Okay, are we all back, dear friends? Our speaker still hasn't had his legal drugs, but I think the extent of the laughter, the intensity in the room, the level of attention, I think, is such an absolute testimony of the excellence, the critical brilliance of this paper. Thank you so much. Who wants to begin, or do I? Matteo, are you sort of winking? I would like to start with a point of clarification then also for the sake of the discussion that we've been having. Could we speak of a change in regimes of governmentality?
Can we go with Foucault on this? In the sense, could we have now homo securitans, and we have to make something, the securitized self, which is quantified, but it is quantified in a certain manner. In the previous seminars, we've heard a lot about the quantified self, the datafication. Now, you are going somewhere very specific with this. So could we do the Foucault bit, and then the media bits? Change of paradigm, change of regime of governmentality. Over to you. If you ever get your coffee. Yeah, don't worry. I think there's a number of different models, obviously, that have been employed to talk about this condition
or the emergence of this condition historically. One is, of course, the analysis of societies of control that Deleuze offers. There's the question of risk that Hans-Holfe Beck offers in his work. And then there's also the question of preemption and of governance through forms of probability calculation that we also see presently. So I think that all of these kind of offer different models for understanding this. But what I think we can also say is with the present mode of governance that are offered by asymmetric warfare
and technologies of the self, such as social media, there's a direct conjunction of the scale of the individual, the scale of the individual data point, the individual datum or captor that a system will elicit, articulate, frame, store, record, analyse, and so on. and the way in which these are integrated into large global monopolies of power. So one of the things we see with contemporary web economies is the creation of monopolies, something that's explicitly promulgated by authors such as Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal.
So the idea of the monopoly is the natural form of economy, the natural form of culture. If we see that Web2 platforms or post-Web2 platforms offer the primary forms of culture in the present or fundamental forms of culture in the present. The monopoly is seen as the fundamental economic form for these to take. and one of the things that these do is articulate a relationship between the individual and the individual is generative of data, the individual is generative of records and patterns that can be further analysed and large-scale global monopolies. Now, what happens in the constitution of this relationship
between a global condition and the condition of the individual that the mechanism attempts to elicit or to track is the constitution of new kinds of data structures. So the movement from relational databases, which are kind of classic row and column tables, to very much pre-broken structures, structures that are capable of accepting multiple kinds of data type, that are capable of having different kinds of structure of data embedded within them that are much more, let's say, promiscuous in terms of the kinds of data
that they can accept and that they can work with and they can bring analysis to bear on. So there's a kind of relationship between individual data types, individuals that generate those data and patterns of social relation that also are generative of the data large scale global forms and the technologies that they use to address those so this is part of the condition in which we have to kind of mark out this question of security and one of the things that results from it is also the condition of a more polymorphic idea of security.
The security, as we know from work by people like Louisa Moore, is to do with probability and calculation and almost speculative investment-like behavior on security derivatives or kind of bets on the outcomes of different... the results of different patterns of behaviour. But we can also see that the structures for engaging with power are not monolithic, disciplinary per se, nor are they necessarily something that is entirely predictable and dry,
but they're also... They have this relationship to the anti-foundational critique of science, so that they're constructivist, so they create the conditions in which we operate in, in which they then govern, and they're also polymorphic. So those are the two kinds of responses I would make to that. Talk about capitalism and schizophrenia. You have a double pool on this. Was that clear? Because I would like to follow up quickly, and then I'll come to you on, if we do this with classical Foucault and regimes of biopower, there, one of the aims, or one of the side effects, was a reinvention of the human. Something, as you said, that humanism is a side effect of a number of techniques of construction of the self,
self-other relation, a certain understanding of the technology of writing, as a metaphysics of presence, institutionalizing the book. I'm cutting 2,000 years of history very short here. but that produces something that we call the human. This is not the case in the posthuman computational securitized turn that you're defining. Or is there here a reinvestment of something that we could call the human? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about that from the point of view of media theory, in a sense. if the book characterises the era of the human so that you read and by reading you internalise
the process of thought and you then constitute yourself as an individual in relationship to the text that is being read historically media theory would have said following McLuhan that we change our relationship to the self Once we become involved in global streams of electronic images, we become much more involved in a gigantic global synaptic sponge that effectively releases emotion, feeling, knowledge, affect, etc. in a global televisual community. What we find, however, is that there is a doubling of these conditions.
