Translated from the Brazilian – Portuguese by Rodigo Maltex-Novaes

Vampire squid

• vampyroteuthis infernalis
• “the only surviving member of its order”
• exhibits a bioluminescent – counterillumination behavior that “cloaks” it to animals swimming below it.
• “threat response called “pumpkin” or “pineapple posture”, the Vampire Squid inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines”

Vampyroteuthian Art

• Compare – men to vampyroteuthes:
  • “engaged against oblivion” – i.e.: they want to live
  • both communicate
  • both are historical
  • both are creatures of memory
  • DIFFERENCE: the methods we use to store memory
• Man’s memory / information:
  • imprinted upon objects – “objectified”
  • we trust the “relative presence” of objects (relative to what? suggests that there is some other presence – metaphysics?)
  • humans hope to possess two types of data storage:
    • the egg (genenics) – biogenetic – species
    • the object (books, buildings, paintings) – technogenetic – individual
• Vampyroteuthis’ memory / information
• this trust of the object seems “ridiculous”
• only puts trust in the “egg”
• Genetics are aere perennius (more lasting than bronze)

• The “problem of historical engagement” is to elaborate methods for moving “acquired data” (individual) to “inherited data” (genetics, species)
• Trust is always towards the permanence of the species and not in the permanence of the objective world
• Sometimes we use objects for this transfer – making them not storage objects, but objects of transmission: MEDIA

• But is this really saying anything?:
  • Men treat objects as media, and Vampyroteuthis uses media (light, colours, etc.)
  • The difference is that men express themselves through objects
  • Whereas Vampyroteuthis express themselves in others through objects
  • These are two different types of art

Man’s art:

• When man expresses himself – he does it “in function of a particular object”
• EXPERIENCE AND OBJECT ARE INSEPARABLE FROM EACH OTHER
• everything man experience is for a particular object – for marble, for language, for music, for film
• every object implicitly contains categories that allow articulation – for a sentiment, a value, a desire
• “It is not the case that man has experiences first and then seeks an appropriate object through which to express it”
• Man experiences the world in function of a particular object
• objects can be immaterial or material (what is the immaterial object here? math?)
• objects are perfidious – treaters, deceitful, untrustworthy – they evade our attempts to inform them
• it is through attempts to inform them that their resistance is revealed – discovery of structure

• this violence changes man himself
• the discovery of structure takes place when man attempts to imprint knowledge
• but this new discovery changes man’s knowledge – which in consequence requires new imprinting in order to transmit these acquired experiences
• feedback loop: man imprints knowledge in object, discovery of structure occurs, man is altered, man imprints new knowledge (further?) into object
• This ‘feedback’ is human art

• Resistance of objects provokes man –
  • “whoever does no discover the object of his vocation will live in frustration”
  • an invocation of flow?: “this feedback between man and object is so passionately engaging that it leads man to forget his original purpose – that of informing objects so that the infoation can continue to be available to other men.”
  • man forgets that his original purpose is to inform other men – that the art is to communicate, to translate through objects
  • instead man is consumed into the object – becoming “sculptor” or “writer”, not simply “man” communicating to another “man.”
  • the object concentrates passions and the artist winds up informing the material – probing its existence
  • “No longer does he speak through the language, but against it”
  • “The poet’s vocation is to inform lanugage”
• Human art is not the fabrication of beautiful objects
  • so anything we inform is ‘art’ – math, politics, symphony
  • all things also have aspects of the scientific the political and the artistic:
    • knowledge
    • value
    • sensation
  • “every human work is art, an answer to a provocation by a particular object.”

Vampyroteuthian art

• objects do no provoke Vampyroteuthis…
  • more interested in the other
  • beyond objects – towards the other
  • his creation is not ‘performed’ but ‘perfected’
  • there is no resistance – calling – of the object… only of the other (the message’s receiver)
  • feedback between sender and receiver is the essence of vampyroteuthian art
• Phases of vampyroteuthian art:
  • experience occurs
  • vampyro searches its memory for a model of this experience
  • the absence of this model is verified – no such experience to compare to
  • the arresting experience goes beyond the organism – to the brain – to the chromatophores
  • chromatophores transcode into “skin painting”
  • this new experience provokes and calls another vampyro
  • the sender seduces the receiver and copulates with it
• this creates a model for the copulation of vampyros – it is now part of their dialogue
• it is now stored – eternal – genetic information

• sepia cloud – ink cloud – is ‘shaped’ or ‘sculpted’ by vampyro, but this is different from man’s shaping of marble, because the sepia cloud is not foreign/strange to him
• vampyro’s only fascination with the object of the sepia cloud is about the effect it will have on another vampyro
• the sepia cloud must not only divert an agreessor, but “epater les bourgeois” (shock the middle class)
• what is stored here as the dialogue of vampyroteuthians is the ability to decieve (“i am not where i have indicated i am”), to lie, to make art.

• Vampyroteuthian art is pure art – the effect on the other (not on the object) is the intention
• science, politics, etc., are just strategy
• the raw materials of vampyroteuthian art is not objects – but their society as a whole (resonates with Kaprow, total art, Systems Art, Burnham)
• “Vampyroteuthis is an artist that chisels into society to immortalise himself in it.” – his motive is “his spite for the other” (desire to offend)

• valuing of vampyrotheuthian art by Flusser:
  • human art is a “confused and undisciplined” enterprise
  • as human art becomes more “self-awareness and discipline,” it moves towards a convergence with the art of Vampyrotuthis
• man’s purity (of science, of art, of politics) will reveal itself to be DIRT
• dirty stone (artist), dirty equation (scientist), dirty objectified subject (sociologist)
• “The artistic gesture reveals itself as an embarrassing gesture, as when a chicken pecks for grain when it doesn’t know whether it should flee or attack the enemy.”

• Communications theory – consists of a diversion … back to towards the other
• we are on “a vampyroteuthian path”

The vampyrotheuthisation of our art

• before industrial revolution – blacksmiths, cobblers – we were all craftsmen
• information, value and artwork – were indistinguishable and constituted “culture”
• industrial revolution – divides craftsmen and artists
• industrial revolution began the era of the ‘tool’
  • the tool stores value
  • the tool transmits information to the object (so the object’s value becomes less and less)
  • the industrial revolution creates the seperation of ‘object’ and ‘value’
  • it is the printing press, and not the book that stores the information (writer becomes tool maker)
  • most of creative process remained object-valued, because the new methods of production were kept of the “ghettos called ‘exhibitions and museums.”
• the second industrial revolution
  • information is not inside tools, but inside cybernetic programmes
  • cybernetic programmes which produce tools
  • toolmaker becomes programmer
  • “Programmed Culture” – valueless culture – pens and houses prefabricated
  • these are uninteresting to possess – no longer objects that ‘call man’
  • objects to information – less and less interested in the consumption of goods
  • intersubjectivity – “a society of Vampyroteuthes”

Man was a worker – Now a programmer

• private property / production will not be morals any longer
• total artists – trans-subjectively communicating outside objects
• photography – for example
  • the individual photograph is not valuable
  • the “image” is what’s important – the negative, the prototype
  • the photographer does not work but functions within the programme / apparatus of the camera

The vampyroteuthian future?

