Alison Collins, The Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of the Second Day of I'm Alison Collins, and I'll just be introducing today's panel. As we did yesterday, we'll start the day off with about 20 minute, three 20 minute presentations in kind of in succession, starting with Mackenzie Wark, followed by Michael Ferrer and Nick Cernicek. We'll have then a keynote presentation by Suhail Malik, which will be followed by a response
to the keynote by Martha Schwendener. So before we break for lunch, we'll have a bit of a roundtable discussion generated by short responses to each of the presentations, leaving a little bit of time for questions from the audience and also from the streaming audience. So I'll ask you just to keep your questions until the end. So in order to keep on track, I'll just remind all the speakers we are a little bit behind, but just to try to remain within your allocated time. So to begin, we're going to start with Mackenzie Wark. I'm pleased to introduce him. He's a professor of culture and media art at the New School for Social Research. Hi. And the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory,
and Telesthesia, among various other things. His presentation today is called Pro Cult for Cyborgs. Welcome, Mackenzie. Thank you. So, good morning everybody. Happy International Women's Day. I hope you can hear me over there. Wow, I can actually see myself on a little screen in the big screen there. Alright, so I want to talk a little bit about a work in progress. It's called Molecular Red. I thought I'd talk to it rather than read a paper because there's enough layers of estrangement here already. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is what Marx, Capital Volume
3 called molecular rift. Molecular rift. The sense that, and he wasn't even aware of it in his time, but the big one in our era is carbon. You know, carbon is in the wrong place. Carbon that was in the ground is now in the air. That's a problem. But there are others. is in the wrong place. Nitrogen is in the wrong place. And by wrong I mean in ways that don't create feedback loops but where you start to create runaway processes that head in directions we can't even model and don't even quite grasp. The big one's climate but there are other ones. So it seems to me that the problem of constructing critical knowledge in the 21st century really has to take the question of metabolic rift as its kind of central concern.
Of all of the liberation fronts of the 20th century, you know, we got somewhere with some of these in terms of liberating women, people of colour, of liberating the working class, but the liberation movement that succeeded above all others was the liberation of carbon. I mean, we liberated an element in the atmosphere. And I think one needs to sort of rethink the history of the 20th century sort of around that fact and the subsidiary ones that that perspective then opens up. We put methane in the wrong place as well and so on. So rather than talk about totality as Lukash did, can we talk about biosphere as what totality now is? So the paradox of the 20th century is on the one hand this astonishing improvement in the
capacity to create information systems and yet at the same time the kind of thermodynamic system that underlies the whole thing is kind of totally out of whack. So we've kind of expanded the newer sphere of the digital, if you like, on the one hand, but the underlying metabolic processes on the molecular level that would sustain that are in really not very good shape at all. So it seems to me that there's a body of knowledge upon which one needs to base a critique. It's no longer political economy. It's essentially climate science. My source for this is this terrific book, which I highly recommend, The Vast Machine, by Paul Edwards. Where I can start to grasp, curiously, how one of the things that, it's only a subsidiary
cause, but one of the things that advances digital technology in the 20th century was in fact the demand of firstly weather and then climate modeling. one of the drivers, they're a subsidiary driver to the military of course, but those two things are also in themselves not unrelated. So can we have a critical theory that co-joins in a sense these two objects, the problem of a thermodynamic system and then the growth of information system on top of that? And I wanted to introduce Alexander Bogdanov as really the first person who did it. He was Lenin's rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party before the revolution.
Lenin throws him out. He becomes a kind of a theorist. And there are a few sort of key concepts I wanted to get out of Bogdanov. And the reason was that he actually sort of got climate change almost right as an idea twice, first in about 1908, his science fiction novel about Mars, that's called, in English, Red Stark, and the second is in his work on technology. He almost got the physics right, which is an astonishing thing to pull off in the 1920s. All right, so three Bogdanov concepts that might help us in thinking about how knowledge is produced. Is what happens in any system of knowledge what he calls a practice of substitution.
So what Bogdanov means by substitution is that we extend out from the labor practices in which we're involved and start to imagine the rest of the world, a kind of a metaphysics, based on that model. And he thought, in essence, that there'd been three. That ancient knowledge is based on authoritarian substitution, the authoritarian relations within the household and the Greek polity get expanded out to the cosmos. He thought there was a second substitutional model based on exchange, and it coincides with the kind of rise of political economy, of modern science, and so forth. And his goal was the production of a third. Is there such a thing as a kind of comradely set of relations that one can imagine in everyday life
that one could then use as the basis for building a metaphysics that's not either of the other two. And it strikes me that in looking at what's happened in so much of contemporary thought, I kind of see substitution based on models of exchange, based on models of authority, as if we didn't really make any progress in thinking through the relation between how knowledge would be organized and how we would then construct the metaphysical extension of that out into the world that's, if you like, always the penumbra around how one thinks. So for Bogdanov, what he proposed was a technology. Can there be... Technology. Can there be comradely relations among different kinds of knowledge
that understand the relation between the world, and how we construct metaphysical extension of that out into the world? I just started to hear myself back again. And to introduce another really key Bogdanov idea, Proleth Galt. He's the author of the idea that what really matters is the production of culture by the people and for the people. So it's to start, if you like questioning property and knowledge, and property and culture was one of the things Bogdanov starts to do in the early 20th century. And for a while he even had his own rival organization to the Bolshevik party after the revolution, but it sort of quickly gets shut down by the Leninist party.
Alright, so is there a way to take this as a model of critical thought for our time? First of all, because Bogdanov kind of gets it, that one has to think political economy within a kind of biospheric economy. Secondly, because he starts to think about, oh, here's a theory of knowledge that we tend to sort of recycle these metaphors that are really just extensions of forms of social relation, particularly authoritarian ones or in the model of exchange. And would it be possible to do that in a kind of playful, creative manner based on the kind of comradely co-production of knowledge? So to me that seems like a reasonable starting point for thinking the problem of how one might engage as a critical intellectual in the larger problem of how does one start to
realign the totality of information relations with the thermodynamic relations that underlie them. If we don't solve that problem, then we're not really accelerating anywhere anytime soon. We're going to have to be doing remedial work to patch up all of the damage that that's done. I just want to take a couple of minutes to say if anybody accidentally starts to reinvent Bogdanovism in the 20th century, it was Bonnie Haraway. I find her thought is quite striking in the way that, like Bogdanov, she was interested in the biological sciences rather than just political economy, and how one then starts to think from the point of view of a collective agent. And if for Bogdanov, it was still classically the working class, in Haraway, she started
to think, we are all cyborgs. What is, if you like, a kind of cyborg being one can think? So that one doesn't assume in advance that there's a separation of subject and object. One doesn't think in advance one could, in Bogdanov's terms, define working class. One doesn't construct a philosophy that assumes in advance that there is subject and there is object. You'll notice speculative realism is still doing. It still kind of takes this, you know, it doesn't really question the basic presumption of the categories. It just wants to change the relation between them. So it's to ask this other question, is how are cuts between subjects and objects produced in the first place will, I think, take you to the productivism of Bogdanov or in 21st century form into something like the figure of the cyborg.
Now, Haraway is well aware that all of us are creatures of what we would now call this, military entertainment complex. There isn't an outside. We have to kind of stop thinking that there's an outside from which one can think about these things. We're inside it. We're produced by it. And what it's producing, above all else, is kind of a third nature. If there was a second nature that collective labor produced over and against, a nature which it then calls into being as a category, what we're seeing in the age of the digital is a kind of a third nature that sees as hold of that second nature but is building something out of it that's not thermodynamically sustainable and you know I can only sort of rattle through this quickly but one could ask
you know well what constitutes the power that would organize the planet in such a form maybe there is a new kind of ruling class I call it the vector or class Maybe power in this day and age is based on control of stocks, flows, and vectors of communication. There's a move away from the actual physical control of industrial production to a kind of third order control, not of the resource, not of its means of transformation, but control and command of the information system. Maybe it's a ruling class whose goal is not surplus value, but surplus information. And after all, this whole apparatus we're using today, it's basically subsidiary to Google's attempt to extract surplus information out of us in order to create a new engine
of business. It may or may not succeed. It may or may not be a new mode of production. But I think the question has to be asked. Is this just capitalism as usual or is it something worse? My proposition to you is that maybe it's something worse. So if there's a field of knowledge one might start to construct, maybe we need to think about the digital inhumanities. You know it seemed like such a big thing that we would put digital on the front of humanities, but what if it's the inhumanities? What if we were to look at the production of power over and against some notion of self, the production of versions of a cyborg being that aren't really terribly habitable or sustainable? And if one started from that critical point of view, one might then at least be able to
tease out what other kinds of cyborg being would we like? What other kinds of organization or power and knowledge do we think are possible? Can we take everyday life as a site for the construction of experiments in other ways of life that don't try to extract us from our embeddedness, our connectedness, our cyborg being, but repurpose it, detour it, that construct another way of life? And if there's a last project for art, it might be in that very domain to think about what the everyday in the era of third nature might constitutively be. So I will leave it there, and thank you for your patience with the mediated communication. All right, thank you, Mackenzie.
I'm going to turn on the other microphone here real quick. Okay, please go ahead. Sorry about that. That's all right. Thanks. Next up, we'll have Michael Farrer. Michael Farrer is an insurgent scholar living in Portland, Oregon. He was previously creative director at Spooky Action in St. Louis, a leading venue for experimental music and performance. He's written about neuroscience and continental philosophy, the ludic impulse in 20th century art, and contemporary electronic music. The title of his presentation is Outline for a Recursive Curriculum. Malcolm Michael. Pardon me. Michael is not actually in Vancouver, correct?
I'm going to explain what's going on with Michael. Yeah, Michael was actually supposed to be here with us, but he had problems with his passport and all that, so he couldn't make it. So he's just, like, setting up his system. So I thought maybe if we... Why don't we have a discussion? Why don't we... I just want to see if Robin can, like, respond right now, if Robin can get on. It's, like, as if not having Ken's paper earlier wasn't bad enough. I'm putting him on spot to do his... And then by then, Michael will be, like, setting up and joining us. . No, you don't need to do that, because other people can also comment on Ken's piece. But you're here, so maybe you want to start it. So Robin will introduce himself.
Hi, good morning. My name's Robin Simpson. I'm a graduate student in art history at UBC. So unfortunately, as Ken sort of demonstrated with his presentation, this is something that he's thinking through. So I didn't have an opportunity necessarily to read anything that he had prepared in advance. But I sort of counted my blessings that I was assigned Ken to respond to. because I think as you've seen from his presentation from afar, he's a deft and agile pedagogue and orator and delivers his ideas in quite a clear and generous fashion,
which I admire a great deal. So all I really knew was that we might talk about Alexander Bogdaninov and Donna Haraway. Bogdaninov I hadn't really heard of before, but of course I had sort of heard rumors about him, this sort of Soviet polymath that I think later practiced sort of experiments in blood transfusion and sort of extending life, but also early sort of like proto-systems theorist and developing sort of early ideas of what would speak to cybernetics, which I think Ken already demonstrated. And then also his engagement with prolet cult and early engagement with art as well.
So it seemed like an exciting topic and such. But it was also interesting. It was nice that Donna Haraway was inserted in there. Not even inserted, but it was sort of the second part of what Ken was thinking through. And it was just such a pleasure to reread Haraway's manifesto, which I think, sort of giving the other manifesto that's sort of hanging over this conference, if I had to choose amongst manifestos, my favorite manifesto, I might maybe choose Haraway's over the Accelerationist Manifesto. And I think just sort of in particular, there's one thing in the Manifesto for Acceleration Politics which sort of sits kind of potent today, but Mo addressed a bit at the beginning
that there's point 15 in the third part where it's written, we do not present any particular organization as the means to embody these vectors. What is needed and what has always been needed is an ecology of organizations, pluralism of forces resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is. And in this regard, we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics, even those we disagree with. Like I said, it's soapboxing a bit here, but I really find that this sort of point 15 in the third part is sort of detectable ennui in this statement compared to the surrounding
points that really are not even this manifesto. It reads like a sort of rote caveat of sorts that seems to preemptively define acceleration's homosocial makeup. And so I kind of struggle to locate any palpable declaration of affinity in this statement compared to what Haraway activates in her essay. And particularly what I admire about Haraway is her capacity to recognize existing sort of analogs to her thought and also more frequently to learn from existing activities and means of creative resistance. And so there's three examples that she offers in her manifesto. In the Cyborg Manifesto, which is the Livermore Action Group,
the Service Employees International Union, and also anthropologist Ai Wei Ong's studies of the role of Southeast Asian village women in Japanese and American electronics firms. And so, yeah, there's a strength in that thinking through affinities. And there's an object lesson in the form of Haraway's manifesto that I find is noticeably absent from the accelerationist manifesto. But, okay, should I keep talking? talking.
