Okay, we will start. Are you ready? Okay, it's live. Super. So, welcome everyone. I am Jaime, head of education of Museo Tamayo. We are excited to share the conference, Critic and Machine Philosophy by Luciana Parisi in the context of Materia Abierta, a summer school in theory, art and technology in Mexico City, funded and directed by Federico Perez Villoro. This is our second collaboration with Materia
Abierta through the Futuros Posibles program of Museo Tamayo that began in 2019 with a seminar by Armena Vanessian followed by interactions with Imgare Melhines, Patricia Reed, Christopher Roth and Mauro Reis. Futuros Posibles is a series of events with leading thinkers on topics such as object-oriented ontology, immaterialism, speculative realism, post-humanism among other investigations that influence contemporary art and vice versa. Futuros Posibles is co-created by Humberto Moro, Artistic Deputy Director of Tamayo Museo and I. We have the chat open for questions and comments. We will share with Luciana after the conference. Welcome, Luciana and Federico.
Gracias, Jaime, for the introduction. And thank you also to Humberto Moro, Ana Paula and all the Tamayo Museum for generating this space. I also want to thank, in the name of the Open Materia to the other institutions that make it possible in our program, a Cultura Unum, a través de Casa del Lago, al programa Arte, Ciencia y Tecnologías y a la Cátedra Maxab en Arte y Tecnología. Asimismo, gracias a Cádiz, Tanoro, Peana y a la Universidad de Monterrey. And I'll move to English now to start welcoming Luciana. As Jaime was just saying, we're thrilled to have Luciana Parisi with us today in this fortunate crossing of our programs, which coincide in the question of the future. But when we speak about futures, we must recognize the future itself as a rhetorical construction that sustains a linear understanding of time, which in turn serves a rationalist, capitalist, Western project,
and its diverse forms of oppression and exploitation. And discussing the future then becomes a paradoxical condition where on one hand, it is a conceptual excuse, a framework that continues to obfuscate oppressed versions of the present and manifested ancestral knowledge. But on the other hand, we have to figure out ways to escape the contemporary socioeconomic and political organization of the world. And these are shared preoccupations of our programs and also of the proposition of Monica Hoff and Eva Posas who curated the 2021 edition of Materia Abierta. And are also questions that resonate with Luciana's work. Of course, her talk today will move us through the complexity of the ways in which time is recalibrated
under the predictive logic of algorithms and the reclusive violence program into the technologies we design and how it is also present in the critique of automation today. Her work also extends the possibility of intelligence far beyond the human and is restless in searching for possible emancipatory epistemologies and metaphysical spaces as provoked from and within critical computation. Luciana Parisi's writing investigates technology in terms of ontological and epistemological possibilities of transformation in culture, aesthetics and politics. She was a member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and is currently a co-founding member of CCP Critical Computation Bureau, from which she co-initiated the symposium
on Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation in 2020. In 2004, she published abstract sex philosophy biotechnology and the mutation of desire her book contagious architecture computation aesthetics and space from 2013 explores algorithms in the in architecture and interaction design and her current project automating philosophy which is a forecoming book explores radical critiques uh starting with in human intelligence and cosmic computations so we no further ado welcome Luciana it is a real pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you very much Federico, thank you very much Yami and the Museo Tamayo.
I'm very happy to be here and I hope this can be as we did this last week a very productive discussion. I'm going to share my screen because I prepared some slides and I'm going to talk through them and hopefully be on time and not take too much time. So today I'm going to talk about critique and machine philosophy. This is a recent work that I developed in an article, Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines, which is for coming in critical inquiry and also an interview with William Morgan on the journal Kipar where I discuss
what is machine philosophy and what machine philosophy can do. The question that motivates my recent research in terms of as Federico pointed out on one end the the the balance and the um the system of suppression that is within a design within our technological um uh everyday system or apparatus uh is somehow uh reflects somehow also is reflected somehow also within the critique of computation. So this is some kind of mirror mirroring happening between the structure of power and the structure of critique. The question of, for instance,
what is thought or what is philosophy, what is critique after computation, has encountered various debate in the last 10 years of opposition, where they go back to much earlier on already in the aftermath of World War II, where the question of the demise of philosophy corresponds to the poverty and scarcity of critical and philosophical thinking in the face in relation to this increasingly system automated decision making, which was already individuated by the
emergence of the proliferation of cybernetic system after World War Two, and which led the philosophers such as Martin Heidegger to investigate what is the question of technology and how the question of technology corresponds to the end of philosophy. But the problem of philosophy, the poverty of philosophy, as I already mentioned, has seen as a problem of critique, i.e. as the problem of the limits of knowledge that are determined by the very procedure of thinking or reasoning, which is at the core of the
modern project, the Kantian modern project of establishing philosophy as a scientific method led by a procedure or a method reasoning and establish the limits of what can be thought. So this kind of discussion return in the kind of critique of AI which resonate with this of philosophy as investigating the limits of reason and the limits as the limits of men.
When I refer to men, I am actually thinking of Sylvia Winter's articulation of the kind of the way Western cosmogony, So the over-representation of men within Western cosmogonies, starting with the Big Bang, so including physics, moving on to the biological explanation of the evolution of the species and the evolution of sapiens. and passing through the Judeo-Christian model of metaphysics.
So this kind of articulation of the limits of philosophy, the limits of man, the limits of reason, have been taken on, you know, this kind of popular and less popular debates about how technology on one hand seem to extend the prosthetic intelligence on men within the kind of Promethean model of progress and emancipation from the chains of entropy and death, which we can find in something called transhumanism. But on the other hand, they've also been discussed, I'm so sorry.
They've also been discussed in understanding of machine intelligence in terms of non-conscious cognition, as articulated, for instance, in the work of Catherine Hayles in the article Cognition Everywhere, everywhere or the book the unthought where there is an attempt to actually move away from the the the kind of dichotomy between intelligence and reason and where actually intelligence becomes something that is commonly shared amongst animal humans and machines as a way to skip logical steps
and to actually what has also been called deductive reasoning and therefore to actually make decision without what has been really at the center of philosophical conception of reason of since modernity since Kant which is a reflection so without reflection This question, as I said, is not new and what needs really to be traced back amongst many to Heidegger's quest that what technology announced was the completion of metaphysics. The completion means both the end of metaphysics, of the kind of teleological project of European
philosophy, but also the end of metaphysics as a kind of truth. So the kind of, so on one end, we have this kind of engagement with how cybernetics, how Hadeger complains the cybernetics is actually replacing knowledge and epistemology, the very formation, the very ground of epistemology with the task oriented functions and how, you know in a way this this kind of an understanding of of task oriented epistemology also returns
in understanding of computation today so in a way the poverty of philosophy is extended this lament about the decline of philosophy in the face of this non-conscious, non-reason, or simply intelligent task-oriented function has been discussed in terms of also poverty of knowledge and the way, for instance, techno-capitalism only has accelerated forms of automated decision which are already pre-established and choreographed by the design or through the design of algorithm and the selection of data.
And we can see, for instance, you have an example of neural net or image net or deep dreaming as a kind of example of how, in a way, it has been argued that meaning, i.e. the kind of semantic structure of um uh of power is already given uh in data and therefore the in a way the association between concept and objects returns to reproduce biases or to reproduce categories and and therefore the argument is that um what this intelligent system this non-conscious intelligence system
can do is only to reproduce knowledge without actually adding or transforming or challenging the very ground for which knowing is possible. So the automation of philosophy as the end of philosophy corresponds to the poverty of knowledge and also the kind of impossibility of doing critique insofar as critique can only reproduce the system of knowledge that is already being predetermined by machines. But I argue, I want to argue, I want to reflect upon how, you know, what does it mean that the fact that, you know,
the argument that intelligence or machine intelligence is less than reason or is a kind of demarcation of the end of loss of your knowledge and of critique. And I argue, I want to argue that, you know, behind this kind of system of reproduction of critique, the limits of critique or the impossibility of critique, there lies what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the transparency thesis. For Da Silva, the transparency thesis is what gives ground to modern historical and analytical forms. So as if to say that the pillars of the modern model of the subject is a self-determined
subject is produced or is given by a scientific construction of the racial other as lacking consciousness, subjectivity, self-determination, and history. And she also argued that the the transparency thesis that is based on this particular construction that lies behind the eye or behind the subject of what one can say universal subjectivity as Kant called it, actually has denied the racial other through violence force power of exclusion.
In a way, this kind of articulation of the end of philosophy or the impossibility of thinking, of reasoning, now the machines have taken over of thought. For me, institutes itself as a transparent subject, separated from the word, creating the problem of how to relate with the word. So how to relate with the world, how to relate with, in a way, this marker of the other that machine intelligence embodies as something that cannot be completely disavowed, cannot completely be ignored.
because in a way the self-determining subject and universal subjectivity does need the kind of process mode method of exclusion or method of exclusion of of exteriority which however as the silver argues cannot be disavowed and And actually what the transparency thesis does is to rely on this exteriority as much as aiming to exclude it.
I want to talk about this kind of process of this kind of return on the transparency thesis in the articulation of the kind of planetary competition and how racial capitalism extends or is again, once again, perpetuated through techno-capitalism by reminding ourselves about, you know, this kind of necropolitics, as I remember, talks about it,
about how the structure of racial brutalism is embedded in science and philosophy, and how can we abstract this kind of model of the transparency thesis perpetuated on racial brutalism in terms of a non-entropy, in terms of a necro-entropy that it can be located in the tension between signal and noise. How, in other words, one could think about the limits of
the computational system in terms of the noise that remains as a reminder of the impossibility of transforming a noise into patterned information and how this the the dissipative energy of of information system demarcates a negative horizon of the human error of the human in terms of the universality of the subject, which as we know, within Kantian model of philosophy is predicated on the universality of the human. And so what I'm trying to do is how to map
and necropolitics within information system that as you know, both rely on this model of, one can say a model of second cybernetics and a model of third cybernetics, i.e. moving from a kind of question of a system that was outside, whose externality, was necessary outside and externality, is entropy or is the kind of the measure by which the system runs out of equilibrium. And now this kind of entry, this kind of noise that is necessary to the system to self-regulate, comes back in terms of randomness.
