[-empyre-] networks and reticular pessimism

Sun May 18 19:51:23 EST 2014

Alex

I guess i would like to bring a mathematical topology point of view to
the discussion on networks- I also have been intrigued
by how the science of networks has been transversing discipline after
discipline and we have even been helping thourgh
the leonardo arts humanities and complex networks projects  (
http://ahcncompanion.info/ )

over the past centuries there have been a number of waves of new ideas
on how to understand the structure of things-
and of topological tools - statistical mechanics and say the work of
understanding the mathematics of the random walk
had cultural influence in the early 20c - in the 50s and 50s
cybernetics and then general systems theory- then
complexity science and emergence of structures from low level rules
and now the science of networks

what is new of course is that we are now accumulating data on human
behaviour in the same way that physicists
accumulate data on what collections of atoms do

my colleague at UT dallas max schich has names his lab the 'cultural
science' lab because people are now
bringing to cultural analysis trans disciplinary tools like network
analysis- but many others also

over the coming decades we can expect other new insights that help
analyse and understand how things
are structured and organised- and indeed one has to be careful not to
over theorise a la post modernism
each way of appropriation= mathematics and topology are continually
developing new ideas and tools
and complex networks science is not the end of the story

roger malina


-----
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 11 May 2014 10:25:52 -0400
> From: "Alexander R. Galloway" <galloway at nyu.edu>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited
> Message-ID: <890434DD-190C-4F85-A048-347D58477F15 at nyu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> Dear Soraya & Co..
>
> I guess part of the impetus is that I'm surprised--if not unnerved--by the way in which networks have captured and eclipsed other ways of thinking. A new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme today, ready to proclaim at every turn that ?everything is a network.? Mark Zuckerberg: people are networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. David Joselit: Art is a network. Guy Debord: the post-capitalist city is a network. John Von Neumann: computation is a network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a network.
>
> Ladies and gentlemen, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new meta-narrative to guide us.
>
> We might label this a kind of ?reticular pessimism.? And here I'm taking a cue from the notion of ?Afro-pessimism? in critical race theory. Just as Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which African-American identity is only ever defined via the fetters of its own historical evolution, reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves. According to reticular pessimism, responses to networked power are only able to be conceived in terms of other network forms. (And thus to fight Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages, or multiplicities.)
>
> By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.
>
> This is part of the mandate of this book, as I see it: to articulate a logic of being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange, to a metaphysics of the network. This to me is the promise of excommunication: the message that says ?there will be no more messages?; a logic of relation, without the tired, old model of exchange.
>
> So, yes, strategic withdrawal is at the heart of what interests me most. Some are a bit skeptical about this notion of withdrawal -- often because they see in a negative light as alternatively a surrender monkey position (i give up! i'm outta here!), or a position of privilege (the political equivalent of opening a bank account in the Cayman Islands). But I see it very differently. I see it more as a withdrawal from representation. A structural withdrawal. I see it as a way to conceive of a kind of practical utopia in the here and now. "You don't represent us." "No one is illegal." "I would prefer not to." "We have no demands." Yes I realize utopian thinking is very unfashionable today; that's precisely why we need so much more of it. So perhaps less a bunker mentality and more about the reclaiming of a new experience of life and activity.
>
> Re: obsolescence of theory -- perhaps it hinges on *which* kind of theory? I don't agree with Latour and the notion that "theory has run out of steam." Marxism, feminism, psycho-analysis -- they all still work great if you ask me. But I do think that a kind of "vulgar 1968" style of theory has run its course. Nancy Fraser has it exactly right: capitalism co-opted many of the demands of '68-style theory. So now we have to reassess and recompile a new kind of theoretical method. Because of this I'm much more interested in a slightly different spin on the theoretical tradition.
>
> -ag
>
>
> On May 9, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Soraya Murray <semurray at ucsc.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> I am intrigued by this discussion, and would like to acknowledge the posts by Alex Galloway, Geert Lovink and Renate Ferro. Greetings to all of you.
>>
