Good morning everyone. It's very nice to have you all here. This is the first TGI FHI event of the year. Normally we would be welcoming you into our space in Smith Warehouse at Duke University and having time for casual conversation over breakfast before a talk followed by questions to introduce Duke faculty members to the Duke community here. I'm sorry that we can't replicate that form of hospitality. Over the past two years, we've had colleagues from humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences fields present their scholarship. This year, in all likelihood in Zoom formats throughout,
we will have 16 talks in the series. So please do come back for more and bear with us as we experiment with different formats if we find that our traditional one is too taxing on Zoom. What I'm very happy about is that this format gives us the opportunity to welcome colleagues and interested people from around the world in real time. People who before this time would be watching recordings later, if at all. So I want to extend a warm welcome to you wherever you are. I'm Ranji Khanna, the director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and it's my great pleasure this morning to introduce Luciana Parisi, who is a professor in the literature program here at Duke, where she researches and teaches media theory through multiple lenses, ranging over cyberpunk, philosophies of sexual difference, bacteria, computation, and Afrofuturism.
Luciana's first book, Abstract Sex, Philosophy, Biotechnology, and the Mutations of Desire, from 2004, is comprised of a proposition that the age of cybernetics gives us insight into that which has comprised our understanding of sex in the past, presenting an older, indeed prehistoric, understanding that is paradoxically made visible only by our cybernetic present. Using a geological metaphor in order to highlight the scale of history with which she wishes to work, she presents three versions of sex for our consideration, the most familiar being the
biocultural, which she claims is a 19th century concept that provides us with an idea of sex produced, sorry, shaped by human reproduction, human pleasure and a focus on fluids. The bio digital that is a late 20th century formation that produces the clone, understands sex on the molecular scale through desire and focuses on the egg. And the strata that intrigues her most, I think, and propels the book is the biophysical, a strata that focuses on the meiotic or the splitting or division of cells, the reproduction of organisms that plays itself out in trade as bacteria and mitochondria in which the biochemical processes of respiration
and energy production occur. This strata, 3900 million years ago she claims, started and has a new relevance today for understanding sex. A new model of difference might emerge from this focus on this particular strata, one that is interested in the processual, on becoming, as an understanding of sexual difference. The imagination of this draws to be sure from Deleuze and Guattari, some of the new Darwinian, new materialists, but takes its imaginative force importantly from writers like Octavia Butler. Her second book, Contagious Architecture, Computation, Aesthetics and Space from 2013, in many ways continues this
form of thinking difference, this time through the idea of computation. Whereas we may think of computation and algorithmic thinking primarily in its system of governance based on prediction and intrusion and shaping of our desires, Luciana describes the second order of cybernetics in which algorithms modify themselves, are far from passive recipients of data, and function to generate more incomputability and incommensurability than we have known heretofore. Indeed, incomputability for her is embedded in the computable. She works with a range of sources, again, from mathematician Gregory Chaitin's idea of omega, a number that is definable but not computable, to new Darwinian thinking and the work of philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead. Most recently she has clarified from these works the manner in which these productions of difference serve a new material function, one once again shaped by race, class and gender politics but using these terms not only but also as signifiers of already known forms of difference, but ones in production also imaginative, full of potential, both exciting and hopeful, but terrifying and deadly at the same time. Today her talk, she tells me, will be about 40-45 minutes long, followed by questions, which you should address to me in the chat, as Sarah told us. Thanks for coming, everyone. Luciana Parisi's talk is titled Recursive Colonialism
and speculative computation and I now invite her to speak and you all to listen. Thanks for coming. Thank you Ranji. Thank you Ranji, thank you to the Franklin UMAGI Institute. Thank you for inviting me to this experiment to share my new research with everyone, with such a huge number of people we we would never anticipate it. Thank you everyone for your interest. And thank you to Sarah and all the other people behind the Franklin Institute that made this possible. I'm gonna share with you some more, some slides
so that you can follow my propositions today. So, sorry, I just need to, okay. So, this talk today is part of a larger research program on cybernetics and race that I've been working on for the last three years, in collaboration with my colleague at UPenn Professor Ezekiel Dixon-Roman. The first iteration of this research project will involve an experimental virtual symposium entitled Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation. This symposium was initially supposed to occur in Naples and be hosted by the Università degli Studi L'Orientale in southern Italy, in collaboration with Professor Tiziana Terra Nova.
Under the pandemic condition, as you know, at the new restriction of border movement, however, our collective, the Critical Computational Bureau, has decided to hold a symposium on online platforms during the first two weeks of December between the 1st and the 13th. This symposium will see the participation of critical theories, young scholars, computational artists, music producers, and we really think, allow people to think together about what might be a competition for ethics, what might be algorithms of mass racialization, deep learning aesthetics, new diasporic logics, and data enslavement. So I hope you could also be able
to participate today in the near future. So my talk today is a version of the article that I have written with Ezekiel entitled Recursive Colonialism and Cosmocomputation, which is for coming for social texts online periscope, called Controlled Societies at 30 Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference. So this talk today is an attempt to map recursivity as a generic dispositive of power constituting an epistemological field that entangles algorithmic functions of prediction and computation with the rules of knowing at the core of the racial logic of capital.
