I stand in solidarity with the NYU graduate student union GSOC (Graduate Student Organizing Committee) who have a strike authorization vote today.
I also stand in solidarity with the Graduate Workers of Columbia University who are currently on strike. Please consider respecting their picket line and donating to the strike fund.
Jonathan Beller's new book, The World Computer, is on the intimate relation between information and power. Characterized by the author as “political in intention, speculative in execution, and concrete in its engagement” (70), the book touches on computers, photography, film, and finance, all the while attending to the specific details of racialization and proletarianization. Beller's book is part of a growing wave of new titles devoted to politics and technology, from Katherine McKittrick's new book Dear Science, to McKenzie Wark's Capital is Dead, to Jason Smith's Smart Machines and Service Work, along with many others.
Beller approaches the question of information and power by triangulating three areas, racialization, computation, and capitalism. His mission is to show that these three areas are inextricably linked, and that racialization is the ultimate logic that fuels both computation and capitalism. I applaud Beller for his willingness to expand the historical frame, not just to the post-1945 period, or even the 20th C as a whole, but back some "seven centuries ago" (17) to the development of modern capitalism through what Marx called primitive accumulation. Indeed one might follow this path even further, given that quantification is a problem in metaphysics more generally, not just in capitalism. Continue reading
I'm pleased to announce the syllabus for my spring doctoral seminar at NYU on "The Digital and the Analog." Please note that the first hour of class will be an open-access webcast, followed by two hours of (closed) seminar only for enrolled students. The open-access portion will begin on February 10, 2021. If you are not enrolled, feel free to join the lecture for the first hour. Email me for access URL.
The Digital and the Analog
(Special Topics in Critical Theory -- MCC-GE 3010)
Spring 2021
Time: Weds 9am - 11:50am EST
Location: online
Digital and analog, what do these terms mean today? One common response to the question of the digital is to make reference to things like software, hardware, or computers in general. Indeed the definition of “digital” is too often eclipsed by a kind of fever-pitched industrial bonanza around the latest technologies and the latest commercial ventures. Like the digital, the analog also seems to go through various phases of popularity and disuse, its appeal pegged most frequently to nostalgic longings for non-technical or romantic modes of art and culture. The analog is difficult to define, with attempts at definition often consisting of mere denotations of things: sound waves, the phonograph needle, magnetic tape, a sundial.
In this doctoral seminar we will define the digital and the analog explicitly, not merely by reference to actually existing media technologies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through encounters with theory and philosophy. If digital and analog describe media artifacts, they are also modes of thinking and being, with the digital closely aligned with rationalism, logic, and politics, while the analog with empiricism, aesthetics, and ethics. Sections of the course are devoted to analogicity, digitality, the logical, the illogical, interfaces, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, geometry, and arithmetic. Readings are drawn from the work of Alain Badiou, Wendy Chun, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Katherine McKittrick, Kaja Silverman, and others.
Here are some texts published in the last few years that were meaningful reads for me in 2020 (and late 2019).
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art And Textile Politics
Andrea Long Chu, Females -- more here
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "Queerying Homophily"
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Aria Dean, "On the Black Generic"
Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images -- more here
Denise Ferreira da Silva, "1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value"
Lisa Gitelman, "Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale, An Essay in Four Parts"
Saidiya Hartman, "The Plot of Her Undoing"
Tobi Haslett's review of Thomas Chatterton Williams's Irrational Man
Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification -- read my review of Jagoda's previous book
Shane Denson's new book Discorrelated Images has captured my attention in recent weeks. It's a fascinating investigation into the contemporary image, with an emphasis on cinema but spilling over into other forms of image-making.
Denson has carved out a niche for himself in what has become known as "post-cinema," that is, a new phase of cinema starting in the late Twentieth Century concurrent with digitization, postfordism, neoliberalism, and related developments.
Indeed, in a co-edited collection simply titled Post-Cinema, Denson has helped assemble an impressive collection of chapters that tackle contemporary image culture from a variety of angles. Such discourse had already began to pick up speed in cinema studies in the early 2000s (and also prior, in discussions of postmodernism overall going back to the 1980s and before), coalescing eventually around Steven Shaviro's book Post Cinematic Affect in 2010. Denson and Leyda's Post-Cinema is a veritable who's-who of film and digital studies, with texts from Shaviro as well as figures like Lev Manovich, Richard Grusin, Patricia Pisters, Vivian Sobchack, Mark Hansen, and many others. This is the kind of volume that helps define and galvanize scholarly discourse, particularly when the subject matter is still so new and deserving of scrutiny, as is the case with digitality. Continue reading
For my German friends and colleagues -- My article "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" has been translated into German and published in the Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, along with an introduction by translators Jakob Claus and Richard Groß. Email me if you're paywalled.
