Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Computing the human – biometrics and our dividual selves

Over on the excellent Aeon website there’s a beta section called ‘Ideas‘ that poses questions and solicits responses. One such question is: “How will biometrics transform surveillance culture?“. To which Kelly Gates (UCSD) offers an adroit response in the form of a short essay entitled ‘Computerising Humans‘.

Gates unpicks the technological deterministic fatalism of the expectation that the widespread deployment of biometric technologies is a foregone conclusion. She argues:

There’s also an assumption that in the very near future, these technologies will be capable of automatically identifying us with near-perfect accuracy, free of the messy cultural baggage that muddles the way humans identify one another. Human perception is inherently biased and flawed, according to this logic, while computers are inherently objective, free from error and prejudice.

It follows that, and as Gates goes on to argue, to invent the technology, be the owner of the data upon which it operates and then verify the ‘accuracy’ of that technology (as Facebook do with their facial recognition systems) means that one necessarily invents the accuracy of that technology as well. Likewise, in creating such systems and the parameters in which they (must) operate (to be effective) we necessarily circumscribe and predetermine their uses, and thus also invent their usefulness. Therefore, in this sense, by inventing the technology and its usefulness we invent the future in which it is necessary:

In other words, inventing the accuracy of biometric technologies involves making bigger claims about what they can do than their limited experimental results can support.

Of course, such a process of invention is also, necessarily, a (re)invention of our ‘selves’, in multiple. It is a kind of ontogenetic (and more specifically here, technogenetic process, as Gates highlights – although I prefer Simondon to Hayles on this point). The multiple nature of the data representations of our ‘selves’ convenes the various ways in which we are conceived as entities, in data and in flesh, and thus the multiple ways our identities are performed. We are reinvented by looking back at our-selves through  the ‘eyes’ of the technology: the surveillant relation between the unblinking gaze of the technology and our performance of identity is co-constituted.

Understanding ourselves as fully enmeshed with technologies might help us get a better sense of what biometrics portend for our already surveillant culture. We already conceive of ourselves as people with official identities composed of disembodied aggregates of transaction-generated data–digital representations of ourselves that circulate over networks. In fact, it is a necessary precondition of biometric system development that we conceive of ourselves in this way. In short, if computers are getting better at recognizing humans, it’s because humans are getting much better at looking at, and seeing themselves, much like computers.

A helpful way of understanding this is through the brief exposition of the ‘dividual’ Deleuze makes in his Postscript on the Societies of Control: “a physically embodied human […] that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies of control, like computer-based systems” (as Robert Williams has it). If we look at the production and performance of our selves, as ‘dividuals’, we are, I would argue, confronting the necessity to un-think “the subject” (following J-D Dewsbury’s Deleuzian reading of Badiou). We accordingly consume our selves by trusting in the apparatuses of multiple surveillance (Facebook etc.) and are invited to deny what is incalculable.

Stiegler would perhaps argue that to combat our rendering as biometric surveillant subjects we must take care of our selves, of our incalculability; believe in that incalculability, and make that care a basis of our political economic relations. Of course, that is far easier said than done. Biometric technology does not necessitate the rendering of ‘dividuals’, that future is not a forgone conclusion, but it will take a lot of work to invent an alternative.

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Repost > “Against ideological determinism : Simondon’s political epistemology”, Andrea Bardin

Following a link to the Centre International
des Etudes Simondoniennes (CIDES) in a blogpost by Andrew Iliadis I saw the following paper transcript, in English, by Andrea Bardin (author of Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon). The paper concerns Simondon’s theorisation of individuation as ontogenetic. This is a paper rich with ideas and I suspect of interest to anyone interested in theories of information, of being/becoming, and in epistemology more broadly…

I am daring to reproduce the paper here – in the hope that it reaches a broader anglophone audience. Please do cite/link to the original though – not to this page. (I also do not know if Bardin wrote this in English or if it is a translation, there are no clues on the CIDES page.)

“Against ideological determinism : Simondon’s political epistemology”*, by Andrea Bardin

* This paper was presented at the London Conference in Critical Thought, 7 June 2013. Part of it has been further developed as “On Substances and Causes Again: Simondon’s Philosophy of Individuation and the Critique of the Metaphysical Roots of Determinism.” In Galofaro, F. et al. (eds.) Morphogenesis and Individuation. Springer, 2014.

