Digital Univocity

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 →

Control Societies @ 30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference

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.

Continue reading at Social Text

Three New Podcasts

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.

Chris Kerich, "Motion Studies (the Hunger Games)"

Heretical Computation

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

Source: Gilles Deleuze, “Sept dessins,” Chimères 21 (Winter 1994): 13-19.

"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

Ada K. Dietz, "AKDietz-6-2-SW-1" (c. 1947; reproduction 2020).

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

Transcoding, Transduction, Sampling, and Interpolation -- The Four Interfaces

During the 2020-2021 academic year I'm lucky enough to be co-leader (with prof. Emily Apter) of a research lab at NYU focused on questions of translation. Translation is a notoriously difficult topic, not only within theoretical discussions, but also as a practical art form. Translation is hard to think; it's also hard to do, and harder still to do well. Emily was part of a team working on "untranslatables," which tried to keep the problem alive as a problem, while also providing some basis for orientation with specific terms that have remained, for whatever reason, untranslated.

I'm very much still a beginner when it comes to translation theory, and only have limited experience in actual translation. Instead of talking about translation I'd like to outline four operations that are somehow external to translation -- prior to it perhaps, or maybe implicated by translation, yet still somehow necessary to it...I'm not yet sure how exactly.

Let's begin with two basic kinds of conversion thresholds for bodies and information. I will call these "symmetrical" interfaces because they involve a common measure across the interface threshold. These are the two conversion interfaces that don't entail a mode change, and thus are simpler in a certain sense. Continue reading →

Massumi's Matheme

In the past I've written on how to spot digital philosophers. But let's name names. Who exactly do we mean? Digital philosophers are many: Democritus, Leibniz, Konrad Zuse, Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus but later he inverts), Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and many others.

Analog philosophers are also observable in the wild. Deleuze is one of the most vivid examples of the species. I've also long admired Brian Massumi for his pro-analog chauvinism, proud and unapologetic. Let's remember that this is the man who, at the onset of the first dot-com boom, penned an essay titled "On the Superiority of the Analog." Massumi harbors a deep skepticism toward anything digital, particularly number and quantity. While not agreeing with Massumi -- for me the digital and the analog are co-equal -- I admire anyone willing to take a clear stand. He serves as an excellent case study in analog philosophy.

Massumi recently published 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (also online).  Written in geometric style (thesis, lemma, scholium), the book unfurls 99 theses over 135 pages, culminating in a proposal for a new kind of digital platform based on a "postblockchain speculative alter-economy" (20). I have sub-sub-interest in blockchain. Regardless, the ambient enthusiasm around blockchain from a few years ago has largely subsided, so I'll sidestep the ostensible terminus of Massumi's book in favor of its core motifs and allegiances. Ultimately this book is more about analog reality than digital currency.

It's difficult to summarize or outline a treatise written in geometric style. Instead let me chop it up, sort it, and collate it into phrases and sentences. I've extracted characteristic passages and collected them under a series of themes: awesomeology; Red Bull sublime; Google Deleuzianism; and analog chauvinism. Continue reading →

The Ideology Issue

I'm thrilled to be included in "The Ideology Issue" edited by Andrew Cole for the journal SAQ, along with essays by Hortense Spillers, Eleanor Kaufman, Anna Kornbluh and so many other thinkers I admire. The problem of ideology critique was a major part of my theoretical formation as a student, and I was always disappointed to see how the topic had slowly vanished in recent years. Or as Hal Foster asks in his contribution to the issue, "How did critique become a bad object when, only a few decades ago, it seemed to be the cutting edge of cultural practice?" So when Andrew Cole pitched the idea of a special issue on ideology and critique I was keen to reengage with a theoretical conjuncture that has only grown more and more relevant in these hallucinatory times.

For "The Ideology Issue" I took the opportunity to write about the work of Fredric Jameson under the title "Meditations on Last Philosophy." The piece revolves around a few propositions and themes that I try to unpack along the way:

Figuration is superior to equation;

Form reveals the social situation;

The law of genre.

The essay is something of a companion piece to a previous essay of mine from 2016 titled "History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism,” also devoted to Jameson. If you're paywalled and want to read either essay simply email me.

Stiegler and Lacan -- No Relation?

I won't bring up Lacan on Monday. But the non-encounter between Stiegler and Lacan recently struck me as important and I wanted to try to unravel the mystery...

Stiegler wrote frequently about technology and technical objects. But how does he compare to one of the key object theories, psychoanalysis? Surprisingly Stiegler's object theory was only partially psychoanalytic. What do I mean by "partially"? First it is clear that Stiegler was deeply influenced by Freud. References to Freud appear in almost every Stiegler book. Yet at the same time Stiegler had almost no relationship to Lacan. How to characterize the non-relation between Stiegler and Lacan?

From Freud Stiegler adopted the notions of narcissism, desire, and drive. Recall Stiegler's text on "loving oneself and loving others" reprinted in the English book titled Acting Out, where Stiegler works through the problem of primordial narcissism. "I call 'primordial narcissism' that structure of the psyche which is indispensable for functioning, that part of self-love which can sometimes become pathological, but without which any capacity for love would be impossible" (39). The book Symbolic Misery, vol 1 picks up on the theme of narcissism originally articulated in the previous text. And almost every book and article that follows contains numerous references to Freud.

On Lacan, however, Stiegler wrote almost nothing. Hunting for Lacan in Stiegler, a handful of brief references pop up here and there. Beyond simple references or footnotes, I remember only a few passages where Stiegler engages with Lacan for more than a sentence or two: in Taking Care on the mirror stage, and in States of Shock on the thing [das Ding]. I'm sure there are other passages I've overlooked, but the larger point holds: Stiegler had essentially no relation with Lacan. I find this surprising particularly since Stiegler was so invested in the operations of desire and enjoyment, as well as the intricacies of language and symbols, although perhaps not "the symbolic" in Lacan's sense. Continue reading →