On the one hand, recursivity challenges the ontic presupposition of technoscience. On the other, it points to the need to transform the conditions of knowing that ground the ontological reproduction of reality in terms of self-determination. In particular, this talk considers recursivity in systemic terms, i.e. as coinciding with the principle of self-organization that grants the compression of contingency in the self-modulating articulation of the real. Recursivity, in other words, is a dominant mode of knowing based on the self-reflective, spiraling interiority which constitute the cosmogonies of colonial epistemologies, namely
of the condition of reproduction of racialized knowledge and body capacities. At the same time, recursivity also indicates that technoscientific knowledge production is not linear, and rather necessitates the encounter with contingency, the indeterminate or the unknown. In other words, reclusivity in systemic terms coincides with the principle of organizational knowledge that requires a self-modulating compression of contingency to explain the real. Before discussing what it would mean for critical theories of computation to challenge the recursive principles of colonial epistemologies,
I would like to remark that to approach epistemologies in terms of recursivity requires us to suspend the skepticism that separates the ontological remit of philosophy with the ontic formation of technoscience. science. From this standpoint it is important to question the argument about the ontic constitution of epistemology for which technoscience can at best be said to offer an objective observation of actual facts in reality, but indeed can never tell us about the condition of reality itself. This argument belongs to Martin Heidegger's reflection on the question of technology,
for which the ontological defines the underlining deeper structures of reality, while the ontic only refers to what is already known, an observed fact. Scientific epistemology therefore can only give us data in the form of a transcendent, already observed and measured reality, and can tell us nothing of the metaphysical condition of reality. For Heidegger, the only possibility to contemplate the ontological condition of reality in the aftermath of World War II, then dominated by the cybernetic view of the world as information, is to retrieve an ontology of technet through the lenses of the Greek poesis,
to invoke an original and yet never complete site of being in its everyday manifestation of production and disclosure. As much as technoscientific epistemology can only present us the world as a given series of facts, information, entropy, data, it remains a static byproduct of an original production of knowledge or poiesis that could rather liberate us from the imprisonment of being or the ontology in the already given schema of knowledge. My intervention today starts with questioning this assumption that techno-scientific epistemology is limited to represent the world and never change the world.
Our critique of technology, automation and computation, I argue, is locked in this adagarian suspicion against quantity measurement and the discretization of the world. I have argued, I swear, that the suspiciousness is but a manifestation of a conservative need to maintain the authority of Western philosophy and its autoimmune autonomy from the secularization or vulgarization of knowledge, a claim for an exceptional immunity of Western thought against the contaminated world of technoscientific knowing. By autoimmune autonomy of Western philosophy, I mean to describe how the autonomy of Western thought is continued in the automation of Western metaphysics,
in the form of the modern technoscientific secularization. This is predicated on the paradoxical statement that philosophy coincides with a self-posed decision that can never depend on the medium, the techno-scientific instrument used for thinking itself. On the contrary, instrumentality in the form of media, from writing to artificial intelligence, must be used by philosophy but must not be dependent on it. Similarly, as much its autoimmunity entails that philosophy is attacked by itself, and thus by its own means, it also defines how its techno-scientific machine
is rather used to expand philosophies' authoritative decisions everywhere by accelerating the social condition of a slow death that keeps its dogmatic metaphysics alive. What the autoimmunity of Western philosophy denies is the speculative direction of technoscience towards abolishing its conditions of onto-epistemological reproduction. Inspired by Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Winter, instead, my argument today is that the metaphysical privilege of man rooted in the Judeo-Christian cosmogony of its exceptional sapience recursively returns in its secularization, in the observed fact of the evolution of man and the bioeconomic law of the fittest species.
This cosmogony at the core of Western philosophy recursively serves to maintain the double game of metaphysical power, whereby the supremacy of man is at once justified by technoscience, but not derived from it, especially because epistemology can risk to overturn the myth of man and its bioeconomic success. This is to say that the critical outcasting of technoscientific epistemology on the base of its ontic limits risks overlooking the return to a pure poiesis immune from technoscience is a return to a dogmatic origin of thought.
What I'm suggesting is that critical thinking risk remaining blind precisely to the possibility of technoscience to transform the ontological structure of being and abolish the original division in Western philosophy between thought and the medium of thinking, between poetic production and technoscientific discovery. My point is to imagine how technoscientific epistemology and the explanation of being can be transformed and can also radically transform the becoming of knowledge. In the spirit of what Sylvia Wynter proposes by echoing a necessary lament of the half-starvation
of natural sciences, the becoming of technoscience entails that we study the alien conditions of knowing in terms of speculative computation. The critical task of reprogramming the future past of man's metaphysics therefore requires a multiplicity of counter cosmogonists that can originate in the interactive logic of syntactic and semantics of data and algorithms my talk today considers recursive colonialism in the contemporary epistemology of computation as an attempt and maintaining which is an attempt at maintaining the autoimmunity of the universal
men through practices of hyperdisciplinary confinement and necropolitical killing but what exactly is this notion of recursivity a recursive algorithm is a self-referential procedure that expresses itself through its own terms recursion allows rules to repeat themselves as in a spiral and not a cycle. Recursive algorithms give us the dross effect of a continuous repetition of the same. Recursivity, therefore, corresponds to a self-generative reflection of an infinite inferiority at different scales.
Cybernatician Gregory Bateson proposed the notion of recursive epistemology to argue that self-reflection granted a continuous relation between mind and nature, a self-regulating dynamic of knowing. Recursive epistemology therefore contains within itself a response to contingency through an agentropic feedback between input and output. For Bateson's recursion of continuous looping is a departure from the linear progress of modernity and the Cartesian subject. Silvia Winter, however, takes Bateson's proposition further and argues that the mind-nature recursion is a fundamental function
function in the generation of a sociogenic instruction of colonial and new colonial bio-humanist principles of the homo economicus. This function becomes enfolded in the flesh, for which the less than human, the non-human, the slave, refugee, immigrant, women, disabled, non-heteronormative sexual bodies must remain in a state of perennial surrogacy at the limit of man. This suggests that the condition of recursion in computational epistemology cannot be disentangled from the ontopistemological recursion that ensures the return of the original input of racial capital.
The concern here is with how the liminal space of contingency is always the point in which recursive logic returns as a continuous variation of the sociogenic principle to regain ground, to remind us of the exceptional autoimmunity of the universal man. Winter calls Western men this recursive epistemology that programs the symbolic logical difference in the body, branding the flesh and grounding a racial ontogenesis of the human. As first coined by Franz Fanon, the sociogenic principle is a concept that Winter further developed
to account for how the sociopolitical becomes flesh. Recursivity as a cybernetic order of knowledge entails a principle of conservation of energy spanning from the macro dimension of the individual to the macro scale of society. The feedback loop between the internal organization of being and the expansion of its structure almost coincides with an automation of poiesis, where the self-making of man evolves by turning energy into information. By preserving the condition of knowledge based on the biocentric explanation of man, flexible programming of race, recursive epistemologies continue to
perpetuate the split between poiesis and techne, in order to describe the techne under the biopolitical regime that justifies the natural deselection of the unfitted. In other words, recursive epistemology continue to give to technique the task to extend the thermodynamic conservation and accumulation of energy for the organic reproduction of racial capital. According to Winter, the invention of the biocentric origin of being was a necessary cosmogony for the modern techno-industrial capitalist model reproduction, which granted the continuum of the modern metaphysical order of nature in Western modernity.
Within this dynamic conservation of knowledge neurobiology, for instance, explains how symbolic differences materializes as ontologies via neurochemical processes that produce a racialized effect, making the materiality of difference seem natural and fundamental to the cosmogonies of human origin. According to Winter, the current iteration of cosmogony corresponds to a bio-humanist homo economicus as informed by the economic theories of others' myths. Here, the correlation between biological and economic survival through the forces of selection and optimization defines the epistemological explanation of who he is and who is not successful as a species.
It is this feedback correlation that consolidates the formation of the sociogenic code and ensures the reproductive racialization of the world. This also corresponds to what could be called the sociopolitical constitution of man, as a fictive genealogy that tells the story of being human. This autopoietic institution of the sociogenic code, however, permeates not just the human, also more than human ontologies including the socio-technical assemblages of data and algorithms the sociogenic coding of blackness as the negative marker it is it has been argued is necessary to the naturalization of secular knowledge whereby the logical equivalence between men and machines
ensures that all remains the same under the western sun However, instead of being dependent on the principle of conservation of energy, establishing a monological causation from the biological to the bio-social, I suggest that the CNE as information that is in based on terms a difference that makes a difference in a system, can rather be taken as a starting point to break from this sociogenic order, insofar as indeterminacy or contingency in computational interaction of rules transforms, can indeed transform, the condition of knowing.
This involves not only that information enables a retroactive cosmogony that can reprogram epistemology against man, but also a speculative dimension of information as a logic of syntactic and semantic interaction that can open up technopolitical possibilities that transform not just culture, but nature and culture, biology and language. It is in this generative disentangling the informational laws of poiesis and technet, rather than in the frosting effect of infinite iteration of the same input,
that speculative computation can define a techno-poetic space of reason to overturn the sociogenic principle of modern capital. In the attempt to challenge the reproduction of the sociogenic principle in and through the techno-social systems, I will now turn to Yukui propositions about a systemic theorization of technology for which the principle of recursivity was already entailed in a confrontation with contingency. In his recent book, Recursivity and Contingency, Yukui draws on Gilbert Simondon's Refusal of Descartes' Rationalism and demonstrates that the cybernetic principle of feedback adds a new temporal structure to machine thinking.
thinking. In particular, insofar as the recursivity of feedback makes the cybernetic system possible, it also impedes the system to become systematic, to become complete, a whole or simply a reproductive organicity. For who we, margins of indeterminacy do not only describe the recursive temporalities of machines, but more importantly a recursive thinking in machines. This argument suggests that the technical machine is not simply a mirror of the normative apparatus on knowledge reproduction. Computation instead can include both contingency and chance within itself, because the temporality
of the technical object or cybernetic machine, precisely admits that errors, incidents, failures are part of the casual process of the system's learning. Recursion indeed does not only preserve energy, but also noise and patterned information for which the system is forced to become immanent to the indeterminacy of reality that transforms its initial condition of knowing it must admit a futurity of which there can be no prior concept within the epistemologies of race recursive colonialists must entail model imminent modes of rationalization where the overfitting representation of difference
encounters the leading point of indeterminacy coinciding with the ultimate threat of the apocalypse, of the end of the world as we know it. But the over-determined monotechnologies of recursive colonialism is breakable. The apocalyptic horizon is a reactive parasite, remanding capital that nothing can be done without the subjection of the other. If recursive colonialism is qualified by the age of contingency, then we must see how the cosmogonists of Western techno-civilization have also been qualified by so many apocalypses, where the fear of total extinction has preemptively granted total immunity to man.
Every time there is an apocalypse, there is an expansion of enslavement, and each iteration brings an even more intensified form of planetary incarceration. The ultimate abolition of man is contained within the threat of planetary apocalypse, demarcating the limit of incompleteness of recursive knowledge of scientific technology and racial capital. The global order of racial capitalism was technologically actualized through the universal standardization of knowledge. Technocultural diversity is here subsumed by the efficient causality of Western industrial automation through the inclusion-exclusion diet of unknowns used as surrogate to sustain the epistemology of progress or Prometheus.
From this standpoint, how to take the limit of recursivity as the moment at which universal colonial epistemology can be turned into the epistemological proliferation of cosmotechnics? How can one open recursivity to many different and thus transversal techno-epistemologies? In particular, it seems crucial to push the incompleteness of self-regulatory system to account for an expansion of epistemology that transform or that have already radically transformed the standardization of knowledge as carried out by technologies, digital media, computation,
algorithms and data. But how to do so without following the claims of the ontological term against universal epistemologies, for which the debunking of the universal model of technology would coincide with a time before modernity, before racial capitalism, a return to poetics in order to uncover different epistemologies of different cultures. It seems to me that arguments about incompleteness of recursive epistemology cannot be exhausted but the propositions of and for techno-diversity, whereby mannered knowledges and representations are granted a particular access to or under the universal system of knowledge.
As opposed to a multicultural diversity that demands of non-Western techno-cultures to conform to the Promethean metaphysics of man, Yukui theorization of cosmotechnics instead warns us against describing different techno-cultures following the same techno-epistemology. Instead, one must account for a multiplicity of, and quote, cosmotechnics that differ from each other in terms of values, epistemologies and forms of existence, end of quote. But how exactly one can do cosmotechnics? As opposed to the Kantian thesis of technology as being anthropologically universal, for
who technology, end quote, is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologists, which go beyond mere functionality or utility, end quote. He says, quote, there is no one single technology but rather multiple cosmotechnics, end quote. In other words, cosmotechnics indicates that multiple technocultural mediations of the universe are possible, that multiple cosmogonists have been and can be re-originated in and through technet, where form and function, logic and reason, nature and culture become part of an alien effort to restart epistemological fabulations.
Cosmotechnics today are also cosmo-computations that can expand the techno-cognitive paradigm of epistemology, experimenting with how incompleteness can come to haunt the origin of recursive knowledge. The tension between recursive colonialism and the artificial intelligence systems of today, for instance, demands that the universal epistemology of computation and the causal efficacy of algorithmic decision is each and every time over written by cosmotechnical fabulation that refused the racialization of artificial intelligence. Instead of a universal master algorithms that surveils us all through the constant addition
of axiom by axiom and the continuous update of the system, the so-called age of planetary automation must be submerged by a plethora of trans-infinite axioms that account for trans-infinite worlds that inundate the system, deliver the system to its completeness and and give space to multiple Cosmo-computations. For Cosmo-computation epistemology entails not only a limitless opening to different technocultural forms, but the transformation of the monological computation such that the universal cannot slip back in as the mediator of techno-diversity. As an instance of the cosmotechnical formation of contemporary information systems,
cosmo-computation must account for how algorithmic functions, binary data, probabilities and prediction, interaction and randomness enter the cultural languages and cultural logics of metaphysics. Instead of a universal Turing machine, cosmo-computation must turn toward the computational multi-logics that afford culture the possibility of transforming their relation to the metaphysical conditions of the human entailing not only the abolition of western men but the abolition of all systems of knowledge of knowledge based on the mirroring effect of the universal and the particular whereas the modern model of efficient of efficiency of universal technology is said to be a mere
extension of Western metaphysics the call for multiple Cosmo computation instead follows you could reflection upon the possibility of constructing multiple metaphysical spaces that are cultural mediated through a weed techniques from this standpoint computation is at the center of a planetary negotiation with unknowns which are represented or come back to us under the rules of computational recursivity as the latter extend the strategy of preservation of the self-determining subject recursivity in computation is a computer programming technique of divide and conquer in
in order to solve problems, but breaking down generalities into particularities. Recursivity, therefore, can always already be said to be part of the computational metaphysics of racial capital. In other words, in order to overturn this metaphysics, it seems necessary to argue that computation, as the contemporary universal technosystem, must itself be radically transformed first and in itself in order to open to non-Western cosmotechnics. For instance, a heretic study of the post-Turing paradigm can contribute to radically transform the matrix of computational logic by turning the axiomatic protocols of the included-excluded,
through which the system constantly updates, into a speculative computation of differences without separation. Within the post-Turing paradigm, the irresolvability of the halting problem has opened up computation to become an imminent process of interaction between algorithmic parts that cannot be synthesized back into a complete procedure. With post-Turing intelligence system, indeterminacy in computation enters the dimension of speculation or futurity. What this means for computation is that algorithmic predictive modeling must be automated in terms of the indeterminate interaction of the syntactic arrangement and the semantic becoming of information.
To break from recursivity speculative computation must entail non-program interaction between hypothesis and randomness. As I've written elsewhere, and I don't have the time to discuss now, as much as hypotheses coincide with the reasoning including unknown, so too randomness allows for rules or logic to change. While addressing the reaction about the influx of refugees entering the Mediterranean to access Europe, Denise Ferrera da Silva discusses the racial grammar of modernity as based on the rules of separability, determinacy and sequentiality.
Da Silva also discusses how the content of modern epistemology in explaining differences shifted from physical forms to mental, moral and intellectual differences, as for instance in the work of cultural anthropology. This shift from the biological to the cultural explanation of differences, according to Da Silva, importantly equals the work in classical physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, which changed the study and approaches to economic, social and juridical issues. For Da Silva, these scientific methods, however, inspired by major transformation in epistemological explanation of difference have not yet been allowed to transform the cultural logic of difference without separability.
Rather, theories in physics have been used to reify the idea of culture and mental content as mirroring the separation within culture through the matrix of identity, nationality and ethnicity. Da Silva insists that the fundamental explanation and thus the scientific epistemological explanation of cultural differences still relies on the principle of separability of a social whole constituted by separate parts that summarize humanity under the universal standards of white European collectives. Da Silva proposes to invert the pillars of modern epistemology from within the scientific explanation that would defy concepts of separability, sequentiality and determinacy.
She takes the principle of non-locality in quantum physics to argue that the epistemological explanation of difference can involve, and quote, elementary entanglements, and quote, difference coincide with singular expressions of each and every other existence, as well as of the entangled whole in as which they exist." Dasilva's proposition to challenge the ontic invective on epistemology could be called quantum techniques. That does not only refuse the recursive reordining of universal technology but also inspires us to continue the project of cosmic computations by asking how can technological universality be refused and transformed
through practices of difference with inseparability we know that computational techno mentality based on recursivity have already been counter articulated by many attempts to argue for incomputability and indeterminacy as the condition of computational processing, where spatiotemporal interaction step beyond the pillars of sequentiality, division and conquest. Recent effort to challenge this pillar can also be found in the in ludic logic that has explained the computational search for proof in terms of changing interaction between syntax and semantics between this dimension of data aggregation and learning algorithms.