My aim is to ‘introduce’ today the two-sided philosophical enterprise Simondon developed in 1958 in his main work, Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. His philosophy was both concerned with an encyclopaedic and entirely ‘modern’ project of axiomatisation of all sciences (the social sciences included), and with a quite original, experimental conception of epistemology he called philosophy of individuation or ‘ontogenesis’ which, I believe, has some interesting political consequences.

This double aspect he inherited from one of the fathers of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, who conceived information as a paradigm which could be at least in principle extended to all the fields of scientific research: biology, psychology, psychopathology, sociology and political economy. From Wiener’s research Simondon not only derived his far-reaching project, but also a peculiar view on the individual – I quote from Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950):

The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance.

Now, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation neither maintains a substantialism of the individual, nor dissolves it into a complex system of relations: ‘the individual is being and relation’ (Simondon 1958: 143). And at the same time it refuses two apparently opposed views on physical, biological, psychical and social processes: determinism and indeterminism. Simondon does not believe in pre-constituted objects or subjects, and therefore he is interested in the processes they both emerge from. In general, he is well aware that – despite any possible disguising – the same subject underlies Descartes’s metaphysical ontology and Kant’s transcendental epistemology, since both are the counterpart of what we still refer to as Nature, the deterministic whole we are supposed to accept as a ‘matter of fact’. On the contrary, philosophy is rather concerned with ‘the processes of individuation from which the subject of  [both] critical thought and of ontology emerges’ (Simondon 1958: 269).

Today, after briefly introducing Simondon’s epistemology – which is still quite new to the Anglophone context – I’ll suggest in which sense his conjoint critique to determinism and indeterminism can be read as a critique of ideology.

1. How does Simondon proceed? (Fortunately) he does not have a predetermined method. So, he looks for different theoretical tools to describe processes and systems far from equilibrium (metastable) instead of ‘beings’. And he does that – I would say – ‘experimentally’: throughout the text of Individuation (but also before and after it) one can witness subsequent attempts to define different ‘paradigms’ he derives from the whole spectre of the natural sciences. ‘Crystallisation’ and ‘modulation’ are in fact two of them he had already developed before writing the book on Individuation. There he also speaks of ‘transductive processes’ or more simply ‘transduction’. The categorisation of such paradigms was further widened and complicated by Simondon: he added ‘continuous modulation’ and ‘discontinuous transduction’, ‘organising amplification’ (Simondon 1962: 417).

It is not necessary here to go through the different connotations of these expressions, but it is interesting to discern what actually links all of the recurrent attempts to ‘name’ these processes. From this perspective the entire Individuation appears as a kind of powerful experimental-setting of concepts. The genuinely philosophical performance of the book lies in the attempt to enable different ‘schemas’ or paradigms – modulation, crystallisation, metastability, transduction, and many other conceptual tools – for the analysis of the different domains of being, of their structural conditions and the processes they emerge from: these models are tools for defining the thresholds between different domains in order to make a problem of them, rather than to fix them.

Simondon’s concepts, in fact, do not define any separate ‘realms’ – matter, living beings, human beings, psyche, society – which would be traversed by some fixed individuals or by any kind of substances of which individuals would be composed. On the contrary, they indicate ‘phases’, processes, whose tension and dynamic composition continuously constitute and modify the configuration of individuals, both as objects and as subjects, as it happens within a magnetic and gravitational field, in which different forces and processes constitute an irregular and unstable space, full of potentials, which can modify or be modified by whatever – matter or energy – becomes part of it (as information).

No ontological guarantee, then, of a stable and secure domain, and no science capable of defining the specific processes characterising a domain: only a singular enquiry of the singular processes and of the different emerging structures. And nevertheless we do not have a kind of vague postmodernist free speech. In fact, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is based on the critical analysis of the results of the sciences, even if aiming to criticise rather than to confirm the alleged ‘identity’ of their objects, but still starting from them. And from such results Simondon recurrently reactivates the ontogenetic hypothesis in order to discover the actual tensions that render each single being a metastable system undergoing a process of individuation. In this sense, as I am going to explain, philosophy as ontogenesis is not any a-priori axiomatisable method, but rather a meth-odos through the hard pathway of scientific research. Not to acquire metaphors, but to transport schemas of functioning from one domain to another: to experiment their heuristic efficacy.