I have more content, yes. There's sort of like two parts to this that we said. The first part. And the second part is more about art. And it sort of has a title that would be sort of like USB stick in a brick of concrete. And it's something that Mo talked about at the beginning of the conference yesterday, where he was sort of, Well, he's talking about art and asking artists, I think, to quote him, to quit playing around and get serious about the consequences of thinking about computation within a capitalist system and its effects on forms and its effects on visual culture. And so I had my suspicions when he said that, and I might be wrong about this, but I
think that some of the art in question he's thinking about was all assembled last year at this exhibition, Castle, that was entitled speculations on anonymous materials. And this exhibition was complemented by a symposium bringing together some of the thinkers that you might expect considering the title of Reza, of course, was speaking there. As I've been lingering on this show, I haven't seen it, just looked at it online. And viewing it from afar, and despite the call to get serious, I'm sort of wondering if maybe it's worth briefly considering some of the work that's alluded to in this exhibition, even if it's kind of, in my opinion, from a distance, sort of like miserable and bourgeois art,
even if you're not supposed to use that word anymore. And so under question are these artists who really just sort of delight in suspending their encounter with advertising systems, algorithmic sort of advertising systems that depend on some sort of monitoring of our activity or our social activity, whatever we're generating. And a lot of these artists have statements that are peppered with general outlines of how these systems work. But what I detect is actually sort of an underlying spirit of collaboration with corporate entities, and there's sort of nihilism behind that. And what I think is actually kind of like this sort
of paranoid genealogy, where there's this desperate search for information that was once suspended or surrendered, that were always sort of like hemorrhaging and leaking out. And so on social networks, Wark writes that we tend to, as users, we pay rent with our information. And he's spoken to this sort of vector class that, of course, figuring out means of harvesting this information, whether it's a viable system or not, economic system or not, is up for debate or means of accumulation. And this contract is always sort of assuredly. I guess that contract's always assured because we all have this sense that whatever information
we're giving about is probably pretty useless, especially as artists and intellectuals. Like maybe as activists, there's something worth calling about their ideas or any sort of dissenting ideas. But otherwise, really just kind of like nominal tiny bits of information, like what's it really worth the frequency that you log in? And there's a larger network, of course. Maybe there's something that it amounts to. But we just sort of understand that what we'll put up with dealing with all these corporate entities, because we're not really providing all that much. But I think also that for these artists, that there's a sense that actually they're more so that this sort of speaks to what Mackenzie was talking about a bit in terms of ecology and natural resources
and the dependence on natural resources for technological development, is that these users are positioned more so is a sort of like raw, natural resource. That rather than being some example, variable capital to engage with social networks or to surrender your data is in part this sort of, they end up being more so some form of constant capital. And maybe that's a sort of like dumb Marxism, but it's kind of dumb art. So we can leave it at that. So what maybe occurs through these exchanges is that there's more of a transference of information, no matter how nominal, that in some way contributes
to the look and feel of any number of products, so that we understand that our information actually sort of contours the aesthetics of the world, or the aesthetics of products, the aesthetics of screen culture. And so just all these bad advertisements that try to get us to stick. And we kind of find it amusing, because again, We have all these heterogeneous interests, and none of these things ever seem right. They never seem to find an ad that can really catch our attention or actually match us. But I think there's also this sense for these artists who are in this exhibition that there's this sort of exchange of information is sort of a genetic. This is the cybernetic thing of it. There's this confused sort of sense that there's a genetic relationship with whatever weird, knobby, strange product shows up,
or whatever advertisement ends up, or whatever string of text ends up. And so we're sort of always left, especially these artists are trying more so to just sort of suspend in this moment, where they're sort of like desperately looking at this material and kind of wondering about their information. Where did my information go? Is it going to do anything? Is it going to make a difference? Will that corporation buy it? Will they like it? Will they make use of it? Will they ever see it again? Can I ever see what my information has done? Can I see it here in this unwanted product, or this useless service, or this annoying ad? It must be delivered to me because there's some affiliation. There's some sort of relationship
that I have with this at some point. Yeah. Just before we leave the stage, I was going to ask you. I was actually referring to that exhibition. I wasn't holding up that exhibition as a model. No, no, no. Well, that's what I understand. Yeah, yeah. I was talking directly actually referring to that exhibition. Yeah, well, that's what I sort of recognized. And I feel, obviously, that you brought it up as well, because there seems to be a contrast in terms of the symposium that was organized that undergirded the exhibition of sorts. and then a name that itself was affected by a series of theory and ideas that are making their way through the art world. Hey, Walter.
Yeah? Can I direct a quick question to you before you sit down? Yeah. That idea of the ads never matching our own desires, and in fact, someone writes the other way and never exactly why you take the words talking about it in the end of your life. Did you know any ads that pop up and so on? I think in some ways that all is your one-on-one, in the sense that it's a moment of failed interpolation, but that's when interpolation takes place. That's when we emerge at the digital subject or the online proletariat or whatever. It's when, why is it gay ESL belly fat ass on Facebook? Why doesn't it match me, right? So that moment of stuff that the big others come recognizing is when that interpolation is set sort of awkward. Even the digital, now the digital thing is match,
Just updating how that's . Yeah, that's a great reflection on something I threw together quickly. But yeah, absolutely. But I guess if I had a question for McKenzie, would be more, again, thinking about natural resources in this proposal, thinking about a usership less as some sort of weakly tied proletariat and more so just as raw material and what your reflection on that might be. Yeah, thank you very much. So I won't reintroduce Michael's talk,
but I'll just welcome him to begin. I did that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hi. So I'm sorry for delay. I'm sorry that I couldn't be there. I was really looking forward to it. About half of this is going to go very smoothly. I was prepared for an evening talk, but not a morning talk. So I'm just going to dive right in, since we're running behind. The title of my paper is Outline for Recursive Curriculum. About half of this is going to go very smoothly, then I'm going to go off script. It's fairly self-explanatory, so I'm just going to dig right in.
The challenges that condition the pursuit of universal education can be roughly divided between those pertaining to its socio-political establishment and those pertaining to its pedagogical organization. While practically distinct, these are not functionally independent of one another. The stability of the project's institutional supports relies ultimately on the integrity of its didactic content, which in turn requires a substantial civil infrastructure to ensure its consistency. So long as it is treated as a generic service, addressing only the minimal requirements of socialization, public education fails to translate the political motives for great kindness propagation and the liberatory facilities it is promoted as supplying.
A 2005 internal report evaluating UNESCO's Education for All movement highlights the crucial relationship between quality of student participation, noting that despite their routine affirmation of education is a basic right, many international instruments are silent about the qualitative dimension of learning. Assessments of the UN's Millennium Development Goal to achieve universal primary education by 2015 similarly reflect the disappointing results of erratic implementation and inadequate teacher training.
Even in poor communities where formal schooling is provided, it is often difficult to invest children and their parents in the process of education when a culture of learning is still lacking. While a global educational infrastructure might be an achievable near-future goal, this only multiplies the basis of problems that already complicate the work of schooling and the developed world, recalling attention as well to the shortcomings of approaches here. I suggest that one way to ameliorate these concerns is to redefine the methodology of general education around the imperative of its universal extension, extrapolating local infrastructure stipulations accordingly. In agreement with UNESCO's recommendations, this involves reevaluating the constructivist philosophies that have characterized the recent history of Western education and developing more explicitly structured
curricula for both classroom teaching and teacher education. To take seriously the potential of universal education, we should submit equally to its demands rather than setting ourselves as its benchmark. What should count is the criteria for a form of universal education that could most fully realize its merits. We can cite three requirements to satisfy what might be called its strong definition. First, that formal education be made available to all without further qualification. Second, that it be implemented globally through a system of consistent methodological principles and standards of content. And third, that it directs itself explicitly towards its own universality. That is, that it should be transnational in its concerns and constitutive of a self-consciously
cosmopolitan perspective. It is this last criterion that is missing from received strategies of universal education, but that could serve most clearly to direct the particulars of that mission. However, besides insufficient civil infrastructure, the major impediment to ensuring the success of any such program is the unavailability of the sort of global frame of reference it would be put in place to facilitate. So long as it is seen as imposing the values of one group upon the members of others or as being irrelevant to their specific needs, the effort to determine an ethical or conceptual lingua franca is bound to invite suspicion and hostility.
Hence, Western liberal intellectuals have defaulted for some time to a kind of relativist isolationism in the name of those communities that populate the capitalist periphery. Yet, rather than protect the oppressed from cultural aggression or economic subsumption, the isolationist prescription against universalism largely contributes to an environment of resignation towards conditions of exclusion and exploitation, so long as they are maintained by locals. If, on the contrary, we reject the notion that technical and scientific knowledge especially should be restricted by their perceived geographical provenance, and assert instead that it is by keeping these resources effectively private that we fail those groups without access to them, then we commit ourselves to the active dispersal of concepts and skills that require
sophisticated training and materials to secure. This training should be understood not just in terms of a vocational practicum, but as providing common vocabulary through which to make sense of the world as an architecture of causal mechanisms. Again, we should not approach this charge as if the world's richest nations have already fulfilled it for themselves. Rather than export or multiply entrenched pedagogies in their administrative forms, essentially unaltered, the project of universal education strongly defined compels the transformation of those practices as well. We can take several routes to arrive at computation as an effective, practical, and conceptual framework in which to address the demands of that project. Most immediately, the ubiquity of information and communications technology, ICT, has already
forced the question of how to situate digital literacy in the curricula of the developed world. If universal education is supposed to be the instrument by which to narrow the knowledge gap between those societies where formal schooling is well established and those where it is not, the same question is raised still more pressingly in the latter context. This, in itself, reiterates the mandate that education must be developed alongside an infrastructure capable of supporting it appropriately. Schools without computers today simply cannot meet the requirements of equitable implementation. But even though schools where digital literacy does count as an essential aspect of the curriculum, it cannot alone corral study of the implications of computational resources for the disciplines
those resources now define. It can only register the historical fact that this transformation has occurred. Hence, merely fitting it into the curriculum accords ICT an axial position around which other courses become implicitly arranged, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged. As it is increasingly enlisted throughout both schooling and daily life, digital literacy becomes indistinct from learning in general, while other subject areas must individually address the basis of their amenability to computational expression. Teaching through simulations and games doesn't just neutrally increase the range of educational media, but instead draws concentrated attention to the construction of their design and to their epistemological presumptions models.
Responsibly contemporary pedagogy must be sufficiently reflexive to accommodate this shift. For example, computational thinking, as promoted chiefly through its center at Carnegie Mellon, aims to expand digital skill sets to include familiarity with techniques of algorithm design, pattern recognition, decomposition, and so forth, with the goal of promoting these as a generalized approach to problem solving. This strategy has metacognitive applications as well, insofar as it inculcates an awareness of thought as rule-based input-output procedures. This refinement of human intelligence, according to the automated standards of our machines, suggests that computation, which begins by rendering logic concrete, completes the cycle of its conceptual achievement by providing the grammar of that common language we cannot
Seems like we're still live, but... We are still live. It's just that his... It depends on the speed of the connection where he is. Yeah, no, he's coming on. He just messaged me that, like, sorry, hold on. Okay. So he might go leave the room and then come back again. Okay. There he is. No. I think he's just going to come back.
If anyone has his number, we could certainly call him directly. We didn't have a phone number for him. But if anybody has that and can share that... Yeah, I'm trying to contact him. Maybe I can just, like, dial him in so he'll just, like, finish his paper with the phone. Yes, and you can just hold it right up to the... Thanks, Dana. We could certainly call him directly.
