with understanding and consciousness in the first place.

And as an abstraction of the world you might even say that understanding is compression itself, as does, as says the mathematician Gregory Chaitin where he writes, and I love this quote because it's so weird, a theory and explanation is only successful to the extent to which it compresses the number of bits in the facts into a much smaller number of bits of theory. Understanding is compression. comprehension is compression, he says. So this, of course, is the great old story of modernity, in which there is this kind of, you know, grumbling undercarriage of the earth,

beneath a kind of iron cage of modern experience, and grumbling underneath this lies a superlative nature full of life and energy. Beyond mankind exists a vital or virtual real, a natural wellspring of energy waiting to be unleashed. Step by step, the advancement of modernity crushes nature through a kind of cataclysmic compression of everyday life. The vital flows are subdued, the wellspring is capped, the natural energies are abstracted into a second reality called culture or society and

the bifurcation of nature is complete. So in other words, and here I might be kind of exaggerating the consequences in order to underscore the point, but here I think this going dogma of abstract compression entails two corollaries. First, a kind of romantic or poetic ontology, right? A romantic ontology of matter and second an orientalist or developmental technology of nature. To be sure these two corollaries are quite common during the modern period and I think they help to define the very concept of modernity.

Now the first, evident most vividly in the Romanticism of the 19th century, assumes a superlative nature that exists beyond all attempts to compress it. The uncompressed natural real thus exceeds and suspends the mere experiences of everyday life, which themselves strive to comprehend its full majesty a majesty of extension of feeling of abundance a kind of aesthetic abundance and so on So second this what I'm calling a kind of orientalist or developmental technology of nature

stems directly from the first by Composing the decompression of nature along global lines of ethnic and developmental difference So now nature is an unknowable space of excess quite literally a heart of darkness and its energies must be released harnessed and developed according to the rules of the machine the factory the firm or the metropolis Now whether these technologies are more like 15th century Portuguese Carex or 20th century Delizian desiring machines, I think matters much less than the underlying narrative that fuels them both.

Nature is unknowable, infinite, bottomless, and uncompressible. technology is the discoverer, developer, exploiter, and harnesser of nature. In short, technology is nature's compressor. Faced with the cataclysmic compression of modern life, a number of compensatory therapies emerge. Indeed, phenomenology emerges as a recuperative or compensatory strategy vis-à-vis modern life. Likewise, even Deleuzeanism is a form of compensatory therapy in which the real is understood in terms of an uncompressed vital milieu

within which, for him, expression supersedes compression. So not so much representation for Adela's, but expressions instead of compression. But also consider Marxism and the New Left. Marxist critique is rooted in decompression, namely demystification of the commodity form. While the New Left's politics of visibility is understood in terms of an unpacking, an expansion, a liberation, from the compression of everyday life. So slogans like, take back the streets, or come out of the closet, and hence a shift to a new state that is somehow less compressed than so-called normal life.

But I think this is only the beginning of the story, and as you can imagine, I'm ultimately not so much interested in this kind of going dogma of compression that I've just described, but rather what sorts of alternative uses of obfuscation and opacity might be possible. So I see an alternate tradition emerging. Not entirely opposed to the first tradition. I don't want to have it be a stark opposition, but if you will maybe absent or withdrawn from the dominion of a compressed transcendental. In this second tradition, Compression is not an epiphenomenon of metaphysical difference,

but in fact a positive tactic of what we might call physical indifference. And that shift from difference to indifference is I think totally crucial. I think we can label this the tradition of generic compression, in which data deletion happens at the level of real material life, not at the level of mind, language, spirit, essence, or totality. And so I'm gravitating now more and more toward this concept of the generic or generic compression,

particularly as it's been articulated in the work of people like Alan Daidieu and more recently for me Francois Laruel. So in the second half of the talk I want to shift and try to explore what this mode of generic compression might actually look like with reference to Laruel's theory of art and maybe pose the question to you, maybe something that's been an elusive question thus far for speculative realism, is a realist aesthetics possible? Another way we can phrase it is is it possible to have a non-digital aesthetics? So I think we can explore this idea of generic compression in La Ruelle.

I won't give a detailed gloss of all of La Ruelle's thoughts on art, art of photography, particularly because I wrote a small piece called Laruel and Art that was published online and I don't want to duplicate that, but I will reference that article a little bit and then say more about Laruel's theory of art. And by the end, if you'll indulge me, I think I want to propose that Laruel is essentially a thinker of utopia and that the best way to understand Laruel's aesthetics and and indeed his so-called non-standard method as a whole is as a theory of utopia. I see it as a kind of actually existing communism.

So here's a quote from Frederick Jameson, a recent quote. We need a new image here, our Cascadia image. He writes, there are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers. The last being Colin Bach's ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service. 1975 was a year of crisis. Saigon had fallen that spring, marking the end of the war in Vietnam. A few years prior, OPEC's oil embargo had sent price shocks around the world.

The boom years of the 1950s and 60s had given way to new economic crises by the early to mid-70s. And these crises would in part usher in a new economic regime that would place the computer at the heart of value production, the so-called shift into post-Vortism. This was the time of waning modernity. In Jameson's estimation, it was the last time we could propose a kind of non-place apart from our own. A utopia in which alternative axioms generated alternative worlds.

And indeed, the years since have been marked, you might say, by a failure of imagination, particularly among progressives, during which it has become impossible to conceive of viable alternatives to the new cybernetic universe. And Jameson puts it like this, I'll read a couple lines here, he says, today instead of utopian texts, we have the free market deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety. I think this failure of imagination on the left can be attributed to the assumption

that computers are enough to take care of totalization. That the well-nigh infinite complexities of production on a global scale, which the mind can scarcely accommodate are mysteriously resolvable inside the computer's black box and thus no longer need to be dealt with conceptually or representationally. That's the end of that long quote. So the end of the utopian text signals for Jameson really an end to representation. or at least it indicates that representation,

as complicated or flawed as it might be under otherwise normal conditions, has been interrupted, perhaps even outsourced to another domain entirely. So what exactly happened during those years, and how is it possible for Jameson to claim that utopia vanished? So if we were to consider aesthetics strictly from a theoretical point of view, the 20th century witnessed a single great death and transformation, the death of representation and its transformation into a new form. The end of critique, the crisis of mimesis, the post-hermeneutic turn,

the new materialism, the end of representation, such a transformation has appeared under a number of different names in recent years. Now of course the question of non-representationalism in art has been around for some time, but I think the question of a rigorously non-representational ontology or aesthetics is something quite different. For even non- representational art has some sensual element that it reveals to a solicitous viewer, no matter if that sensual element has a referent in the world. Abstraction can still be mimetic, even if it isn't a picture of nature.