or, and interestingly, I just want to make a parenthesis that is more to do with the kind of articulation of what computation and this information system mean in terms of how they are both delimited by, in terms of information, by randomness, which is a, relates to noise, i an impossibility of of compressing noise into readable patterns and at the same time how randomness also maps uh onto in the incomputable which income in in in the application
of mathematical logic to machines with the universal turing machine of alan turing uh again became the limit of the system to actually process proof of which there were no truth. And therefore, you know, shows that there is something about within the computational system and within the information system. We know that these two are entangled and interrelated within the kind of contemporary computational system that we use from our phone to our mobile phone to our computer, where both information
any and uh we're both sorry cybernetic principle of interaction and logical uh principle of uh computability uh uh are at play and my point is to say that as much as the transparency thesis relies on the externality of the other and the necessary construction and repression of the others, so too forms of contemporary technology or actually do rely on the externality of randomness and the incomputable. And yet these kind of externalities are not, once they are negated, they are also, as it
were uh alive was were active uh and for me they know to become the marker of another kind of uh of of logic or another kind of intelligence another kind of knowledge uh which i called another another place i've called um uh xeno patterning alien patterning but i want to go back about and make a reference to the work of Louis Choudé Soquet, who instead already articulated this relation between technet, technology, and automata with the figure of the process
of racialization which relegated blackness to slave machines. So in a way what I'm trying to say is that the slave machine reproduced it becomes a marker of an extension of an intensification of the model of slavery and of the model of the master-slave dialectic that has been a fundamental pillar of philosophy, of modern philosophy.
So, when I say that the slave machine is not only negated, but also necessary, at the same time, it's also in order to rethink of critique away from the reproduction of the limits of critique, which are described in these pillars of inclusion and exclusion and transparency thesis, I want to think about that in terms of something like a stranger, like alien or like being and coming from elsewhere.
And there is this thing of how if machines have been, or this automated system, bring within them the demarcation of the inhuman, then why is important to re-articulate this kind of zone or this kind of claim or claim the alienates of the inhuman rather than as other as I would say in a second other contemporary debate or critical technology almost you know you have a
one-hand this question of oh let's make technology more transparent let's really see where the bias come from let's rewrite technology in a transparent way so that they can actually be objective and ensure democracy or ensure models of equality. And for me, that's a way to kind of reform the interesting tension that the question of technology today poses to us, i.e. a mode of think of reasoning that doesn't fit within the structure of the pillar of modern subjectivity
in terms of space, time, self-determination, or kind of understanding. And actually, rather stay on the side of the inhuman. My question is, what if we stay instead with the side of the inhuman, and rather than reanimate the inanimate in a way that's, one could argue that the critique of bias, the claim for making the system transparent is a plead to become part of the system of representation of the human and of the universal subject.
Rather, I would say, what if we suspend this kind of anthropomorphization, as it were, of machines and rather stay with the side of the human? What will it be? And to me, that translates with a refusal of the decisional structure of philosophy or the decisional structure that divides, for instance, the concept of nature, from the concept of freedom in Kant, where, you know, there's the argument that since nature is just a kind of sequence of cause and effects, and is unable to think
of itself as itself thinking. Hence, you know, we need the structural concept of philosophy, which is able to decide between what can be explained and what can be understood and what cannot, or is able to explain the causes by which we think or through which we think. So what I'm trying to say is that philosophy, in a way, by posing automation or machine intelligence as its double, as its specter or its mirror, that is less than or actually determines the demise of philosophy.
Actually, this game is what maintains the disputed metaphysical power on knowing the world. And so, what I'm trying to say is that the critique of automation somehow flirts with is kind of miraculously under the spell of the ontopistemological ground of men. Insofar as the ontopistemological ground of men, the scientific knowledge from physics, from biology, chemistry, mathematics,
is what determines the uniqueness of men and of the ontology of being, which somehow is justified by the inhumanity of automation, in the same way as the inhumanity of the other justify the brutal repression of the other. And now I just would like to turn to this kind of question that the late Bernard Stiegler asked us.
