millionsofmovingparts | selbstversuch | john j. may

2012
02.20

HST RIP

2012
01.11

Risk/Uncertainty -- Let us be careful not confuse the notion of uncertainty with that of risk, which is its false friend. The two notions tend to be used interchangeably in current language, but they cover different realities.

The term 'risk' designates a well-identified danger associated with a perfectly describable event or series of events. We do not know if this event or series of events will in fact take place, but we know that it may take place. In some cases, statistical instruments applied to series of systematic observations performed in the past make it possible to calculate the event's probable occurrence, which will be described as objective probability. In the absence of these observations, the probabilities assigned depend on the points of view, feelings, or convictions of the actors; these are called subjective probabilities. Whether objective or subjective, these probabilities have in common their application to known, identified events that can be precisely described and whose conditions of production can be explained...

Let us agree to speak of risk only in those quite specific cases where the explorations of possible worlds (or, if you prefer, the establishment of conceivable scenarios) has been completed, revealing the possibility of harmful events for certain groups. We are completely familiar with these events and the conditions necessary for them to take place, even if we do not know whether they will in fact occur, and even if all we know is the probability of their occurrence... In actual fact, science often proves to be incapable of establishing the list of possible worlds and of describing each of them exactly. This amounts to saying that we cannot anticipate the consequences of the decisions that are likely to be made; we do not have a sufficiently precise knowledge of the conceivable options, the description of the constitution of the possible worlds comes up against the resistant cores of ignorance, and the behavior and interactions of the entities making them up remain enigmatic... we know what we do not know, but that is almost all we know: there is no better definition of uncertainty. (M. Callon, Acting in an Uncertain World, pp. 19-20)

2011
12. 01

Engine/Machine -- The English words engine and mechanical (including their cognates) have traditionally had, apart from their familiar meaning, a negative connotation. Engine signified not only the kind of mechanical contrivance that it does today but, consistent with its Latin ancestor ingenium, also meant artifice, trickery, plot. In the case of machine (originally artful contrivance), its ambiguity led to the formation of of a new word: machine was retained for the neutral, purely technological sense in which it is understood today, while the negative connotations of trickery, intrigue, and deception became the burden of the word machination. This ambiguity of the English words engine and machine, which may be evidence of a deep-seated ancient distrust of technology, is also present, more or less, in their cognates in other European languages.

Peculiar to English, apparently, was the ambivalence of mechanic and mechanical. Besides their familiar value-free modern meaning, these words also had a pejorative sense... For the contemptuous use of mechanical in the sense of vulgar, low, base, the English literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries provides innumerable examples... mechanical described a characteristic somewhat indirectly linking machines with persons of low class, namely their lack of freedom... There is even more evidence that mechanical was perceived as antithetical to liberal. (O. Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe)

2011
11. 29

The Signs of a Rational Enjoyment of the Machine -- But precisely because there are so many physical organs, and because so many parts of our environment compete constantly for our attention, we need to guard ourselves against the fatigue of dealing with too many objects or being stimulated unnecessarily by their presence, as we perform the numerous offices they impose. Hence a simplification of the externals of the mechanical world is almost a prerequisite for dealing with its internal complications. To reduce the constant succession of stimuli, the environment itself must be made as neutral as possible. This, again, is partly in opposition to the principle of many handicraft arts, where the effort is to hold the eye, to give the mind something to play with, to claim a special attention for itself. So that if the canon of economy and the respect for function were not rooted in modern technics, it would have to be derived from our psychological reaction to the machine: only by aesthetically observing these principles can the chaos of stimuli be reduced to the point of effective assimilation.