At this point we can ask ourselves what does Simondon abandon and what does he gain through this shift from a science of the universal laws of nature to a science of the partial regularity of processes.

– What does he abandon? The myth of modern science: granted on the one hand by ontological objectivity, offering a whole set of substantialist and deterministic explanations, and on the other hand by epistemological universality, which surreptitiously hypostatised a pure and non questioned subject of knowledge to ground its forecasting power. (à While, on the contrary Simondon – as aforesaid – wants to understand precisely ‘the individuation from which the subject of  [both] critical thought and ontology emerges’, Simondon 1958: 269)

– What does he gain through the study of the processes of individuation? A new place for philosophical thought which is no more the alleged king of sciences (in fact a servant or better a clown deprived of any power and confined in a kind of imaginary world deprived of extension).

In short, the philosophical force of Simondon’s oeuvre, of which he is not always aware, appears to me to emerge precisely in the obstinate repetition of the same operation of structuring a subject-object relation: a relation of knowledge which is not THE relation between the subject (of science) and an object anymore. It is a relation at the exact scale of each of the systems concerned: always mixed systems in which different physical, chemical, biological, psychical and social processes simultaneously take place according to a singular and unique configuration. The singularity of individuation, in short, requires a singular exercise of knowledge, a kind of ‘clinical’ thought which is itselfan individuation:

An operation of knowledge which is parallel to the known operation; we cannot, in the common use of the term – know individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in ourselves [“¦] Beings can be known through the subject’s knowledge, but individuation of beings cannot be grasped out of the individuation of the subject’s knowledge. (Simondon 1958: 36)

Because of that, philosophical knowledge is in this sense an operation about which Simondon at least once explicitly assumes the impossibility of providing a definitive formalisation:

It might be that ontogenesis cannot be axiomatised, which would explain the existence of philosophical thought as perpetually marginal in relation to all the other studies. Philosophy would be the kind of thought set in motion by the implicit or explicit research of ontogenesis in all orders of reality. (Simondon 1958: 229)

2. For our present purpose we can ask: what did he conclude about processes in general, and what can we derive from his philosophy? When building a ‘philosophy of individuation’ Simondon was in search of what he called ‘a non Cartesian epistemology, borrowing Bachelard’s expression, neither conceived in the sense of determinism nor in the sense of indeterminism’ (Simondon 1958: 144).

It is worth recalling here where he started from: his debt to the physicist Louis De Broglie is not always evident, but constant and decisive throughout the book. According to De Broglie, although referring to microphysics, the discovery of the ‘indeterminacy principle’[1] should be extended also to biology[2], and, furthermore, to social sciences:

[Microphysics’] relevance is not limited to the domain of physical sciences, it applies to the sciences studying life, man and human societies. (De Broglie 1947: 225)

Simondon’s debt towards quantum discontinuity is evident throughout the whole of Simondon’s production: processes are non-continuous, they are always partially deterministic, triggered by singularities and resulting in the emergence of non-stable structures. From his point of view, determinism itself is a conceptual tool that allows the understanding and forecasting of portions of reality, while modern mechanicism has progressively transformed it in the metaphysical assumption typical of the ‘deterministic age’ that still haunts our totalising conception of nature.[3] In a way Simondon was following Bachelard’s line of conduct in Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934), where the latter invited to ‘dissolve the huge block of metaphysical determinism which burdens scientific thought.’ And to this purpose Simondon’s theory of the singularity of processes was quite fit, since it entailed the abandonment of the ideological couple determinism/indeterminism:

It is possible, in the last instance, to suppose that the theory of singularity can be ascribed neither to the framework of a deterministic physics nor to the framework of an indeterministic physics. The two would rather be considered the particular cases of a new conception of the real that one might call the theory of transductive time or theory of the phases of being. This completely innovative mode of thinking – which conceives determinism and indeterminism as mere limit-cases – can be applied to different domains of reality beyond the one of elementary particles. (Simondon 1958: 144)

As it is clear, Simondon does not take quantum physics as an alternative model to the modern mechanistic one, in order to build a kind of new ontology. No, it is according to Simondon an ‘innovative mode of thinking’ which quantum physics brings about. In fact in his philosophy of individuation Simondon always struggled to maintain all epistemological models in their technical, clinical, inventive dimension, out of any metaphysical assumption. It is in this sense that, a few years later, he assumed this enterprise required a technical and ‘clinical’ exercise of thought that he defined as a regime of functioning in which ‘the appropriation of each single problem is probably the highest task the effort of philosophy can assume’ (Simondon 1965: 16).

