Category: technicity

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Reblog > Drones, sport and ‘eventization’

Last month Patrick Crogan wrote a great, pithy blogpost about the conduct and conceptualisation of war in relation to the relentless gaze of drones arrayed with computer vision technologies that originate from professional sports video analysis. Folding together Derek Gregory’s recent detailed reading of Gregoire Chemayou’s ‘Theorie du Drone’, the work of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and Bernard Stiegler’s theorisation of the industrialisation of memory, Patrick highlights how software systems embedded within the complex surveillance and attacking capabilities of drones that are becoming quasi-autonomous are operating in the very constitution of the events of war, not merely reacting or functioning as equipment, but proactively producing events. Reproduced below…

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This post is to start some ideas circulating from work I am increasingly becoming preoccupied with concerning military robotics and AI, as a particular (and also particularly important, in many ways) case of automatizing technologies emerging today. This is a big topic attracting an increasing amount of critical attention, notably from people like Derek Gregory (whose Geographical Imaginations blog is a treasure trove of insights, lines of inquiry and links on much of the work going on round this topic), and Lucy Suchman who is part of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and brings a critical STS perspective to drones and robotics on her Robot Futures blog.

NFL

I’m reading French CNRS researcher Gregoire Chamayou’s Théorie du drone, a book which has made a powerful start on the task of philosophically (as he has it) interrogating the introduction of these new weapons systems which are transforming the conduct, conceptualisation and horizon of war, politics and the technocultural global future today. Many riches in there, but I just read (p. 61) that the U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, looking for ways to deal with the oceans of video data collected by drones constantly overflying territory with unblinking eyes, obtained a version of software developed by ESPN and used in their coverage of American football. The software provides for the selection and indexing of clips from the multiple camera coverage of football games to enable their rapid recall and use in the analysis of plays which (as anyone who watches NFL or College football coverage knows takes up much more time than the play itself in any given broadcast). The software is able to archive footage (from the current or previous games) in a manner that makes it immediately available to the program director in compiling material for comparative analysis, illustration of player performance or tactical/strategic traits of a team, etc. The player and the key play can be systematically broken down, tracked in time, identified as exceptional or part of a broader play style, and so forth.

These capacities are precisely what makes the software desirable to the US Air Force inasmuch as the strategic development of drone operations deals with effectively the same analytical problem: the player and the key play, the insurgent/terrorist and the key act (IED, ambush, etc).  The masses of video surveillance of the vast ‘gridded’ space of battlespace, a vast ‘arena’ similarly zoned in precisely measurable slices (but in 3D) must be selectable, taggable and recoverable in such a way to be usable in the review of drone operations. And the logic (or logistic as Virilio would immediately gloss it) of this treatment of ‘battlespace’ is realised in what has recently emerged unofficially from the Obama administration-Pentagon interface as the emerging strategic deployment of drones by the CIA (which runs a significant and un-reported proportion of drone operations globally). This targeting strategy is based precisely on pattern analysis both in tracking known suspected enemies of the state and in identifying what are called ‘signature targets’ (the signature referring to a ‘data signature’ of otherwise unidentified individuals, one that matches the movements and associations of a known insurgent/terrorist – see Gregory’s post on this in Geographic Imaginations ).

The ethical and juridical-political dimensions of this strategy are coming under increasing and much-needed scrutiny (more to come on this). As a media/games theorist, the striking thing about this felicitous mutuality of affordances between pro sport mediatisation technics and those in development for the conduct of drone operations is the reorientation to space it not only metaphorically suggests (war, become game now steering the metaphoric vehicle back in the other direction) but enacts through an ‘eventization’ (Stiegler) operating in the very constitution of the ‘event’ of war or counter-insurgency (or what James Der Derian called ‘post war warring’) . While there are many complicit actors benefiting from the profitable mediatized evolution of American football into a protracted, advertising friendly broadcast, no such ‘partnership’ exists between key players ‘on the ground’ and those re-processing their data trails.

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Stiegler on Malabou, plasticity and the brain, via @DJRoss70

Dan Ross, Author of Violent Democracy and Director of the phenomenal film The Ister and translator of several of Bernard Stiegler’s books, has been tweeting some snippets from Stiegler’s recent book États de choc and from his 2013 lectures at Goldsmiths. I have concatenated the split quote and reproduced it here, as an aide de memoire as much as anything…

First, from États de choc:

“Catherine Malabou makes plasticity Hegel’s major concept. But plasticity is possible only by passing through its solidifying and fixing exteriorization. Plasticity is possible only by passing through the fixing that is writing, without which there can be no reading. By passing through writing, which is a specific moment of technics-become-grammatization process. Hegelian, or post-Hegelian, plasticity is CONSTITUTED (and destituted) by its ‘inorganic moment’, as Hegel says.” Bernard Stiegler, États de choc, pp. 189–90, note 2.

