Information Tukhology
Digital technologies are programmatic, numerically organized, objective, quantitative. As such, they are subject to the received criticism of instrumental rationality, charged with proscribing contingency, eventhood, improvisation, subjectivization, and qualitative dimensions. This paper argues that digital technologies are in fact, and rather, the material condition for wholly new kinds of difference and contingency-making, altogether removed from anthropological and historical constraints. As such, they constitute a new condition for social futurity. The standard, misrecognized name of that technically-organized futurity qua contingency —a tukhology— is information; more exactly, information without knowledge. But such a determination requires the now-prevalent criticism of instrumental rationality to be abandoned. The contention here— exemplified by comparing how contemporary art and automated derivatives markets respectively organize the future—is that such critique must now be cast aside if there is to be a politics adequate to the present.
Suhail Malik is 2012-14 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York, and Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent publications include: Co-editor of Realism Materialism Art and The Flood of Rights (both 2014); “The Value of Everything” in Texte zur Kunst (2014); “The Ruling Elite Have Feelings Too” in The New Reader (2014); “Ape Says No” in Red Hook Journal (2013); On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art at Artists Space, NY (2013); “The Politics of Neutrality: Constructing a Global Civility” in The Human Snapshot (2013): “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization” (with Andrea Phillips) in Art and Its Commercial Markets (2012); “Why Art? The Primacy of Audience” at Global Art Forum, Dubai (2011); “The Wrong of Contemporary Art: Aesthetics and Political Indeterminacy” (with Andrea Phillips) in Reading Rancière (2011); “Educations Sentimental and Unsentimental: Repositioning the Politics of Art and Education” in Red Hook Journal (2011); “Screw (Down) The Debt: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Austerity” in Mute (2010); “You Are Here” for Manifesta 8 (2010).