Within the condition of contemporary media, there is a moment of reflection and constitution of the self. and there's also this hope as epitomized in this PowerPoint slide that there is a possibility for these kind of convulsive, contagious affective mechanisms that are articulated in social media but at the same time these are integrated within systems of calculation systems of prediction, systems of construction of different kinds of subjectivity. So the grounds by which the human might become self-aware
are fundamentally kind of interwoven with calculated mechanisms. Mechanisms of storage, replay of memory, of calculation and so on that kind of change the condition of the self coming to know. We also see that these objects, computer programs, systems, storage devices and so on, also become the mechanisms of another kind of knowledge. They become the seat of knowledge in themselves. So the place of knowledge shifts from the reflexive human
into the data bank, as they were called, or into the program that analyzes the patterns of interaction, the patterns of data transmission that articulates culture as it emerges online. Fantastic. Thank you for your patience. You were scratching your nose. I thought you were raising your hand. Who wants to come in? Are you coming in? I see Jonas also being positioned for the leap. Who wants to go first? Fantastic. If you pick your nose in this room, it's dangerous.
Don't scratch your nose, ever. I was curious to hear more about how we could miss the technical somehow. because you're talking about somehow the fetishization of the algorithm as a sort of escape route to not have to deal with it but I would like to hear a bit more about how that happens and how it cannot happen yeah I mean I think one of the ways you can observe it happening is for instance a lot of recent social theory on computational media or computational society is essentially about the kind of class division of labour within sociology.
So you have people who do ethnography and will kind of do painstaking kind of observational work on computer science. But then you also have the kind of the level of social theory, which attempts to provide a kind of airplane view or kind of satellite view of social conditions. and as with any field, certainly as with the intelligence field as we saw from that set of slides, the academy is subject to plagues of enthusiasm for certain kinds of words. Algorithm is one that works at present. I suspect it will probably last... Academic seasons are slightly longer than fashion seasons,
so I guess it will last about a year and a half. but after that maybe we'll get people looking at systems more substantially. But I think the algorithm is attractive because it exists at a number of levels. One is a formal description of a process. One is an actual instantiation of that process. Another is something that can be written out in pseudocode as something that looks like an algorithm or looks like a set of instructions. Another is the actual algorithm written as code. Another is the algorithm instantiated in the hardware running on the actual data. So this is an interesting object in that it's multidimensional.
It exists at multiple scales of instantiation and so on. So this is obviously very attractive. But I think from a kind of software studies approach, we have to insist that the algorithm does not exist alone, and it also has these multiple scales of existence. Are you happy with this? Matteo, you're next. You're already in position. Maria brought the microphone to scratch my nose at the notice. It's very interesting what you said about, of course, the fact that today there is too much algorithmic idealism and too much centrality given to the algorithm. And of course it's important also a critique
that the algorithm itself is imperfect, that there are limit of computational computability inside it, randomness, and so on. But it's interesting for me how the beginning, the relation between humanities and the digital were actually stretched toward the other side of the spectrum. So at the beginning, when humanity started to study the digital, they had only language as a form of, let's say, as a cultural form, as a symbolic form of analysis, especially natural language. And also the way code was analyzed sometimes was as a kind of language and often even sometimes as a sort of form, as a form of artistic expertivity and so on. And Turing himself at the beginning probably, Also, if you think about Keter, we can make a lot of examples of humanities also in the
German context, the way they've been analyzing the digital as a language. But for me, probably now, finally, we make the kernel, the inside kind of the machinic element of the digital, of the code, of the Turing universe, it is the algorithm. And if you do a proper genealogy of this evolution of this technology, we go back to the first symbolic form, it is the Turing algorithm, the Turing machine. So I'm wondering how much there is in this process of the rediscovering the centrality of the algorithm, maybe there is something that maybe brings justice to a form of a real historical development of
this. I don't know if I'm clear intervention, but I have the feeling that between humanities And media studies, yeah, there is still a lot of kind of balance to do between the different symbolic form we're being used to discuss. It's just a question going back basically even to Kittler, the way he was just addressing the media, the digital, as a text-based media. And without no mention, almost never mentioning the algorithm form. And today probably do the opposite. We just mentioned the algorithm. Yeah, that's true. I think you could read Kittler differently through his writing on music, for instance, compared to his writing on text,