Without standardization, without repetition, without the neutralizing effect of habit, our mechanical environment might be, by reason of its tempo and its continuous impact, be too formidable... the machine has thus, in its aesthetic manifestations, something of the same effect that a conventional code of manners has in social intercourse: it removes the strain of contact and adjustment. The standardization of manners is a psychological shock-absorber... those who complain about the standardization of the machine are used to thinking of variations in terms of gross changes in pattern and structure, such as those that take place between totally different cultures or generations, whereas one of the signs of the rational enjoyment of the machine and the machine environment is to be concerned with much smaller differences and to react sensitively to them. (Mumford, Technics and Civilization -- emphasis mine)

2011
11. 15

Ways of Life | 02 -- Our servile lust for the environmental technosciences not only intensifies our near-total surrender to the modern myth of functionalist efficiency (previously socio-mechanical, now eco-electrical) but, more dangerously, overexposes our selves--our passions, our desires, our willful capacity for delight (viz., all that has come to be rationalized as aesthetics)--to the frigid distancing of objectivity, which asserts superiority over those so-called subjective qualities despite its own historical contingency and the speciousness of its own unbending claims to "blind sight." Consequently we heroically tiptoe around the central problem, which in fact is not a problem at all (not in the narrow technical sense in which we now conceive that term) but rather a twinned project. On the one hand: the gradual, patient erasure of dreadful ways of living that continually find their alibis in our so-called solutions; and, at the same time (and here we confront the absurdly difficult part), to carry out that erasure in ways that do not amount to a repudiation of all that is excessive and unjustifiable. In other words, to reimagine our ways of living without organizing a cold, barren, negation of life.

"Science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings, but the time for that, too, will come." That time, it seems, has come. And alongside our Cyclopes, suffused throughout them, we find ourselves in need of a platform for rumination, a way of seeing, an orienting schema--or at least a primitive compass--for preserving our insanity; for protecting our ecstatic will from the boredom of myopic clarity; for refashioning the practical and conceptual conditions under which something like freedom might still be possible (wasn't that the original dream of urbanism?). "The bastions of rationality in which the technical sciences used to operate are collapsing--but we are moving in, we must live in them." All of this requires a countervailing force to resist the rote scientization of all ecological sensibilities, which in itself, utterly devoid of any glossy instrumentation, would constitute a kind of ecological urbanism. Indeed, the great promise of something like ecological design rests not in its ability to fashion terminal and partial palliatives for sustaining our degenerate modes of civilized existence, but in its capacity "to create concepts that are always new;" to foment a biophilic disposition that does not materially undermine itself. To foment, in other words, something like a philosophy, teeming with ideas for living--not merely surviving--amidst the suspect moral certitude of objective environmentalism. (J May, The Control Papers)

2011
11. 14

Ways of Life | 01 ...a profound difference exists between the representations which the ancients made of philosophia and the representation which is usually made of philosophy today -- at least in the case of the image of it which is presented to students, because of the exigencies of university teaching. They get the impression that all the philosophers they study strove in turn to invent, each in an original way, a new construction, systematic and abstract, intended somehow or other to explain the universe, or at least, if we are talking about contemporary philosophers, that they tried to elaborate a new discourse about language. These philosophies--which one could call "general philosophy"--give rise, in almost all systems, to doctrines or criticisms of morality which, as it were, draw the consequences, both for individuals and for society, of the general principles of the system, and thus invite people to carry out a specific choice of life and adopt a certain mode of behavior. The problem of knowing whether this choice of life will be efficacious is utterly secondary and accessory; it doesn't enter into the perspective of philosophical discourse.

I think that such a representation is a mistake if it is applied to the philosophy of antiquity. Obviously, there can be no question of denying the extraordinary ability of the ancient philosophers to develop theoretical reflection on the most subtle problems of the theory of knowledge, logic, or physics. This theoretical activity, however, must be situated within a perspective which is different from that which corresponds to the idea people usually have of philosophy... at least since the time of Socrates , the choice of a way of life has not been located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary it stands at the beginning, in a complex interrelation with critical reaction to other existential attitudes, with a global vision of a certain way of living and of seeing the world, and with voluntary decision itself... Consequently, philosophy is above all a way of life, but one which is intimately linked to philosophical discourse. (P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?)

2011
11. 03

Course of Action -- I have noticed that, in general, the acquiescence conceded by a man in the role of reader to a rigorous dialectical linkage is no more than a slothful inability to gauge the proofs the writer adduces and a vague trust in the later's rectitude. But once the book has been closed and the reading has dispersed, little remains in his memory except a more or less arbitrary synthesis of the whole reading.