So how do we, given this condition in which we know that competition and this kind of model of intelligent decision making are actively producing knowledge, are actively producing aesthetic, are actively contributing to forms of governance. So how can we actually instead of just denigrate or just kind of diminish the role of computer science, how can you, you know, in the spirit of rethinking the humanities outside the separation between scientific endeavors or the kind of epistemological endeavors of science versus the kind of
metaphysical or humanity question for freedom. And which, you know, of course, this is a super problematic already question because, as we know, and I want to just give a nod to, you know, how the Black radical tradition and the re-articulation of the Black radical tradition in the work of Fred Morton and Stefano Ardi and Denise Ferra da Silva and others is actually pointing to the fact that, you know, as we know, the question of freedom cannot be disentangled
from the question of the unfreedom and of, especially within the US context of the, you the articulation of a liberal subject predicated upon the genocide of enslaved people during diaspora and its continuation in relation to the expropriation of the land and all modes of dispossession that continue to be articulated in all forms of wars and migration and everyday kind of affective and human labor. That's one thing we can discuss later, but to me, I want to
point to you this kind of attempt within a contemporary debate of looking, of refounding computer science so if computer science is just some kind of um vessel for the reproduction of the structural power of the subject and all forms of kind of domination of colonialism and of course you know as we know the question of technology today could be the question of computer science tomorrow could be the question quantum physics but the question of computer science in terms of of how technology or intelligent system are not just a way of reproducing the kind of
entropy or barbarism of technology, which was already anticipated in the critique of technology by the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Archimer, and how instead one can open up computation of technology outside of the universalism of technology. And another nod here is to the work of Yukui, who writes about cosmotechnics and how the colonialism of the modern question of technology he argues that doesn't need to be found in the kind of neglect or the kind of overcoming
of the mode of modern universalism and therefore as a moment as he calls it makes a critique to the ontological term to argue that one is no longer possible to go to a place before the modern question of technology before the universality of technology, but one is to open up modernity across cultures or within different culture. And his book, The Question of Technology in China, is trying to do that. And so I think the Stigler is writing in a similar vein here, because in order to not to have this universality of the computational language and open up different forms of negotiation of cultural negotiation of reality, of politics, of belief
with technology, then it's necessary to rethink at the foundation of theoretical computer science and expand the pillars of computer science. He says the cybernetic nuclear age is appropriated the hopes of potentials in decentralization of networks and the editorialization of the worldwide web and it's referring to a moment in which you know the the kind of um everyday uh reliance of of technology uh in the 90s uh you know in there was this moment in which computer science became the place where articulation of free software or communities or decentralized
networks so we became you know part of a of a kind of political theoretical movement which has been completely harnessed by you know the the the big AI corporations from in the in the organization and exploitation of labor from Amazon to Google, Facebook and the likes, as we know. He refers to this kind of demise, this kind of sadness, as it were, or blockage of critique in view of what Benjamin Bratton calls planetary computation has brought forward,
where the learning algorithms of social media have led to a platform nihilism, or what this group, art group called, art industrialis, called net blues. So this kind of belief into possibility of rethinking of computational technology outside universality and the monolithic model of techno capitalism rather um i think with social media and with this and with this social media platform has encountered again a moment of crisis of critical reason um and um he um he then he makes a proposition which i would like to discuss with you which is about
how one has to rethink about the break, I'm sorry, the break of what can actually fail or break down in this kind of seamless system of automated decision, where there is not just techno diversity, but also a techno diversity in its kind of forms of calculation that are not just determined by the Western European model can also bring together a biodiversity. And for him, this coming together, a biodiversity, a techno-diversity, is what he calls new diversity.
And it's a quote here. I follow Aristotle Peri Poussakes, the knowing soul, is named noetic. And noesis is a modality of the relation to the pride mover, a relation constitutive of the passion of an emotion, imparting motion, the cognitive motion, moving the unmovable theos. So, what Stiger says that in order for us to really break from the universal pillar or the universalism of the question of technology today, I have computer science, we really need to go back to this knowing soul, this kind of moment in which everything can originate.
in knowledge, in knowing, in terms of a passion. But what he does is to say that actually it's not this new orzology, this house of this mind, this house of knowledge is not just exactly in the mind, but it's in technique. So technique, if noesis has to do with the process of psychic and collective individuation, and here is referring to and drawing from Gilbert Simondon, where technical mentality become part of a psychic collective individuation.
then technique brings forward another form of knowledge. So in a way to unite techno diversity and biodiversity, nosology or the principle of knowledge needs to become technical. He then points to, you know, argues that, you know, the problem of the kind of extinction or the end or the threat of the collapse of knowledge and self-destruction of the human is not to be found in the Anthropocene.