>> I keep circling back to the notion of strategic withdrawal, alluded to several times in the last few posts, as well as somewhat enigmatically toward the end of Alex's recent lecture here at UC Santa Cruz. For example, from his post:
>>
>> "This book is not about the world ?for us,? and not the world ?in itself,? but what Eugene calls ?the world without us.?"
>>
>> This, in relation to Geert's recent essay in e-Flux ("Hermes on the Hudson"):
>> ""This leaves us with the question of the mandate and scope of today?s media theory?if there is anything left. Are you ready to hand over the ?new media? remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art historians, and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more imaginative ?act of disappearance?? Are we ready to disguise ourselves amidst the new normality?"
>>
>> ...and which seemed to betray a similar anxiety around obsolescence of theory -- or a strategy of withdrawal? With respect, is this to be seen as an act of battening down the hatches? Is this disappearance/disguise a radical strategy to shift perspective as a means to generate new possibility? Something conceded, or something new gained?
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 11 May 2014 16:26:54 +0200
> From: Geert Lovink <geert at desk.nl>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] effusion and miscommunication
> Message-ID: <659F4472-BB45-464C-BD82-A20EFE24D2F6 at desk.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> On 9 May 2014, at 7:42 PM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> What exactly are we meant to do with the (catholic? mystic?) notion of excommunication?? (..) What realm of the "non-human" do you propose for our social and political and personal activities?  and how do you intend to get rid of media or convince others to join your sect?
>
> Thanks, Johannes. These questions are geared towards the authors, I guess.
>
> I can only say what I make of it, and what I can see what we can do with these notions, in my case, the context of net criticism, media theory, tactical media, new aesthetics activism of artists, geeks, designers etc.
>
> There is an urgency to study and understand the non-human. I can see that. I really started to 'dig it' and apply it to my own context when I got familiar with the work of Stuart Geiger (http://stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/) who studies the role of bots in Wikipedia. These days there are the social bots that people like you and me employ? resulting in a recent figure that 61.5% of internet traffic is 'non-human' (source: incapsula).
>
> There are people making millions of this by tooling and ticking companies like Google. And this brings me to the humans behind the non-human. In the end I am more interested in them. Robots can be cute, or cruel, they are here to stay and will gain influence etc., all that is true, but I would like to know who profits from them, who built them, what their inner architecture is, which values and ethics they inhabit and spread? It is not so hard to delegate power and trust to machines. We can get used to that, and in some cases even benefit from it, but in the end I prefer full-employment for humans first. No sympathy for the machines.
>
> On Hacker News this weekend a related article was popular:
>
> http://www.bainbrdg.demon.co.uk/Papers/Ironies.html
>
> It is from 1983, so before 1984? ;)
>
> The article "suggests that the increased interest in human factors among engineers reflects the irony that the more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator."
>
> Greetings, Geert
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 12 May 2014 09:16:30 +1200
> From: simon <swht at clear.net.nz>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited
> Message-ID: <536FE8AE.5060703 at clear.net.nz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"
>
> Dear Alexander Galway and empyreans,
>
> I enjoyed your your letter, particularly for the notion of 'reticular
> pessimism' as the /en abyme/ of a socio-cultural dispensation
> mirror-struck by its own mental processes. I even like the idea of the
> network as meta-narrative and proof that pomo's over. However, the
> strategies in play here rather than those of escape - blueprints of the
> prison studied in preparatory lucubration - seem to belong to the
> mentality of the captors - from the viewpoint of the cell, in clear
> sight of the tower, or power.
>
> Albert-L?szl? Barab?si attributes the invention of network theory to
> Leonhard Euler in the 1780s. I don't think either would agree with Mark
> Zuckerberg, Donald Rumsfield, Bruno Latour, Franco Moretti, David
> Joselit, Guy Debord, John Von Neumann or Konrad Wachsmann that the
> complex fields of the respective engagements of this strangely
> fascinating (uncanny - reticularly depressing) roll-call ought to be or
> can be reduced to what may be considered /network effects/. And, in some
> cases, /affects/ - where network is the nomination of a brand
> endorsement: Facebook is neither truly a network nor social.
>
> In the same way, corpocratic concerns rhapsodise on the now highly
> recognisable formula /Big Data/ - an object that has as much affinity
> with a meta-narrative network as any of the individual cases adduced.
> Then there is the authorial tick of periodisation: after post-modernism
> (nostalgia for the post- or non-human?); and the obsolescence of the
> '68ers - the vulgarity of theoretical products reaching their use-by