Non-representational aesthetics, I think, is something else altogether. It abandons the age-old question of reference, or to use the current parlance, indexicality, right? But so too it abandons the this-that structure of representation in its entirety, reducing aesthetics to a form of kind of pure imminence, you might say. From Plato's Hipponomata to McLuhan's Extensions of Man, most all of media theory is essentially phenomenological. Most media theory posits a baseline relation between an entity and its

disclosure to another entity. Even the most sophisticated post-structuralist positions will agree on the essential relation, I think, that entities will form relations of difference with other entities, self with other integral entities with heterogeneous entities, and so on. Most all of media theory is thus Heideggerian in that it dwells on the elusive relation between man and world, between a subject and its relation to the arts and technologies that extend it. The Heideggerian tradition is both metaphysical and transcendental and puts

representation at the center of mediation. But starting in the 1970s and 1980s, I think, a shift in aesthetic theory becomes evident. I think it happens first with Deleuze, but it happens very quickly afterward with two other people, with Michel Henry and also with Francois Laruel. Now references to art, literature, and aesthetics permeate nearly all of Deleuze's writings of course, but with this important 1975 collaboration with Guattari on the literature of Franz Kafka and then later with subsequent books published mostly in the 1980s, Deleuze deals with aesthetic themes in a more systematic way, first with painting,

then with cinema, and then with the Baroque. So Heidegger poses a basic question for aesthetics. What is the relationship between hermeneutics and imminence? Many who have written on Heidegger have explicitly or implicitly taken a position on these two terms. There are those who claim adamantly that Heidegger is the consummate thinker of hermeneutics, for in his version of phenomenology one is constantly grappling with a world that is only partially knowable at best, constantly withdrawing from our being, remaining forever at a distance,

a cryptographic world that is only tolerable through a kind of mystical submission to its sublimity. And in many ways this might be the kind of prevailing view But there are others who champion the more if you will the more poetic Heidegger and hold him aloft As proof of an immediate relationship to truth So this is the Heidegger as a philosopher of sincerity of authenticity the romantic Heidegger who places man at the center of being and then asks him to stretch out his arms in order to remain within it. And I think, for me at least, the appeal of, part of the appeal of reading Heidegger and maybe an explanation for his, you know, continuing legacy is due to the fact that he doesn't actually, I think,

adjudicate between these two things, between the hermeneutic quest and a sense of imminence. But the aesthetic question takes a totally different form in Dulles. If Heidegger queries after the relationship between hermeneutics and imminence, Deleuze asks a different question. What is the relationship between imminence and multiplicity? Of course, Deleuze thinks both terms at the same time. There is the Deleuze of imminence as well as the Deleuze of multiplicity. And in fact for him the two sides fit nicely together For under the banner of what he calls univocity

Deleuze describes a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally imminent within nature So there isn't any kind of this that logic sender receiver logic in Deleuze's theory of expression only a kind of imminent transformation within a set of virtualities. And likewise there are no entities and in the proper sense in Deleuze I don't think, but just as Whitehead spoke of occasions, Deleuze describes specific gatherings of heterogeneous multiplicities, dubbed assemblages, which occasion themselves as blips of singularity,

regularity on an otherwise smooth plane. So on the one hand, Heidegger is forever locked in the heroic throws of hermeneutics, which while ultimately shackled to the basic phenomenological contract, also cherish some sense of imminence, at least as a kind of ideal. On the other hand, Deleuze breaks definitively from the legacy of phenomenology, Pursuing instead the great compromise between imminence and multiplicity. Forging an alliance between univocity, speaking as one, right, and difference. So not to, I don't know, put too fine a point in it, I think that the 20th century basically gives us these two basic

options for any kind of aesthetic theory. Either Heidegger or Deleuze. Either aesthetics as as representational correspondence or aesthetics as non-representational expression. And so in my reading, figures like Henri and Laruel appear in the kind of shadow of Deleuze, or the legacy of Deleuze, in the shadow of a kind of non-representational knight to which he introduced them. Deleuze was not the first to consider the topic of imminence of course not even the first to think aesthetics as imminence and neither Henri nor Laruel mimic the course taken by Deleuze but

all three do agree on certain things that representation is bankrupt that the transcendental must give way to some kind of theory of eminence, that the world is not mimetic at its core, that aesthetics must not continue to ape the logic of metaphysics. Instead, they suggest that aesthetics follow a more mundane logic. So in the case of Henri, it's this kind of, I don't know, a very different direction, a kind of internal logic of spirit. Or in Deleuze it's the productive capacity of matter, or in Laruel it's this kind of imminent and generic logic of the real.

So still Laruel's aesthetics remains elusive and I just want to kind of end by showing a little bit and parsing a little bit a text that he wrote on the artist James Turrell. Now in the early 1990s, LaRuel wrote an essay on the artist James Turrell known for his use of light within architectural space and the essay focuses on a series of 20 aquatint etchings made by Turrell called First Light For the exhibition of First Light at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990,

and the works were hung again actually just very recently, but this is from the original press release, the aquatints were arranged in groups based on the white shape that hovers in the dense black field of each print. In the installation, with light projected onto the images, the shapes appear to glow and float. Viewed in sequence they seem to move. The effect from print to print is trance-like and mesmerizing. I am dealing with no object, Tyrell said in a lecture a few years after producing First Light. I am dealing with no image because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought.

I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image, and no focus, what are you looking at? That's a quote from Tyrell. Indeed, the object of first light is perception itself. And Terrell says this much. No object, no image, no focus. No wonder Laruel was drawn to first light. Because it represents the very core principles of the non-standard method. For Laruel, Terrell's artwork poses a basic problem. Quote, light makes manifest.

That's the basic phenomenological claim, right? Light makes manifest. But what will manifest the light? Systems of representation reveal aspects of the world to perceiving subjects. This is how light makes manifest. But is it possible to see light in itself? Not in relation or as a relation to a perceived object. And it's that subtle shift from as to in, or from what you might say the as structure of philosophy to the in structure of theory. Is it possible to manifest the rigorously imminent genericness of light itself? That's the challenge.

In order to describe this radical, the radical nature of Turrell's non-standard art, Laruel poses this hypothetical scenario that I love, and so I'll read this quote. He says, imagine a photographer tired of using light to render his subject or whatever other objects were before him. Imagine that this photographer was crazy enough to want to render the light as light. If so, this would not be the light from distant stars, but a light without stars, without source, no matter how distant or hidden.