We didn't have a phone number for him. But if anybody has that and can share that. . Mohamed, I'm not getting any response right now, so... Yeah, don't worry. I'm just putting him on the phone. He's going to just wrap up his paper, because he already actually made his argument. He's just like, to finish, and then he just lost the internet.
the discussion is going. Nick, are you there? Hi, Nick, are you there? I just unmuted you here if you're ready to go. Yeah, I'm all set to go if you guys want. OK. OK, so go ahead. No, just one second. Allison's going to introduce you. I think we'll get back to starting in the room here. Welcome, Nick. Nick Cernczyk is a teaching fellow in geopolitics and globalization at UCL and a PhD graduate in international relations from LSE. He was co-editor of the Speculative Turn and is currently writing Folk Politics with
Alex Williams. His paper is called The Eyes of the State. You can see it up there on the screen. He's going to do it himself. Thank you. about the technological and sort of infrastructural tendencies
within contemporary capitalism, particularly the shift to automation and computer mediation that we see everywhere. And up on the screen now is just a sort of schematic overview of different sectors of the economy and the sort of ongoing tendencies, technological changes that I think are going on right now. So I think this is all quite closely related to Ben Bratton's work on the Black Stack, Tiziana Terranova's work on the Red Stack, and also Nick Dyer-Witherford's work on what he calls Red Plenty platforms. So I think this is all quite heavily interrelated. So the emphasis on this paper is going to be on the bottom two aspects, so macroeconomic forecasting and macroeconomic intervention, so particularly on this modeling aspect. And I think it's the nodal point, essentially,
at which complexity, the aesthetics of cognitive mapping, and the organization of a decision-making system all sort of come together. And I think it's all important because we essentially live within a Promethean world. So we've produced a world of immense complexity, vast technical infrastructure spanning the globe, speeding circuits of data and capital, unprecedented interventions into our biology, the ramifications of all of this on the environment. Yet in the face of this complexity, the left is largely turned away from questions of how to manage this complexity. Instead of grand images of collective self-emancipation through democratic control over this complexity, We instead have the romanticization of endless insurrection by people like Tikkun and the invisible community in particular, or the sort of ephemeral protest of horizontal movements
like Occupy, or just the straight-out retreat into small scales by well-meaning localists. So it seems to me that the left has largely renounced any sort of Promethean venture. But as Alberto Toscano writes, diffuse anti-Promethean common sense seems to express a dangerous disavowal rather than a hard-won wisdom. So in the face of climate change, global infrastructure is an increase in complexity, the point is not whether or not we should be Promethean in our intentions. We already are in terms of our shaping of the environment, the control over our biological body and the manipulation of the global economy. So the point is rather that this Promethean venture has so far been limited to the interest of capital accumulation, and increasingly a small portion even within the capitalist
class. So the questions and problems raised by Prometheanism and large-scale social change are problems to be faced up to, not rejected out of hand. So in light of this, this paper seeks to examine how states have responded to complexity and to the global, and it argues that states have responded by developing cognitive assemblages, essentially systems of human and non-human elements which function to produce a representation of a complex system. So we can see their existence most prominently within the climate change modeling centers, things like the Hadley Center within the UK. Here we have the massive power of the world's leading supercomputers, mobilized to filter through billions of data points, collected by a global observation network, and all with the aim of simulating global climate change.
But that being said, this use of computational technology for modeling, forecasting, and planning are increasingly ubiquitous. Insurance companies, for instance, are spending millions of dollars annually on catastrophe modeling, shaping decisions about insurance premiums and the level of capital held as a buffer. You also have in the field of government energy policy, the production, distribution, and consumption of energy are all represented and understood through about 60 to 70 different models. Likewise, with financial investment and corporate investment, they're increasingly determined by things like value at risk models. The global food system is also modeled and manipulated by a computational technology. So in other words, I think what you see here is that every fundamental aspect of human society, food, energy, capital, nature, and infrastructure, is today represented computationally.
So the aim of this paper is going to be to focus on these eyes of the state, in particular as they perceive and construct the national and global economy. So this paper wants to uncover the ways in which particular constructions of the economy came about, how the economy was made visible, essentially, how particular levers over the economy were made possible, so how the economy became an object of manipulation. And then sort of more speculatively, what post-capitalist potentials do these modeling techniques have? So how could the economy be manipulated for the commons? So the latter essentially forms the normative thrust of this paper. And essentially, you know, if the civilizational deepening of social complexity is mirrored in the expansion of abstract representation of technologies, then it is these technologies
which make complexity both cognitively tractable and pragmatically manipulable. And it is these computational technologies which provide insights into how a post-capitalist society could reappropriate and rationalize the productive forces of society. And indeed, I think Hayek and von Mises recognize the key debate in the 1920s and 30s. The fate of whether we can move beyond the market ultimately lies in the question of whether or not we can intervene into complex systems in a beneficial manner. If we can't do this, then decentralized decision-making by individuals is the only response. But if we can, if we can intervene in complex systems without making things worse, then all sorts of progressive options open up. And so suddenly the question of rationally manipulating economies in the service of the commons becomes a live problem.
So throughout all of this, we have to recall that the economy is not a natural object, but is instead a social and technical construction. So from the physiocrat's initial attempt to map the economy in 1758 to the development of national statistics in the early 20th century and on to the elaborate computational morals of the early 21st century, the economy has always been something to be constructed. This construction of a visible economy, it goes hand-in-hand with constructing ways to manipulate that economy. Given that states act upon economies on the basis of their understanding of the system and that this understanding is broadly, although not completely, embedded in the computational medium of macroeconomic models, then shifts in these models both reflect and cause shifts in the ways that states manipulate economies.
So modeling is therefore a crucial medium bridging conceptual understanding and pragmatic manipulation. So therefore, this paper is interested in the sorts of affordances that these models offer and the politics that they embody. Now that being said, these models are not simply simple determinants of politics. They instead provide a mechanism for organizing thoughts about the economy, for suggesting a range of possible futures, and simulating these sorts of things. They're always supplemented by expert judgment. In accomplishing their functions, models employ a type of thinking embodied within machines. In particular, they construct and embody abstract formalizations of conceptual systems. They operate by combining various elements together in a somewhat partially flexible way. For
For instance, they link together analytical definitions, empirical regularities, local context, universal principles, disciplinary laws, and concepts into some sort of consistent whole. These elements, while permitting of some flexibility in how they are put together, are nevertheless constrained in terms of how they can produce a model. Part of this constraint comes from the medium through which the various elements are linked together. A mathematical formalism, for instance, permits of some linkages, while the use of paradigmatic examples of the model provides other means. Now I think in discussing models, Mary Morgan's work has been particularly exemplary in demonstrating how model-based reasoning functions. So I think it's in her work that we see how models gain their cognitive power, in particular
by embodying two general sets of rules for manipulation. So first, there's the rules imposed by the material of the model, and second, there's the rules imposed by the subject matter of the model. So in the former, the material can be considered physical, for instance models that attempt to build scale replicas of the phenomenon, but it could also be ideational material, so models built in a particular algebraic language or a particular programming language, for instance. But in both cases here, one is bound by the rules of how one can manipulate such material. You can't just manipulate it in one way. The second broad set of rules comes from the subject matter itself. the theoretical concepts and their interrelations that the model builders have implemented into the technology. A consequence of the two sets of rules imposed by modeling is that one can have a precise
pathway for following a chain of consequences. On the basis of this, what gives contemporary computational models their peculiar power is their capacity not only to organize, but also to outsource cognition. So while organizing cognition is a virtue in itself, it is when these rules and chains and consequences are outsourced into a computational medium that they take on their uniquely modern power. So with such a representational technology in hand, one can allow the calculative and inferential processes to expand far beyond any human capacity. So models therefore solidify certain rules of thought into them and ramify the conceptual linkages. And this consolidation of a particular state of knowledge is a source of both their power and their limits. Now, in addition to this, models also perform a certain social function, which is namely
to convince others. And in this regard, the construction is also a means to transform a purely sort of conceptual argument into a medium for propagation and persuasion. And this is more than just the argument that numbers give an illusion of certainty and precision. The point is rather that the very path of reasoning is altered and made more palatable, or not, depending on the medium through which it is made. So the point to be taken from all of this is that models condense a set of inferential and material rules into a medium ...
consequences of log linearization within dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. It turns out, actually, this technical issue is a highly political issue as well. Now, in the longer version of this paper, I covered the Soviet use of economic cybernetics, the Chilean use of the communist internet, the firm level planning of global corporations like Walmart, and the global modeling of institutions like the IMF and the BIS. In this version of the paper, I'm only going to have time to give a very schematic overview of capitalist modeling within central banks. It's quite common to believe that we live in a post-planning era. Communism has failed, and neoliberal doctrines of privatization have taken over. Yet planning still exists in significant areas of even the most neoliberal capitalist economy.
This planning exists on its three levels. State-led investment, firm-led planning, and state-led monetary interventions. In particular, here is the third form of planning, which is the focus of this analysis. The use of modeling and other technical tools in order to construct an image of the economy and to generate levers for manipulating the economy through monetary instruments. In particular, the focus is on the use of these theory-heavy models called Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models, or DSGE. Central banks also use a variety of other representational technologies, things like vector auto-regression models, which are highly statistical, large-scale macroeconometric models, leading indicators on economic surveys, mostly.
But that being said, it's DSGE models, which have become the workhorse of most forecasting. So notably, though, on a sort of side note, most private firms, like an investment bank, for instance, don't actually use DSGE models to model the economy. The only times they use DSG models tend to be when they want to forecast what the central bank is likely to do. Instead, anecdotal evidence that I've gathered suggests that many investment banks, for instance, take a much wider approach to modeling, incorporating models based upon heterodox economists like Kalecki, Minsky, and Godley, for instance. So it's quite interesting, I think, that private firms, the ones who are actually making money off the markets and off the economy, use heterodox economists to actually model what is going to happen. So all that being said, returning to central banks, what happens when we look at the historical
record of central bank modeling? We see that the representation of the economy and the construction of levers of the economy go hand in hand. So when stagnation hit the mature economies in the 1970s, government intervention, primarily fiscal, was initially justified by virtue of the classical Keynesian models of the time. conceptual and technological development, the 1980s brought a series of monetarist models which constructed new levers over the economy. This is partly why they were adopted at the time as well, because they gave policymakers new levers to try and combat state inflation. As continued conceptual and technological development occurred, new levers were constructed via the new Keynesian models, and by the mid-2000s, these DSGE models were widely taken up by central
banks. Now there's a number of sort of problems with DSGE models. My longer paper goes through some of these, but for here I just want to sort of point out one, which is that the notion of equilibrium being central to DSGE models, and sort of practical use of these models, this particularly means a single equilibrium rather than multiple equilibriums. So on the basis of this, the research question becomes, for a DSGE modeler, becomes what explains the fluctuations in the system. In these models, there's only external shocks which are responsible for upsetting the otherwise perfect balance of the economy. So by contrast, post-Wall-Rassian models emphasize that the economy is subject to chaotic behavior, while something like the Minsky approach would emphasize the tendency towards financial instability, and the Marxist
approach, of course, would emphasize that the tendency towards crisis is just built terms of the economy. So this sort of focus on equilibrium and a single equilibrium within DSGE models already negates the possibility of even asking these questions. So in these latter cases, the Marxist and Minskyian approach, the question instead becomes not of explaining fluctuations, but instead of building institutions, rules, and programs to constrain a naturally chaotic system, or in other words, to build social movements to move to a new economic system. So I think this sort of, you know, reliance upon DSGE models essentially forbids all these sorts of questions from the outset for a central bank, and therefore determines what they do and can't do in terms of intervening. Now, in discussing all of this, I don't want
to say that modeling is a panacea or that it is independent of human cognitive systems. These aren't, you know, this isn't a technical sort of solution to a political problem. Rather, So they're situated in a much broader community of socio-technical reasoning. And all the models invoke exogenous variables, and they require implicit and explicit assumptions. Moreover, these models are subject to constant conceptual revision as the economy changes. To give one example, the Bank of England recently spent £3.4 million on building a new model. So these things are constantly being changed all the time. also therefore an important part of a socio-technical reasoning process in setting monetary policy. And as every personal account from a central banker attests to, forecasts from various models
act as hubs around those discussion centers. So they're sort of iterative processes of forecasting and discussion along with inputs from the expert judgments of the members. The role of expertise, I think, comes in a number of places in the socio-technical reasoning process. So the Bank of England, for instance, it incorporates more frequent information, such as business surveys and other leading indicators. It incorporates this information via the judgment of the members of the committee, rather than directly through the core model itself. So human reasoning comes in via the summarization of variables that cannot yet be computed. And since no single model is a perfect representation, there's also model uncertainty. Now in part, this uncertainty is minimized by using multiple models. models. So this is similar to the recent shift to ensemble modeling in the climate change sector
as well. And if models agree on the implication of a shift, if you use a bunch of models and they all agree on the shift, it can be considered that there is little uncertainty, but if they disagree then obviously there's quite a bit of uncertainty about the models. So further estimation of how uncertain the model is though, it also depends upon human judgment. relying on past experience to know the idiosyncrasies of a particular model, and areas where it often over or underestimates its effects, for instance. So I think this is the second way in which the human judgment, human cognitive reasoning, gets incorporated into these technical models as well. Now lastly, and perhaps most importantly, human reasoning interacts with models at the level of assumptions and in the setting of parameters. So DSGE models constantly require parameterization, which is the setting of certain variables.