This was split across six tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Second, Dan’s précis of a key point from Stiegler’s Goldsmiths lectures:

Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths 2013, disagreeing with Catherine Malabou’s “no justification for separating mind and brain”. Malabou’s discourse completely ignores the fact that knowledge is not simply cognitive. Knowledge presupposes social circuits of transindividuation through which a form of knowledge is constituted. Malabou’s discourse is regressive in relation to what Freud taught us, that libido is irreducible to the drives. What Catherine Malabou ignores is that the brain harbors drive-based automatisms or compulsions. These automatisms or compulsions can become object investments of desires and idealizations. But they can do so only because the non-organic recoding of the cerebral organ meant that the instincts were replaced with the drives, thereby becoming (thanks to this recoding) educable.

Split across eight tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

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Digital geographies – two new articles

I have two new articles broadly concerning ‘digital geographies’ at different stages in the publication process. This represents a long-held interest I have held in the various ways we can think about and study ‘the digital’. In particular, these are the first articles to come out of a strand of my research which aims to advance understandings of the materialities that underpin digital geographies. In particular, this research focuses on the emergence of what have been called ‘spatial media’, the devices and systems we increasingly use to mediate our activities and way-finding in everyday life. Conceptually, this work significantly draws on my ongoing engagement with the work of the philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler.

The first article is in Geography Compass: ‘Beyond the screen’ addresses the different ways in which we can study ‘life online’, drawing together a range of methodological strands to demonstrate how geographical thinking can inform and enhance social scientific research concerning the internet, particularly in relation to the articulation of spatial experience and knowledge. I am grateful to my colleague Gail Davies for suggesting that I write this piece for Geography Compass, which is an excellent resource for scholars at all stages of their careers. Thus paper was published in the August 2013 issue of Geography Compass and so can be found on the journal website. I also have a pre-press version available here.

The second article will be coming out in Progress in Human Geography: ‘The Matter of Virtual Geographies’ revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space’, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life. I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.

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Simondon – the technical object and the transindividual

Following on from the excellent biography of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon to which I linked recently, here he is, in his own words, in a short interview:

I came to this thanks to the Politics and Matter research group (Geographical Science, University of Bristol) blog.

In the interview, the subject of individuation is touched upon and briefly articulated. This is central to Simondon’s philosophical project as a theorisation of a metastable and pre-individual “more-than-one”, as explained in the aforementioned biography.

Muriel Combes excellent introduction to Simondon’s work “Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual“, recently translated for MIT Press, has been reviewed by David Scott on NDPR. It is a detailed and useful review and offers some insights into Simondon’s work in its own regard, well worth a read if you’re interested.

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“Save the technical object” – Gilbert Simondon interview, 1983

Andrew Iliadis has translated what seems like a really interesting interview with Simondon from 1983, originally in the magazine Esprit. Simondon covers creativity, novelty, alienation (in technics as the originary relation of the human-technical) and invention. There are, as one might expect, obvious resonances with Stiegler’s work, e.g.:

“Technics are never completely and forever in the past. They contain a power that is schematic, inalienable, and that deserves to be conserved and preserved.”

I recommend reading it.

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Gilbert Simondon biography

Jussi Parikka has highlighted the translation of a biography of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon [the original was written by Nathalie Simondon], who was a key influence, of course, on the work of Bernard Stiegler and also Gilles Deleuze. In his post, Parikka highlights the hands-on nature of Simondon’s practice – the fact that he built a television in the basement of his school – and the resonances with Friedrich Kittler’s building of a synthesiser. This is also a link, as Phillipe Petit highlights in his introduction to the book of interviews Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir, with Bernard Stiegler, whose father worked for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the French national broadcaster between 1939-64, and built their first TV. Parikka picks out the neologism of ‘thinkerer’ (commingling ‘tinkerer’ and ‘thinker’) coined by Erkki Huhtamo to describe Simondon, a term that might also be applied to Stiegler for his various means of practising philosophy.

The biography demonstrates what an extraordinary, and, sadly, relatively short, career Simondon had, including a fairly meteoric rise from teaching at a lycée in Tours (1953-55) to being appointed Chair of Psychology B at the Sorbonne (1965). Simondon worked with Barchelard and Hyppolite, as a postgraduate, and his thesis was examined by Jean Hyppolite, Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricoeur and Paul Fraisse. Quite something!

