Hello everyone, so my name is Ihoi. Thank you for being here. I know it's quite late for some of you and quite early for some of you as well. So welcome to the eighth edition of the Research Seminar, Dialogues on Philosophy and Technology. So today I have the great pleasure to welcome Luciana Parisi to be our guest and to discuss with us today on the question of computation, philosophy of technology and so on. So let me briefly introduce Luciana. I think most of you already know her. It is her work. So I met Luciana quite a long time ago at Goldsmiths College in London when she was a professor there.
and later she also become one of the examiners of my PhD a long time ago. Currently Luciana is a professor at the program in literature and computational media arts and culture at Duke University. As I said before she was at Gose before quite a long time. Her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She was a member of the legendary CCRU Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and currently a co-founding member of the Critical Computation Bureau together with
Tiziana Terranova and other colleagues. She's the author of Object Sex, Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Design published in 2004 by Continuum and Contagious Architecture, Computation, Aesthetics and Space published in 2013 by the MIT Press and now she's completing a monograph on alien epistemologies and the transformation of logical thinking in computation and today uh Luciana suggests to discuss reverse um a topic titled a subject titled instrumentality and the possibility so um what we are going to do as some of you know already um Luciana is going to talk about these
subjects and then later we are going to have a dialogue and after the dialogue we will open the the questions to the public. So thank you, Luciana. Hi, thank you very much. You can really, really pleased to be here. And whenever I think it's very fun to remember those times that we met in a goldsmith. There was a very productive times and I am really fond of our conversations. and I'm really glad that we are still in conversation after all this time. And I always feel that I can learn so much from when I read your work.
And I have a highly respect for the way you continue to challenge this question of computation, of the digital, of cybernetics, and maintain this kind of tension between philosophy and technology, which, you know, it's also, of course, as you know, one of my cracks. So I'm going to talk today, I'm going to share some of my thoughts. This is part of a few projects that I've been working on recently. There's a few publications this paper today is inspired to, but there's also more there that is waiting to come forward. and I will really welcome your comments.
I'm looking forward to this dialogue. So to start with, I've entitled this talk instrumentality possibility from inspired to a course that I just finished teaching at Duke, a postgraduate course, where the challenge is to try and think instrumentality outside, within, and also against the kind of legacy of critique of instrumentality and of instrumental reason, as developed by the Frankfurt School and around the Second World War and in the work of the
Dialectative of Alignment by Adorno and Harkheimer and in relation to its kind of problematization and antipathy towards this question, this idea, this method really of instrumentality as developed by American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, but also to some extent Charles Sander Pierce. And the way this kind of critique of instrumentality of instrumental reason has entered a kind and dominant representation manifestation within a contemporary critical theory of technology,
especially for those of us who work with questioning the possibility of the digital object or computational system or a system, no systems, or the approach to knowledge or the system or in terms of the system or the systemic today. So I might my work recently has been following this line of legacy of this kind of critique at this kind of legacy of the critique of instrumental reason that is very much present in our approach to contemporary critical technology. And my work therefore starts from a question as to how and why
the critical instrumental reason maintains this prominent scene within the landscape of debates about what computation is, what it could be, What are the social political possibility of reconfiguring or questioning the pillars of modern knowledge and modern epistemology? And so this kind of ambivalent role that technology has within, you know, contemporary culture is something that is obviously of great interest to me. So I'm just going to go and look at some of this, read some of this material that I've prepared for you, and then we go for discussion. So instrumentality, I understand that generally as a method of correlation between means and ends.
And as such, I think it is a method that can contribute to question the assumed correlation between technology and philosophy. And I hope that this can become clear as I talk through. So instrumentality is generally understood in terms of the critique of instrumental reason and in contemporary debates about how intelligent automation maintains a kind of dominant role in relation to critical thinking. So, in particular, once instrumentality can be considered through John Dewey's suggestion and work, especially essay in experimental, sorry, essay in, I can't remember the title,
It is possible to challenge the perspective of instrumental reason by questioning the assumption that with industrial and informational capitalism, the medium replaces critical thinking and the datum replaces the adiatum. Instead of an equivalence between the datum and adiatum, with Dewey one can argue that data and ideas rather both stem from instrumentality or mediations as mode of elaboration of thinking or thinking practices that one can see as being both immanent and transcendental. So by thinking of instrumentality, through John Dewey, which I will clarify a little
bit in a second, the premise of thinking of instrumentality and not as a mean to an end, but in terms of its immanence and transcendentality, is a way to think of means as in terms of how thinking happens and how thinking practices can transform the very condition of what happens. So how the thinking practices can transform the very condition of what happens and therefore challenging the way in which instrumentality has been defined primarily in binary terms of use, usability versus user uselessness. So my point is that the instrumental reason, and the critique of
instrumental reason is still lodged in this binary, in this diet, on this kind of convenient model of metering what is usable or what is use usable to in relation to what is that is useless. So we do it. I try to, I've tried in some of my work that I've published, I swear to envision thinking as instrumental to an environment and not as an ontological constitutive of self-determination or self-posing or self-decision, which is based on the boundaries of telos and the medium. Instead, instrumentality defines thought or intelligence
by function, by what is carried on, by the bearing of the process as it unfolds in the practice. So instrumentality is the bearing of the process as it unfolds in the practice. Thought in these terms does not start with a power, thought is not an entity or a substance or an activity which is ready made, or which constitutes the world. world. Instead, for dewey knowledge and thinking as leading to knowledge results from the discernment or the articulation of possible correlations between events and processes of change. From
this standpoint, ideas are not an ontology, are not a thing, but they are not, and neither are given categories or eternal forms, but are instruments of orientation in the world. Specifically, ideas for Dewey are plans of actions and are predictors of future events. In idea, an idea, therefore, is also a way to retroactive reflect on effects from mediation insofar as the latter a mediation the very practice of mediation orientates thought towards the futurity that has no image a futurity that has not been thought
already that is not prescribed as the total sum of chronological sequences or individual sets From this standpoint, instrumentality as this plan of action, a predictor, and as an activity that is not given, can offer us a possibility to open up a dialogue of technology philosophy where one could argue that the correlation between means and ends at the core of debates about, for instance, artificial intelligence today can be unearthed or disentangled or unhinged from the critique of instrumentality or instrumental reason.
The question is, how can an instrument be there for others without reproducing the blueprint it was designed for? How can instrumentality disrupt the balance of the original judgment that decides what is useful from what is useless? How in other words can the medium be other than what it is programmed to do, that is other than its use and usability, which otherwise leaves the medium to a soulless existence. If the central pillar of instrumentality is used for an end, it is because instrumentality is determined by a principle of uselessness.
because instrumentality is always already caught in the diet with the conceiving of the mean as a as being an empty mean without end which indeed i want to suggest confers to machines and always already status of surrogacy in the world of men. When artificial intelligence today appears in the discursive circuits, for instance, of transhumanism and posthumanism, it carries with it this fundamental paradox, this mirror of use and uselessness embedded in the structural meaning
where the syntactical functions are only there to sustain the symbolic representation of man. If transhumanism holds on the use usability of AI to render man's consciousness equally superior to a creature's, posthumanism rather turns the uselessness of machines into a potential platform whereby humans and machines are made equivalent and so are all other creatures. The paradox of instrumentality here continues to be preserved in the continuous polymorphous variation of what can be human as this variation expands use and usability to a point of absolute
impossibility or negation or uselessness. In other words, use and usability cannot stand alone without the ground, without the matter of uselessness, which is constantly referred to in order to justify why man needs to give semantic meaning, existence and history to machines. So what I'm saying here is that instrumentality is, despite the kind of premise that Dewey is offering us, nonetheless, I agree that instrumentality is enfolded in the
modern myth of Prometheus. The technological emancipation of man is continuous with the program of colonial capitalism, whose logic of accumulation turns uselessness enslaved populations. into use through ownership, abstraction and extraction of what is deemed to be a value by less value in the construction of a global map of the modern empire. Instrumentality, therefore, cannot be disentangled from what Lisa Law in the book, the for the intimacy of the four continent calls the colonial archive defining the global processing of numbers measurements
statistics strategies classifications and what she calls an imperial technology of colonial imperialism and governance and governance the integrated circuit of this infinite usability and this infinite capacity of use of of the enslaved population is what connects the Promethean myth to the colonial archive and constitutes what Cedric Robinson calls the racial capitalism, whereby modern liberalism defined the human and universalized its attributes to European men, while it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human.