These parameters are usually set by historical data, but key information is also derived from expertise, microeconomic research, and Bayesian statistics. So human reasoning has an important role to play here as well. Model-based reasoning is ultimately incorporated into a larger socio-technical form of reasoning. Now, it's here that the study of how modeling sociotechnical reasoning and the manipulation of the economy link up, I think it's here that they link up with the problematic of a post-capitalist society. So we've seen the various ways in which the economy is being automated and augmented by technological developments, and we know from philosophy of technology that technology is not neutral. Embedded in the design and function of technologies are particular political affordances.
even if these affordances are not exhausted by any particular political orientation. But if these technologies are not neutral, then they become a terrain of contestation for any sort of politics. The design and function of the individual technologies and the large-scale infrastructures of society are all open to being mobilized in different and post-capitalist ways. Given that planning in economies is increasingly ubiquitous, the question to be raised is what can be done with this state of affairs. Marx famously argued that the increased centralization of the productive forces would facilitate the transition to communism. Now, can a similar claim be made in regards to the construction of computational models, and models that manipulate the economy in subtle and significant ways? So in other words, can these models be put towards collective ends?
My wager here is that not only is this possible, but it's also necessary. Recognizing the limitations and political nature of current efforts, the open sort of research program involved here is of how to build and repurpose cognitive assemblages for post-capitalist and democratic ends. And ultimately the aim here is to recuperate one of the traditional and now largely forgotten arguments for communism, which is that not only was it a more equal society, but it was also a more rational, efficient, and productive society. So in the end, socialism or barbarism. That's it. Thank you. I'm just going to introduce you and then you're going to introduce me.
So Mo's going to pop up here and introduce the keynote for today's morning session and then we'll follow that with a response. So I welcome Mo. Yes. Thanks for dealing with all the technical difficulties and like, like, glitches and stuff. Michael may join us later to sort of like, finish what he was talking about, but I think Michael and Nick's kind of like, went well together in terms of the necessity of trying to get over our, like, ontological critiques of critiques of computation and try to somehow use them like consciously and correctly towards some kind of like solution now talking about modeling and
solutions I wanted to sort of like say a few words about so here and talk about how we so like intersected and that and me and so here met in person last year at the artist space so I was there doing a residency of four parts of a lecture series which are all of them are online for our YouTube videos the topic was on the necessity of art exit from contemporary art so arts exit from contemporary art and this is not like a mistake that's what really he meant in the in the series of talk so I kind of like laid out what are the sort of problems with the notion of contemporary art and how art can salvage itself like from these sort of like problems and then i also knew that so i had an interest in a couple political
economists that worked with the material before people have been reading and kind of communicating and i would have loved to actually have them here too but uh jonathan was too busy that the names of jonathan nitsen and shimshan bitchler they're like um one of them teaches at york university and the the other one at the University of Tel Aviv. And their sort of like magnum opus of the book that they kind of like put forth their ideas is called Capitalist Power. And so it's like an update on a classic Marxism and kind of like try to create an imminent theory of political economy in which divisions between politics and economy or like fictitious economy and real economy and the sort of like privileging of labor theory value are kind of questioned. And instead of the old school Marxism,
they kind of proposed something. And the proposals are quite controversial in both the world of culture, but also economy. But me and Sohel have this common interest in them. Sohel did a very interesting piece about them called Tainted Love, which is with another writer, Phillips. So yeah, so that's how we sort of met. So I'm also going to read Sohail's biography for you, and then we can. Sohail Malik is 2012-14 visiting faculty at CCS Bar
at New York, and program coordinator of the MFA Fine Art Goldsmiths London, where he holds a readership in critical studies. Recent publications include Co-Editor of Realism, Materialism, and the Flood of Rights, The Value of Everything in Texts or Kunst, The Ruling Elite Have Feelings Too in The New Reader, Ape Says No in Red Hook Journal, and then On the Necessity of Art Exists from Contemporary Art at Art of Space. This is like the talks, the four talks, and many, many, many more. So I would like to welcome Sohel. The title of Sohel's paper is Information Techology. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't have time to produce that today. The received criticism of instrumental rationality is by now well established. Instrumental rationality is a mode of of production of control, or control organized by externally set ends, stripping subjectivities, communities, collectivities and projects of the self-determination
or autonomy, the kind of critique that's been at the base of many of the presentations we've heard so far. Systematization and expropriation take command. Number, calculation, generality, and substitutability deny if they do not repudiate or even vanquish singularity, autonomy, particularity, and locality. Quantitative requirements supervene upon qualitative considerations and conditions. The logicizing constraints of rationality supervene upon creative irregularity or freedom or upon ethical-moral obligations. these amongst many such variants. The locus classicus of this distinction is Plato's banishing of the artist from the political organization of the city which Plato presented in the Republic
from about 380 BCE. Now this expulsion by Plato is required because the artist's skills and mimesis threaten the integrity of the national political hierarchy. The artist can sort of slide between the different hierarchical distinctions that Plato wishes to construct for the functioning of the good republic. The locus moderna of this axiomatic distinction is presented in Immanuel Kant's critique of judgment power from 1790 in Kant's specification of aesthetic judgment, which takes place without external ends. It's purposeless. And in this, it's distinct to judgments of the understanding, judgments of the understanding determining particular sensory experiences, according to concepts regulated by reason.
And from industrial modernity to post-war managerial capitalism to now, this distinction and this condemnation of instrumental rationality that follows from the distinction have become the organizing axis for theorizing the repudiation, if you want, of classical modernity, sorry, of capitalist modernity, as a dominant exploitative and alienating formation of that rationality. So in modernity, the critique of instrumental rationality is the critique of capitalist modernity because capitalism is dominating, exploitative, and alienating. This is all familiar stuff. For all the differences between the... To bring it up to date, for all the differences between the now prevalent schools of critique,
they commonly, if divergently, appeal against standardization systematization, generalization, and calculability. What is common to them is the advocacy of asystematicity, the unprogrammable. Mention of the program goes right to the core of this conference. It states a theme, which I take to look to affirm what can happen on this side of program digital technologies in terms no less emancipated from instrumental rationality. I take this construction, what can happen on this side of program digital technologies emancipates from instrumental rationality to be, if you want, the core edict of what's now called accelerationism. In order to better situate what electrocomputational digital machines inaugurate, both in the marked developments
of the systematicity and scale of the instrumental rationality over the past 40 years, and also, in addition to that, to understand what their transformation, the transformation or even the repudiation of their logic requires, I think it's instructive to contrast them, electrocomputational digital machines, to contrast them to a praxis which assumes, and in new ways operationalizes at every instance, the critique of instrumental rationality as its very condition, the praxis that is contemporary art. And if you were here yesterday, you'll understand I'm doing this partly because it's the burden that Mo placed upon me. He's the only speaker, somehow, speaking to contemporary art.
Contemporary art, and here I'll rely upon the series of talks that I did at Art of Space that Mo mentioned. Contemporary art extrajects, objectivizes, and semanticizes Kant's criterion for the purposelessness of subjective aesthetic judgment into the art itself. So whereas for Kant, aesthetic judgment is a subjective condition of judgment, The claim is contemporary, and this is a completely common claim. Contemporary art objectivizes the purposelessness of judgment into the object itself. The object is purposeless. But it's not just the object. Also, the mode of address of contemporary art follows the edicts of aesthetic judgment. Contemporary art assumes the critical injunctions
against instrumental rationality as a default condition, a requirement of all of its aspects, the object, its mode of address, its reception, so on and so forth, and also its economy, I should say, its market. And in doing so, contemporary art extends and mutates that critique of instrumental rationality beyond its modern formations. In general, and in particular, i.e. contemporary art as a whole, but also per artwork, contemporary art leaves space for the ongoing and ever-revisable making of meaning and action. Finding solace in post-structure theorizations, if not motivated by them, contemporary art in its critical dimension refuses, or at least tries to refuse, instrumentalization in all its dimensions,
be it via soft, though networked and partially institutionalized, autonomy of art makers, curators, and writers, or be it via the open-ended constructability of meaning by arts recipients, who are often the first-mentioned bunch of people, but also via the non-totalized and partial articulations of the art itself, which thus repudiates the well-defined message, the clearly determined message or standard sense of information. So something about art's open indeterminacy of meaning, its constructability, both with each encounter of the artwork, which is how our contemporary art is set up, but also for the recipient, the addressee of the work, sort of seems to be dedicated to denying a common sense of information
as the defined signal in a structured system. Contemporary art is not determinate or contra the standard notion of information. Contemporary art is not determinate or determining or closing down univocal fixing very much to and for the contrary. Three points, I think, can be made around this. Firstly, if contemporary art communicates anything at all, it is certainly not information in the cybernetic sense of a signal that alters the system within designated parameters. That's a point I just made. Rather, contemporary art is a kind of generation of importantly plural experiences or knowledges that are rich, multiple, and reflective. In any case, irreducible to the schematics of information. Contemporary art advances a condition
of what Stiegler, Bernard Stiegler, calls interpretation, contrasted to information. And this is because, second point, contemporary art is an art of indeterminacy. which is the central claim around organizing the artist-based talks. Contemporary art is an art of indeterminacy, which is to say that contemporary art is not the name of all art that is being made now or now-ish. Rather, contemporary art is a specific genre of art, precisely that art which observes and affirms indeterminacy. And the paradox of this genre is that as an art of indeterminacy, it proscribes definition. And I think this is what allows an identification,
a mistaken of identification of contemporary art as just the name of all art that is being made now because it's definitionless. But I think insofar as the indeterminacy organizes, stipulates a certain type of art practice and a certain type of reception of art and a certain mobilization of art, including its marketization. It seems to me we can characterize contemporary art as a genre, as a specific genre of art. This indeterminacy and indefiniteness, or if you prefer, indefinition, is not just the condition of contemporary art's operation. It's also its requirement, what it affirms, and what it is affirmed of it. Contemporary art that is too didactic fails as contemporary art.
for example the third point I want to make from this is that for all of these reasons contemporary art is an all too appropriate kind of practice for what the sociologist Elena Espositor following Nicholas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck what she calls societies at risk this is from the book Future of Futures commonly translated as risk society but she's very clear that there's a potential mishap in that translation societies at risk for her is the better translation Societies at risk are societies that hold open and maintain the possibility of the revision of decisions, deferring finality, acknowledging self-reflexivity as a necessary condition for transforming past judgments given the uncertainty of the future, given the change in understanding because of previous judgments,
and also that judgments are always anyway constructed and subject to revision, which is to say, given the necessity of change and the uncertainty not just of the future, but that any knowledge or decision in the past or present may or may not have been a good one. Acknowledging all of that, we open ourselves to revision. That's the main characteristic of societies at risk. Or again, for another formulation, in such societies, any and all knowledge, decision, or judgment is an ineliminable risk. You make a judgment or a decision to do something, you take it knowing that you may revise it in the future because every judgment is a risk. Norms then, and studies at risk,
norms are at best weak as are continuities between past, present, and future, and no less continuities or social bonds between individuals because they're all open for revision. They can be changed at any point. They're not strong bonds. Temporal bonds, social bonds are not strong bonds. Now, these three aspects, contemporary art is not a kind of cybernetic information. It's because it's an art of indeterminacy, and therefore it's a good art for, it's a good cultural project for societies at risk. These three aspects, these are just three aspects of one imperative. It's precisely contemporary art's indeterminacy that is at once its appropriateness as a mode of culture
for societies at risk at their most structurally complex. That is, societies that are developed enough in their temporal, institutional, and intersubjective structures to maintain and further promote the revisability and incompletion of meaning. The proliferation of knowledge that makes contemporary art a propagator of semantic risk. Semantic risk predicated on uncertainty. But we need to be more careful in making these standard identifications. that contemporary promotes risk and therefore is anti-information. And we need to be more careful for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, sociologically, as positive as a kind of society at risk is made in the course of a theorization of derivatives markets as precisely themselves advanced modalities of self-reflexivity
and recursive revision, which operationalize precisely the uncertainty of the future and the present, organizing that uncertainty in the case of derivatives markets, organizing that uncertainty in terms of the present by managing risk. Or equally, such markets manage risk by propagating it. And as indexed by the centrality of digital electric computation to the functioning of those markets, digital informatics is now a primary in the practical organization management and propagation of risk. which is what I think Nick was just talking about. In broad terms, information cannot then be opposed to semantic risk. Prices on finance markets mean something as prices.
If the price is a risk, then it means something as a risk. Prices are semantic in derivatives markets. The second reason I think we need to be more careful about a quick distinction between information and contemporary determinacy is that information is also primary at the level of the theoretical rationality of finance markets as risk markets, whether or not they are electrocomputationally operationalized. And this is so because the construction of pricing dynamics observed, sorry, the construction of pricing dynamics on finance markets observed what's called the efficient market hypothesis, formalized by Eugene Farmer and Paul Samuelson in the second half of the 1960s. In crude terms, the efficient market hypothesis states that if all participants in the market have equal information,
it is in equilibrium, the market is in equilibrium, with the returns for all participants matching the general level of the market, the average market rate. Gains greater than that average, which is what the participants in the market is interested in, and here we can think of Nitzan and Bischler's interest in differential accumulation, gains greater than the average of the market can be made by some against others when there is new information. Information is a disequilibriating, which is why it's risky, disequilibriating, let's say, operation in the market because it introduces an asymmetry or an equivalence between traders. However, trading itself on the basis of that information
balances out that differential informatic advantage serving, at least theoretically, to restore the market to equilibrium. That is the market's efficiency. If you trade on new information, which is your advantage against other traders, that trading cancels out the advantage of that information. That's the equilibrium condition of the market. Okay. Now, so practically through the digital operationalization, which is something from, say, the late 70s onwards, and theoretically through the construction of the model of market pricing through the efficient market hypothesis, which is to say from the 60s, the complex systems for generating, sustaining, and managing risk via the praxis of derivative markets is constituted by information.
