@tommcglynn I cannot agree more. In order to turn around and attend to the future, the Angel of History either needs a loving kick in the butt or a new bionic neck that would upgrade (or downgrade, depending on how one views history) him to a Janus-like figure.
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I would never make the assumption or even pretend that you are stupid dxb as that would be an illusion that I would then have to prove in the light of divine reason. I would prefer not to do this. My point in evoking a mechanical fortune teller in substitution for a mechanical turk was to re-position the argument from an orientalized chess match toward the mystification that occurs when one sincerely asks an automaton to respond in dialectical fashion to one’s speculative query. The mystifying answer will always be automatically perpetuate another mystified question. The fortune-teller as noumenon, (or perhaps as the reflexively intuitive habit of reasoned discourse) can only be “played” when one refrains from putting another coin in the slot to perpetuate the virtual conversation. In other words the dialectic between the Left and the Right depends upon perpetuating an agreement on the abstract terms of that dialectic. To “make argument impossible”, not by winning the ground but by refusing to engage on compromised ground, therefore is a pragmatic goal that might be productively explored by whatever Left is still functioning at this point in time.
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@tommcglynn I have thought a lot about the interface of this early attempt by Europeans to construct an artificial intelligence. As one might imagine the skeumorphic operations in this crazy device is twofold: from the one hand, the mystifying & exotic value of the Turkish attire which already is associated with an oriental flavour of cunning is used to dress up the machinic claims of the device with a form of humanity. From the other hand the device as a whole is completely anti-skeumorphic, camouflaging its real human essence.
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@DADABASE The fact that a necessarily smaller human actually manipulated the (inscrutible) illusion of technology is probably still how we reason and visualize technology to ourselves, not as alien but as other, compressed. This is not so much a form of ventriloquism as it is a form of anthropomorphic discovery. This notion tends to limit discourse to recuperation and conservation of “organic” reason. Interesting to think of nanobot research in this light.
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As asked by Mohammed Salemy above - and one wonders to what degree the fault with the Left lies in the tacit rejection of the technological in favor of the tried and failed methods of the past: organizing in the standard manner, pamphleteering, placard street protest.
Starting with the eden of cybertechnic aesthetic, the rave culture of the '90s is emblematic of how the world of “cyberpunk” was co-opted by entrepreneurial capitalism and made to work as a tool for the generation of surplus value and corporate profit. From DIY collectives of underground DJs the raver motto of PLUR (Peace. Love. Unity.Respect.) has been replaced by mega-DJs, and stadium dance parties; a generation earlier the sell-out musicians of a formerly revolutionary form of music, Rock and Roll, thrilled arenas full of adulating fans eagerly buying the t-shirt and smoking a little subversive weed. What need one say about the assimilationism of gay wedding cakes; are these symbols of revolt or bourgeois acquiescence of a movement formerly revolutionary? Has Stonewall become walled-in and safely contained within a manageable capitalist cultural ethos?
The Left, and those underground movements which have associated with it, have failed to engage the realities of Capital and its ability to assimilate the rebel for the cause of profit. This in answer to Salemy’s question squarely places the blame on the failure of the Left to fail to engage with the theory and practice of cybernetics.
Albeit a few, Anonymous is exemplary, along with a few cyber-heroes, Assange, Manning, Snowden, have successfully engaged the neoliberalism of California corporate Silicon Valley elites, the rest for the most part have passively depended upon the march down the public road with the hastily scrawled words of protest of a placard and method of self mollification in the face of the new reality of cloud computing. Who are the researchers of cloud protest, cloud riot, cloud molotov?
One recalls the dreams and aspirations inspired by the Apple commercial of the 1984 Olympics, does this commercial not now resemble the actuality of Apple with the latest gadget rolled out to an audience of slavish spectators( Apple 1984 Ad )?
Watching that ad shows the startling prescience of what has become the Californian Ideology and the failure of the Left to adopt and re-purpose these instruments to the end of reconfiguring culture. Have not these corporations become the hunchbacked dwarf inside the apparatus of the mechanical Turks of Silicon Valley?