> dates. Neither brand theory nor brand network provide any clue as to how
> to make a map that lets us get the hell out Dodge, or dodge the oncoming
> traffic of the imminent - and in the name of brand immanence each holds
> a pasteboard halo.
>
> In the light of the network effects that theoretical dissipation - its
> current /dispositif/ - elevates by the mechanism of reduction to
> /networks/ (pure, simple, unreal thing) or networkism - as that
> theoretical cul-de-sac that ought at least be avoided - 'strategic
> withdrawal' were better called 'statistical withdrawal' - a term less
> pregnant with cognitive content.
>
> Best,
> Simon Taylor
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 11 May 2014 16:00:02 -0700
> From: "christina at christinamcphee.net" <christina at christinamcphee.net>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] a new meta-narrative to guide us
> Message-ID: <3C7B6308-7E22-4479-9229-2103F841CD91 at christinamcphee.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Alexander et al,
>
> To insist on focussing our ethics on a strategy of infinite (as in, non-relational) withdrawal has antecedents in the Orthodox spiritual tradition of the via negativa.
>
> Your (AG?s) discussion of James Turrell?s light installations in ?light of? Laruelle?s theory of non-photography resonates with me to that tradition, and even to the figure that LaRuelle throws up, the Son of Man.  St. Matthew calls Jesus the ?Son of Man? rather than ?Son of God? more often than not.  Matthew is writing in an attempt to link the story of Jesus to an historical geneology of culture-heroes in the Hebraic written tradition and oral history and community consciousness during a time of tremendous catastrophic and ongoing loss of those community values. Perhaps also, if you can indulge a psycho-history, to a loss of a sense of God?s presence among His chosen.
>
> At the same time, Matthew?s invocation of ?Son of Man? also radically points to the transcendent arrival of an agent whose parentage is of ?Man? , i. e. not just the Jewish people or any tribe, but an ultimate Man.  It?s not for nothing that Pasolini chooses Matthew as his text for his film ?The Gospel according to St Matthew? : Pasolini rightly builds on the radical implications of the figure of Christ as arising directly from a transcendence that gathers force not alongside, or against, but ?in, with, and under? the people? transubstantiation.  On the level of poetics if not politics, Pasolini?s agnosticisms consider the possibility of accord with an ?too-innocent philosophy? ? but, by means of making of the film itself, with Palestinians, in ?Palestine? , reject a radicalism of extraction of the Logos; no, for PPP, the Logos is in and among us qua film qua life qua body and blood.  In contrast? an opposite politics--- in your discourse on Turrell via LaRuelle, AG?  I?d lik
>  e to explore this further, starting here:
>
> As one blogger recently notes
>
> ?. the beginning of the determination of a too innocent philosophy, a non-philosophy, a supra-rational innocence, which could only expressly mean the immortalization of the Logos through the extraction of all its radical conceivability in history, already practiced or imagined, the only reason, ne plus ultra.http://veraqivas.wordpress.com/category/immanent-philosophy/francois-laruelle/page/2/
>
>
> Imagine this binary, just for a moment (it may or may not be provisional).  Let?s say : where Pasolini and Matthew remain on one side of a chasm,  on the other stands LaRuelle, the non-philosopher who may not presume to partake (through history, through ethics, through the spoken word, through the moving image..) community or communitarian values. If Matthew the historian, and Pasolini, artist of proto-Christian atheism, stand for and with community--with or without ?God? (AKA the noumenous) --through the figuration of relation and partaking (taking part) (=transubstantiation) of the Son of Man; then on the other side, LaRuelle proposes to stands in for, contra or at least in figure/ground opposition, to community--with or without ?Man? (AKA the human community) . Alexander, are you also there with LaRuelle, or is this binary too stark?
>
> Listening to your talk, Alexander, on Incredible Machines, considering James Turrell?s installations as evidence of LaRuelle?s theory of non-photography, I immediately turned back to Laruelle?s desire for the Son of Man. (I must confess I am relying on impressions I had when I listened to your live talk)  Alexander, your manifesto is ? to articulate a logic being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange? ?there will be no more messages.? And you go on to point to a ?logic of relation..without the?.model of exchange. ? It?s possible  Laruelle espouses a (non)-figuration of the transcendent angel en arrivant.
>
> So: to propose a chasm here.  No exchange, means no more messages, means in its equal and opposite expression (since if there is no more  x->y or y->x there can only be x= not-x).   Turrell?s light objects, in order to be understood as new information, new knowledge?.  need not require a St Matthew-esque historicity with antecedents like Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, El Lissitsky?  They can arrive, like angels? ?
>