Okay. Information is risk generating, risk constituting. Distinguently organized and oriented as they are sociologically and in the model of communications they respectively advance, both contemporary art and derivatives markets are praxis advancing what Esposito calls the minimal continuity characteristic of societies at risk. Contemporary art does it through the repudiation of communication, quiet information. Derivatives markets do so on the basis of instrumentalized information. So there's some problem in the notion of information running through these two models. Now the two contemporary art derivatives markets cannot be directly identified. More does the indeterminacy of contemporary art fold into the promotion of risk by derivatives markets as its cultural correlate,
the common complaint that somehow contemporary art is a plaything for the financiers and sort of people who work capital markets. markets. What the comparison between them draws out is rather and only at this point that the indeterminacy mobilized to advance the critique of instrumental rationality's prescription of fixity and stability is now itself, that indeterminacy quoir risk, is now itself a semantic risk, no less the terms of the operation for a complex financially fabricated mode of capital accumulation. Precisely what from the left the critique of instrumental rationality was meant to oppose. so the critique of instrumental rationality from the left which is the contemporary art moment kind of gets inverted if you want
and sort of played out through Derritte's markets assuming that the critique of capitalism is to be maintained and I will assume that several non-exclusive options present themselves we ditch the first option we ditch the critique of instrumental rationality because it is not now the repudiation of capital accumulation because the finance markets do risk in order to accumulate capital. And what this would indicate is that capital accumulation is no longer dependent on instrumental rationality, i.e. we've left the industrial age. And this would also, this option,
This option would also explain contemporary art's servile and at best supine relation to its own success with regard to capitalization today, both within art and outside of it. The second option is we maintain the critique of instrumental rationality because despite it all... Sorry. We maintain the critique of instrumental rationality today because it is a refugiation of capitalism, but it is badly made quite indeterminacy. I.e., we look elsewhere than contemporary art for such a critique, so we give up contemporary art as a place for the critique of capital. And the third option is we reassess the terms of the analysis because information is not what we thought it was. And maybe because instrumental rationality is not what we thought it was
from the tradition currently governing critique. So the question here is the adequacy, of the political adequacy of critique for our complex societies. The rest of this talk will proceed with this last option, that we need to rethink information, partly because it permits the other possibilities to be addressed, not simply as a matter of political preference, but also as a theoretical demand. A more exacting identification or distinction between contemporary art and derivatives markets is required than the correlation we arrived at earlier. And this exactitude that I'm going to try and press has to ascertain if the respective constructions by contemporary art and derivatives markets as a part of societies at risk,
as contributors to societies at risk, are little more than homologous in the fabrication of uncertainty, or if rather, and I think this is the case, there is a direct structural systemic or conceptual equivalence or identification to be made between them. identification would require an account of instrumental rationality, qua risk, not contra risk, but qua risk, that enables it to be apprehended as promulgating uncertainty rather than fixity and standardization. So what is the common notion of information as promulgating uncertainty that runs both through derritus markets, which is how it's operationalized, but also through contemporary art, which is where it's negated and repudiated. What is required here is, in other words, a counter-theorization of information.
And this will return us to a question of programming, and to come back to the thematic of this conference as a whole, what must be the incredible aspect of digital electrocomputation, which is its exocognitive operationalization of risk. Exocognitive meaning that which is outside thought. so the claim here is that digital electrocomputation inaugurates a mode of risk which thought cannot withstand or understand here I'm going to rely on an article I wrote in 2005 so I'll run through it very quickly if you want more information go to that article Okay, Nicholas Luhmann, who's the inspiration, if you want, for his positive.
Nicholas Luhmann states that information is, in general, quoting an event that selects system states. Okay, information is an event that selects system states. Luhmann continues, this is only possible, the selection of system states, for structures that delimit and pre-sort possibilities. Information presupposes structure, yet itself is not a structure. but rather it's an event that actualizes the use of structures. So information is an event. Recalling but more exactly locating Gregory Bateson's 1972 ultra-general definition of information as a difference that makes a difference, information is what is new to an existing structure and modifies it. That's the key point of organizing the rest of this talk. Information is what is new to an existing structure and modifies it.
Yesterday's news is not information because it is already incorporated into the system's knowledge unless you have not registered as news or not looked at Facebook for 10 minutes. Equally, information can arrive long after its signal is received. Information is the complex temporalization of structures. It's what's new to a structure and modifies it. So it temporalizes the structure. Three specifications follow from this general determination of information. Firstly, the structure delimiting possibilities by virtue of which a signal can be information is necessarily conserving. It conserves itself because it's modified, but it's modified. It is modified. It conserves itself, and it conserves the information which it transforms into the terms of that structure.
It's some kind of memory. Secondly, information intervenes and transforms memory. It is an event distinct to mnemic systems and order by virtue of being new to it, and it transforms the given order. Information is the transformation of memory. Information is a situated event that is necessarily inventive. We could call it eventive. And this is to say, again, that information events temporalize the mnemic system. Thirdly, if contemporary art advances differentiation in its constitution and operation, it is information. The proliferation of differences that make some difference, maybe not a grand difference, but some difference, which nonetheless remain part of art,
that's the very definition of information in its broad sense. But only if contemporary art has a structure, which is where I think the claim that contemporary art is a genre helps us understand it as information. What is key here through these three points is that as an abstract description of information, dynamic structure transformed by information can be anything at all. It can be material, biological, neural, technical, rational, social, or some cross-section of these and other differentiated fila of organization. All that is supposed in this account of information is a structure of some kind, a memory, that is transformable, mutable, by what is for it a contingent event, which is the information. In particular, for the human qua culture
and the human qua psyche, individuated, the privileged name for its nemic organization within rational traditions is knowledge. So the question is, how does knowledge, how does information impact knowledge? How does it modify knowledge? This is the organizing schema for the received critique of instrumental rationality. Knowledge is distinct to information. But what it also tells us is that, as we know from the news, information transforms knowledge, or knowledge has a history because of information. Culture is an immediately obvious name for that history of order and contingent reordering of knowledge. Now, this is a sadly commonplace result after that much work,
but I think it has a less obvious dimension. The commonplace is that information transforms what we know at the level of the content. This is the news, right? Information changes the content of our knowledge. This is a parochial, anthropocentric determination of information, and that refers the assimilation of information to the NEMIC system, which is knowledge. There is a change in knowledge. There is new knowledge. The more general determination, which is less parochial, which I think is harder to grasp, is that if information is taken to be the transformation of knowledge, then what knowledge is as such itself changes. Knowledge cannot be unilaterally predicated on the extant nemic system. Knowledge is only that which is mutable by information,
which information mutates, transforms. Knowledge, sorry, excuse me, information transforms the very condition of knowledge itself as the privileged nemic organizational structure of meaning for the human at the level of the psyche, of culture, and of rationality. The contention here is that the name for that transformation of knowledge per se is instrumentality. So if information is the transformation of knowledge, which is in the rational tradition human prerogative, what I want to now contend through superficial accounts of Bernard Stiegler's presentation of the genesis of the human
is that instrumentality is the name for the mutation of knowledge by information. So turning to Stiegler's philosophical anthropology, mainly from Technics in Time from about 20 years ago, tools as well as language and social organization more generally are prosthesis to the human body and mind, which also constitute external memories that socially and intergenerationally transmit customs, actions, practices, knowledges. If there is a tool, it's used in a specific way. That's the transmission of a cultural memory, which individuates a psyche, what it calls, following Simondon, transindividuation. Instruments and the rationality they code and embody
are systemically integral to the constitution of the human being as having, first, a history of any kind, and secondly, semantically stable communication. And also, thirdly, shared customs, including social and transgenerational continuity. You can think of language here as a tool. The human is then constituted without identity in itself. And in this exteriorization of its transgenerational, transindividual, and social memory, qua tools, language, and customs, as much as by its biology qua internal or genetically organized memory. So for Stiegler, the human is both its genetic organic transmission, but also its cultural transmission primarily through the tool. Consequently, the development, quite complex,
education of tools and social memory is the development of the human at the level of cultural psyche, at the level of cultural, sorry, at the level of culture, the psyche, and even the body itself. The human then is not just a biological being per individual or per species, but is co-constituted in its biosomatic particularity, precisely in its non-specificity, because it's tool constituted. It's constituted in its biosomatic particularity, in its biology and in its construction of meanings through the operation of the neural cortex, by instrumentality. The human is an originally social institution. So the human with Stieglitz is a biosomatic complex, or again, it's an anthropotechnical complex.
Tools, language, and culture, instruments, order and organize what and how the human is, what Stiegler calls an instrumental meiotic. And because it is detached from the body, the instrumental meiotic can develop and complexify at rates much greater than the human biological system can, which means that the primary channel of human development is technical, social, and semantic, instrumental. In these terms, if knowledge is the privilege name for the anthropocentrically determined NEMIC system, that is, observing the diktats of the critique of instrumental rationality and privileging a tool-free human understanding as the organizing and primary dynamic system, then, as its external and constitutive transformative condition, the instrumental maiotic is information.
Now, this is a complex point. Let me rearticulate it in four steps. Firstly, instrumentality is the primary channel for the transformation of knowledge, qua human nemics, and it co-constitutes the human, qua anthropotechnical complex. Information, second point, information cannot be extirpated from the development, excuse me, information cannot be extirpated from the development of that complex because that complex is just what the human is anyway. In fact, information is the primary channel for human development, qua anthropotechnical complex. Thirdly, and this is the main point of this stage of the argument, it is not then that information is an instrumental relationship to knowledge,
but that instrumentality is a mode of information. Instrumentality is a mode of information. And fourthly, at the level of this general idea, which is what we're talking about here, information is always greater than and transformative of what we know the human to be, even as an anthropotechnical complex. Information is always greater than and transformative of what we know the human to be, even given Stiegler's identification of the human as anthropotechnical complex. That is, knowledge is only information as it passes through the anthropodynamic determination. The critique of instrumental rationality is the repudiation of information in this sense.
It's anti-human. Seeking to prioritize and maintain dynamic organization of knowledge by repudiating its transformation by instrumentality, which is the specifically anthropotechnical formation of information. seeking to maintain and prioritize knowledge by repudiating its transformation by instrumentality and technological rationality, which now means practically and socially information. The critique of instrumental rationality paradoxically diminishes the human in its anthropotechnical revisability,
and it does so for a phantasm of the human liberated from the human from its constitutive condition. So the critique of instrumental rationality repudiates the human qua anthropotechnical complex. And it does so in order to assert the phantasm of a human as non-anthropotechnically constituted. The critique of instrumental rationality is then an idealist repudiation of the human. This noocentric, if you want, cognitivo-centric humanism is not even a regression, which at least would require transformation and thus informatic determination of the human. It's only anti-developmental statusizing. If we do not repudiate the human,
that is, if we acknowledge the general idea of information, what is information in the specific instance, then, of the program determinations of the digital electrocomputational signal? So the argument so far is a general idea of information. What I now want to do is to push this into the specific model of cybernetic information, which is central to digital electrocomputation, which is the basis of digital electrocomputation. Now, it's here, I think, that the distinction or the question of the distinction or non-distinction between contemporary art and derivatives markets is instructive. Now, with contemporary art, as noted earlier, there's a promulgation and affirmation of a difference that makes a difference in general. And also, in each particular instance of contemporary art
as a situated event, contemporary art is information. But what is instructive here is that in observing the critique of instrumental rationality, which it does as a ethical political imperative, called critique now, and affirming its indeterminacy as a permanent access to structuration and determination, this mode of informatics called contemporary art repudiates the instrumental of the aspro-technical complex, which is anyway its condition. It's in bad faith. If, however, the general idea of information is that it is the temporalizing alteration of knowledge quarmic system, contemporary art's diminishment of information is then a de-complexification and even
a de-temporalization of the aspro-technical numic system by which it is nonetheless constituted. Such art is then correctly called contemporary art, not because it is the name for all art that is being made today, but because its de-temporalization is a refutation of the future of knowledge. Contemporary art is contemporary because it is replete with invention, the events and the differences of contemporary art, but without strong temporalization. Contemporary art is a weak temporalization. Risk, the risk that contemporary art is and promulgates, is but an indeterminacy of the reordering of present without effecting or mobilizing a future. And I think this is the common malaise many of us understand about contemporary art.