and his writing on psychedelia as a kind of fundamental form of new media, or of digital media. So I think there's more to his work than has appeared fully in English. so far. There is a sense, however, within the broader so-called digital humanities that the role of the humanities is simply to apply code or technical instrumentation to the problems, the central problems of the humanities, that is interpretation and exegesis of text and of documents. This tends to colour a lot of the ways in which, for instance, people have looked
at software. For instance, the way in which people would read code, as you say, is a kind of poetic form and do things like look at the ways in which programmers would give a cute name to a variable, for instance. There's obviously limits to this kind of approach since they tend to focus on very short programs rather than the kind of programs that are millions of lines of code long. Even PowerPoint would be several millions of lines of code. And the way in which this kind of tends to,
in the kind of way in which humanities have worked on software, tends to be bringing things back to a human scale. The thing that several stand... A program that several stanzas long, say, that we can understand and read in one sitting rather than something that is a massive, systematic, infrastructural scale size object. So I think there's the question of scale and there's a question of what are the modes of interpretation and understanding that are appropriate to look at these kind of systems. I don't know if that addresses what your comment was. I think to go back to Turing as a primary point,
I think is useful. To reread Turing's description of an effective procedure as both a kind of a recipe for making a mathematical calculation, but also abstracting a form of work into something that can be replicated and turned into a machining process. So I think there's a lot of ways that could be worked through. But I think the 36 paper and the 37 notes are kind of fundamental. to understanding the present condition. Are you happy with this?
Yes? We also have your reading on Turing. I'm looking around the room. I can't imagine. We're only beginning to sort of scratch the surface of this. Are you about to speak? You're sitting on the edge of your chair, but the body language does not indicate lips. Jonas, very welcome. Grab a mic. I really like the way how you, Rosie, are doing this algorithmic analysis of the room. How you are processing the data of who might make a next move. You're like the embodiment of these new security cameras that they're introducing. That are preemptively analyzing potential subversive gestures. Without yet being actual questions. Thank you for your talk. I have a couple of questions.
The first you spoke about or you tried to analyze the post human condition through some of the Snowden files, the GCHQ PowerPoint presentation in specific, and you spoke about the way that values specific to the humanities and arts are circulating or reoccurring throughout this presentation. But apart from having seen them mentioned in a kind of cloud of terms around a set of people like figures, icons, I don't know exactly how. What has been your, when analyzing this document and what it proposes, what are the exact implications for humanities and specifically arts? seems a bit obscure to me, how the organisation imagines to weaponise those in relationship
to this PowerPoint presentation. And that brings me immediately to the second question, and that is if the weaponisation of humanities, you mentioned specifically sociology, history, psychology, if that is not an inherent part of the construction of modern propaganda since the First World War, from, I mean, you are speaking of GCHQ in the context of the UK. The Wellington House is, of course, famously the first official propaganda bureau in history, which was employing exactly these domains in order to create or manufacture a space in which its early liberal democracy could be protected or at least could be communicated while weaponized at the very same time.
So I'm wondering where exactly do you see a shift from the way that the weaponization of humanities is inherent to modern propaganda, as far as my knowledge of the development of modern propaganda today's so-called public relations go. Where do you see the fundamental shift based on your analysis of this PowerPoint? I think the fundamental shift happens really in the Second World War. So if you think of the development of the CIA as an organization, one of the documents they used to train intelligence operatives to give people an understanding of how to read a message, a coded message,
was Emerson's book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which is a fundamental text for reading modernist poetics. So in that book, Emerson proposes a number of ways in which text can have meaning, by allusion, by directly specifying something, describes metaphor, synagdoki, and so on. So we can say that intelligence prior to the Second World War, prior to Turing, had a fundamentally kind of literary mode. So there was the exercise of a certain kind of connoisseurship. You can say that the intelligence operative, the interpreter of encoded texts, was someone
often trained in the classics, was someone trained in the interpretation of obscure texts in foreign languages. And this was a mode of intelligence that was fundamental, as you say, to the humanities. What happens in the Second World War is that machines become involved in interpretation and coding. And mathematics becomes a primary mode of investigation. So Turing's work in decoding the Enigma machine, Turing and others, based at Bletchley Park that then becomes GCHQ, which is the document we see, the same organization that produces the document.