From this perspective, the emergence of nature as a deterministically conceived object within the modern dualistic framework goes far beyond the exigency of scientific research, and rather appears the counterpart of an absolute, metaphysical ‘subject of science’. In fact, both constitute the non-existing limit-cases of a relation in which social and natural processes dangerously play their productive role out of any effective control, precisely because of the fixed dualistic image that ideology projects on them, hiding their actual non-simply-deterministic becoming.

In this sense dualistic metaphysics, born from the reflection on the principles of modern science by some of those who invented and practised it, can be interpreted as the attempt to stabilise the shift between knowledge and reality – opened by the productive method of science and immediately ontologically hypostatised by making of the mathematisable reality of primary qualities reality in itself. To this reality, a deterministic Res extensa provided adequate ontological repair, while to its scientific knowledge Res cogitans offered, – in all its metamorphoses – on the other hand, a metaphysical umbrella which saved the subject of science from the vicissitudes of collectivity and of history (and of biology), in which it is nevertheless embodied.

 

3. Today this early-modern – anthropomorphic indeed – model offered by mechanistic science still inhabits our understanding of nature, and still pushes us to take position for or against its imagined determinism, according to a false alternative:

– to embrace it, and conceive the universe as entirely deprived of any sense, or

– to abandon it, following the alternative of believing in a different kind of being (as Descartes did), in order to maintain the possibility of a freedom of choice, a reference to established truths and so on…

In fact, the non-substantialistic and non-deterministic epistemology Simondon presents in Individuation can play a demystifying and anti-ideological function. It programmatically dismantles the ‘conceptual couples’ (form/matter, active/passive, subject/object) that have for centuries grounded a whole series of false alternatives. And first of all, Individuation contributes to the overcoming of the epistemological and political machine represented by the alleged ontological opposition between liberty and necessity, the key institution of a supposed ‘ontological difference’ between the human being and nature (Or better – to use a Spinozian rather than an Heideggerian expression – any presupposition of an ‘imperium in imperio’).

Simondon meant to dismantle this dualistic ‘machine’ neither by reducing human beings to an imagined natural determinism nor by saving their alleged metaphysical nature. From this theoretical stance one can derive that determinism has to be programmatically adopted as a tool, although with the caution required since when, from the seventeenth century onward, the conceptual instruments of modern science have massively participated in social ontogenesis, with direct efficacy not only at the level of technological development, but also at the level of ideology.

Along this line of thought I believe a conjoint critique of the shared teleological grounds of fascism and technocracy can be derived. On the one hand ontological indeterminism frees political voluntarism from its ties to reality, thus instituting an unconditioned domain of pure political will and of its absolute goals. On the other hand ontological determinismgrounds a technocratic politics which, apparently depriving teleology of any possible significance, in fact restrains any political project to the calculable conditions of possibility that underlie it and therefore to the definition of predetermined goals. In effect, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation struggles to maintain determinism in its technical, inventive and epistemological dimension, out of any metaphysical assumption of ontological determinism.

In a similarly accurate fashion, from a dossier dated February 1945, Canguilhem attacked

The kind of Laplacean determinism [which] entails a conception of the relationship between man and reality analogous to the Newtonian conception of the relationship between God and Universe [“¦] Human intelligence is understood as an imitation, and as a limitation of divine intelligence. The observers and measurers of the universe are exterior to the universe. (Canguilhem 1945: 9)

And yet Canguilhem continued to denounce the rhetorical tool of anti-scientistic indeterminism, whereby the rigour of scientific knowledge would be lost, thus opening a path to the myth of political voluntarism. In this sense it is worth recalling how – with as much exactitude and severity – in the same dossier he schematically noted the political costs of deriving indeterministic ontological conclusions from a conjoint critique of substantialism and determinism:

Exploitation by fascism of some possible interpretations of the new discoveries in physics [“¦] – dissolution of the concept of individuality. Individuality destroyed at the ultra microscopical level [“¦] – liberty in the object itself. Therefore two arguments: against individualism à liberalism; against materialism à Marxism. (Canguilhem 1945: 10)

In this precise sense Simondon’s philosophy can be said to preserve the efficacy of science as a weapon against the ideology of determinism without defending the counter-ideology of indeterminism. And Simondon’s epistemological critique of the ideological assumption of the deterministic model as an ontological reality, opens up a field for political invention, conceived as the process of experimentation within which finality does not pre-exist (either in the form of a disincarnated subject or of an ordered objectivity) the transindividual processes and the political struggles it emerges from.

References

Bachelard, G. 1934. Le nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris: PUF, 2006.

De Broglie, L. 1947. Physique et microphysique. Paris: Albin Michel.

Canguilhem, G. 1945. Dossier “Déterminisme et indéterminisme » (février 1945). In Archives de Georges CanguilhemG.C 11.3.7. CAPHES, ENS Paris.

Simondon, G. 1958. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005 (First edition: PhD thesis, Archives de Georges Canguilhem: GC. 40.2.1. CAPHES, ENS Paris).

___ 1962. “Résumé de la séance de travail sur l’amplification dans les processus d’information.” In Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine, 5ème colloque philosophique de Royaumont. Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie n° 5, 417. Paris: Minuit, 1965. (paper originally delivered at the Colloque de Royaumont in 1962).

___ 1965. “Culture et technique.” Bulletin de l’institut de philosophie morale et enseignement. Université libre de Bruxelles 55-56: 3-16.

___ 1966. “Initiation à la psychologie moderne. Première partie.” Bulletin de Psychologie 1966 5/254: 288-98.

Simondon, G. and Le Terrier F. 1957. “La psychologie moderne.” In Encyclopédie de la Pléiade – Histoire de la science, 1668-703. Paris: Gallimard.

Wiener, N. 1950. The Human use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society. Sphere Books, 1968.

(article mis en ligne le 01/02/2014)


[1] Even if the current English translation is ‘uncertainty principle’, the original term used by Heisenberg was Unbestimmtheit, which can also mean ‘indeterminacy’. I will use the second term, since it better expresses an ontological lack of determinacy rather than an epistemological uncertainty of knowledge.

[2] ‘A mammal, for instance, belongs to the microscopic world as far as the elements directing its living dynamics are collocated, in effect, at the level of atomic systems. The functioning of living systems will therefore be studied one day thanks to microphysical concepts’ (De Broglie 1947: 162). By the end of the following decade, Simondon was planning to integrate an epistemology derived from quantum physics in the reform of the cybernetic concept of information: ‘The language of cybernetics, already applicable to nervous system physiology, could prove to be suitable for describing the relations between man and his natural and social milieu, overcoming the alternative between liberty and determinism, which seems to be the major obstacle for any psychological science’ (Simondon and Le Terrier 1957: 1701). This is what he actually tried to achieve through Individuation.

[3] According to Simondon, the ‘deterministic age’ is the one which postulates the order of Nature as ‘uniform, necessary, universal and analytical’. According to him the ‘deterministic age’ started collapsing at the end of nineteenth century, first attacked by evolutionary biology, then by holistic assumptions based on Maxwell’s theory of fields, later integrated by Gestalttheorie, Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty (Simondon 1966: 288-90).

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Inaugural British Academy Geography lecture: Bill Cronon

The inaugural British Academy lecture in Geography is taking place next Tuesday at the RGS and a very worthy speaker too… Worth a look if you’re (going to be) in London:

Who reads Geography or History anymore? 
The challenge of audience in a digital age

Professor William Cronon

Tuesday 7 July 2015, 6-7.15pm followed by a reception
Venue: The Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR
(Please note the main entrance to the RGS is through the Exhibition Road reception)

Chaired by: Professor Felix Driver FBA, Royal Holloway, University of London  

The disciplines of history and geography favour quite different rhetorical venues for communicating their research findings. Geography long ago joined the rest of the sciences in preferring peer-reviewed journal articles as its principal mode of professional communication, whereas history is one of the last remaining disciplines still committed primarily to the book-length monograph. Neither format seems ideally suited to the increasingly dominant rhetorical media created by the digital revolution. How might geographers and historians best respond to the challenge of reaching academic and non-academic audiences in the 21st century?

