[-empyre-] Mediated Matters and design abjections

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks Adam for going further with your argument & drawing attention to what you call "eco-technologies" within "spatial-political order predicated on limitless expansion," and you seem to include "life" –  and not the cosmos of the unknown John was referring to in response to us -  into this province of the tinkering with limitless expansion. I am not so happy with the confluences you suggest ; (and  thus with the notion that there is a neoliberal agenda of limitless expansion. National Socialism in the 1930s/1940 declared such expansion as one of the pursuit of "Lebensraum." That ideology of expansion, under the "spatial-political order" of fascism, included severe reduction for lives, in fact it meant, militarily and organizationally, genocide and scaled eugenics programs for undesirables, it stood for extermination). 

After reading Davide's complex and fascinating post on datapolitik, I was waiting for the floods of responses from the list, and Davide's elaboration of the (invisible, transspatial order) data emitting entities was indeed very thought-provoking if I understood his ideas on a new predatory regime correctly –  "dataveillance requires a concrete engagement with technical objects as autonomous actants in the cynegetic powers of predation -- a participation of objects, if you will -- including technologies of detection (i.e., software) and data storage."  

Yes, but it's interesting that you call data presence as a "shedding" that no longer needs a subject. A subjectless data politics -   how does code operate by itself (algorithms and programming platforms), who uses them, who writes the code, who takes advantage of the dandruff or installs capture systems (the police? are they the only subjects? capitalism? profiteering industries? states?  there are no more states, citzens?) was the yes/no voting in Scotland done subjectless? 

(An analysis of predatory societies, would it not need a political theory of subjects executing biopolitics? cf. Branden Hookway,  Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Would we not need to ask in whose service the data collection agencies operate?)

Perhaps I got worried when reading the last paragraph, when you casually speak of a "culture"of zombies". The zombie as archetype (in Hollywood movies?).  Meaning whom? us here in the West, others in the less datapolitiked zones, outside the walls of Jericho? Who are these zombies? And if datapolitik is highly controlled (even if rhizomatic), who builds and controls the Trojan horses, if we take your reference to the Homeric story of a war at face value? Who controls the horses of ISIS?

regards
Johannes Birringer