To avoid this evident disadvantage, I will, in the following paragraphs, cast aside all strict and logical schemas, and instead amass a pile of examples. (Borges, "The Nothingness of Personality")

2011
10. 17

On Control | The User 02 -- I'd like to ask just two questions. Clearly no one knows what to do with drugs, not even the users. But no one knows how to talk about them either... The first question would be: Do drugs have a specific causality and can we explore this direction? Specific does not mean a 'metaphysical' or an exclusively scientific (i.e. chemical) causality. It is not an infrastructure on which everything else would depend as on a cause. It implies mapping the territory or contours of a drug-set. Let me use a completely different domain as a example: psychoanalysis. Whatever we can say against psychoanalysis, the following fact remains: it attempted to establish the specific causality of a domain, not only neuroses, but all kinds of psychosocial formations and productions (dreams, myths, etc.). In short, it traced this specific causality by showing how desire invests a system of mnesic traces and affects. The question is not whether this specific causality was right. What matters is the search for this causality, through which psychoanalysis led us out of overly general considerations even if it was only to fall prey to other mystifications. But my question is: Can we conceive of a specific causality of drugs and in what direction? For example, with drugs, there is something very unique where desire directly invests the system of perception ...It seems to me that there was a time when research was headed in this direction: [viz.] how all drugs involve speeds, modifications of speeds, thresholds of perceptions, perception on a molecular level, superhuman or subhuman times, etc. Yes, how desire directly enters into perception, directly invests perception...

The second question would be: How do we account for a 'turning point' in drugs, how do we determine at what moment this turning point occurs? Does it necessarily happen very quickly, and is the material such that failure or disaster is necessarily part of the drug-plane? ...My two problems converge. It may be at the level of the specific causality of drugs that we can understand why drugs turn so bad and alter their own causality. Once again, desire directly investing perception is something very surprising, very beautiful, a sort of unknown land. But... the long list of dependencies -- they are all too familiar, even if replayed by the addicts, who take themselves to be the experimenters, the knights of the modern world, or the universal providers of bad conscience. What happens to get from one to the other? I have the impression that no progress is currently being made, that good research is not being done ...Those who know the problem, the addicts and the doctors, seem to have abandoned their research, for themselves and for others. (Deleuze, "Two Questions on Drugs")

2011
9. 12

On Control | The User 01 -- The effect of large doses of coca was investigated by Mantegazza in experiments on himself. He succeeded in achieving a state of greatly increased happiness accompanied by a desire for complete immobility; this was interrupted, however, by the most violent urge to move...when he increased the dosage still further he remained in a sopore berate: his pulse rate was extremely high and there was a moderate rise in body temperature; he found that his speech was impeded and his handwriting unsteady; and eventually he experienced the most splendid and colourful hallucinations, the tenor of which was frightening for a short time, but invariably cheerful thereafter. This coca intoxication, too, failed to produce any state of depression, and left no sign whatsoever that the experimenter had passed through a period of intoxication. (Freud, "Coca," p.62)

2011
9. 04

Sensation and Doubt -- The processes of meaning and communication that Kepler describes are on the same continuum. They have the same origin, since God is both the Object of meaning and the Source of the communication. At the other pole, man is both a sign in the "book" and the recipient of the sign. As recipient, he has been endowed by God with an intelligence capable of understanding the geometric language of the world. The human mind is the simulacrum of the divine mind, and geometric archetypes are innate to him, such that observation does no more than elicit their recollection... The result is anamnesis: "Just as objects seen from the outside make us remember those we have already known, likewise the mathematics of the senses, if they are recognized, excite an intellectual mathematics, previously present to the inner man, such that there actively shines within the soul what beforehand was hidden beneath the veil of potentiality." (Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World, p. 172-173)