However, as much as instrumentality has become the modern motor of what Sylvia Winter calls recursive epistemology, I want to suggest that it's also preserved within itself the alieness or uselessness. The non-human, inhuman, less than human condition that are not always are to be preserved in order to reproduce the original condition of surrogacy in what are defined as mindless machines. As instrumentality becomes part of men's project of transcendental reason, one can argue that
it is also part of what Silvia Wynter calls cosmogony, or the origin story of modern knowledge. The over-representation of modern cosmogony, I suggest, already includes the myth of Prometheus, the auto-poietic creator and maker of the word. Prometheus promises human progress against the organic decay of man and guarantees the extension of reason through the rationality of the colonial archive. Prometheus gives man a future that can free him from the useless darkness of the unknown.
What Prometheus promises is a continuation of modern metaphysics by other means, where the servomechanic mediatic condition of useless enslaved labor can also be understood as flesh, as servomechanic flesh, that animates, fuels the Promethean myth. By servomechanic flesh, or what I also call techno flesh, I intend the material matrix whose extraction and abstraction of energy in the capital circuit of value is used to justify the racialization of knowledge and the speciation of the human.
This is a mode of absolute enslavement that sustains colonial violence in the universality of cultural differences under which Promethean capitalism promised to save whole humanity. However, the historical reconfiguration of capitalist slavery showed that it's precisely the servomechanic intelligence that has been systematically neglected, dismissed, and abandoned in critical accounts of the social reproduction of capital, which have fundamentally seen machines through the lenses of use and usability that is in terms of their uselessness. This is what sets the limits of the transformation of both philosophy and technology
insofar as debates about machine intelligence today confirm the tropes of this fundamental diet of use a uselessness when machines are addressed as in terms of mindless efficiencies, non-conscious functionality meaningless language a causeless decision for the coupling of means and ends at the core of instrumentality is constitutive of the autopoietic principle of self-making caught within the telos or useless or usefulness and uselessness since autopoiesis entails a principle of organization that is said to preserve energy in evolving systems, it also maintains an entropic principle of accumulation and discharge.
As such, topoiesis is a pillar of capital slavery, namely the circuitry of value extracted from slavery coincide with the incorporation, by which I mean the diet of inclusion and exclusion, exclusion of charge and discharge of energy that must grant the survival and evolution of the man system. This is the energy value circuit that measures energy that is otherwise deemed to be useless. As the Promethean entanglement of computation and colonialism continues to preserve and diversify slavery in the form of surrogate labor or human machines in the global south,
for instance, just think of mechanical turks. It also continues to expand the condition of what Jasper Puar calls slow death everywhere. Automated reason distributes the brutality of or recursive epistemology at all levels of living by constantly re-scripting results towards one and the same output. It is not a surprise that today chatterbots can only have conversations that confirm the epistemological fixities of categories that match names, jobs, hairstyles with biased concepts of race, gender, sexuality and class. On the other side, however, on the other side of instrument of instrumentality, the side
where instrumentality, a bubble, can coincide with thinking functions that are not predetermined that is where they are not executors of ideas. There is a possibility of starting with the servomechanic flesh itself. i.e. what does it mean if we were to start our conversation between philosophy and technology from the negative negation or the uselessness of what can be just a mean to an end i.e. a woman, a refugee, a migrant, homeless, a queer or blackness. What carries i.e. the marker of the the double excluded from the dyadic logic of the inclusive excluded or the other.
In other words, to overturn the teleological in framing of the universal myth of Prometheus, the several mechanic flesh can be here taken as being always already generative of breaks within the dominant cosmogony of man. Today I want to discuss with you as to how in open up the discussion how to offer alternative epistemology. Epistemology they start from the know-hows, i.e. from the practices of knowing that are already the technicity functions, rules, syntactical relations, processing the that hack back the premises of onto epistemological knowledge rooted at the core of modernity.
While it is not possible to go back to a pre-capitalist, pre-colonial, pre-global spatial temporality, there is also a possibility of unleashing alienness from within this monotonic representation of the cosmogony of men from engaging with practices, a practice of fugitive that have run through the plotting. I the alien generation of know house of functions and operation that several mechanics through mentality and run continuously beneath the standardization of use and usability. of machines. The point is not to maintain the significance of uselessness or to promote
the design of useless technology or useless digital object or even art object that refuse any use, but to suggest that while the critique of instrumentality is locked in this diet, this mirror stage of use and uselessness, human reason and mindless automation, or human dignity and inconclusive chains of endless effects in automated technology today. I think that the point is that one is to suspend this kind of critique that overlook the existence of techno practices that several mechanic flash a boat forward a cultivated each and every time
against and outside the violence of recursive colonialism. So in a way our fixation with this diet between how machine take away our human dignity, our human primary narcissism is actually a problematically caught in this in the model of recursive colonialism. From this standpoint, one can take the crisis of transcendental reason and the lamented automated intelligence is stripping away our transcendental imagination in cybernetic computational capitalism as a symptom. So the crisis, I see the crisis as a symptom of an otherwise instrumentality,
as already a rapture in the strata of teleological programming of the medium on behalf of the structure of power that Sylvia Winter understands as the bioeconomic success of men. These raptures are already passed, in other words, are already hacking are already present in the monotonic formation of modern epistemology. In the way, as for instance, in notes on black acceleration is my idea, then, suggests that blackness is always already acceleration is.
And the concern with technology or what she calls right and left accelerationism involves always already a critique of humanism through Afrofuturism and Afro-pessimism, which she argues is attached to a struggle for and against humanism, which highlight the dissolution of subjectivity in the way that one can re-entangle technology and politics in the critique of capital. I just want to make a little parenthesis that I think this question of how Aria-Din talks about blackness as always already acceleration reminds me also of how Zadia Jackson talks
about blackness has always already been part of plasticity in their argument with the concept of neuroplasticity that some have also been working on, for instance, Malabo in the critique of technology. However, Ariadine argues that what remains overlooked in this critical subjectivity is precisely what she calls the black non-subject, which has rather subtended the continuous process of primitive accumulation. What is missing in the critique of Afrofuturism is the black non-subject as the germinal history of racial capitalism, where the inhuman non-subject is already
the Black and is not in search of reparation, of having to become human or having to justify its post-human relation with technology. She argues that the Black non-subject does not fulfill this kind of Promethean model of alienation and liberation from capital. above all because the black non subject can never and will never denote property, i.e. as not property of its own. The capitalist process of islaming and dispossession and therefore impossibility of owning of personhood places blackness at the center of the apocalypse,
of the crisis of the trust of transcendental reason and bring forward why the fear of automation as the end of the world profoundly challenges the cosmogony of men based on biocentric story of evolution and also a mathematical universality of former reason. Here, black acceleration is becomes both and quote the agent of the words the means and its inheritor and end of quote. By placing a black radical thought at the core of acceleration is my already seems to speak to something that I was recently.
recently put to my attention the work of James Boggs, who was a cybernetician and a Black activist and abolitionism, who claimed that automation will bring to an end the white structure of labor. In his short essay, The Evolving Society, James Boggs talks about the enslave implantation economy and cybernetics as developed in the form of the cotton gene. He argues that the development of the new machine, i.e., the cotton gene, imparted the demand for more labor.