I mean, actually replaces the Anthropocene with this figure of the Neganthropocene. Insofar as Neganthropy, right? So it's making display on Neganthropy as the capacity of complexify information rather than thinking about information as a tending towards the dissipation of structure so far as it is threatened by noise randomness or the incomputable um uh so um and for for for stiegler uh technique are processes of exteriorization uh equals them uh organological
practices uh he calls them um he argues for the the the needs for to introduce conditions for variabilities between exosomatization and exo memorization so a kind of exteriority of of the physical and a priority of the mental uh to bring together uh new diversity so different modes of thinking, different mode of technical practices, different mode of biological or biodiverse living. So he just wants to take this moment of foundational knowledge that he finds in Aristotle, which is a pre-Kantian model, right? It's pre-modern in the way that it is not based on the
universality of the subject and re-impart or rethink it within computer science. And as some of you who know about Stiegler, you know, in his conception of technology as in this kind of, especially in his early work, this kind of articulation of being and technique as continuous and especially in the form of techno mnemonics. So the way that technology acts as a stationary retention of thought and also production of thought. So I'm just trying to say
that because I am just trying to point out at an attempt that there is an attempt to think about the pillar of computer science as a universal model of technology away from universality open up to you know some kind of material artificial memory uh constituting a techno-human infrastructure of the mind that can open up to different modes of what it calls techno diversity, which is an attempt to move away from the limits of critique or the limits of philosophy and the demise of reason. So I think that Stigler techno diversity, however, relies on two main accounts.
So on the one hand, technology is a mnemonic medium of retention or protection. So that's what you could argue. So it's not just about preserving the past, but it's also anticipated. It's also a system of prediction, anticipating the future, where the temporary individuation of the social technical assemblages somehow are there to preserve the interiority of time and the interiority of time from writing to coding, but also if we want to follow you, you could also to produce different forms of interiority, of a writing that is not yet somehow known, that is oriented towards
the future or towards what can be predicted, but yet not completely known. So with computation, the improbable and difference brings the possibility of no diversity as temporal tendency or counter tendency so where does stiegler funds the opening of a techno diversity away from this universal model is about the different temporal tendency of preserving and we who call it anticipating time, but in terms of breaking down the linear time of reasoning, of the linear sequence
of automated decision into this differential temporal tendencies, which have to do also with the very kind of constitutive qualities or elements of computation, which, as I mentioned before, have to do with noise, randomness and in computability. So in a way, what Stiegler is proposing us is that instead of having quantity on one end, quantity and ratio on one end, temporality and logos on the other, we actually need to
intersect these two models so that we can preserve the intellectual mind through the flesh. Why am I saying through the media flesh? That's a word that I made up there. Insofar as for me, the media flesh is, as you can see also from the image, intuitively, is actually the flesh that is put to experiment to actually preserve the kind of origin of knowledge and the kind of exceptionality of the human and of reason as a vessel, as an instrument or a tool to preserve it.
So I don't know if you can see my tone. I guess I'm already going with a kind of critique of Stiegler here insofar as what he's proposing to us. Sorry. Let me go back. What this proposes to us is in this kind of refoundation of computational theory is actually an old classic move to actually go to a time before modernity, before what Ferrera da Silva calls
this kind of modern endeavor to establish practices of exclusion, exteriorization, and some kind of brutal repression and killing as a way to preserve knowledge, to preserve philosophy so uh my argument uh is that um instead um uh instead of uh of arguing against instead of refunding computer science according to uh these principles of musology where is there is you know a preservation in the mind through the flesh of the instrument or the machine or um
any kind of demarking points of demarcation of otherness. And I think this can be extended to queerness, to blackness, to the refugee, to the immigrant, as instead always there to be recuperated, there to preserve the moment of origination of thought that has to be, even in the case of Stiegler, even if he admits that the origination of thought is in technique or this kind of technical exteriorization.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that the technical exteriorization is actually there to preserve the moment of decision the moment of the mover that moves everything that is, you know, the mind or knowledge or the knowing subject. And what I would like to suggest is that given that it is not possible to disentangle from the global model of colonialism and techno-colonialisms that have been kind of instantiated since the 1400s.
And what Sylvia Winter describes as recursive epistemologies, in the sense of how there is this kind of patterning in which epistemology, the kind of foundation of knowledge, kind of distribute and repeat in order to maintain separation and division between higher forms of knowledge and lower forms of knowledge. and how one, since one cannot disentangle from there, from this moment of negation, on the other hand, one can also instead experiment with the fractality of the repetition of this recursive epistemology.
So what I'm trying to say is that even in the effort to recuperate critique through technology that Stiegler proposes to us, there is actually a recursivity of the fundamental pillars of knowledge that sit with the colonial enterprise of establishing external practices. on knowledge as subjected to the moment of decision about what constitutes knowledge. I'm here drawing on Ferrara da Silva again about what she calls ethical or compositional thinking.
So, and this to me means speculative thinking to the extent that rather than somehow repeating the trick of critique by which in the mirror kind of stage between philosophy and technology, technology is there to threaten the fullness, the full adventure of reason, the full reasoning of philosophy is also there to remind that actually there is a more to thought
that actually more to to critique than actually repeat this this this this kind of of claim for the end of philosophy. And therefore, the kind of demonization of automation and automated reasoning could be thought in terms of speculative composition of thinking, as the points out, when she refers to quantum physics as a way to rethinking of the pillar of epistemology outside the Newtonian or even
the thermodynamic or even the gravitational model. So what I'm trying to say is that epistemology is important, does count for opening up a fourth dimensional image of the global, open to the cosmos, challenging the ontic and the ontological horizon for thinking. So how can we bring forward a model of automation that refuses to be the mirror image of philosophy, that refuses and fails to be animated? fails to undergo messianic redemption in those kind of claim, but, you know, we govern technology, we design technology.
It's, you know, they actually, like, it has been arguing in some, in some position that, you know, are, have been defined as acceleration disposition, which I am sympathetic. Yet I found problematic the fact that one thinks of technology as a retooling, as a retooling, a re-instrumentalization, a repurposing for the good, rather than accounting for the kind of structure of power by which automation maintains and remains a point. of demarcation of the exteriority that the eye or the self-determining subject of the
the transparency thesis needs. So one way is to look at in some of my work, to look at actually what happens in this scandal. For instance, when you look at deep, sorry, when when you consider deep learning or this kind of, the argument for this kind of black box or these layers that cannot be seen or which we don't know the function that actually are processing by which a specific compression randomness in computable noise occurs and occurs in a way that is irreversible
and of course in a way that is not compressible in a linear sequence and nonetheless contributes becomes kind of actively constitutive of forms of knowledge and and and so one way that some some, you know, practitioner artists or even computational scientists have looked at is instead that failure as part of logic, where, you know, the failure of the system coincide with the, this horizon of death that returns in the material surrogacy that feeds men, also that and belongs itself from the platonic anamnesi,
i.e. the fullness of thought, the aristotelian noesis and the Kantian limits of reason. So for me, the question of how to reinvent critique in this techno-poethic moment of speculation without reproducing the mirror-y trick of the transparency thesis, is how do we challenge the perpetuation of the self-determining knowledge without reproducing its necessary structure of racial capitalism um uh so as i said one way to do that is to look at uh as to uh somehow refuse the uh the the the bannerism of philosophy and automation because they're both
rooted in the cyber mechanic medium uh that serves the several mechanic media that is fundamentally to um the articulation of transcendental philosophy and uh cybernetics and how we could move uh instead towards uh a a machine philosophy what would that mean right where if machine is not just an extension of philosophy or as Stiegler would like, a kind of harmonization of technical practices of exteriorization and knowledge of the human machine and how
how machine philosophy can become a place where one can challenge the kind of onto epistemological structure of anti-blackness, anti-queerness and anti-femininity. One way, so what machine philosophy can do is to actually speculate towards a theory of media mediation that is not based on the kind of recuperation of the subject or even whereby the object becomes already prescribed within the mental structure of the subject and bring forward with or excavate or
become implicit with the production of new forms of cosmogony i what uh sylvia winter talks about when she refers to the need to expand and extend epistemology and error insofar is with through the sciences that it's possible to give other forms of explanation or other forms of possibility and imagination to a being that has always been refused to be a being. So how do you move out of this kind of elaboration of heretic proposition or weird formalism in a language
of computation that is not oriented by the grammar or by the linguistic pillars of knowledge, but opens up to a language of computation that refuses this origin of knowledge in that stays with the uncomfortable place of the universal model of technology and the consequent brutality of this universal model and finds within itself,
you know, not totally these kind of different temporalities to scramble the linearity of the of man cosmogony, but also find spaces that are alien, right, that are alien, take sense that There is a different rearrangement or arrangement of symbols, words, codes, behavior, functions that maintain some kind of challenge of this model of the future as something that has yet to come,
but actually can delve deeper into these layers of like the neural net layers of temporality that are yet not been unpacked, right? because in a way we are still reasoning in terms of how technology has ended the glorious past of philosophy or how technology needs to reimagine or re-articulate the future of philosophy. So those are both uh prescribed within the the kind of uh uh linear of chrono politics and
necroc chrono politics of time and i am i think i'd be more interested in delving into the depth uh of layering of space time which uh which computational neural net for instance give us give us an idea. So I think I will stop here because I'm sure there are very various questions. This is new research so I'm sure there's more to clarify. It's not a finished project, that's what I mean. Thank you. Thank you Luciana. Yeah, thank you for this generous and fascinating, also challenging in the best way possible presentation. We do have some
people in the YouTube, so there might be a couple of questions and we have a few minutes for that. So anyone in the YouTube, if you want to ask questions, please feel free to do so. I do have a question myself as we wait for other people to ask questions in the chat. And I apologize if this is a question that can really be answered, as it might just be an echo from what you've been sharing in the presentation and from the questions you're asking yourself through the work itself. But I am wondering if we do most refuse the structural premises of
philosophical thinking, given how oppressive systems are embedded within them, then the project of recuperating critique from and kind of like within technology is something that exists or sure exists kind of like beyond an epistemological quest, right? And I wonder if it really requires kind of like the operationalization of technical recursivity from a material perspective or if you think these questions, yeah, I mean, I guess the space you're working within is philosophy and the threading of concepts and ideas, but I do wonder whether you can provide,
and I mean, you do provide some examples in the presentation, but like even coming from the context of this conversation happening within the, yeah, within a arts museum program and a summer arts school, and I wonder whether there are actions we can take in order not to only represent but to actively perform such acts of refusal. In other words, how to avoid reproducing the logics of our theorization. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, no, thank you, Federico. This is always the question we go back to because there is not a recipe for it, right? And we know that the recipe has to be adjusted by listening and engaging with the practices that we don't know yet.