Starting from the geometrical complexity or lodging, that is a place that interacts, ludic logic argues that interaction is not defined in terms of points representing fixed space and time, but rather must be understood in terms of action, in terms of algorithms as assemblages of actions. of actions. It is as if algorithmic action become non-local assemblages that make space to artificial epistemologies, expanding the non-linear relation between data aggregates and meaning beyond the recursive looping of programmed ontologies. Ludic logic can be
an example of how cosmo computations admit not one changing system for all, but the continuous elaboration of techno-poetics praxis or the artificial knowledging together. As non-men or alien humans and more than humans perform interaction with inseparability, the speculative computation between syntax and semantics run in more than one direction and admit more than one logic of knowing. So to conclude this talk, let me say that a transdisciplinary inquiry into the epistemological problem of recursive colonialism
must break not only from technological universality, but also from the metaphysics of the apocalypse. that we have seen in the planetary response against the contingency of the virus, justifying the necropolitical homicide in the everyday computations that menace the end of capital of man and of the world as we know it. If, as Mark Fisher reminds us, the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism, one can now say that the state of emergency under COVID-19 reminds men that racial capital cannot die. The ultimate fear of man's extinction has brought to view the long-term dross defects of white supremacy
and anti-Black violence against the contingency of change. For this reason, the cosmocomputational inquiry must start in post-apocalyptic times on the other side of the limit or recursivity because the war machine of colonial empires everywhere activated violent preemption and total war against difference in order to stop the full abolition of white men and its magic box. The long-term process of abolition already started with the erratic refusal of epistemic, of colonial epistemologies, they maintain raciality in single institution and codes of white supremacy.
From praxis of refusal in slave narrative and combat to the technopoetics of Basque culture, the critical praxis of abolition is at the core, and must be at the core, at the logic, at a new logic of computation. The concretization of mathematical formalism in machines exposed incompleteness in universal formalism, which in turn precipitated the apocalyptic end of man and opened the recursive order of colonialism to contingencies. The The post-apocalyptic world is empty out of a universal humanity, promisingly, as in Octavia Butler's Parables of the Sour,
it is forced to undergo under-determinable phases of change that must mutate the immunologics of the human in the displaced causality of nature, culture and machines. The reactionary return of computational universalism through the molecular acceleration of separation and divisibility mapped through the planetary response to the pandemic of COVID-19 is precisely a symptom of the projected immunitas of white men and its biopolitical autoimmunity. Not only has the virus refused to maintain the pace of global business as usual, but it has also intensified the reaction of racial capitalism, extending the universal colonial practices of total incarceration to everybody, making racism an antigen of the state.
On the other hand, however, this intensified condition of incarceration has exuberated the intolerable imperative of being yet again resilient, to yet again accept the gratuitous violence against blackness. But the refusal to re-become pre-incorporated into the recursive epistemologies of the empires has this time taken a life on its own. Searching for practices of collaboration that are everywhere demanding us to re-originate thinking, learning, knowing, living beyond the disciplinary programs that ensure more variables of accessibility, diversity and delegated representation.
The refusal to be under the recursive program of technological universalism, however, requires that computation as we know it must change. To push computational logic away from technological universalism is to experiment with modes of computing without programming, to open algorithms to a multivocality of logics to parallel cosmic computations. Speculative computation as non-human thinking, non-linear decision, non-organic mutation as inputs that act to perform trans-reasoning, xeno-origination of knowing, where there is no pre-modern past, a poetics to safely return to, because all of the past is in front of us, demanding to be techno-debugged from the virus of fear.
As Paul Preciardo suggests, the COVID-19 event and its consequences summon us to once and for all to go beyond the violent epistemologies that keep us immune from the mutations of collective desire, from retroactively abolishing men and allow for computational futures to enter our everyday techno-politics. Thank you. I'm going to stop this chair.
Yes, thank you. Thank you, Luciana. Thanks very much. We are now going to let's just take a couple of minutes for people to think of their questions and then we can go ahead and ask them. Just as a reminder, if you send me a message in the chat with your question, then I will relay this. Luciana, maybe I can throw a question out to just get us going here.
I wanted you to actually say a little bit more about the statement, every time there is an apocalypse, there is an expansion of enslavement. I think that on one level today, we can see that very clearly. But I'm just, I'm trying to understand, I suppose, the, the, the, the, whether the apocalypse itself is something that is truly about the end of the world, or whether it works within one cosmogony.
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, thank you for this question. That's the point, the remark that I make, we must, if we want to start an inquiry in this kind of cosmocomputational cosmogony, we need to start in post-apocalypse. because exactly that, the limit, the apocalypse is conceived within this recursive model of the limit of self-reproduction or self-iteration. So the limit is posed as, you know, the point at which contingency enters to summon up the system to reproduce itself.
So the apocalypse is totally within. The idea that there have been many apocalypse and there's been so many, and each time there's an intensification of incarceration, of tactics of islamment that were being practiced by the empire for 400 odd years are actually totally part. So the apocalypse is totally part of the cosmogony of Western metaphysics to me. So it's not outside of it. And so there is a sense I was thinking, what's the difference between 9-11 and COVID-19 apocalypse? You know, and I was thinking about how 9-11 was perceived
as the system eating itself, the means of production or the means of colonialism were turned against the system itself so that the system could, you know, incorporate the limit point as to expand or to find more energy or to suck more energy. Whereas to me, and so there was a moment of complete hallucination where, you know, the system kind of doubled itself through this autoimmunity, where parts of it seemed out of control, but actually were completely intrinsic to its own recursive defrosting effect.
expanding forms, you know, everything changed. All forms of security, of control, of border control, especially completely changed. The way we travel, the way we are in crowds, the way populations are also managed during demonstration, everything changed. The biopolitics of the system became completely revamped, as it were. But I think that what happened with the COVID-19, instead of one end looks like the recursive, you know, the capacity of the technological universalism to actually give one explanation for everyone.
