Andersand's work notes

Things according to Deleuze and Guattari

via Troy Rhoades in the Fibreculture Journal (in a week or two’s time).

‘… a thing forms. ‘When we go from a state of affairs to the thing itself, we see that a thing is always related to several axes at once according to variables that are functions of each other, even if the internal unity remains undetermined’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 122)’

Is this an “object”, understood in terms of relations, additionally, here, on the plane of reference that Deleuze and Guattari are writing about?

Wiener

Reinhold Martin: ‘Norbert Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the ‘absolute size’ of the organization’s nervous system – its upper limit of growth and index of social advancement. An organism’s social potential, conceived in terms of its ability to organize into complex communication networks, is thus measured as a function of the size of its internal circulatory and communications system, which is a function, in turn, of their own organizational complexity. The original analogy between the social and biological organism is thus collapsed, as the two become directly linked as part of the same network…. A relational logic of flexible connection replaces a mechanical logic of rigid compartmentalization, and the decisive organizational factor is no longer the vertical subordination of parts to the whole but rather the degree to which the connections permit, regulate, and respond to the informational flows in all directions’.

Lovink and Rossiter

Cybernetics 2.0

If we were to reinvent cybernetics (as an organizing logic of recombination, feedback, noise, etc), outside the military-industrial context of the Cold War, what would it be? First of all, it would no longer be obsessed with biology and bio metaphors. The aim of computer networks is not to mimic the human by copying or improving human features such as brain, memory, senses and extensions. The question of agency and the relation between humans and non-humans, as thematized by for example Bruno Latour and the actor-network theory crowd, is a typical remainder of the cybernetics 1.0 era. In the past cybernetics tried to figure out how to connect the individual (human) body to the machine. It presumes we still have an issue with ‘intelligent machines’. The cybernetic 1.0 age was both worried and drawn to the idea that the human can(not) be replaced by thinking machines. The result of this was a decades long irrelevant debate over artificial intelligence (AI). These days no one is concerned if and when the machines take over. Have you ever been scared by the idea that a computer can and will beat you at chess? Sure it can, but so what? We know Big Brother is storing all the information in the world. AI is here to stay but is no longer a key project in technology research. Whereas cybernetics 1.0 tried to schematize human behaviour in order to simulate it through models, cybernetics 2.0 is concerned with the truly messy, all too human, social complexity. We are not ants. We are more and behave as less. Our understanding has to go beyond the boring mirror dynamic of man and machine. Computer science will have to make the leap into inter-human relations in the same way as human are adapting to the limits set by computer interfaces and architectures. Stop the mimicry procedures, and restart computer science itself.

Lovink and Rossiter

Politics of Memory

This seeming paradox means that the question of hypomnesis is a political question, and the stakes of a combat: a combat for a politics of memory, and more precisely, for the constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieux.

The inaugural struggle of philosophy against sophistics around this question of memory and its technicisation is the heart of political struggle which, from time immemorial philosophy is; and the reevaluation of the scope of hypomnesis in Plato, as well as its deconstruction in Derrida, must become the basis of a renewed political project of philosophy where the main stakes are in technics.

the service economy is based on the short-circuiting of the knowledge of its users by way of industrial hypomneses

Steigler http://www.arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis

Stiegler and the mnemotechnological reproducibility of motor behaviours

For if it is true that industrialisation in general is the generalisation of a mnemotechnological reproducibility of the motor behaviour of producers, hyperindustrialisation is the generalisation of a mnemotechnological reproducibility of the motor behaviour of consumers.

Stiegler http://www.arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis