Interesting panel, introduced and moderated by the inimitable Geoff Cox.
The panel members are: Finn Brunton, Marloes de Valk, Suzanne Treister.
prove you are nonhuman – transmediale 2017
Material carriers of thought
In a recent article on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Lyudmila A. Markova discusses the material supports for human communication, what Stiegler would call the processes of exteriorisation and thus materialisation of memory/thought:
Even the most common type of communication is not possible without a material carrier. For example, at a minimum stone, papyrus or paper is required for written communication. Their production processes obey the laws of engineering sciences, which are completely independent from the content of the information they convey. Even if the information is transmitted orally, with a voice, a material carrier is present. The sound is produced in a person’s larynx and is uttered through the mouth as language. Furthermore, the air movement, which is born inevitably during the conversation, obeys the laws of physics.
There’s some really interesting discussion of the various ways those involved in studies of social epistemology, and most notably in the essay it’s Steve Fuller’s work set in relation to Kuhn, have attempted to reconcile the passage to knowledge. It’s also curious to see how David Berry’s work ends up in there too, I suspect there’s more than a hint of Stiegler shining through there (but I haven’t read the work so should probably do so…) and it’s a shame Markova doesn’t make that connection. Might be interesting to pursue that angle…
Reblog> [Future Cities] Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware
Worth a watch…
Planetary technics? “Technosphere”, HKW
Via: EnemyIndustry
The always interesting HKW and a project relevant to lots of geographers…
Technosphere
Research Project 2015–2018
The twentieth-century celebrated technology as a way to achieve planetary unity and control. Yet today technics, nature, and human activity seem to combine in increasingly disorienting, uncontrolled compositions in which once-reliable distinctions lose their stability. How did we end up in this world of technological vertigo, this Mobius strip of world and planetary technics, wherein cause and effect, local and global factors, human and non-human agency, perpetually confuse and confound one another’s borders? What governs this constitution (or collision) of forces? And what are the contingent, strategic, or historical events and networks that form durable apparatuses among them?
This dilemma of global technology and its identity will be the main theme of Technosphere (2015-18), a research project investigating origins and future itineraries of this technical world within a larger series of international events, performances, seminars, and conferences that will take place at HKW over the next four years.
Scientists and thinkers have introduced the term technosphere to describe the mobilization and hybridization of energy, material, and environments into a planetary system on par with other spheres such as the atmosphere or biosphere. The term emphasizes the leading role of the technological within this global system. At the same time this term encompasses the enclosure of human populations, forests, cities, seas, and other traditionally non-technical entities within systems of technical management and productivity. But where is that ominous technosphere to be found? How does it impact the everyday passions and experiences of humans, animals, a nation, or an ecosphere?
The coining of the term technosphere announces a conceptual innovation as well as a political challenge. As a conceptual innovation, the notion of the technosphere invites us to recognize and confront the reality of technical systems whose unintended consequences and internal dynamics have accumulated into a quasi-autonomous global force in the world today. Moreover, the very naming of these forces constitutes the posing of new political and social challenges that, though already widely felt, remain largely misunderstood. Their description and study will entail inquiries into physical and political science, but also topics as diverse as aesthetics, waste management, international law, social media, financial markets, animal studies, immigration, and colonialism.
From 2015 to 2018 the Technosphere project will host public events and seminars that explore the potential of this concept to coordinate conversations among scientists, artists, and the general public. It will explore the events, structures, and mechanisms by which the twentieth-century dreams of global unity and human hegemony morphed into disorienting compositions of technics and nature, of human and non-human actors. These investigative and experimental exchanges will ask how the technosphere operates today and endeavor to imagine alternative futures. The result will be a tentative vision of communities and understanding equal to the challenges of our world today.
Under the title The Technosphere, Now a daylong series of conversations and presentations that reveal the infrastructures and operations today will inaugurate the project on Friday, 2 October. Interwoven streams will address the infrastructural exploitation of earthly resources, how data monitors technical and social systems, and how the trauma maps out the dynamics of the technosphere on individual human bodies. The event is part of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s opening weekend of 100 Years of Now, taking place from September 30th to October 4th 2015.
Concept and Realisation: Katrin Klingan, Bernard Geoghegan, Christoph Rosol, and Janek Müller
“Technosphere” takes place as part of the HKW series 100 Years of Now.
Reblog> Body & Society 22.4 – Special Issue on The New Biologies
via TCS.
