Nobody knows, not really. I've said in the past that no one has yet patented a Meaning Machine. And when it comes to the digital and the analog I'm mostly in the dark about the question of meaning. My intuition is that meaning is not exclusively subsumed by either digital or analog phenomena. Meaning seems to be one of those things that spans both the digital and the analog, even if it might need to be thought differently in both contexts. (And here I'm continuing some thoughts that emerged from recent conversations with Beatrice Fazi.) Continue reading →

I've been talking recently with Beatrice Fazi about a structuralist theory of the digital. In my experience, the majority of digital theory today is essentially empirical in that it tries to understand words like "digital" and "analog" by looking at the world and writing descriptions of what one sees there. At the same time there's a small contingent of folks -- I count myself among them -- who want to do it a bit differently. Instead of relying on empirical methods like observation and description, we might also turn to theories of language, ideology, representation, and even metaphysics. Following that path, a number of quickly questions arise. For instance, if digital code is a kind of language, does that put digitality under the heading of rationalization, logical structure, symbolic representation, and the symbolic order more generally? And likewise, since the analog tends to resist symbolization, does that mean analogicity is somehow extra- or sub-rational? Is the analog the natural domain of contingency, randomness, impossibility? Does the analog resist representation? Is the analog a synonym for the real?

It's a challenging question, one that doesn't have a simple answer. I've been scolded in the past for suggesting that the analog has a relation to the real. And while it's easy to fall into a romantic trap where the analog comes to mean pure nature or some kind of purely authentic presence, I also think it's wrong to discard the real entirely. (In fact this "romantic trap" can be leveraged for use by digital tools, as in the example of random number generators using trigonometry to tap into the pseudo-chaotic nature of continuous values.) Because of these challenges, it's best to address the question through different registers rather than offer a single pat answer. (tl;dr: yes I do think the analog is on the side of the real.) Continue reading →

The following short translation is from Catherine Malabou's new book, Au voleur! : Anarchism et philosophie which deals with the often troubled relationship between anarchism and philosophy. A hefty volume, with chapters on Aristotle, Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière, the book explores why some thinkers are willing to profess a kind of ontological anarchism, while at the same time avoiding anarchism in their own politics. This page comes toward the end of the book and offers a nice overview of some of the various positions discussed by Malabou. Let me know if you notice any mistakes in translation.

"I am an anarchist" -- For philosophers, this is an impossible claim, now and forever.

One can not be an anarchist. The phenomenon of the anarchy of being, in an age when principles wither away, resists reduction to any ontic determination. Being is no longer understood in such and such a way, and thus being ceases to fulfill its function as a predictive or determining agent (Schürmann).

One can not be an anarchist. In reality, anarchy reveals itself to be more fundamental than ontology, exceeding ontological difference itself (Levinas). Its "saying" exceeds its "said," and hence endlessly overflows the propositional form itself, by carrying the responsibility of obligation beyond the question of essence.

One can not be an anarchist. As soon as we associate anarchy and power -- "the power to be an anarchist" -- we recognize, in one way or another, how anarchism participates in the drive toward mastery (Derrida).

One can not be an anarchist. It's not the predicate "anarchist" that transforms the subject and makes the subject anarchist by determining its qualities. No, the subject must first elaborate its own anarchic dimension, must first cultivate its own propensity for transformation, in order to constitute itself as an anarchic subject prior to "being" it and predicating it (Foucault).

One can not be an anarchist. This term is a signifier so inflated with the emptiness of its own signified that it has become a fetish, made sacred, and hence announces a new kind of idolatry (Agamben).

One can not be an anarchist. The negativity at work in politics, the basic structure of misunderstanding and miscalculation, means it cannot be localized. Political expressions are rare and intermittent, appearing sometimes but only in eclipse. Negativity puts things in play and never comes to rest (Rancière).

"I am an anarchist" -- Each word in this sentence poses an insurmountable obstacle to all the others, an echo of the untenable political character of anarchism itself.

(Source: Catherine Malabou, Au voleur!: Anarchism et philosophie [Paris: PUF, 2022].)

Recently I spoke with game designer Frédéric Serval about war games and Guy Debord. It was a fun,  far-ranging conversation with Fred, who is a real expert on games of this type, and being French knows a lot about the history and context. This is part 1, with part 2 forthcoming.

Announcing my doctoral seminar for Fall 2022.

Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

Special Topics in Critical Theory -- Thursdays 9:30am - 12:20pm

This doctoral seminar is on two books, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both subtitled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," the two books describe and sometimes anticipate changes in the nature of society and the subject. Spanning the pivotal decade of the 1970s, these texts will provide a lens through which to understand psychoanalysis, Marxism, aesthetics, technology, and several other topics. The course will consist of close readings of the two books, with minimal secondary material. Open to doctoral students and approved master's students.