• will the society of the future necessarily become one of hatred, lies
• we may come to despire the obective world as much as Vampyroteuthis despises it… but will always have the hangover of our history with objects
• vampyroteuthis don’t have the history we do with objects, so their unconcern with them is not a refusal (it’s just the way its always been for them)
• man has come together in objects – i.e.: the other for us is not just an adversary – we have created information (informed objects) together in our past
• we must remember this “primordial alliance” during this “second industrial revolution” which would have us be “heirs and transmitters of programmed information”

• In vampyroteuthis – information can dismiss the need for apparatus, organism can function as apparatus
• “The contemplation of vampyroteuthian art prevents us therefor from glorifying the total work of art, the artificial, artifice and deception. So that we shall avoid every form of romanticism, because Vampyroteuthis illustrates the essence of romanticism: Hell.”

Notes

• the initial difference between man / vampyro in their use of objects is not that clear to me – is it one of intention? one of method? (i.e.: there is the invocation of the other in both cases…and both use matter articulated in some way)
• best i can make out is that humans are different as they become absorbed in the object (they become “writers” and “sculptors”), instead of using a media to objectify the other
• so the ‘pure communication’ is at once a positive force (for getting our heads out of objects) and a negative one, which renders the inter-subjective artificial, artifice and deceptive.
• vampyroteuthian – devil

Reading by Rodrigo Novaes - Flusser Archive

Accursed Share [Volume I] – The Meaning of General Economy – Bataille

Bataille and the Notion of Gift

Notes on “La Part maudite”/ The Accursed Share

• the accursed share is the excess part of an industrialised, networked economy (“circuit of cosmic energy”)
• excess – superabundance of energy (the sun, phosphorescent algae)
• the general economy assumes an organism has an excess of energy – where as the “Rational Economy” assumes scarcity
• wasting energy is “luxury”
• the form of “luxury” is what characterises a society
• Potlach
• Mauss – The Gift

The Dependence of the Economy on the Circulation of Energy on the Earth

• The elements of a given operation can be operated upon as if they were completely isolated from the rest of the world
• Economic activity in general… is a system of relations between ‘individual action’ and ‘the whole’
• Studying economy in a much larger framework
  • general consequences – systems / complexes
  • movement of energies

The Necessity of Losing the Excess Energy that Cannot be Used for a System’s Growth

• “Is the general determination of energy circulation in the biosphere altered by man’s activity?”
• “Mans’ disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way.”
• “Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe.”
• Bataille here is sympathetic, as it is not easy to understand ones “ends” (effects, repurcussions) – as it requires a move which surpasses them
• “The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g.: an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”

The Poverty of Organisms of Limited Systems and the Excess Wealth of Living Nature

• Energy is what constitutes wealth
• Productive forces are not the ideal end of activity
• “A series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits.”
• Why is squandering / wasting considered a failure?
• Economic activity is not considered generally enough
• Man is destined to useless consumption – but this is denied through an urge towards necessity

War Considered as a Catastrophic Expenditure of Excess Energy

• The fact that we don’t understand that we waste doesn’t change that we waste
• The fact that we don’t acknowledge the destruction inherent to our existence “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way”
• War is an example of what happens when we don’t choose “an exudation that might suit us”
• recall – writing in 1946 – end of WWII
• The general principle of an excess of energy – to be expended – shows that the “industrial plethora was at the origin of these recent wars”
• we cannot accumulate energy – the excess must be dissipated
• demands a margin of profitless operations
• a copernican revolution in economics from restrictive to general

The Law of General Economy

The Superabundance of Biochemical Energy and Growth

• Example of a calf -
  • the animal “commands” an exceess which ensures its growth
  • stors in fat that which it cannot expend
  • if left to live – males become “turbulent” and females produce milk / other calves
  • reproduction is the passage from individual to group growth
  • castrating a bull is a way of increasing volume of the animal
• “On the whole, the excess energy provides for the growth or the turbulence of individuals”

The Limits of Growth

• “Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development”
• “… the sun, which dispenses energy – wealth – without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.”
• In former times – value was given to unproductive glory – now it is measured in terms of production
• We have reversed our morality in terms of energy expenditure – we used to worship the sun which gave unrelentingly, now we worship utility
• Real excess does not begin until the growth of the individual or group has reached its limits
• The size of the biosphere limits growth

Pressure

• life exerts pressure - it wants to occupy space (the gardener trying to clear a path that perennially is overtaken by plants, weeds)
• contradiction between interest and desire – utility of our actions is juxtaposed to the acceptability of waste

The First Effect of Pressure: Extension

• The pressure that life exerts is ‘elusive’ – but its effects can be described
• The bullfight crowd:
  • the bull ring is too small
  • there is pressure – people want to see the bullfight
  • what do we do?
    • we increase the size of the bullring
    • i.e.: water and earth was first offered to life – but it quickly occupied the air (leaves / trees / verticality)

The Second Effect of Pressure: Squander or Luxury

• The bullfight crowd:
  • lack of room can have another effect – fights break out
  • if people die – the excess will be reduced
  • in opposition to the first effect: instead of creating more room for life, life limits its excesses in the face of the available room
  • this is varied in nature – the most interesting form is death
    • death is not necessary
    • scissiparity – reproduction by fission – splitting of organisms
    • duckweed – covers ponds in a film (through scissiparity) and then stagnates
    • excesses are given dynamic space to grow – the place left vacant by death

• “I insist on the fact that there is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form!”
• “The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance; the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life.”
  

The Three Luxuries of Nature: Eating, Death and Sexual Reproduction

• One species eating another is a simple form of luxury
• Vegetation is less burdensome than animal life
• Blake’s tiger: “In what distant deeps or skies burned the fire of thine eyes” – What struck him in this way was the cruel pressure… the immense power of consumption of life
• Blake linking the sky and the tigers eyes – the consumption of the sun is like the consumption of the animal / life
• Death is the most costly form of luxury
• Death (and copulation) are “the profound truth of that movement of which life is the manifestation”
• On death: “we are wrong to curse the one without whom we would not exist”
• Sexual reproduction assures waste – it is the “occasion of a sudden and frantic squandering of energy resources”

Extension Through Labor and Technology, and the Luxury of Man

• as tree branches did for vegetation – man’s extension opens up a new possibility for life (new dimensionality?)
• “considerably increasing the resources of available energy”
• 19th century history is an example of a development of energy resources driving population growth: the rise of industry
• revivals of development have a double effect
  • the use surplus energy
  • but then produce a larger and larger surplus
  • this surplus then squelches growth – and the initial luxury remains but in an uncertain / powerless way (i.e.: we don’t make anything of it)
• Just as the herbivore relative to the plant – carnivore relative to the herbivore…
  • “man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations befitting the solar origins of its movement.”

The Accursed Share

• “everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation”
• War is an example of this squandering that is hostile to human will
• freedom and justice are contrary – freedom is a dangerous breaking loose, justice a limiting to what is most just
• freedom has become a guarantee against the risk of servitude - instead of a will to assume those risks without which there is no freedom
  • here Bataille means real freedom would be taking on the responsibility of the excess / luxuries of life?