So there's one explanation in terms of what kind of technical automated infrastructure we need to make sure that we safeguard itself, to make sure that the immunities of the system is actually maintained. But on the other hand, the contingency of the virus also break the kind of recuperation because it's a contingency that actually pushes, is pushing the system to become unable to complete its story, right? So there is another story that comes in and it's the story that the post-apocalyptic story is that
you need to reform the system but the reformation and the revolution, you know, are discussion that we are having today, you know, what's the limit of, you know, do you, you know, the forms of abolition that we are actually have been discussed are discussing today are not recuperated in in concept or information but really need to initiate seem to want to a re-originate somewhere else so the forms of abolishment are not just destruction of the system but are at the same time co-construction of system
elsewhere so to re-originate what I call exeno-alien origination where there is this effort that the contingency of the virus has led to this effort to rethink of a world in a post-apocalyptic after the end of the world has already happened and and so there's no way that you can't look back you know you can only look you can only abolish retroactively what has happened what has already been happening but at the same time you can only do that from the standpoint of a future where you can no longer go back so for me uh the the apocalypse and the post-apocalyptic moment are very, are two different political moments
and the post-apocalyptic is where I see, you know, as Octavia Butler, the Parables of the Sour, where there is instead a new initiation, a new form of conviviality that doesn't go through, pass through the state in the same way. Thank you. Thanks. We have a question from Courtney Dantzler. The question is, what are some ways we can create cohesive narratives about race, gender and other constructs formed on the principles of separability that don't proceed on recursive logic? In other words, she says, how can we translate the non-human thinking and non-linear decision-making of speculative computation into stories humans can understand with our current frameworks of knowledge?
Yeah, I'm not sure about the cohesive narrative. I'm not sure that it is possible to create a cohesive narrative because we know cosmogonists are, you know, Silvia Wintere talks about this conception of the narration, the narrowing man, the narrowing human. So that, you know, there are stories that have to be fabulated and have to be, you know, constructed in a way that don't exist specifically in the real. So it's not that, you know, techno science or computation will allow us to have a direct understanding of something that we don't understand,
Right, or the real computations are mediations. So the question is, what kind of mediation do computation allow if we think about these forms of logic that are not predetermined or pre programmed in given rules, but learn from the interaction between different dimensions of algorithms. So different dimension that are the way that algorithms can aggregate data, but also can disaggregate and learn from data and get to decision that are not directly mirroring data. So that's that's a speculative way that computation could go. And therefore, they can never be a cohesive narrative of gender, race and class.
the cohesive narrative is a cohesive battle against racial capital, which operates through separability, conquest, and division in the same way as recursivity at the moment does. the same time so at the same time there is a way in which this the non-linearity of the logic cannot just bring particularities together so there must be a moment in which entanglements allow for become political become political decision when the political projects and you know cannot just
So the cohesivity is an effort of construction and of speculation and cannot just be given because there are certain kinds of identities that have always been excluded by the system. So how to think about beyond the separability is, you know, I think a wonderful idea that one can and always, you know, take inspiration from is Fred Morton and Stefano Arne idea of the undercommon or what they talk about, Morton talks about in terms of displaced origination.
So a kind of para-ontology, something that, you know, or criminal ontology or Sylvia Winter talks about eretic epistemologies. You need to start from somewhere where it's not identity that becomes first, it's not the particular that comes first, but actually what comes first is the condition of being improper, of being eretic, of the condition of the, let's say, the liminal point of recursivity from that condition something can be generated that is outside the particular of the universal but otherwise to me will always be recuperated into recursivity without contingency as it were
thank you for the question sorry i didn't say thank you for that was a great question Lucia, there's a question from Diane Nelson who apologizes for the vulgar Marxism of it, but it actually picks up on a couple of different themes that I'm seeing in the questions so far. She asks you to talk about the ways in which environmental racism is undergirded, is undergirding the electricity needed for algorithmic possibilities. How does one take on some of the questions of computation in relation to energy use? And in turn, how is, how is, how,
how is that connected to to questions of people in relation to the land that they live on in relation to intergenerate yeah thank you thank you it's a very good very good question i um you know that there is no way it's impossible to argue the artificial intelligence don't need energy okay so you know the the old automated system since the standardization of technology during industrialism you know the for the standardization of technology or the universal technology is exactly based on the exploitation of energy for information so that's a problem that that obviously is intrinsic to technology,
but is also the problem that is intrinsic to technology is the expropriation of resources, right? The idea of the colonization of the soil, the colonization of human capital, the colonization of mechanical Turks that who work all over the world and you know in for a lot of the world meaning in whatever is how it's called the global south or the capacity of being completely a surrogate.
You know, this great book, Surrogate Humanity, that explains that very well as to how, you know, technology needs, this technological universalism needs this expropriation and exploitation and extraction and dispossession of energy and of, you know, of course, in its racialized articulation is devastating. but we you know so there is a lot of discussion that one could some people have argued what about recycling retooling you know what about blockchain as a way to actually use a system of shared energy so that so that it's it's not that in some places like Detroit are completely out of energy
as some other places instead, you know, next door have energy and how that articulates exclusion, forms of exclusion and discrimination. So some people have argued that, you know, if we use blockchain as an infrastructure, we can actually bring together, we can actually distribute energy. So, you know, that's a way to think about how technology, how computational calculation, computational compression can actually help in sharing rather than just accumulating.