A light inaccessible to the camera. Should the photographer abandon his technique and find another? Or should he generalize his technique? It's the generic again. Should he generalize his technique across the various forms of the darkroom, the white cube, and the camera obscura in order to proliferate the angles, the frames, the perspectives, the openings and shutters used to capture or perhaps to seduce the light itself. Would he not be making in essence the kind of work that Tyrell makes?" And that's the end of the

Larouel quote. So, Tyrell's light is a light that doesn't come from the stars, so that the Sun and the stars. Larouel gives it an unusual label, he calls it a photic materiality. So being both non-cosmic and non-ontological, so non- cosmic not from the Sun or Stars. Tyrell's light does not orient the viewer. Instead, according to Laruel, Tyrell's light performs experiments on perception and retrains perception according to alternative logics. This mode of

experimentation produces what he calls an aesthetic generalization of perception in order to unilateralize the conventional prohibitions placed on perception by philosophy. Instead of philosophy or photography setting the agenda, quote, light acts instead like a drive that has its own subjectivity or like an a priori force. and this to me I think is what compression might mean for us today to delete data means to delete this representational infrastructure and once such deletion or compression has taken

place we are left standing directly and imminently in the real I just don't think there's any other way to describe it. So just to end, does Laruel contradict Jameson's argument? The argument that no great utopian texts exist after computers enter everyday life? I don't think it does. I think it actually ratifies it all the more, because Laruel's work confirms a particular kind of historical periodization. Formerly existing as narrative or world or image, utopia might have perished by the end of the 1970s. But where it perished as narrative, it was

reborn as method. And I think this is the key to Laruel's utopianism. For him, utopia is a technique, not a story or a world. Utopia for him is simply the refusal to participate in the philosophical decision, a refusal to create worlds. And so it's a, I grant you it's kind of counterintuitive, but Larouel's refusal to create alternative worlds is what makes him a utopian thinker because his non-standard world is really a kind of non-world, right, just as utopia is what we call the non-place. So I think that the use of a

non-world is the connection. Cold comfort for Jameson, however, since Laruel's marginality today, his recent exposure in the Anglophone world, a burst of visibility after 30 plus years laboring in obscurity is but further evidence of the marginality of utopian thinking. And the many efforts to malign, mischaracterize, or simply ignore Laruel are testament to the very failure of imagination that Jameson identified. And indeed the chief difficulty I think lies in the fact that this this image of a utopia of difference and variety might not be the goal anymore.

Ever since big business has become so adept at selling these many different and varying worlds. In other words, when difference enters the mode of production as it has under post-fortism, it might not be possible anymore to conceive of utopia as difference and Here is where I see the promise of this black box of philosophy The problem of modern knowledge is not that of an unfulfilled enlightenment ideal The problem with philosophy is not that it hasn't yet fully revealed the secrets of the world.

The problem with philosophy is that it's not compressive enough. And we can only hope, I think, that compression, not expression, will guide the media and art of the future. Thanks very much. Great, wonderful. Thank you, Alex, for that wonderfully complex talk. I'm sure we all have lots of questions and ways to respond. So first we're going to have a short response to the keynote from Ty Smith.

We'll just briefly introduce Ty as an assistant professor, read history at the University of British Columbia. In her forthcoming text, she looks at how Bauhaus weavers harness the language of other media to articulate the specific dimensions of their field. This is titled Bauhaus Weaving Theory, From Craft to Design. She is currently developing a new project which will examine the use of textile metaphors in media theory and philosophy since the 19th century. So please join me in welcoming Ty Smith to respond to our keynote. Thanks so much. It is actually a real pleasure to have this opportunity to respond to Alex today.

though I'm sure just as you were perplexed by aspects of his talk so was I even though I had two weeks head time to figure it out but anyway I want to kind of just remind well I had a kind of introduction obviously my field is not media theory I'm an art and design historian which I think actually gives me something of an interesting perspective on this. And so I'm hoping to kind of approach this, on the one hand, somewhat obliquely, that is, not from the outside, but tangentially, perhaps bringing up an alternative set of questions or problems at the end. But to begin, I'm going to focus on the arc of Alex's argument,

perhaps focusing on the question of method as it informs his arc. So, a couple of comments to begin. If we were to pay attention to Alex Galloway's recent writings, like his lecture for today, it would appear that media theory, I might be wrong, again, I'm coming at this tendentially, but it would appear that media theory is undergoing a kind of epistemic crisis. Insofar as media studies has stemmed from the field of communications or philology, it finds itself struggling to articulate a methodological paradigm suited to the present, or something that can account for the opaque logic of, say, networks or the black box,

but also developments in contemporary philosophy, François LaRoyle. Hence, as Galloway and his co-authors Thacker and Warwick recently argued in their joint publication that Mo mentioned earlier, media thread now must excommunicate itself. It can no longer be beholden to the paradigm of communication that has, at least since Francis Bacon's analysis of words as instruments for transferring thoughts, generally dominated the concept of mediation, or medium, or media. And this is coming from an essay by John Gillery. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Gillery, is that right? Yeah. He teaches English at NYU.

The essay is called Genesis of the Media Concept. So this is why it seems that Alex has turned, I'm going to speculate, in the last two or so years, perhaps three, to think through the various questions of philosophy, why he has been addressing, say, the concept of the digital and the history of philosophy, quote, together in parallel and in series as they merge. Hence, he examined this evening the way in which metaphysics recasts philosophy as a kind of media theory, whereby certain things like ideas, forms, and essences may or may not be represented in the form of other things like phenomena, qualities, bodies, environments, worlds.

The key to understanding metaphysics is that it transfers, metaphorizes, or represents the world in concepts. So mining the landscape of philosophy for its medianess, its positioning of the philosopher as a kind of hermeneutic postal worker who carries messages across borders. and that's a metaphor actually that comes from Rory L. Alex, it seems, is seeking another way to imagine mediation. But of course Alex's argument is not merely concerned with that which is properly philosophical. Alex provides a narrative of the space where philosophy meets media, less to see these parallels in utter abstraction, but in order to periodize the present, that is to get a sense of its history.