After Sianne Ngai's great talk yesterday on The Political Unconscious, I'm re-upping these two essays I wrote recently on the work of Fredric Jameson:
"History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism"
"Meditations on Last Philosophy"
Email me if you are paywalled.
Ngai's most recent book is Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form.
Over the summer I read a lot of Lacan and revisited some influential Lacanian texts including Jacques-Alain Miller's 1966 essay on "Suture" published in the first volume of Cahiers pour l’Analyse. It's an important essay, garnering key responses from Alain Badiou (and, much later, Zizek), as well as helping to spawn a whole cottage industry of Lacanian cinema studies. Curiously, both Miller and Lacan make use of the mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege -- a strange pairing indeed considering how Lacan and Frege are worlds apart, the one a poststructuralist psychoanalyst, the other a logicist and progenitor of what would come to be known as analytic philosophy.
While Lacan jumped around a lot -- he particularly liked the graphical notation scheme Frege unveiled in his Begriffsschrift of 1879, and he borrowed from Frege's quantifier logic for his formulas of sexuation -- Miller himself focused more specifically on Frege's second major treatise The Foundations of Arithmetic (or the so-called Grundlagen) published in 1884. Surprisingly readable for a math text, Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic presents a novel theory of number, different from some of those that came before (namely, Kant, Leibniz, and Mill). Famously, Frege developed a theory of number rooted in pure logic, rather than intuition or empirical experience. He also began with the number zero -- not unimportant, given philosophy's customary interest in, alternately, the one and the many -- rooting zero in (a negation of) the principle of identity. Continue reading
I'm delighted to be included in a dossier of essays curated by Ezekiel Dixon-Román devoted to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Deleuze's "Postscript" has dramatically influenced my work over the years -- I devoted a whole chapter to this short essay in my last book -- so it was nice to revisit Deleuze's work in the context of contemporary events. Published on the Social Text website, the "Control Societies @ 30" dossier also includes contributions from Denise Ferreira da Silva, Orit Halpern, Martina Tazzioli, and Ezekiel Dixon-Román and Luciana Parisi.
What did Deleuze represent in thought and culture? He represented a new shape: rhizomes and distributed networks, assemblages and multiplicities, horizontality rather than verticality, surface over depth. He represented a new kind of subject, specifically the breakdown of the Freudian subject, a turn to affect instead of emotion, desiring machines rather than repressed neurotics, affirmation and expression (not negation), schizos not Cartesians. Deleuze represented a new ontology as well, a rejection of classical metaphysics, replaced by immanence, univocity, and multiplicity. Deleuze also represented a new bibliography: Spinoza instead of Descartes; Leibniz instead of Hegel; Bergson instead of Heidegger; Riemann instead of Einstein. At the very apogee of poststructuralism, Deleuze made it okay to stop talking about culture and epistemology and focus instead on ontology and being. And through it all Deleuze pushed a world that was a little less continental (Hegel, Husserl) and a little more Anglo (Peirce, James). Indeed, just as Deleuze once felt license to call Francis Bacon an Egyptian, I feel no hesitation in calling Deleuze an American.
Over the last few weeks I had the opportunity to give a few different lectures, three of which are now newly archived online. The three lectures are all rather different, one on digital aesthetics, another on the state of contemporary theory, and a third on media history. I hope you find something interesting here during the doldrums of so many global crises, both political and economic.
In this lecture on "heretical computing" we explore the outer limits of technics through forms of hypertrophic digitality and exotic analogicity. Inspired by Shane Denson's book Discorrelated Images, I embark on a series of studies in superlative discorrelation. Is it possible to degrow the digital into something else entirely?
Video. 49 minutes
"Always Deterritorialize!" -- On the Play of Being
What happens when the old prescription for critical and cultural theory, "always historicize," changes into a new mandate, "always deterritorialize"? Engaging with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Catherine Malabou, this lecture reflects on new materialism and questions of becoming within the contemporary landscape.
Video. 66 minutes
The Computable & the Uncomputable
In this keynote lecture for the VLC Forum, I revisit the topic of protocols as they exist in 2020. Themes include the sexual and racial politics of computation, as viewed through a series of historical and archival examples focusing on textiles and looms.
Video. 89 minutes