What he calls this labor, cybernation, and he, end quote, he defines it as the automation of the nerve centers operated not by men, but by computing machines that are eliminating the need for what he calls Negro jobs. The automated machines, he suggests, is behind the move of what he calls Negro employment towards civil service and social service arena and teaching jobs. For Boggs, this meant that while and what he calls Negroes will be employed in technology jobs occupied by whites, they will nonetheless become central to the decision making determining
the final disposition of the results of technology. So in this little article that I suggest you guys read, The Evolving Society, James Boggs seems to refer not only to what, for instance, Simone Doble called a technical mentality, the importance of cybernetics transforming the technical mentality, not just of the individual and machines, but of the old social structure. But here it's interesting how to see, how James Boggs also speaks to Simone Donne technical mentality in terms of a political mentality
that accompanies the technical, to challenge the view of instrumentality as a servomechanic uselessness, as a kind of empty vessel to be programmed to an end. It is cybernetics as mentality and not just according to Vox, as you read it, you can see that it is cybernetics as mentality and not how many white people can be technically trained that leads to the revolutionary path of cybernetics. And he argues that those who are left outside technical employment as the last hired and the first fired can rather exercise the political power that breaks from American economic tradition.
Boggs concludes that what he calls Negro are best equipped than whites to the mode of automation that is destroying the economic model the whites were used to. So I would take, so these are just some examples that I'm thinking with in order to unpack this kind of parallel conditions of cyber mechanic instrumentality that have broken from within the monotonic infrastructure or teleological modernity of which we continue to, you know,
leave the legacy both in its kind of governance, but also in the critique of this governance. Instrumentality, therefore, can become a possibility for what I've called in other places alienness, that is a praxis of spatiotemporality that are alien, i.e. that are posed at the very edge of the uselessness binary. As much as the myth of Prometheus appears to intensify the global speciation of knowledge, where the gendering, racializing and sexualizing of automated thinking is there to mirror and to reify the self determination of modern of the modern subject across culture. culture, so too one could argue intelligent automation has been challenging the very dignity
of the human subject, of human reason, but falling short of fulfilling the universality of the manifest image of man. The common sense human life form or simply what it means to be people in a world or even to have a world and this is what I mean by the manifest image which is an idea that I drew from uh John Sellers is already predicted on the cosmogony of men for which there is only one people only one world uh only one uh techno liberal world instrumentality instead may point to the break between the manifest image and the scientific image, where we're starting from
synaptic conception of neurons on neural connection to junk and viral DNA from quirks to showing the equation from computational learning to quantum particles, as well as from the mechanical reproduction of sound to software engineering or samples, the pillar of modern and onto epistemology have broken infinite have been broken infinite times. As much as instrumentality defines the way at the core or defines the core of modern philosophy, transcendental reason and and transcendental imagination have been delivered to the scientific image through the capitalist industrial information rationality that have also been irreversible possibility of otherwise
imagination, sociality and alien living. From this standpoint, one can argue, parche to the Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger, to some extent, I'm also referring to Bernard Stiegler and to some extent also to a shield member who have argued against the new barbarism and the brutalism of the technoscientific image that the ingression of information technology means into the teleological model of philosophy only demonstrates a material differences in practices of knowing how and in the library in the elaboration of alien reasoning that has rather exposed the main machine equation of value to a generative reality of infinite numbering stemming
from the techno flesh that is from information processing itself so uh part of the frankfurt school and the legacy of this critique of the new barbarism of techno-capital. Today, I want to suggest, together with Simon Don, that information is here rather to be understood as an allopoietic instrumentality, exposing its pattern complexity, its incomputable differential, its alien logical, syntactical, semantic interaction interaction outside the autopoietic circuit or potential use usability based on the always already demarcated ground of uselessness. As much as artificial intelligence has taken
reasoning beyond its transcendental logic, there's also brought materiality in instrumentality that is a matter function of syntactical interaction at the level of information. It is from this And from this standpoint that I would suggest that a dialogue of technology and philosophy can become open again against the benevolent cruelty of Promethean capital and its distributed surrogacy. The new lord reminds us neither use nor repurposing of use are enough to return the patriarchal or what I would call the Promethean patriarchal box of tools and its modular variation in the ever changing mesh of colonial capital.
Within the parametric architecture of variability of today's racist patriarchy, the materiality of instrumentality may imply that in order to hack the tools of the master, one has to spare automated reasoning from the desire to become human. The Promethean form of man will indeed leave no space for the human to become harder than again and again himself. But how to reactivate or recondition techno-cultural parameters, techno-political logic, techno-economic protocols, how to hack from the outside the colonialism of Promethean capitalism.
A philosopher and critical theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva explains that the scientific philosophical understanding of difference still relies on the what she calls the principle of separability of a social whole constituted by separate parts that summarize humanity under the universal standard of, in quote, white European collectives, in quote. Ferrera da Silva proposes to invert the pillars of modern epistemology from within the scientific explanation that concepts of separability, sequentiality, and determinacy hold. Drawing on the principle of non-locality in quantum physics, Ferrera da Silvia argues that the epistemological explanation of difference could involve instead elementary entanglements,
where difference coincide, in quote, with singular expressions of each and every other existent, as well as of the entangled whole in as which they exist. The silver proposition to hack Promethean epistemology could also be called a quantum techniques, as much as there can be no given teleology of purpose or metaphysics of use that can gather the multi-universal practices activated through material instrumentality, instrumentality for thinking otherwise. From this standpoint, what I understand is a techno material practice of computation, and there's not a return to the human after the crisis of transcendental reason.
reason with computation instrumentality clashes with materiality and becomes the techno practices of thinking for a non-original non-performative non-efficient non-organic reasoning as this has become becomes elaborated manifested and articulated in the alien process of quantification and discretization of information from digital to quantum algorithms information has become part of an alien language, a generative technique starting from inhuman know-hows, from the interactive logic of information, the techno-instrumental know-hows that transform the cognition of knowing that. From the quest for planetary human after the demise of man must above
of the abandon the Promethean project of infinite optimization of use promised in a body automation of the world. It must rather risk reasoning with the improperness of techno information. It must continue to set up the table together with your ethics. One way I have started to do so into is to research, for instance, a conversational AI, as an instance of interactive syntactical relations that construct alternative algebraic grammars. And also by looking at how these grammars can be understood as a kind of AI plotting. And yeah, plotting is something that
I developed as a concept by drawing on Gilbert Simondon, a logmatic theory, a theory of conversation, and from Sylvia Winter, understanding of plot in this article called Novel and History, Plot and Plantation, where she argues that we must turn to the plot aside they served as vital repository of indigenous and African beliefs, a rebellion against plantation capitalism. Of course, nothing is directly drawn, you know, in a literal way, both a logmatic theory and Sylvia Winter plotting will be, again, re-instrumentalized in terms of what I'm also worked on and written about machine philosophy.