It poses no future. Contemporary art is information without a future. Put the other way, the future is a risk, information emancipated from knowledge to be avoided by contemporary art. Let's look then to derivatives markets. I'm overrunning here, but I'll be about 10 more minutes if that's okay. derivative markets manage risk too. But what they do, contrast to contemporary art, they promulgate risk on the basis of the uncertainty of the future. They're informatic in a strong sense. In the terms taken up here, that is to say, sorry, in the terms taken up or mobilized in this paper, what derivative markets can then be seen to do
is to affirm the general idea of information of information and its temporalization as the very condition for their expansion, meaning increasing speculative capital accumulation, and also the increased integration of risk into expansive geotemporal networks of financial trading. Risk in these markets is the knowledge that the revision of knowledge, risk is the knowledge, because risk is priced, and that's a knowledge. Risk in these markets is the knowledge that the revision of knowledge, information as a general idea, and its temporization is primary. It's what's mobilized by derivatives markets, the primacy of the informatic transformation of knowledge, of price. The knowledge has to be and is only
a revisable calculation presented as price. Via price, finance markets are now the structured dynamic system primarily organized towards their informatic revision. It is here that the general idea of information can be connected to the specific technical organization of information as bits, codes, and programming. The electrocomputational digital organization of information determines all information in terms of numeric technical convertibility. Information is configured as the inequivalence of one variable against another via common calibration that accelerates the conversion of information into knowledge. So what the processor does is it accelerates conversion of information into knowledge, the structure and the hardware, the coding
of the chip itself. That ultra-particular material systemic determination of information and the technical specifications of what we can call information-ready knowledge, that's what digital electrocomputation is, information-ready knowledge, in its conversion, in its capture and in its processing, all All of this permits a massification of the scale of information processing and an intensification of its speed, organizing the derivatives markets in the service of pricing, which is another kind of information, and of course, capital accumulation. So contrasted to the diminution of information by contemporary art, derivatives markets expand and intensify information. They capitalize information as a temporalizing revision of knowledge, and knowledge is re-vectored
almost entirely towards the future, which, from the present and with regard to knowledge, is unknown. Knowledge in such markets is conveyed by price, a number that is indifferent to what it prices. This is the Marxian, all that is solid melts into air, but highly instrumentalized and operationalized at micro-fractions of time. Information is the change in price. but information in derivative markets the change in price rather in derivatives markets can itself be priced that's what derivatives are they price the change in price and what can also be priced are the rates and the range of changes in price
volatility and these the changes in price can be themselves revised again and priced price is a medium in derivatives markets It's only a medium. In these markets, information machines permit a near equivalence between the general idea of knowledge and information. Price is the name and operation of that operationalized threshold, the threshold between knowledge and information weakening to next to nothing. To put it in a straightforward way, If the revision of price is itself priced and then revised, and if price is the knowledge, is the kind of moment
of knowledge in these informatic systems, or rather than these non-systems, the revision of price is automatically built into knowledge. Information intervenes, supervenes upon knowledge at the very moment that it's instantiated as knowledge. So through the material semantic operation of price on derivatives markets, knowledge is nearly at once. Nearly at once. It doesn't collapse to zero. It can't collapse to zero because that would be to eliminate price altogether. Knowledge is nearly at once informatic. Knowledge, quite the dynamic system that is the market, switches into primarily contingent determination information. There are two interlocked aspects of this contingent
because of informatic determination of knowledge. Firstly, with regard to the machine integrating expansion of knowledge informatics structures that are finance markets, there's a massive expansion in both velocity, rather speed, and size. I can give you some numbers, but I think I'm kind of out of time, so I'll just proceed. The expansion of the speed of trading to what's called high frequency trading, and also the expansion of the derivatives markets to, by the end of 2012, about $25 trillion in gross market value, which is the combined size of America and Chinese GDP for that year.
This expansion, this massification, and intensification, intensification, we can call it an ultra-intensification. Both of these dimensions indicate that the only constraints on the expansion of what we can call info knowledge is the technical capacity of the processing systems and also, importantly, the regulatory conditions imposed upon financial trading. So it's material-juridical at this point. The second point around this near identity, let's call it near identity, information and knowledge, is with regard to the anthropotechnical complex that is the institution of the human. The near equivalence between knowledge and information in finance markets and the operationalization
of that equivalence of our pricing vector towards capital accumulation is certainly the threshold of the instrumentalization of knowledge. But what that now means is that the NEMIC system of the anthropotechnical complex is being re-engineered more with regard to its contingency than its stability. This is societies at ultra-risk, if you want. The electrocomputational determination of information is then a rational organization, a logos of contingency. In Greek, . It is an information tuchology. It's an information technology, which is also an information tuchology, a rationalization of contingency, or rational promulgation of contingency.
And this information tuchology transforms extant or coming cognition insofar as they would be predicated on non-instrumental conditions. And this, I think, is my disagreement with the resurgent hardcore rationalist inferentialism of Ray Brazier and Reza Nagristani. Because they're dedicated to cap, not Ray and Reza, but derivatives markets, because derivatives markets are dedicated to capital accumulation, they are a particularly dramatic and politically demanding case of the reconstitution and vectoring of knowledge towards its contingent revisability. Facebook and other social media generate the same equivalence at the order of social subjectivity. In broad terms, information tucology
vects its knowledge beyond its biosemantic, its cognitive constraints, reorganizing as it does so the ambit of its anthropotechnical complex, sorry, of the anthropotechnical complex, also known as the human. In this condition, the critique of instrumental rationality requires the repudiation of the anthropotechnical complex as I said earlier. But that complex is now determined by what, from the perspective of that critique, can only be an ex-anthropic contingency, a contingency beyond any human capacity to know it, a contingency that then remains forever unknown to the human. But that is just to repudiate not just the future of the human, but also the new chances of the future human.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure now to introduce Martha Schwenderer, who will respond to that lovely talk. Martha Schwenderer is currently an art critic for New York Times. Her criticism has been published in Art Forum, Book Forum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Art Papers, Artforum.com, New Art Examiner, CCA Reviews, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Splash Art, After Image, and others. She studied art history at Columbia and at the City University of New York and Graduate Center
and has a master's degree in fiction from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught at Hunter College, the School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, and the University of Texas at Austin, Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute. She is currently a visiting professor in the art department at the Steinhardt School in New York University. Welcome, Martha. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah. All right. I think, first of all, I should say I've only had this paper for an hour and a half. Can you still hear me now? Okay, yeah, the visual just went off, so I'm not sure what's going on.
And it's been a very long week here in New York, so I'm tired, and as you can imagine from what you just heard, this is quite a paper to be confronted with immediately. And the other thing I should say is I feel as if I'm almost the completely wrong person to be responding to this around very, very specific, and that's actually my... She cursed that she said I'm the wrong person,
and then he just died. Jason, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. So it's just Martha's machine is off, right? It seems to have frozen. Yeah, so you know what? You may want to get in the chat and get Martha going. Why don't we, what do you guys think? I think there's other people on, and then they're willing to respond to. I mean, it was nice to hear Martha's response right now, but given the constraint of what we're in, I would say let's just wait 30 seconds. If Martha can't get back, we should try to get other people to come in and talk about the previous papers, because all the respondents are ready there for her previous papers.
So then we just give Martha five minutes to log out, log in, and maybe decompress the paper a little bit further so she doesn't feel so put on spot. How about that? So Jason, do you want to facilitate that? Because we have people from Michael responding to the question of technology and education, all the way to, you know what I mean? You have some students who wanted to comment on Ken's paper and others. So what do you think? Because you can just bring them in. Because you have to just tell them and put their mics on so they can talk. And then we get Martha going again. Let's start with the respondents who are already primed.
Nushin, are you ready? Let me try for a mic real quick. Maybe we should start with Nushin, because she is here. Hi, Nushin, are you there? Hi, Nushin, are you there? She needs a couple of minutes, it says. OK. So actually, let's just improvise. Just like, I think maybe Martha's back on. There she is. Yeah, Martha's back, yeah. OK, so yeah, back on the normal. Sorry about this.
That's all right. Was that me or you? No, it's technology. I think you cursed it when you said, I'm not the right person. So then Google just went like, OK, I'm just going to give you a couple of minutes. So here we go. It really depends on the connection speed at the originating location. OK. Am I the originating location, speaking of information? I don't know. I'm all set up. So it only has, OK. Great. At any rate, in terms of what I wanted to say, is just when I said I don't feel like the right person in some sense, when I'm sorry. I don't know everybody involved, but when someone just read off this laundry list of places that I write for, or have written for, I only write for one now, but they're very, very specific in every audience they address,
in the type of work that they present, and, you know, right now I only write for the Times, which, how is that specific? It's addressed to a 10th grade reading level, which means you're always working at one, you're talking to people who know nothing about art, and unfortunately, everybody who knows everything about art and hates the New York Times. And, you know, it's an online circulation of 20 million people. So obviously, and it's not something I, you know, that's a whole story, how I got involved with something like that. But the last place I also wrote for was The Village Voice. And the reason I'm mentioning these things is because the whole point of writing for The Voice is that it was ex-institutional, which creates a certain sort of art. It can be
people working on boats or doing stand-up comedy, you know, as a sort of art form. Or activism, which is one of my primary areas, and that's why I know this particular group of people on Facebook is through, you know, activism, and very specifically through Occupy. So I am, the other thing I should say that's not on there is I'm actually writing a dissertation now, finishing, you know, on the late PhD, on Willem Fluser. And so I'm very invested in things like the technical image and media theory, and particularly in its kind of, not in its genesis, because we're talking about the 80s and particularly sort of German media theory. What's interesting is that I was actually reading Abraham Moles, you know,
earlier this week, who was in the late 50s and early 60s. You know, it's not particularly looked at these days, writing about information theory and aesthetics and how you could connect the two. What's interesting though and that I and why I say I'm the wrong person is that I have a very specific reaction to the you know contemporary art world or contemporary art. I just don't imagine it as monolithic or as one thing and so when when we go from there I'm already stopped at the beginning that it's not one thing. And similarly, the human, I have a lot of problem with that. Or when I think of knowledge,
I usually stick an S on the end. And so in terms of, you know, knowledge, the human, contemporary art, I'm a little bit stopped right there. And so that's why, you know, instead of going into Stiegler and figuring out, you know, instrumental rationality. I sort of wonder within the art context if these can be theorized in that regard. And the other place, of course, is that with derivatives is that this was quite prevalent in, you know, in the United States. And again, within contemporary art, one of the things that you start to realize is that even though it's supposedly a global art world, that's just not true, you know. And so there are different, not only different forms of work being done in different places,
but different modes of reception that produce different forms of knowledge. And so if we can, you know, we try and make a sort of overall theory, but then the only way that it really touches down is in this sort of one layer, perhaps in the biennial world or something, where there's this kind of global circuit, where there is a kind of a contemporary art world and a contemporary knowledge around art. With derivatives, one of the places that I did find interesting is that probably five or six years ago, there was a lot of that in the American art world of art historians looking to derivatives theory and mostly to tie it with abstraction and very specifically in forms like how there was
a lot of abstraction in photography at the time. So it's a sort of formalist application of derivatives. At the same time, I think what I'm interested in in this paper, which of course I've only sort of looked at very briefly, is almost more the idea of risk. And so tying that to an essay like Tainted Love in terms of either a sort of erotics of art production or this idea of risk You know, in terms of the future, I mean, I think that's what particularly, you know, I think it's very difficult when we say we all agree. I can say the people that are gathered in terms of my Facebook universe around, you know, again, originating out of the Occupy movement is the idea that capitalism does not, you know, see any kind of future.
everything is done in the present, I would disagree that art, or at least the artists, any of the artists that I know, work with, write about, etc., think about art as predicated on a kind of non-future. That just doesn't strike me that way. Most people I know, it's almost like they're trying to channel the present in terms of just speaking to a future. So again, I'm not sure I'm, you know, I'm the right person to, you know, I said it from the beginning, I'm not sure that I'm the right person to be responding to. Even in terms of the idea of art as a specific event, as a critic, you're the first person
to respond to something, and you also know you're a very specific person responding. Part of what's frustrating about writing for the Times is that everybody sees that as a monolithic organization, and they also see the critics as completely the same person somehow, and they could not be any more different. You know, part of the reason I write for that paper is because it has a very, very big reach, and I could get things in it at certain points that I sort of couldn't believe, but at some point I was told to stop mentioning things like Occupy, things like, stop it, enough. So the thing for me is that I, you know, as I said at the beginning, I am very invested
in thinking about information theory to take it back to something else I've been writing about this week. Again, a very specific instance. Willem Flusser, this person I'm writing about, was a technical advisor for the 1973 Sao Paulo Biennial. Now, the biennial was boycotted in 1969 because of the military dictatorship, but this did not mean the same thing. And so, again, this idea of specificity versus like a sort of one definition, it meant one thing for the people like Hans Haka and Pierre Restigny who were boycotting it from outside of Brazil, and it meant something different. Do you still have me?