About the speaker:

William Cronon studies North American environmental history: how human beings depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.

FREE. Registration not required.
Seats allocated on a first come, first served basis.

If you have any questions about this event please call the Events Team on 020 7969 5200 or email events@britac.ac.uk

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Robot-caused death

A robot has tragically caused the death of a VW worker, we learn in today’s news coverage. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know…) this is, quite remarkably, only the third reported industrial robot-caused fatality.

The first two reported deaths of workers caused by manufacturing robots happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

Robert Williams was killed in Detroit by a parts recovery robot in the Ford Flatrock Casting Plant (Michigan) in January 1979. A circuit judge in the US found the manufacturer of the equipment criminally liable and ordered Unit Handling Systems USD$10m to the Williams family.

Kenji Urada was killed in Akashi (near Kobe) by an industrial robot in a Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in July 1981.

There is a temptation to think about some kind of intentionality (however weak) or malign tendency by the machine here, largely because of the word ‘robot’ and because of the detailed imagination of what constitutes the entities we might commonly understand to be referred to by that term. The chatter on Twitter about the sad VW incident certainly seems to invoke the kind of Asimov-style Sci-Fi robotics of I, Robot and the Terminator.

The corollary to this is, of course, that we have become very used to seeking blame located in a single figure of a ‘wrong-doer’. Indeed, we have sought (in the UK) to enshrine this in law after a fashion by holding senior manager personally to account in corporate manslaughter cases. Thus it is unsurprising that TIME magazine report that:

Prosecutors are still deciding whether to bring charges and whom they would pursue.

One can argue, however, that a desire for singular culpability is misconceived. The workers tragically killed in all three of cases were involved in complex assemblages or systems that, even with contemporary safety systems, have contingencies that might lead to undesirable ends. In this way, while the contexts are very different, the worker in today’s robotically enable factory is a distant relation of the 19th century mill worker powerfully described by Friedrich Engels.

Workers both in the 19th century and today have to be alive to the operation of a complex and continent manufacturing system, with many kinds of rules and procedures that circumscribe a place for the human body and its function within industrial manufacturing. If one places their body outside of that circumscribed place, or if the rules of circumscription shift (by accident or design) then the body is at risk of harm.

There may all sorts of factors that lead to a manufacturing accident, but I would hazard that they are more often than not a condition of what it means to work and how that work is designed: how the body fits within the system, or how that system is programmed to accommodate the body, rather than a malign or supernatural robotic agency.

For example: Urada was trapped by the work arm of the robot which pinned him against a machine which cuts gears and was killed. He had entered a prohibited area around the robot to repair it. According to factory officials, a mesh fence around the robot would have shut off the power when unhooked, but instead of opening it, Urada had apparently jumped over the fence. He set the machine on manual control but accidentally brushed against the on-switch, and the claw of the robot pushed him against the machine tooling device.

A grizzly story and one might look at the safety procedures and equipment. There are of course standards and codes of practice for safe working with robots (by the ANSI and the HSE for example). Nevertheless, it remains the case that Urada transgressed those procedures putting himself at risk. We can only speculate about why he did so, but again that is a condition of work, not of robots as such.

All three of the deaths caused by manufacturing robots are tragic and all three have and will no doubt prompt questions about how complex systems of manufacture that may be hazardous to the human body can be made as safe as possible. They could, and perhaps should, also prompt questions about how we work (see, for example, this article in the FT).

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Reblog> Klimahaus ~ the world interior of climate (by Martin Mahoney)

Martin Mahoney has written a nice piece reading his visit to the ‘climate museum’ Klimahaus in Bremerhaven through Sloterdijk’s World Interior of Capital.

Here’s some excerpts and then a link to the full post below, it’s worth a read:

The two main strands of Sloterdijk’s argument in the World Interior neatly map onto the two main sections of the Klimahaus. In the first, we follow an ‘explorer’ boldly setting out to discover spaces which do not belong to his own lifeworld. Suitcase in hand, he embodies contemporary residues of the ‘Geography Militant‘ culture which Felix Driver argues can be detected in diverse discourses and media, a long time hence from its Victorian apogee. The presentation of other cultures as situated timelessly within particular spaces and climates, displaying ahistorical ‘customs and traditions’, recalls much earlier modes of knowing and representing the anthropological Other.