     

Opposition of the “General” Viewoint to the “Particular” Viewpoint

• The fact that we turn away from this waste / dilapidation is not surprising – “The image of the tiger reveals the truth of eating”
• anguish, horror, fear – are individual anxieties
• “Anguish is meaningless for someone who overflows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an overflowing by its very nature.”
• Juxtaposing the Particular with the General
  • Particular always lacks resources, deficiency
  • Generalresources are in excess, death has no meaning
• e.g.: America versus India:
  • On the one hand, there appears the need for an exudation; on the other hand, the need for a growth.
  • “General economy suggests, therefore, as a correct operation, a transfer of American wealth to India without reciprocation.”
  • Reducing pressure to below the “danger point”
  • (recall the later half of C.P. Snow – mucking in… sending resources from the West to the 3rd world)

The Solutions of General Economy and “Self-Consciousness”

• “A curse obvioulsy weighs on human life insofar as it does not have the strength to control a vertignous movement” (a large, extreme drop over a steep cliff)
• This is not just a political issue – but one of human consciousness… and historical data will be related to present data through the rest of the work…

Intro

Speculative Realism

• ray brassier, ian hamilton grant, graham harman, quentin meilassoux
• against correlationism – the linking of ‘thought’ and ‘being’ in philosophy since Kant
• against philosophies of “access”
• Collapse journal
• links to…
  • Actor Network Theory (Latour)
  • Eliminative Materialism (challenge of mental states)
  • Phenomenology (Heidegger)

• the blogs
  • Larval Subjects by Levi Bryant
  • Speculative Heresy by Ben Woodard, Nick Srnicek, and Taylor Adkins
  • Object-Oriented Philosophy by Graham Harman
  • Another Heidegger Blog by Paul John Ennis
  • Naught Thought by Ben Woodard
  • The Accursed Share by Nick Srnicek
  • Complete Lies by Michael Austin
  • Eliminative Culinarism by Reza Negarestani
  • Ecology without Nature by Timothy Morton

Meilassoux

• Critiques of…
  • Principle of Correlation (that thought and being are never thought outside of the ‘for us’)
  • Principle of Factiality (things could be different than they are – our reality is contingent)
• General critique of transcendentalism:
  • transcendental – Platonic – rising beyond sense experience
  • transcendent / transcendental – surmount, climb over or beyond
  • Kant & Schopenhauer
    • transcendent – God, soul, beyond human experience
    • transcendental – those forms in the mind which give us the ability to formulate perceptions (the felt experience? sort of like preconceptions…? the psychological apriori?)
    • before Kant: Leibniz (dogmatic)- space and time were relations (God is the only constant) vs. Newton (realist) – space and time are substances (physical brains give human brains connection to physical things)
    • Kant said that although it was true that there were physical connections, the mind did not manifest a simple mapping of outside data – so there must be a transcendental a priori of human sensibility
    • Schopenhauer called Leibnitz dogmatic – based on internal thought forms
    • Kant’s “synthesis” was a way of conceptually unifying sense data through concepts – categories of understanding – in space time. These are the ‘two-worlds’ of the ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’
      • Schopenhauer said this was an epistmic limitation – we can’t ever know something as it is (as we are always conditioning it) – we can’t know the thing-in-itself
      • Others said this was not a limitation – as we can know something ‘fully’ in our minds (100% apriori, thought along – existing outside of space/time)
  • Primary / Secondary quality distinction
    • John Locke – Essay Concerning Human Understanding – 1690
    • George Berkele – 1713 – refutes Locke by positing that everything is perceived, and has no existence in an of itself
    • Primary – independent of observers (number, motion), so objective
    • Secondary – sensation based qualities (taste, color), so subjective (in the subject)
  • Mathematics allows us to get at the primary qualities of everything – even the ‘ancestral’, pre-human realm

• Principle of Factiality

• causality (principle of sufficient reason) is not necessary
• truth is still possible (principle of contradiction)

• Meillassoux Spectral Dilemma – From Collapse
• Meillasoux – Time Without Becoming – notes on After Finitude:

• Correlationism
  • opponent of any realism
  • transcendental philosophy, phenomenology and post-modernism are all correlationist
  • transcendental – Platonic – rising beyond sense experience
  • correlationism maintains that there are no objects, events that are not always already correlated

Terms and Ideas

• Hypostatization – Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.
• Facticity – the concretisation or necessary existence of rules (for causality, truth) – the necessity of the laws of nature
• Religiosity – the end of ideologies – “by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious“
• Fideism – a resurgence of the division between faith and logic – originating in the Counter Reformation, Montaigne
• Necessitarian – classical metaphysics –
• Critical – empirical and transcendental

Chapter 1 –

• “…instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every worldis without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as ‘unreason’, is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge.”
  

Chapter 2 -

Chapter 3 -

• Week correlationism: Kant (1724–1804) and the development of an ability to imagine thing-in-itselfness, but never know it
  • The thing in itself is a Liebnitzian nomad – a non spatiotemporal, non contradictory thing-itself
• Strong corelationism:  Hegel turns the in-itself and the for-us into One entity - reality is being thought by God.
  • de-absolutised correlation
  • analytic philosophy – for whom language is inescapable / continental philosophy – consciousness is inescapable
• Following the same trajectory in Descartes “Meditations” after the second Meditation (after he’d established cogito)
  • “that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.” (Meditation II.)
    
  • cogito – the principle establishing the existence of a being from the fact of its thinking or awareness
  • Meillasoux’s 6th meditation – that mathematical physics is the basis of the thing in itself
• We are establishing a “correlationist cogito” – thought and being are reciprocal – different from the Cartesian in two ways:
  • it is not necessarily representational.  it is a correlation between thought and being, not just between subject and object
  • it is not a cogito of the self – but a cogitamus.  the intersubjective concensus of consciousnesses that is the foundation of science’s truth
  • extracting ourselves from the communitarian solipsism (e.g.: “we think therefore we are”?) is to acess the “Great Outdoors”
• Coordinates of the problem:

1. 1. Ancestrality is only thinkable if absolutes are thinkable
   2. Our asbolute cannot be necessary – i.e.: dogmatic
   3. Thinking an absolute for-us keeps us locked in the correlationist circle.

• Non-metaphysical absolute must also not be… 
  • a realist absolute – because we can only know correlates
  • a correlationist absolute – because things may be other than they are (facticity)

• We take a path that is similar to the subjectivist metaphysician’s when acknowledging and then dealing witht the constraint of correlationism (only allowing us access to the for-us not the in-itself)
  • Taking the same move that Hegel made on strong correlationism (Kant) – “let’s say that the correspondence between the mind and the thing – which cuts us off from the thing, is attributable to our insight, not our ignorance” (Caputo)
  • We absolutise – make a positive insight – out of facticity (congingency – the possibility of being other)
• That is, we “convert radical ignorance (suggested by our inability to know the in-itself) and unveil its true absoluteness (that the correlation is what is knowable – and hence the only ontological truth – a positive knowledge)”
• The facticity (the contingency, the ability to be other than what it is) of the correlation would contradict this absolutisation of the correlation
• Subjectivist Metaphysicians:  Descartes and Kirkegard – conceed that reality exists, but that the nature of reality as given to that consciousness depends on that consciousness (i.e.: the correlational form, so to speak, is absolute).  I.e.: That the only absolute is the correlation itself

• The strategy is – to create an absolutising of the facticity of the correlation… To show that “it is not the correlation but the facticity of the correlation that constitutes the absolute”… and that “thought… experiences its knowledge of the absolute through facticity”
• We do this as subjectivists did with correlation – by using the obstacle erected against absolutisation to uncover the instance of an absolute being
• “Unreason” – the absence of reason – results from facticity – or the ultimate property of the entity (all we can ever know is that everything is contingent)

• “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; an this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.”