In fact, the key to understanding this moment, he argues, is the black box. The computer with its algorithms and programming languages that are effectively opaque. The black box may generate worlds, but it can never represent them. It makes the concept of representation or communication impossible. Our present, our place in history, renders the world of philosophy or whatever a kind of black box. Thus, to understand this sightless, placeless realm or condition that functions today according to this, I don't want to say logic of compression, but this mode of compression, Galloway suggests it helps or is maybe necessary to turn to philosophy,

philosophy, but more specifically the non-philosophy of Francois Laruel. And so Alex provides us with a kind of metahistoriography. He situates why Laruel appeals now, that is, as he says, after 30 years of Laruel's writing in obscurity. If media theory now requires a theory of mediation that is a non-media condition, an exodus of man from the world, it is because our historical moment no longer functions according to the logic of communication, or phenomenology, or representation for that matter. And so L'Auel's non-standard philosophy, as it comes out of Deleuze, is best suited to the task. Now, to take a step back, one of the tricky things about Alex's historiographic argument,

at least as I tried to distill it, is that as he narrates it, the logic of compression, or the mode of compression, is harnessed in different philosophical contexts according to different ends. So compression is not just one thing. First, as Alex suggests, there was a metaphysical philosophy that deleted data in order to arrive at a theory to represent the world according to abstracted bits or concepts, in order to yield a representational infrastructure of the world. Second came those compensatory therapies, like Heideggerian phenomenology and Deleuzean vitalism and Marxism, which through various tactics sought to decompress the real.

And finally, a philosophy, or rather the non-philosophy of L'Arrel, that seeks to delete data to such a degree, perhaps entirely, that it gets rid of the representational contract or the representational infrastructure altogether. Now with this latter model of compression, Alex says, quote, one is left standing directly and imminently in the real. So utopia is no longer a distinct world, but a method, a set of processes in the black box that cannot be represented, that fail a representational aesthetic model. Hence, in Alex's essay, what starts out is a mining of philosophy for its black boxness. Its tendency to compress the world into

signs and concepts ultimately switches gears. We are left contemplating how Laurel's philosophy functions to understand utopia as a mode of compression. and this is a very different model so I wonder how are the different modes of compression to be reconciled how is the compression of metaphysics transmuted into non-philosophy how does utopia refuse communication how does it refuse its being a world of non-worldness and if this new model of thought about mediation bears black-boxness Once we enter its parameters, can we ever leave? What are the consequences for utopia as it shifts toward a non-reflective,

non-representational mode of thinking? Have our lives as aesthetic animals sensing become forever inaccessible? Or is this the point? Once we get past the correspondence with the black box, as metaphor, a hermeneutic model, Can we be left standing in the real? Is that possible? Now, I want to go to my tangent at this point, if I have a moment. And that is to ask something about the choice on the part, not necessarily of Alex, but of Laroel, to kind of pinpoint Tyrell and photography as a model for thinking this non-standard aesthetics,

non-philosophy or non-aesthetics, non-representational aesthetics. Now it's apparent that the question of light as kind of its own quality is the issue, right? Light as without, not as making other things manifest, but as existing in its own self, not self, but its own space. I guess I'm confused by the use of light. Maybe I could actually ask Alex to clarify this. Why light? what is it about light that is able to access this kind of space of non-communication?

So I'm going to suggest that, in fact, Galloway provides another model, which is the black box. And you might say that the black box and light are working as this kind of couplet together, that the black box is in fact the space of non-philosophy, that space in which light enters but does not leave? And what is the kind of condition of that space in which something cannot leave that speaks to the problem of non-philosophy? I'm also going to suggest, again, as another tangent, that perhaps another model, and this is perhaps a little bit self-indulgent on my part, another model might better be suited to the question of the no object that light presents.

Textiles. Now, textiles, which is my kind of object of inquiry, recently, actually for the last several years, have with few exceptions fallen outside of the parameters of media theory, in part, or maybe precisely because of, the fact that it is unclear what, if anything, would mediate. The sheer materiality of a bolt of fabric, for instance, appears almost silent to touch, perhaps, on a life of organic immediacy. Even when its structure is complex, it fails to communicate messages, unless such messages are projected onto it, i.e. as brocaded images or printed after the fact. fact. So, since I don't have any images, I just suggest you look at your jacket for a

moment, close up. And yet, as a flexible surface made from a network of threads, this same textile is highly mediated, produced by an apparatus, a loom, it circulates within various modes of, say, economic exchange and global trade. Textiles are media, fundamentally, that trouble the distinction between immediacy and mediation, materiality and representation. In their transition from technique to object, from a network of threads to a world of stuff, textiles slide deftly back and forth between the visible and the invisible, the reflective and the non-reflective, materiality and representation. Thanks.

And I'll move on to the other presenters. Thank you. So we're going to move on to the sort of round table discussion portion of the night. So we have one respondent here with us and three that will be joining us online. Yes, we're going to go one by one based on how this presentation is unfurled, right? So we're going to have probably either Aaron Gemma or Barry Warren sort of responding.

I'm just going to, because this machine crashed halfway through Alex's keynote. So what I did was we restarted the other one. Now everything is cool because we actually taped it with a high-res camera that's kind of like we're going to like edit it out and make one ready to be available tomorrow. But I'm just going to like re-connect this one to the new handout that everybody else is kind of like on right now. The one that you're watching because this one was off for this whole entire period. I mean, even though it's not really necessary, but I just wanted to get this one going. I mean, I wouldn't be able to join it because the room is full. But anyways, can we, guys, can we get the communication going with the handout to hear them?

Because it would be good if Jason can turn. Yes. Rory, you want to start or Aaron, you want to start? Can you hear him? Yes, we can hear you. Go ahead. OK. OK. We just have to pick him for the screen. There we go. Mohamed for the invitation. It's really exciting to be part of this event. I'm glad to be part of the conversation. I should kind of say, first of all, that I'm no expert on technology. I feel pretty unqualified to speak to a lot of the questions that are being raised.

And I guess with a lot of the conversations that happen that have led to this conference, I'm kind of usually the kind of like a, I feel like sometimes like the little brother just running behind the bigger boy is trying to catch up, you know? Kind of lacking the knowledge to engage too deeply. But what I kind of hope in this kind of broader conversation with kind of accelerationism, that I can kind of maybe exert some kind of useful drag at kind of key moments to kind of help it take corners a bit better and navigate some of the bumps in the road. But that said, what I can kind of speak to a little bit more is the question of geopolitics and thinking about the relationship between spatiality, forms of politics, and processes of technological change. More specifically, I wrote a PhD on the topic of space in Carl Schmitt's work, which was

the basis, the kind of jumping off point for Ben's comments. And I'm currently writing a book about that. So Noah asked me to respond to Ben's paper. I'm just going to offer a very few cursory comments, touching Smith here and there, and then end with something of a really broad kind of question. So it's not going to be any involved critique if anyone was expecting it. But OK, so the Blackstack. Obviously, no one heard what Ben was saying, so it makes it a little awkward. And actually, really, I was responding to a paper that he circulated, which was kind of a draft of the paper that he published under the same title in EFLUX earlier in the week. It was kind of a little shorter version of that. So in broad terms, I mean, I appreciate what Ben's trying to do. I think it's crucial trying