…

The ‘Climate Protection’ section offers climate not as an exterior space to be explored, but as part of a modern interior which must be carefully calculated and managed. The symbolic media of this calculation are many and varied: the ice core, the computer model, the ‘personal climate account’. But amid these calculative rationalities uncertainties proliferate, which are domesticated through personal stories from the future offered by characters we met on our first voyage

Klimahaus Bremerhaven: in the world interior of climate

I recently visited the Klimahaus in Bremerhaven, northern Germany along with cultural anthropologist Werner Krauss. Klimahaus is a unique museum dedicated to humanity’s relationship to climate. The main body of the museum leads visitors on a journey along the line of 8-degrees Longitude, following a modern-day explorer as he heads south from Bremerhaven to Switzerland, through Italy and the Sahara, into Cameroon, across the south Atlantic and over Antarctica. From there visitors head across the Pacific, calling in on Samoa and Alaska, before looping back to northern Germany at Hallig Langeness. At each stop, visitors enter an exhibition dedicated to the climate of the location, exploring its role in shaping human life and culture. In a rather old-fashioned anthropological tradition, we are introduced to the ‘customs and traditions’ of the locals, while immersed in the heat or cold, humidity or aridity of their climate.

Read the full blogpost on Topograh blog.

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Reblog> Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Political economy via blogging… Yannis Varoufakis’ blog makes for an interesting read – extraordinary that a finance/treasury chief keeps a blog, and indeed has time to do so!

Here’s his powerful and succinct (and remarkably polite) six bullet points for voting ‘no’ in this weekend’s referendum in Greece:

Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

  1. Negotiations have stalled because Greece’s creditors (a) refused to reduce our un-payable public debt and (b) insisted that it should be repaid ‘parametrically’ by the weakest members of our society, their children and their grandchildren
  2. The IMF, the United States’ government, many other governments around the globe, and most independent economists believe – along with us – that the debt must be restructured.
  3. The Eurogroup had previously (November 2012) conceded that the debt ought to be restructured but is refusing to commit to a debt restructure
  4. Since the announcement of the referendum, official Europe has sent signals that they are ready to discuss debt restructuring. These signals show that official Europe too would vote NO on its own ‘final’ offer.
  5. Greece will stay in the euro.  Deposits in Greece’s banks are safe.  Creditors have chosen the strategy of blackmail based on bank closures. The current impasse is due to this choice by the creditors and not by the Greek government discontinuing the negotiations or any Greek thoughts of Grexit and devaluation. Greece’s place in the Eurozone and in the European Union is non-negotiable.
  6. The future demands a proud Greece within the Eurozone and at the heart of Europe. This future demands that Greeks say a big NO on Sunday, that we stay in the Euro Area, and that, with the power vested upon us by that NO, we renegotiate Greece’s public debt as well as the distribution of burdens between the haves and the have nots.

Via: For Another Critique of the Pyramid, Nicholas Crane’s blog.

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David Moats reviews Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution in TCS

On the Theory Culture & Society journal website you can read a review of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution by David Moats.

Here’s the abstract:

Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution helpfully strips away the hype surrounding ‘big data’ and clarifies key terms. This review suggests some avenues where the book could be taken further, particularly in reference to the performativity of big data discourses and infrastructures, giving the example of Cameron and Palin’s dismantling of the hype around globalisation. It is also suggested that the performative effects of data enact sociality in new ways and may require more dramatic methodological and philosophical shifts. Crucially however, Kitchin’s book successfully clears a space of shared understanding on which more radical projects can be built.

Read the whole review.

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The unacknowledged (professional) expense of books

These are just some rough thoughts…

Reading is a significant part of academic life. Staying up-to-date with debates, excavating the lineage or context for certain arguments or ideas, diving into new areas – all these things, and more, more or less require us to regularly read… journal articles, books, book reviews, and perhaps (increasingly) blogs and other online texts.

The thing is… most of those texts are free to access, for academics, through institutional access (we can login through Athens or Shibboleth). The exception (most of the time anyway) is books. While universities remain committed to stocking their libraries there are, of course, limits to what can be bought. We often want to foray into very particular areas that other colleagues or students won’t and so we cannot reasonably expect the university to pick up the tab, especially when budgets are only being reduced.