Yes. Oh, okay, because I see something else on my iPad. I'm sort of wondering. I have, like, a whole different... Speaking of temporalities, I have a different one. Okay, I'll just continue, and you can... Mo, you can, you know, send me a text if something goes wrong. We're actually all, like, quiet and listening to you. That's why it sounds like nobody's listening, but actually it's, like, super listening. Well, I have a whole other thing going on here, so... I should put you up. This is even better. That is probably the YouTube video, which is like a few minutes late, but it's kind of live. Got it. Okay. Live. At any rate, I'll just finish up with this idea of the Sao Paulo Biennial, which is that, yeah, so it was boycotted. And, you know, what was pointed out by people later is that that was fine for people who were already outside of the country, like Lidja Clark, etc.
But there were other people, like Mira Schindel, who did show in this boycotted biennial. What's interesting for me in terms of the application theory, the application of communications theory, however, is that for 1973 that Flusser suggested instead of the National Pavilion model, which we know is of course the biennial model, that it's like the Olympics and the biennials, you know, they've got to be this like, you know, organ for nationality, that that maybe you could institute it on a communications model instead and have different nuclei, etc. And which has been tried out and was later sort of adopted.
And so that's what I'm sort of interested in, in terms of thinking about how this can be applied. I have a great deal of respect for this paper that's in front of me, but as I said, because I work with such kind of specific things, and, you know, modes of delivery, that it's hard for me to kind of see it abstracted in terms of, and it's a very difficult thing to connect, information, derivatives, and contemporary art, and then alongside that, the human future and knowledge. So that's where I should probably just end. I know, I don't know, if you'd like anything more, I can keep trying to talk. I don't want to interject because I'm not scheduled to actually talk, but the enigma,
I guess, is to somehow relate or create another layer of, like, another model to use, like, mixed words to somehow relate these two because we relate to both of these sort of, like, particular and universal positions, particular being yours and universal being Sohail's because you know what I mean? Like, his talk resonates. It's not like his talk doesn't resonate. But you also have, like, and in fact, that's why I put you guys in a conversation to somehow, like, hopefully today or later on in the roundtable with Jaleigh, we can maybe somehow find a way to model this connection, you know, rather than just, like, giving up in frustration, you know what I mean? Which would, again, be sort of, like, sort of, like, kind of defeating. So that's all. And then we can just, like... I'm not giving up in frustration.
It's good. I mean, I'm teaching a graduate seminar right now that's thinking about medium and media. And then I run into people around town, and there's some other people teaching the exact class. So what's interesting to me is I'm not giving up. I mean, we just read Gregory Bateson a couple of weeks ago. You know, we did, I have to say, you know, we did read Wendy Chun, Lisa Nakamura, you know, Kathleen Hale, Catherine Hales. that the entire, you know, regular crowd of people, Kittler, of course, to start with. But, you know, in the past week, we sort of switched back, and we're reading Panofsky and Demish, because there is a prevalence of images right now,
and what you learn from being on the ground as an art critic, and everybody said it in all these art fairs, and in the current Whitney Biennial, there's a prevalence of painting. Now, I suppose painting was supposed to be dead, But that is a very specific form of, if we want to put it in these terms, knowledge or information. And the reason, it turns out, you know, I think, gosh, am I the only person reading Panofsky? No, it turns out everybody's reading Panofsky because we're going back to this idea of that sort of, like, that's a very long regime, you know, in terms of perspective. And, you know, as Damesh calls it, the perspective paradigm. So I'm really invested in what we can get from information from media theory.
The reason I'm writing the dissertation I Am, which is not on an artist, is because I think we are at this threshold of connecting media theory to art history, which of course is, you know, got a little bit too tied to the market and a number of other things. But I think, you know, I really, because in some ways you got me in a good place, I realize on my iPad I'm seeing how positively everybody's responding to this talk and I'm thinking, well, I'm just going to out myself here. But I think it's pretty out already. I mean, I write for a major publication that I have to say concrete things about concrete objects. And so to think of it as contemporary art, I just can't. So that's, I think, what you're
seeing sort of played out and I'm, you know, in some ways, you know, I think we can all learn from each other and I'm happy to do it, is the certain poles of thinking around contemporary art that you can be that specific or you can be very abstract. What I'm curious about, you know, after reading something like Panofsky, you know, yes, it has its very specific moment in that it's, you know, I mean, this is like the formalists, you know, and what it's, you know, gave rise to in Vienna, etc. But the reason that a text like that, you know, lingers and has such an impact on younger students, and I think maybe I'm having a, you know, a reaction to that too. I think it's bad faith to teach in an art school and say that art poses no future. Do you say that to people, you know, being educated and making
art, hey everybody, go for it. We'll take your money, but art has no future. But, you know, I don't know. I should shut up while I'm ahead. So, yeah, let's talk about it in our own table. We're going to revisit this topic at the planetary session. Okay, so let's get back. We just have to rewind here on memory and remember, we started this talk not with, I mistakenly said, Michael Ferrer, but with McKenzie Ward. But McKenzie Ward's response already took place, and that was Robbins. So now we're going to go to Michael Ferrer, and I think Danep, you can take over if you want. Jason, if you can turn Danep's microphone on, that would be lovely.
Oh, is it me now? Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can still hear you. Okay. Can Michael hear me? Is Michael there? Is Michael around? No, Michael's not here because Michael had like a power outage or something and his whole system went down and he couldn't even answer the phone and all that. But this will get recorded and Michael will see it. Okay, great. Yeah, because I actually have some notes that I prepared for like to respond. Basically, just I think... Just introduce yourself. Oh, yeah, sorry. Hi, my name is Deneb. I'm doing a PhD at Columbia University in Latin American and Iberian cultures and Comparative Literature in Society.
Right now, I also teach. I'm teaching a class in Introduction to Portuguese Studies, which is basically a combination of language course with literature, Brazilian literature, and looking specifically at Brazilian theory on literature, media, and technology. So the part that I actually want to talk about a bit in regards to Michael's paper, which is kind of like an admirable attempt to take up the question of computation in relation to education and the preparation of curricula, also the ways in which education comes to be a paradigm or comes to stand as a paradigm, not only in terms of information processing
but also in terms of information organization and representation of information itself. So I think one of the things that need to be discussed, first of all, is in a way kind of like the way we need a very robust understanding of what such thing as a universal program of education would constitute on. So not only in terms of like whether it is in terms of accessibility, but also in terms of context specificity and the way in which that education has very, sometimes like local demands. And I see him addressing some of this in his paper.
The other question that I would like to raise or to just bring to the fore is the task of the educator. in a computation-oriented paradigm, which in a way biases a bit or has a bias towards information processing. And the educator then is positioned as someone that has to organize information in a very efficient way and has to be able in a way to bring to the fore the very principles of the organization of education itself, meaning that in the context of a classroom, how would that translate into actual practices? And already we have as examples, I think in a way,
like if you would even look at like Althusser and his whole critique of state apparatuses and the ways in which interpolation between teacher and student tackle precisely questions of like, actually like repetition and recursion, right? The ways in which learning and the success of learning and processing information involves sometimes extremely regressive practices and somewhat problematic ways of establishing relations between student and teacher. So I think one of the things that I would like to suggest that should be thought about is one, social relations in the classroom in face of a computational paradigm, two, the
the question of the bias towards information processing, which today obviously was discussed a lot. So, and the other question would then be, well, for the teacher's training itself, the way in which the teacher is already in face of the computational paradigm of education, the way in which the teacher is already called for to be able to manage and administer a very programmatic type of curriculum in that sense. I know Michael is also trying to deal with the question of where creativity comes in and also confusion, which obviously anyone who teaches knows that confusion is a very common thing in a,
is actually an also very productive thing that happens in the context of a class. So these are just, I'm just trying to kind of like establish relations between, you know, the way in which computation favors correctedness or the way in which it processes error itself as already being either like a foundation for precisely the recursion of a program or something that sure does afford the student the opportunity of like evaluating and coming to the awareness of how the principles are working and that becoming itself the goal of education. So these are just some of the themes I detected on his talk and I would ask him in a way to
elaborate a bit more on more more about the social relations of the teacher and the student and how it plays out with the with the ideas that he's proposing so that's that's it thank you so much machine are you ready hello hi yes I'm We're just getting your camera on. Do I have my camera? It is actually on. I can see myself. We can hear you. Hello. Oh yeah, there it is. Awesome. So can I start? Yes, you can. Okay, great.
Hello everyone, my name is Nushi Rosami, and first of all I wanted to thank you, thank Thank you, Mohamed, for making this happen. I'm really, I feel very honored to be a part of this and responding to Michael's paper. So, first of all, I want to give you very tiny information about myself. I'm an artist and I'm also an educator. Well, I'm responding to, I'm like specifically interested in Michael's paper because I'm an educator. I've been working in education industry for the past four years and I've been dealing with so many different age groups from toddlers teaching language and art to grown ups and
also teaching at an elementary school or teaching at pre-k. And right now I work in a public school in Brooklyn. I teach art to four years old to nine-year-old age groups in an after-school program. So it is extremely interesting for me to see the reaction of each of these groups of people who I interact with as an educator and see exactly what their response is to bringing in technology as a tool in more of a pedagogical model.
So what draws me into this whole paradigm is just the fact that when I compare it into the process of learning from the linear process of learning from books, how it's everything, like every chapter comes one after one and then comparing it to the universal pattern that sort of the curriculum that Michael is presenting and how exactly these information would be organized in terms of, so the students would be the front row of this, are the people who actually will be in charge of prioritizing the information, finding out
what is exactly relevant to them, and then the teacher and the educator will be in charge of sort of organizing this information. But what comes to my mind as a question is sort of this linear Korean process through which we walk through the information. How are we creating that interaction between the students and also the teacher? And it becomes increasingly important to address this radical shift in this model of knowledge consumption in this
curriculum and this part of this curriculum is exactly how we navigate through this links and hyperlinks and this whole universe of a computer as a tool to sort of learn. So, and I want to also talk a little bit about the notion of space and how it's actually, when it comes to a classroom,
when students are dealing with a sort of computer as a tool as opposed to more of like a, let's say, sorry, I got a little bit distracted by the notes on the side. So when it is in the classroom, how students exactly... Where am I? Okay. Now you're distracting me. No, no, no, it's okay. I got distracted by you and the notes on the side. Okay, so, sorry about the pause.
So I'm interested to know how exactly this notion of bringing a computer from more of an early childhood as a tool to start interacting with ideas of... because when it comes to younger age groups, they not necessarily can react to text, and it has to be in different formats of what Michael sort of referred to in his paper about bringing models of like puzzles or patterns,
And so I want to know how exactly we're creating these interactions between the students and the computer as a tool. I hope it made sense. I wanted to verbalize it. Thank you very much. Are you done? Yes. So I would say, Jason, who do you have ready? Because Joshua should be really responding to Nick at this point. Okay. Well, I mean, we do have Joshua. Are you ready, Joshua? Yes.
You are? I just had to turn on the sound there. Okay. All right. So I just have a short response kind of prepared, so I'll just get into it. Hello. Thank you to Mo for having me and the speakers. Should I go? Make sure you introduce yourself. Yeah, I will. Hello. Thank you to Mo for having me and the speakers today for the thoughtful presentations. I'm an artist based in New York who works primarily in sculpture and other media with strong interests in philosophy. Last year, I organized and edited a book called dark trajectories with contributions from Reza Ngaristani, Ben Woodard, and others released by named publications and includes the first published version of the Accelerate Manifesto by Nick Cernicek and Alex Williams.
