t byfield on Fri, 17 Jan 97 15:31 MET


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Re: nettime: Hari Kuzru/Rewiring 2


[Greetings, Hari, pleased to meet you, etc. -TB; Everyone else: I've edited
Hari's remarks down--obviously, I hope, in a way that retains the sense of
his remarks.]

Before responding to Hari Kunzru in substance, I'd like to point out that
my dismissal of some of his views as "trendy jargon" hardly stems from an
ignorance of the 'schools of thought' he's talking about--on the contrary.
The foundational text of this nonlinear/Deleuzian poetic (imo) conflation
of organic and nonorganic phenomena, Manuel De Landa's _War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines_, is a book I spent months editing. At the time--six
years ago, I think--it left me with a deep pessimism about some of the
guests he had invited to the party: a resurgent "thermodynamic" rubric for
cultural advance, a quasi-psychedelic oscillation between positivism and
metaphor, a strong emphasis on lay readings of hypertechnical material, and
an extremely selective reading of Deleuze (nary a mention of _The Logic of
Sense_ or _Expressionism in Philosophy_), to name the ones I remember.
        My pessimism has shifted since then, but pessimism it remains; some of
these things have proven to be important, some utterly trivial. Lazy
readings of Deleuze, for example, are no more significant than lazy
readings of Nietzsche or any other philosopher have been in the past: they
window-dress wares that would have been flogged in any case. At the other
extreme, though, resurgent "cultural" thermodynamicism is a serious
problem: there's a growing trend toward a tinpot theoretical fascism that
justifies itself with appeals to--and propounds as
policy--pseudo-Malthusian/Darwinian "necessity" and related twaddle. So
much for the fatalistic strands; two remain.
        Another of these concerns--lay readings of hypertechnical material--is
a much more interesting question. In some ays, the lay/technical
distinction says more about social stratification than it does about the
complexity of the material in question; and while it's certainly possible
that many or most people can't or won't understand some nuanced technical
distinction, that possibility doesn't justify denying them even the chance
to try; or the need to elaborate those distinctions, whenever possible,
into broadly relevant ramifications. That would have remained a largely
academic debate were it not for the recent rise in popularity of computers
and the net--and with it, a parallel rise in popular technical curiosity
combined with resources for people to begin to explore many technical
questions. Without doubt, these developments have been fueled by technical
developments moving at such a pace that whatever curiosity they breed  has
been shrouded by mystification; some of it is temporary, as people adapt,
and some of it is structural, due to the necessary divergence between
specialized R&D and popular adoption. But whatever dangers this
mystification poses *can*, I think, be offset by the unpredictability of
popular responses to the forms that mystification takes. The salient fact
is that these facilitating technologies have propagated far beyond the
cloistered realms of the industries that safeguarded their uses. This is, I
think, in some ways like the renaissance of literacy (itself a technology)
in the ~11th-13th centuries: as people learned to work with sacred writings
outside of the institutional frameworks that imposed doctrinal limitations
on ambiguous texts, a "renaissance of heresy" blossomed--much of it
excellent, most of it quite extreme, and all of it profoundly
consequential. In sum, then, "lay" interprettaions of technical material
are a profound source of social creativity; and the forms that creativity
is taking have begun to influence the directions that some R&D is taking.
This, I think, is very much (if very loosely) in line with Manuel's reading
of certain ideas, such as (vaguely) "singularities" and (specifically)
Deleuze/Guattari's "war machine."
        So, as I said, my pessimism has shifted--and just to be clear, it has
done so largely through historical analogies: "vulgar" Deleuze : Deleuze ::
"vulgar" Nietzsche : Nietzche, "lay" readings : technical material :: "lay"
readings : scripture. And to be equally clear, it has *not* advanced
through poetic transpositions of, for example, nonlinear math. Neither
historical analogies not nonlinear models guarantee *anything*. Whether or
not you're interested in how my thoughts have changed isn't especially
relevant, though, because of a simple fact that should not be forgotten:
historical analogies occur on the same order, whereas nonlinear