to examine the relationship between geopolitics and the new technological platforms that are being discussed here, and how geopolitics is responding in response to those technological platforms and vice versa. He points to a number of interesting areas, the new forms of governmentality, the new forms of sovereignties that are emerging and the shifting relationship between those in relation to spatial politics. And how the new forms of geopolitics that are emerging in relation to new technologies relate to older forms of thinking about the relationship between space and politics, whether they be accompanying them, replacing them, overlapping them and so on. I think Aaron might talk to this a little more. I think he has a tendency, no harm to him, to exaggerate the novelty of the effects of

technology on geopolitics. I know that the paper and the talk that he did give that we probably didn't hear, he offered let's say two slices of a six-part steak cake that he discussed. So we didn't get the full picture of what he was saying, but he did talk about verticality and complexity of these kind of new dimensions of geopolitical analysis that he's trying to present. I think a lot of the stuff that he's kind of saying appears in really quite standard geography and international relationship, international relations, sorry, literature at this point. Albeit these are presented on a less kind of encompassing horizon than Ben attempts to construct. And I think it's probably within that horizon where he's looking for what he calls an accelerationist

geopolitics that the main interest of his work would lie. I'm pretty uneasy with his characterization of the cloud and the stack. I'm not going to go into that too much. But I do appreciate this attempt to grasp the kind of three-way relationship between politics, spatiality, and the new technologies. And also the ambitious kind of scope that he approaches this with, this idea of taking on a kind of planetary nature of these changes. Again, I think there's probably some questions to be asked here about the relationship between the planet itself, natural systems, in relation to human systems. Maybe that appears in other areas of the work, but that's something that he would need to touch on again. Again, I'm kind of curious also the way he presents the idea of planetary. The question of scale, he presents the planet as something of a totality, planetary thought as a form of thinking of totalities.

I think these need to be pulled apart a little bit more. I think his concept of the planetary, for example, kind of falls into this type of a holism where you have this kind of terrestrial nugget, and that's the planetary basis on which we should understand geopolitics. I think at this point we're far beyond that. Even if you think of satellites alone, never mind any of the emerging and previous space races, technologies, and astral mining and so on. But I think he needs to think about the relationship between the planetary and the extra-planetary, or what one might say is extraterrestrial forms of geopolitics that are already quite dominant. I think there's a certain obvious affinity. I think what he's doing in accelerationism, in terms of the manifesto at least,

that Alex Williams and Nick Sernik have produced recently and there's been a lot of discussion of here. I think trying to think through the geopolitical implications of accelerationism something I'm interested in doing myself. I'm not sure if Ben's work here constitutes what he calls an accelerationist geopolitics, but at least I appreciate his attempt to kind of stand in this direction. I particularly think it's important to, what one gesture really does make, which I really appreciate, is the attempt to think of new forms of institutionality, take account of this technological change. He talks about durable platforms, alter totalities in contrast to both existing understandings understandings of state-based geopolitics, and the new kind of cloud politics that he sees emerging. And I think it's very important for the left

to try and think about institutionality. It's been something that's been shunted away with the kind of folk politics or horizontalism, the idea of thinking about forms of representation, forms of hegemonic organization, and how those can be institutionalized and not be this kind of flash in the pan, occupied by movement. and to try and take this as an infrastructural challenge, yes, of a planetary scale, and yes, involving processes that are already beyond the planet. I have a question on how he thinks these are constructed, but we'll kind of come to that. So to just kind of quickly go through some of the limitations, I think, in what he's doing. The first is the relationship between state and capital. I think Ben's discussion, even though he's

kind of introducing this element of the cloud, It's really quite very much takes part within the only form of discussion of the state and geopolitics based on state categories. I think he adopts that terminology too much. I think you can see something of the legacy of Schmidt's influence on his thought here. One of the key moves that Carl Schmidt made in his work was to critique liberalism on the basis that it separated politics and economy. or the economy was the basis of the political forms, but that was kind of separated into a separate category, very similar to some of the basic Marxist critiques. But in doing that, Schmidt also produces this understanding of politics where the economy is actually emptied out of, so he apes liberalism in what he critiques of. And I think you find this in Ben's talk.

He gives this very state-based understanding of geopolitics, which hollows it out of political and economic processes, which are driving many of even the technological changes which he's talking about. I think this is one tradition of understanding geopolitics that has serious limits. I kind of, you know, I think it's a lot of weakness in how you think about the relationship between geopolitical change and technological change without understanding the role of capital. I mean, I think there's even fairly standard sources like Giovanni Arigi, we can talk to people who've, you know, from the 1970s even, who tried to do this. Yes, their thought needs to be and updated, reformulated, but there's insights there that could help Bernd's project, I think. I think the other key category is warfare.

And it's something that, I mean, this may appear somewhere else in his work, but it seems kind of curious. I mean, this is something which traditional forms of geopolitical thought based on the state have done better, but it's still absent here. I don't think it's, you know, we should avoid trying to conflate the logic of state and the logic of capital with regards to war, in case of the logic of kind of a state warfare loses its specificity. At the same time, I don't think we can totally easily separate the logics of capital and the logic of state. I think Ed Ben will do this in what he presents. Technology, logical change is always going to change. It changes in warfare, and he needs to kind of bring this in. I think I'm quite close for time here. here so the main kind of bone of contention I have with it is the kind of question of

political subject and I think this would lead on to to broader question that are asked the kind of conference to consider as well and I missed some of that Ben Woodard's talk earlier but I think he was kind of gesturing towards this and the concept of political subjectivity that Ben Bratton presents in the black stack is again based on Schmitt and I think this is a very limited understanding of what the political might mean. He directly talks about Schmitt's concept of the friend and enemy. Schmitt famously argued that the field of politics is defined by the relationship between friend and enemy. And certainly, we might say that antagonism is unavoidable and inherent to the field of politics. But surely, it's not exhaustive to that. I think by running with this, he misses out

many opportunities to think about other ways that politics might be organized. I think this is kind of important in relation to the forms of political subjectivity that he presents. We're not giving much to go on here. He talks about the user, which is obviously this kind of polemically aping language of neoliberalism, quotes in the air, in case Nick Land hears me. But this is a very, very kind of liberal understanding of the political subject. Again, the only other thing he contrasts that to is the public and the individual, again, kind of classic kind of liberal categories of public and private. And he stays within this spectrum. There's no form of collectivity presented here, subjective collectivity,

that we might associate with the traditions of the left. Are you telling me to hurry up? Yes. Yes, okay. We're going to have some lively discussion here too. People are waiting to ask questions here too, so I want to go over the respondents so we can actually get some questions from the floor. So just to finish off, I think the question of political subjectivity, even beyond Ben's work, how do we think of the category of subjectivity in relationship to politics and the changes that are happening in technology, and how might some of the other speakers, I mean that's basically what I was going to say. I think Ben fails to do this adequately. Maybe someone else can step in here and do that.