The first term in Euclid’s Elements came as a surprise to me. The first term in Euclid’s hefty treatise on geometry is not number or line, not triangle or sphere, not mathematics, and not even geometry itself. The first term in Euclid’s elements is point: “A point is that which has no part.”

Is this the origin of geometry, this the first term in the first major omnibus of geometry? The question has been posed before, by Jacques Derrida famously. But he was upstaging another voice, that of Edmund Husserl writing just prior to the onset of World War II. Why not upstage them both, as Michel Serres did, first in his sketches on the “Origin of Geometry,” then later shifting the frame slightly, not “Origin” but Origins.

Who would not be a little disappointed by Husserl’s text, that tedious appendix, forever dancing around the topic of geometry but never addressing it head on? The general attitude--voiced by Derrida with his characteristic condescension--has been to discount the question itself, to invert Husserl, and to investigate not the origin of geometry but the geometry of origin, origin now having been recast as the cardinal sin of all philosophy. But was that not just another distraction? In trying to unseat origin, one risks naturalizing geometry, a new structure to replace the old, even if that structure is, in some sense, deconstructed. So instead of discarding the question, let us retain it. Let us return to Husserl’s investigation and try to look for a different answer. Let us ask the question again. What is the origin of geometry?

(Continue reading at Grey Room.)

For my friends in Paris and elsewhere -- I'll be delivering a lecture at IRCAM / Centre Pompidou on March 10th at 2:30pm CET (8:30am EST). The event will be webcast.

Lecture title: "Read, Write, Execute: What are the Machines that Determine Thinking?"

(Update: Watch the lecture in English, which was also translated into French.)

Book review at boundary 2

I remember snickering when Chris Anderson announced "The End of Theory" in 2008. Writing in Wired magazine, Anderson claimed that the structure of knowledge had inverted. It wasn't that models and principles revealed the facts of the world, but the reverse, that the data of the world spoke their truth unassisted. Given that data were already correlated, Anderson argued, what mattered was to extract existing structures of meaning, not to pursue some deeper cause. Anderson's simple conclusion was that "correlation supersedes causation...correlation is enough."

This hypothesis -- that correlation is enough -- is the thorny little nexus at the heart of Wendy Chun's new book, Discriminating Data. Chun's topic is data analytics, a hard target that she tackles with technical sophistication and rhetorical flair. Focusing on data-driven tech like social media, search, consumer tracking, AI, and many other things, her task is to exhume the prehistory of correlation, and to show that the new epistemology of correlation is not liberating at all, but instead a kind of curse recalling the worst ghosts of the modern age. As Chun concludes, even amid the precarious fluidity of hyper-capitalism, power operates through likeness, similarity, and correlated identity.

While interleaved with a number of divergent polemics throughout, the book focuses on four main themes: correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition. Chun deals with these four as general problems in society and culture, but also interestingly as specific scientific techniques. For instance correlation has a particular mathematical meaning, as well as a philosophical one. Discrimination is a social pathology but it's also integral to discrete rationality. I appreciated Chun's attention to details large and small; she's writing about big ideas -- essence, identity, love and hate, what does it mean to live together? -- but she's also engaging directly with statistics, probability, clustering algorithms, and all the minutia of data science.

Continue Reading at boundary 2

Math has a gender issue... but how and why?

I have a new essay on "The Gender of Math" just published in the current issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. This article is on the problem of essential bias in mathematics, algorithms, and digital media.

(Email me if you're paywalled, although I believe the above link is open access.)

My essay on the "Golden Age of Analog" is now published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry on "Surplus Data" edited by Orit Halpern, Patrick Jagoda, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, and Leif Weatherby. Email me if you're paywalled.

Oh, for days long gone, when intellectuals sparred over symbolic economies and cultural logics. Gone are those heady chats about écriture and the pleasures of textuality. How quaint would it seem today for a critic to proclaim, defiant, that there is nothing outside of the text. Who speaks that way anymore? Who speaks of word, symbol, text, code, economy, social structures, or cultural logics? Of course, many of us still do; nevertheless, this language feels reminiscent of another time. Or, to be more precise, the language of language is reminiscent of another time.

The world is awash in data, yet these days it is much more common to encounter scholarly takes on a series of distinctly nondigital themes: books about affect or sensation; treatises on aesthetics as first philosophy; essays on the ethical turn (turning away from the political) or on real materiality (turning away from symbolic abstraction); manifestos proclaiming, defiant, that there is nothing outside of the real.

A generation ago, the theoretical humanities was fixated on codes, logics, the arrangement of texts, and the machinations of the symbolic order. Today the theoretical humanities is more likely to address topics such as perception, experience, indeterminacy, or contingency. Why in the digital age have some of our best thinkers turned toward characteristically analog themes?

Continue Reading