> I take it that 'the new meta-narrative to guide us? ? (AG, below) partakes of this only-reason, this new plus ultra of an arrival of an angel in the subject-site of theorist. Could Turrell?s space-time-image manifest the arrival of something new, like this? A Logos, of a sort? The canard of art as knowledge-production goes to something else, something very interesting.  Since always otherwise words partake of the play of the trace, the way from above is to make the person-space-time of the Logos an embodied speech act?   A via-negativa speaks, from a space of non-relation, non-photography? from the somewhat disingenuously described ?too-innocent? site that is outside of perceivable substance?  No transubstantiation, because the Son of Man, for Laruelle, arrives without a body, without the body of the human, without the body of community, and is self-born, self-generating, ?like? (oops) God?. ?
>
> Does Laruelle?s extravagance around angels as theorists and theorists as angels deserve special notice as an auto-epipanic event- LaRuelle recreates himself ? Can we do the same? At the ?event-horizon? of the human?
>
> What do you think, Alex, does your argument of withdrawal exclude all ?poetics of relation? (Glissante) with a sublimity (angel-theorist-Son of Man) in its place?   So seems to be the logic of commentators around LaRuelle. like Grelet (trans. Brassier) here http://www.onphi.net/texte-son-of-man--brother-of-the-people--behold-the-theorist-29.html
>
> But perhaps you imply something more nuanced. I began my comment with a mention of the ?via negativa?.  Would you instead be proposing, via Turrell a negative theology?
>
> "n negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition:?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
>
> So, to put it in tragicomic mode, and yet I am serious,  is this new meta-narrative about a revelation from ?God??
>
>
> Christina
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
> Incredible Machines/ Alexander Galloway March 6 2014  http://incrediblemachines.info/keynote-speakers/galloway/
>
>
> On May 11, 2014, at 7:25 AM, Alexander R. Galloway <galloway at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Dear Soraya & Co..
>>
>> I guess part of the impetus is that I'm surprised--if not unnerved--by the way in which networks have captured and eclipsed other ways of thinking. A new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme today, ready to proclaim at every turn that ?everything is a network.? Mark Zuckerberg: people are networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. David Joselit: Art is a network. Guy Debord: the post-capitalist city is a network. John Von Neumann: computation is a network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a network.
>>
>> Ladies and gentlemen, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new meta-narrative to guide us.
>>
>> We might label this a kind of ?reticular pessimism.? And here I'm taking a cue from the notion of ?Afro-pessimism? in critical race theory. Just as Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which African-American identity is only ever defined via the fetters of its own historical evolution, reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves. According to reticular pessimism, responses to networked power are only able to be conceived in terms of other network forms. (And thus to fight Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages, or multiplicities.)
>>
>> By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.
>>
>> This is part of the mandate of this book, as I see it: to articulate a logic of being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange, to a metaphysics of the network. This to me is the promise of excommunication: the message that says ?there will be no more messages?; a logic of relation, without the tired, old model of exchange.
>>
>> So, yes, strategic withdrawal is at the heart of what interests me most. Some are a bit skeptical about this notion of withdrawal -- often because they see in a negative light as alternatively a surrender monkey position (i give up! i'm outta here!), or a position of privilege (the political equivalent of opening a bank account in the Cayman Islands). But I see it very differently. I see it more as a withdrawal from representation. A structural withdrawal. I see it as a way to conceive of a kind of practical utopia in the here and now. "You don't represent us." "No one is illegal." "I would prefer not to." "We have no demands." Yes I realize utopian thinking is very unfashionable today; that's precisely why we need so much more of it. So perhaps less a bunker mentality and more about the reclaiming of a new experience of life and activity.
>>
>> Re: obsolescence of theory -- perhaps it hinges on *which* kind of theory? I don't agree with Latour and the notion that "theory has run out of steam." Marxism, feminism, psycho-analysis -- they all still work great if you ask me. But I do think that a kind of "vulgar 1968" style of theory has run its course. Nancy Fraser has it exactly right: capitalism co-opted many of the demands of '68-style theory. So now we have to reassess and recompile a new kind of theoretical method. Because of this I'm much more interested in a slightly different spin on the theoretical tradition.
>>
>> -ag
>>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
>
>
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-- 
Roger F Malina
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