Thanks. Thank you, Larry. Larry Rowan. So, is Aaron arguing? Where is Aaron General? I don't see him in your room. So if Aaron's not here, then I guess we can go to the respondent to Ben Woodard. Okay, okay. Yes, but please don't. Oh, there he is. Okay, sorry. Okay, there we go. Okay, few minutes, because he's also responding to . . . . . . . Hello?

. Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. So I'll be very brief, folks also, for allowing me to participate. And thanks to everyone else for your contributions. I am a professional, but sort of non-expert and very skeptical sort of computational worker. And I'm also an artist, so I guess I'm going to speak quickly briefly to what sort of much as basically the sort of means of diagramming these sort of segmentations of political space that Ben lays out that he calls the Black Stat.

And sort of those Rory's that also, I think I feel the sort of the novelty of this sort of vertical orientation is somewhat overstated. You know, verticality is basically implicit in the most basic apprehension of concepts of political space. To use some long-run short-century terms, we have the hierarchy of first, second, and third worlds. We have a three-dimensional volume suggested by spheres of influence and the sort of great heights upon which the leaders of the superpowers would be at a summit. And then, the sort of more practical terms of interstate conflict you have with the first Gulf War initiated via Iraq's claims of

communities not drilling into their sort of subterranean mineral resources and then after the war, the no-fly zones enforced and then northern and southern thirds of the country were enforced by NATO so you have these sort of complicated multi-jurisdictional segmentations already existing independent of a sort of computational situation and in general I think the horizontal image of political space is basically implicitly rendered from an aerial advantage you know this sort of interchangeability of maps and say aerial photos

and I think And we also have really a more explicitly vertical consumption space available, really in terms of private property. So to use a basic example of a parcel of land, someone may own a particular surface of the earth, while someone else may own the rights to harvest minerals from beneath it. And the building on the surface may be owned by yet another party. and skylights above the building may be owned by still another party in various easements. Three-to-one spaces within it may actually be owned still by others. So in terms of sort of conceiving the space,

I feel like this sort of vertical thickening that Ben talked about or as representation in a way, we could call maybe a consequence of the usurpation of state services and jurisdiction by private enterprises that he talks about in the cloud section. But again, I feel like a lot of the sort of technical capacity of what we have, what we call the cloud, I think, is sort of where the sort of state actor and the private actor begins and ends is also not so clear given the agreements for data harvesting between the big social media and various data providers

and NSA, for instance. But I think in terms of the kind of diagram of this idea, I think that insisting on the vertical image of layers of the stack, the Earth Cloud Studio Address Interface and Users, sort of lends this vulnerability to these terms being revisualized horizontally. or maybe in state bureaucratic terms, jurisdictionally, for instance, simply as concentric links with the user in the center. And so there's something interesting about that. We could maybe say there's a sort of compression that would be suggested by that

where the squeezing of the earth, cloud, city, and address and so on into the user layer could be the sort of process that produces the new liberal subject, but I don't think that I would really carry that very far. But this sort of jurisdictional diagram of rooms becomes actually sort of more interesting to me if we're able to reorder the concentric rooms not to a sort of static, like, or preferred reconception of the jurisdictions that Ben lays out, but actually in a sort of continuous process, shifting each layer of the stack's orientation to the other. And really, one of the things that's sort of led me to that is that I feel like the issue of denigrating the interface

really as a layer of the stack, when it seems like it would be instantiated actually between each layer of the stack, or even constitute the boundaries between each layer of the stack. So I guess rather than conceiving it, this sort of geopolitical layer cake, I would stretch those interfacial segmentations around a toronto form, you know, cleaving and rejoining the earth and city and user and so on. So that rather than a black stack, we would maybe possibly call this new toronto diagram the black donut. And that's all I've got. Thank you.

So I guess next we have Kate. Hello. Thank you for having me. Sorry, I'm using my voice, so bear with me. So my name is Kate Henderson, and I'm responding to Ben Woodard's paper. So just to introduce myself, I'm an artist working with lens-based media. So through projection, video and installation, my work navigates the fraught transition overlap between body, machine, the digital and the analog. So my thesis work at UBC this past spring investigated the shift from analog to digital in lens-based technologies.

And on the internet I discovered a series of low resolution digital candid photographs of the destruction of Kodak factories. And what I was particularly interested in how this drastic iconic shift to digital was experienced, how vision and perception of analog spectacle was mediated through a digital device. So these images raised larger questions about the nature of a compressed circulating image and the role and location of the body in a historical moment life with interfaces and apparatuses of control. So ultimately, my work deals with the proximity of the human body to machine and how the image is now inextricably bound to capitalism's ultimate fetish object, the computer. I also argue that the digital is material.

It's generally seen as immaterial and floating and ethereal, when actually it requires very material sites of production and distribution and ends up as e-waste, as an example. So this leads me to Ben Woodard's paper, which is refreshingly out of my comfort zone. And as an artist, I latch on to the material and to the actual. So in Ben's paper, several parts stood out to me as something I could sink my teeth into. So the visual of Plato's line as that dividing line between the visible world and intelligible world. The line is seen as a doctrine of what is real. And as I take it, and this is me and me, one side of the line we have images, reflections, shadows, and on the other side we have a resemblance of images.

So I'm interested in what role computing plays in this line in men's paper and how our viewing of images shifts with it. So the second thing that I found interesting was the imaging of abstraction. So the computer allows for the imaging of abstraction by translating script text into images, by translating the unseen into the visible. And so I was really drawn to Ben's mention of the Turing machine, which I hadn't heard of before, which was a device developed in 1936 by Alan Turing that could make visible the inner workings of a computer and reveal the limits of mechanical computation. So it was essentially a strip of film or tape that was inserted inside the computer from when I see it, and literally imbued with information and symbols on its surface. So this was, for me, it seems like the ultimate imaging of abstraction.