Body & Society 22.4 – Out Now! Special Issue on The New Biologies
The December 2016 issue of Body & Society – 22 (4) – is now available.
This Special Issue, ‘The New Biologies: Epigenetics, the Microbiome and Immunities’, is edited by Lisa Blackman, and features articles on Antibiotic Resistance, Epigenetics & Obesity, Placental Biologies, Pandemics, and the MRSA Epidemic, among others.
The issue is available here: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/22/4.toc
“Reality Chunking” – David Roden reviews DeLanda’s Philosophy and Simulation
I found this via Deterritorial Investigations Unit (naturally 😉
David Roden has blogged an interesting, fairly lengthy, review of DeLanda’s Philosophy and Simulation. Roden offers some interesting observations, setting his discussion in wider debates within (continental) philosophy, i.e. exotic flavours of realism and their politics. The aspect of the discussion I particularly find interesting is the discussion of DeLanda’s logical fudging of ontological ‘flatness’, when, in fact, in his philosophy of simulation there is quite a bit of hierarchical structure. I hadn’t really given this any thought before now but Roden’s reading together of Philosophy and Simulation and A New Philosophy of Society is informative.
I encourage those interested in philosophy in the wake of Deleuze and those interested in ‘assemblage theory’ to take a look at this review.
The Assemblage Brain – new book from Tony Sampson
Via Virality : Looks interesting…
Part of Minnesota’s spring catalogue – Out early Feb
“The Assemblage Brain provides a much-needed critique of the black-box, computational brain that has been a staple in philosophy, science, and the arts and connects the dots between recent innovations in science, dystopian literature, and theoretical developments in contemporary philosophy.”
David Gunkel, author of The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics
“‘Tap my head and mike my brain’; Tony Sampson’s new book might silently echo Pynchon’s famous lines, but this is also an original, inspiring, and theoretically savvy take on the culture of the affective brain, from sciences to business, cybernetics to political power. Warmly recommended.”
Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Blurb
Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence.The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new concept of sense making, one that challenges conventional scientific and philosophical understandings of the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Tony D. Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics. From this novel perspective the book is structured around two questions: “What can be done to a brain?” and “What can a brain do?” Sampson examines the rise of neuroeconomics in informing significant developments in computer work, marketing, and the neuropharmaceutical control of inattentiveness in the classroom. Moving beyond the neurocapitalist framework, he then reestablishes a place for proto-subjectivity in which biological and cultural distinctions are reintegrated in an understanding of the brain as an assemblage.
The Assemblage Brain unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is produced, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain.
Full details
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-assemblage-brain
About the Neganthropocene & Its Economy – Bernard Stiegler
A video of a presentation (in English) by Bernard Stiegler on his conceptualisation of the ‘neganthropocene’ for the very interesting The New Center for Research and Practice.
N. Katherine Hayles on UAVs/drones as ‘cognitive assemblages’
In a recent article in Critical Inquiry, N. Katherine Hayles formulates an understanding of particular kinds of technological support as ‘cognitive assemblages’ (sort of following Deleuze & Guattari*). She takes as her particular case study the advent of swarming, quasi-autonomous UAVs/drones and their use in warfare. The final paragraph of the piece is interesting but, for me, raises as many questions as it seeks to answer:
Language, human sociality, somatic responses, and technological adaptations, along with emotion, are crucial to the formation of modern humans. Whether warfare should be added to the list may be controversial, but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries suggest that it will persist, albeit in modified forms. As the informational networks and feedback loops connecting us and our devices proliferate and deepen, we can no longer afford the illusion that consciousness alone steers our ships. How should we reimagine contemporary cognitive ecologies so that they become life enhancing rather than aimed toward dysfunctionality and death for humans and nonhumans alike? Recognizing the role played by non conscious cognitions in human/technical hybrids and conceptualizing them as cognitive assemblages is of course not a complete answer, but it is a necessary component. We need to recognize that when we design, implement, and extend technical cognitive systems, we are partially designing ourselves. We must take care accordingly. More accurate and encompassing views of how our cognitions enmesh with technical systems and those of other life forms will enable better designs, humbler perceptions of human roles in planetary cognitive ecologies, and more life-affirming practices as we move toward a future in which technical agency and autonomy become increasingly intrinsic to human complex systems.