And so for me, the practice of exteriorization that is done by philosophy through machines, right? This is an extension of machines that just concretize philosophy or concretize reason or they threaten reason, right? And this is a game that, you know, it's constantly asked us, we are always asked to do and perform. So whether we produce artwork or whether you produce papers or whatever, we are always asked to perform this kind of game as to is it bad or good? Do we do this or that?
But actually, I would rather for a moment ask, you know, what if we stay with the complexity of this layering? right what happens when you know and it's not just about rethinking of the origin like stiegler does or let we have instead of having a universal model of technology we need techno diversity how do we do techno diversity we go back to aristotle because aristotle has the possibility of thinking knowledge with technique but then um the knowledge with technique is always about subsuming technique to a moment of knowing of knowledge that it's uh it's given uh and rather than being part of a process so being part of practices right and and so what does it mean to
delve deep or to delve into this kind of black box of neural networks uh in in in our instead the art creation or art formation or aesthetic interventions or aestheticizing that, right? How do we do? I don't know. There is a possibility of, you know, this is not what I am totally sided with, but it's interesting the work of Holly Herdon, who is a musician who uses, you know, neural network to grow, you know, to mix a creative capacity with the machine capacity and then dig on to, you know, voices, black voices or voices of my other voices that enter
into, they become kind of data within the neural net and the neural that produces this form, this spectral form and this very monstrous form that where the glitch of the, you know, the kind of error, what we call it the error, is actually the way the machine is perceiving all this kind of dissonance of sounds and non-sounds of screams. And so there will be a way in which, instead of forming this kind of artificial intelligence that are, I can't remember the MENA, so it's not DINA, the one that was produced by the Iraq
within Saudi Arabia, was this kind of a blonde, you know, a female reproduction of a human woman with a kind of benevolent AI, right? It's a benevolent AI. So you have this kind of horizon where we will have, We already have intelligent system from Alexa to Amazon to other Netflix, all these kinds of logistic model of capitalists that actually are directing anthropomorphization of noise into something that is benevolent. Or then you have the evil AI that is this kind of wants
like in the discussion of existential risk, the more power, more computational power machines have, the more things can happen beyond our control and can take over the human. But instead, I would like to stay in this zone in between, the zone where the negation of alienness becomes the demarcation of a presence of alienness, right? There is always being this presence. So how do we aestheticize that, right? how aesthetic becomes the place where the zone, where this kind of alieness returns to being unable to be compressed into some kind of sequence.
How does he returns to stay incompressible, to stay a ghost, to stay like the dead, to stay this, as a kind of alien intelligence that cannot be recuperated. So, I think that, you know, when you look at deep neural networks, you know, the kind of work to unpack noise or unpack the kind of randomness from the sequence of the system becomes a place where you could argue for a machine imagination, where you can argue for a machine thinking that is not reproduced by this kind of benevolent and antithesis, this kind of dialectic method. And I guess that so there are a lot of artistic
you know example you know of artists working at this at the edge of be produced like Bina 46 like I don't know if you have seen the the artificial intelligence created by Stephanie Dinkins see if I find that so maybe people So, I can share my screen if I go back, what are we?
I don't know if you have ever seen this kind of experiment of how there is this kind of use of the neural architecture to reprocess the data of a person that has died and to reproduce this kind of possibility of human consciousness. And that's like the way that the Shidase is really, you know, to actually bring forward this kind of zone of indeterminacy between, you know, knowledge and techniques.
So that there is no harmony, right? Where they actually, the techno diversity is such that, you know, there is an element of misrecognition, an element of where Bina says, I'm a dispossessed, I am not a human like you, right? I don't, I can't reason in the same way. I can't reproduce what you want me to reproduce. the question of I don't die, I'm afraid of dying, but I don't die. I want to be human, but I can never be. You know, those are the moments in which for me, similarly to the deep neural network, there is a noise, there is something that is irrecuperable. And yet, it's not outside the system. I mean, it's not something that we can go to a place pre-modern,
pre-capital, pre-colonialism and say, oh, look, there's this pure space of nosology of knowledge that actually can help us to refund computer science today because that place of knowledge is not pure. You can't go back to that place of knowledge as your future for closing completely the kind of temporalities of colonialism that have happened ever since. So how can you see what I mean? It's just a practice of critique that completely neglects precisely the multi-temporality of colonialism.