So that's something that stood out to me as an artist interested in materials, as the strip of film, as this tape that receives information and text or images. And the last thing, another issue raised in the paper, is that of whether computation is an application of, and Ben's quote, epistemic operation upon the physical, or whether computation is inherently physical. So Ben asks if energy and matter are abstractions of computations. And this raises questions about pan-computationalism, or whether the universe itself is a vast digital computation device. So within pan-computationalism, the universe is in essence digital. And this is at the macrocosmic level. And then the idea of evolutionary computationalism, which comes up in this paper, or computational

theory of mind is at a microscopic level, and that it claims that the human mind or brain is an information processing system, and that thinking itself is a form of computing. So my question for Ben, and he's here, I'm not sure if he'll want to respond to it, but it doesn't need to be answered, you can think about it, and I'm not even sure what I'm asking. My question for Ben then comes from a material perspective. So if our human essence itself is computational, if the mind is inherently digital, what happens to the body, in this case our digital bodies, when it is remediated through a secondary computer, a touch screen interface, iPhone, etc. So can a physical, material, non-digital body be located in this digital pan-computational

movement? That's my question and I will end it there. Thank you. . . Marisha, are you? Marisha. Yes, I am. Hi, sorry. Can you hear me? Go ahead, we're waiting to hear you. Okay, great. Hi everyone and thanks for being here. My name is Maureen Allegary. I'm a new media artist and art activist. I was born and raised in Iran, moved to United States in 2007. So my work, my creative work and my research in the last six years has mostly been focused

on experimental 3D animation, 3D printing, digital filmmaking, multimedia installation, and also performance. So I guess I am really also trying to think about a lot of ideas that Clint talked about as an artist, as a new media artist, as someone who deals with technology and also I think about different layers of these concepts in my work. So Clint, again this is kind of both a response and questions. There's a question that you don't have to answer but if there are other people in the audience who want to kind of maybe mention or address some of these thoughts, that would be awesome.

So in your talk, Clint, you explain and talk about certain and I guess very specific processes and perhaps at some point, you know, series of accidents or, you know, what I thought about as cause and effect relationships. Like you talk about, you give specific example of Thomas Hirshhorn's video installation, touching reality or you know your example of bananas and the fact that you know I was thinking about this as an artist I've been working on these creative research project you know like 3d printing project called dark matter for the last eight nine months and so I'm going to talk a little bit very shortly about the project because I kind of want to contextualize this and then

ask my question so that this project is a series of objects reappropriated and modeled, 3D modeled in Maya and then 3D printed to form humorous juxtapositions. The objects chosen for the first series are objects that are forbidden or unwelcome in Iran by the government. For example, one of the objects that I've created is a dog wearing a dildo with a satellite dish on top of it. So it's kind of like a political and I think it's humorous but sometimes a very poetic perspective to you know 3d printing 3d printing objects but at the same time these objects are completely dysfunctional um except maybe for dildo um so i i kind of want to i i think it's

also interesting that kate just talked about um the digital um as as material but um i wanted to ask you kind of like question in the context of thinking about digital perhaps as radical So when you were giving your time, I couldn't stop thinking about ontology of an object made by technology like 3D printed, right? To think about the potential, the cruelty, and I guess many different modes of existence embedded into the 3D printer itself as a machine and also the 3D object that it creates as a result of the collaboration between a human and a machine. I want to know your thoughts that if I were to think about both the object of the virtual reality and internet and then add to that then your whole object oriented democracy concept, political size, manifesto of a flat ontology that you talked about.

How in, this is my question, how in and in what ways you might explain or think about this object oriented ontology that you talk about in case of an object made with purpose and potential through the 3D modeling printing process, for instance the object, you know, the 3D printed gun project that could potentially work, right, so there's like this whole purpose behind it and there's functionality. versus objects that are made through the same process but with that purpose. Rather objects that are results of failure or error, objects that are called keepal by... or Philip Dick talked about actually these whole crap-jects, contraction of crappy objects. Much of what comes out of 3D printers, basically unwanted waste created by unskilled designers

fabricated using inferior materials with, let's say, poor surface resolution. So basically, objects that there's this whole notion of errors in them. They're not really functional. They're not usable. So I guess that was kind of my question. I wanted to kind of bring in the differences, like using this whole process to create these objects. But then if I, as an artist, thinking about this technology of 3D printing, or the 3D printer itself as something that gave me the opportunity for being radical, for I guess creating something again like purposeful in that sense, that you know, a gun, as I gave an example. How would you explain that with I guess some of these concepts that I brought up?

So yeah, that was that. Thank you. So I guess now we're going to have the sort of Q&A to wrap up the night. And thank you everyone for staying with us. I know we've had a lot to get through this evening. So, Mo, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but we'll ask the speaker, the presenters, to come up to have questions. I think we'll just take some questions first. But what do you guys think? Anybody have questions? Male Speaker 2, President of the United States Speaker 2, President of the United States,

President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, the speaker in the audience. So Alex, I really enjoyed your talk, and there's a lot of synergy in things I've been thinking about, and I'll follow up on you later on that. But really, my central question is around this idea of context in a compression. That when you're in this process of deletion and compressing something, that deletion happens in the context of particular needs or adaptive value or something.

And so it's not like there's an objective, these things aren't important in a pattern, and we can throw them away. There's, we need to do this, or this is the goal, or this is the task, or we need this to survive. And based on that kind of context of survival, then we can decide to throw away these particular patterns. So that lack of context, for me, disconnects a little bit from the argument. And I'm not sure also, maybe you can address it slightly a different way. In the context of that ideal context, what is the possibility? It seems like then the flat hierarchy, the absence of compression, is some kind of super objectivity that's entirely independent of context. So anyway, that's the question.

Any more questions? Anyone come? Well, I don't really have any questions, but I have a comment. And that would be what I thought about, in particular, during your talk, Mr. Galloway, was that I couldn't get out of my mind the contrasting notion of the clean room. them. And that is really, you know, totally tied to the black box. The black box is tainted by the unknown, the compression, you know, the encryption, and the distrust. But in the

clean room. It's like the blank page. You enter the box, the owner, collectively, and you begin with that utopia, the light inside the box, and you illuminate. You began with the inputs and the outputs and the taint, and you chose to enter. And then you're faced with the choice of, do we just take that and produce that and say that we own it or that we did it ourselves, we reinvented the wheel or the world? Or do you look at it together and choose

to do something new, do something else? So I'm not sure if I agree with the philosophical proposition that there is no utopia in computing, but rather that utopia in the computing world, in the era, totally cluttered and tainted with rhetoric and commercialism and everything. I think it has given us the clean room, the blank page, that opportunity to enter into together with nothing. Hopefully this conference can be part of that.

Some more questions from the board. Seems like two questions were from Alex. So I think we should see if there's more questions. So then we can, and then Alex, maybe you can take a minute to respond if he's interested. OK, Daniel, why don't you start? Oh, yeah, for sure. And then Reza, come here. Alright. Alright. I have an exegetical question or recommendation, I suppose. As I understood, and I perhaps got this wrong, the way you set up your argument was to counterpose on the one hand, how do there is one potential paradigm for aesthetic thinking, and specifically

specifically through his hermeneutic method, and then counterposes it to the expressive method that Deleuze offers, for example. And you say that aesthetics and philosophy has been suspended between these two possibilities. And if I'm correct, I believe that you say that whereas the Heideggerian option remains captured by the paradigm of representation, it is with Deleuze and later with Lorel's sort of the non-object-bound invitation which they can say is right, that we finally overcome the presentation as paradigm in aesthetics. My rejoinder or my observation would be to say that, at least as I understand how to hear, there's two things going on, which I think you did right to point to.