Today I will mostly be addressing Nick Cernicek's presentation. First, I want to state that I am largely in agreement with Nick regarding the necessity of planning. I do not believe that we can propose an alternative to capitalism without a developed alternative to its methods, and that any truly modern solution to the problems of the present must be willing to engage with the complexity of present economic conditions in a robust and technologically informed manner. There is no retreat from the Promethean condition. We cannot reconstitute the ashes from the fire. To attempt to go back is only a ramified manner of going forward, and to move forward without the full armament of our present knowledge and technical capabilities is folly. As Nick has outlined, we face challenges whose scope and complexity represent immediate existential
threats. For these reasons, I also believe that the heuristic efficacy of models is needed. Contra Alexander Galloway's presentation last night, we cannot afford to base our decisions on a fully attenuated detail to the eminence of the present. This is a recipe for myopia and inaction. It is the mistake of gods and utopians to believe that we can achieve the fullness of the present in the present. We move forward as we always have, failable and imperfect human beings, not gods, but armed with the clever tools which are the heritage of our sapiens. Models, as Alex says, are not true, but this is their virtue as much as their weakness, which allows us to recognize where they are inadequate and develop better models. Compression is the necessary evil of those who wish to act. Now I'd like to turn to some concerns with Nick's work
and offer as a friendly critique two qualifiers I have with regarding the details of this paper. If you slow down a little bit because the lack kind of makes it, like, compressed, so just slow down. Take your time. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, you're saying cool stuff. Should I go back with anything, or...? No, no, just, you know, because you're getting into arguments, so I thought I'd slow down a little bit. That's it. Okay. Now I'd like to turn to some concerns with Nick's work and offer as a friendly critique two qualifiers I have with regarding the details of this paper, and hopefully he will develop his thought further. The question of value. How do we have knowledge of what the value of resources is in the cybernetic system which Nick advocates? Here I am thinking of Friedrich Hayek and his competing epistemologies. Hayek developed the cognitive epistemology,
which outlines the failability of human knowledge, and which is in contrast to his epistemology of the marketplace, which uses the tools of pricing to coordinate human action across the social system in an elegant but minimal system that operates upon the deficits of Hayekian cognitive limits. But if the limits of human knowledge, in terms of allocating resources in a sufficiently complex social system, are incapable of producing the necessary knowledge, would technology be capable of playing the same role as pricing in coordinating action? How will that technology know how to value the goods it is coordinating since? In many of Nick's examples, pricing operates as the fundamental quantity for their measure. And then my second point, affect and subjectification.
This seems to me the aesthetic question of how we represent the alternative. The neoliberal regime is in part popular due to its anti-statist ideology. Freedom from the state is simple to understand notion of liberty, which can be seen in the focus on inflation and minimal intervention in the DSG model Nick outlines. A new politics must not only produce a new technical model for operating economies, but must also couple with new ideals. Perhaps the most developed statement in this regard comes from manifesto in terms of freedom from work. This, of course, inverts neoliberal ideology, but also goes against the grain of a Weberian culture, which is deeply ingrained in the Western mindset. Here, then, I see a challenge, not just for Nick, but for the audience as well,
in regards to how we might revolutionize our cultural ideals and develop a new commons around different affective values. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we... Sort of like that. That's probably for, like, all the respondents. So I guess we can open up to some questions. Jason, do you want to, like, bring in some of your students? Yeah, yeah. We have a student, Alex Kulik, who's also a student at University of the Arts in Philadelphia area, and he would like to post something. Are you there, Ox? I am, indeed.
Great. So I guess everyone can hear me. I'm live. Everyone's listening. Yes, we can. Yes, yeah. Maybe get a little bit closer to the microphone, but we can hear you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Just wanted to mention how much of a crazy experience it's been the last couple days. It's around 9 PM when we started here in Philadelphia with another GCAS student here with me. And we've pretty much been up ever since. We haven't slept. And it's been really an incredible experience. I'm no longer a student at University of the Arts, actually. there for a short time. My name's Alex. I'm primarily a musician in the Philadelphia area,
mostly concerned with improvisation, I guess, as an expressive medium for the most part, and jazz, and mostly rooted in jazz, and specifically for me, the sort of period in the 60s and the opening up and blah, blah, blah, blah. So I just want to preface with the fact that, you know, I am so, so far from an expert in, you know, a lot of the theory-based things that are going on and a lot of the, you know, I guess like citations and things like that. But I've been reading the pieces that Jason has provided for us for the conference. And instead of approaching it from a theory-central thing,
I just wanted to maybe bring up a few points just because being an improviser and working with people so much, you're looking at what people are saying musically and otherwise, how they're communicating with each other and how they're spinning off rhizomes and integrating. or fighting and all that stuff. And I guess I'm mostly going to talk about the workpiece, the spectacles of disintegration, and maybe post some questions about education and things like that. So the first interesting thing to me is that it seems like with everyone,
even with all the dense talk and going so micro and macro with a lot of things, it's still like we have this sort of fight between moving, trying to be so careful of, I guess, the neoliberal regime in terms of we have all of these large, expansive, sort of abstract and open possibilities, but we don't want to lose the vigor and the responsibility and those kinds of things in the face of, you know, these sort of, like, easily taken in and easy to get drunk off of ideas, I guess. And, you know, coming from, I guess, like a jazz tradition,
the remarks in Reza Negaristani's piece, The Labor of the Inhuman, about the space of human being something that is revisionist and is sort of like a game, and this space that is open to error and open to building upon steps, even if we trip and fall. and so I guess I'm wondering where everyone lies in terms of reason, in terms of and my comment is just sort of like a lot of these talks
at least Nagarastani lays back on this reason as a cornerstone in a way and I want to know we're talking about defining human as being this revisionist thing, what about reason? And then in terms of media, because we're opening up into all of these new forms so much so that and they're proliferating so fast that this giant plane is opening up and it's so open and there's so many things left untampered with or undefined, I guess, is that the space of what we're concerning or what we're regarding as reason also revisionary and then And how do we take all of these new avenues that are opening up with media
and making sure that they don't become calcified in the way that I think sort of Wark is articulating his spectacles piece? how do we keep them from being calcified in the same way that the spectacle has and the point where you're at a point where things are so oversaturated and have proliferated to such an extent that, you know, I think he says at one point in the piece, even the people that were sovereign and the people that had control over those mechanisms, they don't even know anymore. They've also sort of left it to go, I guess.
And I'm wondering, in combination with sort of the Deleuzian Guattari kind of thing of opening up a new way to think of... I'm so bad at wording these things opening up a new way to think in terms of I automatically think of the rhizome as many connections as we can make sort of it being this sort of like this multiplicity structure that kind of thing how do we how do we bring media into education and into the world in a way that is,
once it's established in a way that maybe a greater population can see, outside of philosophy, outside of critical theory, what are the steps that need to be taken? How do we approach it so that it becomes a rhizome platform, that it becomes something that isn't whitewashed, something that isn't, you know, so root tree systematic in place. That's really all I have, I suppose. Thank you very much for your comment and question. Thanks. So if, Jason, you don't have anybody, even if you do have somebody, maybe we should take some questions from the floor because we would like to break for lunch in about 10 minutes.
So there's time for some questions or comments If somebody wants to come to the microphone, we can take your question. Lunch? Okay, so if we're going to go for lunch, let's see if anybody else from the participants, I guess not, let's go for lunch, all right? Yes, go ahead. You want to get to the microphone so your voice goes over to the people who are like, You can actually come here so they can see you. Can I just say something? Yeah, yeah. No, come here. Okay. Yeah, because it's important that they hear you too, right? Oh, okay, okay. So you can either do it here and be seen, or you can do it there. Stand beside you.
Yeah, come here. But, no, I just thank you for everyone's thoughts and for all the speakers and the respondents. My head is spinning from all this information. I just had a question, maybe just to put it out there, but there was mention of social media and Facebook and I was just wondering for Sukail and Martha, about their thoughts on social media with respect to what you've discussed about this idea of the anthropotechnical process and the individual's presence within these sort of matrices that you've described. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that.
I know Martha mentioned something about an Occupy movement Facebook page that she's part of. So, yeah, just wanted to ask about that. Soil, do you have something to say? Well, actually, can I answer it a little bit? Well, Soil's not even on Facebook. But we all suspect that he is on Facebook with an anonymous spy account, because every time he talks to me, he knows things about my Facebook. And I'm like, how could you see or read those things if you're not on Facebook? So I guess he is there, but anonymously. But in terms of the rest, the interesting thing about Facebook is, I'm going to be brief, and I'm speaking from the position of a medium expert, because I use it a lot, and people
You know I use it a lot. I can see both sides of these things like operative. You know what I mean? On one hand, there's this notion of pricing the risk. And risk is an operation in Facebook. You could immediately lose all your fans who would like your pages or participate in your activities or comment on your thing and raise your social media clout. And you somehow, without any kind of guideline, you will learn a way to manage this risk and expand your clout by saying things. And so basically, what Sohail talks about is actually an operation in Facebook.
But there's another layer of Facebook which is very particular. And that's your core groups of people that you share very specialized interest with. And those people are constantly, it's a different level. On that level, you're really using it for its emancipatory potentials. And I'm sorry to say that. Those potentials coexist with Chatele's notion of internet is a system for worldwide domestication. I can see how that is right. And how a tool like Facebook is domesticating us in a form like turning us into kettle, just to quote directly from Châtelet. But also at the, you want to come here?
Pardon me? Yes. Yeah, so and then on the other side, there's this sort of like, but the only point I wanted to make is there's another stratification taking place with technology, which is sort of like the 1%. But it doesn't map itself onto the 1%, 99% of economy. And it's sort of like technological intelligence, which is sort of like divides, and it creates a 99% and another kind of 1%. 99% who just basically use technology as sort of like this robotically. And then another 1% who uses the very same conditions that's supposed to turn you into like a kettle, and they use it against it. And this sort of like divide, its effect could actually be sort of like thought of as like
a potential for change because it's not like people who use technology to really advance the way they think and the way they produce knowledge is kind of like emancipatory. So that type of 1% I'm very interested in. And I think we can expand that. It needs that use like the power and money of 1% and 99%. It can kind of get expanded through practice. So you have more percentage of that, rather than this majority of people just sharing like dumb little things with text on it that you see, and people who really are contributing, or people who are really utilizing it to generate stuff. The comments on Facebook were just in passing towards the
end. but in a way what they exemplify is the core point I was making towards the end around the near identification of information and knowledge. So it seems to me what happens in what I've been told about Facebook and the minute-by-minute postings is the way in which there's a constant revision and reiteration of one's name or one's Facebook presence. And the issue there is what is being presented on Facebook through the post, right? Is it a subjectivity which communicates something? Or is it the revision of a previous post?
And that's what constitutes the subjectivity of Facebook. And it seems to me it's the second. So there's a construction of a subjective position, which is the person behind the Facebook post, or the stream, the newsfeed, who's organized through the revisability of what they say. And that seems to me exemplified the condition of this risk. It's like a risk subjectivity. The risk isn't a major existential risk because it's a bunch of crap usually, or just kind of witterings that are going on. Some of which are more important, some of which are less. But it doesn't matter in a way what the content is. What matters is the velocity of revision. That's a strong Facebook presence.
So, and I think this is where I've got qualification of what Mo proposes, which is, I think that the people use Facebook most emphatically in the most interesting way, which is kind of the way they use, in fact, which is a constant, it's sort of updates, but the updates are also somewhat molecularized or atomized. There isn't a sense of... There's a sense of a strong, let's call it, subject position behind the posts, but the posts don't agglomerate to an identity. Call it that, right? So it's a kind of fragmented manifestation of a subject position,
and qua personality, which doesn't amount to something that you would call knowledge. It's not a knowledge-based production. It's an informatic production of subjectivity. That actually seems to be the most interesting use of Facebook, which is where I agree with you. But it's also this near identification of knowledge and information. Now, the issue is, is this progressive or is regressive? I'm not sure. With Stiegler, who I'm using as the main point the argument, Stiegler's kind of very grumpy about the social networks because they're basically modes of capitalization, they're clickbait, essentially. And it's what Alex Gallo was speaking about yesterday, that every click is a form of, you do micro work because you provide capital somewhere.
And also, you now, we understand you provide sort of state, information to the state. So you're doing work with respect to capital and also work with respect to the state. so Stigler understands this pretty well and is trying to repurpose in a kind of I guess a proto-accelerationist way repurpose social networks and digital technologies to do what he calls economies of contribution which has sort of ground up kind of quasi-autonomous productions of new types of knowledge using the technologies but this seems to me to follow a kind of critique of instrumental rationality account of the technologies. He's a kind of Marcusian in this. But it seems to me that that critique kind of misses something else that's going on,
which is the production of, let's call them contingent subjectivities, which are irreducible to the kind of subjectivity that he's calling for, Stiegler is calling for, through this repurposing of the technology. So, I mean, because it's an already dense and complex paper, I didn't push this any further, but it seems to me that there's something about the contingent subjectivity of what I call a tuchological subjectivity, which is happening through Facebook, which is not reducible to traditional forms of subjecthood. Thank you, everyone. We're going to break for lunch and meet back here at 2 o'clock.
It's actually only one minute over our time, which is incredible given what we've been through. So we're going to close this. Let's close this Hangout and start a new Hangout at 2 o'clock, Jason. And this will just automatically archive itself, and you guys can go watch it in one minute if you want. No, it'll take about 10. So goodbye. Ciao. Thank you.