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@DADABASE, your question,
[quote=“TheNewCentre, post:1, topic:1639”]
To what degree should the present form of advanced media and political technologies, resting within the grip of a corporate-government alliance, be blamed solely on the California Ideology
[/quote] reminds me of the tendency to conflate finance as a tool with the manner in which it is predominantly deployed today (something that we have in part discussed in this conversation. While I wouldn’t go so far as to argue for a complete neutralization of the relationship between the constitution of tools/technologies that organize our present moment and the political “flavors” of the historically specific organizational modus operandi (a la Manuel de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History), I do think that the resistance to constructively reimagine and repurpose these tools is not only holding the Left back from revamping its political project on a global scale but is also prohibiting those who are already working on these projects from gaining the needed traction and visibility to reach the set out goals. Not only do these projects have to deal with the difficulties of operating in an ideologically hostile environment, but the very factions that should be supporting them turn out to be their greatest critics! That’s a pity. I think this raises questions around solidarity that are rarely formulated as such.
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I am also thinking about changes to technology as they relate to changes in platforms, specifically in regards to conversations that have come out of internet sites like Facebook (or e-flux conversations, Academia.edu, etc). One one hand, Facebook is business oriented --it sets itself up as the only means of access to this space. At the same time, Facebook is a massive platform that makes internet available to everyone. Publicly accessible platforms open up space for generative conversations and allow for more experimentation. These ‘open’ platforms are subject to privitization/commodification, but there is also the possibility for worldwide distribution.
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In a broader sense, I think its pertinent to quote David Baltzer’s new book Curationism. On Jens Hoffman’s “Show time: the 50 most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art”, is yet another unintentional postmortem on the avant-garde, a beautiful coffee-table book asserting, through a list, a canon of shows that rarely predate 1990. The oxymoronic phrase instant classic comes to mind." Baltzer goes on in the next parragraph about When Attitudes become Form 2013: "An uncanny restaging of Szeemann’s famous show, it might be deemed “exhibitions porn.” It also belongs in the broader cultural context of “nostalgia porn,” (He cites other examples of this, such as pop bands reuniting and playing classic albums, without anything new. This is a fundamentally anti-avant-garde approach to art production. This all points to an obsessive fixation on a permanent past.
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@Liev I can’t agree more. I think besides their romantic trust in the popular street modes of change and progress, the other major shortcoming of the classic left is their weak cybernetic conception of the trickling down effect, believing that whatever intelligentsia does in their specialized world will somehow naturally influences the bigger society and causes positive change. This is why epistopolitics is a better term than knowledge/power for describing the relationship between politics and truth. Not only is truth political but also that the direction of its “politicality” will have to be politically determined. In other words, even the production of good knowledge if not then taken up politically and pushed through in the right direction cannot be subverted by the powerful towards misguided aims.
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@victoria, I don’t think recognizing te socially transformative potentials of financialization should stop us from talking about the California Ideology or the progressive left’s inabilities in dealing with it. These kind of inquiries help secure a future in which financialization can be put to productive use.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it! - Ferrys Bueller’s Day Off
this is a truly fascinating discussion and many of the comments so far contemplate aspects of my reaction to these texts. there is, nevertheless, something i’d like to bring attention to. when aranda & pinto state that In spite of the political, economic, and ecological crisis of the last few years, the new social forms and categories that have emerged have failed to constitute themselves politically, and it’s hard to fathom what form change could take - i believe they might be a bit over pessimistic. in that respect, their text is genuinely illustrative of contemporary thought. after all, general pessimism is, together with cynicism, the overarching malaise of our critical thinking today. sloterdjik’s critique of cynical reason nails it:
cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. it is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. it has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered
left and right can be just as cynical, although in different ways. my point being that not everything is bleak and dark in the anthropocene. california has, at times, an abundance of sunlight to offer. if we look closely enough we will find visible indicators that represent how new forms of decentralised, autonomous, autopoietic political formations are beginning to emerge globally, challenging and undermining corporate control. higher social awareness of the toxic effects of corporate strategies has already had a concrete impact in catalysing loss of profits, two important examples being monsanto and mcdonald’s, two corporations which are experiencing serious damage from consumer rejection of their brands. of course my saying this makes me vulnerable to all kinds of deconstructive attacks based on the naivety of my arguments, or, better yet, on the “right-wing” approach which would be inherent to conceding to the existence of any positive aspect within capitalism. both critiques would miss the mark. it all goes back to paradox and contradiction (i’ve explored these ideas before in a comment i’ve made to jason’s response to boris groys). basically, i don’t think that the canon of the social sciences is the place to look for the answers we need today. my point of view would be that these answers have a better chance to be found via a direct and active transdisciplinary engagement with science and technology themselves - but that would be the topic of another conversation.