we looked at earlier. Once the machine becomes involved, there is no time for delicate, educated, sophisticated exercise of learning. It's really simply about number crunching. The amount of probability, or the amount of combinations that the Enigma machine introduced into encoding mechanisms was such that there was no way that Emerson's mode of ambiguity could be used, it was simply down to questions of probability. And this had to be something that only a machine could handle. So the design of these machines
and the kind of operation of these machines produced a new mode of interpretation, a new mode of systematizing relationship to intelligence and signals intelligence specifically. This condition then produces the computer as we know it, and through its genealogy, from these very highly specialised machines to those that we've all got in our pockets. And now, since their distribution and ubiquity produces the kind of condition that we're talking about, in which everyone's subjectivity becomes a problem of computational analysis. And that, I think, is the key split between the traditional colonial view of the humanities
in the way that you describe, and what we have in the present, in which the human is fundamentally a problem to be decoded by machines rather than itself. My first question was specifically about the role of arts, or the role of humanities in arts, in specific in the presentation in the PowerPoint document that you were mentioning. Could you say something about the exact dates and context and audience and department that the PowerPoint was directed at? What is the exact source? That's not clear. I would say it's certainly from the last five years, but it's not clear. When it became public, the metadata was stripped out,
so that we couldn't find who produced it, what data was produced, and so on. I've looked at different versions of the file to see what's available, but there's nothing available. I would say from the spelling and from the crappy humour I would say it was an English document then the question in terms of the relationship to the arts and humanities my impression is that the interpretation of the resources of the arts and humanities is done through two basic mechanisms One is through the way in which anthropology becomes interpolated and mobilized via marketing and the discipline of advertising.
So a lot of the resources that are in that slide, such as Maslow's Pyramid of Needs, from this kind of psychology, advertising, anthropology kind of nexus, which then kind of draws upon the idea of creativity, of intuition, and so on, in a way in which has a lot of kind of crossover with creative industries discourse. So in a sense, we're not talking about art per se, art proper, but we can say some of the ways of emphasizing intuition, experiment, creativity, that art has historically been a kind of incubator for, then cross over into these domains.
This is actually really interesting because that makes, because before you spoke about the fact that those analyzing data before the computational term were those with a specific literary quality or who could read or sense or have like a specific sensibility or sensorial consciousness of what the message could mean. And in a way, you are that person, because once that PowerPoint is, once the metadata of this PowerPoint is removed, you are exactly performing this activity upon the document that has been released by those who actually have that computing skill, but through the Snowden release have removed it. So you're in a way repositioned in that pre-Second World War status of data analysis, which is really interesting.