• In what regarding is this absolutisation of facticity able to overcome the correlationist circle?:
  • contingency designates the possibility of something persisting or perishing – facticity designates our essential ignorance about either the continency or the necessity of our world and its invariants
  • factivity applies not only to the things in the world, but to the invariants that govern the world (physics, logic)
  • correlationist would say:   absolute contingency is just like absolute necessity (God) – absolute unreason may also just be ‘for-us’ and not ‘in-itself’
  • COUNTER:  that correlationism (the distinction between the in-itself and the for-us) already assumes the absoluteness of contingency
    • i.e.: “The truth is that
  • the correlationist circle – the distinction between the in-itself and the for-us – will be shown to already admit the absoluteness of facticity.  continency therefore will be immune to the relativisation of correlation
• post-mortem – DEATH – christian dogmatist vs. atheist dogmatist vs. correlationist, etc.
  • christian:  the in-itself is God is shown through reason to be outside of reason.
  • atheist: existence is abolished completely by death.
  • correlationist - agnostic reply to christians and atheists – one cannot claim to think what there is when one is not (as thought implies, or required existence). but the agnostic acknowledges that such a relationship is relative… that there could be an in-itself different from our present state
  • subjective idealist: the mind if ‘immortal’ – i can only think of myself as existing, and as existing the way i exist
  • the correlationist-agnostic can dispute the idealist’s claim that we can’t think of an in-itself at all by saying that i can think myself as wholly other (in heaven, or completely annihilated) because it is the same as thinking ones own persistence in self-identity.  
    if there’s no reason for you to be, there’s no reason you not to be otherwise.
  • speculative philosopher doesn’t agree with the two dogmatists, or the idealist… but likes the correlationist-agnostic, as the absolute is the capacity-to-be-other as such, as theoriszed by the agnostic
  • the absolute is the possibility of transition
  • The thinkability of mortality, annihilation, wholly-other-inGod results from the absence of any reason for our being
  • facticity expresses the absolute of the in-itself which is indifferent to thought
• M1s and M2
  • M1 and M2 are metaphysical theses (god, annihilation, etc.) – normally posited as necessary by dogmatist
  • But M1 and M2 are equally possible, and both are possible, which includes the possibility of complete ignornance about them
  • The speculative thesis:  either one of these is possibly necessary, and both are also possible – so there are actually three possibilities of ignorance (a positive property, an absolute)
  • “So long as you maintain that your scepticism towards all knowledge of the absolute is based upon an argument, rather than upon mere belief or opinion, then you have to grant that the core of any such argument must be thinkable.”
  • The capacity to think the in-self and the for-us (which derives from our ability to access the possibility of our own non-being)
• Faultline in correlationism:
  • Either I deabsolutize correlation or I deabsolutize facticity (the capacity to be other).  I.e.: Either:

• idealist are right: facticity is only true for me, not the in-itself – which means that it is a correlate of my act of thought, rendering the capacity to be other unthinkable (like the subjective idealist who maintains that we’re locked in the correlation)
• speculative philosophy is right:  in de-absolutizing the correlation, we absolutize facticity – absolutizes facticity.  i.e.: that the possibility of things being other than they is absolute – as this is what allows us to think things other than they are in the first place
• i.e.: it is necessary that everything is contingent