The biography also includes very interesting quotes from letters to Bachelard and Hyppolite as well as fantastic summaries of Simondon’s key works. The experimental spirit of Simondon’s work is strongly evoked throughout, with a clear commitment to a collaborative methodology (across and between science and philosophy):

[He] chose a path of reflection where philosophy might inform science. Such collaboration between science and philosophy, he wrote in 1954 to his future supervisor [Hyppolite], must be carried out not in the results, which would be “an invasion of thought by unworthy followers, as shown in scientistic time,” but in the method: “At the level of method, science is never a feudal lord ruling over a vassal philosophy; rather, it is a relation between the spontaneous and the reflective. The spontaneous governs the reflective, as in scientism, only when the reflective activity is not contemporaneous with the spontaneous activity.”

The biography makes for essential reading for those interested not only in the philosophy of technology and technics, but also for those with a broader interest in the history of ideas, in particular related to the development of what we call continental philosophy.

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Review of ‘Code/space’ by Kitchin & Dodge

I submitted a review of Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s Code/space, in slightly revised form, for a review symposium in the relatively new journal ‘Dialogues in Human Geography‘. I thought I’d share an earlier version here, just to give a flavour of some of the things I’ve been thinking about…

Kitchin, Rob and Dodge, Martin 2011 Code/Space: Software and everyday life, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s Code/space has been rightly celebrated in a number of reviews (Adey 2013; Wilson 2012; Zook 2012) and with the Association of American Geographers’ Meridian Award for outstanding scholarly work in Geography in 2011. Code/space offers a future-oriented glossary for the understanding and description of the increasingly technical, ongoing reconfiguration of everyday life.

Building from a longstanding and prolific writing partnership (see the Code/space bibliography), in the book Kitchin and Dodge offer a really useful engagement with code and software via geographical sensibilities. They describe a range of examples of the ways in which software is integral within and modulates the spacings and places of (largely Western capitalist) everyday life.

Code/space offers a rigorously argued framework of concepts for understanding software in everyday life. Furthermore, the book hones this framework through case studies concerning air travel, the home and consumption. In the final, impassioned, and more speculative, section of the book, the authors engage their theoretical framework with the speculative ruminations of urbanist Adam Greenfield concerning ‘everyware‘, the proposition of ubiquitous computation embedded into the fabric of the everyday urban environment. To conclude, Kitchin and Dodge offer a manifesto for the emerging discourse and disciplinary context of ‘software studies’ that insists on an ontogenetic understanding of the capacities of code.

Code/space is valuable for two reasons. First, it elaborates a useful and very clear conceptual framework, drawing on contemporary philosophies of technology. Second, and importantly, it brings into conversation a range of important work concerning digital technology that has previously been somewhat distant: geographers concerned with the ‘automatic production of space’ (like Stephen Graham, Nigel Thrift, Matt Wilson and Matt Zook); computer scientists studying human-computer interaction (such as Paul Dourish) and humanities scholars critically reflecting on computation and software (like David Berry, Matt Fuller and Lev Manovich).

Software code, in the terms of Code/space, is perhaps the best example of the human ability not only to produce other entities and forms of spatial experience but more significantly to create things that in themselves produce space–that are ontogenetic. The agency of software must be understood, following the book, as its quasi-generative properties, accomplished through code, which Kitchin and Dodge call ‘secondary agency’, following Adrian Mackenzie (in his book Cutting Code).

Code, in Kitchin and Dodge’s terms, is both a process and a product, both a means of systematically calculating the world and an operational grammar for action, or ‘worlding’, as Nigel Thrift has suggested. To account for this capacity Code/space offers a taxonomy of coded entities: coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes and coded assemblages.

Kitchin and Dodge thereby describe the distinction between ‘coded spaces’ and ‘code/space’. Whereas there are many examples of software and code augmenting the production of space, which the authors call ‘coded spaces’, there are increasing examples of the modulation of and making anew of spatial experience through code, which are ‘code/spaces’.

Building from space conceptualised as ‘constantly brought into being as an incomplete solution to an ongoing relational problem’, Kitchin and Dodge offer an account of forms of space that are co-constituted with software, because code ‘modulates the conditions through which space is beckoned into being’. It is this reiterative and transformative modulation that forms one of the central theoretical tenets of Code/space – conceptualised as ‘transduction’.

The conceptualisation of ‘code/space’ and the account of ‘transduction’ are the foremost of a number of significant contributions that Kitchin and Dodge make in this book. Indeed, the former is arguably a particular empirical category of the latter. Code/space is accordingly something of a watershed moment, for geography, in the operationalisation of the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. He was a significant influence on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Brian Massumi and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others.