But that is an interesting practice, but still a practice that is based on the concept of retooling, reappropriating, expanding the use of technology, which on one hand is very important as political practice. but in terms of the future, in terms of the possibility of creating cosmo-computation, I don't know if it is because it will always already reduce the tool to the means through which we do something. So the point is that the agency of the human and the non-human needs to be rethought. The point is that technology are not something that are
belong just to Western metaphysical progress but need to be recovered and uncovered from within different kinds of cultural practices. So the point of Cosmotechnics for instance is to say we can't go to a word pre-technology because there is no word pre-technology because in a actually technology in what allows to mediate the relation between metaphysics or what is beyond the human and the human condition so um i've answered in a very general way but i think that um there's a very specific use of technology that can be done in this retooling and expansion of computation but there is also a metaphysical problem about
what tooling and retooling means and what is the condition of the human in relation to the cosmos and how technology mediates that and in different culture how it has been mediated we don't know nothing about that we are still fitting the universal model of technology to everything else but there's been virtually not much research into the modern technology of all the rest, as it were. Luciana, there's a question here from Titiana Terranova. I think it sort of speaks to your your interest in black feminist thinkers and writers, Octavia Butler, etc.
You spoke about Sylvia Winter now. She's asking about Audre Lorde. Is it the case that you are expanding on Audre Lorde's famous sentence about the master's tools never dismantling the master's house? it seems to her that you're asking how you need to understand the master's tools to dismantle them and to make different tools that recursivity provides both the means by which colonialism operates and also its weak point and the way to its abolition yes thank you tiziana that's a wonderful uh thought that obviously you you know we are
connected even if we haven't talked about this particularly but you know that this book is my bible book is always with me is the uh this inspiration book um that um i'm working on on another on another piece uh as to you know the the the what does it mean the tool what are the tools of the master so for for me within the my disposition against western metaphysics or the simple opposition between philosophy and automation is exactly to say that the medium by which thinking occur is where a process of enslavement starts first and expands so that at the same time
the master, the Promethean master, things that all can remain the same because, you know, the medium is just an instrumentality. And the way that also this idea of instrumentality is locked within the critique of technology, because we always go back when in critique of capitalism, especially is the idea that technology is turning our poetic capacity of thinking into forms of program decision making. I'm not saying that this is not true. What I'm saying is that there is a suspicion there that has to be looked at and reworked through the lenses of, you know, the amazing
work done for years from a Black feminist writer who had already individuated this question of the problematic of the tool. You know, what does it mean to rethink of the tool? What is the tool? tool? What's the relation between enslavement and tooling or the slave and the tool? What is the, what is this medium, this vessel through which, you know, the recursive, the recursive philosophy can actually say, I just use it, but I don't need you, you know, I don't need technoscience because you know the the a priori the a priori model of understanding or realizing
conceiving the real is in my mind I don't need the body I don't need this this vessel and I guess what does it mean to rework that to expand that it requires a challenge to the metaphysics of instrumentality. And so to actually show that there is always been a modernity, a modern, as you were, reasoning of another kind that as manifested itself within and through the tool, through the instrument. And so, yeah, that's a great question. So thank you.
OK, Luciana, Negar Motahede has a question. I think that this is, in fact, a couple of questions. I think this is actually asking you to expand on the way in which you're using the category of poesis in relation to tekne. She's interested in hearing you talk a little bit about the idea of formal shifts, the difference, I suppose, between computational transformation on the level of form and the formal shifts that you see in different moments of cinema, shift from the Hollywood system to the French New Wave,
or the shifts in musical composition as well, formal composition. So if you could just sort of speak to that question of poesis through any aesthetic mode that you wish. Yeah, no, thank you for this, this question. It really asked me to clarify because there are many, many layers in today's, as you know. So, when I refer to Poiesis and my invective against, you know, the limit of techno science imposed by, you know, this ontic understanding
Thank the science by Martin Heidegger is because which also returns in writers such as Frederick Kittler it's because there is this kind of separation between philosophy and you know pure thinking or and and technique as a kind of just an application of knowledge this division between poiesis at the knet is very old you know you can go back to you know Plato looking also at the which is where I think Heidegger goes back to division between poiesis although you know the poiesis for for either we know that plant didn't meet any poets in the police but the poiesis as
a form of dialogical thinking at the knet as a form of applied thinking that was done outside the police by slaves and women. So that's the setting that always stays with me as a kind of fundamental authoritative self-posed decision as where thinking happens. So happens in the police and not outside the city where applied science is just some kind of routine kind of application of a knowledge that is produced as well. So when Heidegger tells me that in the modern question of technology, also the end of philosophy, tells me that, you know,
cybernetics has come to replace metaphysics with a system of exchange or variability, where everything is everything, where cybernetics, you know, the idea of the network and knowledge that can just be uh you know recursively one can say but also can be exchanged in different uh in different kind of systems but it's the same knowledge it's just applied knowledge just data just facts it's just um something that has lost uh its sense of um uh outside the sense of uh reflexivity or aesthetic,
aesthetic, I can say, incompatibility, but aesthetic incompressibility, something that is outside facts. And so he does this operation of rethinking of technique in terms of places and abolishing completely technology. Technology is just abolished as a land in the hand of a techno-scientific haunting system that is limits knowledge to this techno-industrial standardization that has emptied out thinking of metaphysics and of indeterminacy
or any capacity to think the new or especially change or transformation it's just a series of procedural you know activation and very much as what the algorithm is taught today it's a master algorithm the procedures are the same you have this recursive process and all the subroutine that just repeat the same uh the same uh data or the same information that comes from the data that the system aggregates so for me um it's a it's a very um this kind of uh operation is a conservative operation it's conservative because on one hand maintains the authority of philosophy as who is entitled to think and where in the police or in the circle of uh uh you know uh of course either