• Clarifying the meaning of the absolutisation of facticity
  • The absolute is the absolute impossibility of necessary being
  • This is an an-hypothetical principle – something which cannot be deduced, but can be proved
  • The principle of unreason is a principle by virtue of the fact any argument which contests it is in fact presupposing it to be true (we refute all arguments we make as we’ve already supposed the possibility of thinking, and hence the impossibility of knowing for sure, anything being other than it is)
  • Meillasoux summarizing here why the principle of unreason is valid – like “non-contradiction” (Aristotle) it is established refutationally (nah nah nah nah nah)
  • Differences between non-contradiction and the principle of unreason:
    • artistotle says that we cannot think contradiction, but it could exist
    • not being able to think something does not acknowledge it’s absolute impossibility (hence facticity is the way to go – not the absolutisation of the contradiction)
  • So the principle of unreason is both anhypothetical and absolute (unlike non-contradiction, which is anhypothetical but not-absolute).
  • We can only conceive of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us because we can imagine things to be otherwise (i.e.: that there might be some other for us)
  • “It is precisely because we can conceive of the absolute possibility that the ‘in-self could be other than the ‘for-us’ that the correlationist argument can have efficacy’”
  • Thus, to contest the principle of unreason is already to have supposed it
• Let’s think of a time that would be capable of abolishing everything (Morton – hyperobject)
  • A time which harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality (including laws, etc) is thinkable
  • Only unreason can be thought of as eternal – anhypothetical and absolute
  • It is possible to establish the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything
  • Unreason, facticity is compared to a time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality
• Empirical contingency vs. Absolute contingency
  • Emprical = Precariousness 
    • verifiable, realisable – that which is bound to be realized sooner or later –
    • that which must eventually be realised
  • Absolute = (real) contingency 
    • pure possibility
    • the set of possibilities that is untotalizable
    • anything might happen, even nothing at all – for no reason
• Speculative critique of correlationism:  
  • Correlationism (even strong correlationism) ligitimates religious discourse – by maintaining the position of ‘reason’ (“Reason”)
  • “There is nothing beneath of beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given – nothing bu the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence.”
• Facticity and contingency are similar – in so far as facticity (the capacity to be other) is a positive knowledge about reality.  Differentiates here between:
  • Precariousness
  • Contingency
  • Facticity
  • Necessary
  • Impossible
• Hyper-chaos
  • We’re in a rough spot:  We’ve asserted that everything is contingent while trying to demonstrate a primary absolute in mathematics
  • Hyper-chaos is omnipotent, like a Cartesian God
  • “ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas”
  • something like Time – but not Heraclitean (time is becoming, is change)
  • Hyper-chaos i, “a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, death”
• From hyper-chaotic primary absolute to mathematical absolute
  • the sceptic’s inorance – everything is possible – is our knowledge (which is as indeterminate as the most complete ignorance)
  • we know more than the sceptic: 
    • that contingency is necessary (eternal)
    • contingency alone is necessary
  • hyper-chaos cannot produce one thing:  a necessary entity
• Two propositions emerge from the difference between principle of unreason and correlational facticity
  • “only non-ncessity is necessary” – what is always remains contingent
  • “nothing can exist that cannot but exist” – what is never be necessary (i don’t get this one)
• But we must create a rational discourse from this – the constraints to which the entity must submit in order to exercise its capacity-no-to-be and it’s capacity-to-be-other
• Objectifications of strong and weak correlation:
  • When we objectify the strong model of correlation – we get “strong” chaos (resulting from the inability to know the in-self of the strong model of correlationism)
  • When we objectify the (Kantian) weak model of correlation – we might get a ‘curbed’ chaos:
    • the necessity of contingency might impose the absolute truth of Kant’s idea of the ensured conceivability of the in-itself: 
      • The thing-in-itself is non-contracdictory (A cannot be -A)
      • There is a thing-in-itself
    • The principle of unreason can guarantee the above Kantian propositions, which guarantee the knowability of the in-itself
  • From the principle of unreason, we know: 
    • A necessary entity is impossible
    • The contengency of the entity is necessary
  • THESIS 1:  a contradictory entity is impossible, because if an entity was contradictory, it would be necessary.
    • refutation 1: contradictory entities are nothing – so we can’t even say that they’re impossible.  this has no justification.
    • refutation 2: the argument being made is circular – as argumentation itself requires non-contradiction to be truth (not only possible).  because the entity cannot be necessary, we can infer the impossibility of contradiction.  the impossibility of thinking contradiction does not preclude the impossibility of there being contradiction.
    • refutation 3: the argument made is circular because we’re only inferring necessity from contradiction, not contingency.  hyper-chaos was meant to allow for anything (even the unthinkable), so it should allow for an entity that is both contingent and necessary.  We should be able to infer contingency and necessity from contradiction – but we’ve only chosen one.  Why? 
      • The thesis of “real contradiction” is different from the thesis of “sovereign flux”
        • sovereign flux accounts for the existence of contradiction through everything ceaselessly becoming other than it is; beings passing into non-beings, etc.
        • “real contradiction” is different from this sovereign flux, as, were it to exist a real contradiction would have no alterity in which to become – it would just be a contradiction, and that’s it – it would no alternate between A and -A, but just be A=-A (this is like the pure possibility)
        • “real contradiction” has a paradoxical essence – so it couldn’t be destroyed (as it would then not-be, which is a passing into alterity) – one of its defining characteristics would be to continue not to be even were it not to be.  a truly contradictory entity is therefore perfectly eternal, “always already whatever it is not”
        • Against dialectics:  ”real contradiction can in no way be identified with the thesis of universal becoming, for in becoming, things must be this, then other than this;” – mistaking temporal succession with absolute, ontological coexistence
      • the principle of unreason shows that the principle of contradiction is an absolute truth:
        • the true meaning of the principle of non-contradiction is that things need to be able to become other than they are (they are determined in such a way as to be capable of becoming)
        • i.e.: the true meaning of a “real contradiction” is, instead of the hegelian conception of sovereign flux, is the necessity of contingency
    • Leibniz, Hegel, Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian
      • The principle of non-contradiction (A != -A) vs. the principle of sufficient reason (things are the way they are for a reason) 
        • Leibnitz:  non-contradiction and principle of sufficient reason are foundational
        • Hegel: absolutization of sufficient reason required devaluing of non-contradiction.  So for Hegel the reason things are was more important than them contradicting themselves (sovereign flux)
        • Strong correlationists (Wittgenstein/Heidegger): relativisms which devalued both non-contradiction and sufficient reason
        • Unreason (Meillasoux): because principle of reason is false, the principle of non-contradiction (real non-contradiction) is absolutely true
  • THESIS 2: The contingency of the entity is necessary.  
    • Leibnitz:  ”Why is there something rather than nothing?”
    • Here we demonstrate that the world would subsist despite the abolition of thought
    • The in-itself, the “there is” (the realm of the in-itself) exists
    • We need a resolution that is non-theological (not appealing to an ultimate reason) and non-fidiest (not appealing to faith – which renders it non-philosophical, non-rational)
    • Fideist marvels at the fact that there is something rather than nothing because he believes that there is no reason for it – and that being is a pure gift
    • Countering two questions:
      • Theological: claims to invoking God as a rational answer (prime-mover, originator with a purpose, direction, morality, etc.) – dogmatic
      • Fedeist: claims to deliver the question outside of reason (being is a gift, which has happened for no reason) – ironic dissolution
      • we must approach this prosaically… “so that’s what it was…”
    • The non facticity of facticity has two different interpretations – strong and weak:
      • Weak Principle of Unreason
        • if something is, then it must be contingent
      • Strong Principle of Unreason
        • to say that contingency is necessary is to say:  both that things must be contingent, and there must be contingent things
      • If we accept unreason, then we know that things must be contingent.  If we go further and say that there must be things (which are contingent), then we’re essentially asking Leibnitz’s question.
      • I.e.: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” becomes “Can we assert the strong version of the Principle of Unreason?” which is the assertion that there must be things (which are necessarily contingent)
    • Can we posit the weak version?  No… 
      • We’re only able to think of being through its absolute contingency (mortality by imagining our death as an absolute possibility, being by imagining the absolute possibility of non-being)
      • As the facticity of facticity would result in in infinite regress (if facticity is a fact, then the facticity of facticity is a fact, etc.)
    • So all we have is the strong version:  It is not a fact, but rather an absolute necessity that factual things exist
    • Negative and positive facts – another objection to the Strong version of Principle of Unreason
      • Positive: things/events that could not have existed
      • Negative:  things/events that could have existed by didn’t (potentialities)
      • Contingency could just be the contingency of negative facts – i.e.: potentialities that never come to be
      • We cannot think the becoming of existence in general
    • It is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else
• Objections from paraconsistent logic
• Factiality vs. Facticity:
  • Factiality is the speculative essence of facticity – i.e.: Factiality is the non-facticity of facticity
  • Non-iterability of facticity is the impossibility of applying facticity to itself
  • This provides us with a non-dogmatic absolute:  everything that is is a fact (i.e.: it is factitious)
  • Principle of Unreason is too negative = principle of Factiality
  • Factiality is the unreason of facticity – which is absolute
  • Factiality is the absolute aspect of facticity – which prevents facticity from being a fact
  • Only facticity is not factual = Principle of Factuality
  • Contingency alone is necessary – which makes the claim non-metaphysical
• FACTIAL vs. DIALECTICAL:  the principle of non-contradiction illicits the concept of real contraction – an entity which is ontically contradictory, and hence actually two things at once
• SPECULATIVE vs. METAPHYSICAL:  there is no reason for anything and the only absolute is contingent

Chapter 4 -

• Against frequentialism in Indra’s Universes and mosquitos: 
  • From Joseph Campbell: The boy says, “Indras before you. I have seen them come and go, come and go. Just think, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, and the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator. Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being, governed by an Indra. Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being. The life of a Brahma is 432,000 years. When he dies, the lotus goes back, and another lotus is formed, and another Brahma. Then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space, each a lotus, with a Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes. And Indras? There may be wise men in your court who would volunteer to count the drops of water in the oceans or the grains of sand on the beaches, but no one would count those Brahmin, let alone those Indras.”
  • Caputo’s example of the mosquito’s claim for constancy – if a male mosquito is born in the summer (lifespan = 10 to 20 days), it might make a the frequentialist claim that there’s constancy to the laws of nature that require it to be warm.
  • a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

Chapter 5 –

TheTwoCultures_CPSnow_RedeLecture

Mostly meant to underscore the privileging humanities education in British education. I.e.: A lack of preparation to live in a modern, scientific world.