I have one more follow-up question, but I don't know if I'm taking too much time now. I think we can. We have time. Am I allowed? I'm taking registration for after you, but I don't see any hands. Go on. Okay, so second, thanks. These are very clear answers, actually. The second question that I had was about your choice to discuss the PowerPoint as a mundane case when it comes to the inscription of scripts upon its users. And I was a little bit surprised about it. I mean, I understand that that relates to the content of what that specific PowerPoint is bringing about when it comes to mass surveillance, data analysis, algorithmic analysis, et cetera, et cetera. But in the case of the... I mean, I personally find that the PowerPoint is probably one of the most retro forms of technological means that we're still using, more or less,
in the sense that even a couple of days ago, we had a presentation with a group of Filipino militants who use, like, who have this kind of slides that they use to teach dialectic materialism to people in the jungle, and they just bring it as like eight printed slides that they flap one out of the other. But for me, that's exactly a PowerPoint. And they give that presentation also 14 times a day, just as the subject that you mentioned that goes to Miami. So I'm wondering, how do you see exactly that a PowerPoint inscribes a specific behavior upon its user more than the kind of, let's say, retro forms of mediation like books or chalkboards or that it basically relies, that its logic relies
upon. And when it comes to the forms of inscription in mundane technology that are actually substantially dangerous, are we then not talking about the algorithmic analysis of Google or Facebook when it comes to the selection of what we see or don't see, the reinvestment that this does in specific class interests, I only see information that is tied to me through algorithmic analysis of those who are already having the same opinions of me, how this has influenced also electoral processes, how it influences the analysis of behaviour, for example, in security cameras that by themselves decide if a specific gesture at an airport or train
station might potentially have a future subversive outcome. So I wonder why you would choose for the PowerPoint. I mean, because it's part of a broader set of work. I mean, for instance, some other projects I've done have been reverse engineering personalization mechanisms of Google. So using kind of programmatic means to analyze the ways in which personalization is structured and processed, looking at the ways in which, for instance, GitHub, which is a major kind of open source repository, structures access to resources and so on, the relations between pieces of code,
analysis of the Afghan war diaries that were released by Chelsea Manning. So doing computational analysis of these, word frequency analysis of these documents. So in a sense, I focus on PowerPoint just in this project as a mundane example, but I see it as part of a wider continuum of work trying to analyze the kind of spectrum of devices, systems, procedures, and so on that are operative. So a lot of my work would be using some of the interpretive capacities of computational systems,
the structuring modes of databases or location and temporal recording devices to provide a critical analysis or critical use of these systems. But I also think it's important to look at things that are outmoded, that exist almost as prehensile organs within our mediatic systems. So PowerPoint being a fundamental part of these. Other work has been looking at Microsoft Word, for instance. looking at these kind of the ways in which there are different layers and temporalities of computational systems that kind of
have an integral culture that we need to understand the advanced edge of but we also need to understand the kind of mundane, time-lacked version of as well. I just have the feeling that that seems to be more about about a cultural analysis of the use of PowerPoint, which I thought was very interesting also in the talk. I don't really see how the internal or, let's say, how the back end of PowerPoint, but maybe that's something you know more about than me, would specifically address the same kind of problematic as other researchers that you are now referencing, which is on algorithmic analysis of human behavior, and that indeed prescripts my future relation to the knowledges of others
or social relations to others. I don't really see that in the... PowerPoint might actually be more of a savior in that sense than its problem. I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that there are various kinds of... If we say that one of the conditions of the present is big data, predictive analysis, various kinds of open-ended, underspecified and open systems of surveillance that we exist in, that also acts as the condition for the creation of culture,
for political action, and so on. These systems are known by various means. So one of them would be direct, or can become known by various means. One is the direct technical analysis of these systems. Others can be explored by hacking and intervening in them. Others can be explored by engaging in social or artistic intervention, expropriation, exploration of these systems. So these are all different research strategies. One can also read, for instance, the technical papers that underlie a lot of the systems, the kind that you mentioned.
So you can look at the ways in which surveillance systems are articulated in the publications of the ACM or the IEEE, for instance. And these are also very useful sets of resources. But we can also say that there is an internal culture of these organisations and the way in which they frame their mode of operation, in the way in which they internally narrativise it, which is also useful to look at. And although the agents within GCHQ will be partially using sophisticated systems of computational analysis, recording, measuring, intervention, and so on,
they also need to constitute a kind of working culture amongst themselves. They need to constitute a narrative for what they're doing. And they need to identify themselves with figures such as magicians or Batman or marketing executives. And what I'm trying to get at is, in a sense, this double articulation of the narrative that these agents tell themselves. or in which they kind of pitch for resources and funds within an organization. One can assume that like any other state organization, they're fighting for office space, they're fighting for funds, they're trying to get extra resources for certain kinds of projects and so on.