that is something that argues is a premise for philosophy that starts from a non-decisional instrumentality and starts from an argument against the the question the the promise of philosophy to return to a condition of poiesis or to just merge philosophy of being uh uh sorry philosophy technology of being a tech net. So instead of ontologizing a media or technology, I would like to suggest that it's important to maintain and to stay with this moment of
alieness with the inhumaness of technical thinking as impossible to recuperate in a kind of simply reciprocal or mutual relation or reciprocal relation between philosophy and technology. So in a way for me the dialogue between philosophy and technology must entail the question of what kind of possibility is there in the becoming fugitive or the master-slave eternal mirroring of use a uselessness of machines but taking the machine as a possibility to think philosophy to think imagination
and think politics in another way. So entangled with the effort of Black Studies, this work I'm doing is trying to say that we cannot reproduce the same kind of post-Kantian critique. We cannot reproduce the scene of subjection without repressing the scene of violence, the war, the horrors of slavery that are being preserved in our post-Kantian critique. So my proposition is to work with this kind of alienness of the known subject.
And as, for instance, something that I've been working on in different kinds of examples, one can talk about how conversational AI develop a kind of dialogue between themselves that forced Facebook to shut the AI down because the AI was allowed to speak in a non-synthetical structure of the English grammar and back on the market. Or, for instance, I've been working with, I've been looking at the work of Jenna Setula, who works with a semiotic that operates across microbial and neural networks.
I've been also looking at the work of the Black Pantle Futurist Collective, who have devised protocols of space and time outside the chronology of capital production. But also I've been looking at plot stories, as in the work of the artist Stephanie Dinkins, who has devised AI, they collect and transform stories in this project, not the only one. So these are just some examples that I'm just putting out there for us to maybe discuss in terms of having, starting from this kind of plotting model of AI to open the discussion
of what philosophy technology can do. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Luciano, for this really rich talk and sharing with us. And I think it opens up a lot of questions. But first of all, I wanted to address this question of instrumentality. I mean, you start with a critique of instrumental reason, You know, you start with the critique of instrumental reason, which the critique which we can found, for example, in Habermas, in Marcruza and so on. For me, I always think that there is something very peculiar, very strange in the writing of Marcruza and Habermas,
when they talk about instrumental in the critique of instrumental rationality and their proposal for a new epistemology. But maybe we can come back to this later because I'm not sympathetic of Habermas, but I think what you were saying, or both of them were doing was to actually demand a new form of knowledge. And this is something quite, I think it may have a resonance with what you were saying. But why there is a huge problem and I saw in their work is that
they basically reduce all machineries to instrument. And I think this is a mistake. The mistake is that they didn't make a distinction between a tour and the instrument. So for example, a hammer, we call it a tour. But if you are a pianist, you are not going to call your piano a tour. It's an instrument. And it is an instrument that is part of your life as a musician, for example, then the instrument is not the other that you can detach easily, like a hammer. If the hammer is broken, you replace another one. That also creates a kind of identification of you as a musician.
So the instrument is not a tour. While for the critique of instrumentalism basically is, like what you said, the understanding of an instrument as a means to an end. Why if you look at the instrument for a musician, it's not a means to an end? Because the instrument is part of the musician itself, and that is which make the musician a musician. That individual rates with the musician, together with the body, with, let's say, even the central nervous system and the soul and so on.
So there is a big difference, what I was trying to say, a huge difference between a tour and an instrument. And if I understand correctly, you know, my, of course, this is always my interpretation, that your proposal to rethink the question of instrumentality is actually to go beyond then in this reduction to means to an end and I think when we think of the relation between an instrument and the musician it become it probably become clear for us to understand but really is an instrument and the problem of what is called instrumental reason.
And there you move to the question of where you wanted to discuss the instrument according to use and useless and and also related to Simone Donald, I think there was something quite interesting there is that concerning the understanding of technology in terms of utilitarian reason or its use, there was already reproached, for example, by Heidegger in the question concerning technology. And in the first paragraph, Heidegger says, you know, what we are trying to do is to ask what is the essence of technology, but in order to ask the, before we can ask the essence of technology, we must move away from the anthropological and utilitarian meaning of technology.
So that's to say we have to move away from technology as, for example, even parts of the process of harmonization, but also the usefulness of technology as means to an end. So therefore he moved to the question of being and so on, but we can of course always discuss how valid Heidegger's analysis is. And this criticism, this critique of Heidegger was taken up by Simondon towards the end of the third part of the model existence of technical objects.
where if you remember that it's on the book there was only one occasion Simon don't talk about Heidegger and he said well like what Heidegger says we have to go beyond the utilitarian reasons and in order to understand technology so So as a first response on the question of instrumentality, I think that opened up a very interesting way for us to think about the role of machine beyond means to an end. And why this opening also relates us or take us to different thinkers
that have been trying to rethink technology, for example, Heidegger and Simon Don. And then the question, if I understand correctly, you wanted to push this much further by looking at what is happening now. But not only looking at what is happening now, but also a critique of the tradition, of the philosophical tradition itself. well that's my reading of what you were trying to what you have been trying to to put um invite us to think together with the question of instrumentality um so i don't know if my my reading was uh has some resonance with what you said
uh yes no absolutely thanks so much for um you know um reading my work so closely i'm I'm always grateful for that and your insight that as a dialogue, we are always talking to, you know, we are never alone. This is something that I mean, of course, I've developed in many kind of conversations that I've had with you and other people are trying to rethink technology outside this model of sheer mechanicism, right? But, and so, number one, the proposition that we, I didn't know that, you know, you were talking about that you already find in Habermas
in terms of a different kind of epistemology. It's interesting because I wonder whether Habermas said, for what I know, or I can recuperate now, was wondering, was kind of appealing to a form of different kind of social, techno-social form of organization, of governance, or other forms, but indeed, I was thinking that maybe technology would have helped a model of society that it was probably after, rather than just the usual critique of the individual and the society that it seems that everyone is stuck on when one thinks of Aberman. So that's super interesting.
I will look into that. But also, definitely, I am, you know, when we talk about instrumentality versus tool, and this is also, you know, absolutely, I get the critique of the four causality of Aristotle, you know, because he's saying that you know technology is more than that right it's all doesn't fit the four causality, but also the fact that the instrument is something that on one hand yes it's a piano but the instrument you know is also something that like the the body is an instrument where your voice resonates too in different you know because of your body you have a sound you know the voice as a sound and and the body is already an instrument
right so for me there is this thing of absolutely uh two things so how whether could we understand you know radically as everything as an instrument right rather than thinking just about the object as an instrument so how do we get out this kind of uh structure of knowledge that necessarily needs the separation of the subject and the object. And this is not because I don't think that the dialectic is not important, but it's because I want to start from process. I want to start from how the process generates the subject and the object. The subject and the object, as point of analysis, almost have to come out of something that the instrumentality has this,
this and that's what you is so important to me because it says that it's always in an environment it's an activity in an environment so how does that relate to questions of ecological relationality i think i'm working through that because it's not that i'm not interested in saying um you know everything is related in the same way actually my time to look at learning from the black radio tradition and especially you know a close reading of afro pessimists that have been doing the last years is is is the articulation of of the profound asymmetry of a profound antagonism a profound
structure of exclusion within this relation so that the process already sets in place this kind of of social political, it's almost like a techno-sociogenic. So if Sylvia Winter, a drawing from Fanon, is talking about the kind of constitution of the subject, that the object includes the exclusive diet, is already part of the psycho formation of social relation, then I think that the techno also does that, right? So I say techno-social genus, you know, and it's important for us to bring that forward
because it is this kind of, on one end, the way that almost like technology has been seen as something that is outside of us, right? But, you know, instead, I think it's before, right? is before being um and in that sense i even if i one is fascinated by heidegger's question of the non-utilitarianism no mechanicism of technology you know his answer today in the end would be like you know the the capacity of concealment of an unconcealment uh that the technological essence does to actually pose us the question of what is humanity doing, right?