it talks about experience about the consuming of life or about this thing that can never be this this moment of poiesis can never be given as a whole it's always withdrawing from us you know is this limit condition of human is the crisis the lead to me is the limit point so the limit point of of the human as a poetic moment a poetic more because he knows that there's something going on but that something going on which is this techno-scientific articulation of of knowledge which can transform the ground of being needs to be worded off right so for me that is that those the moment um so what how does this translate in terms of former shift
so um you know um i think that what is important for computation that we need to bear in mind is that the former shift uh very much happened in the transformation of artificial intelligence system or computational system as as rule-based and uh you know thinking or system of symbolic representation into predictive inductive and learning systems which is something that computation did sorry the cybernetics did the computation what cybernetics did to computation is to add interaction once once interaction with the system when the system was no longer just a linear procedure but start to feedback on itself and that's where we have recursivity but that's where
we also have the limit point of computation as something that cannot be computed like the whole problem or something that is outside all the probability that we can think and we can put on the system. That's what the system starts to learn from the real, you know, but of course we know that there is no real. It's always already filtered all the idea, all the conception of data biases is because there is a filter that already operating. There's no, no given truth, no given data that is unstructured. Okay, but there is indeed within the recursivity of the system, the possibility of information to become so big that cannot be compressed and that's where you have these sprouts of in computability or where you have a formalism that is a bit like
in contagious architecture i call the weird formalism it's weird because on you know on one hand is an abstraction and therefore you know one could argue you know it's got some kind of generic quality that can be applied to more than one thing so it's not particular in that way but on the other hand this abstraction is incomplete is the process so it's on the verge of becoming and in terms of musical composition, I think that if we want to shift that, what is important is that when you see the level of music production today, you know, the kind of system that people use, software that people use,
there are software that can be also used through, you know, glitches or errors, you know that because sampling of computation that can be included in the music so for me that's a formal is that you know it becomes more like information and not a given force so it's not music or cinema or photography but becomes this capacity of computation to articulate different relation between cinema, music or photography without separation. There's an inseparability there which has to do with the process. But at the same time, there is a
formalism because the way that computation operates is in terms of this kind of generative generative articulation of information. So I don't know. I think this is what goes across. If you really use computation for music, cinema, or photography, and not just a digital binary representation, then you will have something else. You will have this weird formalism. Yeah. Thanks, Luciana. I think there's time just for one more question, unfortunately. We have a lot here, and we will pass them on to you. Certainly, but this is a question from Mark Hanson where he's asking about what the radical transformation of computation means from a practical standpoint.
Asking you to explain and perhaps give an example of how computation can be transformed in a practical way. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mark. Great question. In a way, I could say that computation is already a practice. So, you know, we have always this conception that, you know, how, that's why the weird formula is important to me, because computation given that has already moved away from this metaphysical presumption that there is an idea, a preconceived idea that is applied in the machine but actually the machine doesn't apply the idea the machine
makes idea so that's what i'm interested that's why computation for me needs to be thought not just as an automation of knowledge that pre-exists but actually a generative uh formation of knowledge or transformation knowledge that's when it becomes important so for me it would mean that instead of filtering automation because for instance there's this argument that you know we you know even other in with supervised or unsupervised algorithms you have the risk that the system creates you know errors or something that makes no sense or some kind of you know, create some kind of existential crisis. I think that instead, as a practice of thinking,
and as a generative practice of thinking, computation is already transforming what we think thought is, i.e. that we have an idea that we apply to a machine and then we have a result. I mean, this is not new, you can find example of this computational practices in so many art forms, you know, so many aesthetic forms, you know, the idea of even in opt art or that it was a paper work, you know, everything would be taken away, you know, that repetition you know that repetition is actually already part of a computational form
or weird form that can transform is already potentially transforming so that is one one way but another very technical one could argue way is the work that you know I've been doing in computational logic with ludic logic which postulates that algorithms are assemblages of action that they do not represent idea or symbols, but enable this kind of interactive articulation of an arrangement of data every time in a singular way. So in a way, what ludic logic does is to open algorithm, for instance, you know, in this
this practical way, if you want to say to, to, to, to, to change meaning, and to make new meanings. So it's not really like the gun of the generative algorithm, generative algorithm network, where there's a database, which is aggregating different ways by the algorithm and, you know, all is transformed where a flower becomes the face of a cat or something, but it's actually a much more discrete logic that enables algorithm to act upon each other and act upon the data. So it is incredibly transformative. So when you ask me of a practical way, I would say that's why we need labs
to actually shift away the use of algorithmic, you know, aesthetic from symbolic representation, just data aggregation. That is a work that has to be done. It's an epistemology that has to be constructed, although there is many. I saw this book today, Glitch Feminism, thanks to Oana who sent it to me and it's a it's a very interesting it's a series of very interesting examples from visual art music and performing art into how to you know practically have computational practices or transformation thank you thanks so much Luciana we are actually now at the end of our time together unfortunately
Thank you, definitely. Bravo. And I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to next week's TGI FHI. Next week we will be having Professor Jasmine Cobb speak. She is a professor in Art Art History of Visual Studies and African and African American Studies. And she will be talking on tactility and the texture of racial capitalism so i hope you can join us for that but in the meantime i also just wanted to say a big thank you to luciana i know that we because of the particular kinds of sound constraints on zoom we can't uh we can't clap in all clap together
in person but maybe we can through the through the reactions we can give give Luciana a round of applause. Thank you very much thank you for staying with me and sharing sharing ideas thank you. Thanks so much Luciana.