Simondon was a philosopher of technology, or more accurately of the human-technology relation in terms of ‘technogenesis’. The theory of technogenesis is that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other. It is this form of human-technology relation that is being described when we consider the processes of transduction described by Kitchin and Dodge, themselves drawing the concept from Adrian Mackenzie who translates it from Simondon. Transduction, in Simondon’s terms, decentres the human, it is

a procedure of the mind as it discovers”¦ [that] consists in following being in its genesis, in carrying out the genesis of thought at the same time as the genesis of the object is carried out (Simondon, translated in Combes 2013).

In offering a kind of ‘Simondonian’ analysis of software and everyday life, Code/space strikes directly at the heart of the question of what it means to be human in an age of a perceived increase in technological agency. The account of the human here is not one of miraculous separation from nature, or from technology. It is a case of imbrication and becoming with a wealth of other entities. This is not a deterministic relation, for the authors, precisely because: ‘The nature and transduction of code/space is then never fixed, shifting with place, time and context (social, political and economic relations and situations). Code/spaces are relational, emergent, and peopled’.

As Kitchin and Dodge suggest in the fourth chapter, in the formation of code/spaces and the en-coding of parts of everyday life, we are negotiating the ongoing reformulation of what it is to be human. Indeed, this resonates with the account of technogenesis that is firmly established in other disciplinary contexts (for example in the work of philosopher Mark Hansen, literary theorist Katherine Hayles, sociologist Adrian Mackenzie and philosopher Bernard Stiegler).

While the major theoretical contribution of the book is the work synthesising accounts of transduction, a substantial portion of the book is given over to case studies of how code/spaces emerge in everyday life. Chapters seven to nine provide three case studies of air travel, the home and consumption. Those familiar with the prolific output of this writing partnership will recognise some of the content of these chapters, although the detail has been updated. Equally, the analysis has been translated into the new lexicon put forward by the book. This works to the extent that the project here is clearly to advance a form of ‘software studies’, though it could prove bewildering to some (there is a helpful glossary at the back).

The empirically based analyses draw out something like a dialectic of software, with its potential to both empower and control, which the authors carefully unpick in the mode of the later Foucault. Genealogies of the various assemblages of actors and discursive regimes in which code/spaces consist are critically discussed to demonstrate how and where labour, power and values are variously located.

In the penultimate chapter the analysis takes a distinctly speculative direction. The authors consider future code/space in the guise of the ‘everyware’ (following Adam Greenfield) of ubiquitous computing, a long-held aim for computation embedded into the fabric of everyday life (following Mark Weiser). Kitchin and Dodge entertain a significant range of speculations about a world of ‘everyware’, from enthusiasm for a prospective empowerment of citizens, to opposition of an increased ‘securitisation’ through ‘sousveillance’.

However, despite a well argued and impartial discussion of these themes there remains a tacit acceptance of these visions of ‘everyware’ without much critical reflection upon the source and reasoning behind the speculation. The ‘powerful discursive regime’ that the authors argue supports the embedding of software into everyday life and the implementation of ‘everyware’ should also be recognised to include speculative discourse (see some of my research). Thus there remains cause for further critical reflection upon such governmentalised representations of the uses of computation.

Code/space offers a wealth of examples of the transformations of everyday life through the transductive capacities of software and code. It is not only a snapshot of contemporary technogenesis with and through computation, and a critical response to such observations. It is also a rallying cry for further critical research in the shape of the concluding manifesto for software studies. Many geographers may ignore or skim the concluding manifesto, focusing instead on the case studies of chapters seven to nine. However, in many ways it is in the concluding chapter that we find Kitchin and Dodge’s challenge to geography.

The ‘digital’ is the latest significant step in the processes of the discretisation of knowledge and memory external to the body, as Bernard Stiegler forcefully shows, and code is precisely its ontogenetic vanguard. Following Stiegler, to study code and software, is to study the latest stage in the spatialisation of time-based forms. To transform the temporal flow of speech and gesture into discrete forms, such as text and mechanical movements, makes them spatial objects: they are constituted in various material forms (from sheets of paper to silicon chips). The transductive power of code can accordingly be understood as the latest phase in the process of what Stiegler, following the linguist Sylvan Auroux, calls ‘grammatisation‘, which describes:

all technical processes that enable behavioural fluxes or flows to be made discrete”¦ and to be reproduced, those behavioural flows through which are expressed or imprinted the experiences of human beings (speaking, working, perceiving, interacting and so on). If grammatisation is understood in this way, then the digital is the most recent stage of grammatisation, a stage in which all behavioural models can now be grammatised and integrated through a planetary-wide industry of the production, collection, exploitation and distribution of digital traces [see Stiegler’s broader work].