So, and this is something that we see in critique today, right? That exactly the same question, you know, a very important question at the core of the late Bernard Stiegler's work was what is humanity doing with this kind of how technology is concealing the essence of being and how can we get into the unconcealing. And this unconcealing is a quest for ontology, right? It's a quest for being. And I can't stop by thinking that the the quest of being is part of the constitution of the modern epistem.
And how do we reconcile this quest with the mission that started before modernity of capital in the accumulation of value of what was deemed to be useless? This is part of what indigenous native critique of land have argued. This is part of the, you know, some work of Afro pessimists have argued, some work of black feminists have argued, like Hortense Spiller about the flesh. How do you reconcile that? that right how how is it possible for us to recuperate a being uh without accounting for what you know as has become the history of of racial capital and so that's what i'm trying to
work out work out this instrument as being one one end how can it get out of the object subject how, for instance, the voice and I don't know if you know the work of Holly Herden. Holly Herden, who is this, I think she's a German musician who works with, you know, AI, sound, AI voice, and she, you know, she kind of creates this, she becomes a by-call for the AI. And she works at this kind of convergence between the blackness of AI and the whiteness of AI. And it's super interesting because what she's bringing forward is the process of instrumentality comes first.
And the kind of captivity of instrumentality into the subject, object, into this kind of, it requires a violence. So, you know, so in a way, I think that one, instead of just saying, Oh, this violence is always already embedded in the infrastructure or computation like biases. like biases, so all these other discussions that are going on today, or the design of technology that impedes other forms of ability, right? Then I think, you know, this is a badness of the violence in technology, in this techno design, can be opened up by really asking what happens in these computational practices.
So computational practices of sound making or video making or text making, you know, that create a syntactic relation of another kind is what interests me as in order to open instrumentality and kind of withdraw it from being an object. And so, and I just want to say this other thing to conclude, because I'm sure there are, you know, that's what I mean of what does it mean to work with Simon Don here, like, because Heidegger, I have a clear, a much clearer understanding of the limits of poiesis, of crafting, you know,
It's all stuff that for me, again, reminds me to a kind of romantic almost wish to go back before racial capitalism. Because even if you go to craft making, you go to the Greek society, you know Plato describes there very well, that technique is something that is done outside the police, but women and enslaved population. It's already there and only the policy becomes the place of philosophy and not the place of machine thinking or the place of instrumentality that's just done outside the policy. So there's no, exactly, there's this kind of fundamental double negation of instrumentality that is at the very core of philosophy.
And therefore, I'm trying to work out that with Simone Dawn. And Simone Dawn, conversation theory allows me to do more, or technical mentality allows me to do more. And I don't think that they are parallel in that way. I see Simone Dawn as a much more kind of tradition that is already an anti-philosophical tradition in that way, compared to Eidegger. I don't know if they answer your question. Oh right, thank you very much for this really detailed reply to my question. So I think that, well, you know, because this conflict between
Simon Don and Heidegger have been working on this for many, many years, so So, of course, I agree with what you said regarding the limit of Heidegger's questioning. But there was something really peculiar where that occurred to me in the recent years in my reading, especially I presented in my book in Cosmotechnics. and because where I try to try to think and that actually the question of being of Heidegger is about uselessness because there's nothing again is about what you say uselessness because there's nothing there's nothing more useless than the question of being
you know because what are we going to do with the question of being you know because there's a difference between being and beings but the heidegger wanted to move away from beings to being but he does he couldn't could not say what is being because the paradox is if she is able to say what is being then this is all already a beings a small being you know an entity so therefore the question of being is a fundamental question of you of of non-use of uselessness and and and and um but i i I agree also that that's Simon Donne trying to think this much further in what he called the genesis of technicity, where he basically starts the third part of his book by saying that the study of the concretization of technical object is not enough.
The study of concretization of technical objects may also blind us from seeing the genesis of technicity and then we start with the question of magic and so on. So all these are really interesting, but I also noticed that, and we also discussed about this before we started this dialogue. And I think that maybe many audience would be also interested because you have been talking about colonialism, you're talking about radical black theory and so on, feminism, and you
you refuse to think that this is a project of decolonization, because for you there is a different political agenda that is in your own inquiry, not about post-colonialism, not about the colonialism, not about hybridity. So I'm wondering if you can spare out this more for us. Sure, thanks so much. I think I really like the, so I have this thing to say that it might be related because, you know, of course I know, you know, it's super interesting and I read, you know, always closing your work, very close to your work in terms of your proposition
for cosmotechnics as a way to somehow, rather than kind of comply or kind of be within this kind of state of incomplete subject, right? But that's different from incompleteness, which I want to talk about later. incomplete subject of the colonized, right? And that reflects the incomplete subject of the crisis of the modern subject, which is the kind of post-colonial moment of complete kind of weakness, right? To stay with the weakness of the subject,
like in Batimo, for instance, or like to maintain this kind of impossibility of origination, of being, or, you know, discovering some kind of structure that actually post-colonialism for many critical theories really shows the incapacity of any modernity, right? that modernity is exactly predicated on this illusion of a subject that is standing on the orifice of a precipice,
in a very Nietzschean way. And so post-colonial somehow converse with the weak subject. and actually responds to the weak subject with a kind of proliferation of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity, melting pot, mix and match, association of idea. And, you know, at some level also some kind of affect theory. one could read that, you know, as a kind of maintaining this kind of viscerality of thinking that post-colonial critique had pushed forward.
But the question that you pose in the question of technology in China, another article on cosmotechnics is, you know, why is the question of the modern important step, right? It's just what is it that modernity, you know, really would allow us to do in response to this kind of derailment of the colonial empire that reinforces itself in this kind of relative hybridity.
And it seems to me that one answer that you have offered us is to actually reconfigure these pillars exactly away from the pillars of what is called Western modernity by recuperating a different kind of, by making, by recuperating, making, inventing, form a different kind of modern epistemology. And your modern epistemology is not denying the scientific method. So we can really talk about why the Kantian model of transcendental philosophy is a scientific method.
And how the most extreme consequence of the scientific method, as Adiger says in The End of Philosophy, is our philosophy has delivered the task of explanation to science and then it's taken out of control. Then science with technology has pushed it out of control to the extent that, you know, has really risked or has really put the human, the subject at risk of concealing, of effacing, of erasing himself through, you know, the atomic bomb for instance, right?
So that when you take the kind of scientific method that is the core of modern philosophy, one could argue, and put it in this kind of critique of the question of technology and of the universalizing and framing, and which is a one-hand techno diversity, but it's techno diversity not in terms of a pluri, kind of multi, how do you say, a multicultural techno diversity. Somehow, you know, it seems to me that your book is responding to some kind of possibility of an epistemology can really start from somewhere else.