And at the same time, use these kind of ways of framing their operation, which is sophisticated forms of computational surveillance and at the same time has this kind of mundane layer. So I'm trying to think about these two in the same way that you might look at, I don't know, say Wired magazine, which has very interesting discussions about or has discussions of very interesting projects that are technically very interesting but has this extremely mundane way of describing them in business terms. So there are multiple layers of interpretation between the technical and the way in which they're described by the internal culture of agencies
that allow us to understand some of the kind of permutations and shifts within the culture at large. Thank you. If I can just annotate, and I'll come to you. I think it is the extent to which in Matthew Fuller's work you see this constant return to the imbrication between the abstract codes and the materiality, between protocols that seem to be far away and the constitution of the self. It really is the early Foucault that also brings your work to bear on questions of subject formation, which is the basis of our alliance in the work on the posthuman and the basis of our objection to the object ontologists who dispose hastily of the subject
because politics is not what they're remotely interested in, if we can even understand what exactly they're interested in, but certainly it is not political subjectivity. So I think it's very crucial here because not all the people that we invited to speak in our series actually did raise the political as a concern that actually had an impact on the type of media and cultural analysis that they were producing. So I just want to underline that because I think it's one of the great features of Fuller's work. Thank you for your patience. You've got the mic. first of all I like very much the way you weaponize language against the excesses of this posthuman condition so to speak but I wanted to ask you how do you think of anonymity as a technique
or as a rhetorical practice in all these different instances of posthuman mediation Yeah, no, I think, I mean, certainly anonymity is, you know, something one engages in, you know, as a necessity. You know, I mean, just as a kind of a basic, you know, one can basically assume that everyone in this room has illegally downloaded files, right? I mean, from the internet. Yes? No? Of course. Of course. So the basic condition of information sharing and access to academic or intellectual or cultural life today is based around a violation of copyright and a violation of intellectual property.
in order to get access to books, music, films, and so on, the basic kind of constituent elements of intellectual culture, we need to violate copyright. And in order to do that effectively, now that we have relatively good monitoring and surveillance of the internet, we need technologies that at least kind of tip the balance in favour of anonymity. So if we think of the internet in the 1990s, it used to be seen as a kind of polymorphic wonder playground of information flows. Nowadays, I think we have to see it pretty much as an airport. So you behave on the internet as you would behave in an airport. And one of the ways in which you can kind of
tip the balance in favor of a slightly more interesting internet is to use things like Tor, PGP, and so on, other encryption devices. But certainly, if you want basic access to academic text online, it's necessary to use anonymity-enhancing technologies. So the Tor browser in the UK in the last month has been a ban put on book piracy websites such as Libgen. fundamental technologies for the present academy. And in order to get access to this now, you need to use the tool browser.
So I think it becomes not necessarily a question of principle, of kind of ethical principle, but it becomes a question of power. What can you get access to? How do you get access to it? The way to get access to it is through the use of anonymizing tools. It was interesting also, I was wondering if you see a difference in using anonymity as a technique and this anonymous movement when it becomes a rhetorical strategy. and following this interwining of layers, as you said,
between the technical analysis and the more cultural level. In the reading that you said, it proves how difficult it is to actually use anonymising tools. for a very lazy and illiterate user like myself, it would actually require some programming skills. Is that what we're really saying here of people? Make more of an effort. Is that an implication of this? Which would be good. To use Tor is pretty easy. It just requires downloading a certain browser, a modified version of Firefox. I think it's very possible. Encore un effort, as they said. Looking around the room before I start shooting my next series of questions.
Okay, then I would like to refocus on the question of methods, because that came across in your paper, and it comes across in the reading that you said very clearly. There is a major methodological shift. Could we run through the different steps of that? Because you assumed that we were all as brilliant as you on that point. Clearly, I shift away from anti-foundational, deconstructivist, linguistic-oriented, if I understood correctly. I return to constructivism, but a constructivism that is polymorphic and yet foundational. I get drunk just trying to follow what strikes me as an utterly irrational, zigzagging, methodological mess. Can you guide us through it, please? Why would you need to resist getting drunk?