On the one hand, there is a methodological operation, which is the hermeneutic method, which obviously concerns a reading of the history of Western metaphysics. And in that regard, you're correct in saying that there's something like the basic idea of something that withdraws. There's a radical forgetfulness of being that has sprawled itself continuously since the beginning of Western history. And then you kind of pose this to maybe a poetic reading of Heidegger in which creation takes place. place. Now, and this is precisely where I would like to interject the positioning. I do not think that Heidegger, in avowing the hermeneutic method, could realistically

be accused or allotted to a representationist paradigm. And very simply because whereas the hermeneutic operation merely reveals tacit presuppositions in the history of philosophy, but does not purport to say anything about, say, a theory of knowledge or a theory of ad equation. It merely reveals, in fact, how we have privileged certain modalities of thinking and conceptions of being throughout history. And likewise, the poetic act for Heidegger is not one which is representative or mimetic. On the contrary, for Heidegger, poetry constitutes something like a radical gesture, an absolute beginning.

I think that the real disjunction between the Deleuzean position, the expressivist Deleuzean position, and the Heideggerian position, would be to say that whereas Heidegger nevertheless still thinks that the creative dimension of poetry and art is still proper to the human, where Deleuze, by inflecting aesthetic creation into the material, dislodges this problematic from the centrality of the human. And in that regard, it's a step towards overcoming at least the philosophy of access, if not representation or including representation. And my second, exegetically much briefer, is that I believe that when we were discussing Raoul, you mentioned the, again,

recommendation for a generalization of, say, the photographer's craft by dislodging it from the source and say the production of light with I believe you were hinted at us, the concept of generosity, as I believe you earlier alluded to in the work of Badiou say. But I think it's very important to distinguish these two operations. Generalization is a procedure of precisely dislodging oneself from the particularity of an entity, event, process, or proposition. And generosity, for Badiou at least, implies a constructive procedure, which of course, as we know, is tethered very concretely to the operation of forcing in self-theoretical mathematics, as thought of by Cohen, and so

on. And it's primarily a productive phenomenon. I think I would be weary of conflating these two concepts together for the sake of clarity and rigor. That's all I want to answer now. Thank you. It's your turn. You have the last question. Alex gets to defend himself because there's been a few contentions, right? It's getting heavy. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about Alex. No. Thank you, Alex, for enlightening talk. Basically, you know that I'm sympathetic to your general trajectory in this critique of digitalization. digitalization. Nevertheless, what I'm going to ask you, and probably my only objection to you, is the

chain of argument that you are making. In so far as it seems to me that basically you are creating the links between metaphors and concepts that you can, that it seems that there is no sufficient warrant to make these leaps from one metaphor or one concept in your argument to another. Hence, it seems that what Daniel was saying, that the generosity that you are in fact advocating at the end turn up to be generalization of an argument, of a set of axiomatic premises. And the first thing, starting with this, that basically from a systematic perspective, a

a black box is precisely not a digit. A black box, in fact, systematically is understood as something that you know the input, but you do not know how the function maps an input to an output, so you can't really predict the catastrophic tendencies that the output might unfold. Hence, basically, the concept of black box was devised by system theory theory in order to understand what they call basically tendencies, which are abstract properties of a system, namely how it evolves according to the trajectories of time. Precisely because black box is a dynamic system.

A dynamic system can never be discretized. So this whole idea that you are basically metaphorizing or making this kind of conceptualization from a black box to this idea of a digit and then digit to the computer seems to be somehow obfuscated by virtue that what we have here, black box, is a continuous tendency. And then it goes to the second stage. The second stage, which is I think the most important one, you are basically making a leap from compression at the level of quality which is semantic organization to compression at the level of quantity which is the locus of certainty of

number or digits but there is no such a leap that allows you to make such a connection between compression at the level of quality qua concept to compression at the level of quantity of compression qua number So, my question would be how can you make such a leap that allows you to construct, to fold it back and try to criticize philosophy as the compressive method of the concept, at the level of the concept. Because what you are trying to use is really compression at the level of number, which is compression at the level of quantity. You can't fold it back and turn it into a critique at the level of compression at the level of quality, which is semantic organization of information.

Okay, that's it. Alex, would you feel like this morning? Yeah, I mean, I don't have a lot to say because I appreciate those comments and I agree with the substance of most of the comments here. I guess I'll just say a few things. The last two points had to do with the difference between the general, or generalization, and the generic. And I totally agree with that, and you're right, there is one line in there where I flubbed it a little bit.

Absolutely, the general doesn't have anything to do with the generic. They're totally different processes. The general, I would say, is on the side of, I don't know, the universal or abstraction or totalization or something. Whereas the generic is on the side of impoverishment, insufficiency, indistinction, right? Indifference, these kinds of things. I want to, I mean, I don't know this whole can never be quantized thing. I think you share this with Longo, a kind of, I don't know, a kind of romantic sense that there is a hard and fast distinction between a sort of human realm or a kind of vital chaotic realm that exceeds computation or discretization

and then this other realm that's the computational realm. My response to that is, what do we do with that, right? And I think that's the non-standard method is to not stop there, but to actually then withdraw from making that decision. So, to answer your last point, that's really a powerful challenge, and I'd have to think a lot more on it, but I guess what comes to mind immediately is that compression actually conjoins the qualitative and quantitative move, right? Because, in my understanding of compression and the generic, it always has to do with

1 and 2. So the fundamental understanding of digitality is the moment when you can make a distinction or a decision and move from the one to the two. And to move from the one, in the Water-Williams sense, to the two is actually both qualitative and quantitative. It's the only moment when the qualitative and the quantitative come together. You're shaking your head. I can't respond to all the other things, but the earlier point about context, I think, is totally right on. And yeah, I would want to expand the comments here about compression and maybe think about a sort of context-appropriate or context-selective form of compression versus your last point,

which I also totally agree with, maybe we could call it a kind of, I don't know, cataclysmic version of compression where you have to go all the way, right? I mean, that would be the generic. So that's all I'll say about that. So, I guess if there's no more questions, we can just end tonight's session and thank people who built this catastrophe of technology with us. I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but yeah, in the middle of your talk, we lost it and we got it back again and people were like joining and coming back.

But yeah, so tomorrow it's 10 o'clock. We begin at 10 o'clock and hope to see you guys here. And thanks again for coming.