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So true Victoria, there are few issues around the supposed failure’s of the Left that can be analysed, but the “lost in language” long critical process against the other’s use of language, is definitely a huge one. The fascist have more solidarity, as they are driven by impulses and affects, the capitalist are more practical, as they are driven by numbers. The Left is left with language as Boris Groys tell us in the Communist Postscript. Maybe this site could become a source for this possible potential force… but with out a common will to affect and solidarity how are we going to get anywhere?
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Dear Mohammad,
thank you for your thoughtful response, whereas I am by no means sceptical about technology, I am very sceptical about narratives that conflate technology with potency. When it comes to cybernetics I think one should take into account that the twin principles at play, “information” and “noise” are a reconceptualization of the dual principles of “work” and “waste” in William Thompson’s formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, concerning the dissipation of energy, i.e., entropy. Thompson, on the other hand, mirrored Darwin’s concepts of “fecundity” and “selection,” which are roughly equivalent to the opposing forces of reproduction and starvation that Malthus argued would constitute a “Malthusian equilibrium” – a stationary state akin to what Adam Smith described as the equilibrium achieved by the law of “supply and demand” (regulating devices—especially after Watts’s incorporation of the governor into the steam engine in the 1780s—had been correlated with a political rhetoric, which spoke of “dynamic equilibrium,” “checks and balances,” “self-regulation,” and “supply and demand,” ever since the dawn of British liberalism, Otto Mayr wrote extensively on this topic, btw) Similarly, the notion of a feedback loop between organism and environment was already present in the theories of both Malthus and Darwin.
Though I would agree that, in principle, the “possibilities offered by automation are politically unaligned,” every scientific theory has a political unconscious. Simply put, although feedback and dialectics represent motion in similar ways, cybernetics is an integrated model, while dialectical materialism is an antagonistic one (obviously an integrated model is hard to reconcile with the narrative of class struggle, which is, I believe, the reason the left failed to engage with cybernetics).
On a more general note: before the 18th century, neither history or society were issues of primary concern for philosophic inquiry. Rather, both fields were seen as secondary to other problems, such as the nature of human consciousness or of the physical world. Social ills were understood to be the result of deficient knowledge, and expected to dissipate the moment one would manage to successfully describe the inner workings of the laws of reason or of those of physics (I am paraphrasing Hayden White). It was Rousseau, who first argued that no amount of intellectual progress can alleviate human suffering and that social ills need to be addressed by social means. Rather than an indictment of technology, our essay is meant to be a critique of the ideological forms that animate it, like the triangulation of novelty-potency-technology and the ensuing dismissal of the social as a domain of inquiry. Though I would totally agree the left needs to reclaim technology the devil is in the details: how? Without an a economical model you don’t have a political plan…
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Rousseau has had great influence in the development of our society, that is for sure, but lets also remember, and to quote someone else on it
From Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy:
Ever since his [Rousseau’s] time, those who considered themselves reformers have been divided into two groups, those who followed him and those who followed Locke. Sometimes they cooperated, and many individuals saw no incompatibility. But gradually the incompatibility has become increasingly evident. At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.
I wonder if a person that shuffled all his sons to orphanages and stole from friends can be very involved in alleviating human suffering. I mean, his immediate legacy was Robespierre’s reign of terror and the radical Jacobins. Is this the world we want to live in?
Dear Manuel, your response is not an argument, just a character assassination (of Rousseau’s and mine, by extension, since I mentioned him), I think his point concerning the irreducibility of the social is a valid one.