Getting drunk on air is a bit cheap. I would like to get drunk on something more substantive. Yeah. I guess, I mean, yeah, methodologically I'm interested in kind of interplay between technical knowledges, technical practices. the way in which these have a mixture of aesthetic and scientific knowledges that are kind of imbricated within them I think we can insist on using kind of art methodologies also as the fundamental necessity of invention and intervention in the world
rather than observation. The kind of withdrawal and observation mode that kind of characterizes some of the humanities, I think would be, along with the agents of GCHQ, I think we can say that we're interested in experiment, we're interested in creation of realities as part of this kind of constructivist aspect of the work. But I think there's also a kind of sense in which the technical has become so much part of everyday life, of political life, of economic life, that it has its own conditions of genesis for new forms of life.
that are paying attention to those in different ways and without necessarily implying a supreme form of technical knowledge or a form of knowledge that allows the superiority of the technical becomes fundamental to understanding the computational conditions. So re-embedding the technical in something called the context? Would that be the term? Yeah, but also understanding the technical as having many different scales and many different kinds of characteristics. So that, for instance, I think a lot of contemporary forms of music, for instance, are ways of understanding computational processes via bodily means.
One of the people who writes well about this is Steve Goodman or Eleni Akoniadu. People who are looking at the way in which sound exemplifies rhythmic processes, but they're also algorithmic process. They're also the result of certain kinds of operations of software. So the way in which certain kinds of rhythmic or dance-oriented music interrogate the relationship of the experience of dance and sound or the intensity of bass frequencies and so on
back to the mode of composition, the circulation, dissemination of music, are kind of fundamental ways in which, in popular cultures, this kind of question has been interrogated. Other forms have been software art, have been different modes of art that kind of border on the hackley and so on. So I think these are also kind of resources we can call on. for setting up that kind of inquiry. You suggested Guattari's notion of the machinic, machinic autopoiesis, was a methodological ally. Did I understand that correctly? Yeah, but also the term in lines of flight,
which is equipment. So thinking about, certainly in Guattari's work, but also his work with Deleuze, there's an interest in machines and the machinic. and the machinic understood as processes in which multiple objects, multiple entities, multiple systems become entailed in a mutual kind of correlation. You know, an engagement of process that is beyond the singular. Equipment is useful because it allows us to think about the way in which technologies produce social conditions, produce relations amongst
multiple entities and dynamics. Okay. What methodological value would you give to deception? Because that was the other big theme that ran through the anonymity. It seemed to me that deception has a strategic function politically, but also a rhetorical function poetically. Do I read you correctly and can you say more about it? Yeah, I mean, I think, in a sense, this returns to some of the work I've done with Andy Goffey in Evil Media, thinking about communication media as kind of fundamentally implicated in questions that are around deception
or around the constitution of truths and looking at the kind of ways in which these, in a sense, co-evolve or the way in which they're kind of mutually implicated. So this is where I think that if intelligence agencies are fundamentally constructivist now and that they don't just withdraw from the world and monitor it, they also, as these slides show, intervene in the world in order to create intelligence, in order to create events that generate intelligence. One of the ways in which we can see this mapped out is in A.L. Weissman's work, where he shows the way in which the Israeli military
and intelligence services will, for instance, drop a bomb on the roof of a Hamas militant, not to target that individual, but to look at the pattern of use of phones in the following few minutes. So who is contacted immediately following that event? So the point is not to target an individual, but to carry out a social network analysis from that. So there's a way in which there's both a kind of deception involved in that they will claim that they're targeting a dangerous individual who's sending homemade missiles onto the nursery schools of Israel.
but one of the primary functions is to maintain a kind of regime of duress and at the same time to elicit telecommunications or signals intelligence. So this way in which there's an extensive aim but there's also an effect generated by acting in the world that elicits intelligence. So there's a move from the current cold observation to acting in the world in order to generate data effectively. So strategic deception. But the role of trolling and laughter, sorry, I'm speaking my language, you didn't pronounce that,
but the role of culture jamming in the 1990s language of reappropriating for the purpose of subversion, almost a carnivalesque. That was also part of your discourse. One of my favorite feminist texts in the 1980s is Elen Cixou, The Laugh of the Medusa, when she talks about the power of laughter. That's also part of your anarchical self. Can you say more about that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's also... It's interesting to think about the way in which you have very libidinal figures such as Ronald
Reagan, Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, these kind of figures that embody a kind of transgressive, disruptive, bacchanalian, nasty kind of heroic figure. The ability to say what everyone is thinking. This kind of populist trope of being able to say the unspeakable truth but which everyone will agree to be true. In a way, this mode of transgression that we associate with the avant-garde in some ways is also now the mode of a certain kind of
white patriarchal power that enjoys the pleasure of speaking its name. So the way in which we've seen an eruption of anti-feminist trolling online over the last few years has been part of this. So there's a pleasure in the exercise of power that is not delinked from its... the exercise of power is not delinked from the pleasure that's entailed by it. In fact, the pleasure that's entailed by the exercise of power is in a way seen as a guarantor of the authenticity and appropriateness of that exercise.