2011
8. 31

The spirit of nature, as More describes it, bears obvious similarities with the ancient, especially Platonic notion of the anima mundi, a living hylarchical principle which penetrates matter and whose active powers are expressed in the larger astronomical and physical phenomena of nature. In fact More occasionally calls it "the universal soul of the world." The idea was quite common throughout the later Middle Ages, being appealed to frequently by mystics, theosophists and speculative natural philosophers; in Kepler, for example, we find each planet, including the earth, endowed with a soul, whose constant powers are shown in the planetary whirling. More's main purpose, however, was to reinterpret this vagrant idea in terms which would give it better standing in the new scientific current, and, of course, without prejudice to his religious views. In the preface to the Immortality of the Soul he calls the spirit of nature "the vicarious power of God upon matter; that is, the immediate plastic agent of God through which his will is fulfilled in the material world. It corresponds in nature as a whole to the animal spirits supposed to pervade the circulatory systems of an individual, through whose agency the purpose of the soul is transmitted to the various organs and limbs. Its functions are vital, vegetative, and directive, but it is not itself conscious."

More defines it more carefully as "a substance incorporeal, but without sense and animadversion, pervading the whole of matter of the universe, and exercising a plastic power therein, according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of the matter, and their motion, as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers." (Burt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 140-141)

2011
8. 25

Consolation of the Imperilled--The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refugium. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and we recover from it, and calm ourselves down, with our way of life. (Nietzsche, Daybreak, #154)

2011
8. 24

We are thus presented with two distinct time signatures, one of which actively conceals the other. The first--the managerial time of infrastructures--is the time of statistical reasoning and the calculus of variations. Up-tempo and staccato, it is punctuated by regular crescendos, which we call accidents or malfunctions, and which are immediately attributed to either temporary failures or resolvable localized inefficiencies. Managerial time renders systemic realities un-visible. The second time--the historical time of infrastructures, or the time of accumulations--is a slowly unfolding, long-wave threnody, in which the full extents of modernization are evident.

In the first signature, where the concept of efficiency has been fashioned so as to exclude its own externalizations, our managerial rhetoric makes sense. In the second, that same language appears utterly absurd, contradictory even.

The widespread inability to recognize or acknowledge the historical time of accumulations is the most pronounced and obvious symptom of an entrenched infrastructuralism. Particularly acute today among urbanists and bureaucrats--for whom efficiency is an almost erotic obsession--infrastructuralism is a contemporary pathological condition in which the rhetoric and imagery of managerial discourse serve to retard any differentiation between primary and reflexive modernization. Infrastructuralism is marked by the self-veiling of a truth--a terrible truth, unendurable for we Moderns: that the most efficient methods of environmental management are also in fact the most destructive and wasteful. Infrastructualism is a lie we tell ourselves in place of truths that would change us if we were made to face them, and the primary material-moral alibi for the supposed superiority of our limitless, civilized lives. (JM, "Infrastructuralism ...or, the Pathology of the Negative Externality," Quaderns, No. 262 "Parainfrastructures," pgs. 6-9.)

2011
8. 19

But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with word-meanings, it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make things speak. (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p.4)

2011
8. 02

Just as design has had to acknowledge its complicity in the aesthetics of warfare, we must now come to terms with an aesthetics of management, whose archive--which constitutes the very essence of modern environmentalism--is no less beautiful or brutal. This task has nothing at all to do with the refutation of false advertising or cynical public relations campaign, dispensing ad nauseam the dull ecstasy of green consumption: unadorned common sense can guide that activity. Rather it consists in examining the intimate historical relation of modern managerial-scientific representation to all that it silently posits as natural or ontological. It involves uncovering an ongoing transposition of the pathos of militarism into the concepts of environmental management, whereby all space becomes a theater of war; whereby the desire for speed, efficiency and control exist as unquestioned values; whereby "the Earth became the common enemy." It involves uncovering, in the spatial politics of neoliberalism, the peculiar forms of contamination that structure contemporary subjectivity. Specific to our own recent disciplinary history, it involves discerning the points of contact between the concepts of autonomy and automation. (J May, "The Church of Managerial Certitude," The Control Papers)

2011
8. 01