mathematical models and social processes do not. When historical analogies
become too universal, they produce nothing more than truisms ("nothing new
under the sun"); nonlinear mathematical models, on the other hand, rely on
exactly that claim of universality to "demonstrate" their descriptive
ability, hence their "truth." Mathematical models are the tool of a
managerial class trained to reject cultural and historical specificity;
and, like any class, it is hell-bent on installing its own worldview as
normative to the point of exclusion. The key to fighting this trend is
specificity--or, to use another word, singularity.
        "Singularity" means one thing in nonlinear mathematics, but quite
another in Deleuze's work: in much the same way that Deleuze "poeticizes"
Prigogine et al., Manuel poeticizes Deleuze and others. This process is
creative because it's raison d'etre, in both cases, was humanism and
expression; the same cannot be said of nonlinear mathematical models, whose
function is to refine rational/predictive efforts. In fact--and just to be
clear--Manuel and his work are guided, imo, by a very rare generosity;
however, this tendency cannot safely be attributed to the technocrats whose
work forms a basis for, or a political expression of, his ideas. I'm glad
he wrote the book; I'll be happier when it recedes far enough into the past
that people will read it more critically.
        Anyway...as Danilo Kis said: "So much for the past."
        So, to answer Hari's question, "Do We Allow Maths In Here?" Yes. But
should we assume that those disciplines which lend themselves most readily
to mathematical expression--physics, economics, and so on--are therefore
the primary rubrics under which to examine human activity? No. Or that
their numerical nature implies their smooth, coherent synthesis? No. These
answers do not imply a "hostility" toward either discipline, or any other
discipline that founds or grounds itself in mathematical terms:
*skepticism* would be a better term, and certainly one that any "rational"
discipline should be intimately familiar with. The problem, of course, is
that skepticism was established as a philosophical method long before
either of these disciplines were established, yet proponents of these
disciplines can't bear the possibility that they don't have a monopoly on
it. So, when presented with a skepticism that subordinates *their*
activities to its own logic, rather than a skepticism subordinated to their
activities as a *modality or method*, they start ranting about
irrationality, luddism, hostility, etc.--categories that, of course, have
no epistemological or ontological basis in those disciplines.
        Let's be clear: Disciplines such as economics are *subsets* of human
inquiry. These specialized fields have been able to make advances *only* by
forsaking the broader field of human activity understood as a whole. And
yet, having made those advances, the ideologues that these disciplines have
spawned reappear proclaiming that they have *total* answers, that we should
embrace their narrowed vision and regulate the whole of human endeavor
according to specialized norms. Rubbish.
        The specific question at hand--the place that nonlinear mathematical
models should hold in social analysis and "social engineering"--can be (and
has been) generalized into a much larger question: How best to reconcile
"soft" humanism with "hard" science? Then back again to brass tacks: To the
extent that any specific choice made within this framework will have actual
consequences, which pole--"sentimentalism" or "technocracy," to use each
pole's polemical caricature of the other--should be decisive?
        If it isn't clear, when the alternative is allegedly value-neutral
technocracy, I think we should err on the side of humanism. Consequently, I
love metaphors--up to a point, of course. That point is where those
metaphors, those fruitful fruits of correlative thought, cease to be
metaphors and become realities--for example, when philosophies become
monetary policies. That point, in other terms, is the nebulous area where
humanistic "values" become the generic "policies" of technocrats; and much
as technocracy is a subdiscipline (or bastard child) of humanism, this
middle ground between humanism and technocracy is a subground of the messy
middle ground *where we live*. So it's not an either/or question of
"allowing" math; rather, it's a question of rationing out our faith in it
according to two basic principles: if we employ it as a metaphor, the
lessons we learn from it should remain metaphorical; and, similarly, if its
truth lies in its generality, then its consequences should remain so too.

Ted


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