So because someone takes a kind of gleeful joy in attacking migrants, therefore it proves the legitimacy of their claim to authority. And I think that's something we see in the way in which these slides present a certain kind of gleeful mischievousness, the kind of slightly kind of boyish naughtiness that's at the root of a lot of their rhetoric. So the libidinal element here is the display of this uncensored glee in the performance of the very power that they know they possess through the massive identification of the masses with them. Wilders would be the example. Highly, highly popular with the teenager population,
white males mostly dispossessed to a certain extent. Now, this is crucial because that brings us to the discussion of populisms that we have had in previous sessions. And populisms in the plural, because we have identified left-wing populism as an issue as well in the work of Beltran in the last session of the mass movements, Podemos and in Greece, more than ever, where there is a massification of a certain populist voice, but to the left of the political spectrum. Could we read them through this? What is the term? I'm looking for words here. Libidional figures, populist tropes of desire, captivating the social imaginary,
being one of the political elements that we have here. And then a footnote, was it yesterday that a general in the Canadian army justified rape and sexual assault in terms of biological genetic evolutionary terms, had to retract immediately, but said we have this because we are so wired that we can go this way. Oops, immediately had to apologise. But again, a naturalisation of a certain form of white heroic raping masculinity, sort of thrown in batteries. Can you say something about this? I'm interpreting you wildly. I'll send a bill at the end of this for your session. The wild interpretation and authority as creative is something that has been a problem for the left
with its asceticism, its puritanical nature, its roots in Protestantism. and there's something that Nietzsche very clearly identified as a problem for socialism, communism, anarchism, and that which many groups throughout the 20th century attempted to address. If a key slogan of 1968 was all power to the imagination, and which also showed very well the problem of that slogan in that the imagination can be infested, driven by numerous kinds of design,
numerous kinds of modes of transgression or creativity. I think then there's a kind of a potential remapping of what creativity or desire or the imagination is said to stand for if we say all power to the imagination we end up with what we've got in a sense because this is the limit of our imagination So we've had several decades since 1968. The imagination has come to power. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea, perhaps. Who do we do desire?
It's the last one. Who do we do desire with? Do we do Reich? Do we do Deleuze? Do we do a mix? Do we have to tell our students to please read some psychoanalysis that we love in our face? Interesting. Who do you do it with? Who do I do desire with? What a saucy question. I'm sorry, it's a very saucy question. I mean it very cleanly. Sorry, boys out there. Yeah, I mean, I guess Nietzsche is a starting point. Spinoza, obviously, and Deleuze and Guattari. Foucault, obviously, in terms of a kind of regime of desire, and desire is a kind of unnatural phenomenon, something that is already technicized. but also I think we could
we can talk about say with Nietzsche the kind of desire more broadly speaking as will to power and the way in which specific media systems calculational systems recording systems and so on have their own modality of will to power and I think that's something we need to catch up with and understand as we live partly in the condition that is kind of set up by their own imagination. Wow. If you can survive that. Fantastic. I am for stopping here unless
I'm doing my fascist teacher bit pre-emptive strike. If you can hold it, then I would give the floor back to our boss, to our hostess. And we do our lunch. May I remind all the speakers that you are my guests on the top floor for lunch, because we have to discuss the glossary. We will not take all of your lunch, but please come up. There will be food for you in the room, and there will be time for you afterwards to rejoin the crowd. What a morning, what a speaker. Please join me in thanking him. Matthew Fuller.