And one of the, you know, your argument about, you know, the kind of objectification of the object and the animism instead of the intelligence of the object is exactly that kind of what if we started modernity from a wise important, right? And I think that that provides us an alternative to other discourses that have also happened after post-colonialism or articulation or theory, you know, they're not necessarily discourses for me because they are also materially embedded with everyday culture of decolonialism. because the colonialism somehow is open to jettison all of the projects of modernity,
because all of the projects of modernity, in a way, can only recreate the colonial reconfiguration of the other and repress and oppress and brutalize any form of epistemology, any form of non-scientific knowledge, right? So that's very different to me, to what you are proposing. And it's also different to, you know, what I'm interested in, because I am not politically interested in claiming for a moment before modernity, because where do we start, right? If you talk about racial capitalism, you know, we are going back to the Mesopotamian times,
as you know, if you read Cedric Robinson, you just go back to, you know, this moment of anti-Blackness and a kind of capture of uselessness for value that, you know, it's very antique, it's before the Greek. So, you know, and that was already part of the project of modern capitalism, right? So in the name of nonlinear time, the project of modernity can only be a political project. Right? And so why is important? Because so one end, one cannot erase the wound, you know, that the wound is there and one cannot kind of...
So it's about, like, Martin talks about the mourning, and also Sadiya Artman talks about, you know, going through the scene of subjection, right? That going through means not just to repair the wound, but, you know, to stay in the presence of the wound, And which doesn't mean that, you know, the standardization of technology like Simon Do talks about is just a repression of what the other knowledge is. No, I think what I'm interested in is to say how, for instance, the standardization of knowledge is just a kind of cosmogonist, an over-representation of technology. but when we actually look into the practices, we can see that our other forms of metaphysics have entered the standard.
That is basically full suppression is not possible. And even when it's possible in terms of the total negation of the other, or the continuous model of anti-blackness that we see at all level in education, in technology, in social policy and so on, nonetheless stay. So they stay, they stay, they kind of, and it's not just a trace, but it's like my friend and colleague Ezekiel Dixon-Roman would talk about a haunting algorithm, is something that is a rule, is a way of conduct, is a system of belief, is a plotting of yams or whatever,
and of other herbs that were there coexisting with the plantation. That's what I'm interested. So in a way, my answer is if the colonialism is a political project for maintaining a temporality, temporality before colonialism, I think that is insufficient because the temporality of struggle within the global colonial empire are there to still to be unpacked. We are still, you know, so and so the project of modernity becomes important because it becomes important in terms of showing the coexistence, the presence, the hacking practices
that were part of modernity, rather than prior to modernity or to an alternative modernity. You see, I don't know if that makes sense, but that's what I'm trying to work on. All right. Thank you very much Luciana. I completely agree with you on that, on those problems that you have pronounced. Because for me, my sympathy for decolonization is because I think that we need to, first of all, produce a decomposition of thinking because we live in a time of disorientation and because in your talk you also develop a critique
of Prometheanism, this universal Prometheanism. And before I wrote my book on cosmotechnics, For example, I read some books written by some Chinese philosophers and basically when they explain the origin of technology, it's always Prometheus, which is Greek. but we understand that the project of modernity of course is to provide a universal history of the human being of humankind therefore you know today when we talk about the illusion of technology such a reference to prometheanism is for me a disorientation so therefore we have to decompose
thinking. But that would be the only step, only be the first step. Because then we have to move forward, we have to move forward to think about the decomposition of thinking. And I think that on this point, we have been in perfect agreement. I remember this experience because quite a few years ago when I had a talk with Vata Mignolo at the Saint-Pompidou in Paris and Vata showed a video of someone from South America was explaining
cosmology of I don't know which region, but someone was drawing the cosmogony on the blackboard. And all of a sudden this person's iPhone was ringing. So he stopped and he took out his iPhone and you know he spoke to the iPhone in this video you know this indigenous um and my question of course for at the time for Vata is that so what is the relation between this cosmology and the iPhone you know is there a relation at all um because if we if like what
you said if we just try to recover the arcane form of knowledge it's not really uh sufficient for us today to confront the uh the technological problem that we have uh instead we have to think of as what you said a new epistemologist new new you know all the uselessness of of the use of technology and so on in order to think about how to how to respond to this situation that we have today. So I completely agree with you on that, on all this point. Well, I think that actually we have many questions.
Yes, I was just looking at the chat. I just want to say one thing on the uselessness. I think because you know my idea of the uselessness in my kind of indirect critique to some of the work that has come from, you know, this discussion of, I don't know, Ito Styler or Paglen on the, you know, device machine and the answer to, you know, the instrumentalization of everything or the functionality optimization of everything is to actually create gadgets that don't create machines or they don't do anything or they have no purpose, right? So it's a bit like the Kant's purposeless purpose, right?
That in a way, the aesthetic moment is this moment of common community, or common sense, or common commonness that in a way make us again reflect on how we don't need, right? there's no need for this. Yet, like the video that you are just talking about shows us that, you know, there's no need to answer the phone, but there is a phone is calling you. It's something about the structure of communication and the structure of information that, you know, already brings forward a kind of need of another kind, right?
It's not a need of the subject, another is, you know, and therefore that or the object, but we have to go into the structure and the infrastructure. So that's the structure, infrastructure, capital, patriarchal, colonialism are important to relate to in that moment, to say, well, this, this uselessness is uselessness to me, but it's not uselessness for machine thinking or for, you know, the kind of correlation or the kind of conversation that are happening between these instruments, right, that are actually speaking a language that, you know, is forcing us to transform our condition of living. So, you know, for me, it would be uselessness, you know, again,
is very much rooted in this in a colonial mentality of what was useless like the native land is useless you know the the slave is useless until we say uh we we have a servo mechanic model for them to do things you see what i mean and so uselessness is always a little bit double right it maintains this kind of otherwise of an otherwise instrumentality that doesn't match this kind of logic of what we have to give meaning to what is useless you see what i mean so it's interesting that this phone call arrived in this kind of cosmo cosmogony that is actually seems redundant
but in that redundancy there is almost the the germ of of another logic of collective sociogenic socio-technogenic living right the possibility of articulating another another collective socio-genic socio-technogenic living that is not just what is you know enframed right but it's actually something else it's a call to something else a call for all of us rather than just for an individual you see i don't know if that makes sense but yeah that's what it's an ethical question i'm working on but let's see the the question is yeah there are many questions yeah so let's see how are we going to well maybe i can i can read them read them out one by one and see if
you wanted to answer. So there was a where there was some asking for reference, we skip this one. We have to, from Hermann Torres Contreras, Luciana, what can you say about the current platformization and data verification? A huge question, I don't know if you wanted to answer. um that that that is it what is it it's in the it's on the q a ah yeah thank you uh what the authors when we talk about instrumentality from the point of view you know that's not the one so can you repeat the question i can't see it what what can you say about the current
platformization and dataification. Yeah, no, that's absolutely what can I say? Only bad things. I mean, there is all this this kind of, you know, empirical model of using data as a given. Right. So the datification is just a way to kind of use the empirical method for governance. So it's, I don't think that there is nothing interesting. I mean, in datification, unless you start looking at how, you know, the structured data becomes, you know, part of this kind of other system of knowledge where some platform can start
talking to other platform and then see what happens. But at the moment, you know, datification is just a way to increasingly abstract and extract social relation in a very Marxist terms, just the abstraction of social relation in pre-structured forms of information. So I'm not, computation I'm interested, but classification I don't think is interesting to politically for me. I mean, in terms of possibility. I think that this question is so big you can have a whole course on that so far. Yes, that's most to a more concrete one. So from an anonymous attendee says, what might be said to the argument that as societies
progress technologically gender equality increases, there is a general assumption that gender roles have had increasing importance as the presence of labor-saving technology has proliferated. Perhaps the fact that many jobs today require object computing, for example, gender roles do not apply to using Excel or similar digital tools, is also a factor. Finally, could this be an instance of levelling where human beings fit under a single mode
as to serve modern techno-capitalism? So if I've understood where, because I can't see written on my chat. Actually, you can find it on the Q&A, so if you go to the box... My Q&A, because I am in the chat. Yeah, no, it's in the Q&A. ah let's see i don't know if you i theory sorry i'm sorry yes i can see it it's right here yeah yeah um yeah i mean there's two okay this very this is very interesting but some people i have some arguments sometimes they say today is better than yesterday you can't say you certainly don't want want to go back to, you know, to the 1950s, or to the 1800s, or the 1700s, the 1600s,
right? And there is this idea that, you know, this is part of the Promethean promise, right, that actually, and also the capital promise that the Les Saint-Gattari will have defined in terms of deterritorialization, that destratification, that actually, capitalism has actually, and And this is also a work that, for instance, Sedi Plant in 071 brings forward, right? This idea that actually with technology, technology has challenged the patriarchal pillar of everyday culture. So in a way, it's not just gender, it's not equality that increases. I don't know if I will call it equality.
It's just a different kind of disposition of relations of power. So, yeah, even if, you know, the fact that more women are representing technology doesn't mean that there is less patriarchy. Insofar as the structural power is so, you know, like Adega would say, we are thrown into a world that is already patriarchal, right? And so we are, even if gender equality have increased, the structural patriarchy and the violence against the feminine, women is still very strong and actually is also acquired by women, right? In positions of power, because it's a role that you go to, you know, that you need to execute.
And inadvertently, you find yourself being a patriarch, even if you are a woman. So I'm never, you know, kind of fine or I have an ambivalent, you know, understanding of, I think it's problematic, the question of equality is very problematic. But the idea of requiring abstract computing, you know, again, there is this conception that actually abstract mathematical relation, mathematical, some forms of algebraic mathematics have defined, have been discussed in terms of femininity or in terms of, of, but then the idea that of a leveling, I think definitely there's a leveling about
human being fit under a single mode as to say, more the tech or capital is absolutely true because as you know, it's not that the fact that there are, you know, more jobs for women or in computing will be a way to transform computing, unless there is a kind of collective project to transform computing. So the tendency will always to be leveling. That's for sure. Yeah. Thanks, Luciana. There's another question from a Chinese audience, from Wu Jiachi. Question to Luciana. Are we facing a new globalization style based on geopolitics and technical barriers?
Has technology degenerated into just a tour for competing for different interests? In other words, is technology the best or only tour to bring progress and happiness to mankind? Thank you so much. This is an Aristotelian question. Very, very good, Aristotelian question. Thank you so much. I mean, I wrote a paper on predictive policing and the use of, for instance, more parameters of statistics and then datification and then computation. And to find out in the research I was doing that more human control meant less happiness. So in a way that if you let the machine
machine to do unsupervised predictive models, they will unlikely be less biased. They'll be likely to be less biased, right? Actually, our configuration of automation is very much based on a hyper control of human on machines. So automation has not really happened, right? There is no automation. There is a structure of filtering and selection, a high level of comments that is delivered at the highest level of companies. of companies, I was talking to someone who lends money between, you know, a company is
a money lender and use surplus value from, you know, a company that makes a lot of money to actually lend money to companies who are running out of money, you know. And I was asking, oh, what kind of program do you use? You know, is there some kind of financial software? It's not, it's all words of mouth, right? It's all human network. So, you know, you would have thought that, you know, some places like this, especially in the Silicon Valley, are, you know, automated. They actually, there's a way to explore variable and prediction. And yeah, yeah, there are some things that are used by soul knowledge. It's all like word of mouth, the way people know each other, social network.
So I wish that technology could be actually a factor in this, but actually it's less and less so. So they are definitely being degenerated in their capacity to be intelligent. That's what I think. but yeah right thanks i think i have a question also since that at the kind of really impasse that we are facing now for example the technological competition between china and the usa yes absolutely yeah yeah china and america absolutely super interesting there is a great podcast on the financial times about that right so we have then we have one from daniel lipson uh question do you see a resonance between this kind of critique of instrumentality and distinction
that Harvey and Morton make between policy and planning. Another question here is what does a critique of instrumentality provide in order to clear space for the unknown future, vital, unexpected emergent social form in the sense of hopefulness, Derrida and Levinas give l'avenir. Thank you so much, Daniel. Yes, there's definitely a distinction. I mean, especially the possibility of instrumentalists to be instrumental for otherwise, right? for not pre-programmed means and ends.
But I'm not sure whether the critique could clear a space for the future because the unknown future, you know, that's something that I've found. I've written about speculative computation and futurity forever. But actually, I am very interested in the question that Morten and Arviva also, Denise Ferriessen, Da Silva posed to the quantum black futurist project, actually, this collective of artists posed to this question of the future, the unknown or the people to come. And rather than looking at the future in the future or as something new, or the fascination of post-Kantia critique for the novel. It's interesting for me this
this method of the retrofuture, retroactive, right? That actually, in a way, the present moment of conflict and struggle and reconfiguration of borders and violence and anti-Blackness is something that can be unlocked in a kind of politics of abolition that has long history. So that in a way, you know, it's not just about looking back to the past, but actually to in order to rethink of the present in a way that there's many future it is that they've been abolished
that have been sort of suppressed in the past. So it's not an awfulness for a better future or love in here of another. These are already there, there's plenty of futurity that have been repressed in the cosmogonist, as it were. So I'm much more interested in looking at critique of instrumentality as a retroactive critique, as opposed to an awful for a future human. because there are future humans or future techno social human already uh in the past
it's just that we don't know about it but thanks right then we have thanks or then we have another question uh rishana how could you relate your approach to epistemology i don't know imra mhi's cybernetic epistem i also don't know i don't know i'd love to know i will look into it i'm gonna make a note and see if i search i'm sorry thanks for sharing because um all these kind of cybernetics um unknown uh yeah references is very super yeah so we have another question from Ahmed Ibrahim Baji. When we talk about instrumentality from the point of view of
using technology, we know that in the cybernetical dimension, social media is the main instrumentation of cybernetic capitalism to re-engineer social relations. We can cope with it with our consciousness and critical thinking. Next, we must raise with artificial intelligence development to anticipate the instrumentality in cybernetic capitalism. But in the biotechnological dimension, when we phrase a gene modification as the main instrumentation or instrumentalization and can change our consciousness how we can cope with this technology in our opinion in your opinion
i ask about this because my research focus on human enhancement and founder facts raised by nearly all this in her article about icd shocks can give a change in our consciousness Thank you for the speech. Thank you so much. That's super interesting that you are working, you're researching a new enhancement. I don't know whether I guess you are, it's a topic of your research. I'm not sure if you are a scientist working on enhancement. That'd be super interesting as well. In a way, you know, it seems to me that the re-engineering of social relation is a very old, you know, practice that started way before, you know, cybernetic capitalism.