(Hayles, 2016: 55)
A couple of immediate questions pop out for me:
- Could you get designers of UAVs to factor in affective responses without reducing them to something like galvanic skin response or another quantifiable measure (which Hayles critiques in relation to MIT Prof. Sandy Pentland’s proselytisation of a ‘sociometer‘)?
- What is meant by “accuracy” in that final sentence?! How might we qualify the idea of “better” designs? This seems to assert a kind of ethics (and maybe aesthetics) antithetical to the institutions and companies that make military equipment – by not addressing this, there seems to me to be a risk of simply making naive assertions.
I appreciate Hayles’ attempt to harness a broadly Deleuzian understanding of cognition (which might be understood as “affect theory”) in attending to pressing contemporary issues such as the rise of “killer robots” (or quasi-autonomous technological platforms that can inflict death), however – it seems to me that the paper uses the case studies (taken from other researchers’ work, such as Chamayou) to validate the theory, rather than using the theory to critically interrogate the empirical state of affairs. This, it seems to me, is a shame (not least because there’s a fruitful application of aspects of How we became posthuman here), and, as observed above, leaves more questions than answers. Maybe that’s productive, it can open debates – but others are doing slightly more to qualify how we might problematise ethics in this arena. I’d recommend taking a look at Lucy Suchman’s work, especially “robot futures” and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots…
Addendum: I’m not suggesting that Chamayou and other ‘droners’ are “right” and Hayles is somehow wrong… I’d definitely agree with Prof Louise Amoore who suggested on Twitter that those folk could do with reading Hayles’ (and Suchman’s) work
* I’m uncertain about the proposition of ‘cognitive assemblages’ – if we were to follow D&G’s theory of agencements would not all ‘assemblages’ be cognitive? The implication is, it seems, that the ‘cognitive’ in Hayles’ formulation is human cognition – which implies a human exceptionalism that might be seen as antithetical to D&G’s philosophy.
A dream of an algorithm – Agnieszka Zimolag
A compelling piece on the Institute of Network Cultures‘ “long forms” website by Agnieszka Zimolag entitled “A dream of an algorithm” explores “our” relation to “technology, or (to my mind) technics as the co-constitutional (and originary [not essential]) relation between what we call, in common sense terms, “the human” and”technology”.
Technology is my reflection. Just as if I never see myself unless I look in the mirror, the same goes for technology. Once I plug, once i turn on the devices, I look at my comforting reflection, I can finally become one with my own image. The perception of the self becomes a continuum, a reassurance of my own existence. Zimolag
It’s a beautiful essay and well worth reading/ looking at in full – the images are lovely and there’s some thoughtful prose reflecting upon this relation. I guess where I’d differ from Zimolag is her implied assertion that the technology, what it does/can do somehow comes after ‘the human’; that technology does something to “us” (humans) that alters us. I can see why, in the face of rapid technological change, we might figure things in this way. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to insist that there never was a “human” somehow separate from “technology”. We have an ‘aporetic origin’ in Derrida & Stiegler’s terms, we continually perform the coming to being of “the human”.
As I’ve observed elsewhere, the theory of technogenesis offered by a range of anthropologists and philosophers is the idea that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other. Humans are irreducibly distinct because of the reflexive transmission of complex cultures made possible by technics and the ‘exteriorization’ of thought. Both Stiegler and Derrida argue that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior: our conscious self-knowledge is only possible with the ability to exteriorize thought as a trace, commonly as language and gesture. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin as a paradox: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, p. 141).
Technics can be thought of as a technogenetic ‘double-bind’ between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’. The interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted and continue to be so.
In opposing ‘technology’ and ‘the human’, the apparently immaterial ‘algorithm’ and apparently concrete human, we either oppose technically mediated experience to other forms of experience or we oppose our technical life to other, apparently ‘natural’, forms of exis- tence. Either way, we risk reasserting old, problematic binaries: human/technology and nature/society.
To bring this back to ‘algorithms’ and their devices, following Zimolag – they are not our ‘others’. these technologies discussed and depicted in Zimolag’s beautiful essay are materially of and with us, they are perhaps not so much the ‘reflection’ she asserts (above) but rather a mirror that we ourselves have crafted through which to look upon ourselves, but, precisely in doing so, the “we” is irrevocably altered to include the mirror. The knowledge born from coming to know our own images, in Zimolag’s metaphor, is irreducibly tied to technics.