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 -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de