From Wikipedia: “As delivered in 1959, Snow’s Rede Lectures specifically condemned the British educational system, as having since the Victorian period over-rewarded the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of scientific education. This in practice deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these countries’ rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion of The Two Cultures tended to obscure Snow’s initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries.”

The Two Cultures

• Biographical note
  • Snow became a scientist because he was poor
  • W.L. Bragg
  • Life of practicality – working existence
  • Was also a writer
  • science during the day / literary culture at night (interesting which one goes on during the day and which one goes on at night -
• Literary intellectuals (T.S. Eliot) – G. H. Hardy: “Have you noticed how the word “intellectual” is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn’t include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me.”
• Scientists – physical science (Rutherford)
• “This is the Heroic age of science!” – Snow thinks he was right…

• Scientific optimism
  • Scientist are aware of the individual condition as tragic – we all die alone
  • But they see hope in the social condition – that which is not fate
  • Man’s loneliness tempts one to sit back, complacent in one’s unique tragedy…
  • “They are inclined to be impatient to see if something can be done: and inlined to think that it can be done, until it’s proved otherwise”
  • Scientists think the ‘other culture’ is too facile
• Literary culture as cynical, politically wicked – anti-social (Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis)
• “Literature changes more slowly than science. It hasn’t the same automatic corrective, and so its misguided periods are longer”
• “The dialectic is a dangerous process”

• Scientist are specialists – so they don’t know about each others’ specialisations, but they do have common politics and assumptions
  • Left in open politics
  • Scientists of 1959 probably mostly come from poor families
  • “They have the future in their bones”
• Without thinking about it, they responded alike – “That is what culture means”
• The Wester world is still managed by traditional culture

• The intellectual loss:
  • The links to traditional culture amongst scientists and engineers as very tenuous
  • “Dickens has been transformed into a type-specimen of literary incomprehensibility”
  • Scientific culture: intensive, rigorous, constantly in action – arguments are at a higher conceptual level than literary arguments
  • Scientists don’t see the history of literature as the place to develop their own moral, psychological and social understandings (it is not that they do not have such understandings)
  • “The Nature Order”
  • “Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

• Columbia – Yang and Lee – the contradiction parity
• “It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art”
• “It has got to be assimilated along with, and as part and parcel of, the whole of our mental eperience, and used as naturally as the rest.”

• Rethinking education
  • UK is not working on the problem
  • intense specialisation – oxford and cambridge
  • intellectual history of the UK builds up social silos, increases specialisation
  • An example of the specialisation history of Cambridge being challenged:
    • 1900
    • Mathematical Tripos was abolished
    • A competition for top honours in math
    • “The only way to keep up standards”
    • Tripos had killed math in England… was not an intellectually creative activity

Intellectuals as Natural Luddites

• Reasons for the emergence of the two cultures:
  • social history
  • personal history
  • inner dynamic of mental activity (phenomenology of thought?)
• The industrial revolution
  • crept up on us… without anyone realising
  • one of two qualitative changes in social living that men have ever known
  • none of the wealth produced by the industrial revolution went back into the revolution which was producing the wealth
  • Eric Ashby’s – Technology and the Academics:
    • all intellectual cultures are ill equipped to understand industry and technology
    • Henry Fords drove the industrial revolution – handymen with a dash of genius
  • Germans did have applied science education before the industrial revolution there
  • Ludwig Mond – applied chemistry
  • Siemens – electrical engineering
  • Germans made a fortune on U.S. and UK markets as they were unprepared for industry and applied science

• Ruskin, William, Morris, Thoreau, Emerson and Lawrence – could not see at once the hideous smoking chimneys and the propects of life that were opening out for the poor
• Ibsen – understood the industrial revolution
• “Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor”
• “The poot have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them”

• Snow’s Grandfather did better as a foreman in the tramway depot than his grandfather did as an agricultural labourer… which was not ‘frolicking through the fields…”
• “The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below.” (Teen cell phone culture – technologies always look ‘crass’ to intellectual cultures?)
• The industrial revolution produced revolutions in health, food, education

The scientific revolution

• The Industrial Revolution – crept up on us, untouched by academics, despised by practical (actual) luddites and intellectual (romantic) luddites
• The scientific revolution – comes about through application of real science to industry
• The industrial society of electronics, atomic energy and automation is in cardinal respects different in kind from any that has gone before
• The material basis of our lives: the social plasma of which we are a part.
• Example of a button – simple, elegant and useful to all. But ‘arts’ graduates at Cambridge could not “give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs.”
• Engineers vs. Pure Scientists – they are absorbed in making things and the present social order is good enough for them
• The superiority of impractical science in academia…
• Kapitza had sent an engneering drawing off to be made – shocked Rutherford

• Dealing with the scientific revolution in education:
  • America – loose education for the entire population until the age of 18, followed by rigour and difficulty at the PhD level.
    • Possible that many more of US student retain their creative zest due to looser rein
    • The US churns out as many PhDs as the UK has Bachelor graduates
  • Russia – much more difficult that US, but less specialised than UK.
  • 1 english for every 1.5 american and 2.0 russian scientist/engineer
  • “An engineer in a Soviet novel is as acceptable… as a psychiatrist in an American one”
  • Differentiation here between alpha scientists – and alpha professionals – technical jobs – responsibility roles – not enough of this last category in England
• The only real assets England has is its smarts… natural resource are scarce, more people than it can feed (unlike Frane or Sweden):
  • creative in getting along within the country, working things out
  • invention and creativity in science and engineering
• Allegory of the Venecians – they had, like England, become rich through luck, and were good politicians. “The current of history had begun to flow against them” but they couldn’t break out of their own patterns

The Rich and the Poor

• Americans do react – but this is not the biggest worry… England/Russia/UK are localised problems
• Global scale: industrialised countries get richer, others stand still
• This won’t last past 2000 – once the trick of getting rich is known… the West must help this transformation.
• The rate of social change has been very slow for most of human history – “men… are no longer prepared to wait for periods longer than one person’s lifetime”
• Rate of change – the only important secret of the atomic bomb was that it was possible - and that knowledge is what accelerates culture and social structure
• Technology is rather easy – somehow we’ve made ourselves believe that the whole of technology was a more or less incommunicable art…
• Technology remains unaffected by training or cultural background – industrial revolutions can happen anywhere (this is basically what Marx said)
• What is needed:  
  • Capital – national scale endowments of money and machinery to the poorer countries of the world
  • Men – who will muck in as colleagues – as scientists do. “In their own internal climate, the breeze of the equality of man hits you in the face, sometimes rather roughly, just as it does in Norway.”
  • Education – an educational programme as complete as the Chinese – western liguists and scientists
• Realistic?
  • “…to think that when we have said something about the egotisms, the weaknesses, the vanities, the power-seekings of men, that we have said everything. Yes, they are like that. They are the bricks with which we have got to build, and one can judge them through the extent of one’s own selfishness. But they are sometimes capable of more, and any ‘realism’ which doesn’t admit of that isn’t serious.”

