People have a lot of questions about digital media. I have answers.

Facial recognition technology -- should be illegal.

NFTs & blockchain -- stupid wasteful tech. pull the plug.

Facebook and Twitter -- nationalize them. end data harvesting. block all advertising.

Javascript -- awful i avoid it like the plague. alas, one of the most successful languages in the history of computing.

Jeff Bezos et al -- expropriate 100% of tech billionaire wealth. they all go to zero. maybe give them a ribbon like at the end of Wizard of Oz.

self-driving cars -- stupid wasteful tech. will increase carbon emissions and immiserate countless workers.

Uber and gig economy -- shut them all down. replace Uber with a living wage and full unionization.

HTML 5 and CSS -- psychotic. if you can code this schizo tech you are a God.

shaders -- also psychotic. but in a good way.

AI and machine learning -- just a fancy way to calculate an average. based on pilfered human labor and data. a total scam.

The Cloud -- a bad metaphor for a server farm.. which is a bad metaphor for a computer.. which is a bad metaphor for a female secretary.. which is (etc etc)

Swift -- apple did two smart things. switching to unix. and killing obj-c.

Hades -- pretty good game actually!

Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama

Middlemarch

NFTs

Paul Chan

innovation

Frank Zappa

Rita Felski

Luis Buñuel

empiricism

influencer academics

NPR cinema (Tree of Life, First Cow, Nomadland, etc.)

biography/biopic/memoir/autofiction/autotheory

David Cronenberg; Brandon Cronenberg

logical positivism

I'm collaborating with my old friend Taeyoon Choi for a trans-continental lecture next week on Friday, April 16 hosted by the Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile (CHAT) in Hong Kong. It's in the morning New York time (9am) and evening Hong Kong time (9pm). We'll be joined by the scholar Amy K.S. Chan. Please tune in!

Interweaving Poetic Code 織碼如詩

Friday, 16 April, 9:00pm (Hong Kong, UTC+8), 9:00am (New York, UTC-4), 10:00pm (Seoul, UTC+9)

Register here

New York- and Seoul-based artist and educator Taeyoon Choi and New York-based professor of media studies Alexander R. Galloway join to consider the common underpinnings of textile and code, including those of duality and opposition, from humans and machines to production and philosophy. How may these considerations supersede or sustain such binarisms? What alternative relations are possible? The conversation will be moderated by Amy K.S. Chan, Hong Kong-based professor and scholar researching on the intersections of technoscience and philosophy, as well as gender and literary studies.

This Keynote is part of Poetic Emergences: Organisation through Textile and Code, a 4-day online Discussion Forum held on 16 – 19 April, 2021 that gathers the voices of local and international creative practitioners including weavers, programmers, philosophers and community workers to investigate the transformative processes of textile and code.

For more information on the Discussion Forum: https://www.mill6chat.org/event/online-discussion-forum-poetic-emergences-organisation-through-textile-and-code/

The quilting point was introduced in Jacques Lacan's 1956 seminar on psychoses. He defined the quilting point as a kind of "anchor" or "button" that stitches together the flux of signification. We can understand this in both a general and specific sense. Most generally, the quilting point is a way to punctuate or mark a chain of words. This happens frequently in ordinary language, where words in a sentence accumulate one after another, only conferring their meaning with the arrival of... the... last... word. The final signifier acts as a punctuating point that retroactively fixes the meaning of all the signifiers that came before it.

Lacan made this clear in his diagram for the "graph of desire" (version 1) reproduced in the Écrits (681). In that diagram the chain of signification--for example words in a sentence--precedes temporally from left to right in a horizontal arc (S to S'). At the same time, the subjective process of meaning-making intervenes from the bottom and runs counter to the arc. Bruce Fink has teased out the metaphor in literal terms: the S-S' signifying chain is "fabric," while the horseshoe arc of meaning-making piercing upward from the bottom is "thread." Meaning emerges by stitching upward, pulling taut leftward against the flow of signifiers, then anchoring the stitch downward (Fink, Lacan To The Letter, 114). Making meaning is thus a retroactive suture requiring two puncture points; meaning does not simply issue linearly from the act of speaking or writing. The quilting point is a knot that holds and fixes the flux of signification. Continue reading →

1 -- Pete Wolfendale

2 -- Graham Harman

3 -- Slavoj Žižek

4 -- Jacques Derrida

(Best take on Laruelle: Ray Brassier)

Following up on the theme of discorrelation, one's mind naturally wanders toward the astounding sorts of images created in recent years by AI and machine learning algorithms. The images created by Google's DeepDream are particularly weird and intoxicating, as is the video work of Mario Klingemann. Continue reading →

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

Download syllabus

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

Continue reading →