Software code is thus the ‘grammar’ of an increasing range of objects and activities of everyday life. Read through Stiegler Code/space echoes his formidable challenge for conducting ‘digital studies‘. Kitchin and Dodge invite us to study (and offer the analytical tools to do so) the ongoing, and increasingly automated, spatialisation of knowledge and the forms of space they reciprocally produce.

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Joanna Zylinska on Facebook and the ‘ethics of mediation’

I am really happy that the DCRC have been able to invite Professor Joanna Zylinska to visit the Pervasive Media Studio to give a talk, on the 19th of March 2013. As well as being a great editor at Culture Machine, Prof. Zylinska has written significantly about ethics in relation to processes of mediation and how we might rethink where agency lies in the increasingly complicated human-technical relations of our everyday lives.

Prof. Zylinska will talk about how our understandings of what counts as ‘human’ are being changed by the capacities of new media technologies that extend our abilities beyond our bodies. Drawing on material from her recent book Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT Press, 2012, co-written with Sarah Kember) Zylinska will explain what she is calling an ‘ethics of mediation’, which she argues is an increasingly important part of our ethical understanding of contemporary everyday life. She will ask: what happens when we understand physical things as intimately interconnected by networks of energy and information?  What systems of morality are made possible or necessary when more and more of our lives are mediated by social networking systems such as Facebook?

To learn more about Prof. Zylinska’s work and to listen to this fascinating talk please join us at the Pervasive Media Studio on the 19th of March.

 

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The Wager of Sublimation (translation), Petit on Stiegler

[Co-posted at technophilia]

In the book of interviews “The hypermaterial economy and psychopower” [Économie de l’hypermatériel et pyschopouvoir], Bernard Stiegler (with Philip Petit and Vincent Bontems) works through and explicates a range of the political-economic and socio-technical issues he feels are most pressing in the contemporary milieu. In the interviews Stiegler ties together his more ontological arguments concerning the co-constitution of the human/technology with his wide-ranging critique of political economy. At the heart of these arguments are the related issues of sublimation in a libidinal economy (the translation of libidinal energy into social objects) and the hypermaterial nature of our material supports (technology, taken in the broadest sense). Stiegler argues for a revitalisation of the economy by better translating our desires into more fulfilling outcomes, rather than submitting to mindless consumption. This is more an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary imperative, as can also be seen by the manifesto of the campaigning organisation Stiegler co-founded, Ars Industrialis.

At the beginning of the book, one of the interviewers in the book, the philosopher Philip Petit, has written an introduction to Stiegler’s project and to the areas of discussion covered in the three interviews. Petit’s short introductory essay, ‘the Wager of sublimation’ (Le Pari de la sublimation), is a useful, if playful, introduction to the life and work of Stiegler. I offer here a translation of Petit’s introductory essay: The Wager of Sublimation [PDF], I hope it is of interest and perhaps of use. I would like to particularly thank Patrick Crogan for his significant and invaluable help in honing the translation of this piece. Continue reading “The Wager of Sublimation (translation), Petit on Stiegler”

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Paying Attention – special issue of culture machine

Patrick Crogan and I are pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the journal Culture Machine concerning the various ways we might examine the commodification of attention. This work stems from our engagement with the work of Bernard Stiegler and draws significant influence from his book ‘Taking Care of Youth and the Generations’. The special issue includes a contribution from Stiegler as well as articles from Jonathan Beller and Tiziana Terranova and an interview with Michel Bauwens.

I blogged about this further on the Paying Attention website:

Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley, researchers within the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE, have co-edited the just released special issue of the influential Open Humanities Press journal, Culture Machine entitled ‘Paying Attention‘. The issue was drawn from the 2010 conference of the same name, documented on this website, convened by the Digital Cultures Research Centre with funds from the European Science Foundation. With a substantial introduction by the editors, the issue revitalises and updates the critical examination of the workings of the ‘attention economy’ in the context of today’s rapidly emerging realtime, ubiquitous, online digital technoculture. It re-focusses work on this theme of attention in light of the current and emerging technocultural milieu of smart devices, the increasing mediation of experience, and the significant financial speculation in the attention capturing potential of social networking media. The special issue includes an interview with Peer2peer Foundation co-founder, Michel Bauwens; essays by key theorists of attention Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler & Tiziana Terranova; and several papers on topics from Facebook, Free and Open Software, the ecological costs of our attentional technologies, to the problematic role of digital social networking in Istanbul’s recent (2010) European Capital of Culture project. Please visit the Culture Machine website to explore this open access special issue.