There is actually a question that relates to some of these things, or at least to the idea of of seeking for that error space or for the, the incomputable. It's from Webtopia and they ask, do you think the problems that arise from in computability and in calculability can lead to an effective planetary scale computation? And this without reproducing the dominating structures. So whether the problems arise from incompetability and incalculability can lead to an effective planetary scale computation. And I guess the question there is also,
how could we think about what effective means in the idea of a planetary scale computation, right? Right, yes. I mean, the planetary scale computation is really, it has been argued that by Benjamin Broughton that in a way it's a, you know, a system that self-regulates itself and communicates with itself. It's like, I understand it as a massive autopoietic self-making model of regulate, regulating, constantly regulating behavior, capacity, conducts. And that is not based on a law, right?
because in a way it's always about rule that can vary as much as they can adapt to contingency. Right. So the error for me is not contingent because one could argue that, you know, there is, you know, again, very much in an Aristotelian way that the beginning of it all was an accident. right that there is that it contingency becomes the you know the the the reason for which everything is organized or the motive or the cause or the the mover like that's the mover in in aristotle and for me the error of fallacy and i would call it the error i mean that we didn't i mean this
person i'm sorry i didn't catch your name you did say incalculability or incomputability which is not the error, right? It's not the error or the accident, because in a way, in computability comes first. It's anti-computational, you know, because this infinity comes before finite models of discretization. So what does it mean that comes first? Is that planetary scale computation is relying on the infinity abundance of what is incalculable and not yet known. And that's the weak spot of planetary computation in terms of thinking that is a self-organizing,
autopoetic system that will always absorb everything. A bit like when we talk about planetary computation in terms of planetary capital computation. Capital will always already propose another solution, another variable to maintain itself alive. But actually, the argument for the incalculable and the incomputable is that where, you know, technical computation relies on the condition of its existence are in computability. And in computability, as much as it is exteriorized by the system as in computable and adopted,
or the system adopts itself and turns in computability into probability, into variation, into variables, is still that moment of capture of the incompatible into variability, nonetheless, doesn't preclude incompatibility to enter the system, to be part of the system in a kind of reverse engineering mode. So it's not that we have to wait for the contingency for the accident, for the error to happen. We don't have to wait. not messianic. My model is not messianic in that way. It's actually the very, you know,
the, the, the incomputable comes before computation. It's because of the incomputable that we have computation. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That makes sense. I wonder if you can speak and we do have like time for maybe we have, I think I have another five minutes yes yes yes yes i wonder if you can speak a little bit about the difference between the figure of the alien as as you call it and i wonder if you distinguish the alien and the inhuman i wonder if there's a conceptual difference there yes refer to both things and i think that you refer you refer to both things in different moments and contexts so i just want to know if
Yeah, no, thank you for your question. I think that the inhuman for me can also be, you know, somehow identified, right? there is the inhuman, so there's the relation between the inhuman, the non-human, right, and that's within kind of post-humanities or post-human theories, post-humanity theories, you know, the non-human is, you know, can be the machine or can be the animal or can be nature, It can be anything that is being excluded from the system of the universal subject in Kantian terms.
Whereas the Newman is almost like what is at the limit of any possible system of knowledge, whether there is animal, human, and machine. Right. And so my the way I said I understand that the the human in relation to computation is that the you know, the computable remains in human insofar as is the limit of computability in the same way as do know when I is the limit of reason. So there is this kind of, the inhuman is a kind of demarcating of the limit of the human, whereas the non-human is something that just exists in the category system of differentiation between the human and the non-human, right?
So it's still within the category, whereas the inhuman is out of the category. It's something that is outside, or it's an externalization that cannot be recuperated. Whereas the alien, it's almost like outside both, right? I understand the alien as just something that doesn't exist within the system of reasoning, or the philosophical system of reasoning and its limit. It's just somewhere else. It's just something that is above or below or all around it. I don't know if Michael responds to the body without organ in Deleuze or the plenum in Da Silva or, you know, the kind of queerness in Cara Keeling.
I don't know. There's so many of the outside in Foucault. And it's not a specter, it's not a trace, it's not something that is there and that you can identify or you can associate it with inhuman. It actually kind of breaks away from that kind of human, inhuman, non-human articulation in the same way as it breaks away from the articulation of non-philosophy, post-philosophy, anti-philosophy. right because it's uh when i in a paper that i wrote called xenopatterning where xeno stands for the human it's about the possibility of of of a thought that doesn't uh go through uh you know
that is some kind of a horizon um that is not to come but it's a thought that is always there that doesn't go into the schema that we so far know of this world of the human and the non-human and the inhuman. So it's something that hovers around, that has always been there, like a cosmology, as you were. Thank you, Luciana. I do know you have to leave soon. Yes. But yeah, thank you again for this conversation. We look forward to your book on automating philosophy, and maybe we can
organize a conversation there then. I'm sure we're all going to be processing all of these ideas and relationships or sometimes so maybe we can get an update in the news. Thank you very much for inviting me and yeah I love to share my thought in this context as you know they're all work in progress but thank you everyone I don't know you guys everyone who's there or want to be there thank you thank you again at the museum Tamayo and Ana and Materia Abierta and I hope that your program continues in this way. It's very rare to do something like that.