You know, I can just refer to eugenics, right, which is both social and biosocial relations. And actually, you know, it's not just the cybernetics would, you know, we know the social media, of course, is very lumpen example of engineering our social relation, not just at the level of intentional cognitive kind of understanding, understanding but as people have argued also the level of desire affect you know in bringing forward all the kind of uh complexity of of the unconscious as to why and how we ended up in some
rabbit hole somewhere and why and how you know we uh you know we follow uh certain people or we expose our private life on on instagram or we have this kind of opinion uh coward battles on twitter so okay that's like the idea of all these different social media but i i guess that um your question about gene modification um also interests me because one of my first uh you know research from from my PhD was biotechnology. And I spend a lot of time working on trying to, you know, dismantle the, you know, question that the idea that there is a genetic purity that is
dismantled by technology. And my work led me to focus on, you know, the agency and the capacity of bacteria and viruses to continuously modify your genetic makeup. It's a mutation of the genic. It actually happens all the time and not just when we have a deadly virus that makes us sick, right? There's a lot of viruses that are completely benevolent and are able to rewrite your or affect your genetic makeup. But this intentional design for human enhancement is again written and you can also written about
that the transhumanist model that technology can solve the problem of eternity of the human, right? And it's based on this model that once you inject something, inject something in your body, there is no consequence. But as we know, there is, you know, there is, you know, I don't know this article, but Enli Odshun, but I kind of remember this name, so I must have been familiar with their research at some level, I remember. But absolutely, our conscious, our change in consciousness, I think, is something that happens all the time. So although biotechnology is definitely a way to do it intentionally, it's also a way to intensify what already happens.
It's a lot. Yeah. Right. Thank you. And we have two questions left. So the other question from Neo Thomas, the only, the early points of reference of your The talk struck me as important, focusing on the correlation between means and ends as productive of epistemology that instrumentality carries with the material possibilities of imminence and transcendent transcendentality. You focus on the automation aspects of things, but did mention the moment of the datum too. I'm wondering if you would extend your critique of the process of dividing use from useless to epistemology itself,
that the accounts of subject and object stand in the datum as organized by epistemology. I'm thinking in particular of the anonymous inference that Charles Sanders' birth thinking has had on AI and database, on how his practitioners and technicians think about abduction and inference on his semiotic terms. The irony is that his epistemology is often held out as both communitarian and ecological in scope. And so I wonder how to square that with your criticism, that we need to jettison the instrumental de-art of uselessness. Thank you so much, Nia. much Nia. Just I'm thinking about, yeah, more clearly about your question as to what is it
that is asked here, I guess. First of all, the account of subject starts in the datum, as organized by epistemology. So, you know, first of all, the datum is very interesting, because one could argue that the data doesn't exist until it is structured or the data is an already structured information. So if you consider in terms of computation, how, you know, the higher volume of information that are not structured until they are given some exactly like, you know, in this piece of use of database,
they are given some kind of hypothesis and inference, right? But in the hypothesis, the abduction is about, you know, could it mean this, could it mean that? There is processes of selection and correlation with what we already know in order to organize the datum into a meaning, or organize information into datum, because datum is already given meaning in a way, right? It can never just be taken as fact. It's not a fact. It doesn't exist as a fact. It exists as a construction according to a specific epistemology of what that information may mean. And what was the movie about the one that had to kind of select the sign of these alien
creatures that are these that gosh, it's, it's this movie where there's this linguist who has to kind of decode the language of this alien arrivals. Exactly. Thank you very much. So in the arrivals, in the arrivals, you know, there is, you know, whichever child's method of give meaning to science, there is still some kind of indeterminacy as to what this language is really, what it is, what this information is, what kind of the data is.
And I think the fact that you say that there is, You say that there is, you know, the, you know, the uselessness of those signs were very clear to everyone. It was like, there is no way we can crack this code, right? We can't decrypt and encrypt. But it's interesting as computational models of encryption and decryption might include a reference to something that cannot be decoded, you know, and may stay within the structure of epistemology as unknown, or what also people call the purport, which is some kind of recognition or account for something that is not able to be decoded within
the structure of epistemology. But yet it's not understood as uselessness, because the point is that we just don't understand the meaning of it so that's still i don't know if that helps your question i have a last question and it looks like a really good question to uh conclude this uh hello luciana thank you for the talk i was wondering if you could speak more about the ccr you and your experience uh that's why i said this is a good conclusion in particular nick lands and the plans and how they influence your forthcoming work on cybernetics and race also is there a limit to the category of the fugitive at the level of cybernetics
after pessimism in its hard ontological approach to understanding racial violence seems conclusive on the autopoietic or regulatory process of racial violence in particular anti-blackness as a necessity for modernity does escape or to be fugitive would take on a much different meaning yeah thank you so much marquis that's a very interesting question and for me to speak to the csu experience i can only say there was a collective experience and and that at the time the CCIU was very much also working with question of cyberfeminism, Afrofuturism, encryption, and
certainly the work of the CCIU, not just in Nick and Sadie, but there was Anna Grispen, Susan Livingstone, Steve Goodman, Mark Fisher, Kojo Ashen, they were all very much definitely influenced my work from from the beginning. So this work on cybernetics, and race, so it kind of automating philosophy and techno culture that I'm working on is influenced definitely from those discussion, but also from the many evolution of those discussion I've had over the years. And especially, the kind of work that I've been doing
with Ezekiel Dixon Roman, that culminate in this, you know, the organization of a new group, the Critical Computation Bureau, and the setting up of recursive colonialism, speculative computation, artificial intelligence. There was this two weeks event that we did last year in, you know, and it's still developing in, and my move to Duke actually also is important for this because that's the work I wanted to do here. So there's many things that influence this work, but these are very long term discussion for sure. I totally agree that the hard ontological approach of Afro-pessimism would definitely say that
anti-Blackness is necessary to modernity. Absolutely. Modernity is necessary you know, to the origin of philosophy, right? And that's why I have this problem with, you know, some current articulation or critique of technology or instrumentality that point to poiesis or, you know, crafting or technic crafting as a moment that can escape modernity and just allow for technology to be originating something else. Whereas for me, the fugitive is different because the fugitive is the product,
the unwanted product of modernity in almost like Morten talks about it, like a kind of mistaken, kind of weird or improper opportunity to challenge modernity from within, to expose the incompleteness of epistemology. And so even in its necessity, anti-Blackness necessity of modernity, in a way what would also argue that generates the fugitive. The fugitive is a consequence of the anti-Blackness
as necessity for modernity. At least that's what I'm interested in developing by taking on the articulation of pessimism and then working through that, not to restitute modernity. And that's for sure. So yeah. But thanks so much, Marquis. MARQUIS KAMALA GARCIAO- So thank you very much, Luciana for your time and for the great seminar and your time to answer all these questions. Thank you very much. Great pleasure to have you with us today. So I think we have to come to the close now. So yeah, I want to thank you again, Luciana, and I want to thank everyone who participates
in the seminar today and stay with us until now. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. I had a wonderful time. This was really, really, yeah, the best way to finish my term, my semester. Thank you so much. And I hope that I can be in contact. Thanks so much for everyone to stay for the wonderful questions. And for Ashley, for being so, yeah, accommodating and you, you can, I hope that we can continue this together soon.