This leaves many (especially early career) academics in a quandary. Resort to the increasingly creaky inter-library loans system (and then probably have to break copyright by photocopying substantial portions of a book), or buy a book with your own money. Inter-library loans is an excellent system and I have no wish to denigrate it – it’s just sometimes you need to keep a copy of the whole book and copyright doesn’t allow for this (and photocopies can be unsatisfactory too).

Now, I know that academics are certainly not badly paid (and I do not wish to moan about that), but those of us early in our careers are not wealthy by any means. Many colleagues, I am aware, give themselves a book budget and prioritise – some simply splash out. Nevertheless, this is a professional expense – we arguably need the books to inform our research (the aspect of our jobs most highly prized by our employers and government) but we must cover it out of our ordinary remuneration. This may well be the case for other professions too(?)

Until I had a family I did not think about this. I didn’t buy every book I fancied but there were book purchases most months. Now, with a tighter belt, there isn’t the room for this in my family’s budget. I was lucky to receive a small start-up pot when appointed to my post and I have used a little bit of that to pay for some essential books (I don’t think that’s what it was for!). I have also made use of the SCONUL system to join other universities’ libraries to broaden the range of books to which I have access.

Nevertheless, and I really do not wish to whinge, but the fact remains that academic books can be really expensive (e.g. Routledge and Ashgate routinely publish hardback-only editions and they cost £60+ per book) and we have to meet that expense ourselves.

I’d be interested in what others think…

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Reblog> Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

On his blog Andrew Iliadis shares an excellent book symposium article published in Philosophy and Technology (paywall), for those interested in the philosophy of technology and in the work of Gilbert Simondon this is a really valuable addition to the scant material in English. It also includes a stellar cast of interlocutors, so kudos to Andrew!

13347I’m happy to announce that our Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine has just been published online at the journal homepage of Philosophy & Technology. Many thanks to Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Marc J. de Vries, and especially Nathalie Simondon for contributing to the volume.Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-015-0205-z

PDF: Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

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CFP> ‘The Politics of Digital Technology’

On David Chandler’s website, a CFP for an interesting session at International Studies Assoc. conference in Atlanta in 2016:

Call for Papers: ‘The Politics of Digital Technology’
Panel Proposal for the International Studies Association 57th Annual Conference, Atlanta Georgia, 16-19 March 2016
Convenors: Linda Monsees and David Chandler

The importance of technology, especially digital technologies, for world politics has increasingly caught the attention of IR-scholars. The so-called digital revolution asks us to rethink the role of technology in our current times and to consider how its specific characteristics might challenge traditional political ontologies. It is now widely acknowledged that technology is more than a residual category for theorizing world politics but in the centre of ongoing transformations. These transformations can be observed in real-world political debates and policy-making (Wikileaks and data gathering, the rule of the algorithm, digital humanitarianism, Big Data and the Internet of Things) and also in a growing theoretical interest in science and technology studies (STS) and the ‘material-turn’.

Contributing to this debate, this panel seeks to rethink the possibilities for theorizing the relationship between technology and politics. The current challenge lies in meaningfully conceptualizing technology and its relation to politics in a way that does not reduce technology to just another variable determining the outcome of policies. However, assuming that all technology is always already political might hinder us from understanding the specific linkages between technology and politics or the distinct characteristics enabling technology to be political. Insights from science and technology studies might help to engage with the social role of technology, but the question of how technology is political remains open. Adapting STS to political science might need additional tools for thoroughly engaging with the political aspects of technology. That is why we would like to bring scholars together who work from different theoretical perspectives and use a variety of approaches.

We welcome contributions that ask how we can grasp the distinct characteristics of the relationship between politics and technology. Theoretical and/or empirical contributions that aim at understanding the above outlined questions are welcomed. Possible contributions might ask about the politics of certain technologies, the specificities of digital technologies or how technologies might challenge traditional categories of International Relations.

Please send proposals with a title (limited to 50 words) and an abstract (limited to 200 words), three tags, and at least one author to Linda Monsees (lmonsees@bigsss.uni-bremen.de) and David Chandler (d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk) by 15 May 2015.