Notes to self

• Quote about the atomic bomb – sounds like a media/content argument. “Someone said, when the first atomic bomb went off, that the only important secret is now let out – the thing works. After that any determined country could make the bomb, given a few years. In the same way, the only secret of the Russian and Chinese industrialisation is that they’ve brought it off.”
  • The information here is the harbinger of change – not the ‘content’ or ‘how-to’ of the
  • The acceleration of culture coming about via the medial and communications structures of our world… It is know of, not knowledge how which changes rates

• “Technology is rather easy – somehow we’ve made ourselves believe that the whole of technology was a more or less incommunicable art”!!!!!

The Two Cultures today – Roger Kimball  

• F.R. Leavis – The Corridors of Power
  • called C.P. a ‘public relations man for science’
  • attacked The Two Cultures in The Spectator
  • “Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow”
  • Snow is “utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.”
  • Most people responded in Snow’s favour – “reptilian venom”
  • Much of the defense in England was just good snobbery – Sir Charles Snow was someone you knew - a letter submitted: “Dr. Leavis only attacked Charles because he is famous and writes good English.”
• CP Snow
  • “so well rounded as to be practically spherical”
  • Novel Strangers and Brothers occasionally compared to A la recherche du temps perdu

• Two two cultures:

• Describes the rift – a matter of incomprehension tinged with hostility – that has grown up between scientists and literary intellectuals
• Lacks precision… expresses regret, censure, superiority

• What is serious beyond the petty egos of these two men – is that the gulf between science and literary humanities continues to widen
• What is the fate of “culture” in a wolrd increasingly determined by science and technology (WHAT? There is culture everywhere… internet culture, cell phone culture…)
• Leavis though that Snow was ‘trivialising’ culture – entertainment, diversion
• Currently: “The triumph of pop culture in nearly every sphere of artistic endeavour, the glorification of mindless sensationalism, the attack on the very idea of a permanent cultural achievement”

• Problems with “The Two Cultures”
  • trivial
  • non-existent
  • misunderstood
• The gulf, gap, chasm between scientists and literary intellectuals are both trivial and misunderstood
• Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Kant – these are representatives of ‘traditional culture – but no anti-scientism there.
• C.P. Snow thought of himself as “the paradigm of the desired union”
• Traditional culture is not afraid of the future – Orwell, 1984 – shows a deep concern for the future
• Leavis on the thermodynamics vs. Shakespeare question: “There is no scientific equivalent of that question; equations between orders so disparate are meaningless.”
• “Snow is a naïve meliorist
• Leavis denies science as a moral resource
• Science’s “province is the province of means not ends”
• Matthew Arnold – 8 years earlier – also delivered the Rede Lecture – “Literature and Science” – with an opposing argument to Snow’s
  • response to T. H. Huxley’s insistence that literature should be supplanted by science -
• “The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish to take” – Arnold
• The role of “culture” to provide a way of relating to “the results of modern science” – towards “conduct” and “beauty”
• Culture as a guide to “conduct” (This is all sounding oddly Christian…)
• Kimball’s tone is absolute: “every problem facing mankind is susceptible to technological intervention and control.” (isn’t every problem susceptible to all kinds of intervention, potentially?)
• Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Notes to self

• The idea (Leavis, Kimball) that there is something that can be a means and not an end seems indefensable in contemporary culture. How can anything be just a means, when it systemically effects the individual and the social milieu so fully …
• The ways that we have developed through scientific culture – tend toward popularism? Because of a reductionist tendency?

The City Is a Medium – Kittler

Capital

• Capitals – Greeks – the head of the state is its capital – anthropomorphism of politics
• emergence of the city due to arms monopolies (i.e.: to defend oneself)
• so perhaps the city comes out of technology – a need to amass arms
• Plato: cities should be limited to the size given by the range of a voice

• industrial revolution (Mumford) caused cities to grow beyond their organic limits
• megalopolis

• we cling to the clear-cut centrality of things – capitals – monarchs surviving, immortal in the “head of theory itself”
  • Glissant and the centrism of european thought
• Kittler main intro here is around the question of whether technologies evolved from cities, or if cities evolved from technologies
  • “It becomes possible to decipher ‘head’ and ‘capital’ from technology rather than vice versa”
  • Perhaps technology came first
  • The existence of a technological apriori

Technology

• cities are now longer about walls or the ‘ear shot’ of bells – but networks of connections
• nformation or energy – are all forms of information (energy flow requires a parallel control network)

Networks

• the labyrinth’s walls are less important than the path through it
• Knosso, Phaistos (4000 BC), Gournia
• trial and error network formation (genetic algorithms?) of the mechanical mouse

Graphs

• 1770 – network theory, graph theory
• The 7 bridges of Konigsberg
• Euler’s solution that all seven bridges could never be crossed in the same round-trip
• “The territory is simply the surface effect of its own topicality” – cities are not reducible to a topological order – they occupy a more abstract space. There is something deeper…
  • Note here about the post Chartres building of Churches – 12th Century Gothic
  • Man had thought of buildings as a weight on the ground… Grounding effect. The Gothic style – shafts, clusters of columns, weightlessness. Glass – light, awe-striking ‘projections of imagery
• Tabula Peutingeriana – a map that was “intensely practical,” not meant to represent but meant as a tool for navigation, finding a place to spend the night, etc.
• A representation of convenience (e.g.: the London tube map) – changing the representation of the Roman empire to make a map that’s easier to carry and travel with
• Place de l’Etoile, Ringstrasse, Anulare

Intersections

• Roads can be ‘flattened’ – but cities now cannot, as gas water electricity connections need be connected such that they do not ovelap
• Roman maps were in this sense ‘one-dimensional’ – one layer
• Brazilia it was attempted to map the infrastructure of the city using non-overlapping tree structures
• But “a city is not a tree”
• Overlappings are part of the system
• Tabula Peutingeriana

Capitals

• Capitals have a… “self-induced ‘resonance’, which defines the city”
• Networks between capitals overlap upon networks between other cities
• “Time in the city is a function of transfers, turn-ons and turn-offs”
• 1866 – “Paris Life” – play in a train station
• Tyche, Fortuna, Chance
• “the capital is clearly the ‘daughter of great numbers’”

Media

• “Media exist to process, record and transmit numbers”
• first forms: money, vowel alphabets – Greek Milet
• Rome – Achaemenidian postal system
• words for ‘media’ perhaps stems from ‘the city’ as much as ‘heart’ or ‘brain’
• “gates” in circuitry – “relays”
• computer “architectures” and “buses”
• Kittlers other comments about geopolitics of computer dev: CPU (american), random access memory (Asia)