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Dear @a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_, I dont mean it as a character assasination, and, while I am aware it is an ad-hominem attack on Rousseau, I don’t think it is extended to you. Rousseau’s argument about the irreducibility of the social to a single set of moral or political principles is valid, but we need to include other voices:
Although on principle, “the possibilities offered by automation are politically unaligned”, even though these possibilities are often implied as a powerful tool for enculturation and homogenization into the development paradigm of the west, the very possibilities offered by technology (specially the internet) have came across as social tools for the solution of social ills. Giving and anthropological context to this: The Penan of Sarawak, confronted by logging companies get in touch with the Kayapo people of Brazil, or the Haida, who, having dealt with similar problems, will aid them and give them options or access to supporters helping protect their communities. So on effect, some technology is really emerging as a true social “campfire”.
This is how they are using the internet: http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/penan
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Dear @a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_ , I will focus on the above quote because a close reading of this statement can illuminate the limits of its circular logic. First of all, I don’t think I can agree with the first statement simply because I don;t find the Freudian categories of conscious and unconscious productive beyond psychoanalysis. Not that there isn’t any truth to this statement but that I am not sure about what can be gain from its axiomatic constitution besides reinforcing the classic lefts cynical attitude towards both science & politics. Yes, perhaps every science has a political un/conscious but us on the humanities side of the Sellarsian divide between the scientific and manifest image is to constructively address this unconscious and give our sciences their politics and ethics. For me, historical materialism & dialectics are preliminary and maybe even weak forms of cybernetics (in its broader sense) which unfortunately were never fully developed into a more comprehensive alternative to normative cybernetics coming out of the Macy conferences etc.
Dear Mohammad
“political unconscious” is a term used by Jameson to describe narrative continuities, it has little to do with psychoanalysis.
Cybernetics is a bad example for the point you are trying to make, as a theory its part engineering, part metaphysics (when Shannon was translated into french the editors combed through the text and removed every term they felt was metaphoric, thus unscientific, like entropy for instance, which is an empirical description). its hard to define what cybernetics is as a science: the treatment of feedback as a conceptual abstraction? the treatment of information as a statistical property exacted by the mathematical analyses of a time-series?
I am not sure I know what you mean by “normative” cybernetics? system theory? information theory? what would non-normative cybernetics be? autopoiesis? I am guessing you mean autopoiesis as that would make sense in the context of your post…? anyway, the distinction between manifest and scientific image is hard to sustain and without constant scrutiny science can easily devolve into quackery, pointing this out is not “anti-science,” its rather anti-demagoguery.
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I agree, the internet has huge potential but that potential is not immanent to the medium, it needs to be fought for at every turn.
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@a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_ Yes. Jameson, of course. We all know Jameson, even though I prefer not to refer to him and go straight to the Freudian sources from which the word unconscious entered social sciences and humanities. Unless you are telling me that Jameson’s use of the word unconscious has nothing to do with Freud which I think is really questionable.
And about the term cybernetics, why enter the definition game in which intellectuals battle each other for authority and legitimacy by referring to the knowledge of the known meaning of a term rather than understanding for the purpose of moving forward in the argument. We all have access to Google and can look up history and context of a term. My usage of cybernetics is not so much tied up with a particular definition per say but relates to a living changing & moving concept that for god’s sake should not still be foreign to leftist intellectuals in the 21st century. So instead of stepping into the familiar trap here :), the term Cybernetic revolution, the way I use the term has to do not only with these definitions (First order, second order, third order etc) but the particular history of the development of the practical use of the concept in sciences, military, government and business, of which the internet is only a significant byproduct. I actually am more cynical than you but at the same time consider left’s unwillingness to understand what was at stake in the middle of the 20th century the most important reason as to why we need to fight this losing battle against what you & Julieta have aptly described as the bad internet. Only if we didnt spend a decade poring over Jameson’s definition of postmodernism and really understood it in its original Lyotardian sense as not so much the cultural logic of late capitalism but the cultural response to the decline of industrial production and labour based understanding of our planetary global political economy towards a distributed knowledge economy of exchange in which barriers between what constitutes work & value versus communication & culture were eroding. Only if instead of uselessly regurgitating Debord’s weak image theory in every decade since the 1960s, we read and analyzed Deleuze’s Postscript instead… the contrast between non normative and normative cybernetics can be illuminated by the example of the Chilean Cybersyn versus the Hayek and the Chicago school economic model that forcefully replaced it.
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