I haven’t prepared anything because I intuited, and I think fairly correctly that this conference would unfold very nicely as much through accidents, error, glitch, and various forms of spontaneity, as through Mo Salemy’s superhuman, very ambitious planning efforts, so here we are!
I also didn’t prepare anything, [be]’cause I suspected, again I think accurately that the topic of this conference would be shifting by the hour, and indeed it has, we’re sort of tracing the ‘object petit a’ of the past two days. So it seemed to me from last night’s and this morning’s sessions namely: Alexander Galloway’s, McKenzie Wark’s, Clint Burnham’s papers, that we were really making headway in tracing the limits of computation.
So, Alex Galloway traced the history of a crisis in representation, in mimetic representation that undergirds computation to the economic crisis that we could date to 1973, though Alex mentioned 1975 and we talked about that a bit. And he then drew on the recent work of Francois Laruelle who postulates that representation not only fails to describe but is no longer mediating the relationship between a sentient subject and the field of the real, and the information that that field generates.
Clint Burnham’s paper talked about the intimacy at the level of touch between mediation and everyday life, so there was the the description of all of the scrolling, the touching, the pinching, the relationship (I’ve been corrected that I’m not to use the term phenomenology any longer but), the experience of the human sensorium relationship to the screen. He used a really, I thought, wonderful phrase which is that in this intimate and indeed erotic and violent mediation between human and machine, we’re seeing something that we might describe as a ‘dictatorship of the objectified’, which was a really lovely phrase and I hope we get to talk about it. [And,] McKenzie Wark brought up Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ today which is a way of both actualising the interstices between the human and the machine but also critiquing computationalism from within.
Then, today’s papers seem to suggest that we’re once again looking at ways of thinking the fact that there is no outside to computation, so Nick Srnicek brought up DSG models which structure macroeconomics, determine the fates of corporations, nation states, peoples, all of it of course predicated on the disavowal of the law of the tendency of profit to draw for the emiseration thesis.
There was Sohail Malik’s paper focused on the price index that moves across the art world, the financial sector and everyday life. And then, as though it didn’t appear that the problem set of the conference had shifted drastically, we then had Reza Negarastani’s paper which suggests a whole other vector to the meaning of computationalism, which is that while the computer doesn’t describe or ‘modelize’ the world it does serve to suggest the future of the human, in which the function of the human, as a function of functions (for lack of a better way to put it), could be disarticulated from substance, constitution, identity, essence, any of the remaining vestigial, mysticisms that continue to inform our notion of the human, which seems to be a whole other set of, of inquiry. I’m hoping that in this conversation I can try and herd these various vectors to see where these three themes either connect or fail to connect.
But I think what we really need to talk about is the role of metaphor, which briefly came up in an, all too brief, confrontation between Galloway and Negarastani—a friendly confrontation, a happy exchange, briefly yesterday evening. I really think that’s what needs to be dilated here.
It seems that we’re really trying to talk about the limits of simulation, correspondence and contingency. That really the only kind of common space I can find among these three themes about the meaning, the role and the assignation of computationalism now. So, its limits, the limits to those limits, and it as a structure that will help us think about the future of our species past the current limitations of the human that we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment which structures a wedge between ourselves and our own proper Enlightenment. So that’s 48 hours in a nutshell.