Mumford’s point of Departure

• heightened tempo of human intercourse
• city as computers – monuments as memory. “As compared with the complex human order of the city, our present ingenious electronic mechanisms for storing and transmitting information are crude and limited.”
• Mumford – computers and cities analogous
• Florence – Uffizi Museum – central bureau for data processing
• MEDIA
  • book, cities, computers
  • Von Neumann’s computer architecture
  • “Reason enough, moreover to decipher past media and the historical function of what we refer to as “man” as the play between commands, addresses and data.”
• DATA
  • transfer of ‘units’ of memory in a city – assigning strings and numbers to the same address (physical)
  • churches become garrisons
  • Benjamin: “the historical signature of the railway…” is that it “forms the masses” (through class structure – first, second class rail)
  • stop lights and logic gates (three states, go, stop and high impedance)
• ADDRESSES
  • “Media are only as good and as fast as their distributors”
  • Nadelbach
  • Addresses CREATE channels – once something is given an address it must be channeled to
• COMMANDS
  • “Orders” not “Commands” (the pedagogically modest Anglo-American)
  • algorithm – requires its own execution
  • the last level of ‘to command’ means ‘to address’ (i.e.: the result of a process is it’s output – pragmatism?)
  • Austria – Hapsburgs – lawyers – chancery courts, linking cities, provinces
  • France – optical telegraph – won out a battle in Munich. Bavarians then commissioned the optical telegraph
  • Church steeples were used to proliferate the power of the optical telegraph – reusing the mythic/spiritual structure as a communications structure
    • “In Ezekiel, there is a description of angels that includes the word “chashmal”, which is taken to mean radiance/energy, and is the modern word for electricity.”

Conclusion

Warning that cities don’t have to keep existing… wars, bombings…

“The computer commands for deletion are also ready to be called up. “This is the last and worst bequest of the citadel (read ‘Pentagon’ or ‘Kremlin’) to the culture of cities.”

Theory Culture Society-2006-Hansen-297-306

Introduction

• Foucault’s historical apriori
  • This is the order underlying any given culture at any given period of history. Foucault also uses the phrase the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ to refer to the same idea. The episteme which describes scientific forms of knowledge is a subset of this.
• Kittler
  • mediatic materiality
  • two approaches
    • exploring the experience of media
    • excavating the technical logics of media
  • oscillation between the phenomenality an the materiality of media
  • perspective shifts are needed:
    • foreground the “infrastructure conditioning experience”
    • foreground the “experience thereby realised”
  • this oscillation is a constraining and enabling frame on the hermeneutic space

• media disturb divisions between the transcendental (experiential, internal) and the empirical (material, external)
• “without being, properly speaking, transcendental at all”
• transcendental empricism – Deleuze (locating reality in the Idea)
• media allows us to think past the empirical-transcendental divide

• “by giving the empirical- technical infrastructure for thought, by specifying a certain technical materiality for the possi- bility of thinking, media remains an ineliminable, if unthematizable, aspect of the experience that gives rise to thought.”
• this is in opposition to Heidegger’s conception that there is nothing technical about technology – i.e.: that technology is a ‘vehicle’ for ideas. For Hansen media “marks an ‘originary’ correlation of technics and thought.”

Mediation

• “contemporary media challenges theory – the oscillation between materiality and phenomenality
• message as the medium itself
• “an expansion in the scope of hermeneutic analysis to include the material- technical support for the message”
  • this is much like the ed halter inclusion of ‘oscillations’ between artwork (photo), index (real), techne (camera) … to which i add artist (producer)
• hermeuneutics of mediation
• message to medium – informational content to technical form
• McLuhan gave us “expansion in the scope of hermeneutic analysis to include the material- technical support for the message.”
• Gilbert Simondon
  
• Donald McKay calls a ‘whole theory of information’
  
• “Transduction, following Gilbert Simondon’s conceptualization, is a relation in which the relation itself holds primacy over the terms related.” – useful conception of practice/theory and art/science perhaps – where in merging two terms we create awareness of their dominance

Medium

• “the ‘essential’ correlation of the human and the technical”is technology’s “transductive relation with the human body”
• that is – it is neither technicist (giving agency to technology) nor understanding the human body as “primary medium”
• Bernard Stiegler – refuses to subordinate technics to thinking
  
• André Leroi-Gourhan – co-originarity of technics and the human
  
• “the human as an originarily pros- thetic being”
• epiphylogenesis
• biological autopoiesis – coupling of environment and organism
• e.g.: the “medium” in biology is that which supports life – bacteria
• this is different from Hayles or Kittler – who see technology as outside, objective and autonomous
• perhaps neglecting the human/living basis of technics is due to their speed of advancement over the last 100 years
• technology as ‘organized inanimate matter’
• “mass media” may have also obscured our co-evolution with technology as it creates so many ‘artefacts’ as to overwhelm the living side of the circuit
• Kittler’s conception is one stemming from ideologies (Lacan) – gramaphone, film, typewriter.
• ANTI-humanism of Kittler appears via the digital
• To Hansen, the digital is “expansion of the very exteriorization that is constitutive of the human”
• artifactual and transductive conceptions of the medium are limiting… and probably just the result of the rapid growth of technologies over the last two centuries
• Hansen’s possibility for ‘artificial life’ will not be ‘life’ – as it will be the technogenesis without the genesis – which may emerge from the cosmic life in which we participate
• This is only a lure of autonomy – as even very complex systems – artificial life, etc. – only functing in only through their coupling with the human
  • interesting point – that technogenesis or the correlative development of technologies and the human goes both ways – i.e.: there has never been a human without technology, so how could there be a technology without a human?

• Simondon – technics are a distinct evolutionary lineage – correlated to the human
  • Reciprocal indirection – perturbations of the other is how both the human and the technical function
  • “challenge response model”
• Son-O-House -  Lars Spuybroek & Edwin van der Heide
  • capture data of human movement – deformed through various stages into sound environment
  • ‘stages’ in the dialectic of indirection
  • human embodiment – quasi-autonomy
  • “media technics remains and can only remain within the history opened by the inauguration of (human) life”
  • allows pertubations in the human and machinic domains – but in ways that are entirely particular to these domains (respects their “constitutive principle of operational closure)
  • “creativity of paper as an ‘analog computer’ and of the digital computer itself as a transformation of analog processes”
  • Brian Massumi’s important claim for the ‘superiority of the analog’ – showing that most operations within ‘digital’ are in fact analog – and hence ‘analog excess’

Media Critique

• Son-O-House – the piece is in opposition to “highjacking and standardizing the time of their consciousness”
• politics of presencing: against media artifactualization, towards the flux of life itself
• Stiegler points to how “culture industries operate by controlling and directly capitalizing the time of consciousness itself.”
• An update of Husserl’s melody/music as the perfect temporal object
• “the contemporary temporal object/media artifact constitutes the very site for a struggle over who controls the flux of consciousness”
• “this industrialization of consciousness”
• “digital technolo- gies restore some of the agency that personal lived consciousness has (apparently) lost over the past two centuries of rapidly accelerated technical evolution”
• new media: designates a ‘new phase’ of human technogensis
• but the Stiegler account doesn’t suppose that mass media will simply ‘be replaced’ by new media utopia(s)
• Stiegler’s account acknowledges the ‘symbolic misery’ of contemporary mass-media structures, without giving up hope
• acknowledges “the risk that accompanies, and has always accompanied, human life as essentially-technical, as epiphylogenesis.”
• Stiegler echoes Benjamin’s appreciation of balances between aesthetics and politics
• “– to rediscover the singularity of embodied temporal fluxes” is a pressing/inspiring challenge